Forgotten News Read online

  A Reverend Cox took the stand, interesting everyone because he'd been sued for divorce last year in a sensational case, "the complaint being," said the Times, "repeated and aggravated infidelities." (I understand "repeated" but I wish they'd explained "aggravated.") Cox said that only last Friday Burdell had told him he wasn't married, and never would be.

  Then a big fight with attorney Henry Clinton, who demanded to be allowed upstairs to see Mrs. Cunningham. Connery refused, defending his decision, then seemed to forget the argument, drifting into what is eating away at him. "I can bear all the scourge I get; I am thankful to the press; it is a liberty which the press has a right to possess. That liberty I do not wish to deny. I esteem the press for more reasons than one, and I wish the press to have very full powers. They are at liberty to chastise every man when he departs from strict rectitude and honest deportment of conduct. But I trust anybody who has been listening to me here, and to the manner in which I have been conducting this investigation, will do me the justice to say that if I may not have the most towering talents in the world, there is honesty of heart for the protection of the accused and the development of crime." (This is correctly copied.) The Times adds: "(Applause, and cries of 'Order!' from the police.)"

  Connery then changed his mind, and allowed Henry Clinton to see Mrs. Cunningham; he went right upstairs, and got her signature on a writ of habeas corpus.

  Charles Ketcham testified that the bloody shirt was his. Mrs. Stansbury talked about the lease she and her husband were to sign here last Saturday. But they hadn't come that morning, because the weather was bad, and: "On Saturday evening," Mrs. Stansbury now told the jury, "my husband was sitting in the parlor reading the paper, when he dropped the paper, turned round to me, and said, 'Mr. Burdell is dead!'

  "I said, 'What Burdell?'

  "He said, 'Harvey Burdell, Dentist, Bond Street.' Then he said, 'He broke a blood vessel, and the blood is on the door.'

  "I said, 'It is very strange that a blood-vessel should fly on the door.' I thought then that something perhaps was wrong, knowing how the parties felt. And I says, 'This morning the writing was to be signed, and last night he was murdered or died….' " Impressive, chilling; but proof of nothing, and not even evidence.

  The inquest went hopelessly on. Mrs. Cunningham's hairdresser raised her hand, laid the other on a Bible, swore to tell the whole truth, then told the jury that all she knew was that she dressed Mrs. Cunningham's hair, and that Mrs. Cunningham owed her money. "I wish you luck till you get it," someone called out, and when she stepped down, Connery said, "Gentlemen, that is a very important witness." He could have said the same for his remaining witnesses today, such as a livery-stable owner whose testimony was simply that he had sometimes rented carriages to Dr. Burdell, to Eckel, and to Mrs. Prosser.

  A bad day for Edward Downes Connery, who "walks a little lame."

  After he and the jury had left, the house empty except for the Cunninghams up on the third floor and the cops on guard duty, the Times reporter was left without much of a story for the day. So instead of leaving, he climbed the stairs to Harvey Burdell's office, hunting for something to liven up his account. It was after six, early February, as he stepped into the room, so I expect he had to light the gas: possibly the jet over the Doctor's desk. Then he wandered the room, but nothing had changed: walls, carpets, furniture, the doors in the far corner still marked with spilled blood; turned black by now, I would think. Why this room hadn't been cleaned up I don't know; maybe Connery still hoped some kind of clue would turn up here; or maybe he was afraid to do anything irrevocable that the papers might criticize.

  The Times man picked up the Doctor's bloody boots, surprisingly still there, and looked at them. But all he found to say when he wrote about it later was that the blood ground into the soles showed how the Doctor must have struggled for his life, and that had already been said by others.

