Eight

Friends and Foes

Late September–Early December 1831

HANDSOME, THIRTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD David Paul Brown, with his broad forehead, empathic eyes, and playful Cupid’s bow lips, was one of the most famous men in Philadelphia—in his own opinion, the most famous. He was a lawyer and, as he would one day point out in an autobiographical work, not just a lawyer but an orator, a distinction he considered vital. “Hortensius,” he wrote, “was a lawyer—Cicero an orator, the one is forgotten, the other immortalized.” Brown had reason to be proud of his oratorical skills. In 1824 when the Marquis de Lafayette returned on a triumphal tour to the country he had helped free itself from British rule, Philadelphia had selected Brown to deliver the city’s welcoming speech.

Brown had less reason to be proud of another skill of his—playwriting. But that didn’t stop him from bragging about his play Sertorius, a tedious tragedy about a Roman patriot that was performed nine times by one of the greatest actors of the day, Junius Brutus Booth. The critics had loved Seriorius, he boasted; they’d said it was difficult to find a single jarring line in it, a reaction that, if you asked him, David Paul Brown, was quite odd, since he’d written the whole thing on horseback. He’d been trying a big case in Philadelphia at the time, but his wife and children had been vacationing thirty miles outside the city. Desiring to spend his nights in the company of his wife, he’d left the city at dusk each evening and trotted until midnight, and to make the journey seem swifter, occupied himself by creating his play while jogging along. Doing so had been no easy feat. “Composing upon all fours is sometimes expedient, but seldom very agreeable,” he was wont to say, “or profitable.”

Still, profit wasn’t what motivated the multitalented David Paul Brown, or so he would always insist. He had been born rich, and later his legal work had made him even richer; by 1831, after fifteen years of law practice, his professional income exceeded one hundred thousand dollars—the equivalent of several million dollars today.

No matter. To hear him tell it, he spent money as fast as he earned it, spent it out of principle and not extravagance, spent it because if he had too much money around, he’d become indolent and lose in fame what he gained in wealth. And it was fame that, to steal a phrase from the man from whom he claimed to have learned everything, was his spur. When he was a child he’d been forbidden by his parents, kind-hearted Quakers though they were, to read the playwright. But he’d disobeyed those well-meaning parents, sought out the prohibited book, and by the age of ten, made himself master of all within.

Even so, his early days as a lawyer and orator were not enviable. He was admitted to the Philadelphia bar at the tender age of twenty-one but, to hear him tell it, weeks, months, finally a whole year rolled by without the tranquillity of his office being disturbed by a single client. Or, for that matter, by a single friend, for as he soon sadly observed, even the courteous shrank from and shunned the unfortunate. Then one day while he was walking near the courts, he noticed a crowd of people surrounding someone, he couldn’t determine who it was, and shouting epithets about cruelty and barbarity. He pushed forward to see what the commotion was all about and came face-to-face with a little girl about eight or nine years old. She was wretchedly attired, her eyes were streaming with tears, and her limbs were covered with welts and dried blood.

No sooner had he seen the girl than someone in the crowd, surmising that he was in some way connected with the law, demanded that he point out the way to redress. Redress for what, he’d inquired, and an old woman had stepped forward and informed him that the child was one of a large family of German Redemptioners who, upon arriving in the country, had sold themselves as indentured servants to pay back their passage money. Mother and father, sisters and brothers, everyone in the family had been bought, each by a separate owner in a different, distant area of the state. And the little girl, the youngest of the brood, had fallen into the hands of a barbarous individual, a man who had starved her, beaten her, made her flesh raw.

He, David Paul Brown, was then not yet a parent, but as he was given to saying, nature ever prepares man for those affections which, when they arrive, are the most despotic and resistless in their sway. He took the girl by the hand, ushered her into the chief magistrate’s office, and filed a complaint on her behalf.

On the day of the trial he came to court fearful that despite intense preparation, his supply of legal lore was so scanty that it would be insufficient to the task at hand. Opposite him were seated the haughty defendant and his counsel—two experienced and distinguished members of the profession, men accustomed to sway the scepter of the mind with kingly hand. They so intimidated him that when it was his turn to speak, he couldn’t find his tongue, and his hands shook like aspen leaves in a storm. But his desire to vindicate the principles of humanity, to right the wrongs that had been done to the little girl, gave him courage, and suddenly all that he had ever known or read came flooding into his mind and his voice burst from his throat, roaring with rage and indignation. He was electrifying, if he did say so himself, so eloquent that the entire assemblage in the courtroom melted into tears, and he won the case handily, so handily that from that time forward his office was thronged with clients, all of them eager to unload their griefs and their pockets, and his life was thronged with friends, all of them eager to enjoy his erudition and his passion.

