Page 20 of The Girl from Greenwich Street

On Friday last, Croucher came running into the store and said, “What do you think of this innocent young man now? There is material evidence against him from the Jerseys, and he is taken by the High Sheriff, sir, and carried to jail; he will be carried from there, sir, to the court and be tried; from there he will be carried back to jail, and from thence to court again, sir, and from thence to the place of execution, and there be hanged by the neck until he is dead.”

—From the testimony of David Forrest at the trial of Levi Weeks

New York City

March 28, 1800

“She lost the baby.”

Levi slumped in a chair in the room the governor of the Bridewell had so kindly allowed Alexander for his conference with his client.

Unlike the last time Alexander had visited him in the Bridewell, Levi was clean-shaven and neatly dressed. He’d only just been brought back to prison, having been taken before the grand jury and indicted on a charge of having with force and arms assaulted Gulielma Sands, and feloniously, willfully, and of his malice aforethought, cast, thrown, and pushed the said Gulielma Sands into a certain well, and there choked, suffocated, and drowned the said Gulielma Sands.

In case that weren’t enough, a second count had been added, accusing Levi of having cast and thrown the said Gulielma Sands upon the ground, beating, striking, and kicking her, with mortal strokes, wounds, and bruises, in and upon the head, breast, back, belly, sides, and other parts of the body.

That, Alexander thought, was overreach. The medical evidence didn’t support a charge of battery. Strangulation, possibly. But the bruising on the rest of her body had been such as might have been caused by immersion in the water, not a brutal beating.

Levi had sat through the litany of horrors like a man in a nightmare. He’d scarcely seemed to hear the words, so engrossed was he in his own private terrors.

When prodded, Levi had said, “Not guilty,”

but the statement had lacked conviction.

“The baby?”

These were the first words Levi had spoken of his own accord since he had been fetched from his brother’s house, and Alexander had no idea what he was talking about.

“Elizabeth.”

Levi looked at him with red-rimmed eyes. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in a week. “Elizabeth lost the baby.”

It took Alexander a moment to remember Ezra Weeks’s heavily pregnant wife, now pregnant no longer.

It was, he thought, a very good thing they had taken her deposition when they had.

Now that Levi had spoken, the words flooded out in a deluge of grief. “The doctors despair of her life. Mary Ann keeps asking for her mother. I don’t know what to tell her. None of us know what to tell her. Ezra sits by Elizabeth’s side hour after hour, never sure if the next breath will be the last.”

That hit Alexander in the gut. Six years ago, Eliza had nearly died of a miscarriage. Alexander had been away from home, in the wilds of Pennsylvania, leading troops against the insurgents who had taken up arms against the whiskey tax; it had been left to others to visit Eliza and send him word. He’d rushed back as soon as he’d heard; he’d immediately resigned his post at the Treasury. But it still haunted him, the thought that his Eliza might have perished while he was elsewhere.

“Childbirth is a dangerous thing for women,”

Alexander said soberly.

Levi shook his head wildly. “I brought this on them. If it weren’t for me, Elizabeth would never have lost the baby. It was the strain—that was what they said—the strain of the charges against me—”

He gulped for air, his face contorting into gargoyle shapes.

“I never meant to hurt anyone. Oh God, Elma—and now Elizabeth—”

Alexander patted his hand. “With good care and God’s grace, she’ll see this through and there will be other children.”

“Unless she dies.”

Levi refused to be comforted.

“It will worry them more if they hang you,”

Alexander pointed out. “The best thing you can do for your family now is prove your innocence in a court of law.”

Levi gave a short, bitter laugh. “What hope is there for me? They’re all in league against me. That Croucher has been spreading stories that there’s evidence against me come from the Jerseys—”

“Why from the Jerseys? Have you connections there?”

“No! My family is from Massachusetts!”

The insinuation that he might be from the Jerseys seemed to distress Levi as much as his own impending execution.

“He and Elias Ring—they’ve been stirring everyone up against me. Ring has been telling everyone he’ll shoot me on sight.”

Levi shoved his hands into his hair, making it stick out wildly around his face. “I was a prisoner long before they brought me back here. Ezra forbade me to leave the yard for fear someone would take justice into his own hands. They say I touched Elma’s corpse when they found her and her drowned face wept tears of blood.”

The sign of a murderer.

“What did I do to bring this on myself—on my family? What did I do more than any other man has done?”

Levi demanded hysterically. “All I did was talk to a pretty girl. . . .”

“What about Ring?”

Alexander demanded, breaking into Levi’s lament. “From all accounts, he did far more than talk to her. You were there in the house with them this autumn. Did you know?”

Levi stared at him like a startled rabbit, frozen in a field.

Alexander looked at him with exasperation. “Why didn’t you tell me of Ring and Elma? The basis of the prosecution’s case—the center of all the rumors against you—is that you seduced an innocent girl with promise of marriage. If the world knew that Elma was sharing her favors with Ring . . .”

“I didn’t want to shame Elma,”

Levi muttered.

“Elma is beyond shaming,”

said Alexander gently. “You, however . . . You’re not beyond saving. If not for your own sake, for your family.”

