My heart sank. “Oh,” I said.
“But, Gram, couldn’t you tell us what you do know?”
“Yes, I could tell you that.”
Tremendously relieved, I bombarded Mrs. Putnam with all the questions that had been bombarding me: the accident, the evidence, The Courier, the other papers’ silence, the trial, Isabel’s tale. Disregarding her previous admonishment, I spread the articles on the table, pointing to inconsistencies, flipping through the pile to find the quotes I wanted. It suddenly dawned on me that she was not responding. I stopped and looked up in surprise. Mrs. Putnam was calmly sipping her tea.
“I,” she began, “was, of course, not born until many years following the accident and the. trial. The only reason I happen to know anything of these events is that Mr. Putnam’s family had an involvement in both The Transcript and The Herald during our marriage.”
“She means they owned them,” Babs said.
“Because of this involvement,” Mrs. Putnam continued, “when Louisa Coxe, my dear childhood friend, married Daniel Cadwalader, we were forbade to associate. You see, the Putnams and the Cadwaladers had a feud of long standing. Louisa and I formed many schemes to convince our husbands to relent, to allow us to call, but alas, it was all to no avail.”
“But, Gram,” Babs interrupted, “what does this have to do with Isabel Davenport?”
Mrs. Putnam held up her hands. “Patience, child; I shall tell the story my way.” She turned to me. “Louisa and I took it upon ourselves to discover the cause of this rift, in the hope of mending it. We traced the feud’s inception to the Davenport murder trial.”
“Aha!” I grinned.
“Aha!” Mrs. Putnam repeated, her eyes twinkling. “Apparently, during the late nineteenth century, the Cadwaladers had owned a paper called The Courier…”
“Aha!” I said again.
“Yes.” Mrs. Putnam nodded. “And even though the paper had ceased to exist by the time of my marriage, the feud had not.”
“All because of Isabel Davenport?” Babs asked.
“Apparently Isabel Davenport was rather incidental to the whole affair.” Mrs. Putnam slowly filled our teacups and took a small taste of her cake, followed by a few tediously drawn-out sips of her tea.
I was having difficulty keeping silent and had to bite my lip to control myself from screaming at the older woman. I gulped some tea to keep my fingers from drumming my impatience on the table.
Mrs. Putnam daintily tapped the corners of her mouth with her napkin, and somehow (perhaps a hidden button?) called for the maid, who entered as a fresh pot of tea rose to position on the dumbwaiter. Finally, after the particulars of tea removal, tea arrival, and additional tea pouring commenced, Mrs. Putnam continued. “According to the Cadwaladers, it was the Putnams who caused the demise of their paper. And, in consequence of this fact, they declared every Putnam to be an enemy of every Cadwalader from that day forward.
“They claimed The Herald, and to a lesser extent The Transcript, falsely accused The Courier of yellow journalism and sensationalism. You see, after Mrs. Davenport’s acquittal, the Putnam papers printed a series of editorials criticizing The Courier for manufacturing a murder where only an accident had existed.”
“She wasn’t acquitted,” I said, my heart sinking again. How reliable a source was Mrs. Putnam going to be? “It was a hung jury.”
Mrs. Putnam looked confused. “Yes, yes, child, you’re right. Now I remember—it was the trial’s dubious outcome that gave the feud its power.”
“But I don’t understand, Gram,” Babs said. “Why would a paper make up a murder? It seems to me that’s asking for a lot of trouble—and a lot of lawsuits.”
“Don’t be foolish, Barbara. Things were not always as they are now.” Mrs. Putnam’s voice was hard and icy, and Babs looked appropriately chastised. “In those days, there was no ‘media,’ as you girls would say, only newspapers. And these papers cared not a whit about lawyers or lawsuits or absolute facts. They only cared about luring readers from the other Boston dailies. The papers printed what they chose, and if something turned out not to be the truth—well, sometimes it was retracted, and sometimes it was not.”
“But what about Isabel Davenport?” I asked when Mrs. Putnam paused for breath.