He had so many friends. Judges like Robert Porter, head of the Court of Common Pleas—he’d have been impeached if he, David Paul Brown, hadn’t defended him. Journalists like Anne Royall—she’d made him famous all over the country, not just in Philadelphia, by saying in one of those books of hers that he was the very essence of the term “gentleman.” Then there were the actors like Booth. The wits like Robert Waln, who went out on the town all the time but styled himself the hermit of Philadelphia. The scientists like William Chapman. Poor Chapman—people were saying he was the man alluded to in that article that had appeared in the Gazette over the weekend. The Bucks County man who’d been poisoned. How sad for Chapman’s intelligent wife, Lucretia—she’d been his, David Paul Brown’s, friend, too, back when the couple had their school in Philadelphia. Well, as he always said, all our days are anxious, all are made up of clouds and sunshine, and so continuous and unvaried is this truth that this uninterrupted variety actually becomes monotony, still running, as it were, in a circle, traveling over the same ground, and knowing no end.

Was there a doctor on board, High Constable Blayney called out to a boatload of gawking passengers on the afternoon of September 21, 1831. He and his deputy, Fred Fritz, had taken Lino into their custody in Boston early that morning, escorted him by stagecoach to Rhode Island, then hustled him aboard a Philadelphia-bound steamship where, despite his chains, Lino had eaten a hearty lunch. But just now, suddenly, he had started flailing around, his shackled arms and legs shaking, his head bobbing as if it might fly right off his body. Was it a real fit or just a ruse to create sympathy and get his limbs freed? Blayney couldn’t be sure. He needed a doctor. Right away.

To his relief, soon after he shouted for one, a top-hatted man stepped forward and announced that he fit the bill. Pushing aside the nosy onlookers, Blayney helped the man to Lino’s side. The doctor grabbed hold of the prisoner. He held him tightly and started talking to him. And that did it. The fit, or whatever it was, subsided.

Probably, Blayney reckoned, his prisoner had been faking sickness. Blayney wouldn’t put it past him, because he was a wily fellow for sure. According to the Boston police, he’d talked some rich young woman from Cape Cod into marrying him; the poor thing, not realizing she’d just been spared by the police department’s good offices from wedding an unscrupulous scoundrel, had come inquiring after her fiancé’s whereabouts on the day after his arrest. He’d better not interact with such a scoundrel, Blayney decided. He’d best not even speak to him, because there was no telling what kind of trick the fellow might try to pull. Seating himself alongside his prisoner and keeping his mouth closed but his eyes wary, the high constable settled down to enjoy the boat trip as best he could.

It wasn’t long, however, before Lino, who had already tried to strike up several conversations with the boat’s passengers, interrupted the constable’s effort to savor the voyage. “I wish,” he said to Blayney, “to make some confidential communications to you.”

“On what subject?”

“On the subject of Mr. and Mrs. Chapman.”

“I don’t wish to hear anything. Better keep it to yourself.”

At this, Blayney changed his seat, putting more space between himself and his prisoner. But shortly after he moved, he saw that the unstoppable fellow was buttonholing his deputy and jabbering away at him.

What did the prisoner have to say, Blayney demanded of Fritz when the deputy succeeded in extricating himself from the troublemaker.

“That he and Mrs. Chapman were married,” Fritz reported. “And that before they were married she used to come to his room very often.”

Maybe, Blayney reconsidered, he should try to talk to the man. Maybe he could get something useful out of him, something more than the rubbish Fritz had gotten. A little while later, when Lino once again tried to start up a conversation with him, Blayney allowed him to talk.

He didn’t learn much. “Mrs. Chapman came to me,” Lino boasted. “We had connections a few days before Mr. Chapman’s death.” Blayney wasn’t interested in the prisoner’s sexual exploits. He wanted to know where he came from, whether he had a record, had ever been a pirate or a convict. But although the prisoner had kept saying he wanted to talk, he wouldn’t answer questions, was reluctant to speak about himself, and was interested only in implying that Lucretia Chapman had been up to no good. Frustrated, Blayney resolved to try his luck with Lino another time and brushed him off again.

