by Caleb Carr
“But she could’ve come from anywhere!” Mr. Moore protested.
“John, do try to listen for more than thirty seconds running,” Miss Howard spat back. “She couldn’t have come from anywhere. She was a woman who learned that the Muhlenbergs needed a wet nurse from an advertisement—that makes her local. She talked a lot about towns in Washington County—so she must have spent some time there. But if she was trying to conceal her roots, she didn’t actually come from Washington County—which means—”
Mr. Picton snapped his fingers. “Which means you may want to get back down to Troy, Sara. It’s the seat of Rensselaer County, which is to the south of Washington County—on the east bank of the river. And Stillwater sits directly across the water from the line that separates the two counties.”
Miss Howard slapped her map hard and set the kerosene lamp down. “Which is exactly what I realized five minutes ago,” she said, with a big, satisfied smile.
“It’s still a long shot,” Marcus said, shaking his head wearily. “And you’ll have to go tomorrow, which means missing—”
“Which means missing what?” Miss Howard cut in. “Darrow’s ‘experts’? Mrs. Cady Stanton? I know what they’re going to say, Marcus, and so do you. It’s obvious—maybe even gratuitous, at this point. But we do have to work fast. Cyrus, I could use you, if you’ll come—Stevie, too.”
“And El Niño to protect you!” the aborigine near shouted, getting caught up in Miss Howard’s enthusiasm.
“Naturally,” she answered, rubbing his bushy head. Then she looked to the Doctor and Mr. Picton. “Well?”
Mr. Picton paused and smoked, shrugging his shoulders. “Nothing to be lost, I suppose. I say go to it.”
“And you, Doctor?”
The Doctor looked at her with just the faintest trace of hope in his features; more, at least, than’d been there all night. “I’d say that you’re all going to need some rest. You’ll want to catch the earliest possible train, if you intend to have the full day in Troy.”
At that the four of us—Miss Howard, me, Cyrus, and El Niño—got up and headed for the screen door. We weren’t exactly confident, I couldn’t say that, but the prospect of actually doing something, instead of spending another day watching Mr. Darrow turn the Ballston court house into his private stomping grounds, was some kind of a relief, and I was glad to be included in the plan. The reasoning behind it did seem promising, too, even if the time we had to test it wasn’t much; and as we went into the house and up the stairs to our respective rooms, I took the opportunity to pay my own sort of compliment to Miss Howard’s brainwork:
“So,” I said, as we got to the second floor. “I guess being a ‘spinster detective lady’ leaves you plenty of time for thinking, anyway.”
I barely got into my room without catching a playful but well-aimed clip to the side of the head.
So began a new round of searching the Hudson Valley countryside, one what was both tighter in terms of schedule and less tedious in terms of method than all the riding around Miss Howard, El Niño, and I’d done before the start of the trial. We caught the first train to Troy the next morning, and managed to get to the Rensselaer County offices without too much trouble. Housed in a building what bore more than a passing resemblance to a bank, the offices looked out over a small park at the center of town, and from the windows in the records room the city didn’t look half so ugly as it had from the train. In fact, it had a sort of charm about it, or at least that particular part of it did. I suppose that impression could’ve just been due to the unseasonably cool weather and my thankfulness at not having to sit in the Ballston court house; whatever the case, I found that the first two or three hours we spent going through birth and death records passed pretty quickly. There wasn’t anybody else in the spacious room with us, except for a clerk whose biggest chore, besides fetching files for us, seemed to be staying awake. So we were able to talk and act pretty freely, a fact what quickly led El Niño (who couldn’t read English) and me (who wasn’t much use with official documents) to start clowning around among the chairs and tables, letting Cyrus and Miss Howard attend to the real work and only straightening up at those moments when we were told to roust the clerk and tell him to fetch another batch of files and bound records.
