Ten

Pennsylvania v. Lucretia Chapman, Part Two

February 22–25, 1832

BROWN HAD GRANTED THE opening of the defense to his inexperienced junior man. But he himself had devised the defense strategy. His plan was to prove that William Chapman had not been murdered, and that not only had he died a natural death, but the allegedly tainted chicken soup he’d consumed hadn’t even contained poison. To this end, Brown had up his sleeve a witness who would surprise and enthrall the courtroom—but he didn’t produce her early on. Rather, an expert at timing and drama, he began the actual work of defending Lucretia with a decidedly unshowy offering, a written deposition from a medical expert who stated that it was almost impossible to distinguish death by arsenic poisoning from death by cholera morbus. He followed this with the testimony of another medical expert, one who iterated what Brown had already gotten the prosecution’s chemists to say, albeit more reluctantly—namely, that Pennsylvania Hospital’s attempts to find arsenic in William’s body had been inconclusive. It was enough to put spectators to sleep and make the jury wonder if Philadelphia lawyers, who already had a reputation for shrewdness, were really that much better than their own homegrown attorneys.

But on the second day of the defense case, Brown introduced his surprise witness: Lucretia’s middle daughter, ten-year-old little Lucretia. Like other witnesses, she had been sitting in the courtroom all along, which was apparently no bar to her being able to testify. Nor was her age. Children were allowed to give testimony provided they were first examined in the courtroom on their ability to tell the difference between truth and falsity.

When Ross demanded this privilege, Brown offered no objection, and the child, a reed of a girl, with sticklike arms and a chest as flat as a slate, took the stand gravely. She was composed, her big eyes fastened squarely on Ross’s long-jawed face as he asked her sternly, “Do you know what you have come here for?”

Little Lucretia didn’t answer right away. She thought about the question, then replied, “To swear to all I know.”

“Do you know what will become of you if you do not tell the truth?”

This time the girl didn’t hesitate. “I will be cast into hell fire forever,” she murmured, her voice trembling but her gaze still steady.

Her grasp of the seriousness of the proceedings impressed the judges. They accepted her as a witness despite her youth, and Brown began taking her through the now familiar story of how Lino had arrived at the Chapmans’ front door, and subsequently William had arrived at death’s door. There was little new in her account, but it was filled with vivid tidbits, the kind of details that give a story the ring of truth. When Lino first appeared, little Lucretia said, “Pa was sitting in the rocking chair, nursing little John.” When her father took sick, she was no longer allowed to sleep in the master bedroom in her familiar little “truckle bed.” When her father dined on smearcase and pork, she was in the dining room but no longer at the table; like many a child who finds protracted dinners boring, she’d gotten up and started reading a book.

By the time she came to her version of William’s final days, she had fully persuaded the jury of the authenticity of her recollections. It was on the value of those recollections that Brown was counting. So he asked her to describe at length what had happened on the day William lunched on the presumably poisoned chicken soup.

“Mary brought the chicken and soup upstairs,” little Lucretia said. “The soup was in a blue quart bowl. The chicken was on a plate, I think. It was whole. Pa cut it himself. Pa tasted the gizzard, but it was tough. He gave the rest to me and I ate it.” Then she delivered her thunderbolt. “Pa ate only a few spoonsful of the soup, but he ate very heartily of the chicken. I ate some of the soup myself.”

This was a stunning revelation. And although later the prosecution tried to suggest that little Lucretia was telling a story that had been concocted by her mother, the child insisted this was not so. “I have not talked to my mother about this,” she averred. “I have told this story to my aunt and lawyer Brown—no one else.”

Brown had no further feats of courtroom prestidigitation among his bag of tricks. As is common in criminal defense, he would have to win his case, if win he could, on the basis of cross rather than direct examination, for with the exception of little Lucretia, he had very little to offer other than character witnesses. That afternoon he called on several people who had known Lucretia over the years and examined them swiftly as to her exceptional probity. “Her character was more than moral,” said the father of one of her pupils, and she and her family were “very religious.” The Reverend George Scheetz supported this. Mrs. Chapman was a regular at his church, he said, and took communion from him frequently; moreover, since the rest of his communicants were prone to reporting to him the follies and foibles of their neighbors, “if anything had happened in the neighborhood calculated to impeach her character, I would have been informed of it.”

Indeed, the prideful pastor was so firm a supporter of Lucretia’s that when he was cross-examined, he went out of his way to say that he didn’t find it at all surprising that spots had appeared on William’s face. William, he’d happened to notice a while before the unfortunate man fell sick, had an infection “in the neighborhood of the ear.”