That night the fellow was seasick. Clearly no sailor, he. He threw up for hours, and there was no chance to talk to him. But in the morning he was better and still insisting he wanted to talk.

“So you’ve intimated two or three times,” Blayney said to him coolly. Then, speaking firmly, he made his position clear. “If you’ll answer two questions for me, I’ll listen to you.” When Lino still hesitated, he added, “Nothing you say to me will appear against you if you’re indicted for the murder of Dr. William Chapman.”

Reassured, Lino agreed to answer whatever he was asked, and Blayney proceeded to interrogate him. “Have you ever been in jail?” he asked.

“No,” Lino said.

“Have you ever been a pirate?”

“No.”

Blayney wasn’t sure whether to believe him. He wasn’t sure you could believe anything the fellow said. Especially the things that came spewing out of his mouth after he answered the two questions. Things like his saying that Lucretia Chapman had poisoned her husband. That she’d snuck some medicine out of the prisoner’s private medicine chest and put it into her husband’s soup. Or that he’d only married Lucretia because William Chapman, on the verge of dying, had begged him to marry her.

Blayney managed not to ask him how come, if he was married to Lucretia, he’d been about to marry again, up there in Boston.

While Blayney and Lino were making their way down to Philadelphia, two physicians arrived at the graveyard of All Saints Church in Andalusia to witness the disinterment of William Chapman. One was Dr. John Hopkinson, a surgeon and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. He’d been asked by Bucks County’s deputy attorney general, who’d begun to suspect arsenic as the agent of Chapman’s death, to perform an autopsy and remove any organs that might reveal that William had died unnaturally. The other physician was Dr. Reynell Coates, a general practitioner in the county whose flamboyant wife would one day scandalize his neighbors by being the first local woman to wear bloomers. Coates had come out of medical curiosity and offered to lend Hopkinson any assistance he required.

The two doctors, their heads protected from the warm September sun by tall beaver hats, watched as the sexton dug into the still soft soil over William’s grave and began slowly raising the coffin. It was slightly indented, as if the weight of the earth had been too much for the casket, they noticed when the sexton set his burden on the ground, and the wood where the corpse’s head would be lying looked damp. Some moisture might have seeped inside, the sexton warned them, then proceeded to pry open the lid.

As soon as it swung free, the physicians let out a gasp of amazement. It wasn’t entirely because the face staring up at them was hideously black and putrid. No, the sexton had prepared them for that with his talk about moisture. What was amazing to them was the rest of the body. Despite its three months underground, it seemed hardly to have deteriorated at all. A sure sign of arsenic poisoning, both doctors thought, well aware of the use of arsenic in taxidermy.

In a few moments Hopkinson commenced, right there at the graveside, to cut through William’s burial clothes. He exposed the abdomen and part of the chest, then made a surgical incision into the abdominal cavity. It was oddly firm and resistant, he observed as he cut. Odder still, it was dry, and gave off no offensive odor. Peering down, he stared into the arid cavity. The stomach didn’t look right, he thought. It was unusually dark in color. Could the inside be inflamed? Deciding to check it more thoroughly, and to check the intestines as well, he asked Coates to help him with his examination of the internal organs.

They began with the small intestine. Hopkinson cut into the twisted tubes in many areas, and he and Coates studied the tissue closely. It, too, was dry, both doctors noticed with surprise. And although the small intestine was slightly distended, it was almost totally empty, except for two or three bits of fecal matter tinged with healthy bile. It was the same with the large intestine, which was also dry, and also virtually empty, containing nothing but a small quantity of bilious matter in the duodenum. Neither intestine showed signs of inflammation. Nor, for that matter, did the spleen, the liver, or the kidneys. As to the gall bladder, it had an unusually healthy appearance.

Hopkinson decided to leave all these organs intact and to remove only the stomach and duodenum. He tied them at each extremity, loosened them from the corpse, and put them into a clean wine-filled glass jar he had brought with him from Philadelphia. Finally, having noticed as he severed the stomach that a bit of the internal lining of the esophagus appeared inflamed, he removed and bottled the esophagus as well.

That done, he became tutorial. “Have I missed anything?” he inquired of his inexperienced assistant. “Should I cut further?” He and Coates debated the matter for a while, then agreed that everything that needed examination had been explored. Satisfied, Hopkinson returned William’s body to its coffin, said a fond farewell to his young colleague, and transported the wine jar and its lugubrious contents back to Philadelphia, where he stored it in his home overnight.

