'Henry and Clara': Historical fiction

Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln weren't alone in their theater box the night he was assassinated. Thomas Mallon tells the story of the young couple with them.

This post contains an affiliate link or links. If you use a link to buy a book, I may earn a small commission. You can find all the books that have been featured in this newsletter in my Bookshop store.

We all know the story of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination while he and his wife were watching a play shortly after 10 p.m. on April 14, 1865. What I didn’t know was that the Lincolns weren’t alone in their box. They were accompanied by a pair of young friends, Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, whose brush with history would haunt the rest of their lives.

Rathbone and Harris’ story is told in Thomas Mallon’s 1994 novel “Henry and Clara,” which I picked up for a bit of local literary atmosphere during a recent trip to Washington, D.C. The two were step-siblings, raised together from early adolescence, who’d fallen in love. Rathbone’s mother, Pauline Rathbone Harris, was the widow of the mayor of Albany, N.Y., while Harris’ father, Ira Harris, was a U.S. senator from New York, so their reluctant announcement of their children’s betrothal caused an interstate scandal that was still clinging to them when John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box and fired at Lincoln’s head.

The young couple wasn’t even supposed to be there. The Lincolns had invited them only after two other couples, including Ulysses Grant and his wife, had declined on the grounds that it felt unseemly to be attending the theater so soon after Robert E. Lee’s April 9 surrender to Grant at Appomattox.

Mallon hews closely to the unseemly and unsettling facts of Henry and Clara’s romance and marriage, then heightens them with dashes of supposition. That the two come to know each other in the novel is due to Pauline’s ambition and love of the political limelight — facing anonymous widowhood, she sets her sights on the also recently widowed Ira, just elected to the state Assembly. When the country goes to war with itself, the equally maneuvering Ira makes sure that Henry’s role won’t be that of a mere private.

But all of Pauline’s and Ira’s plotting can’t shield Henry from the horrors of the battlefield. When Clara writes him a mournful letter about the death of the Lincolns’ son from “bilious fever,” Henry replies from Virginia that he must point out “how paltry a thing Willie Lincoln’s death looks from here.”

I sit only yards from one of the fellows hit by a rebel bullet the day before yesterday. He moans persistently, and every once in a while gives out with a sharp cry. Last night I saw the doctor change his dressing. I looked into the wound itself, a deep depression in the muscle of the boy’s right chest. Red blood bubbled to life amidst the discoloration, like s strange flower from a latitude we have never seen.

Then he and Clara witness Lincoln’s assassination, and he himself is stabbed by Booth, suffering a life-threatening wound. By the time he recovers, the spotlight has found him, along with the questions: Why didn’t an experienced soldier save his commander in chief? Why was he watching the play rather than watching for threats?Clara overhears two reporters mocking Henry after he testifies as a witness to the assassination:

“ ‘Intently observing the proceedings upon the stage,’ ” mimicked the second one. “What a fine idea a week after Appomattox! Couldn’t imagine there’d be trouble!”

“The man’s a fool,” said the first one.

“Or worse,” his companion replied.

The Lincolns went to the theater despite portents and misgivings around them. Henry and Clara marry despite portents and misgivings around them. Mallon braids their stories into a fascinating retelling of history.