Free Duel with the Devil by Paul Collins Page B

records.
    The external examination would come first. The whiteness of Elma’s skin would highlight any injuries, or at least any visible to the naked eye and to the magnifying glass. The inquest jury, empowered to interrupt and ask questions during the dissection, leaned in and watched with interest.
    Is her neck broken?
one of them asked.
    Dr. McIntosh examined Elma’s head and neck, gingerly handling them for the telltale droop of broken vertebrae.
    It is not
, he replied.
    There was a deeper suspicion, though, that always attended the death of a beautiful young woman—andrumors had been circulating about Miss Sands ever since her body had been found.
    Is she with child?
a juror called out.
    It was the kind of question that haunted the entire field of medical jurisprudence. Criminal forensics scarcely existed yet: Thefirst two books in English on the subject, barely adding up to two hundred generously margined pages, had only just been issued in the past few years. But both were overwhelmingly about infanticide and abortion, a subject that all too often verged into death for the mother as well. “It is murder in fact,” insisted one text, “and often a complicated crime of murder and suicide.”
    Even among those intending no suicide at all, resorting to abortifacients like oil of tansy sometimes led to poisonings; doctors dissecting these perished women duly recorded irritated stomach linings, doughy and flaccid uteruses, and the unmistakable herbal aroma oftansy wafting over the room as the corpses were opened up. Other women, who instead chanced piercing a fetus with a crochet hook, ran even more serious risks from hemorrhage and peritonitis. Medical texts insisted such women could not claim rape as an excuse for having risked the procedure: Pregnancy was seen asa proof of willingness, for a number of doctors persisted inbelieving that a rape could not produce a child. Other jurists and doctors, perhaps wiser in the ways of the world, had long andpointedly disagreed with this notion.
    But whether Miss Sands had kept her virginity, and willingly or not, was not of particular concern to Dr. Prince and Dr. McIntosh. Thesigns of virginity that their texts relied upon had been obliterated by long immersion in water. Yet the presence of a fetus could suggest a clear motive, either for suicide by the mother or murder by the father. It might explain her death away with a single line in the coroner’s rolls. And so Dr. McIntosh carefully sliced into the uterus, opening it to the unsteady light of his laboratory’s lanterns and windows. He was looking for a white and pink pulpy mass inside, a sign of life sometimes scarcely identifiable to the untrained eye. The jury stared intently at the body on the table as the two doctors examined and then puzzled over what they found.
    The mystery of Elma’s death, it seemed, was about to deepen.
    “A report prevailed injurious to her honor,” the new editor of
Greenleaf’s New Daily Advertiser
reported dryly of the autopsy. “For the satisfaction of lovers of virtue it is mentioned that this appeared totally groundless.”
    So there was no fetus. But if seduction was not the reason behind her death, then what was? As prisoners and their keepers alike warmed themselves with rum against another freezing evening, the coroner’s jury solemnly departed from the almshouse. Elma’s family and neighbors at last received the coroner’s assessment.
    “A verdict of WILFUL MURDER ,” one newspaper printed, “by some person or persons as yet unknown.”

T HE WAGON MADE ITS WAY WESTWARD TOWARD G REENWICH Street, the jostle of each rut and cobble passing unnoticed through the lifeless body of its passenger. For anyone who watched it roll by, the body laid out inside was well-known indeed—and the identity of her killer was no mystery at all.
    HORRID MURDER ! announced one paper, BY HANDS OF A LOVER !
    The story ricocheted across the city, and then beyond the mere bounds of the island in