By suppertime she was so hungry that she could “hardly keep back the tears” when she sat down to her meal of bread and weak tea. So it caught her attention when she heard one of the girls telling Miss Dudley that “the biscuits have arrived.” She turned to Jennie and explained that she had taught the girl to call her to dinner with that phrase because when she was a child living in Paris, they often had to wait for biscuits from a nearby bakery before dinner could be served. When they came, she said, the “French waiter would throw open the door of the saloon and announce ‘the biscuits have arrived, Monsieur, Madam.’”
After dinner, Jennie sidled up to Miss Dudley and shared some of the same sad story she told Sister Dorothea, hoping to inspire an exchange of tales of woe. Miss Dudley became “quite confidential, and admitted that her own life had not been all that it should have been” and promised to tell Jennie her story before she left. Then they bantered about ideas of what they would do when they left the home. Jennie suggested they go West and “begin life anew.” Miss Dudley said she wanted to go to Germany and study and that “she would write and make a great name for herself, and that she would come back to this country so famous one day that no one would dare sit in her presence.” They mused about taking a flat together in New York City, where Miss Dudley said they could live “the pleasantest sort of Bohemian life” and throw after-theater supper parties with all the writers and artists she knew.
Jennie came upon Miss Dudley looking “vexed and disappointed” the following afternoon after a trip to her lawyer’s office. She fumed about the man who she said had ruined her and seemed to Jennie “very bitter and full of revenge.” She told Jennie the man was “thirty years older than she, and that she had given him the best years of her life.” She said that she “worshipped him, and that he made her believe that he loved her; but that he was a coward.” Her bad temper spilled over to the other girls. Jennie watched her thoughtlessly dismiss a “sort of a household drudge” who had spent an hour polishing her brass inkwell, and harshly scold a girl who had “vexed her by some little impertinence.”
Jennie spent the following day in bed, “too ill to get up.” Miss Dudley visited her and told her more of her story, about how she was an “innocent little thing” when she met the man who ruined her and how she “gave him all her girlhood and never had beaux.” She also told Jennie how he made her give up her children and “how she had discovered his infidelity to her” and did not “believe his wickedness possible.”
By this point, Jennie had decided she couldn’t bear it in the home any longer; she felt her “strength giving out,” probably because, with the exception of Sunday dinner, she would tell Stoll, she hadn’t had “a meal that I could eat.” She also learned that some of the girls had overheard her conversation with Miss Dudley about her wayward life, and Sister Dorothea wanted her to promise not to talk to her anymore. Jennie told Sister Dorothea that she had decided to leave after her week was up. “I am getting out of prison,” she scribbled with relief in her diary. She had been helping with the home’s books and told Sister Dorothea she would come back and work in the office, hoping with that excuse and the friendship she had struck up with Miss Dudley she could carry on her detective work from the outside.
After breakfast on Tuesday, exactly one week after she had walked through the front door of the House of Mercy, Jennie sat with Miss Dudley looking over the “rooms to let” section in the newspaper while she waited for Miss Grey to retrieve her street clothes. It was then that Miss Dudley leaned over, and “in a sort of stage whisper,” told Jennie that her real name was Madeline Pollard.
* * *
Jennie fled the House of Mercy with Madeline’s voice still ringing in her head. It had taken all her composure to maintain a “marble calm” when Madeline told her who she really was and to pretend that she was only vaguely aware of the scandal that had engulfed her employer and fascinated the nation. Madeline urged her to get a copy of the World and read her story and vowed that the upcoming trial was going to be “a very bitter fight.” As she said her goodbyes, Jennie promised to send word to Madeline of her new lodgings so they could keep in touch. Then, she headed straight for the dining room of the National Hotel, where she ordered herself a hearty meal that an astonished waiter watched her eat “like an Arctic explorer” back from the North Pole. “I was simply starved,” she wrote to Stoll from the hotel. “It was in every way a dreadful experience.” She was eager to assure him that she hadn’t left the house “due to a lack of courage” but because after their conversation was overheard, “the sisters objected to me having anything to do with Miss Pollard” and she “could gain nothing by remaining there”—although, in truth, she had decided to leave even before that happened.