The next day Brown cursorily questioned a few more character witnesses and two poulterers whose ducks had died suddenly, one farmer’s after eating pickles, the other’s after drinking water tainted with lime. Then abruptly, Brown declared the defense case finished. He had examined eighteen witnesses in a day and a half; Ross had taken six and a half days to examine twenty-four.

But now, it developed, Ross wasn’t done. Telling the three judges on the bench that he wanted the prosecution case reopened, he announced that he had served a subpoena on Willis Blayney, that Blayney was here in Doylestown right now, and that it was absolutely necessary he be heard because he had evidence that had been alluded to during the prosecution’s opening remarks.

The judges would not relent. The prosecution case could not be reopened, they told the deputy attorney general. But if Blayney’s evidence contradicted something a defense witness had said, perhaps they would allow him to testify. Ross thanked the judges and offered Blayney as a witness who could rebut the defense’s character witnesses.

The spectators grew excited. Philadelphia’s high constable was something of a celebrity, a man whose exploits the press wrote about. They anticipated that such a man would provide them with a performance full of fireworks. But Blayney had come to Doylestown reluctantly and was in the courtroom only because he had been fined for his earlier failure to appear. Ignoring the air of expectation that pervaded the pews, he gave Ross what must have been the tersest testimony the prosecutor had ever elicited. “I believe I am acquainted with the general character of Mrs. Chapman,” he said. “From 1818 to 1829 I always considered her character good. Since then I have considered it bad—gradually getting worse.”

That was all he said, all that Ross could get him to say, other than that he had become a policeman in 1829. Hoping it was enough, Ross announced that he had no further questions.

Brown was stunned. No further questions? He himself had quite a few, and had been wondering if there was any way to turn Ross’s cagey witness into a witness for the defense. When the high constable was handed over to him for cross-examination, he asked, “Isn’t it true that within this past week you said to someone that you knew absolutely nothing bad about Mrs. Chapman?”

Blayney didn’t deny it. “Not in those exact words,” he replied. “I have said that if the prosecution expected me to give Mrs. Chapman a bad character, they would be mistaken. That is, to my personal knowledge, I have never seen anything but what was right.”

So far, so good. But what had he seen, Brown wanted to know. In answer to the question, Blayney said, “She lived in my mother’s house and behaved herself remarkably well. My sister taught music in her seminary for several years. I have visited at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Chapman. They lived very happily together—I never heard anything to the contrary.”

“What then did you mean about her character being bad?” Brown asked him.

“I am speaking of a police report,” Blayney said, and added with a touch of irony, “I can’t say I ever heard a good police report.”

Brown knew full well that police reports or “characters” of the kind Blayney was referring to were confidential. But he couldn’t subdue the gambler’s soul that inhabits every defense attorney, and he decided to take the chance of angering the court by asking the high constable to be specific in the matter of Lucretia’s report. “By the way,” he said, “what exactly did you learn about Mrs. Chapman from her police report?”

“Objection!” Ross called out at once, without explaining the reason for his objection.

“Sustained,” Judge Fox ruled. “Though you can,” he directed Blayney, “explain in general terms the kinds of things that might give a person a bad police report or ‘character.’”

Blayney frowned, then said, “If I were to find stolen goods in a person’s house, or if I knew that counterfeiters had been taken in that house, I would say that the owner of the house had a bad police character.”

Brown was satisfied. To those inclined to consider Lucretia guilty, the constable’s reply would add fuel to their fire by suggesting that she’d once harbored stolen property or counterfeiters in her Philadelphia boardinghouse. But to those who were inclined to be sympathetic, the implication of Blayney’s remark might be altogether different. They might wonder why, if the police really had evidence of his client’s having had a prior criminal history, the prosecution and not the defense had objected to revealing her police report. They might ask themselves if perhaps the report contained no evidence, if perhaps it cited her not as a wrongdoer but merely as the owner of a raided property. Maybe they’d even wonder if there was some secret police report on them.

The contents of the mysterious police report would never be revealed. But both prosecution and defense would refer to the high constable’s testimony during their summations, and each side would treat the man’s words as evidence that bolstered its own arguments.

