by Linda Wolfe
Four
Lino
1829–1830
LINO HAD GRADUATED FROM robbing farmers to stealing from the rich, hooking up with a group of fellow thieves to plunder the homes and storerooms of Spanish nobles. One day he and his band attempted a particularly audacious theft—a raid on the royal treasury in Havana.
They waited until darkness shrouded the white walls, climbed over a lofty palisade, dropped on cats’ feet into an arcaded courtyard, and stealthily made their way to a subterranean chamber containing gold and jewels. But their movements attracted attention. A group of royal guardsmen rushed toward them, guns blazing. Lino had a gun, too. He fired into the guards’ midst and fled.
He didn’t get far. He was apprehended, jailed for murder as well as attempted robbery, and warned that he would be a very old man indeed before he would ever again set foot on the cobble-stoned streets of Havana. He was nineteen.
His parents were distraught. Their son had committed a terrible crime, they told the authorities, but it was not his fault. He was insane, and to punish the insane was wrong. They pleaded, petitioned, begged, and finally bribed, and in the end succeeded in obtaining clemency. The Crown agreed to pardon Lino, provided he accepted one condition: he must leave Cuba forever.
He wasn’t happy about being banished. He would probably never again see his parents, he realized. But more importantly, he would probably never again see someone he cared for as much as, perhaps more than, his parents—his daughter. She’d been born to a young woman with whom he’d had an affair before his capture. He’d felt no strong attachment to the mother. When he made love he always pledged to love his women forever and always abandoned them afterward; it had been the same with the mother of his child. But the child was someone he didn’t want to abandon, someone who inexplicably stirred his heart. He longed to see how his little girl would turn out, and knowing that he’d be unable to do so gnawed at him. Still, he accepted the pardon, chose America as his destination, and, borrowing passage money from one of his brothers, boarded a New England–bound brig.
The brig sailed into Boston harbor in September 1829, and Lino took a room at a local inn, the Sun Tavern. The Sun was a popular place—its setting, as its owner proudly advertised, elevated and healthful, and its manager a friendly, efficient fellow who did not ask many questions. Lino liked the sound of the manager. He was hoping to keep his past secret and had even decided to call himself by a new name, Don Amalia Gregoria Zarrier.
America was in the throes of a second revolution, a social revolution, that autumn. Six months earlier Andrew Jackson had at last succeeded in becoming president, swept into office on a tidal wave of votes cast not so much by the landholding men who had fashioned America but by new types of citizens—backwoods farmers and frontier trappers, shopkeepers and mill workers—most of whom were struggling hard to attain some modicum of prosperity. To these men, Jackson, who’d been born in a log cabin to immigrant parents but nevertheless became rich enough to acquire an estate, represented an ideal. When he was inaugurated they’d traveled from hundreds of miles away just to be able to see him. They’d swamped the White House, surging through the doors in their buckskin clothes, muddying the carpets with their dirty boots, breaking glasses, spilling punch, climbing clumsily onto fragile upholstered chairs, so many of them trying so hard to offer congratulations to the man they had elected that he was forced to flee through a back window. Jackson was more than a war hero and a president. He was what so many in the still-young country aspired to be: something other than what they had been born to be.
In a short while Jackson became a hero to Lino.
On December 31, 1829, a meteor flashed through the skies above Andalusia. It came from the north, and left a streak behind it that was like a brilliant rainbow. For Lucretia the spectacle in the sky that New Year’s Eve offered a moment of splendor in what she had increasingly begun to view as a lusterless existence.
It was true she’d made a success of her school, and she’d done it despite stiff competition. Each year in the countryside outside Philadelphia, more and more girls’ schools had been opening and established boys’ schools had been adding female branches; one, in Germantown, was about to recruit the famed educator A. Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May, to teach its youngest boys and girls. Lucretia had kept pace with her rivals and stayed abreast of new educational trends. She’d taught her girls how to use globes not just to learn geography but, with the aid of a quadrant, to solve calculation problems like finding the nautical distance between any two places on earth and translating it into miles. She’d taught them how to write a fine hand using the latest technology for writing, steel-nib pens. She’d taught them how to draw plants and trees, and in the process subtly introduced them to botanical nomenclature and classification. Indeed, she’d taught her girls so much, and so well, that even though there were several good boarding schools for boys in the vicinity, some parents had asked her to instruct their sons. This was flattering, as well as potentially remunerative, and she’d started taking in a few boys.
It was also true that she’d made friends—many more than William, who at times complained, “My friends are on the other side of the Atlantic.” She was no snob, was on good terms with Ellenor Boutcher, from whom she bought her chickens, and Esther Bache, the seamstress who made her clothes, and on intimate terms with Sophia Hitchbourn, an intelligent widow who lived a half mile away, and Sarah Palethorpe, a neighbor who’d placed her bright young daughter in the school. Sometimes she invited Sophia or Sarah to tea, and they’d exchange confidences or gossip about juicy local scandals. And on occasion she entertained or was entertained by a schoolmaster brother of William’s who’d landed a teaching job nearby, or by the wives of some of the local doctors and school proprietors she’s managed to meet. But the truly interesting people in the neighborhood, the ones she might most have enjoyed knowing, were as yet outside her social circle.
