Page 2 of The Girl from Greenwich Street

On Thursday last was found in a well dug by the Manhattan Company, on the north side of the Collect (but which afterwards proved useless) the body of Miss G. E. Sands who had been missing from the evening of Sunday the 22nd.

—Greenleaf’s New Daily Advertiser, January 8, 1800

New York City

January 6, 1800

“I heard they found her muff floating in a drain in Bayard’s Lane.”

“No—not a drain. The Manhattan Well.”

Greenwich Street heaved with people, shoving, pushing, jostling.

Alexander Hamilton slowed, contemplating this unexpected hindrance. His two clerks had been more than usually slow and doltish this morning, his correspondence more than usually irritating, so he had darted out of his office with the object of buying Eliza a coffee biggin. She’d looked so heavy-eyed at the breakfast table, bouncing baby Betsy in one arm while presiding over the coffeepot with the other. The coffee biggin, Gouverneur Morris assured him, produced a superior, stronger quality of coffee. Whether it did or not, Alexander had no idea, but it would be something to offer Eliza, to take that smudged, hollow look from her eyes.

Soon, he’d promised her. Soon he’d step away from public life. They’d build an idyll in the countryside, near enough to town that they could enjoy the society of their friends and he could lend his aid as needed to his fellow Federalists, consult on the odd legal matter. . . . Soon. But General Washington had entrusted him with the organization of the new army—never mind how President Adams resented it, how he worked to undermine all of Alexander’s plans—and with the general in his grave this past month, Alexander felt more keenly than ever how strongly he needed to press the work forward.

Then there was the petty manner of money. Money, always money. Money for the children’s schooling; money to build their house in the country. Money to be earned from the legal practice that was suffering sorely as Alexander struggled to build an army that he knew was needed, if only the ignoramuses in Philadelphia could just be brought to see it.

Just a bit longer. A bit longer and he’d be able to move Eliza and their brood to the countryside, and live the life of a country squire, going out with his fowling piece to shoot ducks in the morning mist, his Eliza presiding clear-eyed at their own tea table. Soon. Eventually. Someday.

But for now, he could buy her a coffee biggin.

Or so he’d intended. Greenwich Street was impassable with this inexplicable crowd. Unlike the elegant brick homes lining Broadway, the houses here were of wood, ugly, clumsy structures so newly built that Alexander could practically smell the wood shavings and fresh-mixed plaster. It was a tinderbox of a street, but it wasn’t a fire causing this unaccustomed press of people; he would have smelled the smoke before this.

Only a block away, the students of his alma mater, King’s College—now Columbia—rushed to class in their flapping gowns, but this didn’t have the flavor of a student riot; there wasn’t enough Latin being spoken. Besides, the students were enclosed behind the high gates of the college, effectively locking them away from the city around them. When Alexander was in college, there’d been much made of the college’s proximity to the so-called Holy Ground, where pleasure could be found for a price and brawls sometimes broke out between customers and madams, or madams and enraged moralists.

But that was on the other side of the college. This was a street of respectable small tradesmen, running their businesses out of the front rooms of their homes: grocers and tobacconists and, most important, an ironmonger who was reputed to make excellent coffee biggins. Alexander could just make out the wooden sign creaking from one of the awnings, right at what seemed to be the epicenter of the excited crowd.

It seemed unlikely that half the city had experienced a simultaneous desire for a coffee biggin.

“Alexander!”

A hand clapped him on the shoulder, and Alexander looked up into the face of his old friend and colleague Richard Harison, once his partner in law practice, still his partner in politics. “Or should I say Major General?”

“Never among friends.”

Or possibly not at all if that ass Adams had anything to do with it, not to mention Aaron Burr and his Republican rabble, downplaying the threat from France, ignoring the dangers of a Revolutionary regime untrammeled, agitating for the disbandment of Alexander’s army. The United States Army, that was, or would be, if Alexander was given the supplies and support he so desperately needed.

“How goes the business of the army?”

“Busily,”

Alexander quipped.

Even to an ally like Harison, Alexander could never admit the fear that it was all for naught, all his preparations and plans, the punishing pace he had set himself and his clerks. That ass Adams had never wanted the army and he’d certainly never wanted Alexander. Alexander had been forced on him, by the one person with the power to do so. The person who had lain cold and still in his grave these past three weeks. Alexander had marched in General Washington’s funeral procession; he’d listened to Gouverneur Morris deliver the funeral oration; but he still couldn’t quite entirely believe he was gone, that great man who had loved him as his own father never had.

