Page 9 of The Girl from Greenwich Street

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 that it was not gone long before it returned again.

—From the testimony of Susanna Broad at the trial of Levi Weeks

New York City

January 20, 1800

“You’re sure you saw a sleigh come out of Ezra Weeks’s yard.”

Cadwallader tried not to bounce in his enthusiasm. Respectable assistant attorney generals weren’t meant to bounce. But Cadwallader felt like bouncing.

A sleigh. He’d never considered a sleigh.

“Running without bells it was.”

The lappets on Susanna Broad’s cap nodded along with her. “It was the night that girl went missing, round about eight o’clock.”

“You’re certain it was about eight o’clock?”

The lappets swayed again. “My son and daughter was gone to meeting and meeting is always done about eight o’clock. I saw the sleigh right about when they came home.”

“And you’re sure it had no bells.”

The elderly woman gave him a look that had undoubtedly intimidated stronger men. “If it had bells, I would have heard them, wouldn’t I? There was no bells on that sleigh. Proper hazard it was,”

she said darkly, “running about on a dark night with nothing to let folks know they need to get out of the way.”

No one took a sleigh out at night without bells. It was the common courtesy of the road. Unless, of course, someone wanted to travel unremarked. A man eloping. Or a man on his way to do away with an inconvenient encumbrance by strangling her and flinging her in a well and hoping no one would see.

Cadwallader could have capered like a boy, but for the fear that Mrs. Broad would undoubtedly thwack him across the calf with her sturdy walking stick, which rested next to her chair. Besides, it would be unbecoming the dignity owed to his office.

On the outer edges of town, the Broad house was one of the few with a view of Weeks’s home and lumber yard. Cadwallader had called in the faint hope someone might have seen Levi walking back from the direction of the well. He had never expected anything like this.

“What about a light?”

he asked, trying to control his excitement.

“No light.”

Mrs. Broad pursed her lips. “It’s a wonder they didn’t trample some poor soul. Lots of folks on the street that time of night, coming back from meeting. I’d have been at meeting myself but I can’t get about the way I used to—not like you young folks, gadding this way and that, picnics in the meadow, turtle feasts, don’t know what all.”

“Yes, yes.”

Not that he was that young, really. Only in comparison with his learned opposing counsel. He was thirty-two, a time at which a man should be trusted to make a name for himself—and he felt increasingly confident he might. “Mrs. Broad, can you show me where you were when you saw this sleigh?”

Mrs. Broad groped for the handle of her stick. Cadwallader obligingly handed it to her. “You might lend me an arm.”

Cadwallader suspected that if he’d lent her an arm, she would have asked for her stick, but he obliged her all the same, supporting her uneven steps toward the Dutch door of the house. At her directive, he unlatched it and pushed it open.

Mrs. Broad leaned her elbows on the bottom half, resting her weight on the sturdy wood. “I like to set here and watch for my boy to come back from meeting. Make sure he gets home safe. He’s still my boy even if he’s a man grown.”

Cadwallader looked out over her white head. Nothing had ever been as beautiful as the winter-blasted landscape: the muddy, pitted road; the pigs rooting in the garbage by the side of the street; and a clear view straight over to Ezra Weeks’s lumber yard, workshop, and stable.

“That’s the gate over there? The gate you heard open that night?”

“And what other gate might it be? The pearly ones?”

She cackled at her own wit. “I’m not aiming to see those yet for some time, my boy. Those are the gates, right enough. You can see ’em with your own eyes.”

“How often do they take the sleigh out at night?”

“I can’t say as how I’ve heard that gate open at night before. That’s why I remarked it. And then when I went to help poor Catherine Ring lay out that poor drowned child, and that man who lodges with ’em was telling us how Levi Weeks had done led her astray, I bethought me of that gate.”

“That was very astute of you, Mrs. Broad. Very wise, I mean.”

Cadwallader’s brain was racing. “Did you hear the sleigh come back again?”

“The way that gate creaks? I should say I did! It wasn’t gone long before it returned again.”

