Page 25 of The Girl from Greenwich Street

And here I observe, before I enter upon the evidence on either side, that it is not my intention to give even a detail of all the different testimonies. Many of them appeared to have no sort of connection with the point in question.

—An Impartial Account of the Trial of Mr. Levi Weeks for the Supposed Murder of Miss Julianna Elmore Sands, by James Hardie, A.M.

New York City

March 31, 1800

A surge of elation rushed through Alexander.

First Ring’s attempt to interfere with his wife’s testimony and now this—what further proof did they need that Ring was guilty?

Colden quickly jumped in, trying to direct attention back to Levi. “Did you not tell the prisoner at the bar you believed him guilty? How did he appear?”

Ring hastily followed his lead. “I did, and he appeared white as ashes and trembled all over like a leaf.”

Instead of going back to the question of what Ring and Croucher had to fear from Levi, Burr asked, “What was the character of the prisoner previous to this, and how was he liked in the family?”

Alexander frowned at him. They were losing the advantage he’d won. They needed to push forward against Ring, not fall back on Levi’s character.

“His character was very good, for anything I know,”

said Ring sullenly. “His behavior was such that he was generally esteemed.”

Alexander pressed forward. “Were not you the friend and protector of Elma?”

Ring’s eyes darted to the bench where his wife sat. “Yes.”

“Did you ever speak to her about her improper intimacy with Levi?”

“I never did,”

Ring said reluctantly.

Because it had never existed. It had been Ring with Elma in Hatfield’s room, not Levi. Alexander opened his mouth, prepared to say just that, but there was Burr again, cutting in with irrelevancies.

“On the night of the twenty-second, did you hear any whispering in the entry or anybody come downstairs?”

Ring looked from Burr to Alexander, clearly suspecting a trick. “I did not, for I set in the corner and was not attentive to these things.”

“Thank you, Mr. Ring,”

said Burr. “The defense has no further questions.”

“What do you mean, no further questions?”

Alexander hissed, as Mr. Ring stepped down, amid a flurry of whispers and speculation. “He was unsettled—we could have got him to admit to his intimacy with Elma! Or more!”

“Would you place all your wares in the shopwindow?”

“Yes, if they’re there to be sold!”

They might not get such a good chance at Ring again. Opportunity was seldom a lengthy visitor, as Alexander knew all too well.

“Then you cheapen yourself and them.”

Burr abandoned the mercantile metaphor, saying briefly, “We must keep to the point, not be distracted by irrelevancies.”

The point. Did he mean the shaky argument of suicide? It was absurd. Why have ammunition if one wasn’t to use it?

“You, sir,”

murmured Alexander, “are too subtle for me.”

Burr bowed, as if Alexander had just paid him a compliment.

Alexander hadn’t missed the way Burr had used the hearsay argument to frame himself as the arbiter of law for the new nation, setting the pattern for the future. Burr talking about not letting expedience bend to justice struck Alexander as ironic in the extreme. This was the same man who had claimed the law was anything boldly asserted and plausibly maintained.

“Did you not observe a very particular kind of attention in the prisoner, to Elma?”

While Alexander was distracted, Colden had called Margaret Clark to the stand.

“I can’t say I did. I can’t say there was anything looked like courting her.”

Peggy Clark wasn’t a Quaker. Her dress was a brightly patterned calico. Her hat sported a broad bow, beneath which bobbed carefully contrived curls. “After I returned, he and she appeared more intimate together, which I suppose was from their having been together while I was in the country.”

Poor Colden looked utterly nonplussed. Alexander wondered why he hadn’t confirmed what his witness meant to say before he called her to the stand.

“Did you ever know of their being locked up together?”

Colden asked hopefully.

“I knew once of their being locked up together in the bedroom—afterwards Levi told me they were in the bedroom together,”

Margaret Clark added cheerfully, robbing the statement of any value for Colden. “That was the Monday evening before she was missing. Another time, I saw him standing in her room when she was sick, but I thought nothing of it because he was always attentive to anyone who was sick.”

Colden was looking rather sick himself. “Pray, how long did you live in the house, do you suppose?”

“I might have been absent about half the time,”

she admitted.

