The Beautiful Cigar Girl Read online

  Significantly, there was room for three in the magic prison-house: “I, and my cousin, and her mother.” Whatever else may have attracted Poe to his cousin, he embraced the fact that his marriage to Virginia had forged a deeper bond with Aunt Maria. Having successfully transferred the Baltimore household to Richmond, Poe declared himself confident of a bright future: “My health is better than for years past, my mind is fully occupied, my pecuniary difficulties have vanished, I have a fair prospect of future success—in a word, all is right.”

  It would not remain so for long. Despite his happiness at home, Poe developed feelings of resentment toward the Messenger and its editor, Thomas White. Although Poe’s efforts had helped to increase the magazine’s readership sevenfold, and brought a profit in excess of ten thousand dollars, Poe continued to be paid what he considered a “contemptible” wage. Poe would later complain that “my best energies were wasted in the service of an illiterate and vulgar, although well-meaning man, who had neither the capacity to appreciate my labors, nor the will to reward them.” Despondent, Poe once again found solace in alcohol, drawing a series of rebukes from White. “Mr. Poe was a fine gentleman when he was sober,” observed a clerk at the Messenger. “But when he was drinking he was about one of the most disagreeable men I have ever met.” In January of 1837, Poe and the Southern Literary Messenger parted ways, with White declaring, “I am as sick of his writings as I am of him.”

  Whatever the justice of Poe’s grievances, his failure at the Messenger was largely his own doing, establishing a pattern he would repeat again and again throughout his career. As his literary talent flowered, so too did his genius for self-destruction, with the result that nearly every triumph was immediately nullified by an alcoholic binge or other reckless behavior. Having struggled so earnestly to win the position in Richmond and succeed in his duties, he chafed against the creative restrictions placed upon him. His resentment grew when he found himself “debased and degraded” by having to ask White repeatedly for more money, as he so often had done with his foster father. “Men of genius ought not to apply for my aid,” Allan had once told him. The remark had been intended as a jibe, but Poe sincerely believed a talent such as his ought to be placed above such things. He knew that Thomas White had profited handsomely through their relationship; it galled him that he could barely feed himself or his family.

  With nothing to hold him in Richmond, Poe gathered up his household and moved to New York in February of 1837, drawn by the same economic forces that had also brought Mary Rogers and her mother to the city that year. For both Poe and the cigar girl, like the thousands of others who flowed into the city that year, New York held out the promise of a bright new beginning.

  PART TWO

  The Unpleasantness at Sybil’s Cave

  “…and when I came to my senses, I found she was dead.”

  A woodcut illustration from A Confession of the Awful and Bloody Transactions in the Life of Charles Wallace, a fictional account of the Mary Rogers case published in 1851.

  Courtesy of American Antiquarian Society

  Really—really, the newspapers are becoming the only efficient police, the only efficient judges that we have.

  —James Gordon Bennett, the New York Herald, August 9, 1841

  The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

  —Edgar Allan Poe, marginalia

  V

  A Person of Chastity

  BY THE SUMMER OF 1841, according to an editorial in New York’s Daily Graphic, the “infernal crowding and overbuilding” of lower Manhattan had reached a crisis. Any further construction, the newspaper warned, must be rejected for fear that Wall Street and its environs might “literally sink beneath the crushing weight of new arrivals.” Indeed, only a few years earlier, a pair of enterprising hucksters had caused a sensation with a scheme to sever the “afflicted area of the city” by means of a giant crosscut saw. In this manner, it was supposed, the offending section would be transformed into a free-floating, heavily populated raft, which could then be rowed out between Governors and Ellis islands by means of enormous wooden oars attached at the east- and west-side gunwales. Once downstream, the floating city would be turned end-for-end and safely reattached to the mainland, effectively redistributing its weight.