She looked significantly at him. “Short trip, it was.”

To the Manhattan Well and back. In a sleigh, the ground could be traversed much more quickly than on foot.

The Van Nordens, who lived nearer the well than anyone, had claimed they heard a cry at eight or nine at night. They couldn’t narrow the time to anything more specific than that. Catherine Lyon, a neighbor of the Rings, had done better. She had come forward immediately, saying she had been helping a woman who had fallen in the street outside the Ring house just after eight when Elma had stopped and spoken to her. A male voice—no, she hadn’t seen him, it had been dark—had said, “Let’s go,”

and Elma had gone. Less than half an hour later, Catherine Lyon had heard Elma cry out for help from the fields around Lispenard’s Meadow.

If Elma and Levi had walked together to the sleigh and then taken it on their supposed elopement they could have been at the well within that half hour . . .

“Did you see who was in the sleigh?”

Mrs. Broad snorted. “On a dark night with no lights on the sleigh and none of the streetlamps lit? You need to talk to them fancy friends of yours and tell them no one’s cleaned the streetlamps since they been set out—nor lit them neither.”

“You can be sure I will, Mrs. Broad,”

said Cadwallader sincerely. If he ever had anything to do with city administration, fixing the lamps and getting rid of those disgusting feral pigs would be among his first priorities. He had many thoughts on the matter. “Would you be willing to come to court and say there what you’ve said to me here?”

“I’ll do what’s needed to help that poor girl. I helped lay her out, you know.”

“So you said.”

Cadwallader paused, struck by a thought. “Did your son or his wife see the sleigh?”

“I don’t know as they did—it left before they were home—but there’ll be others abroad who did.”

Her mouth set in a thin line. “A sleigh without bells! Even if he didn’t kill that poor girl, he shouldn’t be allowed to drive reckless.”

With that, Cadwallader sincerely agreed. It was all he could do not to kiss Mrs. Broad’s withered cheek and spin her around in a jig, but he suspected she wouldn’t approve of either.

A sleigh without bells . . . She was right, someone else would have remarked on it. But where to find them? A notice in the paper, perhaps. His first impulse was to go running to Josiah, to tell him of the marvelous news and ask his advice, but Cadwallader checked himself.

Bad enough that he’d had that embarrassment over the Malone woman who’d been found strangled and stuffed in a cistern, when he hadn’t even been able to pull together enough evidence against the woman’s husband for an indictment.

He couldn’t go running to Josiah for everything. Cadwallader wished he had Josiah’s effortless talent, his incisive mind, and his broad knowledge of the law. It had stung last fall when General Hamilton had insisted that Josiah prosecute the case against the publisher Frothingham personally—instead of leaving it to Cadwallader.

Well, he would show them, thought Cadwallader staunchly. This time, he’d blaze into the courtroom with an unassailable case and impress them with his brilliance. Starting with a sleigh without bells . . .

He thought of going home, but Maria had one of her meetings this afternoon, the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, and the parlor would be filled with women, including Mrs. General Hamilton and Josiah’s mother, Mrs. Hoffman, who always looked at Cadwallader as though his boots were muddy, even when they weren’t.

On an impulse, Cadwallader abruptly switched course and hurried into the Old Coffee House instead. On the middle of a Monday, it was only half-full, the green baize curtains marking off the private booths drawn back. A cluster of foreign merchants murmured over their coffee; a country cousin come to town smoked a pipe and slowly perused a paper. A group of men had moved on from coffee to cherry bounce and were talking merrily in one corner.

The proprietor, John Byrne, put down the rag he’d been using to sop up a spill of coffee. “It’s not a lodge night, is it, Mr. Colden?”

The commerce of the city might have moved to the new Tontine Coffee House, but the members of the Grand Lodge remained loyal to the Old Coffee House, holding their meetings in the long room upstairs.

“No, I was just in need of convivial company. Mrs. Colden is holding a meeting of the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children.”

Mr. Byrne reached for a pot and a cup. “I’ll add a tot of rum to your coffee, then, shall I?”