The following morning he took the jar to Pennsylvania Hospital. The hospital, which had been founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1754, was a leading center for medical research, and Hopkinson had arranged to have Chapman’s tissues studied at one of the already venerable institution’s outstanding labs. The lab he had selected was that of Dr. John K. Mitchell, a renowned physician and chemist who had drafted two investigators to assist him: Dr. Joseph Togno, a Philadelphia general practitioner, and Thomas G. Clemson, a young chemist who’d studied at the scientific mecca of the day, the Sorbonne. The three men showed Hopkinson around the big lab, with its many windows and high, flask-lined shelves, and after choosing a well-lit corner of the room, Hopkinson got out his surgical instruments, opened the wine jar, and cut into Chapman’s stomach.

At once he was struck by a peculiar smell. He’d opened hundreds of bodies and never smelled anything like this before. “I’d compare it to pickled herring,” he said.

“It more resembles,” Mitchell commented, “the smell of a dried Scotch herring.”

The others sniffed, too, then Hopkinson stepped back and Mitchell and his assistants went to work, poking at and fingering the exposed tissues. Mitchell was hoping they would be able to detect some solid bodies or particles clinging to the surfaces—if they could, he theorized, it would make it easier to detect the presence of arsenic. But neither he, Togno, nor Clemson encountered anything with any firmness whatsoever, and in the end they resigned themselves to scraping the internal walls of the stomach with smooth-edged bone spoons to collect the walls’ viscid mucus.

Hopkinson watched them scrape for a time, then excused himself, for Mitchell and his staff would soon be starting their testing, a process that promised to be a lengthy one. They had indicated that they intended to test absolutely everything, solid pieces of the intestines and stomach as well as the mucosa they were so arduously harvesting.

The local newspapers were having a field day. The American public had long shown an avid interest in articles about robberies and killings and during the 1820s the country’s press had begun capitalizing on this predilection, becoming increasingly sensationalistic. By 1831, according to one writer of the time, crime stories were making up “the ‘Domestic News’ of every journal.… That which was once too shocking for recital, now forms a part of the intellectual regalia which the public appetite demands with a gusto.” Murder was the favorite subject, and just as today, murders that took place within the privileged class excited the greatest interest. By mid-October the Chapman case, with its prominent upper-middle-class victim, was receiving intense coverage, and newspaper reporters, not content with the initial scandalous details, had begun dredging for more. On October 22, 1831, the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin, which had been directing opprobrium chiefly against Lino, calling him “an accomplished scoundrel” and “a villain of no ordinary character,” turned its attention to Lucretia, whom it had previously portrayed only as an object of compassion. She was a “woman of violent passions,” the paper said; her disposition was “fierce and cruel”; the boardinghouse she and her husband had maintained in Philadelphia was a “suspicious” one that on at least one occasion had harbored counterfeiters. This malfeasance was hardly surprising, the Bulletin implied, for Lucretia Chapman “has a brother [Mark] now in the Massachusetts State Prison for forgery and counterfeiting.”

From that moment forward Lucretia would be viewed by many of her contemporaries as a criminal, for the common psychological thinking of the time held that criminality was an inherited trait, and if one member of a family was a lawbreaker, chances were that the rest of the family was also felonious. In the 1840s this idea would become, in the hands of pseudo-scientists like Orson Squire Fowler, editor of the American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, an argument for eugenics, the improvement of a population by genetic control. Fowler, who was convinced that “the disposition and mental powers of mankind are innate—are born, not created by education,” believed that just about every human trait could be passed down from one generation to the next. People of African descent inherited their unique “mode of moving … tone of voice, manner of laughing, form of nose and mouth, color of eyes and teeth, and other peculiarities.” People of Jewish descent inherited “intellectual superiority,” but also such traits as “acquisitiveness” and “destructiveness.” The English inherited “conscientiousness” and “benevolence.” One day Fowler would use the fact that there were counterfeiters in Lucretia Chapman’s family to advance his theory that criminality could be stemmed if people avoided marrying into tainted families like hers. In the meantime, Lucretia was throwing herself on the mercy of that family.

She was at the Cape, begging her relatives to help her find a way to avoid being located by the police. She didn’t stay with any of her kin, assuming that to do so might be dangerous either for herself or for them. Instead, indifferent to comfort, she boarded in the rundown house of a stranger. And whenever she went out of doors she wore her disguise, the frock coat and trousers she had packed. With her long torso and tall legs the costume seemed to suit her. She was sure she would not be taken for a woman.

