Page 6 of The Girl from Greenwich Street

However some circumstances that have been published may seem to justify the horrid imputation of her murder which has been thrown on a certain young man, yet there are others which strongly militate against it, and appear to establish his innocence in an unquestionable manner. We understand he has, contrary to some accounts, the universal testimony in favor of his character. He is a moral, sober, industrious, amiable man.

—Anonymous piece in the New-York Daily Advertiser, January 9, 1800

New York City

January 9, 1800

“He has no conceivable temptation to perform such an atrocious action—that’s a bald-faced lie!”

“You won’t forget David’s birthday?”

The coffeepot hove distractingly into Cadwallader’s line of vision.

Cadwallader Colden, assistant attorney general of the city of New York, moved himself and the New-York Daily Advertiser out of the way of the coffeepot.

“She had several times been heard to utter expressions of melancholy and throw out threats of self-destruction, particularly the afternoon before.”

Cadwallader set the paper down slowly on the table, his eyes still fixed on the page. “They mean to make out the girl killed herself.”

“Cadwallader!”

The coffeepot plonked down next to him.

Cadwallader ignored it. “Several other circumstances have come to our knowledge . . . What circumstances?”

“Could you perhaps turn your mind to the circumstance of your only child’s birthday?”

Maria’s tone was as acid as the coffee. “Which happens to be today?”

Cadwallader shook his head, trying to clear it. No conceivable temptation . . . “Of course. Certainly. It’s just this matter of the girl in the well. . . .”

An easy, straightforward case. Or so it had seemed. Until today.

“There’s also the matter of your son’s third birthday.”

“Yes. Certainly. They might have had the decency to make themselves known, whoever it was who wrote this piece.”

Cadwallader picked up the paper again, giving it an irritated flap. “It might be Colonel Burr—Josiah told me Weeks retained Livingston and Burr for the defense. Livingston didn’t put up much of a show in the Pastano case . . . and this doesn’t sound in his style . . . but Burr. It might be Burr.”

Livingston he’d faced off against before. The man was formidable—formidable and cutting—but one felt like one knew where one stood with him. Burr was slippery, tricksy. Look at the way he’d turned the Tammany Society from a philosophical society to a political organization. Cadwallader still felt sore over that. He’d enjoyed the old days of Tammany, when they debated topics like the true nature of man, not how many votes could be got for Burr’s Democratic-Republicans. Was man fundamentally good or evil? These were questions that deserved proper consideration; the nature of man called for as much study as Cadwallader’s botanist aunt would give to the veining of a leaf.

But these days, there was no room for abstract argument: there was only partisan combat and sharp elbows.

It would be just like Burr to place anonymous insinuations in the paper. “She was not, as it was said, pregnant, nor can it be proved that he was under an engagement to marry her.”

It was true that the autopsy had established that Elma Sands wasn’t pregnant, but to claim there was no engagement . . . “What kind of proof do they expect? A written bond?”

“My father and Ben and Susanna will be here at four,”

said Maria in a clipped voice.

That was the thing to do. Talk to the family, verify their testimony. “I’ll need to speak to the family,”

said Cadwallader decidedly. “I wonder if there was anyone else to whom she might have spoken about her plans to be married. . . . One of the neighbors, perhaps.”

Marie tossed her serviette down on the table and pushed back her chair with an audible scrape. “Be here at four,”

she said sharply. “And don’t forget to stop at Monsieur de Singeron’s confectionery to pick up the plum cake I commissioned.”

Cadwallader looked up from the paper. “You commissioned a plum cake?”

The door of the dining parlor slammed behind his wife.

For a moment, Cadwallader considered going after her, apologizing, before deciding, on the whole, that it was probably easier and more comfortable to let her work out her spleen on her own. He thought wistfully of the early days of their marriage, when Maria had entered into his interests and the breakfast table had been a place of domestic and intellectual harmony. But then had come a string of disappointments—that was what Maria called them, disappointments—and with each, Maria had withdrawn a little further from him, spending more time with her parents and siblings. When David had been born, all had been happiness for a bit—but David’s safe delivery proved the exception rather than the rule. They’d had another disappointment that autumn, close on the heels of the death of Maria’s mother in August.

Cadwallader had suggested a visit to the country, a sojourn in the south, a spa, a European tour—but Maria didn’t want to risk David to the vagaries of travel or to his father’s sole care at home. No use to point out David had a perfectly good nursemaid and a house full of servants. Maria refused to countenance the prospect.

Vaguely, Cadwallader thought it would be quite a good thing if they had another child. It would give Maria someone else on whom to practice her ideas of Republican motherhood. Not that she wasn’t a wonderful mother to young David. And David—if a man were to have only one child in this life, it were well that it be one like David, so clever, so sunny-natured. Most of the time.

If Maria were feeling more herself, she would understand what this case meant. They were already saying that Cadwallader wasn’t fit for office, that he’d been given this position only because his late sister’s husband, Josiah Hoffman, was the attorney general. And perhaps that was so, but that didn’t mean that Cadwallader couldn’t make a success of it.

