The attorney-general, who had come down from London to prosecute this most important case, now arose in his place, took the bill of indictment from the clerk of arraigns, and proceeded to open the case on the part of the Crown.
He commenced by saving that his duty in the present instance was extremely distressing in its nature, but, fortunately, simple in its course; that the case he stood there to prosecute, dark as it was with the deepest guilt, was yet so clearly illumined by the light of evidence, that happily it need not occupy the court long; that whether they considered the tender youth of the criminal, the cold-blooded atrocity of the crime, or the high worth of the victims, this agonizing case had no parallel in the long experience of the oldest barrister living, or the whole history of criminal jurisprudence; that he need not recall to memory the celebrated cases of Borgia, Essex, Brinvilliers, or Lafarge to prove that youth, beauty, womanhood and high rank combined, were not incompatible with deep guilt and dark crimes in their possessors; that he did not mean to draw any comparison between the female fiends he had named and the prisoner at the bar, for he should soon prove Eudora Leaton had succeeded in reaching a much higher point upon the “bad eminence” of criminal fame than had ever been attained by Lafarge, Brinvilliers, Essex, or Borgia.
“The prisoner,” he said, “of Indian parentage, was the only child of the late Honorable Charles Leaton and his wife, Oolah Kalooh, of Lahore, and, doubtless, she must have derived from her mother all those subtle, secretive, and treacherous elements of character for which the East Indian is noted, while she gained from her father all that rare, dangerous, botanical knowledge of the deadly plants of the country, the study of which had once been his favorite pastime, and the acquaintance with which has been recently her most fatal medium of destruction.
“By the death of her parents,” he continued, “she was left an orphan at the early age of sixteen years. Her uncle, the late Lord Leaton, as soon as he received intelligence of her condition, dispatched a special messenger to India to bring her home to his own house. Upon her arrival, he, as well as his whole family, received the orphan with the utmost tenderness, placing her at once upon an equal footing with his own only daughter and sole heiress.”
“But how,” inquired the prosecutor, “has the benevolence, confidence, and affection of this honored family been repaid by their cherished protégée! They have been repaid by the blackest ingratitude, the foulest treachery, the deepest guilt; they have been repaid with death—the insidious, protracted, dreadful death of slow poison—poison administered by her whom they received into the bosom of their family.
“And what,” he asked, “tempted this young, beautiful, and high-born girl to plunge herself into this deep Gehenna of guilt, misery, and infamy?
“The basest motive that could influence human nature-the love of lucre! She knew that, in the event of the death of Lord and Lady Leaton and their daughter, she must be the sole inheritor of the whole Leaton estate; and for this inheritance she has perpetrated crimes unequalled in atrocity by her most notorious predecessors of criminal celebrity.
“She has sacrificed her nearest kindred in this world, and her dearests interests in the next. She has destroyed those who sheltered her. Yes, she whom they received into their homes and hearts, warmed at their household fire, cherished with their bosom’s love, she drugged their daily food and drink with the deadliest poisons, until they wasted, withered, and perished before her, as plants before the breath of the death-blowing sirocco!
“As under the action of this slow poison, one after another sank upon the last couch of illness, she it was who superseded every honest and trustworthy attendant, and with deceitful zeal and deadly purpose, hovered about the bed of death!
“Her hand it was that changed the heated billow, bathed the burning brow, and then placed the poisoned cup to the parched lips that thanked her for the cooling draught, and blessed her for her loving care!