Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [19]
Dr. Gordon, who had a wife and daughters in New Bedford, allayed Sylvia’s neediness and fear of loneliness by spending most of his time at her side. During one stretch of thirteen weeks while Sylvia was at Round Hill, Dr. Gordon remained at the farm around the clock.
There is little doubt that Dr. Gordon provided a great comfort to Aunt Sylvia. “I have heard her say that he had done everything for her comfort, and that she could never think of having another physician,” Eliza Brown, the night nurse, later recalled. The doctor designed special pillows to ease the pain in her twisted spine. He built a special sedan chair in which she could be carried around the house. He designed a bedstead with a spring lounge, so that Sylvia could be raised or lowered into bed without being lifted manually. He closely monitored her diet, and prescribed a regular regimen of swimming to ease her pain. As their relationship intensified, Sylvia began seeking his advice on other matters—including her finances. All the while, he was administering laudanum, a powerful and widely prescribed medicine of the time, whose principal ingredient was opium.
Dr. Gordon always claimed that any advice he gave to Sylvia came at her request. There is undoubtedly truth to this assertion. But it is also clear that Sylvia was susceptible to the influences of stronger people, even under the best of circumstances. In this case, the stronger individual was a physician offering relief from her pain and comfort from her fears, and also prescribing pain-deadening medicine. Whatever the underlying nature of the relationship, Hetty clearly had a new rival, and this time it was not a maid or servant. Hetty seethed from a couple of hundred miles away as Dr. Gordon became an ever-larger part of Sylvia’s life.
Among Dr. Gordon’s nonmedical acts on behalf of Sylvia was to write a letter to Hetty in New York advising her that she was not to visit Aunt Sylvia. No copy of the letter remains—it survives only in the memory and testimony of Electa Montague. However justified the mandate may have seemed to Electa, Fally Brownell, and others, Hetty could interpret such a letter only one way—as the act of an interloper and gold digger seeking to put distance between Aunt Sylvia and her one rightful heir.
And Sylvia’s estate was growing larger and more attractive every day. Sylvia may have disliked her brother-in-law, but she had prospered mightily under Robinson’s financial direction of Isaac Howland Jr. and Company, as well as his decision to get out before the whaling industry collapsed. For doing little besides signing the occasional form or financial statement, Sylvia saw her stake in the company rise from $244,000 in 1846 to $1.4 million by the time Edward began to shut the business down. Her other investments, handled by Thomas Mandell, prospered as well, from $77,000 in value in 1846 to $508,000 in 1863. On top of that, Sylvia owned real estate with a combined value of $75,000, bringing her total worth to a little over $2 million, at a time when her night nurse was happy to take home a dollar each morning.
On a September evening, a year and nine months after Sylvia had signed the will leaving everything to Hetty, Sylvia prepared to sign yet another will, undoing in one stroke of the pen all of Hetty’s schemes. The location this time was Round Hill instead of New Bedford, and Hetty was nowhere to be found, but the scene carried the same Gothic drama as the earlier signing. Sylvia was now much feebler than before. At 9 P.M., as she lay in her bed, Thomas Dawes Eliot, a prominent New Bedford attorney,