Blood & Ivy

by Paul Collins

  I’ve got something for Dr. Ware, the boy explained.

  That wasn’t unusual; Jerome sometimes ran errands for Ware. But this time it was something he’d found in the river—under the ice, in fact, while he’d been skating. Bigelow knew that Ware was in the middle of a lecture with the medical students. Leave it with me, he told the boy. When Ware emerged from his lecture hall, his colleague was waiting for him.

  “Found the hands of Dr. Parkman,” the old professor laconically informed him.

  They were indeed hands: the fingers swollen, the flesh stripped off and still stuck to the ice, but unmistakably two human hands. The boy had found them well out from shore; Dr. Ware mused that perhaps they’d been disarticulated from the body and flung as far out into the river as possible. The school would have to inform the family, of course.

  The mystery, however, was quickly solved by a third professor: I put those out there, he explained. He’d buried them in the sandy bank a week ago, before the freeze—just curiosity, really, to study the rate of decomposition—and clearly he hadn’t buried them deeply enough. The hands were those of an ordinary college cadaver. But then, such discoveries were to be expected: the school both being a medical college and occupying a riverfront building in a large city, there’d always be some dead bodies about. In the first days of searching for Parkman, the police had even found a dead newborn, abandoned out on the nearby empty lot where the jail was to be built. Then, as the Herald noted, “a rather good-looking young girl” also proved to be missing from her house-servant job nearby. She later turned up alive in a South Boston workhouse, and the story was quietly forgotten.

  With Bostonians attuned to any hint of mystery around North Grove Street, though, every such find was reported in the newspapers. Impresarios and merchants took note, and one of the most shameless used a false headline to sucker readers into a notice for a mesmerist:

  THE PARKMAN TRAGEDY in the glow of its excitement, scarcely produced more interest in the minds of our citizens, than the wonderful and almost superhuman experiments in the science of “electro biology” nightly made at the Melodeon by the able and educated Mr. Fiske.

  One bookseller, Redding & Co., took advantage of the scandal to unload its stock of one hundred copies of Webster’s 1821 book A Description of the Island of St. Michael, a pleasantly dull tome. It hardly mattered that even the merchant admitted that it was “Dry, physical fact. . . . There is hardly such a thing as a sentiment in the whole volume.”

  If moldering books by Webster had a market, there was an even greater one for books about Webster. That week, even as newspapers ran ads for the latest “Despairing, Raving, Mad, Heart-Killing, High Flown, Lampooning, Romantic” valentine cards from London, there appeared notices for The Boston Tragedy!, a twelve-and-a-half-cent rush job that tidily summarized the case and whose pages promised “evidence of the blackest character.” Its publisher soon claimed that twenty thousand copies sold in the first week alone.

  The relentless publicity was so disheartening that Harvard’s recently retired president, Edward Everett, briefly mulled the idea of teaming up with two fellow Harvard alumni to start their own edifying newspaper, “for gratuitous circulation, or nearly so, to counteract the detestable penny papers which are filled with ribaldry and exercise the worst possible influence.” But Everett was not always a man of the most practical ideas: as president, he’d changed the university’s name to “The University at Cambridge,” reissuing the school stationery and retitling the school’s bulletins accordingly. Perhaps he imagined an eventual merger with the institution’s British cousin; in any case, the new name did not outlast his three years in the office.

  Actual penny-paper proprietors were, alas, considerably more tenacious than Everett. On February 28, Herald readers were greeted with a headline that roared, “HIGHLY IMPORTANT! DISCOVERY OF A DEAD BODY supposed to be that of DR G PARKMAN!” A body found in the river near Roxbury, the article claimed, had been judged by an inquest to probably be Parkman’s, what with its “long, attenuated limbs—the apparent age—the peculiar bend of the body.” News of the discovery was halfway across the country even as Bostonians subsequently learned that the inquest had actually said nothing of the sort. The body was that of a missing thirty-eight-year-old carriage-smith, despondent after his employer went bust—not a fifty-nine-year-old doctor who’d been out collecting rents. The other newspapers leapt upon what they dubbed “the Parkman Hoax.” The Herald, unrepentant as ever, retreated into a time-honored sanctuary for humbug: moralizing.

