Page 28 of The Girl from Greenwich Street

I discover more and more that I am spoiled for a military man. My health and comfort both require that I should be at home—at that home where I am always sure to find a sweet asylum from care and pain in your bosom. . . . You are my good genius; of that kind which the ancient Philosophers called a familiar; and you know very well that I am glad to be in every way as familiar as possible with you.

—Alexander Hamilton to Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, November 1798

New York City

April 1, 1800

It was gone past two by the time Alexander made his way to his own stoop.

Along Broadway, the houses were all dark. Even the strange little wooden house where the German candlemaker, Slidell, resolutely kept his workplace despite the fine brick mansions grown up around him was nothing more than a blot in the darkness, without the man himself in his accustomed place on his wooden stoop, in his apron and cap, defiantly smoking his pipe.

In a few hours, smoke would begin to emerge from chimneys, servants would creep out to sweep the stoops, Slidell would hang out his candles, and the carts would begin to rumble down the street, bearing casks to taverns and goods to market, but for now all was still, an artist’s etching, all line and shadow, with no people to mar the scene.

A single point of light came from one of his own windows. Betsy’s teeth must be bothering her again.

Alexander let himself in, discarding his hat and gloves. He’d thought he’d been as quiet as he could, but Eliza met him on the stairs, a shawl over her nightdress, shading her candle with one hand. “Shhh. I just put Betsy back down. Did you win your case?”

“Levi Weeks is back in the Bridewell.”

“Convicted?”

Eliza’s hand dropped and the strong light fell across her face. “But your speech . . .”

“Not yet uttered. Colden is still calling witnesses. We’ve been adjourned until tomorrow. The jury is sleeping in the picture room.”

Alexander hadn’t realized how tired he was, or how much every bone in his body ached, until that moment.

“Have you had anything to eat?”

Eliza didn’t wait for an answer. “I saved supper for you.”

He followed her as she rummaged in the larder, retrieving a plate covered with a napkin, with slices of cold roasted mutton, turnips, and potatoes, placing it before him on one of the table mats she had woven with her own hands.

Alexander poked at a piece of mutton. “I’m worried I’ve done the boy a disservice.”

“Your oration is brilliant,”

Eliza said indignantly.

“You heard it often enough,”

said Alexander ruefully. Eliza, as always, had been his first audience and critic, listening and suggesting while she mended torn breeches, kissed bruises, and doled out bread and butter.

Eliza stood over him, the candle in her hand. “If you won’t believe me, then what about Betsy? Betsy approved.”

“Betsy drooled.”

Eliza’s lips turned up on one side. “That is her way of showing her regard.”

“Some of the jury were drooling by the time Lansing called for an adjournment,”

Alexander admitted, “but I doubt it was a sign of their regard. Our defense is a shambles.”

Eliza gave up any notion of going back to bed. She set the candle down and sank into the seat across from Alexander. “Why do you say that?”

“The girl never took her own life; it’s plain to anyone. But Burr and Livingston—they say our business isn’t to find who killed Elma Sands but merely to show that Levi Weeks didn’t.”

Alexander lifted his face from his hands. “Eliza, you remember the Bedlow case. The jury acquitted him but he was hounded all the same.”

Brockholst might have won the day in court, but it was Alexander he had retained later on, to try to clear his name. Admittedly, the methods Alexander had used might not have been the most orthodox—he had concocted a letter in the girl’s name—but none of it need have happened if the case had been conducted properly in the first place.

“If we can’t give the mob the true villain—what sort of life will this boy have? And he is a boy, barely more than a boy, not much older than Philip. What boy that age doesn’t make a fool of himself with the wrong woman? Think what scrapes I might have got in if I hadn’t had the good fortune to find you.”

“Hmmm,”

said Eliza. In the shapes cast by the candle, Alexander could practically see the long shadow of Maria Reynolds.

“And then there’s the girl,”

said Alexander. “Elma. Brockholst would be content to savage her reputation and forget that she was the one who was grievously and mortally wronged. What do they know about the shifts forced upon women who are preyed upon by the men who were meant to protect them?”

Like his mother. His brilliant, determined mother, who had been punished again and again for the crime of surviving.

“If they spent any time with the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children,”

said Eliza firmly, “they would understand better.”

Her goodness shouldn’t surprise him, but somehow it always did. “Not all the world has your heart.”

“Only you,”

she said, saying it before he could. “And our children.”

“And the widows and orphans,”

said Alexander. He toyed with a piece of mutton. The smell of it was too strong; it made his stomach turn. “Someone killed that girl, Eliza—but I haven’t the means to prove who! If I had given this the care I gave Le Guen—if I had given this the care I gave the army—if I had only had more time—”

He ought to have listened to Eliza. He ought to have listened when she counseled against taking on too much. But it always seemed like a good idea at the time, all of it, every post, every case. Until it wasn’t.

“You were right. I took on too much and I’m doing none of it well.”

“If you weren’t there to stand up for Elma Sands, who would?”

Eliza twitched her shawl closer around her shoulders. “Last winter, we delivered meals and medicine to a hundred widows and their families. Only a hundred. But those were a hundred who were kept from the poorhouse. Should I stop serving the hundred because there are four hundred more I failed? We do what we can, imperfect as we are.”