By one o’clock or so our horseplay had the aborigine and me pretty hungry, and we set out to find someplace to buy boxed lunches for everybody. Our behavior didn’t improve any as we went about this job, and on our way back to the county offices with the food we were taken aside by a cop, who, I think, was more bewildered by the sight of El Niño than he was interested in what we were up to. The bull walked us back to the county building, just to make sure our story held water, and told Miss Howard not to let us “run wild” in the streets. I had to resist the temptation to tell him that if such as what we’d been doing was his idea of “running wild,” he needed to spend some time in New York; after that he finally left, and we all went outside to the little park to eat.
Once we were back in the records room Cyrus quickly struck gold, in the shape of a small, beat-up book what listed births and deaths for a town with the peculiar name of Schaghticoke during the years 1850 to 1860. Searching for any entry containing the unusual name “Elspeth,” Cyrus found one not under the name “Fraser,” but “Franklin,” which had been the father’s handle. It was the mother who, it seemed, bore the name Libby Hatch had used when she moved to Stillwater.
“Do you mean they weren’t married?” Miss Howard asked Cyrus, as we all gathered around to look over his shoulders at the faded pages of the record book. “Libby’s illegitimate?”
Cyrus shrugged. “That might explain a few things about her behavior. And it ought to be easy enough to confirm. Stevie, wake our friend up”—Cyrus threw a thumb in the direction of the dozing clerk—“and tell him we’ll need the marriage records for the same town, covering, say, the ten years previous to—what’s the date of her birth? March eighteenth, 1858. Ten years previous to that.”
“Got it,” I said, running over to the clerk’s counter and rousting him by banging my hands on the surface of the thing, where he’d nestled his lazy head on a few books. Grumbling and cursing as he got to his feet, the mug dragged himself off to fetch the requested item, which turned out to be another small, dusty record book. I ran it back over to Miss Howard, who sat beside Cyrus and quickly started examining it, looking for any mention of people named either Franklin or Fraser.
“Here it is,” she said, after about ten minutes of searching. “Formalization of a common-law marriage—George Franklin and Clementine Fraser, April twenty-second, 1852.”
“There’s two other children listed here,” Cyrus said, still going over his volume. “George Junior, born September of 1852, and Elijah, born two years later.”
“Well,” Miss Howard said, looking almost disappointed, “there goes the bastard theory. It looks as though she simply adopted her mother’s maiden name as an alias when she left home.”
“And how do we find out when that was?” I asked. “Supposing we can’t locate the parents, I mean.”
“We know that she was working for the Muhlenbergs in 1886,” Miss Howard answered. “We could check the 1880 census—that’ll narrow things down a bit.”
“On it!” I said, heading back over to the clerk’s counter. The man heard me coming this time, and jerked his head up before I had a chance to give him another start; and when he reappeared from some faraway corner behind the counter, he evened things up some by dropping an enormous book onto my hands. Yelping as I grabbed the thing and turned to carry it away, I mumbled, “Nothing like a government job for improving your sense of humor, hunh?” then went back to the others.
From the 1880 census we learned that Libby Hatch had in fact still been living with her family in that year, when she would’ve been twenty-one. We also learned that George Franklin’s occupation had been “farmer” (no thundering shock), and that the two Franklin boys were also still living at home, where the
y worked as hands for their old man. The only other question what we figured could be answered in the records office was whether or not Libby’d ever been married while she was living in Rensselaer County: another check of wedding records, though, came up blank, leaving us wondering if she’d taken the vows in some other county in the years between 1880 and 1886, or if the kid we knew she must have given birth to had been born out of wedlock. We got no help with this last mystery from the birth records for those years, which didn’t mention anybody named either Franklin or Fraser bringing any babies into the world; and so, with all those questions still hanging in the air, we returned our pile of books and files to the clerk and headed back to the train station.
We caught the four o’clock local back to Ballston Spa, and the trip turned out to be a pretty merry and exciting one, given the information we’d come up with. True, there was every chance it would lead nowhere: it was impossible to say what the fortunes of the Franklin family had been in the years since 1880 (I still thought the odds were even that Libby’d done the whole bunch in), but at least now we had a legitimate place to start a reasonable search. Anxious to let the Doctor and the others know all this, we raced up the hill from the Ballston train depot to the court house once we reached town, only to find that court had already adjourned. So it was on down to Mr. Picton’s house at what became a dead run, to spread the word that hope for new information wasn’t dead yet.