And there was his Eliza with gray in her dark hair, their Philip studying at King’s College—not King’s anymore, but Columbia—and Harison, who had been in his prime when they had begun their practice together just after the war, now heavy-jowled, the new Brutus hairstyle not hiding the fact that his hair was thinning at the temples, and gray now, entirely gray.

How had they come to this? This wasn’t what Alexander had thought his middle age would be, scrabbling after pennies, after favor, after political advancement, surrounded by incompetents and opportunists.

Alexander cleared his throat. “What ruckus is this? Are the apprentices revolting again?”

“The apprentices are always revolting.”

Harison chuckled at his own tired sally. “You must have heard, surely? About the girl. The girl in the well.”

The man in front of him had said something about the Manhattan Well, that misbegotten monstrosity. “Ah,”

said Alexander, as if he knew more than he did. “Are all these people—”

“Here to view the corpse.”

Harison shoved his hands in his waistcoat to warm them. “You haven’t come to gawp at the girl in the well, have you?”

“I haven’t. I came to find a coffee biggin for Eliza. The baby is cutting her teeth,”

Alexander added.

“Did you try brandy—”

“Rubbed on her gums? Or for ourselves?”

“Either.”

Harison grimaced in sympathy.

“Neither had the least effect, I regret to say. Poor Eliza has had no peace. And neither have I.”

“Cherish it. Cherish her.”

Harison’s face drooped like melting candle wax. He was, Alexander knew, thinking of the much younger wife he’d adored, his Fanny, gone two years now, leaving Harison with their four young children. Alexander couldn’t imagine such a future, an existence without Eliza. She was the still center of an ever-moving world. “The time—it goes faster than you know.”

“I’ve promised Eliza to spend more time at home—as time allows.”

“Time—or your ambitions?”

That was the trouble with old friends. They felt comfortable asking awkward questions. “You haven’t come for the girl in the well, have you?”

“I’ve come as an officer of the court,”

Harison said grandly. “And, I admit, out of a certain measure of curiosity. The family’s allowing the public in to see the body—fanning the flames. If I’m to sit on the case, I feel it’s my duty to see what every other man jack in the city will have seen.”

“That’s what they’re all waiting for? To see the girl’s corpse? It’s macabre—barbaric.”

“It’s human nature,”

said Harison equably.

“Of the basest sort.”

“It makes a compelling story,”

said Harison thoughtfully. “Perhaps because it’s such a familiar one. The girl lured . . . seduced . . . discarded. And she’s a Quaker, to boot. You haven’t read of it in the papers?”

Alexander had been avoiding the papers because the papers refused to avoid him. He’d promised Eliza he’d hold his fire, but it was hard when Republican scandal sheets slandered him and his fingers itched to take up his pen and defend himself.

Like last time. And they all knew how that had gone.

Mercifully, Harison was still going on about the girl in the well. “It’s the talk of the town. There are already tales of hauntings. The girl’s tormented soul begging justice, all that sort of nonsense. People half expect to see the sheeted dead squeaking and gibbering in the street. You’d know nothing about that.”

Harison looked pointedly at Alexander, who had gotten in trouble, last year, over a prank involving a supposed ghost.

More fodder for the papers. A man couldn’t arrange a joke with his family without being splattered with ink.

“Have they arrested anyone for the crime?”

Alexander asked abruptly.

“Levi Weeks. He’s a young carpenter who boarded in the same house. They’re saying he got her with child and killed her to keep from marrying her. You’ll have heard of his brother—Ezra. He laid the pipes for the Manhattan Well.”

That well, that blasted well again. Alexander seethed at the thought of it. Burr had hoodwinked him; he’d hoodwinked all of them. And the worst of it? He’d had Alexander fighting for his Manhattan Company, supposedly formed for the purpose of digging that well, among others. A well to bring clean water to the city, to fight the dreaded scourge of yellow fever. What civic-minded soul wouldn’t support that project? Alexander had drafted the proposal, crafted the clauses, sweated ink and effort over it. Not a party matter, Burr had promised him, and offered him seats on the board for Federalists, including one for Alexander’s brother-in-law John Church, proof that this was an undertaking meant to benefit the whole.

Except it wasn’t.

The well was only a ruse. In the last hours before the bill went up for vote, Burr had inserted another clause, one setting up a financial institution. It wasn’t a well he was proposing but a bank, a bank to rival Alexander’s own Bank of the United States.

And he’d done it. With Alexander’s support.

How Burr must have laughed at him in his mansion, Richmond Hill. How all the Republicans must have chortled to see Hamilton throw his support behind a measure designed to unman him.