  He put down the boots, and walked over to the corner of the room where Dr. Burdell had died. There, he wrote later: "By the side of the closet door which is thickly splashed with blood, hangs a political chart, on which were printed the names of the candidates and the platforms of the three great parties to the last Presidential struggle." Desperate for material, I suspect, and possibly imitating the generally lively reporting of the Tribune, the Times man now discovered, or says he did, that: "Curiously enough, upon that sentence in the Republican platform which reads: 'Murders, robberies, and arsons have been instigated, and encouraged, and the offenders have been allowed to go unpunished,' a blood-spot had fallen on the word 'murders,' and another on the word 'unpunished.' The sentence proceeds, 'and that it is our fixed purpose to bring the perpetrators of these atrocious outrages, and their accomplices, to a sure and condign hereafter.' This passage is marked significantly, as by an index finger, by a long spurt of blood!"

  I like it, and hope he got a raise for initiative, imagination, and fine creative writing.

  8

  Augusta Cunningham walked into the downstairs parlor of 31 Bond Street next morning, and laid her palm on the Bible: an eighteen-year-old girl "in a dark-plaid silk [dress] and a Russian sable coat." Here at last was a witness who might be expected to know something of what had happened in this house the night Harvey Burdell died; and Connery and his jury, the reporters and spectators crowding the room, watched as she raised her other hand, and swore to tell them the truth. We see her now from the reporters' table, through the eyes of the Times man: "rather tall … her features … regular and decidely handsome. Her air and manner … dignified, confident and self-possessed. Her eyes are mild in expression, but her mouth is rigid, hard and indicative of firmness, not unmixed with peremptory arrogance of character."

  The Tribune man, possibly more alert to color, also saw her eyes: "light blue, and … somewhat dimmed, as if the result of excessive weeping." He saw her hair, too: "light brown." And like the Times man he also saw strength in that face: "She very much resembles her mother … and looks as if full of determination of purpose…."

  They were right. The oath given, Augusta sat down in the dentist's chair, at which Dr. Burdell had once stood fixing her teeth: you wonder if memory of that now stirred in her mind. Then the questions began: and Augusta stonewalled them.

  "… she answered only such questions as were put to her,—volunteering nothing and remembering less than was deemed desirable. Throughout her examination she was evidently inclined to make out the most amicable relations between her mother and Doctor Burdell, and ignored all the difficulties which have been shown by other witnesses…."

  In fact, Augusta seemed hardly to know the answers to even innocuous questions. "What was the period of the first acquaintance of your mother and family with Dr. Burdell?"

  "I do not know; I was at Cleveland at that time."

  "As near as you can guess?"

  "Nearly two years; I am not certain."

  For how long had the Doctor visited her mother?

  "I cannot say…."

  Upstairs Emma Cunningham and Helen sat waiting: for their turns, so Edward Connery thought, to be called down to the witness stand when Augusta was finished. Except for his brief questioning of Mrs. Cunningham on the day the inquest began, when she was not yet a suspect, no one knew what the three women could tell of the murder. Now, finally—a full week later, during which the coroner had questioned several prostitutes, a livery-station owner, a clairvoyant, and Mrs. Cunningham's hairdresser —he was ready for the Cunninghams.

  But Emma Cunningham hadn't waited for Coroner Connery; she was waiting now for something else, for at just about the time Augusta had taken the oath downstairs a Judge Brady took his seat at the bench of his City Hall courtroom, and began listening to Emma Cunningham's attorney, Henry Clinton. Clinton had a signed application from her for a writ of habeas corpus, and now he handed this up to the judge, and asked him to order her brought here along with Eckel and Snodgrass, all of whom, he said, were being illegally imprisoned by Edward Connery. Judge Brady ag
reed, and sent Deputy Sheriff Crombie up to 31 Bond. And before Augusta's questioning was even well started, Crombie arrived to snatch away the coroner's principal witness by serving "a writ of habeas corpus upon the Coroner, in behalf of Mrs. Cunningham." What's more, she was to leave right now: Crombie had a carriage waiting.

  There was nothing Connery could do. All week he'd delayed; could even have questioned Mrs. Cunningham this morning by starting earlier. But now she was upstairs getting into her outer clothing, putting on a veil; and Connery could only hope she'd soon be brought back and delivered over to him again.