  “We never wantonly trifle with the feelings of the public, especially on a subject so awful and momentous as the one in question,” the paper piously announced. “That revolting atrocities—moral abominations, and other descriptions of iniquities, appear in the Herald, is not our fault, but that of the wicked world in which we live.”

  SOMEHOW, BACK in Cambridge, life continued in the Webster household.

  The few times Harriet and the girls had seen John had scarcely lasted over an hour; they’d spent more time with him in a single evening at home over Milton and violin practice than they’d had together in three months of his imprisonment at Leverett Street.

  The family, in turn, was imprisoned in their house, besieged by letters from attorneys—Dear Mrs. Webster, Please accept my deepest sympathies in this trying time. If I might offer my services—none of whom would have bothered writing if they’d known that Harriet and her daughters had resorted to needlework just to get by. Their combined sewing brought in barely fifty dollars a month, less than a third of Dr. Webster’s salary. And then, too, Mrs. Webster had once quietly earned much-needed extra money by having her relatives in the Azores send fashionable straw hats and stockings hidden in their parcels. It was not exactly legal; but she had quietly resold the items at a fine price, having avoided the steep duties on such goods. Now, however, she could hardly leave the house: visiting the docks for shipping would bring an intolerable gauntlet of stares. Even visitors to the house were not to be trusted. One peddler, let into the kitchen to talk with their helper Anne, had inquired so pointedly about their affairs that they became convinced he was a spy—whether sent by the Parkmans, the police, or the newspapers, it hardly mattered.

  The daguerreotypes on the bureau were their best company now, though even they were reminders of what had been lost. There was one of Sarah and her baby, taken in the Azores; she alone of the daughters had been married and shipped off before this disaster struck. And in other frames, views of Porta Delgada, from Mrs. Webster’s childhood home—an ocean and a lifetime away from this imprisonment in a frigid New England winter.

  They’d have to sell some books from the professor’s library. Perhaps, he helpfully suggested, they could sell more than that from his office. “There are also some good pictures, some pieces of statuary,” he added. These, he thought, might be “of interest to persons of taste.”

  But they were still desperately short of money.

  A carriage came by each morning to pick the women up for a brief respite in the outside world. The carriage wasn’t theirs—they didn’t dare hire such an extravagance—but, rather, the thoughtful favor of a Harvard friend. Anything outside the carriage was less calming, especially the newspapers. There terrible, cruel things were said about the girls’ father: the mocking revelation that he’d been dubbed “Skyrocket Jack” by his students, for his milquetoast manner and his sometimes inept proclivity for chemical explosions; the oddly contrary claims of his cruelty and his “devilish” temper; and humiliating revelations about the family’s shaky finances, coming just as his daughters were becoming marriageable. But the news was harder, perhaps, for the false hope it offered. As February slipped into March, and the body found in Roxbury was forgotten, attention turned instead to an extraordinary letter received months earlier by the New Orleans Delta:

  Dear Sir: It is with difficulty that I can get paper to rite you; but I am induced to do so for the safety of Dr. Webster. He is not guilty of the deed
. I myself perpetrated the Deed that he is charged with.

  And I am off for Californiar.

  Yours, ORONOKA

  the 23rd of November was a Bad Day for me

  Newspapers, not to mention both the Parkman and the Webster families, received all kinds of wild letters. One from Philadelphia claimed that Parkman had been murdered by a tenant in a Charles Street apartment—just as Webster himself had theorized—and then his body dumped off at the college.

