Blood & Ivy

by Paul Collins

  This was not a bailable case, the judge explained to Webster; he’d have to wait in jail for the eventual trial.

  And yet, perhaps his situation was not a hopeless one. The prosecution would have to prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt, and Webster’s case promised some very reasonable doubts indeed. How could the prosecutors establish a murder in a building already full of dead bodies? How could they determine that the body was really Parkman’s? Even if it was Parkman, how could they show that someone else hadn’t put the body there? If Webster had put it there, how could they ascertain that it had been premeditated murder and not manslaughter? And would anyone really believe that a Harvard professor would commit such an act?

  How could doubt not seem reasonable in a case like this?

  Webster was sent back to his cell, where some turkey and rice arrived from Parker’s, and he fell upon it eagerly. Then he sat down to write a letter to his daughter Marianne, whom he had still not seen after three days in jail; as the eldest of his daughters still at home, she would be asked to run errands. “My dearest Marianne,” he scratched onto the paper, and he recounted the day’s events: the visit by Peirce and Horsford, the arraignment so admirably hidden from the public. But then, inevitably, he thought of all the wonderful food he had been sent:

  They send much more than I can eat and I have directed the steward to distribute the surplus to any poor ones here. If you will send me a small canister of tea, I can make my own. A little pepper, I may want, some day: you can put it up, to come with some bundle. . . . Half a dozen Rochelle powders, I should like.

  There was another concern on his mind, though, before he set down his pen and sealed the envelope.

  “Tell mamma,” he added, “not to open the little bundle I gave her.”

  AT NINE-THIRTY on Thursday morning, the remains of George Parkman were returned to his home at 8 Walnut Street.

  The casket that now lay in the family’s house was the closest to a homecoming the Parkman family could hope for. The Reverend Peabody spoke with the immediate family and other relations. A brass plate on the casket bore a few simple words:

  GEORGE PARKMAN

  Died Nov. 23, 1849

  Aged 60 years.

  The age was wrong; he hadn’t turned sixty just yet. But the casket in their home and the date of death inscribed upon it represented the family’s declaration: that this was his body, and that he had indeed died that day in the Medical College.

  Those who had known Dr. Parkman best struggled to draw up the kind of amiable remembrances that an occasion like this would demand. There were his kindnesses to the insane, of course. Parkman had donated both an organ and a piano to the Boston Lunatic Hospital—additions much loved by the inmates, but of which few outside its walls would ever learn. The doctor had never quite left medicine, in fact: he had been working on a final paper, it was said, on “the value of electricity in producing active dejection from the bowels.”

  The favorite story, oft repeated, was about his poor tenants, and the old man’s response when a local politician had asked him to donate ten dollars for a showy cannon salute to celebrate an election victory. “Just step with me round the corner,” the doctor was said to reply. Then, taking the politician up some rickety stairs, Parkman ushered him into the tenement of a poor consumptive tenant. “Now,” Parkman remarked, handing over a bill, “here is ten dollars: you may either fire it away in powder or give it to this poor woman. I won’t attempt to bias you.” With that, he vanished from the room, leaving his charge to stand there awkwardly, and then sheepishly hand the money to the woman. The story was a telling one: charitable, in its way, but, like Parkman, also rather sharp and unforgiving.

  The occasional piano or ten-dollar gift did not quite hide the fact that Parkman’s larger operations were not altogether benevolent. George’s donation of the land under the Medical College, it seemed, was hardly as munificent as it first appeared—at least, not when one looked at the land under the new nearby jail. The former had been donated to Harvard while Josiah Quincy Sr. was its president; the latter was negotiated shortly afterward with Boston mayor Josiah Quincy Jr.—and at an astronomical twelve-fold markup from what Parkman and Shaw had paid for the land. The deal had profited Parkman and Shaw more than $40,000 apiece. Their plot was not what the city’s own commission had recommended; the land was partially underwater at high tide, and so waterlogged that it took nearly $50,000 more in municipal funds for a landfill and a seawall to even make it habitable. The donation looked suspiciously like a quid pro quo, worked out with the Quincys, that enriched Harvard—and George Parkman and Robert Shaw—at the expense of the city of Boston. The incoming mayor, John Bigelow, was so irked by it that for months he halted construction on the Charles River property, trying to get the jail site moved, before finally concluding that the city’s finances were already disastrously committed. For this sleight of hand, George Parkman would now be remembered as a great benefactor.

