Hetty (10 page)

George N. Comer, president of Commercial College, a Boston trade school specializing in penmanship, bookkeeping, and similar arts, was called in to provide two important points. One was to show that the signatures could easily have been traced without the use of a pencil, thus deflating the impact of the august
Agassiz and Holmes. The second-page signature appeared to be “written over No. 1 without the intervention of pencil or other tracing, and is consequently more flowing,” Comer said. But he added, “The whole signature bears the evidence to me of having been written over or copied from another, and does not have the character which the genuine signatures have.”

But the defense wasn’t all just obscure penmanship experts. The lawyers for the estate showed that they would bring out the celebrity firepower by producing as witnesses famed Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce and his celebrated son, Charles. An astronomer and mathematician born and raised in Salem, Peirce had spent the first part of his career teaching and writing dry and somewhat unremarkable textbooks, before his landmark A
System of Analytic Mechanics
in 1855 made him a celebrity. He had taken a leading role in establishing the Harvard Observatory, making many notable astronomical discoveries and observations. He had served on the committee drawing a plan for the Smithsonian Institution. For fifteen years he had served as director of longitude determinations for the United States Coast Survey, and in 1867 had just been appointed the Survey’s superintendent. This must have made for interesting office politics for the beleaguered George Mathiot, who had testified at such length for Hetty’s side.

Peirce’s twenty-seven-year-old son, Charles, had followed closely in his father’s footsteps. The elder Peirce had provided much of Charles’s early mathematics education, and, after graduating from Harvard, where his father taught, Charles went to work in 1861 for the Coast Survey, where he would spend the next thirty years. At his father’s direction, Charles Peirce closely examined the three Hetty signatures for improbable similarities that would have been unlikely to occur in the natural course of signing separate documents. The Peirces paid special attention to the downstrokes of the pen, which would have the greatest tendency to vary from signature to signature if written naturally. “The proposed signature must be analyzed into its characteristic lines,” Peirce said. “The safest and surest mode of performing this
analysis is to adopt for the characteristic lines all those which consist wholly or in part of a downward stroke.”

In poring over the signatures, Charles Peirce had found no fewer than thirty identical downstrokes—downstrokes being, as the term implies, the two times in the forming of, say, a “w,” when the pen makes a downward slash. In addition to being a mathematical genius, Benjamin Peirce possessed an eye for the marketable quote, the sound bite in a pre-sound bite age. Sensing that thirty identical pairings of downstrokes might not possess sufficient force to impress the judges and the press, Peirce converted this finding into a mathematical probability that would be repeated in virtually every newspaper account of the trial. “In the case of Sylvia Ann Howland,” he said, “this phenomenon could occur only once in the number of times expressed by the thirtieth power of five, or, more exactly it is once in (2,666) two thousand six hundred and sixty-six millions of millions of millions of times, or 2,666,000,000,000,000,000,000.”

With his flair for drama and language, Peirce added, “This number far transcends human experience. So vast an improbability is practically an impossibility. Such evanescent shadows of probability cannot belong to actual life. They are unimaginably less than those least things the law cares not for.”

It was almost anticlimactic when Peirce introduced another variable making the odds against the signatures being genuine even more remote. This was that the signatures, despite having been written on unlined paper, were all written with each letter on the same level. This would add an additional improbability on the relatively minor and anticlimactic order of one in 200 million.

As if it needed being stated, Benjamin Peirce offered his personal assurance that the signatures were not genuine and that, by implication (though he didn’t say this), Hetty was guilty of forgery. In this matter, he intoned, “I have the utmost degree of confidence.”

FIVE
SELF-IMPOSED EXILE

T
he horde of would-be trustees, heirs, and beneficiaries would have to wait more than a year for Justice Nathan Clifford to hand down his decision. Not surprisingly, the only parties assured of getting substantial chunks of Sylvia’s fortune were the teams of lawyers representing both sides—seven for Hetty; three for the trustees. Hetty’s side had included a former governor, John H. Clifford (no relation to the judge); the trustees’ roster included a former Massachusetts Supreme Court justice, B. F. Thomas. The reams of testimony (covering more than one thousand large pages) gathered from all those scientific experts and celebrities had not simply made for entertaining legal theater. It was also a world-class case of churning on the part of attorneys who, by the time they were finished, had racked up more than $150,000 in fees.

Hetty retreated into the company of the one man who had showed her unstinting loyalty—Edward Henry Green. In the two years since they met, Edward had barely experienced a time of peace, first supporting Hetty through the deaths of her
father and aunt, then being plunged into Hetty’s bizarre world of intrigue, recrimination, scheming, and anger. While he was eager to help Hetty, Edward had put his own reputation on the line by making himself a party to her schemes; and, to the extent that he corroborated portions of Hetty’s fabulous tale of the “second page,” Edward Green quite probably lied under oath.

Hetty and Edward were married on July 11, 1867, more than two years after becoming engaged. The scene of their wedding was, significantly, not New Bedford. The ceremony took place in New York, at the Bond Street home of Henry Grinnell, the relative who had hosted her on her earlier visits to the city. Edward was forty-six; Hetty was thirty-three, well into her spinster years according to the customs of the times, but still a lovely young woman with a fair, clear complexion, blue eyes, and attractive figure.