Levi dropped his face into his hands. “She asked me to keep her secret for her.”

“Would she wish you to keep it at the expense of your own neck?”

“I know. I know. I’ve been a fool. If I said it now, who would believe me? He’s a Quaker. And he’s made the world believe that Elma had eyes for no one but me. When she never wanted me at all,”

he added resentfully. “Not like that.”

“What was it like?”

“I thought it was such luck when I found that there were three pretty girls at the Ring house,”

Levi said bitterly. “Not for dishonor. Just for . . .”

He waved his hands helplessly.

“I know. I was young once.”

Alexander could remember being a young lieutenant colonel in General Washington’s household, overwhelmed with his choice of beautiful women at the Morristown assemblies. “A bit of flirtation adds spice to the supper table.”

Levi nodded. “There were the three of them, all so different. Peggy was a game girl and she had tongue enough for two sets of teeth, but there was nothing in it. Hope, now—”

His lips tightened over whatever he had meant to say. “And then there was Elma. We went to Mr. Baker’s museum once, Elma, Hope, and I. Elma had a way of walking, as if she owned the cobbles beneath her feet.”

Looking at him, Alexander thought it was a good thing that defendants weren’t allowed to speak in their own cause. Anyone seeing the expression on his face would have no doubt that the young man had been hopelessly smitten with Elma Sands.

“Somehow, we got to talking about the building, and the style of it, with those arches and the cupola sticking up out of the middle of the roof. I’d thoughts on it—and Elma had too. I drew a sketch for her, of how I’d have built it, if it were mine to make.”

Levi’s throat worked. “My brother—he’s all for my being part of the family trade; he’s worked hard to train me in it—but as a builder, not an architect. He treats my designs as one step away from writing poetry, a dilettante’s game. But Elma, she would look at my designs with me. She’d suggest improvements too.”

“She had an interest in architecture?”

Alexander knew he sounded skeptical, but it seemed unlikely the girl from the countryside had been studying Vitruvius. On the other hand, he was a boy from an island in the middle of the Caribbean Sea.

“She liked fine things. No, that sounds wrong. What I meant was, she had an eye for line and form. They set her to making hats, and she was good at it, or so they tell me,”

he added, with masculine indifference to haberdashery. “If she’d been a man, she might have been an artist. She’d taught herself, she told me. Her family didn’t hold with such things. They didn’t hold with a lot of things—including Elma.”

“Because she was a bastard.”

Levi nodded. “Mrs. Ring never let her forget it. She’d make comments about Elma dressing too gay, and how she ought to be grateful for their kindness. She was always at her to come to meeting, but Elma insisted she wouldn’t profane their presence by forced attendance without a true conversion.”

Alexander was beginning to get a sense of this Elma, a forceful young lady with a somewhat dangerous sense of humor. A talented, restless girl, constrained by her birth, unable, as a man might—as he had—to break out of her circumstances.

“When did you first know of Elma and Ring?”

Levi grimaced. “When the others went away during the fever. . . . It was hard not to notice what was going on. Isaac Hatfield had taken the room below mine, but he was away more than not, and while he was gone—they used his room. I don’t know. Maybe Ring didn’t want to take her in his wife’s bed. Maybe the bed was better. It was right below me, and the floors aren’t thick.”

“Did you say anything to Ring—or to Elma?”

“I didn’t know what to say! It was ruin for her, anyone could see that. Mrs. Ring disliked her enough already; she made no secret of it, for all she thought she did. I’ve three sisters of my own,”

he added abruptly. “Mercy, Sally, and Kate. I thought, what would I do if it were one of them? So I found Elma in the kitchen when Ring was out of the house and told her I’d heard them.”

“What did she say?”

“She asked if I meant to tell of them. I told her no, of course not, but had she thought of what she was doing.”

Levi bit his lip. “She said it was no matter, Caty—that’s what she called her cousin—Caty was gone to the country and liked it there better anyway, and their marriage was only a marriage in the eyes of the meeting, and if he were to leave the meeting, he’d be free to marry again.”

Alexander knew little enough of Quaker marriage vows, but he didn’t think that sounded particularly likely, and said so.

Levi made a helpless gesture. “I’m not sure what he promised her and what—what she imagined. Men will say things when they—you know.”

“I know,”

said Alexander grimly.

“Sometimes she’d talk of their going away, to Charleston, where her father was. Ring said they didn’t appreciate him in New York, so Elma had this idea they’d go elsewhere, start over somewhere where no one knew them.”

“It must have been a shock to her when Mrs. Ring came home.”

“It was like seeing a ghost, all the life knocked out of her. I got her to agree to visit friends in the country. I took her down to the docks myself, to make sure she wouldn’t change her mind. I thought that would be the end of it—maybe that she’d even decide to stay on in the country. I didn’t know what to do other than getting her away as quickly as I could.”

“Why you?”

“She didn’t have anyone else,”

said Levi simply.

“When Elma came back, what happened then? Did she and Mr. Ring resume their intimacies?”

