"Eddie, I can't leave my things. My collection of Mr. Dickens. The sides from all the parts I've played since I first started acting — every side is signed by all the actors in the play."
Booth flung his hat aside. "They may be precious to you, but they aren't worth imprisonment."
"Oh, dear God. Did he really —?"
"Yes. The charge is attempted murder."
A day later, after dark, he spirited her out of the townhouse and into a cab, which rattled swiftly over cobbles and through mud to a Hudson River pier. He handed her a valise containing some clothing he'd bought for her, kissed her cheek long and affectionately, and murmured a wish for God to guard her. She boarded the ferry for New Jersey and on the crossing didn't look back at him or at the city. She knew that if she did, she'd break down, cry, and take the return boat — and that could lead to disaster.
When she left the train in Chicago, she telegraphed Sam Trump. She stayed in an inexpensive hotel and waited for his reply, which came to the telegraph office the following morning. The message said he would happily provide board, lodging, and a premier place in his small permanent company. For a man in the throes of alcoholic failure, he certainly sounded confident. She was under such stress that she overlooked the obvious: He was an actor.
Like Willa's father, Mr. Samuel Horatio Trump had been born in England, at Stoke-Newington. He'd lived in the United States since the age of ten, but he diligently maintained his native accent, believing it contributed to his considerable and fully merited fame. Self-christened America's Ace of Players, he was also known in the profession, less kindly, as Sobbing Sam, not only because he could cry on cue, but because he inevitably did so to excess.
He was sixty-four years old and admitted to fifty. Without the special boots to which a cobbler had added inserts to lift the heels an inch and a half, he stood five feet six inches. He was a round, avuncular man with warm dark eyes and a rolling gait that jiggled his paunch. His wardrobe was large but twenty years out of date. Managers who flung plagiarized adaptations of Dickens on the stage always wanted to cast him as Micawber. Trump, however, saw himself as a Charlemagne, a Tamerlane, or, truly straining the credulity of his audiences, a Romeo.
In his lifetime Trump had known many women. When sober or even slightly tipsy, he was a blithe and winning man. To anyone who would listen, he confessed to many cases of a broken heart, but the secret truth was that Trump himself had ended every romantic affair in which he'd been involved. As a young man he had decided that the responsibilities of wedlock would only impede a career that was certain to end in international acclaim. So far it hadn't.
Although Willa and many others in the profession practiced the craft of theatrical superstition, Trump raised it to a high art. He refused to tie a rope around a trunk or hire a cross-eyed player. He never wore yellow, never rehearsed on Sunday, and ordered his doorkeeper to throw rocks at any stray dog that approached the stage door during a performance. He always rang down the curtain if he spied a red-headed spectator in the first five rows. He wore a blue-white moonstone mounted in gold for a cravat pin and kept a chrysanthemum — never yellow — in his lapel; he always had both somewhere on his person when onstage. He wouldn't even consider producing or appearing in the Scottish play.
The one superstition he violated was that about discussing the future and thereby jinxing it. Some of his favorite words were "next week" and "tomorrow" and "the next performance," invariably linked with phrases such as "important producer in the audience" or "telegraphed message" or "wanting a full year's engagement."
His theater, Trump's St. Louis Playhouse, had been built by another manager at the northwest corner of Third and Olive Streets; Trump called the latter Rue des Granges. He thought it more elegant to use the town's original French names. The theater held three hundred people, in individual seats rather than the more typical benches.
On the long trip to St. Louis, Willa made peace with herself over what had happened at the New Knickerbocker. Perhaps in a few years the manager would drop the charges, and she could go back. Meanwhile, in case Wood's spite reached beyond New York, she would bill herself as Mrs. Parker. Perhaps that would confuse anyone searching for a single woman, and also deter undesirable men. She refused to go so far as to call herself Willa Potts.
She was in reasonably good spirits by the time the river ferry deposited her on the St. Louis levee. She found Sam Trump painting a forest backdrop at the theater. He cried while they hugged and kissed dramatically, then opened a bottle of champagne, which he proceeded to drink all by himself. Near the bottom of the bottle, he made a startling admission:
"I falsified the tone of my telegraph message, dear girl. You have chosen to inhabit a house in ruin."
"St. Louis looks prosperous to me, Sam."
"My theater, child, my theater. We are months in arrears to all of our creditors. Our audiences are satisfactory. There is even an occasional full house. Yet, for reasons entirely beyond my ken, I can't keep a shilling in the till."
Willa could see one of the reasons, made of green glass and reposing, empty, in a silver bucket from the property loft.
Sam astonished her a second time when he said, with a hangdog look, "It wants a clearer head than mine. A better head than this gray and battered one." Only gray around the ears. He dyed the rest a hideous boot-polish brown.
He seized her hand. "Along with your acting duties, would you perchance consider managing the house? You are young, but you have a great deal of experience in the profession. I can't pay you extra for the work, but I can offer the compensation of billing equivalent to mine." With great solemnity, he added, "That of a star."
She laughed as she hadn't in days. It was the sort of work she had never done before, but, as far as she could see, it needed mostly common sense, diligence, and attention to where the pennies went.
"That's a heady inducement, Sam. Let me think about it overnight."
Next morning, she went to the playhouse office, a room with all the spaciousness and charm of a chicken coop. It also had the inevitable horseshoe nailed over the lintel. She found Trump disconsolately holding his head with one hand and stroking the black theater cat, Prosperity, with the other.
"Sam, I accept your offer — conditionally."
He overlooked the last word, crying, "Splendid!"
"This is the condition. My first act as manager is to put you on an allowance. The theater will pay your living expenses, but nothing for whiskey, beer, champagne, or strong drink of any kind."
He smote his bosom with his fist. "Oh! How sharper than a serpent's tooth —"
"Sam, I just took over this theater. Do you want me to quit?"
"No, no!"
"Then you are on an allowance."
"Dear lady —" His chin fell, covering the moonstone cravat pin. "I hear and I obey."
MADELINE'S JOURNAL
July, 1865. The dark mood has passed. Hard work is a strong antidote for melancholy.
The state remains in turmoil. Judge Perry is now the provisional governor. He has pledged to implement Johnson's program, and set Sept. 13 for a constitutional convention for that purpose.
From Hilton Head, Gen. Gillmore commands the nine military districts, each with a Union garrison whose primary purpose is to forestall violence between the races. In our district some of the soldiers are Negroes, and many of my neighbors angrily say we are being "niggered to death." So we shall be, I think, until we resolve differences and live in harmony. It is my heart, Orry, not my ancestry, leading me to believe that if Almighty God ever set a single test by which to judge the republic's ability to fulfill its promise of liberty for all men, that test is race.