She heard about them from time to time. Heard about Nicholas Biddle and how his bank was riling President Jackson. Heard about Sam Ingham, who was secretary of the treasury and knew all the latest intrigue about Peggy O’Neale—that infamous woman had gone behind her husband’s back to have an affair with the secretary of war, and after her husband died a mysterious death, she’d upped and married her lover. Heard most of all about the neighborhood’s most fascinating resident, a man who held a station so exalted Lucretia knew he was far beyond her reach.
He was Joseph Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, and once—before Napoleon’s defeat—the king of Spain. He had come to America in 1815, lived for a time in Philadelphia, and ended up purchasing a vast tract of land in Bordentown, New Jersey, some twenty miles from Andalusia. His grounds, people said, were laid out in the style of the Spanish royal residence outside Madrid and were traversed by twelve miles of drives and bridle paths. His lawns were ornamented with statues. He had dammed a stream and created a lake two hundred yards broad and half a mile long on which a flock of white swans floated. He had built himself a home that was the finest in America, finer than the White House, a mansion overflowing with sculptures, drawings, and paintings by the likes of Rubens, Canaletto, Velázquez, even Leonardo da Vinci.
Some neighbors had seen Bonaparte’s grounds. They’d skated on his lake and picked fruit in his orchards. Some local people, the truly important people, had even been invited into the mansion. Lucretia envied them. It was said the great man served his guests champagne, feted them with seventeen-course meals, toured them through his house, and even showed them the room in which he slept, a room hung with paintings of women in so little clothing that some visitors grew faint at the sight. Daydreaming about the ex-king of Spain, his wealth and sophisticated European ways, Lucretia became more and more dissatisfied with the less-than-glamorous man to whom she was married, and her entire life began to seem to her a disappointment, a life that was slipping by without her ever having truly ranged the world or tasted its passions and exotic pleasures.
&nbs
p; Despite his lowly Hispanic origins, Lino was a man of grand American ambition. He meant to carve out for himself a comfortable, even luxurious, existence in his new country, and he took his first steps toward it in Boston. He told the manager of the Sun Tavern that his money, Don Zarrier’s money, wasn’t that dubious paper stuff the Americans used, but gold, real Spanish gold. To prove the point, he produced a gleaming coin, a half doubloon, and asked the manager to change it into American bills for him.
The manager was unsure of the coin’s value and declined to make the exchange. But his new guest was Spanish, and the half doubloon did seem to be gold. Perhaps, he speculated, the guest was a very rich man, one whose presence at the inn would lend the establishment a certain distinction.
In his gullibility, the manager was no different from hundreds of other Americans who were increasingly finding themselves the dupes of wily strangers—confidence men, they would soon come to be called. America’s vast size, combined with the mobility of its population, made it easy for deceivers to practice their arts, and swindlers were beginning to turn up everywhere, not just in the large urban centers, but wherever money could be made by gambling, selling fraudulent goods, passing fake money, or using a self-created identity to gain financial or social advantage. In the next few years their predatory presence in the culture would spawn advice manuals that taught people, particularly the young, how to recognize tricksters—and eventually Americans would become more wary of strangers. But at the time of Lino’s arrival in America, credulity was common. The manager of the Sun Tavern, impressed by Lino’s foreign accent and his glittering foreign coin, agreed to let him stay at the inn on credit. Don Zarrier could pay him later, he said, once he’d changed his gold into proper American money.
After fooling the manager, Lino, who was to become a consummate con man, perhaps the greatest in the history of early America, continued his climb toward that distinction by playing to the hilt the role he had assumed—that of a Spanish gentleman. He played it not just at the inn, where he commanded for his table only the most costly wines and dishes, but in other venues, too. At a nearby tailor shop he used his half-doubloon ploy to persuade a tailor to make him a few suits in the latest fashion, with tight pants, cutaway jackets, and embroidered vests. At a stable he convinced the owner to rent him a fine carriage and sleek horses.
But he was still a novice in his new career, and one day he aroused the suspicions of both the owner of the stable and the manager of the Sun, who demanded he pay them immediately for the services they’d rendered. Lino promised he would give them their money the next day, and that night he packed up his wardrobe and fled.
He took to the road after that, living by his wits and slowly making his way down through New England, New York, and New Jersey.
Early in 1830 Lino fetched up in Philadelphia. There he adopted yet another name, Celestino Almentero, and rented a room in a reputable boardinghouse.
He was twenty-one years old now, and although he was short, he was striking, a small man whose stylish attire made the most of a less than imposing figure. More, his elegant outfits were matched by his remarkable face—a dark, handsome face, with fine thin lips, penetrating black eyes, a long straight nose, and a wreath of curly hair. But what was most notable about him was his personality. He was magnetic, full of energy. When he talked, his hands and arms made constant expressive gestures and his words flowed out in a tumbling quicksilver mix of Spanish and English. When he listened, his reckless beckoning eyes seemed to welcome the speaker’s every word.