Stoll, who, unlike Jennie, understood from the start that the House of Mercy was no YWCA home, knew what he was putting her through. “I think a cold chill must have passed down her back when she got an inside view,” he wrote to Breckinridge after he got her letter saying she had finagled her way into the home. He seemed to think what Jennie was most worried about was not getting her things back if she left precipitously. “They are going to take all of her belongings away … so that some scheme will have to be worked out to get them back” if she left early, he told Breckinridge. It wasn’t her belongings she was worried about getting back; Jennie appeared genuinely terrified that she would get stuck in the House of Mercy, with its spartan meals and weak tea, corn-husk mattresses, and jagged glass wall, and what she told Stoll was the “contemptuous authority” of the staff: “It is like a jail there, and one is watched every minute.”
For her suffering she had precious little to show. Stoll hadn’t given her any background on the case and had instructed her not to read Madeline’s World autobiography because, he told her, he didn’t want her to “fix [her] mind in a certain channel, which may prevent you from reaching that correct conclusion, as to her character.” Based on other avenues of investigation he was plotting at the time, it seems he thought all he had to do was get some woman to befriend Madeline and she would blab her heart out about who was really behind the suit. Without the details of Madeline’s life, however, Jennie had no way to suss out fact from fiction or to delve more deeply into areas of inconsistency. When that evening Jennie got a letter from Stoll with some specific points of the case they were trying to clarify, she told him she would have liked to have the information before she entered the home, but, “I did the best that could be done with the material I had to work with.” What she could tell Stoll was that a settlement was “out of the question,” as she thought Madeline took pride in the idea of the trial and was unfazed about any newspaper notoriety it might bring. She also told Stoll that Madeline had “a certain quick wit” and, in her estimation, was “a very good actress.”
Madeline’s backstory did appear to be cobbled together from bits and pieces of the lives of elite folks she met along the way. It was Breckinridge who had a governess and his children who had the idiosyncratic German tutor. She told Jennie about a young Yale student who fell madly in love with her while she was studying in Cambridge. His “parents were Kentuckians and great friends of hers” and they were “worried about their boy, because he was getting wild and drinking,” and his mother implored her to use her influence to try to save him, which was clearly a recasting of the Breckinridges’ desperate battle to save their son Robert. Who knows where she got the story of the Paris biscuits from, but the only Paris she had been to was Paris, Kentucky. She appears to have been a biographical magpie, collecting bits and pieces of other people’s lives to weave into the one she felt she should have had—and to create a persona that allowed her access to the world she wished to inhabit. Yet her story about her relationship with Breckinridge, her innocence when it began, the children she sacrificed, and how he betrayed her all appeared to be true in its essentials.
It’s also not wholly clear that Madeline wasn’t on to Jennie. She came to Jennie one day and told her she had “a strange
dream” that Jennie was Nellie Bly, the famous investigative reporter who had gone undercover at Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum to reveal the horrendous conditions there. “I thought you were one of those dreadful reporters, and that you had come here to take down every thing I said to you,” she told Jennie. “I thought to myself, how much I have been talking to this dreadful woman.” Jennie laughed it off, but inwardly she “knew it was not a dream.” Regardless, she seemed to think that her nascent friendship with Madeline was intact. But Madeline’s “dream” clearly was a suspicion tinged with a warning—Jennie had been very inquisitive, and it would have been very unusual for someone of her class to commit herself to a place like the House of Mercy. Still, she wrote to her mother, “Mr. S’s associates seem to think I’ve done mighty well for them,” and plowed optimistically into the next stage of her spy saga.