Upon their arrival in Philadelphia, Blayney delivered Lino to the jail in Doylestown, the governmental seat of Bucks County. It was here that the county’s courts sat, here that the deputy attorney general had his office. The courthouse, a handsome cupola-crowned brick edifice, and the jail, which had high prison walls, an exercise yard, and two wings of double-tiered cells, had been erected in 1812 at the astronomical cost of thirty-eight thousand dollars. Both structures were, the Bucks County Intelligencer bragged, built with such fine materials that they were “unequalled by any County Court House and jail in the state.” Nevertheless, jailbreaks had been a problem virtually from the start. Two prisoners had bolted in 1816, four in 1827, two more in 1830. Lino began thinking about how to escape as soon as Blayney handed him over to the warden.

At first it seemed impossible. He was loaded down with heavy iron chains. His wrists and ankles were shackled, and a chain went from the ankle shackles to the floor of his cell, allowing him to move only in a four-foot radius. The chain was so constricting that he could barely reach his low mattress, or its trunk of ragged bedding, or the rough wooden bench that sat alongside the hearth. He dragged himself to the bench from time to time and perfunctorily turned the pages of the Spanish Bible that lay upon it. But for the most part he prowled the cell, seeking its secrets and its hidden possibilities, and taking careful note of the barred windows, the hooked inner door, the padlocked outer door, and the fact that when he was brought food, it was already all cut up.

But the jail was smaller and cozier than the Philadelphia penitentiary. And the warden, Bucks County’s High Sheriff Benjamin Morris, a plump, good-natured Episcopalian, was not a bad sort. Lino kept to his best behavior, and after a few days Morris unlocked his wrist chains so that he could keep himself clean, and even agreed to let him cut his own meat.

The next time Lino received his food, there was a blunt pocket-size knife alongside his tin plate. Lino eyed the knife excitedly. Might he be able to cause the warden to forget to remove it someday?

One evening he got sick on jail food. Morris sent for a doctor in the village, who agreed that he wasn’t well, gave him some medicine, and suggested that a fellow prisoner be assigned to sleep in his cell and nurse him until he was better. That’s how he came to meet William Brown, a thickset man with rippling imposing muscles, who’d been jailed for larceny.

Brown watched over him, and by the time Lino recovered from his food poisoning, he and Brown had compared notes on the layout of the jail. They’d also hatched a few escape plans and agreed that if one of them managed to get out of his cell first, he would free the other. The plans were rudimentary. They needed to be talked over some more. But when Lino tried to get Brown into his cell by once again complaining of sickness, the doctor said this time he was faking; there was nothing wrong with him.

So be it, Lino decided. He didn’t require Brown for planning; he had imagination enough for the two of them. He required Brown for labor. All he really needed just now was to get possession of his dinner knife.

One afternoon he succeeded. Chatting and spinning stories with Sheriff Morris, he managed to so distract the man that when Morris removed his food tray, he didn’t notice that the knife was no longer on it.

Lino concealed the knife in his mattress and that night, after scraping it into a tiny saw on the stone walls of his cell, forced his new tool into a rivet on his ankle shackle and sawed the chain open. To conceal what he’d done, he ripped strips of cloth from his bedding and wound them over and under the iron links.

In the morning, when Morris brought Lino his breakfast, he noticed the bandage. But Lino explained to him that he’d had to put a dressing on his ankle because the chain was tearing at his flesh.

Morris nodded understandingly. He knew that chains often did that.

Two nights later, after Morris had finished his ten o’clock cell check and retired to his house across the yard, Lino took a thin log from his hearth and with the tip of it burned a hole in his floor. That was one of the plans he and Brown had hatched: burn a hole in the cell floor and tunnel out. But although he held the end of the burning log to the oaken floor until it penetrated the thick boards, he discovered to his disappointment that underneath the oak was a second floor, this one made of stone. He tossed the log back in the fireplace and set his trunk over the hole he’d made.

A few nights after that frustrating first try, he tied a chip of wood to a piece of string, extricated another small brand from his hearth, burned a hole over the latch of his inner cell door with its glowing point, and passed the woodchip-weighted string through the hole. He dangled the string until he heard the chip hit the floor. Then slowly, patiently—he had never in his life been so patient—he worked the string along the far side of the door until he felt certain it was just below the latch and tried to jerk the wood up so forcefully that it would spring open the door hook. He tried many times. He was like a fisherman casting his line into an empty sea. But at last he gave one fierce jerk, and the hook flew open. He heard it give, and when he pushed on the door, the wooden portal swung wide.

