Page 4 of The Girl from Greenwich Street

The Jurors of the People of the State of New-York . . . on their oath present, that Levi Weeks, late of the seventh ward, of the city of New-York . . . on the 22nd day of December, in the year of our Lord 1799 . . . feloniously, willfully, and of his malice aforethought, did kill and murder . . .

—From the indictment of Levi Weeks

New York City

January 7, 1800

It wasn’t hard picking Levi Weeks out among the inhabitants of the Bridewell.

Straw crunched beneath Alexander’s shoes as he stepped into the cell. His breath misted in front of him; the windows had bars but no glass. The stone walls intensified the bitter January chill, making it colder within than without. Alexander’s business sometimes called him to the New Gaol, the debtors’ prison on the other side of the Common, with its whimsical cupola—he’d had Eliza’s portrait painted by an artist in the New Gaol, and a very becoming portrait it had been too—but that prison, with its shabby genteel inhabitants, resigned but not broken, was a world away from the grim confines of the Bridewell, where pickpockets and murderers brawled over the contents of a bucket of mush and a man wandered mumbling to himself, clad only in such filth as adhered to his person.

“There’s Levi,”

said Ezra Weeks in a low voice, his head turning this way and that, sizing up the room for threats.

Alexander would have known without the telling. The young man had crammed himself against the far wall, his knees drawn to his chest as though he were trying to make himself as small as possible.

His hair, when clean, would be a dark blond or a light brown. At the moment, it hung loose around his shoulders, matted with dirt and straw and what looked like porridge. Unlike some of the others, his shirt and trousers were still largely intact, but they bore dark stains, including some that looked like blood.

They had waited until twilight to come. Yesterday, Elma Sands had been interred in the Quaker burying ground. But before she made her final journey, her family had taken the unprecedented step of displaying her corpse in the street for anyone to come and see. And they had. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. All shouting for Levi Weeks’s blood.

Ezra Weeks had insisted he could ensure his brother’s safety, but he hadn’t balked at the suggestion that the transfer from prison to home be undertaken quietly, under cover of darkness.

“Levi.”

Ezra spared a look over his shoulder at the other inmates, then turned back to his brother. “Levi. We’re here to take you out.”

“Ezra?”

Levi squinted up at them, and Alexander could see one eye was swollen to a slit. Dried crusts of blood clung beneath his nose. “Is that really you? I dreamed—”

He rubbed his hands across his eyes, or tried to, and winced. “I’ve had the strangest dreams. I dreamed I was taken to prison.”

He shivered violently, wrapping his arms tighter around himself.

“Where’s your cloak?”

Ezra started to look and then checked himself. “Never mind that. General Hamilton and I have come to take you away.”

“General . . . Hamilton?”

Levi blinked at Alexander, confusion mingling with awe. “I saw you—in the procession—for President Washington. Why—”

Ezra Weeks pressed a hand on his brother’s shoulder, lightening his touch when his brother winced. “General Hamilton has been kind enough to interest himself in your case.”

“My case?”

Incomprehension gave way to dawning horror. “They say—they said—Elma— They showed me—they showed me—oh God.”

Levi folded in on himself, burying his face in his knees, his back shaking with tears, or cold, or both.

Like Alexander’s eldest son, Philip, in the grips of the fever two years ago, so sick that some of the doctors had pronounced him beyond saving. The hours by his bedside, praying. Putting precious chips of ice to his cracked lips. The wonder of the moment when he’d opened his eyes and known Alexander again, weak but safe.

This boy couldn’t be much older than Philip. Their features were nothing alike, but there was something of that youthfulness—something of that confusion, that thin line that divided the grown man from the boy—that touched Alexander to the core.

Levi lifted his head from his arms. “Elma—what are they—what do they think—?”

“They say you did it,”

said Ezra bluntly. “The coroner’s jury has brought in a verdict of murder.”

“I’m ruined.”

Levi rocked back and forth on the straw. “When they took me, they showed me—they asked me— Oh God, they’ll hang me. They’ll hang me. And I never did it, I swear, I never . . .”

Alexander crouched down beside Levi Weeks, ignoring the squelch of whatever lay in the straw. “I will not allow you to hang,”

he said, the same way he might have once told Philip there were no monsters under the bed. “But we can discuss this in a more congenial setting. Your brother has arranged the payment of bail. Come. Let me help you up.”

The younger man’s hand was larger than Alexander’s and heavily calloused, but he put it into Alexander’s like a child, like Philip in his younger days, when he would still hold Alexander’s hand. Levi winced as he slowly levered himself off the foul ground. He favored one side, Alexander saw, and his trousers were ripped as well as his shirt.