It was three in the afternoon when those summations started. William Reed, who was to speak first for the prosecution, had been practicing his peroration for days beforehand, writing down phrases, crossing them out, and experimenting with a variety of postures and gestures while regarding himself in a mirror. But in a way, he had been practicing for years. Like most young men of his time, he had studied the art of public speaking back in grade school. Since an educated male was expected to know how to declaim, primers gave boys precise instructions in such things as how much to incline the body or lift the arm when emphasizing a point, and how best to compose the face when trying to convey a mood: to indicate melancholy, advised one textbook, “the lower jaw falls … the eyes are cast down, half-shut”; to indicate pride, “the eyes open, but with the eyebrows considerably drawn down, the mouth pouting out, mostly shut, and the lips pinched close.”

Reed was a master of postures and facial expressions, but he was also a budding writer who would one day publish many books and articles on historical subjects. Employing the gestures and moues he had long ago learned, but augmenting his physical performance with writerly phrases, he began to speak, asking the jury “as husbands and fathers, knowing the loveliness of domestic love, appreciating the sanctity of domestic obligation” whether they could conceive of “a more unnatural, a more revolting crime than that which blasts all these, and blurs the purity of woman’s fame.” Then he suggested to them that if Lucretia’s crime went unpunished it might teach many other wives “in whose bosom the flame of impure passion brightens, that there is a summary mode by which she can remove the only check to licentious indulgence, and suggest means and materials for the completion of the gloomy edifice of crime.” In engineering the death of her husband, he went on, the defendant had committed a heinous crime. But it was no surprise, for Lucretia had already committed another heinous crime. She had committed adultery, and if she was capable of that, she was capable of murder, too. “In the moral law of God the first great prohibition was, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ the next, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’—and the interval between the two points on the scale of human depravity is small, indeed.”

The upright Reed was particularly hard on Lucretia for permitting her children to attend the trial. Her doing so, he lashed out, demonstrated how cruel and even barbaric she was. Indeed, such abusive use of the young reminded him of how in famine-wracked Egypt the starving, convinced that because they were sinful God would be deaf to their prayers, drafted children to supplicate for them, leading “little creatures from five to ten years of age” to the dangerous tops of minarets “to lisp from their slender summits entreaties for Divine mercy.” Lucretia was every bit as manipulative and cowardly. “The mercy this wretched woman does not dare to ask, she has brought these innocent children to ask for her.” But it would do the defendant no good, he predicted. The sight of the youngsters had simply reminded the jury that the children once had another parent, a father whose death their mother had contrived.

Later, Reed also attacked Brown, accusing him of making sarcastic faces about prosecution evidence and of intimidating prosecution witnesses with his withering frowns and the “thunder of that voice, the lightning of that eye.” But primarily what the prosecution’s second seat did was marshal the evidence against Lucretia. Detail by detail, he went over the medical and chemical testimony, limning William’s deathbed symptoms to show how closely they matched those known to accompany arsenic poisoning, and insisting that although it was true that the prosecution’s chemists had failed to prove there was arsenic in William’s tissues, they had established its presence by detecting a unique smell emanating from those tissues, a smell they believed was that of arsenic. He also read from Lucretia’s letters—“filled as they are with disgusting effusions of passion”—using them, and the testimony of witnesses, to establish that she had had a twofold motive for killing her husband. She had killed him, Reed maintained, not only because of her licentious passion for Lino, but because she was avaricious and hoped by killing her husband to obtain “the wealth she supposed the seducer to possess … the rank and honors with which she believed him to be clothed.”

Finally, Reed presented a scenario to explain why the presumably poisoned chicken soup had been left unattended in the kitchen all day. The entirety of the soup hadn’t been poisoned, he contended, merely a portion of it, and it was that portion which little Lucretia had given to William. The child must have misremembered or lied when she said her sister Mary brought their father a quart bowl of the soup. Maybe Mary had brought two bowls—the quart bowl and a small, separate, poisoned bowl. Maybe the defense had feared this would come out. They’d put the ten-year-old on the stand. But they hadn’t called Mary. “Why is Mary Chapman not produced?” Reed asked insinuatingly, and left the jury to ponder the meaning of his reproach.

It was seven in the evening when he finished speaking. He had talked without stopping for four hours.

David Paul Brown passed an uncomfortable night. He’d come down with a cold, and his famous throat felt painful and raw. Worse, he was afraid that Reed had made the jury believe in his preposterous two-bowls-of-soup proposition. But he was determined not to let either physical weakness or mental stress stand in the way of his fighting for Lucretia’s acquittal. Was not one of the maxims he intended to pass along to his sons this: that although a judge and jury might take away the life of a defendant, they must not be allowed to take it away without reaching over a defense attorney’s own body? His prostrate body, if need be. Yes, and he’d be damned if he was going to let anyone know how worried he was. That was another of the maxims he was going to pass on to his sons: a defense attorney must know no fear but that of failure, and even that he must hide from everyone. Everyone. In this case, that included young Peter McCall, with whom he was sharing quarters.

