Duel with the Devil (8 page)

With the mournful clamp of soldiers’ boots, an empty symbolic urn for General George Washington arrived. Borne on the shoulders of the mayor and seven veterans of the Revolution, it shone atop a burnished symbolic bier, surmounted by an eagle of gilt and black lacquered wood. Among the pallbearers walking stiffly beneath it was Henry Brockholst Livingston, once the aide-de-camp to Benedict Arnold and now a great courtroom rival to Hamilton and Burr. Having come of age just as the Revolution began—in 1799, Hamilton and Livingston were both forty-two years old, and Burr was forty-three—these three men belonged to a group of Americans peculiarly marked out for history, and they now faced the passing of their mentors among wise generals and elder statesmen.

The crowd and ranks of marchers parted as Livingston and the other pallbearers pressed forward through the opened doors of St. Paul’s. Before them scampered twenty-four children—
girls dressed in white robes—clutching baskets and dropping laurel leaves in their path. Their small voices sang out into the echoing chapel:

“
Its appearance was really splendid,” one judge in the crowd noted approvingly. If the day was a final tolling of the bell for General Washington, it might as well have also been a mighty salute to General Hamilton. The procession he’d arranged had brought out the entire city—from the mayor to majors, from bankers to mechanics, from callow students to aged doctors—the present and future of the city alike. Hamilton, Burr, and Livingston were all veterans of the war and part of a generation that had firmly consolidated its influence in the newly born government, while Dr. Hosack and Cadwallader Colden were part of the rising next generation. Nearly born during the war itself, they were the nation’s younger cousins among these founding fathers.

Levi Weeks had worked at times on contracting projects for Hamilton and Burr; such great men were not unknown to him. New York was still small enough that any citizen could easily cross paths with the founders of the young nation. But watching them all gravely walking in procession was to behold the assembled might of the reborn city and nation before one’s eyes. These were ambitious and brilliant men—powerful men—the sort who might hold a simpler man’s life in their hands.

I
NSIDE THE
confectioner’s shop on Pine Street the next morning was a grand spread: platters of gilt gingerbread stamped with the figures of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette; blancmange molded in bas-relief of French officers dueling each other in cocked hats; and marzipan modeled into a grand and beautiful facade of the Palais des Tuileries. The proprietor, in his former life as a French nobleman, had barely escaped the guillotine; forced to learn a trade after arriving penniless in New York, he’d discovered an almost magical skill at conjuring sweets. Monsieur Singeron outdid himself with his New Year’s
plum cake, rich with candied oranges and mace and
lashings of brandy, topped with a
frosting unaccountably patterned into Cupids hiding among rosebushes and hearts shot through with arrows. To begin the year with such romantic sentiment was so unexpected and delightful that Singeron had turned it into a Manhattan fashion.

The rather more tiresome New Year’s traditions, of course, remained unchanged.

“
Some think it is the first year in the Nineteenth century,” one local reported of January 1, 1800. “And others, the last year of the Eighteenth.”

But along with the passing of the century, the memorials to Washington had become impossible to avoid, and relentless. It wasn’t enough that a Mr.
Greenwood had advertised himself as “Dentist to the Late President”—now there were also ads for mourning jewelry, and subscription announcements for everything from
a portrait of Washington (guaranteed to “afford peculiar satisfaction”) to a portrait of
Washington’s
urn
(“executed by the original designer of this much admired ornament”) to fancy-dress-ball tickets that promised the
debut of “the Washington Minuet.”

But New Year’s Day, for Manhattanites, was always a respite from such cares, and it began, like any grand affair in the city should,
in Mayor Varick’s house, as locals filed in at noon from the church service. “There,” recounted Mr. Thorburn, the local nail maker, “they broke the first cookie and sipped the first glass of cherry bounce of the season. From thence they went from house to house and broke their bread with merry hearts.”

This was a much-loved tradition from the Dutch. Local gentlemen made a circuit around the blocks, catching up on all the family news of the previous year while the women of the houses
laid out the riches of the city—tureens of
oysters
pickled in white wine,
cold jellied lamb, plates of macaroons, and glass after glass of brandy. Men staggered from one house to the next well into the night to pay increasingly merry tidings of the new century, the groups picking up revelers from each house and growing in mass and hilarity. “
Before the moon sunk behind the blue hills of the Jerseys,” Thorburn
marveled, “you might see twoscore of these happy mortals in one company.”

As the cold winter evening set in, a few households could sober up with coffee brewed from the wooden pipes that fed clear, cold water from the freshly dug well out by Lispenard’s Meadow. It was on the meadow, in fact, that local resident
Mrs. Blanck heard the curiously offhanded piece of news that had been making the rounds that day: A young Quaker girl had disappeared almost without a word, and maybe the last to see her was the neighbor girl who had lent her a muff.

Mrs. Blanck reached among her winter clothing, and the eyes of her listeners widened.

This one?
she asked.

E
LIAS
R
ING
and his neighbor Joseph Watkins marched up to Andrew
Blanck’s house on the Bowery the next day.

The muff
, they demanded.
Where did your wife find it?

