reading the daily death list. If anything,
this task had taken on an added urgency.
To lose someone you loved now, with the
rest of the city madly, if grimly,
celebrating, would be unendurable.
The guests in Mary Surrattвs boarding
house began the day with a breakfast of
steak, eggs and ham, oysters, grits and
whiskey. Maryвs seventeen-year old
daughter, Anna, was in love with John
Wilkes Booth. She had a picture of him
hidden in the sitting room, behind a
lithograph entitled "Morning, Noon, and
Night." She helped her mother clear the
table and she noticed with a sharp and
unreasonable disapproval that one of the
two new boarders, one of the men who only
last night had been given a room, was
staring at her mother.
Mary Surratt was neither a pretty women,
nor a clever one, nor was she young. Anna
was too much of a romantic, too star- and
stage-struck, to approve. It was one thing
to lie awake at night in her attic
bedroom, thinking of JW. It was another to
imagine her mother playing any part in
such feelings.
Annaвs brother John once told her that
five years ago a woman named Henrietta
Irving had tried to stab Booth with a
knife. Failing, sheвd thrust the blade
into her own chest instead. He seemed to
be under the impression that this story
would bring Anna to her senses. It had, as
anyone could have predicted, the opposite
effect. Anna had also heard rumors that
Booth kept a woman in a house of
prostitution near the White House. And
once she had seen a piece of paper on
which Booth had been composing a poem. You
could make out the final version:
Now in this hour that we part,
I will ask to be forgotten never
But, in thy pure and guileless heart,