Alexander had never seen anything more perfect in his life, his Eliza, heavy-eyed with exhaustion, her hair half in a braid and half out where Betsy had tugged it, and a slight smell of sour milk about her person.

“I can make a case that Elias Ring did it—the cousin’s husband,”

Alexander said slowly. “He took advantage of the girl—of Elma. We have witnesses to swear to it. He has a wife and four children and only the wife’s word to swear he was home that night. Ring forced his way into the courtroom when his wife gave her testimony.”

“For fear of what she might say?”

“Yes, but fear of what? Was he afraid she would tell of him and Elma? Or something more?”

Alexander cast his mind back on Ring’s performance in the courtroom, his hat stubbornly jammed on his head, chin jutting out beneath. “He was sullen and furtive on the stand and when we tasked him—when I tasked him—with threatening Levi, he burst out that Levi had threatened to tell of him and Croucher.”

“Croucher?”

Eliza stifled a yawn with the back of her hand.

“A lodger. Levi told me last week he’d also come upon this Croucher embracing Elma. Livingston seized on that, as you can imagine. More proof the girl was a wanton.”

Alexander couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice. “From what Levi said, I’d thought he’d caught them only the once, but on the stand, Croucher said that Levi had accused him of insulting Elma not for the first time.”

To embrace a woman once might be a man seizing an opportunity offered. But more than once—it was something different.

“This man, Croucher—he’d spoken of being by the well that night. And he’s been busy going from store to store spreading rumors about Levi Weeks. The most logical explanation is that he saw something and decided to use it as a business opportunity, to extort money from Elias Ring. But—”

Alexander felt like a fool even saying it, but this was Eliza, and he was too tired to dissemble. “You’ll think me fanciful, but there was something diabolical about his countenance. It was the way he smiled when he thought no one was looking.”

“Did he have any reason to do away with Elma Sands?”

“That’s just it. I can’t think of any. Elias Ring had reason enough. He has a wife and four children and a reputation to uphold among the Friends.”

“This Mr. Croucher? Is he married?”

“He wasn’t at the time. He just married a rich widow.”

Alexander straightened in his chair as the meaning of his own words was borne in upon him. “He just married a rich widow.”

“So it wasn’t just Mr. Ring who had something to lose,”

said Eliza sleepily.

“He likes fine things, Mr. Croucher.”

Alexander could picture him on the stand, the gleam of his ring, the rich silks and brocades. “His own means are small. He can’t make that much money peddling stockings, insistent about it as he is. His desire to sell stockings makes one not want to buy stockings.”

Eliza rested her head on one hand. “When did he marry his widow?”

“The day before the trial began.”

Yesterday. That was yesterday. Today felt as though it had been weeks long rather than hours. “He was courting his widow at the same time Levi caught him with Elma. If his widow found out about Elma—”

“She would have had reason to jilt him,”

Eliza supplied for him.

“And take her money with her.”

Alexander was turning it over in his head, fitting the bits together like a puzzle box, which would spring open when solved. “Everyone agrees that Elma was to meet someone that night. She said she was to be married. She dressed in her best clothes. Would she do that for Elias Ring? But if Richard Croucher promised her marriage . . .”

“He might have promised her marriage to win her affections,”

agreed Eliza.

“This Croucher claims to have been at the home of a Mrs. Ann Ashmore—which is also a brandy distillery.”

And possibly something more, although he decided he didn’t need to share that with Eliza. “The well stands between the boardinghouse and the house he visited that night. He might have arranged to meet Elma there. Or he might have arranged for her to meet him at Mrs. Ashmore’s and intercepted her on her way.”

Of course Croucher would tell people he had been by the well that night, just in case anyone had seen him. And because he gleaned a perverse delight from taunting the law with his secret.

“I had him on the stand today—if I had known then what I suspect now—”

Eliza pushed back her chair and used her arms to lever herself upright. “Thanks to Mr. Colden’s industry, you have another chance.”

“I never thought I’d be grateful for a trial that ran into a second day—but I always knew enough to be grateful for you.”

Alexander caught Eliza’s hand, looking up at her as she stood above him, with the light of the candle casting a glow about her white nightdress. “I am much more in debt to you than I can ever pay.”

She shook her head at him. “This isn’t your bank. There are no accounts and no lines of credit in a marriage.”

“Aren’t there?”

Alexander said wryly. “All the same. Once this is over, I mean to pay my debt to you with a house all our own. Once he’s free, Levi Weeks can design it for us and Ezra Weeks will build it.”

And with any luck, his gratitude would extend to a substantial reduction in fee.

Eliza took up the candle. “Are you coming to bed?”

“Not just yet.”

Suddenly, the mutton seemed extremely appetizing. He was, Alexander realized, tremendously hungry. “But I’ll be up shortly.”

Eliza took a candle from above the hearth, lighting it from her own. She set it down beside him, to light his way back to her.

“Don’t be too long,”

she said. “You have important work to do tomorrow.”

A woman to be avenged, a murderer to be accused, and Burr to be put entirely out of countenance when Alexander delivered one of the best speeches he had ever penned.

Outside the window, the night’s black was beginning to lighten to gray. “Not tomorrow,”

he said. “Today.”