  Although this ambitious plan never came to fruition, it reflected a growing fear that New York would soon burst at the seams. By 1841, the population of the city stood at just over 300,000, having swelled from 123,000 over the course of only twenty years. In hot weather, residents complained, the conditions were fast becoming intolerable. “The heat of a New York crowd is stultifying,” wrote one newsman in the summer of 1841. “Together with the funk of teeming humanity and free-roaming animals, it forms a wet, suffocating blanket.”

  “Warm weather!” wrote Charles Dickens, making his first visit to the city the following year. “The sun strikes upon our heads at this open window, as though its rays were concentrated through a burning-glass.…Was there ever such a sunny street as this Broadway! The pavement stones are polished with the tread of feet until they shine again; the red bricks of the houses might be yet in the dry, hot kilns; and the roofs of those omnibuses look as though, if water were poured on them, they would hiss and smoke and smell like half-quenched fires.” The scant “refreshment from the heat” Dickens found lay “in the sight of the great blocks of clean ice which are being carried into shops and bar-rooms; and the pineapples and water-melons profusely displayed for sale.”

  For many others, refreshment from the heat could be found across the river in New Jersey, a short steamboat ride across the Hudson from the Barclay Street launch. There, on a poplar-lined strip of the Hoboken shore known as Elysian Fields, courting couples strolled arm in arm along winding pathways, while children darted among the trees and threw pebbles at straw targets. As the afternoons wore on, the ladies raised their parasols against the hot sun, and the men fetched cooling water from the open pavilion at Sybil’s Cave, on a rocky outcropping known as Castle Point, where a natural spring bubbled up within a chamber of hewn rock. It formed “a beautiful promontory,” according to one visitor, and a perfect place in which to “lave the parched lip of youth.” Local officials liked to claim “healthful, restorative properties” for the waters drawn from the spring at Sybil’s Cave, and frequently likened it to the fountain of youth. For those whose tastes ran to something stronger, ales and whiskeys could be had in the taproom at nearby Mansion House, a local hostelry, or farther afield at roadhouses such as Nick Moore’s Tavern, up the River Walk in Weehawken.

  The idyllic setting also provided a venue for entertainments of various sorts. P. T. Barnum staged an ambitious “Grand Buffalo Hunt” in June of 1843, complete with a lasso-twirling horseman sporting Indian war paint. The event was free, and a staggering 24,000 people crossed from New York to see the spectacle—with half of the steamboat profits going to the canny Barnum. “Unfortunately for the seekers after excitement,” wrote one spectator, “the sedative qualities of Hoboken’s atmosphere produced such an effect on the ‘wild untamable’ animals that they refused utterly to be disturbed in their meditations, and the only real hunt that took place at the time was that for sufficient refreshment with which to regale the famished multitude.”

  The tranquil atmosphere proved better suited to a popular new game called “town ball,” or baseball. In 1846, Elysian Fields would host the first “official” baseball game, which offered a great deal of action, if not much competition, as the New York Nine gave the rival Knickerbockers a 23–1 drubbing.

  Baseball and buffalo hunts aside, Elysian Fields offered the “heated and tired inhabitants of the metropolis” with a place to “enjoy the pleasures and health-bearing breezes of the Country,” noted the New York Tribune, “without purchasing them at the dear rate of sweating over country roads.” For many, the lush greenery offered sanctuary of a different sort: “All the unfortunate beings that crowd a large city seem to go to Hobok
en to get rid of their sorrows,” offered the Herald. “The beauty of its groves—the picturesqueness of its cliffs and creeks—the deep mystery of its wild woods seem to charm all unfortunates to find their solace there.”

  Such was the case on Wednesday, July 28, 1841, when New Yorkers awoke yet again to scorching heat, with the temperature threatening to break 90 degrees for the tenth consecutive day. By midafternoon Elysian Fields was swarming with refugees from the city. One young stock clerk, driven from his office by the stifling conditions, recalled an atmosphere of “snappish enervation,” as though the heat had now taken the form of “an unwanted houseguest.”