  His troubles grew: two judges came visiting the inquest now, Recorder Smith and Judge Capron, and he politely made them welcome. Why they had come I can't say, but it seems possible to me, or even likely, that someone with the power to make it stick had decided Connery's fumbling inquisition badly needed experienced help. "The Deputy Sheriff at this moment called the Coroner out, [and] the rest of the examination was conducted by Recorder Smith…."

  Who had no better luck than Connery. Did Augusta's mother have a lease on the house?

  "That I cannot say."

  "Why can't you say?"

  "I never asked her anything at all about it; I am not of an inquisitive nature…."

  Wasn't she in "the habit of talking with her mother about her affairs?"

  "I never thought anything about the house—whether she was going to live here another year or not."

  "Never even asked the question?"

  "No, Sir, never did."

  "Felt no interest in it," Smith continued doggedly, "whether you was going to remain here or was going away?"

  "No, Sir, I did not."

  And so on. But when the questioning turned to the marriage, Augusta knew plenty. She'd been a witness, she said, to the marriage between her mother and Harvey Burdell; and it had taken place on Tuesday, October 28. She remembered that date because the Doctor himself often spoke to her of it in a joking sort of way; saying such things as you won't forget the 28th of October, and: "He would often joke about my having another father."

  It was he, not her mother, who wanted the marriage kept secret. As soon as they'd left the Reverend Marvine's, in fact, out on the street, "I said, 'Doctor, what would you say if I should tell of it?' Says he, 'Augusta, if you ever tell of it I'll take your life.' I don't know whether he said it in jest or not, but that's the remark." As to why the marriage was secret: "He said because he said he was going to be single, and they would laugh at him if he told of his marriage. But he wished it to be known on the first of June, as they were going to leave here for Europe."

  Pretty positive testimony, but it turned out she hadn't actually heard all this from Dr. Burdell. "Who told you that?"

  "Mother…."

  They'd walked to the Reverend Marvine's because: "The Doctor said it was nonsense to spend money on a carriage," and here the Tribune added: "(Miss Cunningham could not repress a smile as she said this.)"

  "Any merry-making" when they got home that night?

  "No, the Doctor didn't wish anything of the kind. He was very close with his means, and didn't want any money spent that could be avoided." Persuasive; it sounds like the Doctor.

  Her mother and the Doctor, Augusta continued, had occupied the same room on their wedding night, and had continued to do so until about a month ago when her sister took sick and her mother had begun sleeping with Helen. At least, the Doctor and her mother had slept on the second floor: whether in the same bed, she couldn't say.

  There was much more. Recorder Smith, Connery (who'd returned now), and even a juror questioned Augusta about everything any of them could think of. As they hunted for something, anything, the questioning grew so prolonged that to report it, along with the testimony of others, the Times had to publish a "Special Supplement" containing nothing else. Augusta's question-and-answer testimony alone took more than a full page. I read a sample of it aloud, timing it (strange to hear spoken aloud, even in my own voice, words spoken by Augusta a century and a quarter ago); and I believe she was on the stand for nearly an hour.

  "During the course of her examination," the Tribune said, "she bore the gaze of the spectators with remarkable firmness, though at times she exhibited emotion." The Times man thought: "She was pale and evidently controlled the agitation she felt only by strong effort."

  But the stone wall held. Had she never heard of the note Dr. Burdell said her mother stole? No. Well, didn't she know police had come to the house? "My little brother once told me there was a policeman there; I didn't know what it was about."

  "Not a word between you and your mother as to the subject of [their] visit?"

  "No, Sir."

  Yes, of course she'd been curious, but her mother, she said, wouldn't tell her why.

  "Did [Eckel] spend time in your mother's room?"

  "Only when he went up to fix the birds."

  Her mother never went out alone with Eckel, only with a group. Yes, she'd seen the dagger in her mother's bureau; they had had it for years; it had belonged to her father.