  Yet the Oronoka letter looked more convincing than most. It had been postmarked in Washington, Texas—some eighty miles outside Houston—and witnesses stated that a mysterious man from Boston’s suburbs had been in the region. Follow-up reports noted that a “John Weeks” signed himself into a nearby hotel at the time and died of cholera a few weeks later on a steamboat—perhaps bound for California. His effects revealed his identity as Benjamin F. Cannon, who’d disappeared from his Wendell, Massachusetts, home in November, on the run from creditors. Some maintained that the news couldn’t have reached Texas in time for a hoaxer to write it based on the newspaper accounts; the letter writer, they said, must have been someone with personal knowledge of the crime who had left Boston before the body was discovered.

  This might have been a convincing argument, were it not for some simple arithmetic: the letter was mailed twenty-seven days after the public revelation of the crime; yet the first word of the letter appeared in Boston twenty-one days after that. So news could indeed travel between those locations in just three weeks. Its author might have had a week to read of the affair in the papers and then amuse himself with a hoax. Moreover, there was no hint that Cannon had been seen in Boston or around Parkman, or that there was anything incriminating in his trunk of personal effects that was sent home to his daughters, or, indeed, that there was anything remarkable about a man fleeing creditors to reinvent himself out west.

  This story, like all the others, dissipated and left Mrs. Webster with nothing. Nothing, that is, but the sure knowledge that on March 19, her husband would stand trial on a capital charge of murder.

  THE COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS

  V. JOHN WHITE WEBSTER

  SUPREME JUDICIAL COURT OF MASSACHUSETTS,

  NEW COURT HOUSE, CITY OF BOSTON

  March 19th—April 1st, 1850

  Hon. Lemuel Shaw, Esq.

  Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court

  Hon. Samuel S. Wilde, Associate Justice

  Hon. Charles A. Dewey, Associate Justice

  Hon. Theron Metcalf, Associate Justice

  George C. Wilde, Esq., Clerk of the Supreme Judicial Court

  Dr. John White Webster

  Defendant

  COUNSEL FOR THE PRISONER

  PROSECUTORS

  Hon. Pliny Merrick

  John Clifford, Esq., Attorney General

  Edward D. Sohier, Esq.

  George Bemis, Esq.

  MEMBERS OF THE JURY

  Thomas Barrett

  John Borrowscale

  Robert J. Byram (Foreman)

  James Crosby

  John E. Davenport

  Albert Day

  Joseph Eustis

  Daniel T. Fuller

  Benjamin H. Greene

  Arnold Hayward

  Frederick A. Henderson

  Stephen A. Stackpole

  18

  GOOD MEN AND TRUE

  THE BOSTON HERALD?

  Draw.

  The Boston Courier?

  Draw.

  The Boston Mail?

  Draw.

  About a dozen reporters gathered in the empty courtroom, drawing straws from the hand of Sheriff Eveleth, vying for the press chairs closest to the witness stand. The courthouse still smelled of sawdust; all weekend Sheriff Eveleth had had carpenters in here, barricading all but two entrances and strategically rerouting the remaining entryways. Hastily erected hallways and extra railings would smoothly sluice the massed public through only the upper galleries of the courtroom, and then back downstairs, out through the cellar, and into the street. A separate new hallway, guarded by police officers, would admit the trial judges, lawyers, and witnesses into the main floor of the courtroom.

  The New York Globe?

  Draw.

  The New York papers had reporters there for the trial, too. For days, Boston newspapers had been priming their readers, with the Bee going into a reverie at the prospects: “This, without question, will be the most exciting trial that ever took place in this country.—THE PEOPLE demand all the facts concerning this MOST MYSTERIOUS TRAGEDY, and as one of the people’s agents, we mean to do our part towards answering that demand.” The Herald, boasting of “one of the fastest presses, an extra set of hands, and a steam engine,” promised its readers hourly editions so that the “mazy web of this unprecedented transaction will be unveiled before the public.”

