The Murder of Dr. Chapman by Linda Wolfe

Author:Linda Wolfe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

Nine

Pennsylvania v. Lucretia Chapman, Part One

Mid-December 1831–Mid-February 1832

BROWN WAS IN A temper on December thirteenth, the day before Lucretia’s trial was scheduled to begin. On the shortest of notice, he’d managed to hire an assistant, a talented young lawyer named Peter McCall, and the two of them had taken a coach out to Doylestown. But the county seat was jammed with gawkers and journalists from all over the country, not to mention a horde of prosecution witnesses. It was so crowded that even though the town had six hotels and numerous smaller lodging places, Brown and McCall weren’t able to find accommodations. Were he and his new assistant to be like Noah’s dove, with no resting place for their feet? he wondered as they traipsed from one inn to the next. Then finally, quite late at night, they succeeded in finding quarters and were able to set about preparing for the next day’s work—work that promised, Brown feared, to be a most awful and embarrassing business. Because he had no witnesses lined up, or even any idea if his client had witnesses. Not yet. The whole thing was happening too quickly.

In the morning, fighting a wintry wind that sent a chill through his bones, he and McCall hunched to the jail to confer with Lucretia. Brown was still edgy. His short stay in Doylestown had convinced him that not only did the prosecution have a veritable army of witnesses, but public prejudice was running high against his client. When he and his junior colleague passed through the prison’s front door, the grated portal seemed almost to groan as it swung open, and the eerie sound gave him a momentary and uncharacteristic lapse of confidence. What could he do against so much prejudice and proof, he fretted. He needed helping hands.

Nevertheless, when he spoke to Lucretia, he tried to assume an optimistic air, for he didn’t want her to know how worried he was. Who can help us? he asked in as cheerful a manner as he could muster. Who should we call to testify on your behalf?

She named all sorts of people. But many of them—like her first lawyer, Campbell, who’d gone off to sit with the legislature in Harrisburg, or her husband’s speech student, John Bishop, who resided in Vermont, or her own student, Ben Ash, who lived in New York—were hundreds of miles away. Brown wasn’t at all sure he’d be able to round up all the witnesses she was proposing, let alone these remote ones. Concerned, he said a hasty goodbye to Lucretia, and he and McCall hurried over to the courthouse next door, where they began furiously making out subpoenas. They wrote them with their own hands and hired court hangers-on to deliver them, paying the men right from their own purses. And as they dispatched the process servers they perversely hoped that if the trial actually began that day as docketed, the evidence against their client would take up a great deal of time; that

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