The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  Lucretia received these letters, and on a Sunday afternoon she spread them out on her desk and reread them. It was the first time in over a week that she’d sat at the desk. Shortly after finding the bill from the United States Hotel, she’d noticed that the flesh on her neck, where she still wore the chain Lino had given her, was turning a coppery green. She’d ripped off the chain, taken it to a Philadelphia jewelry appraiser, and learned that the chain wasn’t gold at all, just a cheap fake. That news, combined with the hotel bill, had made her so depressed she’d taken to her bed, incapable of any activity. But today, the last day in July, she’d finally roused herself and decided to answer Lino’s letters.

  Picking up her pen, she wrote swiftly, furiously. She told Lino he’d perpetrated an “extensive robbery” on her and her innocent children. She said that it was true that before he went away, she’d given him many of her possessions, among them her “horse and carriage, gold and silver watches, breast-pins, finger-rings, medals, musical box, silver bells with whistle, cake basket,” but that she’d done so with the understanding that he was going to sell them and return with the proceeds. And she said that now she had begun to suspect that he had no intention of returning and no intention of reimbursing her for her property. In which case he was a common thief.

  Her words were bitter and stern. But despite all she had learned about Lino in the last ten days, she still seemed to believe his lies, among them that he had actually been entertained by Andrew Jackson. “You say in your last letter,” she chided, “that as often as you remember me, you bathe yourself in floods of tears.… I cannot think you indulge in grief [when] you visit with the President frequently, and have the honour of walking with a Duke of England.” And although she managed to demand that Lino never write to her again unless he paid her back, she still seemed to be in love with him, or at least she still felt possessive about him. Spinning out a painful fantasy in which she supposed Lino to have fallen for another woman, she charged him with having adorned that other woman’s fingers with her rings, and jealously speculated that his new love was making her Lino “perfectly happy.”

  Then, in the midst of this dreaded scenario, she stopped herself, and in a sentence that would come back to haunt her, abruptly concluded her communiqué with, “But no, Lino, when I pause for a moment, I am constrained to acknowledge that I do not believe that God will permit either you or me to be happy this side of the grave.”

  When she was done, she signed the bottom “Lucretia”—she was no longer, as far as she was concerned, “Lucretia Espos y Mina”—and, taking the letter into Philadelphia, mailed it to Lino in care of the general post office in Washington.

  Seven

  Departures

  August–Mid-September 1831

  PHILADELPHIA’S POLICE FORCE, WHICH numbered some forty patrolmen and several junior officers and high constables, was one of the largest in the country. Among the high constables was sixty-two-year-old Willis H. Blayney, who as a young man had never thought he’d rise so high. He’d been a printer then, turning out books and broadsides, his fingers blistering in winter from the touch of the icy type trays and his eyes aching, winter and summer alike, from the dim light in the print shops where he and his fellows slaved well into the night. But at last he’d given up that difficult trade, entered the police force, and advanced rapidly from patrolman to captain to his present exalted rank.

  Along the way he’d garnered a reputation for being a sharp-minded detective, and in the middle of August 1831, he got a chance to test that reputation. He received word from the high constable of Washington that in the course of investigating a local businessman’s claim to have been swindled by a fellow named Lino Amalia Espos y Mina, his men had gone to the main post office, confiscated some mail, and come across a mysterious letter indicating that the swindler had already bilked a widow living in or around Philadelphia. The letter might prove useless, Blayney’s opposite number in Washington informed him, for it bore no last name, was signed merely “Lucretia”; he was, however, forwarding it up to Philadelphia on the off-chance the victim could be identified.

  Blayney’s investigative appetite was immediately aroused. But at first he got nowhere. One of his underlings, thinking the widow’s letter insignificant because it was anonymous, had discarded it. Blayney railed against the man’s incompetence, demanding that worktables and wastepaper receptacles be thoroughly searched, and in short order the document appeared on his desk—it had been tossed aside but not yet thrown out.

  Fingering it carefully, Blayney saw at once that it was a mess, a peculiar web of underlined words, sentences that ended not just in exclamation points but sometimes in two such points, and phrases that scrawled sideways along the pages’ narrow margins. The work of a very distraught person, the high constable concluded. But also of an educated person. The writer, accusing her correspondent of having made away with her silver and gold and horse and carriage, used bookish words—said the thief had a heart of “adamant” and that she was “thunderstruck” by his behavior—and her handwriting looked tutored and ornate.

  The handwriting. He knew that handwriting, the high constable realized with a start. He’d seen it in the past, set type from words written in it. And then it dawned on him—the letter writer, this Lucretia-no-last-name, was none other than Lucretia Chapman. Mrs. William Chapman. He used to print broadsides for the couple’s speech clinic. They’d moved away from the city, but once upon a time he’d known the pair well. Especially the missus. When she was single and teaching at the LeBruns’ school, she’d lived in his mother’s boardinghouse. When she’d started her own school, she’d hired his sister to teach dancing. She was a fine lady. Yes, there’d been some trouble about counterfeiters in a boardinghouse she and her husband ran for a while on Pine Street. But basically he’d never heard anything but good about Lucretia Chapman. Had someone gone and robbed that estimable woman?

