At last, Wednesday morning, the sheriff’s black sleigh plowed in, and he took us both to Bel Air, wrapped in rugs against the cold and escorted by Dragoons and Rifles on horseback. The sheriff had secured a private room at Glenn’s Hotel to serve as Martha’s jail. It was a pleasant upstairs room with a fire in the hearth and a goose-down bed with ruffled canopy, nicer than either of us had at home. She took one look at it and tried to leave.
“Please take me to the gallows,” she said in a firm but gentle voice.
The sheriff checked the position of his gun and swelled his chest, as if proud of how he was facing up to her, the dangerous murderess. “That’s for the jury to decide. Now, you gotta stay here, miss. I gotta post a guard. You can’t leave, but you can move about the place. Folks can come and sit with you, and you can eat your dinner in the dining room downstairs.”
He placed a young man with a rifle on the porch, despite (or maybe because of?) the Dragoons and Rifles swarming in the halls, at least two outside her doorway at all times. Inside she lay on the bed, her eyes closed, and would not say a word or sit up to eat.
On our second day Richard pounded on the door and let in an Irishwoman with a tray.
“You eat every bit of that,” he said sternly and pointed at the food.
Martha did not even open her eyes.
He shook a finger at the tray. “You’re going to eat that and I’m going to watch.”
But he faltered when it came to forcing her, and soon I took the tray away, half the food consumed by me, the other half untouched. It went on that way for days. I never saw her eat or sleep, though she would drink milk if I held it to her lips, and she may have slept when I did, so I did not notice it.
I fretted for my own children, and my breasts ached, hard with milk, like a poor cow impatient at the gate. Their grandmother could not nurse the youngest, but I knew she would manage somehow, and it did not seem safe to leave Martha yet, when she wanted so much to die. I put off going home from day to day and sheltered her from things she should not hear. Every morning now brought piles of newspapers, delivered to us by the staff of the hotel.
In Maryland and Washington, papers carried headlines such as THE TRAGEDY AT JARRETTSVILLE, and the front page of the New York Times proclaimed YOUNG LADY SHOOTS HER SEDUCER IN MARYLAND. Reporters were dispatched from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and as far away as Maine and Florida. Every day they tried to speak to Martha, but the militiamen had orders from her lawyers to turn them away. Richard moved freely about the town and reported tourists showing up in droves, riding past in carriages to get a glimpse of the hotel and feel the thrill.
Mail started to arrive, basketsful of white and blue and ecru envelopes, often scented, the notes inside them penned in trembling floral script by women neither one of us had ever met. Martha wouldn’t look at them, but I sat on the sofa in her room and opened every one.
“From a Miss Harriet Adams, of Boston, Massachusetts,” I read out to her. “Miss Adams writes that all her friends have wept and prayed for you both day and night. They feel that when you are hanged, God will know the difference between your soul and those of ordinary criminals, and He will take you into Paradise. And here is one from Atlanta. Miss Alice Gagnier sends deep sorrow on your behalf and only wishes she had known you in your life.”
Some sent gifts: a black silk veil, handkerchiefs with black borders, a flat black hat and black silk gloves, yards and yards of fine black silk.
The donor of the silk wrote, “You must have a new mourning dress made up in the latest form,” and when the wife of a local statesman heard of it, she paid her own dressmaker to come and measure Martha for the dress.
Others sent hot pies—mincemeat, pumpkin, apple—from fruits put up the fall before, though Martha would eat nothing, and they fell to the Dragoons. As the days grew warmer, more blooms poked up through Harford County dirt, and one morning the hotel doorman carried in an armload of peonies, ruffled red and white and pink. Martha seemed distressed by the sight of them.
“Please take them to the orphans’ home. They’re mistaken if they think I am innocent.”
But the doorman left them, and I went downstairs to find vases enough for all of them.
One day, as usual, I read out the names on envelopes to her.
