Page 26 of The Girl from Greenwich Street

He is a grave, silent, strange sort of animal, inasmuch that we know not what to make of him.

—Aaron Burr on Aaron Burr

New York City

March 31, 1800

In his zeal to have the glory of finding Elma Sands’s murderer, Hamilton was going to see Levi Weeks hanged, and jeopardize Aaron’s fee in the process.

Ezra Weeks was not looking pleased. He looked even less pleased as Colden called the next witness to the stand: Levi’s apprentice, William Anderson.

“Did you notice your master pay particular attention to Elma?”

asked Colden, who apparently proceeded under the principle that if he asked the same question often enough he might eventually get the answer he wanted.

“I never saw anything to make me suppose that my master was more particular in his attentions to Elma than to the other two, Margaret and Hope.”

Young William looked appealingly at Levi, like a puppy hoping his master might pet him. “One day my master said to me, ‘You must not think it strange of my keeping Elma’s company. It is not for courtship nor dishonor, but only for conversation.’”

That statement was met with the derision it deserved. Everyone, thought Aaron grimly, was now entirely convinced that Levi had been carrying on a torrid affair with Elma. If they hadn’t believed it before, that comment about conversation had clinched it.

“Did you ever know your master to be in private with Elma? You are under oath,”

Colden reminded the boy when he hesitated.

Young William looked from Colden to Levi and back again. “One night I pretended to be asleep, and the prisoner undressed himself and came with the candle and looked to see if I was asleep or not. Supposing I was, he went downstairs in his shirt and didn’t come back till morning.”

“Did your master always sleep with you?”

“Yes,”

the boy said quickly.

“How did he rest the night after Elma was missing, and the next?”

“He slept as well as usual the night Elma was missing, and Monday and Tuesday nights, but on Wednesday night, near day, he sighed out in his sleep, ‘Oh! Elma!’”

“Was Elma of a lively and cheerful disposition?”

“Yes, she was that.”

William Anderson caught sight of Ezra Weeks’s scowl and ducked his head. “But less so the day before she was missing.”

The boy stepped down, his future employment in jeopardy if the look on the senior Weeks’s face was anything to go by. Aaron hoped the boy had talent with his tools, because he didn’t with his tongue. He’d done more to condemn his master than anyone else so far.

This was not going well.

Yes, they’d succeeded in excluding Mrs. Ring’s evidence about Elma’s intentions; Mr. Ring had obliged them by making a scene; and they’d rattled Colden. But they’d entirely failed so far to counter Colden’s testimony about Elma’s state of mind—cheerful, gay, too gay for a Quaker; everyone agreed. It was going to be a hard thing to convince the jury that Elma had flung herself into the well under the influence of melancholy.

Perhaps if Hamilton had spent a little more time following the agreed line of questioning and less chasing after his own theories, they might be in a better position. A jury needed a clear line of reasoning to follow, not scattershot accusations.

They had been having somewhat more success making out that Levi had flirted with everyone, and not just Elma. That he’d taken Hope Sands to his brother’s was a nice touch. But it was flimsy, all of it. And William Anderson had just dealt them a blow from which it would be hard to recover.

Which left them with one line of defense. They needed to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Levi Weeks had never been near the well that night.

Colden’s next witness was an elderly woman, who made her way with difficulty to the stand, leaning heavily on her stick and batting off the well-meaning attempts of the assistant attorney general to help her.

“I live opposite Ezra Weeks’s lumber yard, and on the night when the deceased was lost, I heard the gate open and a sleigh or carriage come out of the yard about eight o’clock. It made a rumbling noise but had no bells on it, and it was not long before it returned again.”

“How did you know it was eight o’clock?”

Aaron asked her.

The old woman looked at him as though he were a half-wit. “Because my son and daughter was gone to meeting and meeting is done about eight o’clock.”

“When was this, Mrs. Broad? What month was it?”

Mrs. Broad bristled. “I don’t know the month. I know it was so.”

“Was it after Christmas, or before Christmas?”

Aaron asked patiently.

“It was after, I believe.”