11
A Good Woman
Two days after she left the House of Mercy, on February 8, Jennie got lucky and ran into Madeline downtown at the Boston Store. Madeline was shopping in preparation for her departure to Cincinnati, where the first round of depositions would be taken the next day. She seemed “a little icy,” but Jennie followed her around the department store nonetheless as she picked out undergarments and a new purse, and then down the street to Morez et Cie, a fashionable millinery shop where Madeline bought a fetching little hat for nearly half the thirty dollars Jennie calculated she had in her pocket. Jennie was curious as to where she got the money, as Madeline appeared completely broke at the House of Mercy. “The day my suit was filed, I hadn’t even my car fare,” she told Jennie. Sister Dorothea had told her that Madeline had no money when she arrived seeking refuge one evening and that Miss Talcott, who was in charge of the house then, “had gone about among Madeline’s lady friends and collected money for her because she did not have a cent for the little necessities of life.” Madeline explained to Jennie that she had gotten the money from her brother, who received an unexpected windfall, although Jennie didn’t buy that explanation. Regardless, there clearly was no shortage of funds to pay for the trial expenses. Madeline bragged to Jennie that she had a private stateroom for the trip to Cincinnati so she “would not have to be stared at,” as well as a nine-hundred-mile train pass.
Meanwhile, the Breckinridge team was scrambling to cover day-to-day expenses, which now included Jennie’s room and board since she had relocated to a boardinghouse on Connecticut Avenue. Stoll had to advance William Worthington, the stenographer in Breckinridge’s law office who was acting as an intermediary with Jennie, thirty dollars for Jennie’s expenses because Breckinridge hadn’t come through with the requested funds. Breckinridge repaid Stoll with a check postdated to his next congressional paycheck because he said he didn’t have “the money to square just now without straining.” Desha wrote to his father, “How are you for money? I am dead broke and I fear you are too,” explaining that one witness needed seventy dollars for travel expenses. As the result of their straitened finances, the defense was relying on the shoestring detective efforts of Desha and Sam McChesney, who were managing an ad hoc crew of party loyalists dispatched to investigate Pollard in various cities, as well as intelligence that came in over the transom from Breckinridge’s network of kin and political allies. A few of the leads proved potentially useful. Breckinridge’s brother Robert wrote to tell him that he had overheard a story from a local doctor that Col. A. M. Swope had “tried to employ him to produce an abortion on Miss Pollard.” But much of the intelligence was a stew of hearsay and rumor: a thirteen-year-old girl known as “Mad Poll” whose father was a Frankfort harness maker supposedly entertained men at the Galt House in Louisville; Pollard’s aunt Mary Stout allegedly ran a secret brothel in a stable behind her house. The team ended up spending a considerable amount of time chasing leads that ended up being dead ends.
Stoll wanted to systematize and professionalize the investigation by hiring proper detectives to investigate Madeline’s life and to direct Jennie’s efforts. Not shy about manipulating women for his own ends, he wanted to hire a female detective to befriend Madeline’s mother and get into her house, “letting her get sick on their hands and having to stay with them ten days or two weeks if necessary” to see if they could get Mrs. Pollard “to talk very freely.” Stoll got a proposal from the local office of the famed Pinkerton Detective Agency that would cost between $1,500 and $2,000. But when he attempted to move ahead with the plan, Robert Pinkerton, who managed the East Coast operations of the firm his father founded, told Stoll that he would need him to personally guarantee the account because the Philadelphia office “did some work on the same case … and there is a balance still due on that account.” Stoll, who like most of Breckinridge’s friends was donating his time to the case, apparently was unwilling to go into debt for his friend, and the Pinkerton plan didn’t come to fruition.
* * *
Madeline Pollard and her lawyer Calderon Carlisle arrived in Cincinnati on the morning of February 9, had a late breakfast, and made their way to the downtown law office where the depositions would be taken. Carlisle was in his early forties, tall, thin, and well dressed, his wavy hair slicked back, every bit the club man. Madeline was dressed in a double-breasted dark-blue coat with fashionable leg-o’-mutton sleeves over a black dress, tan gloves, patent leather high-button shoes, and her new hat, a saucer-shaped black velvet affair with a feather plume.