“Then, let’s see, Mrs. Allen Granger of Richmond. Miss Carrie Newton of Wichita, Kansas. Miss Ida Green of the city of New York. And I think this one’s from a man. Mr. Timothy C. Lincoln of Philadelphia. Is he the first man you’ve heard from?”
Martha surprised me by sitting up and reaching out to take that one from me.
“Is he someone you know?” I asked, puzzled, having never heard of him, and surely I knew everyone she knew.
She flushed and did not answer me but ripped it open and read, and when she was finished, she handed it silently to me. The envelope was made of butcher paper, sealed with flour paste, the ink a cheap, watery blue, already fading. The writing was awkward, printed, not in script, and some letters were backward. But I puzzled it out.
Missy,
Heard of your trouble, afraid they gone hang you so had to right. You brung me them books back then and all. I heard what bad folks been saying down there. Folks hadnt oughta listen to such truck.
Been working at blacksmiths, learning some. Got Ma here and Sophie too. Had to go. It was too bad there.
Well, ain’t no good at righting. Just want to say May God Help You.
Yours & co,
Timothy C. Lincoln
“I think it’s Tim,” she whispered. “Maybe he calls himself Lincoln now. But I bet the C is for Cairnes. He might have kept it. That used to be his name, when he was ours.”
I could not imagine who she meant. “Tim? Tim Cairnes? Who is that?”
Then I knew: black Tim, from her place, the man who had made the chair for Sam. And I flushed, too, remembering the talk. I gave her a hard stare.
She held my look. “What? Are you thinking that filthy talk is true?”
My face got hotter, because I supposed I was. I could not stop myself from asking her again.
“Where is the baby?” I whispered. “What have you done with him?”
She looked at me a long while, and I could tell she was hurt. “He lives with his nurse, in a cabin in our woods. Remember the one we used to think was haunted, near the white pines we used to climb? Well, he lives there with her. I often visit them.”
“Is his nurse black?” I asked, as if that were proof he would be black himself.
Her chin went hard, like she would not say any more.
But instead it trembled, and her face broke into tears. “Oh, Isie, I can’t stand it if you doubt me, too. Please say you don’t. If you could see him, you would know. He is the image of my Nick. His eyes. I can’t stand to look at him, his eyes are so like Nick’s. Do you think I wanted to kill Nick? I loved him. I still do.”
In a rush she told me about giving books to Tim, and how she had met his sister one day as she was riding to my place, on a wood’s trail. She took his sister on her horse to Tim’s cabin in Nick’s woods, where she learned he had been beaten so badly he was almost killed.
“I rode back the next day and changed his bandages and took them food. It was winter, and they didn’t have enough. It’s vile that anyone could make that into something lewd.”
I embraced her and told her I had never doubted her really. I hoped she would believe me, and she seemed to, though after that I felt a certain coolness between us and took it hard.
Finally, one day Richard came to the room to say Mr. Farnandis wanted to speak with Martha in the private parlor down the hall. She stood up as tall as she could and refused.
“I don’t want to speak to him unless he means to have me hung at once.”
“You will stop saying that,” said Richard through tight lips. “You are not going to hang. You will have the best lawyers in the state. Now come and talk to their chief.”
I helped her stand and kept one
arm tightly around her waist, the other clutching her hand. Like that we walked to the parlor, our black hoopskirts bulging together side to side.
Mr. Farnandis was a tall man with a white planter’s beard and mane, high white collar, dove-gray coat, and fine manners. Peering from the nest of his white hair were leopard’s eyes, bright green, alert.
“Mrs. Kirkwood,” he said and bowed over my hand. To Martha, he held out a bouquet of white lilies of the valley. “Miss Cairnes, these flowers cannot half betoken all the purity that’s in your heart, and we will prove it to the world.”
She would not take the bouquet, so he handed it to me. She turned away slightly, as if to deflect the power of his voice and eyes. “Good sir, I know you mean well, but I am neither pure nor innocent. If you feel you have to say I am, I’ll ask you not to plead my case. I have committed murder, and I wish to die. I am afraid of it, but I have killed a man, and I am not a child. I am a responsible adult, and I have a conscience.”
