I sent the staff home early and retreated to my study.
He walked up to the painting of Abe, swung it away from the wall on its hinges, and opened the small safe behind it. Inside were twelve little leather-bound books, their pages filled with tightly packed musings on the nature of life, confessions, fears, triumphs.
The secret journals of Abraham Lincoln.
I flipped through them that morning, knowing that America would never be the same, just as I’d felt in Dallas, forty years earlier.
He came to a passage toward the end of the eleventh book, written on Christmas Eve 1862, less than two weeks after a stunning Union defeat at Fredericksburg—the lowest point of the war, when Abraham Lincoln had every reason to believe that all was lost. It read:
And so I renew myself to the cause, even if it proves a lost one. I pledge my heart and mind to these things because they are right, not because they are prosperous, or even likely to succeed. I echo the last sentiments of Nathan Hale, uttered from the gallows in 1776, “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.”
Henry closed the journal and smiled.
In the end, he thought, you had two.
He returned the journals to the safe. There, among their priceless yellowed pages and worn covers, another small object stood out—bright, unsullied by time. Henry picked it up and stared at it, a single word turning over in his mind from beyond the grave:
Live…
It was Alexei Romanov’s card.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
You did it. You finished the book. Okay, maybe you just skipped to the end because you’re one of those people. But either way, let’s start by acknowledging you. You, Dear Reader. Let us sing songs of your glory from on high the mountain! Let tales of your greatness ring through the ages! Because let’s face it—without you, these books would have no life, and I’d have no fun writing them. You are hereby… acknowledged. To my editor and man-friend, Ben Greenberg, whose last nerve I so frequently work, and whose strong, safe hugs I crave at all hours… I acknowledge you, sir. To Jamie Raab and Michael Pietsch, and my entire Grand Central family, who’ve been the most supportive and enthusiastic partners a middle-class white kid from the hardscrabble streets of Connecticut could hope for… here’s some much-deserved acknowledgement. To Elizabeth Connor, for her brilliant design (and another killer cover); and Stephanie Isaacson Greenberg, who makes pretty pictures and even prettier babies… consider yourselves acknowledged. To Claudia Ballard and my William Morris Endeavor family, who earn 10–15 percent of my paycheck but 100 percent of my love… I acknowledge you. To Erin, Josh, and Jake, and the rest of my actual family, who so frequently ask me, “Can’t you slow down and enjoy yourself a little more, be a little less serious?” I acknowledge you. But my answer is still “No.” And finally, to Stephen King—because it’s my acknowledgements page, and why the hell not.
1. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, act 1, scene 4.
1. A mostly below-ground complex, beneath what is currently the American Surety Building, at 100 Broadway, directly across the street from Trinity Church.
2. Clark was one of the founders of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, which is still in business today. He died before the building was completed.
3. This particular tea service dates to 1845. Members of the Union were so impressed with its craftsmanship that when the Civil War broke out, they arranged for Tiffany & Co. to be the supplier of swords to the Union Army.
4. André-Charles Boulle (1642–1732) was master cabinetmaker to King Louis XIV.
5. Research into the “telepathic” abilities of vampires has so far been inconclusive. Vampires themselves have long insisted that they can communicate without words in close proximity to one another, even “see the future” or divine details of a stranger’s past life by merely “reading their mind.” The science behind these claims is dubious, and the studies have been limited (vampires being hesitant to have their brains dissected in the name of science). Some scientists support the claims. Others have suggested that vampires are merely able to perceive minute physical cues—twitches of the eyes, changes in respiration, etc., that they perceive as a kind of “wordless language.” In the 1950s, the CIA carried out a series of experiments into the telepathic abilities of vampires code-named MKULTRA.
1. Then part of Surrey, but now part of Wandsworth, in Greater London.
2. Better known as “London Bridge” to all but Londoners themselves.
3. Lee Strasberg (1901–1982), acting teacher, founder of the Group Theatre, and director of the Actors Studio.
4. Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938), author of An Actor Prepares, which laid the groundwork for the method approach to acting. He was an advocate of “spiritual realism” in performance, and his methods became popular among a generation of post–World War II actors, including Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Dustin Hoffman.
5. Today, visitors to No. 2 Chester Square will see a circular blue plaque out front identifying it as the former residence of Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), famed English poet and critic. Arnold died suddenly, just prior to Henry’s arrival in London. Henry rented the house from Arnold’s widow.
6. In 1759, Clark’s remains were found, leading to Aram’s arrest and, later that year, his execution.
1. A pub on Thrawl Street, Whitechapel.
2. Since renamed Durward Street.
3. Then part of London’s original Circle Line, which began service in 1863 using steam-powered trains. The station consisted of two covered platforms above track level. It’s since been moved deep below street level and extensively expanded and renovated, and is known simply as “Westminster.”