“Yes, she was just a pawn in the Putnam-Cadwalader feud. There was talk on both sides of buying off jurors. And that’s not the worst of it: there was even some devilishly wicked discussion of fiddling with the judge. Each paper claimed …” Mrs. Putnam turned to me. “Each paper claimed that the other had forced the trial’s outcome to further its own position. Each blamed it upon the other that the verdict had not gone their way.” She shook her head disapprovingly. “It was all in distinctly bad taste.”
“Did anyone pay off the jurors?”
“One surely wonders, but I suspect not.” Mrs. Putnam sipped her tea and stared out the window at the lights of Cambridge across the river. “As determined as I was, I failed to persuade my father-in-law that the time had come to mend fences. Apparently, when the breach occurred, some harsh words had passed between his father and old Mr. Cadwalader—so harsh, indeed, that their granddaughters-in-law were never allowed to call.”
“So she didn’t do it?” Babs asked.
“No, Louisa tried, but she never could get Daniel to convince Samuel Cadwalader that the feud should end.”
“Not Louisa, Gram, Isabel Davenport! Did Isabel Davenport do it?”
Mrs. Putnam turned to Babs, and for the first time she looked her age. “It’s quite difficult to know, child. Up to that time, she had borne a reputation for honesty, although the Jessels had always been known for their strangeness.” Mrs. Putnam sighed. “There were some who thought she could not have been arrested had there been no compelling evidence. And there were some who thought she could not have been acquitted had she actually killed him. I fancy no one ever really knew for sure.”
20
Edgar was avoiding me. I knew it wasn’t really my fault, but every time I saw his face, slightly ethereal behind the white, sheer curtains of his front windows, I’d get this dead feeling inside my stomach. He used to be so cordial and enthusiastic, almost childlike in his desire to chat; now he hid, secreting himself behind his thick door until I passed and he felt free to go about his business. I imagined he was growing paler and even more unhealthy-looking. And I imagined I was to blame.
I wasn’t far from wrong. I ran into him, much to his obvious discomfort, on the stairs the Saturday afternoon after my visit to Mrs. Putnam. He was thinner, almost waiflike, his complexion pasty; his already exceedingly high forehead seemed even higher and bonier. He was nervous. “My, my dear,” he muttered, and nodded, keeping his eyes cast downward. He really looked ill.
“Hi, Edgar,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“Busy.” His eyes connected with mine for a second, then they found his shoes again. “I’m very busy. I daresay, I’ve been very, very busy.”
“And, and how’s Mirepoix?”
“Not well, I’m afraid. Ever since that day in your apartment, she, well, well, she just hasn’t been herself. She quivers in the corner of the living room, and just lies on her dog bed … just lies there, doing nothing …” He turned and put his key in the lock.
I reached out and touched his shoulder lightly. “I’m really sorry, Edgar.”
He whirled around and stared me straight in the eye. “Why?” he demanded. “Did you have anything to do with it?”
“I, ah, I, ah,” I stuttered. “Why, no, of course not.”
“Then there’s no need to be sorry.” He turned and slipped inside his apartment, shutting the door firmly in my face.
I stared at the deep ruddiness of the mahogany panels; there was a series of swirls around the knob that looked like a man with a sharp nose and two horns. Isabel and I hadn’t bothered Edgar in a white—I put a stop to it after the day we rearranged his cabinets—but I still felt like a shit.
I climbed the stairs.
There was nothing I could do now—the damage was done. As I put my groceries away, I vowed we’d never bother Edgar again.
When I finished in the kitchen, I went into the living room to get my “ID” file from among the piles of unpaid bills and unread magazines that littered my coffee table. Babs was on her way over—we were supposed to “do lunch” before going to the Monet show at the MFA, and I was hoping to talk to her about Isabel in light of her grandmother’s disclosures.
I took all the articles and sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor. First I made three piles for “before,” “during,” and “after” the trial. Then I took the “during” pile—by far the largest—and began to sort by date.
The trial had run the first two weeks of March 1887. On March 10, 1887, the day the prosecution rested, all the papers carried at least one article. The Herald’s shed Isabel in the most positive light.