  But a newer medium was also seizing the moment. Local inventor John Adams Whipple was one of the first Americans to manufacture photography chemicals, and his ads for “Daguerreotypes by Steam” were a staple of Boston newspapers. He also dabbled in work as a showman, at night turning his studio into a twenty-five-cent magic lantern show of “dissolving views” projected onto the wall “as large as life.” He had a scholarly side, too, working with Harvard’s observatory to create some of the very first astronomical images. Whipple, however, knew where the money was at the moment with Harvard photographs, and it wasn’t up on the moon. Redding & Co., the same bookstore that had used the scandal to unload old copies of Professor Webster’s rather sleepy monograph, now offered twenty-five-cent engravings of Webster “from a daguerreotype by Mr. Whipple.”

  All the attention on Dr. Webster had almost worked too well. There had been talk of moving the trial to a performance space like the Melodeon theater, or to Tremont Hall—the latter seating some twenty-six hundred—before settling on the more sober environs of a customary courtroom. But the city’s largest room could fit only about five hundred. The applicants could have filled the room twelve times over; still more, neither knowing nor caring about tickets, would show up wanting to get in. Observing the usual courtesies meant that medical and law students, as well as their professional elders, were given special priority in applying for trial passes, which they eagerly took; in the end, only a fraction of the upper gallery seating was left for the public.

  This also left the newspapers jockeying for prime spots on the courtroom floor. The sheriff had done his best; his carpenters had even built some press tables specially for the trial, situated between the jury box and the sheriff’s desk.

  The Boston Traveller?

  Draw.

  Really, the crowding couldn’t be helped. Why, the witnesses alone would number up to 120 people. Sheriff Eveleth could only shrug at the madness of it all.

  “I don’t know what else can be done,” he told the reporters.

  THE CROWDS began forming at seven that morning, gathering in the snow and on the southern steps of the courthouse, electrified by the approach of any important-looking carriage.

  “That’s him!” one of the onlookers yelled.

  “That be damned,” another scoffed, “that’s not Webster.”

  Policemen stood outside the thick, bronze-sheathed doors, opening and closing them to one ticket holder at a time, “to keep at bay the unfavored multitude,” as an observer drily put it. Slowly the gallery and the floor filled, and the air swelled with the spectators’ animated discussions until, at eight forty-five a.m., a sudden hush fell upon the room: Dr. Webster had arrived.

  “All stretched forward to scan his looks,” one reporter observed, “for instinctively all men are physiognomists.”

  Webster’s manner betrayed little. The doctor was no stranger to the courtroom, having served as an expert witness upon occasion. Led up to his seat in the dock—a cushioned armchair—he bowed slightly and smiled at several friends in the crowd before sitting down. He looked exactly like what, in fact, he was: a bespectacled grandfa
ther who taught chemistry at Harvard. Still, with phrenology’s hold on the public imagination, some saw in his features all the marks of criminality that a professional demeanor could not hide.

  “The countenance of the prisoner indicated to the physiognomist strong animal passion and irascible temperament,” opined the New York Globe. “His general appearance makes no favorable impression.”

  The four judges arrived to another hush. Capital cases required a majority of the state supreme court’s justices, and four of the five judges were here today, with Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw presiding. At sixty-nine, Shaw was now in his twentieth year as chief justice, and already the longest serving in the state’s history; his past three predecessors had all died in office, and the dour and dogged Shaw would likely be no different. He was inextricable from the business and culture of Boston; his opinions had shaped New England’s burgeoning railroads and industries, and his new son-in-law Herman Melville had ambitions to shape its literature as well.

  A skeptic might have pointed out that Shaw, as a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, had a conflict of interest in this case. But that was not how the law worked in Boston, and particularly not how the law worked at Harvard. Shaw was also presiding over an endlessly disputed will by one Edward Phillips, whose heirs contested provisos that included a $100,000 bequest to Harvard’s observatory. That Lemuel Shaw was judging that case elicited little comment; how could a connection to Harvard be a conflict of interest, when Harvard was every Boston gentleman’s common interest? And in this day’s case, not only were the accused and the victim from Harvard, but so were Webster’s defense team of Pliny Merrick and Edward Sohier; and so, for that matter, was the associate prosecutor, George Bemis, and many of the witnesses.