At dawn Brown dressed himself carefully, donning a costly silk waistcoat and sleek new boots—he’d never known a man to speak well in clumsy boots—awakened the still slumbering McCall, shared a hurried breakfast with him, then leaned on the younger man’s arm and walked weakly to the courthouse. But there he straightened up, parted the horde that was milling noisily around the steps, and strode into the spartan courtroom as if he were the great Junius Brutus Booth himself, an actor stepping onto a grand and beautiful stage.

Inside, he let McCall speak first, and was gratified to hear his protégé effectively tackle the prosecution’s witnesses and shred its ponderous medical and scientific evidence. The young fellow shows promise, Brown thought, and he’s not without humor. As witness his bantering, “One thing that speaks volumes in the defendant’s favor is that she managed to live more than twelve months under the same roof with Ellen Shaw!” More, the ambitious acolyte had a definite way with words. Telling the jury about one of the crucial defense positions—namely that Lucretia had not engaged in sexual activity with Mina before her marriage to him—he explained away that unfortunate marriage by coming out with, “Left upon the wide theater of the world, with a family of tender offspring looking to her maternal hand for protection and support, was she not bound by the most sacred ties of duty and affection to embrace every possible means of advancing their interest and promoting their happiness?” But McCall wasn’t the orator Brown himself was. If Lucretia was going to be acquitted, it was going to be up to him, David Paul Brown, to find the words to make the jury let her off.

When his turn came, he started out mildly and told the panel he was feeling indisposed. But in a matter of moments his eyes were flashing and his voice was soaring through the austere chamber. Yes, he was sick, he was saying, “however, if fate should decree this speech to be my last, I do not know that my professional or earthly career can be more happily terminated than in the just defense of an oppressed fellow creature—a woman—hapless, helpless, friendless and forlorn.”

He was off and running. Lucretia, he told the assembled throng, was a victim. She’d been assailed by “the storm, the tempest, the whirlwind of prejudice … the leprous distillment of pernicious rumor.” But the jurors could rectify that wrong and refuse to permit “the sacred ermine of justice to be stained or polluted by the blood of the guiltless.” If they didn’t, he warned, they’d be condemning not just her but her children, and the time would come when their verdict, “should it affix crime to a mother’s name, will enter deeply into the children’s souls; the worm that never dies shall prey upon their hearts through life; and the curse that never spares shall stigmatize their memory when dead.”

Soon he was telling the jury he had two major reasons for expecting an acquittal: first, because the prosecution had not shown that William had actually been poisoned, and second, because even if William had been poisoned, the prosecution had offered no evidence to indicate that Lucretia had any knowledge of the poisoning, let alone that she had participated in it. Dwelling on these arguments, he reminded his listeners of the many exculpatory admissions he had forced from the prosecution’s scientists, and waved in the air one of the test tubes that had failed to reveal the presence of arsenic. It was, he said, his “dumb witness … small, it is true, but with a giant’s strength.”

His own strength seemed fully to have returned. He was Ciceronian, clear-headed, forceful. He slammed the prosecution’s nonscientific witnesses, calling them vipers and liars. He presented his theory about the supposedly incriminating line in Lucretia’s last letter to Lino, insisting that if she’d committed murder she wouldn’t have written that she feared God’s punishment on this side of the grave but that she feared it on the other side, in the world to come. He made light of Reed’s two-bowls-of-soup proposition, pointing out that it stood upon no evidence, and mockingly asked why, if the prosecution believed only the soup consumed by Chapman had been poisoned, they had bothered introducing all that “quackery” about poisoned ducks. He justified his client’s hiding her second marriage from the police, inquiring, “Was she to join in the general cry, was she to hunt down one to whom, bad as he was, she had plighted her faith? I openly rejoice that she did not, for fidelity is the brightest jewel that adorns the female character.” And finally he accounted for Lucretia’s flight from Andalusia by saying that any woman in her predicament would have fled. “She was the teacher of a large and highly respectable seminary,” he cried out. “Her reputation was her stock in trade; exposure was but another word for death. That she should shrink from it, therefore, was natural—was excusable.”