  Not every Parkman was so clever at hiding his tracks. The publicity over George’s murder produced the revelation in the papers that years earlier George had helped his brother Samuel—“Naughty Sam,” as he was known in the family—flee the law and the country after a murky scandal involving forgeries. Naughty Sam was rumored to be living in Italy, though the family knew better; he was living in debauchery in Paris.

  Naughty Sam, alas, could not be present for that day’s funeral.

  George’s casket was loaded onto a bier, and a handful of family members and other relatives followed it across Boston Common in a procession of five carriages. For such decidedly partial remains, Parkman’s box was surprisingly heavy. Inside the wooden casket was a sealed leaden coffin; and inside that, the doctor’s remains floated, gently suspended in spirits. This was the better to preserve them if they were needed for retrieval during the trial—a clever bit of forensic practicality that Dr. Parkman would have entirely approved of.

  If only his reputation could also be preserved under a leaden seal. Instead, the secrets of families on both sides of the Charles River continued their steady drip onto the pages of the press. “Day by day,” Longfellow wrote in his journal, “the horrid facts, circumstances, and considerations of the Cambridge Tragedy come oozing like water through an ill-constructed cistern!” To those around Harvard, of course, the plot against Webster was dubbed the Cambridge Tragedy; to those in Boston, convinced of Webster’s guilt and the persecution of the school’s porter, it was now the Boston Tragedy.

  There was, however, one conviction they all shared: that whatever was to follow, it was indeed going to be a tragedy.

  Part V

  THE TRIAL

  17

  IN THE DEAD HOUSE

  THE SKELETON KEY SCRAPED INSIDE THE LOCK AND TURNED; the door swung into darkness.

  The men knew they weren’t supposed to be there, and they locked the door behind them. The coroner’s inquest was in Ward Room 7 of city hall, but old hands knew that the coroner’s storage room—the “dead house”—was right under Room 7, and that an air vent ran between the two spaces. The two reporters strained at the grille to catch any words of the expert testimony: victim, flesh, caustic, teeth . . .

  Click.

  The door swung open under the hand of a court officer.

  What are . . .

  One trespasser bowled past the lawman, sprinting down the old planked hallway, but the officer grabbed the other one and hauled him upstairs before an unamused court—where, it was reported, “he was taken before the jury, and coroner-mauled.”

  Desperate measures by reporters were hardly a surprise, though, with the coroner holding his inquest behind closed doors. This was nearly unheard of, and widely attacked in Boston and around the country. “SECRET INQUISITION,” one Baltimore paper announced. A public inquest, the DA soothingly explained, would result in “pre-occupying and misdirecting public opinion” and would make a fair trial impossible. His reasons might have been given credence until he also let it slip th
at the Webster and Parkman families wanted the investigation kept private, and that he’d accommodated them. Boston once again seemed to have a different justice system for the rich than the poor.

  “From the beginning,” the Bee accused, “there has been shown an evident disposition to conceal and keep back the information in this affair. . . . The public have a right to know.”

  Perhaps, but more urgently, the newspapers had a need to know. Telegraphic coverage of suicides, boiler explosions, and train derailments was growing so rapidly that the Cambridge Chronicle drolly reprinted a proposal for constructing a giant awning made of newsprint across the length of America, to contain “17,000,000 columns of reading matter.” While there was plenty of national news that December, with the Washington Monument reaching the fifty-foot mark and talk of a proposal to send another Arctic expedition after missing explorer Sir John Franklin, the presses were hungrier still for the sensational and the strange. News of spirit knockings in New York was good; the claim that a Russian inventor had created a steam-powered man was even better.