  Henry Mallin, a young vocalist and music instructor, debarked at the Hoboken ferry landing shortly after three P.M. With him were two friends, James Boulard and H. G. Luther, and perhaps one or two others. Together the group strolled north along the river toward the pavilion at Sybil’s Cave. “The walk is beautiful,” noted one visitor. “On the left are the steep marble cliffs, bare in most places, and overhung with deep green trees of the forest. On the right, the waves of the Hudson, rippling up the shore with a gentle murmur.”

  As the group neared Sybil’s Cave, Mallin and Boulard spotted a strange object floating in the river. It appeared, as they later testified, to be “a body floating between two tides, two or three hundred yards from shore.” Rushing to a nearby boathouse, they jumped into a wooden scull and rowed out from shore. As they drew near, there came “an evil shock”: The body proved to be that of a young woman, hideously bruised and waterlogged, floating on her back with her arms crossed stiffly at her chest, and a cloud of dark hair pulsing like seaweed in the water.

  Reluctant to touch the corpse, Mallin and Boulard snatched up a wooden plank from the bottom of the boat and attempted to use it as a hook to tow the body back to shore. After several attempts they managed only to strike a series of flailing blows, tearing at the white fabric of the dead woman’s dress. Tossing the plank aside, they managed at last to fix a length of rope under the corpse’s chin. The two men then rowed back to shore, trailing the body behind the boat. Unwilling to risk contact with the rotting flesh, they declined to drag their cargo out of the water. Instead they fastened their towrope to a heavy boulder and anchored the body to shore, so it would not float back out into the river. This done, the pair spent several moments watching the battered corpse bob up and down at the end of its tether. After half an hour or so, Mallin and Boulard decided that there was nothing more to be done. Leaving the body anchored to the boulder, they rejoined their friends and wandered off along the water’s edge.

  During this time, a large crowd had gathered along the shoreline. With the departure of Mallin and Boulard, a pair of stouthearted bystanders screwed up their courage and waded into the water to pull the body onto land. A reporter from the Herald happened to be on the scene as the young woman was dragged ashore. “The first look we had of her was most ghastly,” he wrote. “Her forehead and face appeared to have been battered and butchered to a mummy. Her features were scarcely visible, so much violence had been done to her. On her head she wore a bonnet—light gloves on her hands, with the long watery fingers peering out—her dress was torn in various portions—her shoes were on her feet—and altogether she presented the most awful spectacle that the eye could see.”

  On shore, the body suffered further indignities as a long line of morbidly curious bystanders filed past. Some of them prodded the corpse with their feet while others poked at it with sticks. One “rude youth” went so far as to reach down and lift one of the legs, offering “unfeeling remarks” to his companions.

  At this moment, Alfred Crommelin and Archibald Padley, the two former tenants of the Rogers boardinghouse, were making their way up the River Walk. As they hurried north, a small boy ran past in the opposite direction, shouting the news that a girl’s body had been brought ashore at Castle Point. Wordlessly, Crommelin and Padley changed direction and hurried to the spot. As they approached the outcropping and saw the knot of bystanders huddled around the sodden corpse, Crommelin felt his throat constrict. As he pushed his way to the water’s edge, the crowd parted to let him through, sensing the urgency of his manner. As Crommelin’s eyes ran the length of the body, he felt a combination of revulsion and dread. Kneeling beside the corpse, he took the extraordinary step of ripping open the sleeve of the dead woman’s dress. For a moment he rubbed the discolored skin of the bare arm, then gently lowered it, apparently having satisfied himself on some final point of identification. “Dear God!” he cried. “This is Mary Rogers! Oh, God—the news may kill her mother!” Ashen-faced, he crouched protectively over the body until the crowd dispersed.

  Dr. Richard H. Cook, the New Jersey coroner, was the first official on the scene, arriving within an hour of the discovery of the body. Cook was accompanied by two jurors, in anticipation of a coroner’s inquest. According to New Jersey law, however, it was necessary that a justice of the peace take charge of the investigation. It soon emerged that the nearest available candidate, the Honorable Gilbert Merritt, was several miles away in Secaucus. While a messenger summoned Justice Merritt, Dr. Cook fretted over the corpse. The excessive July heat was causing the remains to “consume themselves” at a greatly accelerated rate. If an autopsy was not performed soon, Cook feared, there would be nothing left to examine.

