Booth

In 1822, a two-room log cabin is relocated at great expense to a hidden spot beside Beech Spring in rural Maryland, about 30 miles from Baltimore. The new occupants are Junius Brutus Booth, a celebrated Shakespearean actor who tours nine months of the year, and the woman everyone assumes is his wife, a former London flower-seller who ran away with him to America. Over the next 16 years, the couple has 10 children, four of whom die in childhood. The novel traces the Booth family from this isolated beginning through the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, telling the story not through John Wilkes Booth, the assassin, but through the siblings and parents who loved him.

The earliest years are narrated from the perspective of Rosalie, the oldest surviving daughter, who is plain, reclusive, and deeply affected by the family's losses. Frederick dies as a baby under unclear circumstances. Mary Ann and Elizabeth die during a cholera outbreak while their father performs in Richmond. Most devastating is the death of Henry Byron, the family's brightest child, who dies of smallpox during a trip to England, his grave left overseas. Rosalie develops a secret inner life, sensing the ghosts of her dead siblings near the family graveyard and shielding her mother from this knowledge. The farm is home to some 40 people, most of them enslaved workers leased from other owners. The farm is managed by Joe Hall, a formerly enslaved man whom Junius once owned and freed, and his wife Ann Hall, still enslaved and saving to buy her family's freedom one member at a time. Interspersed throughout the novel are short chapters tracking Abraham Lincoln's political development, from his earliest speeches warning of mob lawlessness and aspiring dictators through his presidency and the Civil War.

Junius is a man of towering genius and terrifying instability. He attempts suicide at least twice and attacks his closest friend with a fire poker, permanently disfiguring his own face. When Mary Ann dies, he attempts to dig up her coffin and restore her to life. The arrival of his parasitic sister, her abusive husband, and their seven children forces the family to support an additional household. The ninth child, John Wilkes, is born in May 1838, named by his grandfather after the radical British parliamentarian John Wilkes. On a colicky night, his mother prays to know his fate and sees a flame rise from the fireplace ashes shaped like an arm, with the word "Country" visible.

The family moves to Baltimore in 1840, and the novel shifts to Edwin's perspective. By 1846, the three younger children, Edwin, Asia, and John, form an insular, tightly bonded group. Their father's erratic behavior makes them targets of gossip and bullying. Edwin desperately wants to be an actor, but his father decrees he will be a cabinetmaker. Then Adelaide Booth, Junius's legal wife from England, arrives and begins publicly harassing the family, calling their mother a whore and the children bastards. The children learn for the first time that their parents were never legally married, and each sibling copes differently with this revelation. At 14, Edwin is sent to travel with his father as a minder, tasked with preventing him from drinking, missing performances, or squandering earnings. Junius Brutus Booth dies on November 30, 1852, aboard a steamship. Edwin, far away in California, learns of the death weeks later. He sees his father's ghost in a snowy street, and the apparition tells him to carry on the legacy. Edwin plays Hamlet for the first time in San Francisco, and a young critic writes that he has already surpassed his father.

Asia's perspective dominates the middle portion of the novel, covering the family's return to Tudor Hall, the Gothic Revival farmhouse their father commissioned but never inhabited. John, now 15, reluctantly becomes the farm's manager. He develops a violent temper, beating a tenant farmer who insults his mother and shooting neighbors' animals from his bedroom window. A gypsy palmist reads his hand and delivers a dark prophecy: a fast but grand life, a bad end, and plenty to love him afterwards. John carries this prophecy on his person. Asia and John plan to write a biography of their father, but their mother destroys most of Junius's letters and papers, devastating Asia. A terrible winter nearly starves the family, and John almost freezes to death making a dangerous overnight journey through a blizzard to buy a cow. Edwin returns from California in 1856 with $20,000 in gold, rescuing the family financially. They move back to Baltimore, and the farm is rented out permanently.

Edwin's career accelerates under the mentorship of Adam Badeau, a sophisticated critic who becomes his intimate friend. Edwin meets the young actress Mary Devlin, and despite insisting he will never marry an actress, eventually proposes. Asia becomes engaged to John Sleeper Clarke, a comic actor and Edwin's close friend. John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry electrifies John Wilkes. He talks his way onto a troop train, serves with the Richmond Grays militia, and witnesses Brown's execution, deeply moved by the old man's courage even as he condemns the cause. He promises his mother he will never enlist, but his pro-Southern sympathies intensify.

The Civil War fractures the family. Edwin and Mary marry in 1860 and travel to London, where their daughter Edwina is born. John transforms into a secessionist and secretly works as a smuggler for the Confederacy. Mary Devlin Booth dies in February 1863 at age 22, while Edwin is performing in New York. Edwin believes his drinking hastened her death and permanently swears off alcohol. During the New York draft riots of July 1863, the family shelters in Edwin's house, hiding Badeau, now a wounded Union soldier, and his Black servant from the mob. John performs at Ford's Theatre in Washington, where Lincoln attends and applauds enthusiastically, sending an invitation to the White House that John rebuffs.

The three Booth brothers appear together for the only time on November 25, 1864, performing Julius Caesar at the Winter Garden Theatre. Edwin plays Brutus, the eldest brother June plays Cassius, and John plays Mark Antony. A fire alarm during the performance nearly causes a panic. Soon after, John and Edwin have a violent political argument, and Edwin orders John from his house. John confides to Asia that he is involved in espionage and gives her a packet of letters to lock in her safe, which she does without telling her husband. He begins recruiting conspirators for a plot against Lincoln. Edwin inadvertently saves the life of Robert Lincoln, the president's son, at a train station.

Lincoln's final day, April 14, 1865, begins with a recurring dream of moving rapidly on a ship toward a distant shore. He breakfasts with his son Robert, rides in a carriage with his wife Mary, and arrives late at Ford's Theatre for Our American Cousin. The narrative cuts away at the moment of assassination, as Lincoln hears a sound he has no time to understand.

The aftermath devastates the family. Edwin believes the news immediately. Asia learns from a newspaper. June narrowly escapes a mob in Cincinnati. John is tracked to a barn in Virginia and shot dead on April 26. June and Sleeper are arrested and imprisoned on suspicion of conspiracy. Asia, pregnant with twins, is placed under house arrest. Rosalie develops a nightly ritual, replaying the assassination in her mind, stopping at the moment John paused outside Lincoln's box, and rewriting the ending so he changes his mind and goes home. Edwin returns to the stage in January 1866 as Hamlet, and the audience gives him a standing ovation so sustained the play cannot continue. Asia eventually moves to England and writes a secret memoir casting John as a hero, unpublished until 50 years after her death. Mother never forgives Edwin for throwing John out, believing that rejection was the turning point, and she lives with her youngest son Joe until her death. Edwin dies in 1893, his funeral described as the most remarkable New York City has ever seen. The novel closes with a meditation on ghosts and mortality, asking how there could not be ghosts when so many who once filled the theaters have winked out of existence, one by one.