Burr asked smoothly, “Did not Levi pay as much attention to Hope Sands as he did to Elma?”

Margaret Clark didn’t pause for a moment. “Yes, I think he did, and more too.”

There was a rustling as people turned to look at Hope Sands, who was sitting very straight on her bench.

“Thank you, Miss Clark,”

said Mr. Colden in a strangled voice. “If I might call Mr. Richard Croucher to the stand. . . .”

Alexander watched intently as a tall, thin man rose from the benches. He was dressed with continental care, his cravat tied in an intricate arrangement, his waistcoat of floral brocade. His hair was dark, his features thin and angular. He was not a particularly handsome man—one might go so far as to call him ill-favored—but his clothes and bearing gave him a certain air.

This, then, was the mysterious Mr. Croucher who had been so busy about town spreading rumors of the guilt of Levi Weeks—the man whom Levi had caught embracing Elma the week before she died. The man who might implicate Elias Ring as her murderer, if pressed the right way.

Mr. Croucher bowed to the judges in their robes, as if they were meeting at an assembly, and not a trial for murder. “May it please the court and gentlemen of the jury, I was a lodger but not a boarder in Mrs. Ring’s house. I remained at the house all the time of Mrs. Ring’s absence and paid particular attention to the behavior of the prisoner and the deceased, and I was satisfied from what I saw, there was a warm courtship going on.”

“When you say a warm courtship, Mr. Croucher . . .”

Mr. Croucher shook his head, as though it pained him to proceed. “I have known the prisoner at the bar to be with the deceased Elma Sands, in private frequently and all times of night. I knew him to pass two whole nights in her bedroom.”

This was more to the taste of the crowd. The people who had begun to slump in their benches sat up straighter.

Mr. Croucher leaned forward, drawing the whole room into his confidence. “Once, lying in my bed, which stood in the middle of the room and in a posture which was favorable to see who passed the door, and which I assumed on purpose—I had some curiosity—I saw the prisoner at the bar come out of her room and pass the door in his shirt only, to his own room. Once, too, at a time when they were less cautious than usual, I saw them in a very intimate situation.”

“Seducer!”

someone shouted at Levi. “Murderer!”

Alexander thought he saw a hint of a smile play about Mr. Croucher’s lips before it was hastily replaced with an expression of carefully cultivated sorrow.

“Did you ever tell anyone of this?”

asked Mr. Colden.

“I never took notice of it to anyone.”

It was not, Mr. Croucher’s manner seemed to imply, the occupation of a gentleman to inquire into the affairs of another.

“Thank you,”

said Mr. Colden. “If the defense has any questions?”

“Pray, what countryman are you?”

inquired Burr.

Mr. Croucher drew himself up. “An Englishman. I have been in this country since January 1799.”

Alexander wasn’t going to let Burr waste any more time on irrelevancies. “Where, sir, were you on the night of the twenty-second of December 1799?”

“I supped that night at Mrs. Ashmore’s—but that’s not her real name.”

Mr. Croucher allowed himself a slight smirk. “It is 884 Bowery Lane. It was the birthday of her son. She has had a good deal of my money, and I thought I would go and sup with her.”

“Did you go anywhere else that evening?”

Mr. Croucher gave an elegant shrug. “I crossed twice or three times from Greenwich Street to Broadway and was once at the Coffee House. I went out to the Bowery and returned to Mrs. Ring’s.”

A busy man, Mr. Croucher. A busy man and a strangely precise one. “What time did you return home that night?”

“It was my agreement with Mrs. Ring to be home at ten o’clock of nights, but on this occasion I stayed out until eleven or half past eleven.”

“Do you know where the Manhattan Well is?”

“I do.”

Suddenly, Mr. Croucher was a great deal less talkative.

“Did you pass by it that evening?”

“I did not—I wish I had.”

Mr. Croucher arranged his sharp features into an expression of wistful regret. “I might, perhaps, have saved the life of the deceased.”

He was lying; Alexander was sure of it. He would stake his reputation that Mr. Croucher had passed by the well that night. “Have you not said you did?”

Something flickered behind Mr. Croucher’s eyes. “No. I might have said I wished I had.”