  But nothing sold like murder, and no murder sold like Dr. Parkman’s.

  Papers across the country had picked up the story now—it was, a Georgia newspaper noted, a ghastly bounty for “lovers of horrors.” The New Orleans Daily Picayune reported that “The Northern papers teem with the revolting details” and pondered whether “refined education is valueless” if Harvard could be the scene of such depravity: “How can we expect that the illiterate and benighted child of want will remain faithful . . . when he in whose breast the lamp of science brightly burns is found derelict?”

  The story traveled on ships across the ocean, steadily sailing west to run in the Honolulu Polynesian and the New Zealand Spectator, and east to the Illustrated London News. That city had itself scarcely recovered from “the Bermondsey Horror,” a lurid affair in which a married couple lured the wife’s wealthy lover into their Miniver Place home, shot him and beat him with a crowbar, buried his body under the kitchen flagstones, and then double-crossed each other over the money. Such newly proclaimed Tragedies and Horrors seemed to arrive as regularly as the latest monthly installment of David Copperfield.

  With business thriving, the real scandal of the reporter found in the dead house was, perhaps, that he’d been foolish enough to get caught.

  “He was exceedingly sorry—that the officer had discovered his cool contrivance for getting the materials for an Extra,” a Post reporter dryly commented, and the Journal promptly picked up the story as well. The two other papers typically suspected of such high jinks were the Herald and perhaps the Bee; but the Herald hinted in owl puns that an evening penny paper—the ostensibly more respectable Transcript—had done the deed: “WHO was caught in the dead house? Who?” it needled. The Bee worked up a sly fable of an owl haunting the rafters of city hall: “The owl is killed and is in the dead-house—where an inquest will be held today, and which—on account of the feelings of the coroner—no reporters will be allowed. We hear that a locksmith has been at work all night on another skeleton key.”

  The Transcript still clung to an air of respectability, even while it printed the bloody details of the case. As readers settled in for the Christmas season, the paper ran a poem titled “Murder-Worship,” scolding them for reading the very thing its own columns provided:

  . . . We chronicle the foul minutiae

  Of the dark deeds of crime;—nay! stop not here,

  But sift their very prison-life, and draw

  The veil from off their hidden histories:

  We crowd to see their waxen effigies;

  We make their portraits household gods, and rear

  Them shrines, where Murder-worship is allowed by Law.

  The poem, like so much else in American papers, was pirated from Britain; it had run in Punch as a comment on the Bermondsey Horror. Not a word was changed, nor needed to be, for what had been true of Miniver Place in London was just as true of North Grove Street in Boston.

  THE NEW Year of 1850 arrived in Boston with both sleigh rides in the moonlight and the inaugural journey of the rail line between Cambridge and Boston. Modern life had come to Harvard, and the smoke-belching locomotive was the fitting end to the first half of the century. “What stupendous discoveries, what great events it has produced!” rhapsodized the Evening Transcript. “The steamboat, the railroad, the daguerreotype, the magnetic telegraph, etherization. . . . It has been a grand, a magnificent era, whatever the grumblers may say.”

  Longfellow was delighted by this wondrous conveyance; he rode the rails into town and did not find himself missing hour-long waits in the old omnibus office. The railway terminus in Boston, admittedly, lacked grandeur. The trip, he judged, was “very pleasant, though it leaves down by North End, by no means the most desirable end of a journey.” But then, if one’s final destination was to be the Leverett Street Jail, as Longfellow’s was to be today, perhaps no journey could end well anyway.

  The jail guards showed the poet in and walked him down to Webster’s cell. “There,” Longfellow noted in his journal, “sat the doctor reading.”

