“Let’s begin, then, with the letter-”
Thornton rose. “Milord, the letter has-”
“I sense this is another letter,” said the judge. “Am I right, Mr. Dougherty?”
Doubtful Dick smiled. “You are, indeed, milord. The clerk will provide you, ma’am, with the original and then give copies to Mr. Thornton and the foreman of the jury to pass along. I have already submitted to the chief justice an affidavit explaining the provenance of the document.”
Almeda picked up the copy handed to her. She drew in her breath quickly but gave no other sign of concern. She looked up slowly, waiting.
“My first question is this: do you recognize the handwriting?”
“I do. It resembles mine.”
“Milord, I must protest. Here we have yet another letter with both salutation and complimentary closing in the form of a single letter only: ‘C’ and ‘D.’ ”
“True, but I must allow Mr. Dougherty to ask the witness if she herself can clarify the identities. If not, then he will have to move on.”
“But I fail to see the relevance here.” Thornton had worked himself into a righteous quiver-at ten-fifteen of a Monday morning.
“Continue, Mr. Dougherty.”
“Do you, in fact, recall writing this letter on or about November first, 1838, the date indicated on it, and just two days before your husband left for Essex?”
The members of the jury were scanning the contents of their copy of the letter Cobb had discovered in Detroit, as it was passed along to them. They were shaking their heads with a kind of sorrowful disbelief, but they all looked up at the critical question.
She did not hesitate to reply, “I do. I wrote this in the afternoon of November first, and my maid posted it later in the day.”
The spectators, who did not yet know the tenor of the missive, leaned forward in anxious expectation. What could it be?
“Out of deference to you and your position in Toronto society, ma’am, I shall not ask you to read all or even part of the letter. But would it be fair to say that this is inarguably a love letter written by you to ‘My Dearest C’?”
The galleries and benches gasped and wanted to buzz, but not so much as they needed to hear the lady’s response.
“It is wholly a declaration of love, sir. And it was posted to Caleb Coltrane in Detroit.”
Justice Robinson was swinging his gavel even before the onlookers got started. Marc was baffled. Surely this admission of authorship and Coltrane’s later use of the letter were potent facts in establishing a motive for her husband to kill his wife’s lover. Was she naive or merely addicted to truth telling?
“And according to the affidavit of Mr. Edwards, this billet-doux was recovered from a secret drawer in one of Mr. Coltrane’s silver snuff boxes in Detroit, the letter and snuff box having been sent there by your husband the morning after the major’s death.”
Kingsley Thornton looked ready to spring, but something in Almeda’s face and posture gave him pause.
“Caleb was a great one for secrets and codes,” Almeda said.
“I shall return to those facts shortly, but right now I’m interested in obtaining your response to your husband’s testimony on Saturday, which my learned colleague alluded to a few minutes ago. At that time he told the court that he had received at least three letters from Coltrane in September and October, in which Coltrane attempted to extort money from your husband-using an alleged adulterous affair between you and him. He also testified that he came to you immediately and was so reassured by your response that he ignored the threats and did not pay the blackmail. Did you, ma’am, deliberately deceive your husband?”
“Milord, this is outrageous!”
“I’m exploring motive for an alternative version of the crime, milord.”
“Proceed.”
“Well, Mrs. Stanhope?”
“I did no such thing, because I was not romantically involved with Caleb Coltrane.”
This lie was uttered with amazing conviction, Marc thought. What was the woman up to?
“Do you wish me to read your own words into the record?” Dougherty said, raising his rumble a notch and glancing at the letter before her.
“I can explain, sir. When I stayed with my cousin and best friend, Gladys Dobbs, last May in Detroit, her brother Caleb joined us. He did make an attempt to renew a passion we had shared over twenty years ago. We went for a few walks to revisit the haunts of our childhood and told each other stories about our lives lived apart. When I got home, I wrote Gladys a long letter expressing the genuine joy I felt during my three-day visit. I waxed lyrical, overly lyrical as it turned out, about my feelings of friendship for her brother. It was this careless but entirely innocent paragraph that Caleb must have used to try and extort money from Gideon. My husband showed me a copy of my words taken from that letter, and the twisted interpretation put upon them. I was hurt, of course, but I also knew that Caleb was an idealist, obsessed with liberating the oppressed of the world.”
“Your testimony, then, is that you and your husband together agreed to ignore the blackmail threat?”
“Yes. But Caleb kept it up, sending more letters and upsetting my husband at a time of great worry. His business was not doing well and he was preparing to go off to another battle. So, two days before departure for the west, he came to me with a bold plan to silence Caleb once and for all.”
“Which was?”
“I would write an unambiguous and exaggerated love note to Caleb. But I would deliberately write it so that my script wobbled and slanted. It would look enough like my own hand to fool Caleb, but eccentric enough to suggest a poor forgery. Also, Gladys had given me a present of some beautiful vellum paper from New York. The ruse was that I would write an obvious forgery on paper that could be shown to be foreign-certainly not the usual paper we use. I signed it ‘D’ for my childhood nickname, Duchess. I thought it a risky scheme, but Gideon insisted on it, hoping Caleb would make the phony letter public so he could unmask his treachery. He even offered to compose the letter.”
“Are you telling us that these romantic effusions were concocted by your husband?”
“He wrote them out, and I then copied them onto Gladys’s paper word for word, while he watched me.”
“Did the ruse work?”
“We never found out. Gideon left two days later, and within a month the two men were shooting at each other in Baby’s orchard.”
Whatever else the Stanhopes had fabricated in this amazing tale, Marc thought, the letter itself had been written on expensive vellum paper, possibly from New York.
“Yet Mr. Coltrane kept this letter on his person and managed to bring it with him to his prison chamber in Chepstow, where he hid it in the secret drawer of one of his many snuff boxes. Are you suggesting that Coltrane used a bogus document, composed by your own husband, to gain favourable treatment whilst incarcerated?”
“I am saying, sir, that such a letter was not used in that way. As a blackmail threat, it was useless. Caleb may have kept it, thinking he could produce it as a last desperate measure to save himself. If so, he was deluded. And in the event, he did not live long enough to deploy it.”
Game, set, and match. Marc sighed.
Thornton, who knew when it was best to keep mum, did so. Almeda Stanhope was excused and walked past the jury with her head held high to sit beside her daughter in the gallery.
The rest of the morning was taken up with the Crown’s final witnesses. Knowing the value of leaving the jury with critical facts and phrases ringing in their collective ear, Thornton called both sentries who had followed Cobb into the duelling scene, and of course each was seduced into repeating the exact phraseology of Billy’s death threat. They were succeeded by Stanhope’s upstairs maid, who, with a modest prompt or two, was led to confess that, just before fainting, she did see Billy McNair tumble into the coats and thrash about, after which he tried to sprint out the front door.