Mrs. Broad thought about it before announcing, “It was January.”

There was a stirring and rustling through the jury and the galleries. Colden’s mouth dropped open as an expression of sheer horror crossed his face.

“That you are sure of?”

Aaron asked. “It was in January, you say?”

“Yes, I am sure it was in January,”

said Mrs. Broad firmly.

“Did you ever hear this gate open before?”

Aaron asked gently.

“No, gentlemen.”

Belatedly, Mrs. Broad realized that something was wrong. Taking offense, she demanded, “Do you think I came here to tell a lie?”

Aaron glanced casually at Colden as he asked, “When did you first remember about this sleigh’s being taken out?”

Mrs. Broad scowled at him, aware that she was being manipulated, but not sure how. “When I saw this young woman at Mrs. Ring’s and helped to lay her out.”

Desperately, Colden tried to salvage something from his witness. “Did you observe any marks of violence when you laid her out?”

Mrs. Broad pursed her lips. “I found no bruises except on the right shoulder, when I felt and it was soft—but I thought her neck was broke,”

she added.

No bruises. No sleigh. And this was Colden’s own witness. This, thought Aaron with grim satisfaction, was how it was done. Not chasing after will-o’-the-wisps, but methodically destroying the prosecution’s evidence, point by point.

It was just like Hamilton to go after a dramatic solution and ignore the basic work that needed to be done.

Mercifully, Hamilton had retreated into abstraction, attending with only half an ear to the testimony. All of his attention was on the bench where Mr. Croucher sat next to a woman in a gown of brocade too rich for court in a color which did not become her. Periodically, he would glance from Mr. Croucher to Elias Ring and back again, like a clock where the second hand had become stuck and stuttered back and forth between the same numbers over and over again, never advancing.

That, from Aaron’s point of view, was just as well. It left him free to get on with the real work. One by one, Colden called his long list of witnesses, building his story of the abduction by sleigh. One by one, Aaron and Brockholst tore their testimony to shreds.

The woman who claimed to have seen Elma on the street that night had to admit that she never saw the supposed Elma’s face, and certainly hadn’t seen any sleigh. Another woman, who claimed to have seen Elma in a sleigh, admitted she couldn’t identify the sleigh and the moon had been obscured.

Candles were brought in, branches of them, set around the courtroom. It had to be well past the supper hour now. Some of the spectators slunk off in search of sustenance. And still Colden went on, calling witness after witness.

The mood in the courtroom had begun to change. Subtly, but Aaron could feel it. The crowd had come in baying for Levi’s blood. But now . . . they weren’t so sure.

Buthrong Anderson testified that he had seen a one-horse sleigh on a full gallop heading toward the well, pulled by a horse the same size and color as that owned by Ezra Weeks.

Brockholst was in his element. “Do you pretend to distinguish the color of a horse in the night?”

“Not exactly—but I knew he wasn’t light-colored.”

Brockholst turned to the jury, inviting them to join him in his skepticism. They were all, he seemed to imply, men of experience, and could spot nonsense when they heard it. “Can you determine the size of a horse when he is on the gallop, and, as you say, on a full gallop?”

“I think he was such a horse as I have described him,”

said the witness sulkily.

Mr. and Mrs. Van Norden, whose house was nearest the well, both testified to hearing a woman cry out, “Lord have mercy on me! Lord help me!”

“I got out of bed to hear and see what I could,”

said Mr. Van Norden, “and I looked out of the window toward the well. I can see the well from my house, and I heard this noise that I tell you of, and I looked then to the well, and I saw a man walking near the well, about the well.”

“Did you see a sleigh at the time?”

Brockholst asked.

“No,”

said Mr. Van Norden. Clearly, the thought had never occurred to him.

“Might there not have been a sleigh there which you could not see from your chamber window?”

Colden suggested desperately. “I’ll put the question a little more particularly—is not the make of the ground such that if a sleigh was standing near the fence at the well, you would look over it from your window, in looking at the well?”

“I don’t know,”

Mr. Van Norden said, flummoxed by the question. “I never minded.”

Colden’s next two witnesses, mere boys of eleven and thirteen, didn’t even make it to the stand.