“Have you ever had a quarrel with the prisoner at the bar?”

“I bear him no malice,”

Mr. Croucher said guardedly.

“But have you ever had any words with him?”

“Once I had—the reason was this, if you wish me to tell it—”

Croucher paused. Alexander had no doubt he was contriving his story as he spoke. “Going hastily upstairs, I suddenly came upon Elma, who stood at the door. She cried, ‘Ah!’ and fainted away.”

There was a hooting from some of the men standing at the back.

“I wish pretty women fainted at my feet!”

“You think he’s so ugly he made her swoon?”

Mr. Croucher waited until the general hilarity abated. “On hearing this, the prisoner came down from his room and said it was not the first time I had insulted her. I told him he was an impertinent puppy. Afterwards, being sensible of his error, he begged my pardon.”

In the box, Levi was shaking his head furiously, looking like it cost him all his power not to burst into speech.

“And you say you bear him no ill will?”

inquired Burr.

“I bear him no malice, but I despise any man who does not behave in character,”

said Mr. Croucher with dignity.

Character. That was the crux of it all, wasn’t it? The character of Elma. The character of Levi. The character of the man standing before them in the witness box.

“How near the Manhattan Well do you think you passed that night?”

Alexander asked.

Mr. Croucher gave it some thought. “I believe I might have passed the glue manufactory.”

The glue manufactory was out of his way, on the opposite side of the well. There was no reason for Mr. Croucher to have passed anywhere near the glue manufactory. “Do you not know what route you took?”

“I do not.”

Croucher ought to have stopped there, but his unease betrayed itself in a flood of words. “I cannot certainly say, I might have passed by one route or another. I go sometimes by the road, sometimes across the field.”

“Was it dark?”

“I believe there was a little moonlight. The going was very bad.”

That much Alexander believed to be true. It would have been dark and cold. It wasn’t far from 884 Bowery Lane to the Manhattan Well. Far closer than the Rings’ boardinghouse or even Ezra Weeks’s lumber yard. But the paths would have been rutted and pocked with frozen mud and uneven turf.

A strange route for a man to choose to take home on an icy, cold night.

Except that Croucher hadn’t gone home. Not until far later.

The discrepancy struck Alexander. Why would Croucher have been passing the well at the crucial time? It made no sense for him to have left Mrs. Ashmore’s, crossed to the well, and gone back again. Unless he had gone to Mrs. Ashmore’s later than he claimed? Or unless he was at the well by appointment. As Ring’s accomplice?

Colden took advantage of Alexander’s distraction to bring everyone’s attention back to Levi’s guilt. “Have you ever heard any noise in the room of the prisoner at an uncommon time of night, since this affair happened?”

“Yes, sir, I have.”

Mr. Croucher seized on the change of subject with alacrity. “The night the deceased was missing and the next night and every succeeding night while he stayed in the house, I heard him up whenever I waked at all times from eleven o’clock at night until four in the morning, and a continual noise, almost. I thought then his brother had some great work on hand and that he was drawing plans, but since I have accounted for it in a different way.”

He looked meaningfully at the jury. It was pure melodrama, thought Alexander—but effective nonetheless. It was a potent image, the murderer, driven by an unquiet conscience, pacing the floor night after night, tormented by guilt.

“Mr. Croucher,”

said Alexander, raising his voice so it could be heard in all corners of the room, “were you ever upon any other than friendly terms with Elma?”

“After I offended the prisoner at the bar, who she thought was an Adonis, I never spoke to her again.”

“Thank you, Mr. Croucher.”

Burr stepped up, dismissing the witness, cutting off Alexander’s line of inquiry.

“I had more questions for him,”

murmured Alexander, keeping a pleasant expression on his face for the sake of the jury. “You overstep yourself, sir.”

“And you,”

said Burr, smiling as if they were exchanging pleasantries, “are overplaying your hand—our hand. You might wager wildly on your own account, but not on mine.”

“This isn’t a wager. It’s a man’s life.”

“How good of you to recall that. If we spend less time on wild theories and more time on defending him, he might emerge with his neck intact,”

said Burr pleasantly. “Shall we?”