Alexander burned at the very thought of it, but there was nothing he could do now. The bill to establish the Manhattan Company had passed—thanks to Alexander’s efforts. The Manhattan Company was at this very moment amassing funds and extending credit, a monstrous instrument that pretended to the public good while serving private gain.

For Burr, all for Burr. And the Republican Party.

Harison was still talking. “Young Colden will prosecute, of course. Weeks has retained Brockholst Livingston for his brother’s defense. And Colonel Burr.”

“They’ve hired Burr for the defense?”

How Burr would enjoy that, posturing in the courtroom in his sleek black frock coat.

He’d have Livingston do the work while he took all the credit. It would play directly to his claim to be the champion of the working man, a vivid image for voters to take with them to the polls: Burr using his eloquence to save a lowly carpenter from the gallows.

Unless . . . A germ of an idea began to form. “What evidence is there against the young man?”

“Precious little, as yet. Rumor and hearsay—the sentiment of the street. They’ve been baying for his blood. Someone’s been handing out broadsides, riling them up. The mob’s convinced he did it. They’ll settle for nothing less than his neck in a noose.”

“That’s not justice. That’s lynch law.”

Charles Lynch and the men like him who took it upon themselves to enact vengeance on those they’d condemned without process of law were anathema to everything Alexander stood for. That wasn’t the sort of polity he’d fought for, with the sword and with the pen. “What makes them think it was this young man?”

“The family claim he was walking out with her—they’ve been quite voluble about it.”

“Did anyone else confirm that? Were they seen together? Is there any evidence the girl was with child?”

“You sound as though you’re taking down the points of the case.”

When Alexander didn’t reply, his friend looked at him sharply. “You’re not, are you? Weeks is well defended—”

“By Livingston?”

“He’s a very able lawyer in the criminal sphere.”

“He’ll acquit young Weeks on a technicality and leave his reputation in tatters. In a case such as this, a case that touches on a man’s honor, it isn’t enough to create a doubt; one must leave no doubt.”

As Alexander knew, all too well.

Harison looked sideways at him. “And then there’s Colonel Burr. . . . That’s the matter of it, isn’t it?”

Just thinking of the Manhattan Well made Alexander burn with rage. “You know well enough what his methods are.”

“I know well enough what yours are.”

Harison let out a puff of breath, visible in the cold air. “Didn’t you just tell me yourself you’d promised Mrs. Hamilton not to exert yourself?”

“My Eliza would be the last to prevent me from exerting myself in a matter of justice,”

said Alexander firmly, although when he remembered Eliza as she’d been that morning, exhausted, as close to defeated as he’d ever seen her, he wasn’t quite so sure.

There’d been a piece in the Aurora last week, claiming Alexander had been with his supposed mistress, Maria Reynolds, in Philadelphia. Eliza knew it was nonsense, of course. Alexander was reasonably sure Eliza knew it was nonsense. It was just another Republican dig, another attempt to discredit him, dragging up that old muck, the painful remembrance of his own misjudgment.

A case such as this would provide fodder of quite another kind for the papers. Burr and his Republicans had been making inroads with the lesser sort in the city, the small tradesmen and mechanics. Livingston was an ardent Republican; the two of them defending this Weeks boy would only entrench them as the champion of the little man.

But if Hamilton were joined with them in Levi’s defense . . . well, perhaps that might go some way to getting the Federalists the votes they needed to carry the spring assembly elections.

There was also the matter of the house. Ezra Weeks was one of the most sought-after builders in the city. If one were to build a house, one must have a builder. So it was really for Eliza’s benefit in the end if Alexander were to offer to Weeks to defend his brother.

And there was justice to be served too. It was really quite economical; he could annoy Burr, improve his own standing, benefit his party, thwart the mob, and forward the project of the house in the country, all at the same time.

“Would you have me leave an innocent to the mercy of the mob—and the eloquence of Livingston and Burr?”

“You know best,”

said Harison doubtfully.

“Except when I do not?”

Alexander clapped his old friend on the shoulder, his spirits rising dangerously; he could feel the excitement building, the thrill of a challenge. “You’ll introduce me to Weeks senior? I’ve had it in mind to build a house for Eliza. . . .”

“Oh, it’s about a house, is it?”

“I might just interest myself in his brother’s case.”

Alexander looked seriously at his old friend. “I can’t leave a man to the mob, Richard.”

“Or the glory to Colonel Burr?”

Relenting, Harison took his arm. “Come. We’ll leave these ghouls to their gawking. I’ll take you to Ezra Weeks.”