“Do you know what an oath is?”

Justice Lansing inquired. “Dismissed as incompetent.”

The candles were guttering in their holders. It had to be nearly midnight, and still there were witnesses slumped next to the walls in the hall outside, waiting to be called.

Colden’s broad face was haggard, his cravat askew. He looked like he’d had several rounds in the boxing ring and come out the worse. “But, Your Honor, those boys . . .”

“Are not competent to testify,”

said Lansing wearily.

The next witness knew what an oath was, but admitted his testimony was all hearsay.

“I know nothing about this affair of my own knowledge—only what I’ve been told.”

Lansing turned the full force of his offended majesty on Colden. “Is this a joke, Mr. Colden? Do you intend to call everyone in the city of New York to testify? Perhaps a baby in the cradle?”

“My apologies, Your Honor. I only meant to be thorough. . . .”

“It is past midnight, Mr. Colden.”

Justice Lansing sighed. “Call your next witness.”

With a certain amount of trepidation, Colden called William Blanck to the stand.

Justice Lansing regarded him with a jaundiced eye. “Your witness appears very young, Mr. Colden. How old are you, child?”

“About thirteen, sir.”

“Do you know what an oath is?”

asked Justice Lansing wearily.

“No, sir—but I went to school and they taught me my prayers.”

Aaron exchanged a small, amused smile with Brockholst.

“Dismissed. How many more witnesses do you have, Mr. Colden?”

demanded Justice Lansing, in awful tones.

“Ten. Or possibly eleven,”

Colden admitted. “The prosecution still needs to show—”

Justice Lansing held up a hand, stopping him. “And you, counsel for the defense. I presume you have witnesses to call?”

“We do have a few,”

said Brockholst, grinning. Despite their political differences, he and Lansing were old friends.

There was a murmuring on the bench as the three judges consulted. “—might go on until tomorrow evening,”

Harison was saying.

“What’s happening?”

demanded Ezra Weeks.

Aaron went to stand beside him. “The court is trying to determine whether to adjourn. There is no precedent for a trial going into a second day.”

Ezra Weeks had no interest in precedent. “What does that mean for Levi?”

Aaron wasn’t sure. The exhausted jurors were clearly frustrated with Colden, and his increasingly irrelevant and inadmissible parade of witnesses. On the other hand, they might convict Levi out of sheer exhaustion.

“On the whole,”

Aaron said, “I believe it would be to our advantage if the court were to adjourn.”

The little surprise he had planned for Hamilton could easily wait another day.

A hush fell over the room as Justice Lansing cleared his throat. “The court is prepared to sit as long as necessary.”

“It’s two in the morning!”

protested one of the jurors, the same one who had been so amused earlier by the prospect of Elma gallivanting in the nude. He didn’t sound amused anymore.

“Sir,”

said the foreman, speaking on behalf of the whole. “We’re agreed that if we were to stay, we wouldn’t be able to give this business our full attention. Garrit there has already fallen asleep.”

“Huh, what?”

Garrit mumbled.

“We can’t let you go home,”

said Justice Lansing irritably. “Having been sworn, you must be kept away from anyone who might sway your opinion.”

“They might sleep on the floor of the portrait gallery,”

suggested Harison, who was clearly longing for sleep himself. “We could assign two constables to keep them together until morning—and another to bring them some blankets and refreshments.”

“For want of any better suggestions, so be it,”

said Lansing. “Constables! See the jurors brought to the portrait room and bring them what they need to make them comfortable. The prisoner at the bar will return to the Bridewell until morning.”

A sound escaped Levi’s lips, the first sound to pass them all day. Despite himself—and his private conviction that the boy might well have done exactly what Mr. Colden claimed—Aaron was moved.

“What about us?”

asked Catherine Ring. If anyone seemed as distressed as Levi by the adjournment, it was she. Aaron noticed that she pulled away from her husband, moving to stand before the bench herself.

Justice Lansing raised his voice to be heard throughout the room. “As to the rest of you, go home and get what sleep you can. Court will adjourn until ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”