by Paul Collins
One man felt distinctly unmoved as he bustled about his business in the Insurance Room of the Merchants’ Coffee House. John Shaw had a busy wine shop down on Pearl Street, and he was not about to waste time mourning the rebel whose war had stripped so many old gentry of land and business.
“It is a pity General Washington had not died five and twenty years ago,” he snapped.
The country was still sharply politically divided. Tradesmen and farmers naturally gravitated toward the party of Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson in their tavern talk, while their merchants and masters just as naturally took to John Adams and Alexander Hamilton’s moneyed Federalists. After all, Federalist control of the banks meant that if they wanted a line of credit for business, they had to back the party of Adams and Hamilton. But among some merchants that supported Hamilton and his Federalists, there remained a hangover of Loyalism from the war—and while the past decade had nurtured a vociferous American nationalism, they still retained warm feelings toward the old country. For a few coffeehouse patrons such as Shaw, it went beyond that: A couple of years earlier, one of them had indignantly raised a British flag over the Merchants’ before it got ripped down by an equally indignant patriot.
I said, Shaw repeated, it’s a pity General Washington didn’t die five and twenty years ago.
No one rose to the provocation. Not everyone had loved the man, true, but he had led America through its darkest days. Now, after three years of bitter partisan battles under Adams, doubts were all that remained—and it was with a certain foreboding that publisher Charles Snowden hurried over to his New-York Daily Advertiser print shop to compose an elegy on the spot for his evening edition. “WASHINGTON was our pride, our guardian, and our defense,” he quickly wrote. “Amidst threatening storms of some violence, amidst the more dangerous convulsions of party rage, it was still our consolation that WASHINGTON lived.”
Now the country’s great unifier was gone. It seemed as if the partisans of Jefferson and Adams might crack the fragile republic apart by the following year’s election. For the British-leaning Federalists, there was the spectacle of France’s new democracy spinning into frightening anarchy and ruin—while to French-leaning Republicans, the roundly condemned censorship of the Alien and Sedition Acts smacked of monarchy. And there were more subtle moral fissures slowly forming in this new country as well, the kind that could be seen right next to Washington’s death notice in the New-York Gazette, where there ran an ad headlined A NEGRO MAN TO BE SOLD CHEAP.
But for now, at least, the city voiced a singular grief. Out on Wall Street, John Shaw ran into one of Washington’s old soldiers, Colonel Mansfield, who repeated what he’d heard Shaw say in the Insurance Room. The wine merchant quickly realized he was in trouble: He’d never said those words in the coffeehouse, he insisted.
“It’s a damned lie!” he blustered.
The old colonel did not like hearing his general spoken ill of, but he liked being called a liar even less. He promptly flogged the wine merchant in the middle of Wall Street, and Shaw did not find any defenders. Some New Yorkers, it seemed, still approved of swift justice.
“WHAT MEANS this melancholy sound of Bells, which daily strikes our ears?” the Reverend Linn’s voice rang over the pews of the North Dutch Church. “What means this sorrow which marks the face of every Citizen?”
The city that Sunday was swathed in black, from the veils hung over women’s faces to the armbands worn by the men. In the distance muffled bells rang from every church; by order of the city council, the bells had been wrapped so as to toll in a ghostly, mournful chorus.
“What mean these sable ensigns that hang in our Churches?” the elderly minister called out, motioning at the black crepe newly hung over the pews. “We are witnesses this day that no character, however exalted, that no services however long continued and extensive, can save from the stroke of Death.”
Nearly all the city had gathered in melancholy masses—all, that is, except for Levi Weeks. After breakfasting in the boardinghouse, he trooped over to his brother’s lumberyard for a day of hard work. Even Ezra Weeks himself hadn’t stayed home, but Levi was young and ambitious; in any case, he had to make doors for the new house of Mr. Cummings, and the planes and saws wouldn’t work themselves.
Levi had a good deal of labor ahead of him. Cummings was a wealthy merchant with a growing business on Broadway and a new two-story home, and Levi had been handed an order for eight doors, all of different sizes. As ten o’clock approached, the sun was shining fully on the low wooden houses by the corner of Greenwich and Harrison, and it was turning out to be a fine day outside—as good as any that week for tackling the job.