There was, of course, still the outer door, the iron door, to get through. But he needed no contrivance for that. Just his hand. And the knife. He pulled on the bit of grating in the center of the metal, made a space wide enough for his fingers to go through and, using the handle of his knife, wrenched off the outer padlock. Then he ran to free Brown.

It took him just a few minutes to get his friend out of his cell, but longer to free him of his shackles. The handcuffs he was wearing came off readily enough, but his leg chains were stubborn. Lino’s little knife made but slow and incomplete progress against the metal, and at last Lino told Brown they shouldn’t waste precious time by trying any further. After all, he pointed out, Brown could move now, if somewhat slowly, and he’d be able to conceal the irons under his pants once they got away from the jail. If they got away. But how to accomplish that? Lino’s first idea was that they make a breach in the floor in the day room, the chamber where prisoners, not kept the Philadelphia way and prevented from socialization, were sometimes permitted to gather and warm themselves in front of a big iron stove. He’d heard there was a cellar, not a stone floor, beneath that room. If they could get into the cellar, he told Brown, they could reach the yard, and if they reached the yard, they could scale the prison wall.

How? Brown asked.

He’d make a rope, Lino said.

They threw themselves into action. In the day room, Brown yanked some rods from the stove and began trying to pry up the floorboards. In his cell, Lino ripped up the bedclothes and twisted them into a sturdy rope. Then it occurred to him that he’d best make himself some kind of pack so that once he was over the walls he’d have a disguise, look like a peddler, not a prisoner. He flung the clothes from his trunk onto the floor, packed them into a bundle, cut armholes in the outer cloth so he could carry the bundle on his back, and stuffed his creation with mattress ticking to make it look fuller. Then he ran to the day room to assist Brown with the floorboards.

They were hours trying to lift them. But finally they succeeded. They made a breach, tumbled down into the cellar, and a moment later unlocked the cellar door and piled outside into the yard.

It was pitch-black out there. The night was like a princely cloak that swirled about them. The prison wall loomed like a ghastly monster. Lino threw his rope high over it and began to climb. But the rope hadn’t caught well and he came tumbling down. Then Brown tried, but he, too, couldn’t get over the wall. They took off their shoes and tried again. They tried again and then again. The blackness of the sky faded to gray. Birds began to twitter. Still, they were having no luck.

What was to be done? Lino wondered. In a short while the sun would be up. The warden would be rising from his bed. It wasn’t fair. They’d done so much, worked so hard, and soon it would be all up with them. Or would it? In the shadows near the cellar door, he spotted an axe, and his heart leaped. Brown could break the great lock with which the yard door was fastened! It would make a terrible noise. It would awaken Sheriff Morris instantly. But it was their only chance. They would have to take it.

He shoved the axe at Brown, and his robust companion began swinging at the huge iron lock. With each blow his muscles bulged and the air reverberated with a thundering noise. At once, from behind the barred windows of the jail, prisoners roused from their sleep began cheering. Then there was another sound, a cry of command. Morris was racing across the yard and yelling at Brown and Lino to stand still. Brown swung again, with redoubled energy. The lock gave way and the door swung open a crack. It wasn’t all the way open. There was another lock barring the door from the outside. But the crack was wide enough for Brown and Lino to squeeze through. Not wide enough for Morris, though. As Lino and his comrade skittered crazily into the fields beyond the wall, the portly warden got stuck in the crack. Lino abandoned his pack, shouted to Brown that they’d best separate, and, doubling his speed, began sprinting in the direction of what he hoped was Philadelphia.

A posse of public-minded citizens answered the warden’s call for help and fanned out over the countryside, combing through every fall-fallow field and beneath every sparsely leafed tree. At around nine in the morning they found the chain-impeded Brown crouching in a pile of bark about a mile from town. Lino was farther away, but not as far as he’d hoped to be. The trouble was his feet. In his haste he’d left his shoes back in the prison yard, and now his feet were sore and bloody. He needed shoes. He needed them desperately, especially if he was going to make better progress.

At a quarry about seven miles out of Doylestown he spotted some workmen and, deciding to take a chance, came out from hiding and asked where he could buy an old pair of shoes. He said he was Chinese, figuring, he later explained, that this would account for his being barefoot. The few Chinese he’d seen in America were always dirt poor, too poor to own shoes.