But we found that this news didn’t encourage the rest of our troops much, given what’d gone on in court during the day. As expected, Mr. Darrow’d opened the defense’s case with his three experts, who’d each done their level best to reinforce the jury’s already strong inclination to find Libby Hatch not guilty. Albert Hamilton, the snake-oil salesman-turned-forensics expert, had managed to lay out enough confusing information about guns and bullets to make Lucius’s testimony seem, if not mistaken, at least unprovable. To start with, he’d said, the slug what the state’d found in the Hatches’ wagon might have come from Daniel Hatch’s Colt, or it might not have: because there was no central registry for firearms (just as Lucius and Marcus had told us) and because the Colt Peacemaker had been such a popular model of revolver for so many years, the odds that the bullet had in fact come from some other gun were nothing close to the million to one what Lucius had estimated. As for the identifying marks on the missile itself, Hamilton took great pains to explain just how high production standards at Samuel Colt’s factory were, and how the specifications of every piece turned out were consistent with all those of the same model. Even the nick inside the muzzle of Hatch’s gun what produced the small mark on the bullets that we’d seen could’ve been the result of a factory defect, “Dr.” Hamilton said, a defect shared by dozens and maybe hundreds of other Peacemakers. Mr. Picton, on cross-examination, had asked how a factory what had such high production standards could turn out hundreds of revolvers with the same muzzle flaw, a question what Hamilton hadn’t been able to answer; but, incompetent as the man obviously was to anybody who knew anything about ballistics, he’d done a lot of damage with the laymen of the jury, and Mr. Darrow’s claim that the state’s ballistic evidence was untrustworthy had seemed proved.
As for the Doctor’s associate, William Alanson White, it’d been his job to dispute the state’s contention that a sane woman could plan and carry out the murders of her own children—and he had, it seemed, seen to his task pretty effectively. He was helped by the fact that during his career he hadn’t dabbled much in the psychology of family relationships, certainly not in the controversial way what the Doctor and others of his breed (like Dr. Adolf Meyer) had; because White’s business was pretty strictly criminals and their mental disorders, he was seen from the beginning as less peculiar than the Doctor, and therefore more trustworthy. On top of that, he hadn’t done any direct personal work with Clara Hatch, a fact what under ordinary circumstances might’ve made him look something less than fully informed, but what in this troubling, topsy-turvy case made him seem more detached and reliable. On being asked by Mr. Darrow for his “educated opinion” about Clara’s mental condition, Dr. White’d answered that he didn’t really believe that the memories of a girl who’d been through such an ordeal—and who was still, after all, very young—could be relied on. Such was what the jury wanted to hear—it was a lot easier than accepting that what Clara’d said was true—and so they’d seemed to ignore Dr. White’s own statements about not being an expert on kids and accepted the rest of what he had to say.
The main part of his testimony, though, had focused on Libby Hatch herself, and on the notion of whether she was capable of the crime what the state’d charged her with. Dr. White said that, after spending some three hours with the woman, he’d formed the same opinion as Dr. Kreizler: that Libby, though emotional and impulsive, was free from any mental disease and was, especially as far as the legal definition of the word went, sane. But the conclusion Dr. White drew from this was the opposite of what Dr. Kreizler’s had been: Libby’s sanity was a very strong indication—if not outright proof—that she couldn’t have shot her kids. In his experience, he said, there were only three reasons women committed such crimes: insanity, poverty, or the children being illegitimate. Since none of these reasons was in extreme evidence in this case, the state’s explanation of what’d happened was “not credible.” “The very character of the crime,” Dr. White had said, using words Mr. Picton’d found so outrageous he’d written them down, “is sufficient to warrant a diagnosis of mental disease.” Libby Hatch had no mental disease; so, using logic what, again, was flawed to professional ears but very appealing to a jury, she couldn’t have done it.
