. . . It has pleased God to lay at the door of my afflicted family the life-blood of our great, good and martyred President. Prostrated to the very earth by this dreadful event, I am yet too sensible that other mourners fill the land. To them, to you, one and all go forth our deep unutterable sympathy; our abhorrence and detestation for this most foul and atrocious of crimes . . .

He receives letters.

Blanche Hanel writes to end their engagement.

The American people write, one at a time and anonymously, that his life is forfeit; there is a bullet waiting for him, they hate the very name of Booth, and that his next performance will be a tragedy.

—

The family exists in a kind of twilight where the full dark can’t come on until they know where John is and what will happen to him.

iii

June and Sleeper are arrested together at the Clarke house in Philadelphia on suspicion of conspiracy. They’re taken in handcuffs to Washington and the Old Capitol Prison, where they share a cell. Sleeper spends one month there, June two. Roaches and rats, June says, and intolerable heat. And interrogations.

Others have been arrested as well. Michael O’Laughlen and Samuel Arnold are also in custody here. Each withdrew from the plot when John moved the planned kidnapping from some remote country lane to Ford’s Theatre, where, he said, Lincoln would be subdued, handcuffed, and lowered on ropes from his box to the stage. This was a preposterous plan—suicidal, Arnold told him—and the fact that John couldn’t see that shook them. They were both out by the time the kidnapping became an assassination.

As a result, they’ll escape the noose. Instead, along with Dr. Mudd, they’ll be sent to the prison of Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, where O’Laughlen, the little boy who once trailed after John and the Bully Boys up and down Exeter Street, will die of yellow fever.

Also arrested: George Atzerodt, an immigrant from Prussia, whose mission on the 14th was to kill the vice president. He’d lost his nerve and spent the night drinking instead.

A Confederate soldier named Lewis Powell, nicknamed Lewis the Terrible for his savagery, and sent by John to kill the Secretary of State. Seward had already been hurt in a carriage accident and was in bed under a doctor’s care, when Powell forced his way in. He beat one of Seward’s sons senseless with his pistol, stabbed another. He struck Fanny, Seward’s lovely daughter, with his fist, climbed onto Seward’s bed, and stabbed him five times in the neck and face. He left six people bleeding, then ran from the house, shouting, “I’m mad! I’m mad!” only to discover that David Herold, the twenty-three-year-old pharmacist’s assistant who was supposed to be waiting with the horses, had already fled.