The workmen seemed not to doubt his story. They asked him no questions and one of them even pointed to a nearby house and suggested that its occupants might be able to sell him some shoes. Lino, struggling forward on his ravaged soles, went into the house.

It was a mistake. He knew it as soon as he got inside. “You’re Mina, aren’t you?” someone said to him as soon as he stepped through the door. The inquirer looked athletic, and he was wearing the uniform of a major in the American army.

He’s probably got a weapon, Lino reckoned. But maybe I can fool him. “No, I’m not Mina.” He beamed a wide, sincere smile and, not knowing that handbills offering a reward for his capture had already been printed and distributed throughout the county, added, “If you don’t believe me, you can take me right over to Doylestown, where you’ll soon see you’re mistaken.”

A friend of the major’s walked in just then, and the major smiled back and said he had in mind doing just that. Lino didn’t try to run away. There were two of them now, to his shoeless one, plus the gang of workmen outside. He let the major and his friend tie his hands behind his back and put him into their wagon. He’d find some way, he figured, to trick his way free.

“Mina,” he began as the wagon bumped along. “I’m not him. But I’ve met the man.”

His captors looked interested. “That’s not his real name, you know,” Lino went on. “It’s an assumed name.”

The men wanted to know what else he knew of Mina. He threw them a few tidbits, said the newspapers had printed all sorts of falsehoods about the poor fellow, said Mina wasn’t a bad sort at all.

The major and his friend seemed to believe he wasn’t Mina. At least they said they believed him. But they refused to untie him and let him out of the wagon. “When we get into Doylestown,” the major promised, “we’ll stop at a tavern and see if we’ve made a mistake. If we have, we’ll let you go.”

Lino put his head down. He was out of ideas for once, exhausted from his long night’s efforts and his foot-bloodying march that morning. “You may as well drive to the jail,” he murmured in defeat. “I am Mina.”

The major and his friend nodded and drove him right to the high-walled stone edifice. Scores of people were milling around it. They welcomed Lino, called out to him. Overnight, it appeared, he’d become famous, become someone everyone wanted to greet. It made him feel good. His mood lifted, and he laughed and talked with the crowd.

Then the warden took him inside and returned him to the same cell from which he’d fled just a few short hours ago. Only now both his bed and his bench had been removed, and when he was shackled to the floor again, the chain was so short he could no longer reach the paltry fire burning in his hearth.

Lucretia was in Greenfield, Pennsylvania, a small town in Erie County. With the help of her Cape Cod relatives, she’d obtained a position in Greenfield in the home of a well-to-do couple named Newton. The Newtons had three children, and unaware of Lucretia’s situation, they’d hired her as their governess.

She began her duties with trepidation, frightened at every moment that her whereabouts might be discovered, and on November 11, 1831, three weeks after she had come to live with the Newtons, her fears came true. She was in the schoolroom with the children when the sheriff of Erie County, accompanied by a postmaster, arrived at the Newtons’ sprawling mansion and demanded to speak to her. She shooed the children away and asked the men what they wanted with her. But she knew, and she put up no struggle when the sheriff told her he had a warrant for her arrest. She simply gathered her belongings and let the men escort her to the Erie jail.

It was a dreary place, but she tried to keep her spirits up. She asked for books and spent time reading. She asked for pens and paper and wrote to her children, with whom she’d been out of contact since her flight from Andalusia. She also wrote to her friends. To Colonel Cuesta, the Mexican consul who had once been so kind to her, she wrote requesting that he please visit her lawyer Campbell and ask him if she should hire “an able Advocate … to aid him in pleading her cause.” To Elijah Cobb, who had known her since girlhood and who had entertained Lino at the Cape because of her recommendation, she wrote, “Ah! From what a height have I fallen! But yesterday I had and enjoyed all that heart could wish; blest with competence, surrounded with a lovely family.”

The letter to Cobb was lengthy. In it she romanticized William, saying he had been “the kindest and best of husbands,” and she excoriated Lino, condemning him as a “demon” and “cruel spoiler,” a term of opprobrium right out of Charlotte Temple, that poignant tale of seduction and betrayal she used to love. She also told Cobb that Lino was so mean that once, when her little son John offended him, he said to the toddler that he would never again hug him because he never forgave injuries, and quite terrified the child by warning him that he “delighted in revenge.”