But what about all the other cases what Mr. Picton and Dr. Kreizler had brought up, Mr. Darrow’d then asked, cases involving women who’d unquestionably murdered their own children and been found sane by courts and juries? What about Lydia Sherman, for instance? Lydia Sherman, Dr. White’d replied, had unfortunately committed her crimes during a time when mental science was in a much more primitive state; on top of that, people had been so disgusted by the killings that “Queen Poisoner” had been accused of, and there’d been so much evidence and so many witnesses to speak against her, that the possibility of her getting a fair trial, much less being found mentally incompetent, had been about zero. The alienists of the time had been too unsophisticated to understand what’d been wrong with the woman, and the public had been desperate for revenge: this was Dr. White’s simple explanation for why Lydia Sherman’s fate had been sealed. Mr. Darrow’d then asked Dr. White if, in his opinion, this injustice was now being repeated, maybe even outdone, by the state of New York’s attempt to convict and execute Libby Hatch? Yes, Dr. White had solemnly answered; in fact, since Libby Hatch was, in his opinion, innocent, the injustice was even greater.
Finally, there’d been Mrs. Cady Stanton to seal the deal for the defense. Mr. Darrow’s questioning of her had been particularly clever: as a lifelong battler for women’s rights, he’d asked, didn’t Mrs. Cady Stanton feel that members of her sex had to accept all of the burdens as well as the advantages of equality? Didn’t she think that they shouldn’t be allowed to “hide behind their skirts,” to use their gender as an excuse or even an explanation for certain crimes? Of course, Mrs. Cady Stanton had said; and if the crime Libby Hatch had been accused of had been anything other than murdering her own children, the old suffragist wouldn’t have bothered traveling to Ballston Spa to give testimony. But in this one thing, childbirth and parenting, she said, men and women were not and never could be equal. Repeating what she’d told us when she came to Number 808 Broadway, Mrs. Cady Stanton had lectured the jury and the galleries about the “divine creative power” of women that was made manifest in the connection between a mother and child. If that power was used for evil purposes, she said, it could not be the woman’s doing—after all, no woman could possibly betray a force what, being divine, was greater than her own will. No, if a woman did commit violence against her own child, it was either b
ecause she was insane or because the society of men had forced her into it somehow; probably both.
This last point was tough for Mr. Picton to argue on cross-examination; for he, during his time with Dr. Kreizler, had come to understand how very much Libby Hatch’s actions might indeed have been affected by the society of men. But both Mr. Picton and the Doctor held that, such effects aside, Libby was still legally responsible for her own actions, and Mr. Picton had asked Mrs. Cady Stanton if she didn’t agree. No, she’d answered, throwing the Doctor a look what said that, though she wasn’t allowed to speak of it, she did believe that he was involved in some kind of mysterious witch-hunt. No, she said, a woman so harried and hounded as to be capable of murdering her own children must certainly have been driven insane—certainly legally insane, meaning unaware of the nature of her acts or that they were wrong—by man’s society. And since neither the prosecution’s nor the defense’s expert mental witnesses had found Libby to in fact be insane, she could not have committed the crimes.
It had taken only a day to get all this testimony in, and measured as a whole it represented, Mr. Picton said, further proof (not that we needed any) that Mr. Darrow was truly the master of arguing in the negative. Without ever putting his client on the stand (always a dangerous thing for the defense to do in a murder trial), he’d managed to tear apart the state’s assertions with logic what was so turned around—ass-backwards, even—that it seemed to make some kind of sense. Confused at first, the jury’d slowly become convinced; and all Mr. Picton’s desperate efforts to point out that it was plain verbal trickery to say that someone had to be innocent just because they were sane while the crime they were accused of was insane just made him look, as he’d said the night before, like the voice of an older age. Mr. Darrow’s reverse and negative logic had the feel of a new century, of modern thinking, and so, indeed, it was; but as Mr. Picton had also said the night before, being new didn’t make it any more honorable or respectable—just more effective with juries. Which in the end, I suppose, is the only thing what most lawyers have ever considered progress.