Among the small wedding party was her maid of honor Annie Leary, a young society woman whom Hetty had met during her earlier stays with the Grinnells. Annie and Hetty were opposites in many respects and this, perhaps, helped explain their attraction. Leary, a Catholic, was one of six children of James Leary, a Manhattan hatter whose business was located at the corner of Broadway and Vesey Streets downtown. Leary made his fortune serving some of the most prominent New Yorkers, among them, John Jacob Astor. Annie reveled in her fortune, and in the power her money gave her, both to enjoy the finer things and to support charitable and civic causes. For her efforts on behalf of Catholic charities, in particular to help the children of poor Catholic immigrants, she would be named a papal countess. She spent much of her adult life in a large limestone house at 1032 Fifth Avenue. Although she never married, Annie was an extrovert, a social creature who loved to throw elegant parties with her home lit up and smart people coming and going throughout the night. She had a fondness for fine objects, with a special appreciation for large, ornate, gilt-edged mirrors. According to one count she had
sixty-eight. Their enduring, lifelong friendship was a remarkable feature of Hetty’s life, given that Hetty has frequently been portrayed as a dour woman to whom friendship meant nothing.

Shortly after their wedding, Mr. and Mrs. Edward Green sailed for England. This was more than just a honeymoon—they planned to live there, temporarily at least. While in Asia, Edward had developed a strong network of business contacts in England. But undoubtedly there were other reasons for the change of scenery. Hetty wanted to put as many miles as she could between herself and her recent past. Much of the testimony at the trial had been humiliating; every unattractive act or personal shortcoming was publicly exploited. New York, it seems, wasn’t far enough from New Bedford—an ocean would provide a more secure distance.

And then there was the looming issue of the trial, still waiting to be decided. This was a civil, not a criminal, trial, and Hetty had been the plaintiff, not the defendant. And yet the tables had turned during the course of the trial; as everyone knew, if the now-infamous “second page” was not genuine, then Hetty was by definition guilty of forgery. If Hetty was a forger, could criminal charges be far behind? Some of Hetty’s opponents had made rumblings about that possibility. Hetty may well have feared that she had finally gone too far. Some people suggested the relocation to England was a means of removing her from the arm of American justice. Hetty rejected any such insinuations as ridiculous. But still, she left.

One of the most persistent stories regarding the marriage is that Edward signed a prenuptial agreement laying no claim on Hetty’s fortune should she die first. It’s impossible today to verify whether such a document ever existed. But during this early phase of the Greens’ married life, Edward was making the choices about where and how they lived and he paid all the bills.

The Greens settled in London in the Langham Hotel, where they indulged Edward’s taste for the good life. The Langham,
among the city’s first grand hotels, was just four years old when the Greens arrived in 1867, but already it was regarded as among London’s best and most fashionable addresses. It was located in Marylebone, in the northwestern portion of the city, along Portland Place. The Langham commanded fine views of Regent’s Park. It had been built for £300,000, with the latest plumbing and fire-resistant technology available. Four large pipes ran the height of the building, delivering water to each floor from tanks containing 50,000 gallons. The hotel boasted of its pure water sucked up from an artesian well sunk 365 feet into the ground. Shortly after the opening, the Langham became the place for visiting celebrities to stay. Guests included everyone from Napoleon III to Mark Twain. Twain wrote to a friend from the hotel in 1873, describing the rooms as “luxuriously ample” with fine views from broad windows out onto one of London’s best neighborhoods.

Marylebone was “the richest and most populous metropolitan parish,” according to
The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland
of 1868. The immediate neighborhood had a rich history. Boswell had lived in the area when he wrote his great biography,
Life of Johnson
, and Edward Gibbon had lived there for a time while completing his masterpiece,
The Decline and Fall of the
Roman
Empire.
Marylebone, according to the
Gazetteer
, “contained some of the finest squares, crescents, and mansions in the metropolis, including Cavendish and Portment-squares, Park-crescent and square, Manchester-square, Portland-place, the finest street in London, 100 feet wide, &c, and is inhabited by many of the first families in the empire, and likewise the Langham Hotel…. The inhabitants are chiefly gentry and trades-people, there being scarcely any manufactures.” It was, in short, just the sort of place Green adored, and just the sort of place for which Hetty liked to profess unbridled contempt.

The Greens lost no time in starting a family. Swathed in fine sheets and with all of the attentive care that the Langham staff could provide, Hetty became a mother on August 22, 1868, a littie
over a year after she had become a wife. It was a boy. The Greens gave him a long name befitting his lineage and honoring both sides of the family: Edward Howland Robinson Green. To distinguish him from his father, the boy would be called Ned. The boy was less than three months old when word came from New England that Judge Clifford had reached a decision in the Aunt Sylvia case. The news couldn’t have surprised Hetty. The trustees had a much stronger case all along. But the decisiveness with which Clifford, on November 14, 1868, rebuked Hetty’s claims left little room for comfort.

The most damaging element of Clifford’s ruling was to exclude all portions of Hetty’s testimony related to the mutual wills she and Sylvia signed. Clifford’s basis for this decision was a Massachusetts law forbidding one member of a mutual will from testifying in his or her own favor, unless the other party was also alive and able to testify. Although the case was heard in a federal court, Clifford cited recent precedent that federal will cases should respect the laws of the state in which they are tried. Because of this ruling, it has been suggested that Clifford, in essence, tossed out the great will case on a mere technicality. In fact, Clifford’s detailed, exhaustive decision went on for some nineteen pages and left little wiggle room for Hetty’s side on any element of the case.

Even if Clifford had admitted (and believed) every word of Hetty’s testimony regarding the mutual wills, it is clear that his decision wouldn’t have changed, because he was deeply unimpressed by the wills themselves. “The two wills under consideration [Sylvia’s January 1862 will and Hetty’s from 1860] are not mutual wills in any proper sense, as recognized in the law of evidence or the decisions of the courts,” Clifford wrote, because they were signed at different times and because Hetty’s will left no money to Aunt Sylvia.