His personality drew his fellow boarders to him, and he quickly forged several friendships. But he wasn’t at the boardinghouse very long before he began preying on his friends, sneaking into their rooms when they were out and helping himself to their belongings. One day he stole several quite valuable items, including a gold watch and musical snuffbox. The owner of the objects complained to the police, and Lino was arrested.
In March he was tried and convicted of theft, receiving a sentence of eighteen months’ imprisonment, and transported to Philadelphia’s Eastern Penitentiary. There, with his head and face shrouded in a black hood, a symbol of the curtain that would separate him from now on from the rest of the living world, he was escorted through the fortresslike entrance and led to a cell—a private cell, for in the Eastern Penitentiary each prisoner received solitary confinement.
Solitary confinement was a new idea, and one intended to be humane. In the old and cruel world of Europe, went the philosophy behind the Philadelphia penitentiary, prisoners had been treated like animals, beaten, starved, herded together; here in the New World, in the City of Brotherly Love, they would be treated with respect, given work to do that would afford them dignity and quarters to live in that would afford them privacy. They would not be struck, they would not be denied nourishment. Indeed, they would receive no punishment whatsoever, except the punishment of being denied access to fellow human beings.
Unfortunately, however, solitary confinement was not truly beneficent. Charles Dickens noted, after paying a visit to the famed prison, “I am persuaded that those who devised this system of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentlemen who carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing. I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers.… I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.”
The garrulous Lino, with little idea in what part of the building he was, or what kind of men were near him, or whether in fact there were men near him, suffered during his confinement. His cell, with its two doors, one of oak, the other of iron, had heat and indoor plumbing, this at a time when even Andrew Jackson in the White House didn’t have these amenities, but the plumbing pipes were housed on the outside walls of the cells, to prevent prisoners from communicating with one another by tapping. His cell had a window. But the window was high up in the ceiling, a small round circle that, because it faced only the heavens above, was known as the Eye of God. He was assigned to work at winding bobbins—other inmates spun thread and wove cloth—and allowed to exercise for an hour a day. But he worked alone, in his own cell, and he exercised alone, in his own tiny yard; all the exercise yards were private, each one a narrow, high-walled space attached to the back of a prisoner’s cell.
Theoretically this arrangement kept prisoners from seeing any human movements other than those created by the hands of the guards who passed food to them through a grating in their inner doors and from hearing any human voice other than that of the clergyman who on Sundays led communal prayers at the head of each corridor. But in actuality the rules of solitary confinement were sometimes relaxed. Lino may have had occasional contact with fellow prisoners. Certainly he was permitted, after he’d been in the prison a year, to ask a fellow inmate to translate into English a letter he’d composed in Spanish, a letter begging prison inspectors to grant him a pardon.
He was born on Cuba, his letter said, and he’d traveled from there to Mexico as part of an expedition against General Santa Anna. But Santa Anna’s men had arrested him as a spy and put him into prison. Eventually they’d pardoned him—“on account of my youth,” he said—and slowly he’d been able to make his way up to New York to book passage home. Alas, though, he’d lost his money and travel documents while en route, so “the Spanish Consul would not assist me, and being utterly destitute and in great distress, I came on to [Philadelphia] in search of a countryman of mine, who, could I have found him, would have relieved me.… In the meantime I was arrested in this city for stealing a common breast pin, a very common silver
watch, and a musical box. These things were given to me by another person of my own age, and what ought to convince others that I did not steal them is the fact that I gave them to another boy as a gift. As, however, the witness swore that the articles were not given to me, and I being unable to prove it, and ignorant of the laws, the customs, and the language of this country, I was convicted.”
His imploring letter, which contained additional allusions to his youth as well as a promise to return immediately to Cuba if he was set free, brought a happy, swift result. He was granted an early release, and at dawn on May 19, 1831, four months short of the completion of his full sentence, a guard swung open the doors to his cell and walked him to the prison’s formidable front gate. There, a free man once again, he was set loose in a landscape of deserted fields and pastures. In his pockets he had only four dollars, the money the prison allotted to departing prisoners. On his body he had only a worn pair of pants, a flimsy jacket, and a fraying shirt. But he was out.
In the gray early light he headed in the direction of the city, hurrying to put a distance between himself and the tomb from which he had just emerged. He would go to New York, he decided. He would take a steamboat up the Delaware.
When he reached Philadelphia he went at once to the wharf on Chestnut Street from which steamboats departed every morning for both Baltimore and New York. All around him carriages, wagons, and wheelbarrows were disgorging passengers and freight. All around him bells were clanging, steampipes were hissing, boiler fires were shooting fountains of crackling sparks up into the air, and travelers, behaving as if they were about to depart on a long ocean voyage, were noisily sobbing and bidding farewell to those who had come to see them off. Lino slipped unnoticed aboard a New York-bound boat.