Had he demolished Reed? He hoped so. But in a last effort to get the jury to acquit, he challenged them to set her free. It would be an act of bravery, he told the sober-faced family men who faced him, for if they convicted Lucretia, each and every one of them would have to “return to your own domestic circle, to your own firesides, and surrounded by your partners and your offspring … tell them that the popular clamor was too loud and too general to be escaped, the popular prejudice too powerful to be resisted; tell them that under those influences you have consigned a mother to a timeless grave, and her children to endless ruin. And thereby give them to understand how frail and feeble is the tenure of human happiness—human character—and human life.”

He was done. He had given one of his best performances. It wasn’t just his own opinion. The press thought so, too. He’d been “powerful,” a reporter from the Philadelphia National Gazette said; he’d fully justified his “fame for energy and eloquence,” the man from the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin said.

Thomas Ross’s mother, Mary, a deeply religious Episcopalian, was a local heroine, at least among that portion of the Bucks County population that had supported Andrew Jackson for president. When he ran for office, Thomas’s father had erected a large hickory pole, Jackson’s symbol, in a corner of the family’s property, but one night a posse of anti-Jackson men had tried to uproot it. Mrs. Ross had sprung from her bed and, without consulting her husband or sons, rushed out of doors, planted herself at the base of the shaft, thrown her arms around its rough-hewn surface, and told the vandals that if they wanted to remove the pole, they’d first have to remove her. The men had backed off. Opposed to Jackson as they were, they respected Mary Ross, with her passionate loyalties and scrupulous piety, and some had been direct beneficiaries of her kindhearted ways, including her habit of keeping a lamp burning in her window throughout the night to aid anyone who might feel lonely or frightened.

In the courtroom, despite the murmurs of admiration that greeted David Paul Brown when he finished speaking, Mary Ross smiled encouragingly at her son Thomas. She had no doubt he would be every bit as effective.

It was four in the afternoon, and some members of the jury were showing signs of weariness, their faces wan, their eyelids drooping. Thomas, mightily annoyed with Brown, cleared his throat. In his view the defense counselor had overstepped the bounds of courtroom propriety. He had taken a woman of base behavior and turned her into a victim of public prejudice and prosecutorial vengeance. He had turned the most grave and serious subjects, like the scientists’ vials and poor Boutcher’s dead ducks, into matters for gaiety and merriment. Determined to eschew such cheap tricks, the deputy attorney general glanced at his mother, opened the drawn purse of his lips, and solemnly reminded the panel that “the ground upon which you stand is holy; the moment you passed the threshold of this sanctuary of justice, an impartial administration of your duty required a sacrifice at its altar of every passion or feeling of excitement which you may have heretofore imbibed.”

The heads of a few jurors seemed to nod in agreement, and Ross plunged ahead, presenting numerous arguments as to why the jury should deliver a verdict of guilty. Some of his arguments were analytic—like Reed, he dwelled on minuscule aspects of the medical testimony—and some were absurd, at least by modern standards. Among the latter were that Lucretia had been nasty to her husband, and that she had cuckolded him; “any woman who would compel [her husband] to make the bed in which he sleeps” must have, he asserted, “the feelings of a savage or a demon” and “the wife who can defile the marriage bed will have no hesitancy in taking the life of that husband.”

He spoke inventively, providing jurors with little scenarios to help them see things as he did. They could discount little Lucretia’s evidence, he suggested, because the child had either forgotten just what had happened when her father lay dying, or, already without one parent, she’d lied to protect the other so that she wouldn’t be completely orphaned. They could accept the two-bowls-of-soup theory without believing, he assured them, that Boutcher’s birds had been poisoned by Chapman’s leftovers. No, Mina was so perverse that he could well have tried to amuse himself by tossing arsenic salt directly at the pecking ducks.

He also spoke passionately, implying that he detested the defendant with every fiber of his being. Lucretia Chapman has “gained a niche in the temple of infamy,” he pronounced in language almost as flowery as Brown’s. “She has inscribed her name upon the darkest page of guilt which the volume of man’s crime unfolds. She has become not only the outcast of virtue, of peace, and of fame, but whatever may be your verdict, she will be the shame of her children, and her children’s children, in each succeeding generation, until oblivion shall have wiped her name from the scroll of time.”

When he was done, he committed the case to the hands of the jury, and begged them to find Lucretia guilty as charged.

His speech had been eloquent, and Mary Ross, listening proudly to the only one of her eight sons to pursue the profession in which his father had made his mark, may have had at that moment an inkling of the brilliant trajectory that son’s career would follow—how one day he would rival his father, the Supreme Court judge, by becoming a member of the United States Congress. But to the reporters in the courtroom, Ross seemed a pale second to Brown. He’d shown “persevering zeal,” the man from the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin decided; the man from the Philadelphia National Gazette thought he’d been merely “able.”