  John was voluble, nervous with the bottled-up energy of a sociable man now in his second month of confinement. It was not as cold inside the jail as Longfellow imagined—but it was just as dark. Yet Webster was reading incessantly, more like a cloistered scholar than a prisoner, fortified in the morning by copies of the Advertiser and the Courier, and then writing back to his family and colleagues for the latest books he’d seen mentioned. During his jail time, Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and Washington Irving’s biography of Mohammed were published, and he was particularly keen to lay hands on the latter volume.

  The details of his own case did not make for such pleasant reading. Just that morning the papers had run a claim that he’d been complaining of other prisoners taunting him with “Murderer!” when he tried to sleep. But, one account noted, after a guard was posted overnight and heard nothing, Webster had still complained of voices the next morning. “The doctor’s imagination is so wrought upon,” concluded a reporter, “as to produce in some degree mental aberration.”

  Such fanciful reports by the press, Webster grumbled, left the “public mind inflamed—blind to truth.”

  It was a relief to have Longfellow visit; he was a link to the world Webster had lost, of the pleasant dilemmas of a Harvard family man—what Longfellow dubbed the “Hesperian Gardens of college life.” President Sparks was pleading with the poet to teach more literature lectures in the coming year, which wasn’t really in his contract, but how could he say no? A few days ago, he’d spent some hours building snow forts outside the house with his children; what a world away that seemed from this grim place, where the fortifications were real. Meals with future senator Charles Sumner, tea with Emerson; over a dinner with literary friends, they’d passed the hat around for Hawthorne, who, it was whispered, “was really in want.” The poor fellow had a novel coming out, about a respectable Puritan minister hiding an adultery scandal. What market was there for that quaint stuff, when you could read in any newspaper about a Harvard professor facing a murder charge?

  Webster had his own sheaf of writing in the works. The prison had furnished his cell with a rudely fitted table, where he penned sheet after sheet of notes on his defense. He sketched pages of maps and drawings—some showing the positions of potentially removable panels and latches on his laboratory doors, the better to demonstrate how vulnerable they were to intruders.

  So someone might have gained entry to his lab—but who?

  The janitor, Webster claimed. Littlefield was capable of anything for a few dollars’ profit. Why, when they’d moved into the new medical school building, a few years ago, Littlefield had, for some extra pay, taken on the very worst jobs involving in clearing out the old premises. “Dr. Lawrence hired Littlefield to clean out the bodies etc. accumulated in the vault of the old college, and he did it for 200 dollars I think he told me,” Webster sniffed. “Shows he was ready
to do any thing for money.” That his own lab made this work that now he looked down upon was hardly the point to Webster; how could it be, when the first question was, What sort of man would take that work?

  It was simple, really. Parkman had been murdered elsewhere—perhaps by an angry tenant—and his body was bundled into a sack as a black-market cadaver. “The body was probably brought to the college to sell as a subject,” Webster theorized. “On discovering whose body it was, it would have been the first impulse to get rid of it.” As to the parts winding up in his own privy, Dr. Webster suspected that Littlefield secretly had an extra key. Maybe, he helpfully added, they should search the janitor’s privy, too. “Would it not be well,” he suggested, “to employ a man to look below[?]”

  “He talked freely about his case,” Longfellow marveled, “but showed no particular emotion, save when I told him that the Musical Association Concerts had been given up in Cambridge out of a feeling of sympathy for him.”

  It was shocking for the doctor to hear that Harvard’s alumni concerts had fallen silent. Music was a pure joy of Webster’s home life in Cambridge, and that life, it seemed, was slipping inexorably away.

  THE BITTER cold continued for days, and the Bostonian vogue for using the newly installed plumbing to wash down the sidewalks quickly turned the streets into treacherous sheets of ice. Soon even the Charles River itself had hardened into glass. Locals ventured out onto the ice with their skates, and the river by the Medical College echoed with the cries of delighted children. When a lad named Jerome trudged into the senior Dr. Bigelow’s office, it might just as easily have been to ask for someone to administer to a clumsy skater.