“Do tell us what happened, Burgess,” said my wife Elizabeth, tapping my arm. “You seem quite dazed, my dearest.”
“I am weary,” I said. I took a sip of my tea and withdrew from my reverie. “The trial was most unusual. Instead of a quick session convened to hear the verdict and set the sentence, there was more testimony this morning.”
“Surely that is most irregular.” Miss Mary Erwin was watching me closely, and I hoped she would not ask me what I thought of the day’s events.
“Well,” I said, “it is unusual.” They pressed me for more details, and although I hesitated to discuss such delicate matters with gentlewomen, their demand for the particulars overcame me, and I told them as best I could what had happened today in the courtroom.
“The witnesses changed their stories?” said Miss Mary when I had finished. “But this is monstrous!”
“Surely the testimony was a lie,” said Elizabeth. “They cannot hang the poor girl on the basis of false witness, can they?”
“What did Mr. Woodfin say about their treachery?” Eliza McDowell wanted to know.
I shook my head. “The witnesses claimed that they had reconsidered their testimony, and that upon reflection they had remembered the events more clearly. This may, of course, be true.”
“So they found her guilty,” said Miss Mary Erwin. “I feared that they would. Was judgment passed?”
“Yes. Mr. Donnell pronounced the death sentence. In a case of murder, there is no other remedy. Of course, it may not come to that,” I added hastily, seeing their stricken faces. “I am writing the appeal myself, and I shall take care to stress the change of testimony and the unsequestered witnesses.”
Elizabeth looked around the room triumphantly. “There!” she said. “I told you it would be all right! Burgess will save her!”
Her sisters, undeluded by wifely affection, looked as doubtful as I felt. Juries’ decisions are rarely overturned by the State Supreme Court unless grievous errors have been made in the trial procedure. The Erwin sisters, wives and daughters of attorneys, would know this as well as I when they put sentiment aside, but no one contradicted my loyal wife. We found ourselves talking at cross-purposes in our haste to change the subject.
Miss Mary sat in glowering silence for a good while, and then she said, “We must not forget this poor creature who languishes in the jail. We must visit her.”
I had opened my mouth to protest this outrageous suggestion when my sister-in-law added, “Did our Lord not instruct us to visit those in prison as well as those who are sick?”
Mary Erwin can cite Scripture for her purpose.
The summer passed uneventfully in Morganton. We reveled in the hot weather, cast our woolen clothes aside, and savored the June tomatoes, glad to be released from the confinement of winter. Then, just when we had put the bitter cold and snow out of our minds as if December would never come again, the flies, the choking red dust, and the breathless heat drove us back indoors once more to wait for the cooling winds of autumn.
I did not speak much about the Silver case, for in truth there was nothing to do but wait upon the pleasure of the Supreme Court in Raleigh, but my reticence about the case did not banish it from the thoughts of the ladies.
One breathless afternoon as I sat in the library at Belvidere reading over a packet of new books just arrived from England by way of Wilmington, Miss Mary Erwin appeared in the doorway, clad in a white morning dress trimmed with lace, and carrying a cloth-covered basket, but she looked no less formidable for this maidenly affectation. She is a spinster of six and thirty years, ten more than my wife, her sister Elizabeth. Some of the awful seniority of an elder sibling must have transferred itself to Miss Mary’s attitude toward me, for I always felt like a sweating, lumbering oaf in her presence, and I’ll swear that my tongue grew too big for my mouth at times when I had to speak with her.
I covered my confusion, of course, with bluff heartiness. “Good morning, Miss Mary!” I said gaily. “Are you off on a summer picnic to the wildwood?”
She looked at me as a cat might look at a worm. “No, Mr. Gaither,” she said. “I hope I have better things to do than waste my days in idleness.” She looked pointedly at the illustrated paper that I was reading, and I fought down the urge to stuff it under my coat. “May I trouble you for a few moments of your time?”
Her tone suggested that since I had nothing better to do than to read frivolous tripe, I might at least make myself useful by doing her bidding. I put the paper aside and rose to my feet with a heavy heart. “I am your servant, of course, Miss Mary.”
“Thank you.” She drew on her gloves with an air of brisk authority. “Catherine and I wish to go and see the prisoner, and we would like the escort of a gentleman to town, and to wait for us at the jail. You will suit the purpose admirably. You need not accompany us upstairs to the poor creature’s cell.”
“You wish to see… the prisoner? Mrs. Silver?”
“Certainly.”
“Then I would consider it a privilege as well as my duty to accompany you,” I said, inclining my head to suggest a courteous bow. I had been dreading this gambit for weeks, and now that it had finally come, I felt an odd mixture of apprehension and relief. I wondered what the squire would say about his daughters going to visit a murderess, and whether I should have to shoulder the blame for their excursion. Still, I thought I had better go to keep an eye on them. “Is theother Mrs. Gaither not to be of the party?”
I meant my wife, of course. Miss Mary’s sister Catherine is also Mrs. Gaither, as she is the widow of my late brother Alfred, and so she is doubly my sister-in-law, but my wife was apparently not included in the outing with her older sisters.
“Elizabeth has a dress fitting,” Miss Mary informed me. “She may go at another time. We have promised to report the details of our visit to the rest of the household.”
We sent for the open carriage, as the day was fine, and we trotted along the few miles to Morganton with little conversation passing among us. Catherine is a meek and gentle lady, almost midway between the ages of her sisters Mary and Elizabeth, but after a few remarks about the weather and other inconsequential topics, I find myself with nothing to say to her. I am always afraid that some chance remark of mine will remind her of poor Alfred, and I live in fear that I will induce a flood of tears whose tide I will be powerless to stem. I contented myself with smiling at poor colorless Catherine, swathed in her purple dress of late mourning. I hoped that my resemblance to Alfred would not make her weep, but she seemed to bear the sight of me calmly enough.
As we drew closer to town, I felt that it was necessary to issue a few words of instruction to my sisters-in-law about prison visitation. “Mrs. Silver may not wish to see you at all,” I cautioned them. “And if she does, the jailer will not want you to stay with her long, or to say anything that may upset her.”