Prosecution Rests in Davenport
Murder Trial
Mrs. Montague Cabot Davenport sat silent and pale as the Commonwealth presented its final witnesses against her. Mrs. Henry Hogan, the Davenport cook, stated that although “there had been a bit of coolness between the Missus and the Master,” it was no more than she had experienced among husbands and wives in her previous situations.
Mr. Lawrence Cabot Adams, Esquire, attorney for the defense, proclaimed that tomorrow he would begin presenting witnesses who would “refute every allegation of the prosecution until the case against the poor widow Davenport was reduced to ash.”
As could be expected, The Courier had twice as many articles as all the others combined, some so absurd as to be laughable. They painted Isabel as evil personified; she was a true villain. The “Purple Lady,” they called her—always capitalized. The Courier’s March 10 article was on the front page under a triple-column headline.
Cook Proclaims ‘Purple Lady’
Cold As Steel
Mrs. Henry Hogan, cook to the Davenport family for five years, stated in court, under oath, that the mistress of the house, Mrs. Montague Cabot Davenport, on trial for the cruel and senseless murder of her husband, was cold to all she encountered and often unfeeling to the household staff.
Mrs. Hogan stated that the “Purple Lady” once “ignored the needs of my poor, sickly niece and wouldn’t give a bit of Mary’s clothing to the poor child who had desperate need for a coat.”
The hardworking Mrs. Hogan described the icy silence in which the “Purple Lady” regarded the household staff, as well as her late and eminent husband, and her late mother-in-law, the great philanthropist Wilhehnina Appleton Cabot Davenport. Mrs. Hogan described the “Purple Lady” as “a real hard one, a hard one indeed.”
Following up on this lead, Courier reporters found others of the “Purple Lady’s” acquaintance who agreed with Mrs. Hogan’s testimony. According to many sources, Mrs. Davenport was “snobbish,” “cold,” and “mean-spirited.” This is a profile we at The Courier find consistent with that of a cold-blooded murderess.
Babs arrived just as I finished my “during” sorting. She rapped on the door and then let herself in with the key I kept forgetting to take back.
“What are you doing?” she demanded when she saw me surrounded by piles of papers. “Come on; if we want to have lunch before the show, we’d better get a move on.” She waved two tickets at me. “One-thirty tickets, kiddo—that means we have to be there between one-thirty and two or they won’t let us in.”
“I just can’t believe how different these papers are. It’s almost as if there are two trials going on.”
“Lindsey, we’ve already been through this. Gram explained the whole thing.” Babs put her hands on her hips and squared her small, angular shoulders. “Look, I’m really hungry and I’m really excited about this show—it’s his series paintings: the cathedrals, the gardens, the grain stacks, the poplars! God, I can’t wait to see the poplars! Let’s go, let’s go! Come on, come on, come on!”
“How about we have lunch here and take a closer look at these articles?”
“What for?” Babs demanded. “You know the whole story—you’ve read each of these a zillion times. Lindsey, you say you’re not crazy, and maybe you’re not, but if you don’t get away from this stuff—you’re sure as hell going to be.”
“Maybe I know the story about the newspapers, but I still don’t know the truth about the accident.”
“There was no accident!”
“How can you be so sure?”
Babs collapsed on the couch and put her head in her hands. “What am I to do with you?” she moaned dramatically. “What’s a friend to do?”
“Sit down and help me figure this out.”
She lifted her head and eyed me suspiciously. “If I do that, do you promise you won’t talk about Isabel or Montague or The Chronicle for the rest of the afternoon?”
“The Courier.”
“And no ghost stuff either.”
I patted an open spot on the floor to my right. “For example,” I said, “according to this article, Isabel ‘was a wonderful mother who lavished attention upon her only daughter,’ and according to this one, she was ‘mean-spirited.’”
Babs reluctantly slid to the floor. “None of that has anything to do with whether she murdered Montague or not.”
“It goes to character.”
“Ha!” Babs hooted. “You’re starting to talk like your string-bean lawyer!”