  Distressed, Blayney decided to show the letter to the mayor, Benjamin Richards. Then, remembering that Richards was on vacation, he took the document to the city’s recorder, Magistrate Joseph McIlvaine.

  The summer heat had baked Andalusia dry. The trees were thirsting, the grass was sere. Lucretia’s eyes, too, were dry—she had at long last ceased her nightly weeping over Lino and made up her mind that she never wanted to see him again, without or even with the money he owed her. She was fanning herself on the porch and asserting this to Mercy, who’d stayed on in Andalusia to make sure she was all right, when they noticed a man making his way through the play yard. Lucretia blanched. She knew by the cocky familiar stride that it was Lino. She didn’t want to see him, she told Mercy, and ran into the house. But it was too late. Lino was vaulting up the porch steps and, with Mercy close on his heels, strutting into the parlor.

  “I’ve been to New Orleans,” he announced, speaking to Lucretia as if nothing had changed between them, as if she still wanted to hear about his every exploit and adventure. “I went all the way on a railroad. Traveled night and day—at the rate of thirty miles an hour!”

  “Leave me,” she said with lofty disdain.

  But Lino was acting as if he hadn’t disappeared for a month, hadn’t read her accusatory letter, didn’t know she no longer considered herself his wife. Plunking himself down on the spindly, straight-backed sofa and tugging off his boots, he teased, “What’s the matter? If an angel from heaven had come and told me a wife of mine would behave this way, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

  Angered, Lucretia spurted, “The chain you gave me is not gold.”

  “If your affections are so slender as a chain,” Lino shrugged off her accusation, “I can explain that to you. When I gave you the chain I told you a friend had given it to me—that friend might have deceived me, or might have been deceived himself.”

  Lucretia threw up to him his other deceptions, stormed that he had lied to her about where he’d stayed in Philadelphia, and with whom. He could explain those things, too, Lino insisted and, launching int
o a long tale, told her that because the Cuestas had been out of town, he’d taken a room at the United States Hotel and later gone to see a play at the Chestnut Street theater, only to get caught in a torrential rain. “I ran under the arcade for protection,” he rattled on, “and while I was there, two ladies of distinction came and asked me if I had an umbrella.” He didn’t, but he was about to hail a carriage, and as the ladies were soaking wet, he’d chivalrously offered them a ride back to his hotel so that they could make themselves presentable before traveling home. “I was up all night with the servants of the hotel,” he declared. “Drying their clothes in order that they might go home the next day.”

  Lucretia, fed up, wanted no part of his preposterous explanation. Neither did Mercy, who shot Lino an exasperated look.

  Seeing it, Lucretia put on her sternest schoolmarmish expression and, addressing her husband on her sister’s behalf, said, “My sister is not at all satisfied with this conduct!”

  “We had better be separated, then,” Lino snapped. “I find I have more wives than one to please.”

  “The sooner, the better,” she hurled at him.

  He agreed, but, “Remember, Mrs. Chapman,” he added, “before I go, I must tell you something.”

  “What is it?”

  “I cannot tell you in the presence of your sister. If you will come in the other room, I will tell you.”

  Reluctantly, Lucretia followed him into the dining room. She stood there unyieldingly, and into her stony silence he said something that she would never reveal, not to Mercy, not to anyone, though she did admit to one friend that it was something darkly secret, “something between ourselves.”

  Shortly afterward, Lino left the Chapman house, never to return. But this time, too, he didn’t leave empty-handed. Whatever he had said in private to Lucretia had caused her to agree to write a letter of introduction for him—a letter that, at his request, said nothing about their being married. It was addressed to her relatives on Cape Cod.

  The Cape Cod Winslows were an affluent and powerful clan. They’d first taken up residence in the region back in the 1600s, purchasing and clearing large tracts of wilderness and turning their property into farms. But the Cape, and in particular the Barnstable County town of Brewster where Lucretia’s relatives lived and to which Lino boarded a stagecoach after traveling by boat to Boston, had become a major center for New England’s lucrative whaling and fishing industries. Some of Lucretia’s relatives, like other members of the Cape’s landed class, had branched out from agriculture to become sea captains or manufacturers of supplies for sailing vessels, and some had invested heavily in those vessels and reaped great profits. Their profits, and indeed New England’s whaling and fishing industry itself, were soon to decline, but in 1831 many of Lucretia’s kin were living high on the hog. Lino’s coach was filled with young men eager to make their fortunes on the sea. But he had different ideas about how to make a living. Promptly upon his arrival in Brewster, Lino brandished among Lucretia’s people the letter of recommendation she’d written for him, which termed him “a very estimable young man.” Then, embroidering as he went, he recited his usual tale.

  He was a major in the Mexican army, he said, the son of that country’s famous General Mina. He owned gold mines. Silver mines. Plantations. Just like his hero, Andrew Jackson. Mrs. Lucretia Chapman—he told no one that he was married to her—had been exceedingly kind to him, and because of that, and that alone, he’d given her ten thousand dollars in gold. But alas, he’d met with misfortune on his way up to the Cape. He’d lost most of his jewelry and a pocketbook containing five hundred dollars. The sum was inconsequential, for he had thousands and thousands of dollars and would make a draft on his Boston bank as soon as he got back to that city. But for now he was virtually out of cash.