“No. I don’t know what he’d said to her before Mrs. Ring came back, but whatever it was—it wasn’t kind. If she saw him coming, she’d leave the room.”

Levi frowned. “I don’t think he even knew about the baby.”

There were times when Alexander had trouble following Levi’s line of thought. “According to the autopsy, there was no baby.”

“Not by then there wasn’t. Mrs. Ring—I think Mrs. Ring gave her something. Or maybe she would have lost the baby anyway.”

Levi rubbed his hands along his arms, as though he’d felt a chill. “I was afraid to leave her alone. I didn’t trust Mrs. Ring with her. It sounds mad, doesn’t it? But I was afraid of what Mrs. Ring might do.”

Alexander could feel the hairs prickling on his arms beneath his layers of linen and wool. A baby—now, that was a motive for murder. For Elias Ring—or for Catherine. “Did she know it was her husband’s child?”

“I don’t know,”

said Levi helplessly. “I’ve never seen so much blood. I wanted to send for the doctor—I begged Mrs. Ring to send for the doctor—but she wouldn’t let me. I think she would have been just as happy for Elma to die along with her child.”

There was a difference between failing to provide aid and actively causing harm. Had Mrs. Ring crossed that line? Alexander doubted a jury would believe that the good Quaker housewife had first attempted to poison her cousin, and then, when that failed, pushed her into a well.

And yet . . .

“I couldn’t tell anyone. Not Ezra, not Hope.”

Levi was lost in his memories, long lines carved into his tanned face. “I offered to marry her. She laughed at me and told me not to throw myself away on the likes of her. She said my brother wouldn’t like it and that I deserved better than to be shackled to the village ledger.”

Alexander raised his brows. “She called herself a whore?”

“Only because Ring made her believe herself one, General,”

Levi said earnestly. “What she did, she did because she thought he loved her. You have to understand what it was here, during the sickness. Sometimes it felt like we were the only people left in the world, like Robinson Crusoe on his island.”

“There were cannibals on Crusoe’s island,”

Alexander said.

“Sometimes it feels like there are cannibals in the Ring house too,”

said Levi bleakly. “They were ready enough to devour Elma, and now they’re trying to tear the flesh from my bones. They’ll do it too.”

“Not if we convince the jury otherwise.”

Alexander was trying to make sense of what Levi had told him, balancing it against what the prosecution would throw at him.

The revelation of Ring’s liaison with Elma would certainly raise doubts in the minds of the jury. Ezra Weeks and John McComb would testify that Levi couldn’t have made it to the well and back in the requisite times. But there were two points still weighing heavily against Levi.

“Why did she say she was going to be married to you?”

“I don’t know. Truly, I don’t! When Hope told me—I thought the earth was opening up underneath me.”

The only people to claim that Elma had gone to be married to Levi were Catherine Ring, whose husband had been sleeping with Elma, and Hope Sands. “Might Mrs. Ring have made it up, to cast the blame on you?”

“Mrs. Ring might have—but Hope wouldn’t. Elma had something in train that night,”

Levi said reluctantly. “You could tell just by looking at her. She’d put on her best dress and she borrowed that muff from Beth Osborn.”

“Mrs. Ring claims that Elma said she was going to meet you at eight—and you came back to the house at eight. Why did you come back at eight?”

“John McComb was at my brother’s house, and I didn’t know how long he’d stay. When he starts to prose on . . .”

Levi caught Alexander’s eye and flushed. “All right. I came back because I was worried about Elma. Since Ring threw her over and she lost the baby—it’s as though she didn’t care what happened to her anymore. I’d tried all day to get her to tell me what she was planning, but all she’d do was tell me that I’d see.”

“Your brother thinks she threw herself in the well.”

“No,”

said Levi immediately. “She was . . . excited. She was happier than I’d seen her for weeks. She’d talked so often about running off to her father in Charleston. But why would she go at night? It made no sense. And I wondered . . .”

He caught himself, his eyes shifting away from Alexander.

“You wondered?”

“Who she was going to meet,”

he said, although Alexander was fairly certain that wasn’t what he had been about to say. “I followed her out. I thought if she wouldn’t tell me . . . But although there was a moon, the light was uncertain and I lost sight of her before she left Greenwich Street. So I went back to my brother’s. When I came back, I asked if she’d come in, and Mrs. Ring told me no, that she’d thought Elma was with me.”

They had better hope that no one had seen Levi follow Elma out—if the boy was telling the truth. Alexander thought he was. That air of bewilderment might be feigned, but if so, he ought to be treading the boards rather than sawing them.

“You have no idea where she went, or who she went to meet?”

Levi shook his head. “She stopped confiding in me after—”

“After?”

Alexander prompted.

Levi hunched his shoulders. “It’s no matter.”

“You have just been indicted on a charge of murder,”

Alexander said with some asperity. “Don’t you think it’s time you told me the truth? We would be much farther forward if you’d told me all this two months ago. Why did Elma stop confiding in you?”

Levi pressed his eyes shut. “Elma stopped confiding in me after I came upon her embracing Croucher.”