“Well, it does.” I pouted.
“All right, kiddo, all right. You go and make us some lunch—I’ll have a salad or yogurt or whatever—I’ll go through this stuff and prove to you that your Isabel isn’t as innocent as you’d like to believe.”
“Go ahead and try,” I said, standing up. “I’ll be right back.”
I threw some lunch together and brought it out to the living room. Babs was rearranging my piles. “Negative, positive, and neutral,” she said, pointing to each pile in turn. “I’ll take the negative and you take the positive.” She took the yogurt from me. “Come help. We don’t have much time.”
“Okay,” I said, sitting down on the floor. When we finished sorting, Babs’s pile was twice the size of the other two.
“Well, it sure looks like I’ve got all the ammunition,” she said.
“That’s because The Courier was the most obsessed.”
“Reminds me of someone else I know.”
“I got a book from the library on the history of Boston newspapers the other day. It said that violent crime was big stuff in the late eighteen hundreds and that murder was by far the best circulation builder.” I took a bite of my sandwich. “The book also said that if the victim was a woman, it was pretty juicy stuff, but if the murderer was a woman, that was really, really hot—and if she was young and beautiful and from a good family … well, that was heaven for the yellow press.”
“Forget it, kiddo.”
“Why? It makes sense—they framed her.”
“Even with the information we got from Gram, it’s hard to believe that a legitimate newspaper would just make up this whole thing from scratch—there had to be some truth behind it.”
“Why?” I demanded. “They do it now—think what they would have done in a time when they weren’t afraid of lawsuits.”
Babs shrugged. “Let’s a get a move on here. We’ve got to go soon.” She quickly finished her yogurt and flipped through her pile. “I’ll just do headlines—that’s all that’s necessary. Listen to these: ‘Davenport Family Physician Says Purple Lady Victim of Frequent Hysterical Episodes’ and ‘Valet Tells of Davenport Family Feud’ and ‘Mr. and Mrs. Davenport Always Fighting, States Cook.’ Or how about this one: ‘Parlour Maid Tells of Argument on Night of Murder.’ Really, Lindsey, between the journals and this, I think it’s pretty clear.”
I could feel the sweat prickling under my arms. I read through my small pile. “The Herald and The Globe say nothing about all that stuff. Here’s a quote from a friend of Isabel’s stating that she was ‘warm and loving,’ an
d here’s one from an old teacher saying that ‘Isabel Jessel was a thoughtful student.’”
“So what? Hitler probably had at least one teacher who liked him.” Babs put the papers down and looked at me seriously. “I’ve got statements here from the household staff, relatives, the family physician. There are questions about Isabel’s mental stability, overheard arguments, and suspicions of ‘malicious mischief’ as your string bean would say. Lins”—her voice was gentle “—you’ve read the journals; you’ve got to know what really happened …”
“Breaking some stupid walking stick and murder are two entirely different things!”
“But they come from the same anger.”
The living room walls seemed to lean in toward me, then blow back out like an accordion; the sun dimmed. They come from the same anger. I took a deep breath, forcing air into my lungs as I slowly flipped through the clippings. There was little in my pile to refute Babs. They come from the same anger.
Babs remained silent, a compassionate look on her face.
“I don’t know,” I finally said. “I don’t know why I find it so hard to believe, but I do. I can’t, I just can’t believe she’d do it. If a woman like Isabel could commit murder, then anyone could.”
“So they say. Given the right circumstances.”
I felt a jolt—like sharp, hot lightning—flare through my body. I swallowed, but the lump in my throat wouldn’t budge. “And, and you believe that?” There was a faraway buzzing in my ears, and Babs’s smooth blond hair seemed to stand up and grow fuzzy. I looked down at my hands.
“I don’t know.” Babs touched my knee, and I looked up. “Maybe Isabel didn’t do it. The evidence is all circumstantial …”
“You think so?”
“No,” Babs said. “But what the hell do I know about murder?” She stood up and forced a laugh. “All I know is that I’m dying to see the Monet show. Grain stacks and poplars—here we come!”
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