Ezra’s chest swelled. “Who did this to you?”

Levi swallowed hard and shook his head.

“We’re honest thieves here!”

someone called out. “We don’t hold with women-killers!”

“Who said that?”

Ezra swiveled, searching for the source of the sound, hands already forming into fists.

Alexander put a hand on his arm. He could feel the heavy muscles. Ezra Weeks might be a man of business now, but he’d put in his share of heavy labor. “A public brawl will only make matters worse.”

Ezra hesitated, but after a moment, he nodded curtly and stepped aside, flanking his brother as he and Alexander escorted Levi through the jeering, gibbering mob, down the stairs, and into the cold night air, which might be scented with manure but felt positively clean compared to what they had just departed.

Ezra Weeks had secured a closed carriage, not his own, to bring his brother away. It rattled over the short distance from the Bridewell west to Greenwich Street, while Ezra frowned out the window, keeping an eye out for pursuit, fists opening and closing as though he were itching to punch someone.

When the carriage turned north on Greenwich Street, Levi lifted his head. “We’re not going to the Ring house?”

Ezra choked. “Are you mad? They’d tear you limb from limb.”

“When you said home, I thought you meant—”

The light from the carriage lamps wasn’t sufficient to illuminate Levi’s features, but Alexander could hear the pain in his voice. “I hadn’t thought. I can’t go back.”

“It’s a boardinghouse, not your ancestral acres,”

said Ezra impatiently. “You were only there since July. Once it’s safe, I’ll send Demas to fetch your things.”

Ezra Weeks’s home and lumber yard sat at the corner of Greenwich and Harrison, only a few minutes from the Ring boardinghouse by carriage, but a world away otherwise. Here, the closely built streets gave way to open land—but not for long. Alexander could see the beginnings of new construction on the plot opposite. The city was growing up around Ezra Weeks’s lumber yard, creeping toward the open land between the city and Greenwich Village to the north.

In between lay the wilderness known as Lispenard’s Meadow. And the well in which Elma Sands had drowned.

A well which Ezra Weeks had dug.

These were exactly the sort of men he needed for the Federalists, Alexander reminded himself. The sort of men Burr had so successfully courted. But this time, he was going to get in ahead of Burr.

A servant came out to light them up into the house, holding the candle as Ezra helped his brother up the steps.

The house wasn’t what Alexander would have expected for a man of Ezra’s growing wealth and stature.

The room into which they were taken was no formal parlor but a farmhouse kitchen, with an open hearth and a well-scrubbed wood table.

At Ezra’s nod, the serving boy threw more wood on the fire—a grand gesture given the price of firewood this winter—and sat Levi in the seat nearest the blaze.

Ezra bundled a pile of plans out of the way. Alexander caught a glimpse of a complicated diagram of doors of various sizes; a sketch of a fanlight.

If he could clear Levi’s name, he could build his Eliza a house with a fanlight like that, a house of elegant classical lines that would make Burr’s Richmond Hill look outdated and fussy. Alexander’s father-in-law had already promised him seasoned logs from the Schuyler lands upstate.

“That’s fine work,”

said Alexander, nodding at the plans.

“That’s Levi’s work,”

said Ezra shortly.

Alexander looked again at the boy—no, not a boy, a man. The firelight played off the planes of his face, showing the five days’ stubble of his prison stay. “You have a fine sensibility for classical forms.”

For a moment, Levi’s eyes lighted. “I have a book of designs—The New Vitruvius. Elma said—”

The words ended as though choked off. His face went blank.

“Here. Eat.”

Ezra shoved a plate of cakes in front of him, ripping off the napkin that covered them. “You look half-starved. What did they feed you in that place?”

“Cornmeal mash—with molasses. Some of the men had spoons. The rest of us—”

Levi stared down at his fingers, as though he could still feel the grit of it. “These cakes are good.”

“Sally made them for you. She was concerned for you, as were we all.”

Ezra looked pugnaciously at Alexander, as though daring him to contradict him. “The servants are very fond of Levi. Everyone is very fond of Levi. He should never have been taken to that place.”

Levi scratched one arm. Through the rips in his shirt, Alexander could see the raised bumps of bug bites. “There was a man—he called himself Paul—he said he’d been there two years. He said the rats had eaten his shirt off.”

“You’re not there now and you’re not going back. We’ll see this sorted.”

Ezra’s knuckles were white on the edge of the table. “It’s nonsense, of course. Levi was here with me that night. The night the girl disappeared. John McComb will swear to it. John McComb the architect.”

