Baby in the Woodpile

THE BIZARRE SISTERS (371 pp.)--Jay and Audrey Walz-- Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($3.50).

Crafty, silver-tongued old Patrick ("Give me liberty") Henry wanted no part in the Randolph case. By 1793, he was in ill health and on the verge of retirement from his law practice. But when desperate Richard Randolph, accused with his sister-in-law of murdering her newborn baby, doubled the fee, Lawyer Henry could not resist. He fitted on his brown wig, and hurried over to Cumberland Courthouse to appear as chief counsel for the defense.

The Randolph case had just about everything a grade A murder trial needed. Handsome young Richard Randolph was a member of one of Virginia's first families, and for months before the alleged crime, people had been whispering that he was having an affair with his wife's 17-year-old sister Nancy, who lived with them. This much was clear: one night while the Randolphs and Nancy were visiting relatives, Nancy roused the household with "the unmistakable animal scream of a woman in labor." She swore she was only suffering from colic; but a week later, after the Randolphs had gone back home to their own plantation, the body of a newborn baby was found in the woodpile.

Diaries & Scandals. Gossip plagued Richard until in self-defense he demanded a trial. His contention: there had been no baby, therefore there was no murder. By the time able Defense Attorney Patrick Henry got through with the state's witnesses, the jury was ready to believe that it must have been colic after all. Richard and Nancy were acquitted, but their trials & tribulations at the hands of Richard's vengeful wife were just beginning.

New York Times Reporter Jay Walz and wife Audrey (a successful writer of whodunits who signs herself Francis Bonnamy) thumbed their way through several dusty archives full of old diaries, memoirs and letters to piece together their fictional account of one of the young republic's juiciest scandals. The real story, the Walzes conclude, was that a baby was born to Nancy that night, all right, but born dead, and that Richard disposed of it to save the family honor. In court, sullen Mrs. Randolph screened the deed with lies, waited till she got the erring lovers back home before she declared martial law in the family and assigned little sister Nancy to the most ignoble servant tasks.

Fiction & Fact. Three years later, Richard asked for a divorce to marry Nancy. Mrs. Randolph prescribed for him a fatal dose of tartar emetic instead, and Nancy was kept at her menial work. She was a lot better off the day the self-widowed Mrs. Randolph tired of torturing her and chased her out of the house to earn her own living. Nancy did better than that: she went North, met courtly, wealthy old Gouverneur Morris, and married him--fictionally and in fact.

The Bizarre Sisters offers up popular fiction's oldest standby: the lowly Cinderella who suffers endlessly at the hands of cruel relatives until in the last pages her pumpkin changes to a coach and the prince proposes. The Authors Walz play it for plot, and their plot ripples its muscles admirably. Yet to be convinced that the Randolphs really lived, readers will need more than a note that "except for one supernumerary, no character in this book is imaginary." All blacks and whites, Sisters moves along like a lively shadow play in which no grey shadings ever intrude to slow up the action with a third dimension.

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