Mr. Farnandis revealed no impatience, but I had heard her say it now too many times, and I gave her a hard pinch. She did not even look at me as she bowed her head to him, wished him good day, and slipped out of my grip. I caught up with her outside the door.
“How can you keep saying that?” I hissed. “You can’t abandon your own baby! Would you abandon me? I’ve got the damn consumption, and I’ll be leaving seven children!” Or six, I thought and started to cry, for my little Becky and myself and Martha, too. “They need you to live and take my place. You could raise your boy with them.”
She did not say another word that day. Her face appeared closed off, as if behind a mask, and I was afraid.
But Richard was not finished with her yet. Next day he walked into our room carrying a baby, and from ten feet away, I could see it had Nick’s eyes. Nick’s eyes! Clear gray and slightly droopy, with a soft wide nose and light pink lips. I gave a cry of relief and joy and held out my arms. He was no blacker than Martha Jane or me.
“Is this your little boy? What a perfect little man! Give him to me!”
I took him, and he felt sweet and warm and heavy. I squeezed his chubby thighs. He wore a long white dress like for a christening, and he smelled of milk and roses—his nurse must have washed him just before they left. I held him up to look him in the face, and he gazed back sweet and solemn, drowsy from the drive.
But when he saw Martha he stared so hard he almost went cross-eyed and broke into a toothless grin. So I knew it was true, that she had often been to visit him, not letting on to me.
She reached for him, and I let him go. She held him close and kissed his head over and over. Like all my children at that age, he was trying to make his hands work for him. He wrapped his fingers around hers, waved the other hand around, and when it caught her hair, it pulled free a long shaft and he grinned.
Richard was watching her. “Now go ahead and say you want his mother dead. You can keep him and raise him yourself if you say you’re innocent.”
The blood beat up in her face, but she held tight to the boy. “That’s ridiculous. I will not say I’m innocent. You can’t make me.”
Richard beamed as if she had agreed to something. “Then we won’t ask for your opinion. You won’t testify. Just let them see your face and don’t speak up, no matter what gets said.”
“I won’t let anyone say I’m innocent, no matter who.”
He turned to me and gave me a long look, like he was charging me to change her mind.
“I’ll let you and Isie think on it. Meanwhile, we’re going to move the baby and the nurse in here, so you can be with him. I want you to remember, every day, that all you have to do is let Farnandis and the others work for you, for the sake of your son. We’ll do the rest.”
Martha’s eyes told me she would hear no more of Richard’s plan. But I knew the baby would do more for her than I ever could. He was playing with her hair now and making little crowing cries. He tried to kiss her back, slobbering on her chin.
After a while the black nurse came in shyly and stood by, waiting for Martha to tire of the boy. She was young and rather pretty, and I wondered if she had been forced to leave her own children to come here—well, one of us had to be here, and her bringing the baby might save Martha’s life. But before Richard took me home to my own children, I found a coin in my pocket and pressed it in the nurse’s hand.
THE TRIAL BEGAN one sunny Wednesday in May. Hailstones had rattled roofs the day before, but now the sky stretched blue, and when I got to the hotel, Martha had on the new black silk dress and veil. When she stepped out of doors for the first time in weeks, she threw back her veil to breathe the new-made morning air.
But spectators had lined the street, and as soon as she saw them, she flipped it back over her face. They stared in silence as she and I climbed in the sheriff’s buggy, Richard and a posse of Rifles and Dragoons closing around it on horseback. Women pressed handkerchiefs to mouths as if afraid to breathe the air that Martha did. As we began to roll away, the silence broke.
“Murderess!” bawled a red-faced man in a top hat, sitting his bay horse to watch her pass. “Look on the day for the last time!”
Another man’s voice sneered. “Look at her, she’s cold as ice. She’d mow you down as soon as look at you.”
Martha shrank into a corner of the buggy and sounded like she was in tears behind the veil. “Who are all these people? Have they come to see me put to death?”