Blanck was surprised: He’d just settled down to
lunch with James Lent and a fellow named Page, men he’d brought to help him break
a horse. Living on the fringes of Lispenard’s Meadow, there were always such matters to attend to: a horse—a good black trotter—had been stolen nearby back in the fall, while
an ownerless steer had just turned up in an enclosure a few weeks ago.

Where did she find it?

The well
, Blanck blurted out.

Nearby,
about midway between Broadway and Bowery, in the valley between the sandy hills at the top and bottom of the meadow, there was a well newly dug by the Manhattan Company. The grandly named Manhattan Well
hadn’t been found suitable for the pipeline, though; another had been chosen, and this earlier attempt was now covered up with wooden planks. Ring and Watkins hoisted up poles to sound the disused well, and set off across the snowy meadow with Blanck and his guests alongside them.

His young son
William had found the muff floating in the water
more than a week ago, the cartman added—on Christmas Eve, in fact—and had brought it home and presented it to his mother.

“
I went to the well the next day and looked in,” Blanck would later explain, “but I saw nothing.”

The men reached the well and tossed aside the snow-covered planks. Inside, the brick-lined walls descended into darkness, as clots of snow and pebbles trickled in from the surface above. Page gingerly lowered the tip of his pole into the well. The bottom was sandy and dark, and the frigid
water that had once been meant for the city’s kitchens had risen unattended to nearly six feet in depth. He gripped the wooden rod and
swept it gently through the water, then suddenly stopped.

There’s something down there
.

James
Lent tried it as well, and nodded—there was a mass deep in the water, but it was too big and heavy for the wooden pole to hook around. Elias Ring looked grimly on as his neighbor grabbed a set of nails and a hammer; the
ironmonger banged irons into the wooden poles, preparing a crude set of grappling hooks. James tried levering the object out with just one, but it was simply
too heavy; for a moment, though, a flash of calico cloth floated up near the surface—and then vanished back underneath.

James kept his weight on the pole, holding the burden in place just below the surface, and the men turned to a boy who had sauntered up.

Go fetch some ropes
, they told him.

Thick coils of
hemp were hurriedly procured from the nearest house, and another man
now joined in—Lawrence Myer,
a fellow teamster of Mr. Blanck’s. With a half dozen men gathered around the hole, the poles and ropes were
rigged into a makeshift net and lowered to gently snag the inert mass in the water.

Ready—one, two, three—lift
. Even with the muscle of two teamsters and an ironmonger among those pulling, the mass was sodden and heavy; it rose slowly under the cradling ropes, breaching the surface and ascending into the cold winter air, streaming water back into the dark well.

A body.

The sickening sag of weight tightened against the ropes as the corpse rolled over, as if inexorably drawn back to its hiding place within the earth. The men righted it and then hauled it up, laying the lifeless form out on one of the well’s planks. This had been a woman, once: Her head lolled to the side, and her hair hung in her face; her feet were bare and her dress torn. A comb and a white ribbon still hung in the disheveled mass of her wet hair.

The horsebreaker paused to stare at the terrible unblinking face—and then, turning away, strode purposefully across the meadow to find a constable.

T
HE CONSTABLE ARRIVED TO FIND A CROWD MILLING ABOUT THE
supine figure laid out on a plank.
Levi Weeks is to blame
, one man insisted to the growing crowd, and the mutterings passed among the gathering citizenry—
he’s who she was last with
.

Determining the claim’s truth was hardly the business of a constable, or indeed of any officer of the law.
Policing largely existed to guard property along the docks, and to maintain a night watch on the poorly lit streets. The watchmen, known as
Leatherheads for the leather helmets that they varnished to ironlike hardness, spent their nights manning guard boxes. If a Leatherhead was unwise enough to doze off, drunk students amused themselves by
tipping the boxes over.

Their daytime counterparts were even less prepossessing. The city’s seven wards
generally had only two constables apiece for waking hours, and they neither walked a beat nor stirred themselves for much of anything else unless a crime victim came to City Hall and asked them. Even then, they were only to fetch or search whoever the victim accused.
Constables were not to investigate anything on their own or even ask a suspect any questions; that was a magistrate’s job.

But murder was different. There was no living victim to lodge a complaint, after all, and there was the added danger of a suspect fleeing such a heinous crime. Communication between authorities across the states remained so crude that a murderer allowed to slip away might reinvent himself altogether in another city. So the
constable had to act, even on mere hearsay and reasonable suspicion. He set off for Levi’s workshop with a few men from the crowd in tow. When the group reached the shop, Weeks didn’t even notice their arrival; indeed, the constable walked right up behind him and tapped the carpenter on the shoulder.

Yes?

Weeks hardly seemed violent. In fact, he appeared surprised to see an officer of the law. And yet he was the one person—the only one—to have any rumors attached to him, claiming that he’d gone out with Elma when she was last seen. But to James Lent, it was hard to believe that the fellow before them might be a murder suspect.

“Is
this
the young man?” he asked the constable.

“Yes,” said the officer, nodding.

The horsebreaker ventured closer and peered at him.

Well
, he finally said—
I am very sorry for you
.

Levi looked at the men gathering about, and read the expressions in their faces.