4. The novel appeared as part of a collection, Beeton’s Christmas Annual, in 1887. Doyle received £25 for all the rights.
5. Observations of Dr. Rees Ralph Llewellyn upon arrival at Buck’s Row at four a.m. on the morning of August 31st. After only a brief examination of the body he pronounced Polly Nichols dead. He noted that there was a wineglass and a half of blood in the gutter at her side but claimed that he had no doubt that she had been killed where she lay. Inquest testimony as reported in the Times: “Five teeth were missing, and there was a slight laceration of the tongue. There was a bruise running along the lower part of the jaw on the right side of the face. That might have been caused by a blow from a fist or pressure from a thumb. There was a circular bruise on the left side of the face which also might have been inflicted by the pressure of the fingers. On the left side of the neck, about 1 inch below the jaw, there was an incision about 4 inches in length, and ran from a point immediately below the ear. On the same side, but an inch below, and commencing about 1 inch in front of it, was a circular incision, which terminated at a point about 3 inches below the right jaw. That incision completely severed all the tissues down to the vertebrae. The large vessels of the neck on both sides were severed. The incision was about 8 inches in length. The cuts must have been caused by a long-bladed knife, moderately sharp, and used with great violence. No blood was found on the breast, either of the body or the clothes. There were no injuries about the body until just about the lower part of the abdomen. Two or three inches from the left side was a wound running in a jagged manner. The wound was a very deep one, and the tissues were cut through. There were several incisions running across the abdomen. There were three or four similar cuts running downward, on the right side, all of which had been caused by a knife which had been used violently and downward. The injuries were from left to right and might have been done by a left handed person. All the injuries had been caused by the same instrument.”
6. Dr. George Bagster Phillips (1835–1897) was the police surgeon and performed the autopsies of three of the Ripper’s “Canonical Five” victims.
7. During the autumn and winter of 1888, hundreds of letters were sent to police and newspapers claiming to be from the killer. Though most were dismissed as hoaxes, a few contained details that would have been hard for the public to know a
nd prompted further investigation. The most infamous of these is the “From Hell” letter, delivered to the head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee along with a human kidney, possibly belonging to Catherine Eddows. Here, Stoker is referencing the “Dear Boss” letter, which includes the line: “I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I can’t use it.”
8. A craftsman who makes fine leather shoes and boots.
1. The first death occurred on Sunday, May 24th, when a ship’s mate named Blum (or Bloom) fell from the crow’s nest and broke his neck. The second occurred on Tuesday, June 30th, when a sixteen-year-old passenger named Elizabeth Barrington disappeared during a storm. She was presumed to have fallen overboard and drowned.
2. The Algonquin Peoples were a loosely connected nation of more than a hundred tribes, all speaking a version of the Algonquin language. Their combined population numbered as high as one hundred thousand at the time of the Roanoke Colonies.
3. The practice of bloodletting dates back more than two thousand years and remained popular until the late 1800s. Some historians believe its origins were tied to female menstruation, which was thought to be the body’s way of purging bad “humors,” or maladies, from the blood. Bloodletting was used to treat a wide variety of conditions, from the common cold to cancer to, ironically, blood loss as the result of a wound.
4. A folding straight razor with protruding points (or “teeth”) along the blade, used to open veins.
5. About twenty ounces, or 590 milliliters.
6. Historians have long assumed the “CRO” found carved into a tree at the Roanoke site was short for “Croatan,” the Indian tribe with which the colonists had established contact upon their arrival, taking it to mean that the Lost Colony of Roanoke was either attacked and destroyed by the Croatan or, faced with starvation, decided to join them.
7. The colonists had made this trip before to visit and trade with the Croatan and other Virginia Algonquin tribes. It’s roughly a three-mile trip across the present-day Croatan Sound.
8. John 4:14.
9. From an entry dated August 14th, 1843: “I shall happily trade every ounce of my own happiness for his. My own accomplishments for his. Please, Lord, let no harm come to him. Let no misfortune befall him. If ever you require one to punish, I beg you—let it be me.”
10. Werowocomoco ( whero-wo-ko-mo-ko ), a fifty-acre site that served as the political center of the Virginia Algonquins. The village was home to more than a thousand people.
11. A longhouse, usually made with timber frames, lashed together with strips of bark. The frames were then covered in sheets of bark, leaves, and grass. The biggest longhouses could reach more than three hundred feet in length and were typically twenty feet in width.