What the jurors thought was not yet clear. They had been treated to two entirely different versions of Lucretia. In the prosecution’s, she was not just a murderer but an adulterer, a souless woman whose acts threatened the very fabric of domestic life because they might inspire other lustful wives to emulate them. In the defense’s, she was not only not a murderer, but not even an adulterer. They consistently maintained that she had not had sexual relations with Lino before their wedding, and that she had married him not to satisfy lust, but to safeguard her fatherless orphaned children.

At war in these two approaches was the very definition of womanhood in the third decade of the nineteenth century. The defense had opted to present Lucretia in the sentimental fashion in which women were generally viewed—as helpless, weak, and perhaps lacking in judgment, but essentially virtuous and asexual. The prosecution had attempted to suggest that female innocence was a myth, or at least that there were some women—women of “masculine intelligence and habits” like Lucretia—who possessed a sexual appetite to rival that of men.

Perhaps the jury was uncomfortable with the latter argument, which was, in its way, as troubling to their world view as Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution would be to their children’s generation. Or perhaps they simply could not envision the frumpily dressed figure they had daily been studying in the courtroom as being capable of sexual appetite. She was, after all, over forty, a middle-aged schoolmarm with a brood of children and a jaw that was softening into jowls. Moreover, as her character witnesses had testified, she was one of them, a churchgoing woman striving to carve out for herself and her family a respectable living. And, as her letters had revealed, she was a true American, daughter of a Revolutionary War hero, an American who’d been bilked, as could happen to any of them, by an outsider, a stranger to their homogeneous community. After listening with inscrutable faces to Judge Fox’s charges, they filed from the room, deliberated for just a little over two hours, and announced they had reached a verdict.

At once the courthouse bell began ringing, its clangor piercing the silence of the village night. It was nearly midnight. People raced coatless from homes, taverns, and inns. The courthouse steps became a perfect pandemonium. But inside the courtroom, where the jurors were filing back into their seats, there was an ominous silence.

Judge Fox regarded the jurors somberly and asked how they found the defendant.

Foreman John Balderson arose, glanced sympathetically at a shuddering Lucretia, and called out into the stillness, “Not guilty.”

Leaving the courtroom that night on the arm of her champion, David Paul Brown, Lucretia was surrounded by well-wishers. They congratulated her, embraced her, clutched at the dun-colored skirt of her traveling suit. She was baffled, for some of those who were warmest to her had hissed and booed her at the beginning of the trial. But she accepted their displays of affection and tried to forget the venom with which they had once looked at her.

Brown had arranged a room for her and the children at his inn, and unable to rest, she partied and petted and chattered with them for hours. Toward daybreak the youngsters collapsed into sleep, William Jr. and Mary in beds of their own, Abby Ann, John, and little Lucretia huddling together in hers. She lay down in their midst, little John’s head nestling on her chest, the girls’ scrawny arms tangling around her waist, and enjoyed the soundest rest she had known in months.

In the morning she took her leave of Brown, and with the children mounted a carriage for the journey home to Andalusia. As they started to move, a stranger’s vehicle slipped behind their carriage. Then another’s, and another’s, until soon there were dozens of carriages following them, sulkies and shays, Abbotts and Dearborns, even market wagons, their horses whinnying, their drivers shouting their gees and giddyups, their passengers calling out Godspeeds and farewells. She sat tall beside the children and rode home at the head of a parade, a triumphal procession.

In his cell, Lino took up his pen. “The Creator who, in his infinite wisdom, foresaw that gold would be the cause of many evils to man,” he wrote, “concealed that metal deep in the bowels of the earth, and having covered it with ground and rocks, he strewed upon the surface flowers and fruit, and all that was necessary to the comfort of the human family. But the insatiable avarice of man, impelled him to tear open the earth and snatch the hidden treasure from its deepest and most hidden caverns.

“It was the avarice of William Chapman that occasioned his ruin, as it is more than probable that it was the covetousness of his wife that drove her to murder him. Mrs. Chapman well knew that Carolino had no mines in Mexico, because this fact had originated with herself … but she knew equally well that his parents were of princely opulence, and that by her arts she would inveigle him to marry her, and would thus enjoy his wealth … and at this stage of the case, we [will] see who was the prime mover of all the horrid circumstances which followed.”