  A big question: "Did you hear any noise that night [of the murder]?"

  "Not the slightest."

  I think they finally ran out of questions. A juror stood up to try his luck, eventually asking things like, "Did your mother usually wear much jewelry?"

  "No."

  "Did she wear braids in her hair?"

  "Yes."

  "Did she wear bracelets? …"

  Presently Connery said to the juror, "I think, Sir, that you have gone far enough …" but the juryman didn't want to give up, insisting on more questions, and finally both he and Connery were asking Augusta about a Mr. Todd whose only connection with the case seems to have been that, along with a Mr. Coe, he called at the house for some reason or other on the afternoon before the murder. The long session dwindled to this:

  "Do you know where Mr. Coe lives?" the juror persisted.

  "I do not; he boards in New-York somewhere. I think he is now at Dr. Wellington's water-cure Establishment."

  "What is his appearance? Is he as tall as myself (about 5 ft. 4)?"

  "I think he was; he is rather short. (Merriment.)"

  "Had he black hair?"

  "Not very dark."

  "Does he wear considerable beard?"

  "No."

  "What is the color of his whiskers?"

  "I do not know."

  "Are his features sharp or full-faced?"

  "Rather sharp."

  "I think I know that gentleman," said the juror, and that was too much for Connery. "That may be," he said, "but it seems to me that we have had enough of this."

  "The juror sat down," wrote one reporter, "to the relief of his own legs, and the patience of his fellows." And Augusta, dismissed at last— it was now one o'clock—stood up from the Doctor's chair. If she knew who had killed Harvey Burdell, as she walked from the room in her plaid dress and sable coat, she took the knowledge with her.

  Down at City Hall "the curiosity to see Mrs. Cunningham and Eckel was … great," said the Times reporter. He stood watching an "immense throng gathered about and within City Hall, to see them as they passed," and I try to imagine what the man who put those words down on paper was actually looking at. I can see City Hall because I know what it looked like. Then I try to add women in hoopskirts, shawls over their heads against the winter air; men in tall Daniel Webster stovepipe hats; boys in short-peaked little wool caps; and the girls are miniature women. And there could still be seen on New York streets occasionally old men unwilling to adopt the newer heavy dark clothes of the nineteenth century, and who continued to wear the outmoded knee breeches of their younger days and worn felt hats whose brims tipped up to form a tricorne. Possibly even one of those old men stood in that crowd.

  All this can be managed in the mind, you can see the crowd thus far. But I think there'd be more than merely a difference in clothing style if you could really go back somehow and stand among those people, listening and sneaking looks
at their faces. Because I believe their faces are also different from ours; that you can see this when you study the old photographs. Faces different because the people are different. In their minds lies the knowledge that the name of the President-elect is Buchanan; California is far more remote for them than any place on earth is for us now; and possibly some of them suspect that a civil war may be coming. Those boys in their caps, free of school today, are going to fight it.

  Even greater than the differences in what they know are the differences in the way they see the world and in the ideas that move them; their faces are formed by their own times, and I think that's why movies and television of other days are so often unpersuasive. They get the clothes right, sometimes, but the faces of the people wearing them are today's; they're us, and you can see it. Unless directors search out the rare throwback faces, which they don't generally bother to do. Sometimes the English will, and then you get the sudden sharp thrill of glimpsing what Dickens saw.

  To somehow join that crowd and stand silent beside the Times reporter, seeing what he saw, would be almost unimaginably different from watching a crowd of today. I think the fascination of it might be nearly unbearable, just too much to take, though I'd be glad to give it a try.

  But of course they're exactly like us in the fundamental ways: they push, gawk, and lift their chins, trying to see "Eckel walk from the prison, through Centre-street, in company with … one of the officers of the prison. Not many recognized them…." "The greatest anxiety was manifested to see the unfortunate woman who claims to be the wife of Dr. Burdell…. She was brought from her house in Bond-street in a closed carriage to the City Hall, and there kept in the Sheriff's office…."