“Pay them no nevermind,” Richard called boldly from outside the buggy, and the sheriff slapped reins on the horse’s back to make it trot faster, as our escort posse began to canter alongside. Creaking and shuddering, the buggy groaned around a corner. But more people lined that road, and many hissed and whistled as we passed.
The sheriff gave gruff commentary. “Darned if it didn’t take all day yesterday to get us twelve good men who hadn’t plumb made up their minds and get them in the jury box. Some said we oughta hang you right off. Then some said you had a right. Seemed like nobody wanted a trial. But we’re going to have one, by God. And everybody wants to take a gander at you first.”
I held Martha’s hand tight, trying not to think about the gallows, her chair on a trap door. How did it feel when they let the trapdoor go, the rope shutting off your breath? I hoped it would break her neck outright, make it quick. I hardly prayed anymore, but I could pray for that.
The crowd thickened near the courthouse square, and an awful noise burst out, people screaming, shouting, running toward the buggy. When the sheriff stopped in front of the courthouse, Richard and the others dismounted and closed in to surround us as we stepped down.
Inside the crowd it smelled of sweat, tobacco, cow manure. People stood in front of her and leered, one red face at a time.
“Make way, make way!” the sheriff cried and gripped her arm to tow her through, me clinging to her other side, as Dragoons and Rifles jostled a narrow opening.
Up the front stairs we went, across a lobby crowded with rough men, farmhands and laborers in work clothes, then through the high doors to the court, where rows of well-dressed, upright citizens had secured seats. High in the galleries sat ladies in fine attire, whispering to each other behind their fans and staring down at my dear, disgraced friend. The prisoner’s dock was set where it was visible to all, a box of polished oak, and I walked right in ahead of Martha.
“Now, Mrs. Kirkwood,” the sheriff said nervously, starting to sweat. “You can’t go in there. You come on out now. Come on.”
I did not let go of her, but I did come out as she went in. Our two sets of hoops would have been too big for the box in any case, and the sheriff let me set a chair against the box, close enough to hold her hand. When our girl cousins in the gallery saw me there, several of them flounced straight down and flanked us on either side.
Dragoons and Rifles fanned out along the walls, watching the crowd, and the sheriff stood beside the dock, his elbows bent and hands held ready near his guns.
In the front row of
spectators sat all the living men in Martha’s family, older than when I last saw most of them. Our uncle Will scowled in black. Richard was unusually well groomed (by his wife, I felt sure) and almost dapper in a gray suit. Martha’s older brothers sat beside him, the Reverend William bony and forbidding in a black jacket and white clerical collar, Jimmy humbler in brown serge. Jimmy gazed at Martha’s veiled form with kind eyes and looked as if he wished he could be somewhere else, the collar of his starched shirt tight. He had begun to lose his hair, and the new pink pate made him look like a baby. No one knew for sure how much he understood, since he had never been able to speak or hear.
“Look, Jimmy’s here,” I whispered. “Does he even know what’s going to happen?”
She looked and gasped. “Oh, God, I hope not. How cruel of them to bring him!”
“Rest your eyes on him,” I whispered. “He’s the only person here who won’t know what is said, and you won’t have to see it in his face.”
She seemed to do it, though her pulse beat so fast and hard against my fingers, laced in hers, that I could feel it through both of our gloves.
At a table in front of the family sat her lawyers, four men in black coats and elegant striped pants, all of whom I knew from poor Sam’s funeral. Colonel Stump was the youngest, handsome, tall, and fair, and when he stood up and walked toward the prisoner’s box, every eye in the courtroom followed him. He bowed in front of Martha and murmured low.
“Dear Miss Cairnes, please remove your veil. Your face alone will convince the jury.”
Alarmed, my eyes flew across the floor—there they were, railed off, twelve mustached, bearded men. They all looked prosperous and starched, pink cheeked. Some I thought I might have seen before, most not. Would those men send her to the gallows by day’s end?
Jarrettsville Page 22