“I am well acquainted with Mr. McComb.”

Mr. McComb had designed a lighthouse for Alexander—for the government, that was—and done it very well after Alexander had set him straight on a few points. “It’s no use his swearing to anything unless it’s true.”

“Are you implying it’s not?”

Ezra blustered.

“The prosecution will. Mr. Weeks, you must be aware, sentiment runs strongly against your brother.”

Alexander held up a hand, forestalling Ezra’s protests. “I place no faith in the verdict of the mob, but many do. Our task is that much the harder.”

“They’ve been whipping up sentiment against the boy, using him as a scapegoat.”

Ezra Weeks’s Massachusetts accent was very strong. He wasn’t, Alexander thought, that much older than his brother, for all that he affected an air of authority.

Alexander could just remember being that young. He had thought himself on top of the world in those golden days of the Revolution, certain he had all the answers, certain that industry and truth would win the day. It felt like a very long time ago.

“My goal, Mr. Weeks, is not merely to cast doubt on your brother’s guilt but to prove his entire innocence so he might walk back into the world a whole man, without a shadow cast upon him.”

Ezra grunted. “The entire thing is ridiculous. If that Ring fellow couldn’t control his niece—”

“Cousin.”

Levi looked up from crumbling his cake to bits. “She wasn’t his niece. She was his wife’s cousin.”

Ezra scowled. “Niece . . . cousin . . . What does it matter? Eat your cake.”

Levi looked past him at Alexander. Despite the fire behind him, he shook faintly with cold. “They didn’t want her. No one wanted her. That was what Elma said. She had a father but she’d never met him—he’d gone before she was born. He’d never married her mother.”

Bastard. Alexander had had it flung at him time and again.

Alexander cleared his throat. “Elma Sands’s father. Is he still alive?”

Levi nodded. “She told me she had a father in Charleston and someday she’d go to him.”

That past June, on a tiny island in the middle of the Caribbean, Alexander’s father had drawn his last breath. He’d accepted the money Alexander had sent him twice a year—but he’d never accepted Alexander.

It was foolish, Alexander knew. Eliza’s father had taken Alexander in as if he were his own. Alexander had his own children, children who knew how much they were wanted—he’d sat by their bedsides hour by hour when they were sick, played with them, prayed for them. But when he thought of that old man dying alone in Saint Vincent, Alexander felt . . . cheated. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected. That someday his father would recognize him, acknowledge him, apologize to him. Say he’d never meant to leave them.

But he had. He’d left them. And now it was too late for amends.

“I don’t see how this is relevant,”

said Ezra sharply. “The girl is dead. What does it matter if she had a dozen fathers or none?”

Alexander ignored him. He addressed himself to Levi instead. “What can you tell me about her?”

“Elma was . . . she was herself.”

Levi hunched over his tea, cupping his hands around the ceramic bowl for warmth. “When they showed me—I said I recognized the dress and they asked me if I recognized the countenance—but I didn’t! I didn’t. Elma was—she was so alive. She was like strong tea on a cold morning, or punch that goes to your head. She made you feel awake, alive.”

“You know those wild spirits,”

Ezra said quickly. “One minute they’re up in alt; the next they’re in the depths of melancholy. The girl probably flung herself in that damned well. Her uncle—pardon me, Levi, her cousin—was telling the whole neighborhood she’d killed herself in a love fit, until suddenly he changed his tune and decided to point the finger at Levi. I don’t know what he thinks he gets out of it.”

There was something Ezra was leaving out.

Alexander looked at Levi. “Her family says she told her cousin she meant to marry you that night. Was there any truth in that?”

Ezra jumped in before his brother could answer. “Maybe she meant to marry him. That doesn’t mean he meant to marry her. She might have fancied herself in love with the boy. He’s a fine figure of a lad, anyone would agree. Half the girls in that house fancied him, you told me so yourself, Levi. But that’s nothing to the lad’s discredit.”

“No.”

Alexander let his eyes rest on Levi. The hot tea and well-stoked fire had brought some color to Levi’s cheeks. Rested, clean-shaven, there was no denying he would be a handsome lad. But there was a shadow over his countenance. There was something Levi wasn’t telling—Alexander was sure of it.

Had he offered the girl marriage? Had she gone to meet him that night?

Ezra’s voice went on, over-hearty. “Who’s to say what fits a girl like that might take? Why, you yourself said, Levi, that she’d threatened to do away with herself. With laudanum.”

“Did she?”

Levi’s voice was hoarse. “It wasn’t like that. She didn’t mean it—not seriously.”

