“I object to the question on the threshold of the subject,” Robinson said. “If there be any statement of substance, we will consider that subsequently.”
“The witness may step down,” Mason said. “The jury may retire with the officers and remain until sent for.”
It was very hot for so early in June.
The shuttered windows on one side of the small courtroom were open wide to the street below, but there was scarcely a breeze and the glare beyond the glass panels seemed as bright as the burnished brass of the four gas-burning chandeliers that hung from the ceiling. The courtroom was situated on the second and uppermost floor of the old brick building that was New Bedford’s Superior Court House, a structure graced with a roofed white porch and Corinthian columns but nonetheless eclipsed by the more pretentious residential dwellings in this remote section of the city. Outside the Court House, heavy strands of cable and telegraph wires had been strung from tall poles into the rear of the building and the old carriage sheds. Roughly improvised fences, constructed to keep back the curious crowds, lined the green sloping banks on either side of the concrete walk leading to the entrance.
This was the only courtroom in the building, and it was approached by a stairway leading upward from the ground level. The stairwell created an awkward opening in the courtroom floor, and the haphazard design was further cluttered by the witness box and the jury box to the left of the judges’ high bench, the spectators’ slat-backed wooden benches tiered at the back, the long tables and stools arranged near the court crier’s box, and the hasty accommodations erected for the use of reporters. For several days now the newspaper representatives had been here in force, and each train still added to their swelling number.
Originally, a space in the courtroom beside the jury box had been set apart for them, and boards on sawhorses were set up as makeshift desks. But these could accommodate only twenty-five people and the space was promptly monopolized by the Bristol County and Boston papers. Yesterday, just before the prosecution began its opening statement to the jury, seats and desks were set up near the dock occupied by Lizzie and her attorneys. These were awarded to the reporters of the Providence Journal. The reporters from the New York dailies and the Baltimore Sun — and this pleased Lizzie because the description of her in the Sun still rankled — were left to take their chances finding places among the spectators, who had all been furnished tickets for their seats. Even before what properly might have been considered the first true day of the trial — when the jurors were being selected — the advance corps of newspaper artists had been on the spot, sitting on fences in the vicinity of the Court House, sketching everything immovable and even curious passersby. Lizzie had seen them roving around inside the House of Correction, and they were inside the courtroom now, drawing the interior of the place, making sketches of anyone and anything in sight.
On the day following the selection of jurors, she had been pleased to read an account in the Providence Journal that described her somewhat more flatteringly than had that in the Sun. She had, of course, been cautioned by her attorneys not to read any of the news stories written about the trial, lest they overly upset her and cause her to appear unlike her true self in the courtroom, where all eyes were upon her, and where the artists’ pencils scratched interminably at their pads. It was far easier to avoid the stories printed in the New York Times and the Baltimore Sun — and, oh, how she wished she had — but those in the Journal were available daily here in New Bedford.
“Lizzie Borden is still a marvel,” the article had begun.
How many lines have been written descriptive of the immobility of her countenance, how many word portraits have been painted of her steady and unfailing nerve, of her remarkable self-possession, of her power of control and self-reliance. Yet at each apparent crisis in her career, the watchers have waited for an evidence of weakness, they have looked for a sign of what — for want of a better name — may be termed ‘femininity’, they have waited for the first sight of nerve failure. And all in vain, for though these seekers are told that in the seclusion of her own forced retreat, when there is no one to gaze upon her every action, the woman is the same as other women: this person of the unflinching nerve and steadfast demeanor becomes the torn and tortured girl. Yet there is no weakening in public, and the curiosity mongers are still unsatisfied. And this, after all, is as it should be, for why should Lizzie Borden expose to the world her sorrow and her pain?
Her face expressionless now, she watched as Moody approached the judges’ bench to argue this question of the admissibility of Anna Borden’s testimony.
From where George Dexter Robinson sat at the defense table, attorney Jennings on his left, attorney Adams on his right, he had an unobstructed view of the bench as opposing counsel approached it.
“Your Honors,” Moody said, “the evidence which we offer is substantially this. That upon the return voyage, after this witness and the prisoner had spent the summer in various parts of Europe in travel, there was this conversation which I am about to state, which was several times repeated. It was, in substance, that she — the prisoner — regretted the necessity of returning home after she had had such a happy summer, because the home that she was about to return to was such an unhappy home.
“This conversation, as I say, was repeated several times, and we submit that it would be competent. I should agree that if at that time there had been any characterization of Mr. and Mrs. Borden such as might come from a passing feeling of resentment, that the distance of time of the conversation would be such as in Your Honors’ discretion would well warrant, if not compel, the exclusion of the testimony offered. But there is no language that can be stronger than the language used to express a permanent condition of things in that household.”
William H. Moody was a good lawyer, and Robinson still regretted the day the district attorney had asked him to join in the prosecution. Together, Knowlton and Moody would be a formidable pair. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, Moody wore a mustache under his prominent nose and was a stocky, muscular, rather short man, the descendant of a Welsh ironworker who’d settled here in the colonies with his wife and son. A cum laude graduate of Harvard College, he’d been admitted to the bar in 1878, and early on in his career — or so courthouse rumor maintained — had formulated the rule that had since governed his practice of the law: “The power of clear statement is the greatest power at the bar.”
As yet Robinson had seen no evidence of this guiding precept; yesterday Moody’s opening statement for the government had been turgid at best, nor had his just begun argument on Anna Borden’s now disputed and pending testimony been anything but convoluted. Somewhere in his notes Robinson had jotted down the words, “Moody fond of horseback riding and literature.” His task now was to make certain Moody did not ride roughshod over the three judges, however unliterary his argument might be.
“The word home means a great deal in everybody’s mind and everybody’s mouth,” Moody said, “and I submit that where a person states that he has an unhappy home, states it deliberately, states it more than once, it expresses such a continued and existing state of feeling that it is competent, even though it occurred two years before the homicide into which we are inquiring. This is a case not of the expression of feeling toward persons who are brought casually together, but it is the expression of a feeling by one member of a family in respect to the whole family. And continuously a member, because — according to this testimony — there was no absence except this absence in Europe.