“Things will be much easier when June and Father are both sending us money,” she says, loosening Mother’s grip with her own strong fingers. This statement will come from that same cold hardness. She’s angry to think that this might actually soothe Mother, angry that Mother just might trade June for money.

She expects that Father will be furious; she expects to hear many variations on the serpent’s tooth, but he takes the news more cheerfully than she did. He writes that June will be back, and sooner than they expect. He waxes lyrical about farming and the rhythms of seed and harvest, the goodness of a simple life. The stage leaves a man empty, he says. There’s a falseness right at its core.

And the hollow, fleeting camaraderie of the company is nothing compared to a family who loves you. June will see.

Months pass and he’ll continue to say these things, in letters, in person. “Is June home yet?” he writes. “It’s time for him to press the apples.”

“Remind him to check the shoes on the horses.”

“Time to plant the radishes.”

“The gate to the pasture was loose when I last looked. The cows rub against it. Tell June and Joe to check all the fencing.”

He’ll stop only when they learn, and not from June, that he has married. His wife, Clementina DeBar, is a comedienne, a famed dancer of the Highland fling, and thirteen years his senior. She sends them a breezy letter announcing the event only after it occurs. A daughter follows so quickly that, despite a strong family resemblance, June will always harbor doubts that she is his.

—

In February of 1840, the tenth and final child arrives, a boy named Joseph Adrian, the name Adrian chosen in tribute to June’s debut in Richelieu as the handsome Adrien de Mauprat. It’s a part in which June fails to shine. “Competent” is the best his fellow players can muster. “Great in nothing.” They whisper that it was only the Booth name that landed him the role. These whispers carry all the way to his father’s ear, but too late—Joe is already named.

That autumn the family moves to Baltimore, ceding the farm entirely to the Mitchells in the winter months, returning only during the summer when cholera and typhoid sweep the city. They trade the playground of orchards, fields, and forests for streets and parks. They trade their neighbors, all of whom they know by name, for a busy, noisy city of one hundred thousand people.

The Mitchells move into the cabin. This has at least one happy outcome: Ann Hall will finally be able to re-enter the carriage house, where she’ll find her money in the wall exactly as they left it. She’ll hold it a mercy from God that James Mitchell was too lazy to ever even look about the place where he had lived for two whole years.