Cadwallader looked at the merry group in the corner. “No, just the coffee—but might I beg a favor of you?”

“I’d never say you nay, Mr. Colden. I know you’d never ask anything to my dishonor,”

joked Mr. Byrne.

Unless he wasn’t joking. He actually seemed quite serious about it. Cadwallader suspected that made him very dull. It might be nice, just once, he thought wistfully, to be the sort of person who asked mad and impossible favors, who became embroiled in duels and raised notices in the papers.

Like Brockholst Livingston. Or Alexander Hamilton.

Sadly, Cadwallader resigned himself to a life of unremarkable virtue. “Would you mind asking if anyone saw a sleigh running without bells on Sunday before Christmas? That would be the night of the twenty-second of December.”

The Old Coffee House might no longer be the hub of commerce it once was, but a broad array of people still wandered through those old doors.

John looked up from filling the pot. “The night of the twenty-second of December? That’s the night that girl—”

“It is. So you see why it might be important.”

John raised his voice. Over the assembled chatter of the company, he bellowed, “Gentlemen! Anyone here see a sleigh running without bells the Sunday before Christmas? There you are,”

he added to Cadwallader, passing over his tray. “Well, then. You! You look like you’ve something to say.”

The man Cadwallader marked as a country cousin took his pipe from his mouth. “I didn’t see a sleigh, but I saw a sleigh track, hard by the Manhattan Well—up the new road Colonel Burr had built. Monday before Christmas, it was.”

Monday before Christmas. The day after Elma Sands disappeared. Depending on the time of day, it might be relevant. Or it might not. “What kind of track was it?”

“A one-horse sleigh. I noted it because it ran so close by the well. Mind you, I said to my wife, that sleigh drove so close by the wall it’s a wonder it didn’t turn over.”

“Where did the sleigh track go?”

“Up toward the balloon house. I thought somebody had missed their way because there’s no road there—dangerous sort of driving.”

Especially in a sleigh with no lights or bells. If it was the sleigh with no lights or bells. They’d have had no need to drive up to the balloon house, unless Levi had needed to go up that way to turn the sleigh around—or the horse had got spooked and got away from him.

Cadwallader wasn’t entirely sure this had any bearing on his case, but he did his best to hide his disappointment. “I thank you, sir. And your name is?”

“William Lewis.”

After a pause, the man added, “I noted there was a board off the well. Left a gap, it did. Maybe as much as a foot across. Careless, I thought it.”

A large man, part of the happily inebriated group in the corner, unfolded himself with some difficulty. “I think I saw your sleigh. Running without lights or bells? It nearly ran me down.”

“The Sunday before Christmas?”

“I’d been called out to a christening at Dr. Pilmore’s church—”

“Christ Church on Ann Street?”

commented a man at another table. “I tried to hear one of his sermons once, but there wasn’t even room to stand at the back! He’s a powerful preacher, that one.”

“And a lengthy one,”

said the man who’d been to the christening, raising a general laugh from his friends, who appeared to have had enough cherry bounce to find just about anything funny. “It was late when we made our way out. I took up two friends in my sleigh, and we’d just made it up the Bowery, as far as the middle stone, and then down to Broadway, when a sleigh came on at a full gallop—no bells to give warning, running full tilt right down the middle of the road.”

“Is there room for two sleighs to pass there?”

asked the man who hadn’t been able to hear Dr. Pilmore preach.

“Hardly! It took some pretty fancy driving, I tell you,”

boasted the driver. “They didn’t even slow, not even when we huzzahed at them. And it was a dark horse too. We didn’t see a thing until they were nearly upon us. I thought we were going to go over for sure.”

“Did you see who was in the sleigh?”

Cadwallader asked eagerly.

“I was too busy trying not to land in the ditch. There were two or three people in it, but that’s all I can say. You can ask my friends if you like—they weren’t so busy with the reins.”

“I’d be much obliged if they’d call on me at 47 Wall Street. Anyone with any information about a sleigh on that night can call on me at 47 Wall Street.”