Ezra looked meaningfully at Alexander. “The girl was heard to say she wished she had no existence.”

“It’s your belief she did away with herself?”

“It’s clear, isn’t it? That’s what I told your colleague Colonel Burr. He agreed with me.”

Alexander frowned at him, and Ezra hastily amended his tone. “Perhaps she did it for love, but if she did, that’s not the boy’s fault. He never promised her anything.”

“Her family claims he did. They claim he promised her marriage.”

Alexander held Ezra Weeks’s gaze, staring at him until he blustered himself into silence. Now was his chance to mark himself as superior to Burr, more strategic than Burr. “This is only what the prosecution will say. If your brother cannot answer me, how can he answer them? Think of it as . . . setting the foundations for a structure. Without the correct underpinnings, the whole will collapse.”

“That’s not exactly how it works, sir—but I take your point,”

Ezra said hastily.

“I will defer to you on matters of building if you trust I know how to build a case. I might have need of your expertise someday—as you do mine now.”

Feeling he had made his point, Alexander turned back to Levi. “Did you mean to run away with her that night?”

Ezra controlled himself with an effort; the force of his disapproval was palpable.

“No,”

Levi croaked.

“Might she have been disappointed in her hopes of your affections?”

“She—I—no.”

Levi looked up wildly. “She made a joke of it, that I never asked her to walk out with me—but it was only that I knew she wouldn’t! When I asked her—”

“The girl felt slighted,”

Ezra barked. “You heard what he said.”

When I asked her, Levi had said. Asked her what? To walk out with him? To run away with him?

“What do you think, Levi? Might she have done away with herself for love?”

A strange shudder passed through the boy. The words tore out of him. “Not for love of me, sir.”

“Then for whom?”

Levi shook his head wordlessly.

“Why would she tell her cousin you meant to marry her?”

Levi hunched his shoulders.

Ezra couldn’t control himself any longer. “With a girl like that, who can tell what they might say?”

Alexander ignored him. “Levi?”

Levi shook his head wordlessly. “I can’t think.”

Ezra pushed back his chair. “You heard him, sir. He’s so tired he can’t think. The boy needs rest after his ordeal in that hellhole. I wouldn’t be surprised if he contracted an ague. If he falls ill, it’s the Ring family who will need to answer for it. I should never have sent him to that place.”

Slowly, Alexander stood, looking around the shadowy kitchen.

A child’s wooden horse lay discarded on the floor, half-hidden by a washtub. Alexander’s own home was constantly littered with such things; with the little ones’ dolls and hoops, the older ones’ schoolbooks and dirty linen. He’d tripped over Noah’s Ark just that morning and barked his shin on a table.

No matter how crowded their hired house at 26 Broadway became, with their own seven children in and out, ranging in age from Philip at Columbia to baby Betsy with her teeth just coming in, Eliza somehow always found room for more. Orphaned nephews, orphaned daughters of old friends; there was always a bed, always a place at the table.

“Why did Levi board with the Rings rather than living here, with you?”

Ezra shrugged. “I’ve two children of my own and a new one on the way. And it’s good for a lad to have a place of his own. My journeymen board there too. It was convenient to the lumber yard. And I don’t have the space myself.”

“How many of your journeymen board at the Ring house?”

Ezra had to stop and think. “Three—and Levi’s apprentice. As I said, it was convenient.”

His face darkened. “If I’d known, I’d never have let any of them near the place. But it seemed like a respectable house. Mrs. Ring—have you met her? She seemed like a sensible woman. And that there were young women there—well, what’s the harm in a bit of flirtation provided it doesn’t go too far? Levi was on good terms with all of them. He took—what was her name? the other one—to a charity sermon.”

“Hope,”

Levi said hoarsely. “Her name is Hope.”

“He paid more mind to Hope than to Elma. Elma couldn’t bear it and threw herself into a well. The family doesn’t want to admit it and that’s why they’re pointing the finger at my boy.”

Ezra pounded the words like nails, one after the other, as if he were trying to hammer them into Alexander’s skull.

The clock on the mantel said it was well past seven. Alexander had an appointment to keep at eight o’clock, to the north of the city, in the stronghold of his enemy.

“Our first order of business is to stem the tide of public condemnation. I go to meet with Colonel Burr and Mr. Livingston to discuss how best to go about it. After that”—Alexander looked back at Levi, hunched in his seat by the fire—“we can begin to determine the truth of the matter.”

“The girl killed herself,”

said Ezra Weeks firmly. “And that’s the truth of it.”