Additionally, she assured Cobb that although she was guilty of having become infatuated with “a mysterious stranger—a base impostor” and guilty of having “precipitately married the cruel monster,” she was innocent of William’s murder and could explain why she had married so “imprudently.” It was because she had been decoyed and duped. The impostor had tricked her into marriage. Why? “Ah! It was that he might better accomplish his diabolical designs to rob me and my children of our personal property.”

She may have taken comfort in writing, in pouring out her side of the story. She may also have hoped that some of her words would be leaked to the press. Certainly the press got wind of them. Cobb, or someone to whom Cobb showed her letter, talked about it to a journalist, and on December l, 1831, the Boston Morning Post published a brief, sympathetic article saying that the accused Mrs. Chapman was a “very wellbred and intelligent woman” who had conducted herself “imprudently”—her very own word. The Post also urged the public not to be too hasty in condemning her.

Several days later, when she had been in jail in Erie for three weeks, she was told to ready herself for a journey. She was to be taken under armed guard to Doylestown, five hundred miles away. There she would be put in a second jail, the same jail in which Lino was being held, to await trial on the unbailable charge of murder.

On the morning of December 10, 1831, David Paul Brown’s renowned concentration was interrupted by a knock on his office door and the appearance at the threshold of a tall woman, accompanied by a warder. The woman’s figure was striking, slender, and, he couldn’t help but notice, well-proportioned. “What service can I render you, Madam?” he asked, and offered his visitor a seat. She lowered herself into a chair and sat still, like a marble figure, nothing but the restlessness of her eyes showing any animation whatsoever. Then at last she spoke, in a groan that seemed to Brown to come not from her throat but from her innermost soul. “Mrs. Chapman?” she said, as if those two words alone would be sufficient to explain her entire lamentable story. Which in fact they were. He hadn’t recognized her—she was haggard from her exhausting trip—but he knew all about her case, had even read in some unreliable public journal that he himself was going to defend her, though who could have put such an idea into the editor’s head, he, David Paul Brown, had no idea. It wasn’t true. The woman hadn’t even written to him, let alone come to see him.

Now, however, at the recommendation of her family lawyer, she was here, under guard and en route to jail and indictment in Doylestown. Delicately, oh as delicately as possible, he proceeded to question her, asking her the precise nature of the accusation against her and what kind of defense she hoped could be mounted on her behalf.

The conversation was long and painful. She gave him a thousand details. Told him about the death of her husband, Chapman; about the impostor Mina; about her flight from the police; and about her five fatherless—and soon to be motherless, if the deputy attorney general had his way—children. He heard her out without rushing her, and thought about his own children and the advice he intended to give his sons should they one day follow in his footsteps and enter the practice of criminal law. It was that before they ventured to undertake a capital case they must be absolutely certain they were competent for the hazards of such a case. Remember, he intended to tell them, if you perform your task feebly, the blood of the defendant may be upon you. Do not, therefore, allow a feverish desire for notoriety blind you to the difficulties and dangers by which you will inevitably be surrounded, for the trumpet of fame cannot drown the small still voice of remorse.

Mrs. Chapman was coming to the end of her long tangled tale. She was begging him to represent her. It would cause him, Brown realized, no end of personal and professional inconvenience. The woman had waited until the eleventh hour to ask for his services. Her trial—it was to be a joint trial, with her and Mina standing together before the bench—was due to start in just a few short days. Worse, it was to be held not in Philadelphia, but out in Doylestown, where, if he agreed to handle the case, he would no doubt have to stay in some uncomfortable inn. He’d be deprived for who knew how long of the refinements of his pleasant home, that capacious Washington Square house which Mrs. Royall had called, in that book of hers, “a splendid mansion, in which wealth and taste are alike diffused.” Still, he would take Mrs. Chapman on, Brown concluded. He would stand by her and see to it that she got a fair and impartial trial. Indeed, he would be like the commander of a ship in a storm. The cordage might snap, the masts go by the board, the bulwarks get carried away, the hull spring a leak, but he, the gallant commander, would stay by his helm to the last, determined either to steer his battered vessel into port, or to perish gloriously in the faithful discharge of his duty.

Soberly, he told the poor woman his decision, and before she was removed by her caretaker to finish her trip to the common jail in which the state had decided to consign her, he had the pleasure of seeing how happy he had made her. As to himself, he could not remember a more disagreeable sensation than that which he experienced upon bidding her goodbye. He had assumed, he told his friends, the responsibility of a cause upon whose outcome depended not only the life of an individual, but the hopes and happiness of all who belonged to her.