12. Likely Massinacak, on the James River, near present-day Richmond, Virginia.
13. Though they do cry, vampires are incapable of producing tears.
14. By 1888, there had been at least one popular novel pondering the fate of Virginia Dare: Cornelia Tuthill’s Virginia Dare, or A Colony of Roanoke, in which Virginia survives the Lost Colony and marries a member of the Jamestown Colony. In 1892, author E.A.B. Shackleford published Virginia Dare: A Romance of the Sixteenth Century, in which the titular Virginia befriends Pocahontas.
15. The name Abraham Lincoln gave to his crude, homemade matches. He had studied the work of English chemist John Walker, who had perfected a method of making friction matches (which he called “congreves”) by dipping small wooden sticks in a mixture of stibnite, potassium chlorate, gum, and starch. When the sticks dried, Abe bundled them together, twenty at a time, using glue. They were incredibly unstable, sometimes lighting by themselves in his pocket, or not lighting at all when he needed them to.
1. This is one of the few instances where we have the exact words spoken by Henry at the time. The slip of paper had somehow survived the decades. The ink still bears the blotches where flakes of snow landed on the paper as he read.
2. It’s long been theorized that Stoker was inspired to write Dracula after meeting a Hungarian writer named Ármin Vámbéry, who regaled Stoker with wild tales of the Carpathian Mountains. In reality, it was Stoker’s experiences with Henry Irving and Henry Sturges that led him to begin the work.
3. Now Beijing.
4. Stoker took the advice, using the Orient Express in the climax of Dracula, in which Van Helsing and his posse ride the famous train in a race to Transylvania.
5. The clearest example comes in one of his Sherlock Holmes stories, “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” (1926).
6. By 1900, on average, two people a day were struck and killed by trains in New York City alone.
7. It’s a matter of record that Emily Dickinson was a recluse during the last fifteen years of her life, choosing to speak to visitors through doors rather than face-to-face, even skipping her beloved father’s funeral for fear of being seen. Locally, this was attributed to her being an eccentric. In reality, she had been made immortal by a lover, Kate Scott Turner, in the late 1850s.
8. Tesla was in his mid-forties when he first met Henry in New York. Decades later, his money and vitality gone, he would famously fall in love with a pigeon and claim to have received a transmission from Mars.
9. Equivalent to more than fifty years’ pay for Tesla, who was making $18 a week at the time.
10. Edison’s DC (direct current) system relied on each neighborhood (or in some cases, each home or building) having its own, smaller generator. To Edison, the advantage was safety—less risk of fire and less risk of death by electrocution, as the system peaked at one hundred volts. Edison also saw DC as a way to democratize electric power. With no all-powerful, central manufacturers providing power to whole cities, there would be no mass blackouts, and the price of generating electricity would remain low.
11. Topsy had been scheduled to be hanged, but the ASPCA deemed hanging “too cruel” a method of execution.
12. Twain was in his sixties when he and Henry became acquainted.
13. Susy Clemens died of spinal meningitis in 1896, at the age of twenty-four, leaving Twain devastated. He had the following poem, adapted from the poem “Annette” by Robert Richardson, inscribed on her headstone: “Warm summer sun shine kindly here, / Warm southern wind blow softly here, / Green sod above, lie light, lie light—/ Good night, dear heart, good night, good night.”
14. Twain wrote a fictionalized account of his experiences in the doomed regiment in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885).
15. Built in 1854, the Pennsylvania was a side-wheel steamer, 247 feet long and 32 feet wide, capable of carrying nearly five hundred tons of passengers and cargo up and down the Mississippi River. Her twin engines were powered by five high-pressure boilers.
16. A nonsalaried, entry-level position on a riverboat, a mud clerk was so named because he often had to go ashore to run errands for the officers at each of the boat’s stops.
1. Emma Goldman (1869–1940) was a Russian-born anarchist and political activist.
2. McKinley had, in fact, often sided with striking workers in labor disputes.
3. McKinley almost always wore a red carnation on his lapel, believing that it brought him good luck. When greeted by twelve-year-old Myrtle Ledger, the president’s face lit up. He knelt down and said, “I must give this flower to another little flower.” Moments after giving her his lucky carnation, he was shot.
4. Now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
5. In the early 1930s, FDR amended this reporting structure to include the heads of the FBI and OSS (forerunner to the CIA). Today, nearly every Western nation has a similar structure in place. In Great Britain, for example, it includes the prime minister; as well as the speaker, leader, and shadows leader of the House of Commons; leader and lord speaker of the House of Lords; and the head of MI6. As a courtesy, the monarch is also briefed on vampire activity, even though there is no constitutional
duty to do so.
6. Installed on the orders of President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876.
7. George Peter Alexander Healy (1813–1894) was an American painter, and one of the most accomplished artists of his time. His contemplative portrait, Abraham Lincoln (1869), was purchased by Robert Todd Lincoln. It was donated to the White House in 1939, where it hangs in the State Dining Room today.