Charles Stoll and Desha Breckinridge, who had been dispatched to handle the Cincinnati depositions, met them at the law office to take the depositions of the three women doctors who, Pollard said, attended her after she gave birth at the Norwood Foundling Asylum in Cincinnati the first time she was pregnant. Breckinridge’s strategy, as he told one of his supporters, wasn’t to deny a relationship with Madeline but to prove the “absolute falsity of all the more serious charges”: that he seduced Pollard when she was a girl, that he was the father of her children, and that he introduced her into society. The first two got to the heart of the case against him; the latter was a point of pride for Breckinridge, who was eager to refute the widespread notion it was he who had given Pollard a toehold into Washington’s upper-class society.
The three doctors were Dr. Belle Buchanan; Dr. Mary Street, who was now married and retired and went by Mrs. Logan; and Dr. Kate Perry, who also was married and now Mrs. Cain. All three were graduates of the Pulte Medical College, a local homeopathic school of medicine. Both Dr. Buchanan and Dr. Perry recognized Madeline as a former patient. Dr. Buchanan testified that Dr. Street brought Pollard to the practice she shared with Dr. Perry sometime around February 1885, although she was unsure of the exact dates, and that she treated her for a “disorder consequent upon child-birth.” Madeline said in her autobiography that her first delivery was difficult. Dr. Perry testified that she recognized Madeline as Louise Wilson, who was introduced to her as a widow who had suffered a miscarriage but who she later found out was unmarried. When it was Dr. Street’s turn to be deposed and she was brought into the room, however, she didn’t recognize Madeline at all. “The name Louise Wilson means nothing to me. I don’t know you,” she said when she was introduced to Madeline.
For his part, Stoll was convinced that Street did know Madeline but had pretended not to recognize her because, as he told Breckinridge, “she and the Buchanan woman had performed an abortion on Louise Wilson, who I am satisfied is Miss Pollard.”
The taking of depositions next moved to the Norwood Asylum, the charity home for unwed mothers where Madeline said her first child was born in 1885. Madeline and Carlisle went there in December seeking proof of her stay but hadn’t been able to find any record of a Louise Wilson, the name Pollard said she used. When Carlisle examined the records, however, he did find an Alice Burgoyne who gave birth on a nearby date, which Pollard then said was the name she had used but forgotten in the haze of all the aliases she had used over the years. Sister Augustine, who was the nun in charge of the asylum, said in her deposition that she never saw Madeline
before she came in December, although she noted there were some one hundred girls there every year and most used aliases. She said that Madeline asked her what had happened to the baby she left there and that Madeline “went into hysterics” when she told her the baby born to the woman named Burgoyne died in July 1885.
Sister Augustine also said Madeline didn’t seem familiar with the home. However, as the Cincinnati Enquirer reported, at one point Madeline went directly to a bookcase and “took therefrom a copy of Washington Irving and found among the leaves a card she had placed there when an inmate.” Madeline explained that she had left a three-volume set of Irving’s works at the home as a gift for the sisters and found in one of the books a Christmas card that she had used as a bookmark. Sister Augustine then pressed Madeline as to why she wanted to ruin Breckinridge, telling her that “she must be a bad woman to make such a show of herself before the world.” Madeline replied: “Oh no. I was a bad girl, but I am a good woman.”
Despite this heated exchange, the Cincinnati and Kentucky papers reported that the depositions had been “decidedly in favor of Colonel Breckinridge.” Madeline returned to Washington irritable with how the depositions had gone. “She could not bear to talk of it,” Jennie reported. While working on the bookkeeping at the House of Mercy, Jennie had overheard that Madeline was going out on a walk and followed her. She tried to talk Madeline into dropping the suit, since she wasn’t expecting any money anyway. “I cannot give this up now; it is part of my life,” she told Jennie. “This man has ruined my life … and he shall suffer what he has made me suffer.”
Bringing Down the Colonel Page 18