  Indeed, according to one bystander who saw the body coming ashore, it was difficult to imagine that the “ruined figure” bore any relation to the beautiful young woman from Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium. After three days in the water, followed by several hours in the hot sun, the body appeared to Dr. Cook to be “nightmarish in its injuries,” and he watched in despair as the dead woman’s features putrefied before his eyes. So horrible were the ravages of exposure that Alfred Crommelin had identifed her not so much by her battered face as by her clothing and by the delicate shape of her feet. Crommelin’s seemingly strange action of tearing open the dead woman’s sleeve had allowed him to recognize a distinctive pattern of hair on her arm, confirming his identification.

  At last, shortly after 7:00 in the evening, Gilbert Merritt arrived on the scene. After receiving a terse report from Dr. Cook, the justice of the peace ordered that the body be removed to a nearby building. There, while Merritt began assembling witnesses for an inquest, Dr. Cook began his autopsy.

  Cook’s first concern was to establish the cause of death. Justice Gilbert had assumed on arrival that the young victim had fallen off a boat and drowned, but Cook had reason to doubt the conclusion. The doctor had previously examined some sixteen or seventeen drowning victims, and the case before him differed from the earlier instances in several key respects. “The face when I examined it was suffused with blood—bruised blood,” he later testified. “There was frothy blood still issuing from the mouth, but no foam, which issues from the mouth of persons who die by drowning. Her face was swollen, the veins were highly distended. If she had been drowned there would not have been those particular appearances that I found in the veins.” To confirm his findings, Cook used a scalpel to make an incision along one of the veins in the arm. “The blood was so much coagulated,” he noted, “that it was with difficulty I could get it to follow the lancet at all. If she had been drowned the discoloration would have been in the cellular tissue and not in the veins.” Furthermore, the position of the arms was inconsistent with death by drowning. Both arms were found bent over the chest, and remained so on the examining table—so rigid that considerable force had been required to straighten them. In drowning cases, Cook noted, the arms were invariably extended.

  Further conclusions were made difficult by the appalling condition of the face—the skin had now turned a purplish black—but Cook was able to make out signs of bruising along the neck. He discovered a deep bruise about the size and shape of a man’s thumb on the right side of the neck, near the jugular vein, and several smaller bruises on the left side resembling the shape of a man’s fingers. These marks, Cook stated, “led me to believe she had bee
n throttled and partially choked by a man’s hand.”

  As he made to examine the marks more closely, Cook’s fingers brushed up against a small mass behind the left ear. “This for some time escaped my attention,” he later admitted. “I observed a crease round the neck [and] passing my hand behind her ear, I accidentally felt a small knot; and found that a piece of lace…was tied so tightly round her neck as to have been hidden from sight in the flesh of the neck; this was tied in a hard knot under the left ear.” Now, only one conclusion was possible: Mary Rogers had been strangled to death.

  As he undressed the body, Cook made a further discovery: The lace cord used to strangle Mary Rogers had been torn from the trimming of her underskirt. This finding, coupled with the thumb and finger marks around her neck, led the coroner to conclude that Mary Rogers had, in essence, been strangled twice. First, he reasoned, the attacker had grabbed her by the throat with one hand, choking off her air until she lost consciousness. Then, as she lay senseless, the attacker tore a strip of fabric from her skirts and pulled it “fast round her neck”—so tightly that the thin cord sank deep into the flesh—insuring that she would never regain consciousness.

  Having found the victim’s undergarments in disarray, Cook’s examination now turned to matters of “so delicate a nature,” as the Herald would report, that they could not be fully reported in the columns of a respectable newspaper. The coroner’s fears were quickly confirmed: A cluster of bruises and abrasions in the “feminine region” forced him to conclude that Mary Rogers had been “abducted, brutally violated by no fewer than three assailants, and finally murdered.”