Foreign News: Faith and Circumstance

At 19, Nancy Oakes, Countess de Marigny is a dignified married woman, a fabulous heiress and a student at outdoorsy Bennington College. Her husband is in jail, held on suspicion of the murder of her father. Somebody killed Sir Harry Oakes at Westbourne outside Nassau during a tropical thunderstorm on the night of July 7. Nancy is sure it was not her husband, Count Marie Alfred de Fouguereaux de Marigny. “Freddy could not have done this terrible thing,” she has explained over & over. “I know he did not do it. … I am the only person who can help him.”

Since July 12 Chief Magistrate F. E. Field, who doubles as coroner, has been taking longhand testimony in his tiny, packed courtroom in Nassau. Nancy has watched him laboriously fill one sheet of foolscap after another, passing them round for witnesses and lawyers to read. When his writer’s cramp gets too bad, hearings are limited to two hours a day, and Alfred de Marigny fills in the time in his cell, he has told Nancy, composing poems to the mosquitoes.

This week the magistrate plans to wind up the hearing, decide whether Nancy’s husband should go free or be bound over for trial before the Colonial Supreme Court in October.

It distresses Nancy and Defense Attorney Godfrey Higgs that Freddy still refuses to take his plight seriously. Before the bar he lolls, stretches his long legs, traps flies, winks at friends, strokes his shiny Vandyke and spins in his swivel chair. Beyond a formal denial of guilt, he has said nothing.

Three Women. Older people have been skeptical ever since Nancy turned up at the Colony Restaurant in New York one night in May 1942 with thrice-married, 33-year-old Count Alfred de Marigny and announced that they had eloped. Nancy was 18 that week. Her father roared, her mother wept, her set raised their eyebrows. They were remembering De Marigny’s first wife, well-endowed Lucie-Alice Cahen, an Alsatian girl whom he married in Paris in 1937. Four months later they were divorced, and the Count failed to observe the code and return the dowry.

They were thinking, too, of handsome, social Ruth Fahnestock Schermerhorn, who left home and husband later the same year for Reno. She married De Marigny the day her divorce was granted. The De Marignys went to Nassau, where her money and his ingenuity launched them in promising business ventures. When the war came the De Marignys were divorced one day in Miami to evade British wartime monetary restrictions, but continued to share the same post-office box and telephone number in Nassau. It was there that Nancy first saw the Count, first knew he had noticed her. Later he came north on business, paid ardent court and persuaded her to marry him.

None was more astonished by the news than Ruth, who soon sued for the return of $125,000 she claimed she had lent Alfred de Marigny. Nancy knew much of this, but she knew, too, that Freddy was intriguing, mysterious, dashing, and in love with her for herself, not for her money. To prove it, he offered to return the $10,000 Lady Oakes gave them, said he preferred to support his bride himself.

The Rock. Soon after their marriage Nancy and Freddy went to Mexico City. Nancy came down with typhoid and trench mouth. Her parents flew to her side. Freddy came every day to the hospital, twice gave blood for a transfusion.

But there was still strain between Freddy and Sir Harry. Then, in Miami, Nancy told her mother that she was pregnant. On doctors’ advice the pregnancy was terminated: Nancy was too weak. Sir Harry forbade the Count his house. At about that time Sir Harry and Lady Oakes changed their wills. In the spring Nancy left Nassau, enrolled at Bennington.

Sir Harry had planned to go North July 6 but postponed his trip a few days. On the 8th he was found dead, in a twisted position on a charred bed, his head crushed, his body covered with blisters (TIME, July 19).

Said Nancy: “I want the murderer of my father found.” As Magistrate Field’s pen scratched, she had seen a web of circumstance develop around her imperturbable husband.

The Web. Police said the murderer would have singed hairs from the fire. De Marigny submitted to a microscopic examination, was found to have singed hairs on arms, beard and head. He said he got them scalding chickens, lighting hurricane lamps. Police experts testified that a fingerprint identical with De Marigny’s right little finger was found on a screen near Sir Harry’s bed. De Marigny denied having been at Westbourne since March. De Marigny has never recalled what became of the shirt and socks he had on the day of the murder. Police testified that he had said he “hated him [Sir Harry] because he was a stupid old fool who couldn’t be reasoned with.” Sir Harry’s manager, Newell Kelly, testified that De Marigny had threatened to kick his father-in-law.

Against these damaging circumstantial points stood one for De Marigny: Nancy’s faith and the preparations she has made for experts’ aid if the case comes to trial. But as she left the courtroom one day last week, she stumbled blindly on to the court’s back porch, sobbing without restraint. She did not know that the street below was filled with spectators.