It was just that he hadn’t managed to make a success of it quite yet. There had been that embarrassing business of the woman found strangled in a cistern in December. Rose Malone. A widow, remarried a week. Cadwallader had been so sure the new husband had done it—it was usually the husband—until the husband proved to have been unimpeachably elsewhere. With no other suspects, they’d quietly released the husband from the Bridewell and dropped the case.

At least Cadwallader had Pastano to point to. Of course, Pastano wasn’t anything to brag about. The man had been discovered in the act of stabbing his landlady. But still. It was a mark on the correct side of the ledger.

But this—this was different. This was no widow stuffed into a cistern or a Portuguese landlady stabbed by her compatriot. This was a young woman in all the hopeful blush of youth, shamefully betrayed.

Cadwallader’s fingers itched to write a scathing rebuttal—but a fragment of rhyme he had been reading to David last night from his worn copy of A Little Pretty Pocket-Book played through his head: Think ere you speak, for words once flown, / Once uttered, are no more your own.

David had made faces and demanded they move on to Jack the Giant-Killer—and perhaps there was a metaphor too, given the stature of the two men Cadwallader was facing. Burr could write circles around him any day. Livingston’s grasp of the niceties of the law was unparalleled.

No, what he had to do was build a case they couldn’t knock down, a towering edifice of evidence. Jack had outsmarted the giant, and so could he. Cadwallader smiled to himself at the notion, picturing David in his nightdress, his face fresh-scrubbed, his curls still damp around the edges. David wouldn’t understand yet that this was a form of giant slaying too, but someday he would, and would be proud. Cadwallader would make him proud. And Maria too.

Maybe, if he could dispel this miasma of failure that hung about him, Maria would be happy again, and stop slamming coffeepots at the breakfast table. She’d broken the handle of the last one. Not that Cadwallader minded the cost—they could afford the porcelain—but he’d like to see her happier.

Rolling the offending paper into a tight cylinder under his arm, Cadwallader called for his gloves and his greatcoat and set out for Greenwich Street.

He felt recently as though he were always a few furlongs behind; he was wrong-footed in the courtroom, wrong-footed with Maria. Everything he touched went subtly wrong. And he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why.

This was the turning point, Cadwallader told himself, as he knocked at the front door of the Ring boardinghouse. He would bestride the courtroom like a colossus. Or something like that.

Mrs. Ring answered the door herself, a child clinging to her leg, her cheeks flushed with the heat of the kitchen, and flour smeared in the auburn hair that escaped her cap. At the sight of Cadwallader, her expression veered between consternation and hope.

“Mr. Colden, has thee news for us?”

None that would cheer her. Levi Weeks had been released on bail from the Bridewell and his lawyers were spreading rumor and innuendo about Elma.

Cadwallader decided not to share that bit.

“It’s your sister Miss Hope Sands, I wish to see,”

he said soothingly. “Just a trifling matter of ascertaining some details.”

Mrs. Ring’s face fell, but she regained control of herself rapidly. “If thee will sit in the front room? Hope is at work in the millinery. I shall fetch her to thee.”

The child, younger than David, with the plump fingers of babyhood, peeped out from behind Mrs. Ring’s gray skirt. Cadwallader wiggled his fingers at her. The child smiled back before ducking away again.

“Eliza!”

Mrs. Ring scooped the girl up in her arms. “Come. Let us fetch thy aunt.”

Eliza snuck another look at Cadwallader over her mother’s shoulder, one thumb stuck in her mouth.

The front room was painfully spare, a stark contrast to his own parlor, which was hung with chintz and adorned with portraits of Cadwallader’s grandparents and flower drawings by his aunt Jane, the celebrated botanist. It was very hard being the least distinguished member of a distinguished family, a family bursting with statesmen and scholars. Some, like his grandfather, had managed to be both. It was true that his father hadn’t done anything very particular—other than choose the wrong side of the recent conflict—but he’d got out of it by dying, leaving Cadwallader with the burden of trying to live up to his family’s legacy.

Mrs. Ring ushered in Miss Hope Sands, excusing herself with apologies that were backed by the smell of something burning in the kitchen.

Cadwallader hovered, waiting for Miss Sands to be seated. “I fear I must ask you some . . . delicate questions.”

Miss Hope Sands seated herself on the settle, straight-backed, her hands pressed into a knot in her lap. Her hair was a nondescript light brown instead of her sister’s auburn, but there was something about the set of her chin and a certain light in her eyes that marked her as a person not to be ignored. “I will answer whatever thee need ask.”

Cadwallader felt inexplicably reassured by that firm alto voice. Here was a witness who would say what she said and mean it. “Did Miss Elma Sands—did your cousin—did she ever utter expressions of melancholy? Or threats of self-destruction?”

Miss Sands’s lips pressed tightly together. “It was only the once.”

“Do you mean to tell me she did utter expressions of melancholy? The sort that anyone might utter upon a trying occasion?”

Cadwallader asked hopefully.

Miss Sands looked past him, at the mantelpiece, which was bare except for a simply carved mantel clock. “It was only one of Elma’s tricks.”

