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.