Nicholas Woodfin was courtesy itself to the state’s witness, but he stood perhaps a shade farther from her than he had from the old woodsman Jack Collis, and something in his expression conveyed the faintest distaste for the lady before him, as if he found her anger vulgar. “You were related to Charles Silver, I believe you said?”
She nodded.
“And no doubt you were quite attached to your handsome kinsman.” Something silky in his tone conjured up images of laughing adolescents chasing each other through blackberry patches and stealing kisses beneath a thicket of laurel. One could almost see young Nancy Wilson’s ardor turn to bitterness when Charlie’s roving eye fell upon the pale loveliness of little Frances Stewart. But Nicholas Woodfin said none of this in plain words, and what had not been spoken could not be denied.
Nancy Wilson looked away from the lawyer’s mask of respectful attention. “He was a good boy,” she said. “Too good forher. She was nobody.”
“And had you ever quarreled with Frankie Silver?”
The witness hesitated. “Not to sayquarreled, ” she said at last. “Frankie Stewart thought a deal too much of herself, that’s all.”
“Was she hardworking?”
“And didn’t she let everybody know it, too? As if we’d feel sorry for her.”
“Was she a good mother?”
An impatient sigh. “She was tolerable.”
“And she was a faithful wife?”
A long pause. “I never heard different.”
Unlike Charlie.The unspoken words hung in the air, suggested only by a clever lawyer’s knowing smile. Nicholas Woodfin let the silence echo long enough to get inside everybody’s head, and then he dismissed the witness with a casual wave, indicating that he had no more use for her than Charlie ever did.
Had they been lovers? This dark, proud woman and the handsome, careless Silver boy? Perhaps, perhaps not. We would never know. Mr. Woodfin had no interest in letting us know. It was the seed of doubt he had meant to plant, and he was satisfied that he had done so to his client’s advantage. Still, I thought, the fact that Nancy Wilson had a metaphorical ax to grind did not mean that Frankie Silver had not used one in a more literal sense.
One of our own Morganton physicians, Dr. William Caldwell Tate, was the last witness before the recess. He is an affable young man, only just graduated from the South Carolina Medical College in Charleston, and back in Morganton to practice medicine alongside his older brother, Dr. Samuel Tate, who is not the Sam Tate that had served as foreman of the grand jury last week. The two Sam Tates are first cousins, and to the eternal vexation of future genealogists, no doubt, one Sam has married the sister of the other. (Anyone who can keep Morganton bloodlines straight can do square roots in his head.) Of young Dr. William Tate, suffice it to say: his mother was an Erwin.
In the cheerful, impersonal tone of all his kind (as ifhe did not have a skull, or brains to leak out, or a life that would be all too brief), Tate commented on the injuries as they were reported to him by Constable Baker. The young doctor had been chosen to make that arduous two-day journey over the mountains to examine the corpse because the more established physicians could not have been spared from the care of their own patients in the vicinity of Morganton. “We cannot neglect the living in order to see to the dead,” his brother had once remarked in another court case.
After establishing Dr. William Tate’s identity and medical qualifications, Mr. Alexander said, “Constable Baker described the nature of the injuries sustained by the victim, did he not?”
“He did, sir. I was able to examine the remains for myself, and my opinion tallied with that of the constable.”
“How were the remains found?”
“Some, of course, were burnt, and of those I was able to examine only fragments, but the others had been buried in the snow or concealed about logs in that frozen wilderness, and those parts were tolerably well preserved. The skin had been blanched and shriveled from the cold, but there was no decay or invasion by insects.”
I looked at once at my sister-in-law Miss Mary, hoping to see her swooning in the arms of her cousin, but she was as alert and attentive as if a quadrille were being performed. I put it down to a want of imagination on her part, for I felt that the room had suddenly become unseasonably warm.
The doctor continued, “I have taken the liberty of producing a sketch of the placement of various wounds.” He drew a sheet of paper out of his coat pocket and handed it to the attorney, who examined it and passed it on to the judge, to Mr. Woodfin, to the jury, and lastly to myself. Dr. Tate had sketched the head and limbs unconnected to a torso, and he had labeled each part with the size and nature of the wound. Many of his notations read:Sawing marks, made post-mortem. It was not those wounds that concerned us.
“Were you able to determine the cause of death, Doctor?”
“Any of a number of strong blows with an ax would have served to dispatch the victim, but the one I judge most likely to have done so was a head wound-a gash of several inches’ width along the right side of the skull. That blow would have so incapacitated a man that he would be unable to defend himself.”
William Alexander considered the matter. “One quick blow to the head-probably delivered without warning-and poor Charles Silver is helpless before his murderer. Would it require great strength to strike a man thus with an ax?”
“Well, sir, a child could not have done it,” said Dr. Tate, “but nearly any able-bodied adult could have managed it. It would take more force than cracking an egg, but less than chopping kindling.”
“Would a woman be able to manage it?”
“Oh, easily, I should think. Especially if she was accustomed to doing farmwork.”
The prosecutor smiled. “Thank you, Doctor.”
The courtroom was a hive of murmurings for a few moments thereafter, and I distinctly heard one man say, “I knew she done it!” before Judge Donnell scolded them into silence.
Nicholas Woodfin took his time approaching the witness. “Dr. Tate,” he said slowly, “I know that you have stated that it is physically possible for a woman to have struck this fatal blow. Let me ask you to consider another aspect of that possibility. Have you ever, in all your training and experience, heard or read of a woman killing someone with an ax?”
The physician seemed to be staring straight at me, but I knew that he was not seeing, merely searching the memory behind his eyes for some tale of a murderess. “Poison is a woman’s weapon,” he muttered at last.
“Yes. Poison,” said Nicholas Woodfin. “The ladies don’t like untidiness, do they?”
“Not generally, no. But if you were angry or desperate, and you had the weapon to hand…”
“But-let me repeat-you know of no caseever in which a woman dispatched anyone with an ax. Is that correct?”
“I can’t call one to mind. No.”
“Such a thing would be unheard of then, in your experience?”
“Well, Charlotte Corday killed Marat in his bath with a knife. Of course, she was French.”
When the laughter subsided, the attorney said, “Mademoiselle Corday was not a young girl of eighteen, either, was she? She was a political fanatic killing a stranger, was she not?”
“I suppose so.”
“Hardly a parallel to this case, would you say, sir?”
“Perhaps not.”
“Doctor, if someone had come in and told you that a young man’s head had been split open with an ax, and his body parts strewn about the yard, would you have told the sheriff to look for a slight young woman of eighteen-working alone?” He sounded the last two words louder than the rest, and I heard answering gasps from the spectators.