  Lucretia’s relatives, among them her sister-in-law, Abigail, and a host of aunts, uncles, nephews, and nieces, proved highly gullible. They offered to put him up, and even to lend him money.

  Lino couldn’t have been more deferential and appreciative. When one of his new acquaintances asked if he knew the time, he pulled out his gold watch—it was William Chapman’s watch, but he alone knew this—and not only announced the time but insisted on making a gift of the timepiece to the questioner. It was a calculated move. As Lino expected, his offer was refused, and he was able to slip the watch back into his pocket. But the tale of his impulsive generosity marched as swiftly as time itself through the small seaside community, and soon not just Lucretia’s relatives but friends and neighbors of theirs began vying to have the distinguished foreigner stay at their homes.

  One man who gave him hospitality was Elijah Cobb, a renowned ship’s captain who was an old friend of Lucretia’s. The author of a memoir about his seafaring days, Cobb had gone to sea at the tender age of six to help support his widowed mother and eventually sailed all over the world, visiting and trading in the West Indies, Africa, Russia, even France during the bloodiest days of the French Revolution. But exotic places, revolutions, wars didn’t really interest him—“I saw Robertspeirs head taken off, by the [infernal] Machine,” was Cobb’s laconic observation about the demise of Robespierre, the mastermind of the Terror. Rather, he was interested in money, in making it through trading in palm oil, coffee, ivory, and gold, and by the time he met Lino he had made a great deal. Yet despite his wealth and worldliness, he was thoroughly taken in by “the Major,” as the Cape Codders had begun referring to Lino.

  Another man who believed Lino utterly was none other than the high sheriff of Barnstable County. To make his trumped-up tale seem credible, Lino had advertised his loss in a local newspaper—he’d done that in Washington with excellent results—and to bolster the claim, he’d reported the loss to the high sheriff. The officer, impressed by the newcomer’s fine raiment and unfamiliar accent, took him at his word when he said he was a high-ranking foreign noble and treated him with exceptional courtesy.

  Unfortunately for Lino, however, big city officials were not nearly so gullible. While he was being feted at the Cape, down in Philadelphia the swift-minded Blayney and McIlvaine had decided to investigate him.

  Blayney looked into his activities in the capital. He learned that Lino had introduced himself to a number of wealthy men as General Mina’s son, told them he’d lost a wallet containing hundreds of dollars, and begged them to lend him enough cash to get to Baltimore, where he had vast sums of money. Several people had fallen for this hard-luck tale, especially after reading about it in a newspaper, and lent Lino money, never to hear from him again.

  McIlvaine interrogated Edwin Fanning, who’d requested an interview. The itinerant book salesman told the magistrate that he feared his deceased friend William Chapman had been poisoned to death by a man named Lino Espos y Mina.

  Late in August Blayney and McIlvaine pooled their information and concluded that Lino ought to be brought in for questioning. But they didn’t know where to find him. Then, reasoning that Mrs. Chapman might be able to help them out, they decided to pay a call on her.

  They came on a Sunday, while Lucretia was at church, and waited uncomfortably on the hard-backed parlor sofa. When she returned home, accompanied by her sister and a chattering band of children, Blayney greeted her warmly, consoling her on William’s death and giving her news of his mother and sister, but McIlvaine cut short the small talk and asked if they could speak to her in private. When she led them into an inner chamber, McIlvaine did all the talking. “I understand a person calling himself Mina spent some time in your house,” he began abruptly, then inquired whether, when Mina left her house, he told her where he was going.

  “He said he was going to the north,” Lucretia replied.

  McIlvaine wanted more. “I have in my possession very satisfactory evidence that the man is a swindler and impostor and it has become my duty to have him arrested. I also have reason to believe that you yourself suffered from his impositions.”

  Lucretia denied having been imposed upon by Lino. She
didn’t know that McIlvaine and Blayney had read her last letter to him. But when the magistrate pressed her, she admitted that Lino had made off with many of her possessions.

  He wasn’t surprised, McIlvaine offered, and informed her that Lino had been in Washington for some time and had swindled several people there.

  Washington? For some time? Lucretia was perplexed. “I’d supposed from his account that during his absence he’d been to New Orleans and back,” she murmured. Then she added with awe, “He went all the way on a railroad and traveled night and day at the rate of thirty miles an hour.”

  McIlvaine snickered. “Madam, there is no railroad to New Orleans.” A train to that city had long been under construction, but it was not due to start carrying passengers until the autumn.

  Startled by the magistrate’s information, Lucretia began to pale.

  McIlvaine noticed the change in her complexion, but he was a businesslike man, one not to be swayed from his duties by any excessive reactions from the female sex. “From my knowledge of the character of this man,” he intoned, “and of the lower classes of the nation to which he belongs, and from information I have received of the circumstances attending the death of Mr. Chapman, I have a very strong impression that Mr. Chapman died by poison, and that he administered it.”