Cadwallader sat down, and wished he hadn’t. He could feel the hard edge of the settle digging into the backs of his thighs. “What sort of trick?”

Miss Sands released a long sigh. “My cousin had an illness last autumn. It left her in a great deal of pain—she said.”

Her lip curled in a way richly indicative of her feelings toward her cousin. But girls often bickered to no purpose. Cadwallader remembered his sisters sparring in their youth. Both now dead, taken from him and each other too soon. “Dr. Snedecker left a vial of laudanum with her. One night, as we were gathered here, in the front room, Elma made a show of holding up the bottle and pretending to drink from it. She said she should not be afraid to drink it whole.”

“Only pretending?”

“The stopper was in.”

There was a fine note of irony in Miss Hope Sands’s voice that made her sound older than her years. “Elias said, ‘Foolish creature, it would kill thee,’ to which Elma replied she wouldn’t mind if it did, or something to that purpose. It was just for the attention. She hadn’t any intention of drinking it. Not more than the prescribed drops.”

Cadwallader didn’t like the sound of this at all. He could only imagine what Burr would make of this—and of him—on the stand. “You’re quite certain of that?”

“If she had meant to drink it, she would,”

said Hope firmly. “She only wanted us to beg her not to.”

“Was anyone else present?”

Of course, someone must have been, or how else would the author of that piece in the paper have heard? But perhaps whoever it was had heard only a whisper, a rumor, and not the whole of it. . . .

“My sister. Elias. I don’t recall whether Levi was present. I don’t believe he was.”

Cadwallader had a moment of relief, before she added, “Oh, and Timothy Crane, one of our boarders.”

Cadwallader had an unpleasant sinking feeling. “Isn’t he one of Ezra Weeks’s journeymen?”

“Most of our boarders are,”

said Miss Sands. “We’ve only two who aren’t.”

A house full of men dependent on Ezra Weeks, at least one of whom had witnessed Elma Sands threaten to take her own life. This got worse and worse. “She held the whole vial to her mouth.”

“In jest! She only meant to tease us.”

“A strange sort of jest.”

“She was angry Caty hadn’t sent for the doctor when she was ill in November,”

said Hope Sands, in a forthright way that impressed Cadwallader. He hoped it would impress a jury as well. “She wanted to make us see how much she suffered.”

“Why did no one tell me this before?”

demanded Cadwallader, aggrieved.

Miss Sands set her chin. “Because it had nothing to do with anything.”

He hoped she was right. “Do you believe your cousin might have taken her own life?”

“No.”

“You seem very sure.”

“I’ve never been more sure of anything—except my redeemer,”

she added as an afterthought. Her father, Cadwallader remembered, was rather famous as a preacher. He wondered if that would lend her testimony more credence. “Elma would never have done anything to harm herself. She intended to have a grand future, she told me—married to Levi.”

“And you’re quite sure she said she was going to be married to Levi?”

Hope Sands paused slightly before answering. A shadow crossed her face. Remembering her cousin, thought Cadwallader approvingly. It was a becoming show of emotion.

“Yes,”

she said at last. “She told me the week before. We were trimming hats. I ran a pin through my finger when she told me.”

She rubbed her thumb absently against her finger as though she could still feel the remembered wound.

“She—she told me she was to be married the following Sunday. She told me I wasn’t to tell, not even Caty. He’d wanted complete secrecy—she wasn’t to have told me, but—but she thought I ought to know.”

“Why so much secrecy?”

“We know that—now—don’t we?”

Hope spoke in short bursts, her hands curled in fists in her lap. The passion in her voice made a mockery of the sober gray of her dress. “If she hadn’t told me—if I hadn’t told Caty—she might have disappeared and none the wiser. He could have stayed here—talking, laughing, pretending to goodness—and all the while, Elma—”

Cadwallader gave her a moment to compose herself before asking, “On the day of her, er, wedding . . . did she seem—apprehensive? Unhappy? Melancholy, even?”

“Melancholy? She was elated,”

said Hope Sands fiercely. “She bedecked herself for him. She put on her finest clothes—she borrowed Peggy’s handkerchief—she adorned herself like a sacrifice for the altar.”

A memory stirred. Cadwallader’s Loyalist father had sent him to be educated in England; he remembered sitting in the Drury Lane theater, watching the legendary Kemble as Hamlet. Sarah Siddons had played Ophelia. He’d imagined himself in love with her, like half the bucks in the audience. What it had been to be sixteen years old, thrilling to imaginary tragedy, not stumbling through the aftermath of the reality of one.

“I thought thy bride-bed to have deck’d, sweet maid / And not have strew’d thy grave,”

murmured Cadwallader.

“Is that what they’re saying in the papers?”

“No, it’s—never mind.”

Cadwallader got hold of himself. Perhaps Ophelia wasn’t the best comparison. Ophelia had drowned herself.

Cadwallader forced his attention back to the matter at hand. “You are quite positive your cousin had no idea of drowning herself?”

“My cousin,”

said Hope Sands, rising to her feet, “had no idea of anything but Levi Weeks. She thought to go to her bridal bed—and he drove her to her grave.”