“I’ll put the word about. We all want to do what we can for that girl. It was all anyone was talking about here for days.”

Byrne paused for a moment and then added, slowly, “Ezra Weeks has a horse for sale. He put up a notice here in the coffee shop.”

“When did he put it up for sale?”

“Not so long ago.”

Byrne’s eyes met his. “I hear it’s a dark horse.”

Cadwallader thanked him again and stumbled out, feeling drunk though he’d touched only coffee and not the rum he’d been offered. At that, he didn’t even remember drinking his coffee, although the sour taste in the back of his mouth and the grit between his teeth told him he had. He walked home in a daze and had to read Jack the Giant-Killer three times before David was satisfied.

He needed to see that horse.

What with one thing and another it wasn’t until the following afternoon that he was able to make his way to upper Greenwich Street, having first managed to put Maria in a temper, misplace several important documents, and burn a hole in the back of his frock coat standing too near the fire.

It wasn’t until he was halfway up Greenwich Street that Cadwallader realized the folly of his actions. He couldn’t pretend to be thinking of buying the horse; Ezra Weeks knew exactly who and what he was. And to ask to see the horse outright would tip his hand and give them time to prepare their answers and hide any evidence of the sleigh’s having been taken out without bells that night.

Cadwallader slowed, contemplating the lowering prospect of returning home empty-handed, the hour’s wasted effort, the sense of having failed again. He was weighing the advantages and disadvantages, wondering which way to go, when a woman hurried up to him, dragging a small boy behind her.

“Mr. Colden?”

Her breath showed in great puffs in the cold air.

“Yes?”

He didn’t think he knew her. She looked like she might be one of Maria’s widows. Her shawl and apron were clean but neatly patched, and the boy’s coat was too short in the wrists.

“I saw you from my window and came down as fast as I could.”

She drew in a deep breath. “My name’s Margaret Freeman. My husband told me you were asking about a sleigh without bells. He was at the Old Coffee House yesterday. Stop tugging at me, Henry!”

Henry gave Cadwallader a resentful look.

“You saw the sleigh?”

Cadwallader looked at her with more interest.

Despite John Byrne promising to ask his patrons, not a single other person had come forward yet with any credible word of the sleigh, although one not entirely sober person had told him he’d seen a sleigh bearing the Archangel Michael with a flaming sword. On recollection, though, the Archangel Michael’s sleigh had bells, the man had decided. What sort of madman drove a sleigh without bells?

“It was that night—the Sunday before Christmas. I was on my way home from meeting with my children—yes, Henry—and I had to pull them out of the way as the sleigh went past us. There were two men and a woman in the middle, all laughing very loud.”

“Two men and a woman, you say?”

“I saw them clear,”

she said. “They were all talking and laughing very lively, particularly the woman.”

“What time was it?”

“A quarter past eight,”

she said decidedly.

“Might it have been any later?”

Cadwallader asked, but without much hope.

It was the wrong number of people in the sleigh and there wasn’t any way Levi could have got Elma to the stable and into the sleigh that quickly. They hadn’t left the Ring house until nearly a quarter past. It seemed strange there would be two sleighs without bells that night, but it was quite possible that this woman just hadn’t noticed the bells in the general din of the street.

The woman was firm on the point. “I know particular because I looked at the clock on the mantel as soon as we were inside—meeting ran long and I needed to get the children to their beds.”

Unless . . . A second man, waiting in the sleigh—holding the horses, harnessed and ready to go. All Levi would have to do would be to lead Elma out and into the sleigh, wherever it was waiting.

“Mr. Colden? Sir?”

Cadwallader bowed formally. “Mrs. Freeman, I can’t tell you how helpful you’ve been. You, as well, young man.”

The boy stuck out his tongue at him.

Cadwallader didn’t care. He could see the case unfolding before him. He had the why of it and now the how. Levi Weeks had courted Elma Sands; he had enjoyed her favors; he had lured her to the well under promise of marriage, spirited her off in his brother’s sleigh, and cruelly and foully murdered her.

Just one last question puzzled him. Who was the second man in the sleigh?