Damn it.
Levi sprawled onto the ground, his boot caught—he’d torn a gash in his knee, the bright red blood oozing in the cold morning air.
His brother was still out at the church; straightening himself, Levi hobbled back down Greenwich to the boardinghouse by the corner of Barclay Street. Inside, he ran into another boarder, Sylvanus Russel, who was certain the carpenter wouldn’t make it back out to one of the later church meetings that Sunday.
“Levi, you won’t be able to go out today,” he said, peering at his bloody knee.
“I am determined to,” Levi insisted, before allowing, “tonight.”
Elma fussed over him; as ill as she had been much of the fall, and for all the moodiness she had about her, it was the rare chance for her to tend to someone else. She followed him upstairs and plastered his knee, and he rested awhile in his room. Illness and injury were common enough plights that boardinghouse beds, coarsely built of poplar and painted green, were always constructed low to the ground, the better to crawl into and out of when sick or dying. By the afternoon, though, he and Elma were back downstairs and sitting by the fire in the common room while he nursed his banged-up knee. It was proving a sleepy Sunday indeed: The theater had even canceled the day’s performance of Lover’s Vows out of deference to the late president. Eventually, Elma’s company could no longer quiet the carpenter’s restlessness. As the sun set, Levi plowed through a large dinner, intent on going back to the lumberyard to finish the day’s work.
Elma disappeared back upstairs and dressed to go out for the evening as well.
“Which looks best?” she asked Mrs. Ring. She’d picked out a calico gown and a white dimity petticoat, and long white ribbons—though such choices would matter little until she found another muff. She was missing hers, and the thick, pillowlike mittens were a necessity on a night like this.
Levi stepped in with his coat still on his arm—and though nearly dressed, Elma vanished behind a curtain.
“Where’s Elma?” he asked absently.
“She is hid behind the bed,” Mrs. Ring said primly.
“Don’t mind me,” the carpenter scoffed. “I want you to tie my hair.”
His long hair secured and coat arranged, Levi stepped out into the falling darkness of Greenwich Street.
As Mrs. Ring lit the candles in the common room, the front door groaned with her husband’s return from the Friends meeting. For an inventor, Elias was curiously slow to fix their cockeyed door; but then again, so were the carpenter, apprentice, and shipwright who lived in the boardinghouse. Elias settled into the commons room with his boarders Sylvanus and Lacey—all while Elma dithered over her dress and looked impatiently outside.
She had just gotten around to borrowing a muff from a neighbor when Levi stepped back in.
He wasn’t staying long. His brother had been entertaining guests, it seemed, and so now he’d need to go over yet a third time—to finally get the day’s work done.
“The clock has just struck eight,” Mrs. Ring marveled.
He’d be putting in a late Sunday indeed, but it couldn’t be helped. The boarders and the Rings went off to bed, and after a brief respite in his room, Levi departed once again, his footsteps coming heavily down the boardinghouse staircase. Mrs. Ring, being in a ground-floor bedroom, couldn’t help but put her ea
r to the door.
What are you doing? asked Elias drowsily.
Shh.
She could hear—she thought—another person following Levi, and then a whispering in the hallway. The hushed voice stopped, cut off by a loud groan from the half-broken front door—and then, nothing more.
Mrs. Ring blew out her candle, and the heavy silence of a long, dark winter’s night descended.
LEVI’S APPRENTICE paced the parlor and tended to the fire, passing the time. He shared a room with the carpenter, but as keys were expensive and carefully protected, it was only Levi who could unlock its door. And now, after returning home for the evening, the boy was locked out; even Mrs. Ring couldn’t get him in.
It was ten o’clock when Levi got back, tired from his work.
“Go to bed,” he sighed to his young apprentice, fishing the key out of his pocket. He spotted Mrs. Ring, up in her bedclothes, lingering by the edge of the parlor.
“Is Hope got home?” Levi asked.
“No,” she replied. There was the Friends meeting, and Hope—unlike her cousin Elma—was the kind of convert who would stay late. But that, at least, left someone else for him to pass the time with before turning in.
“Is Elma gone to bed?”
“No,” Mrs. Ring said, fussing about the room a bit. “She is gone out. At least, I think I saw her ready to go, and have good reason to think she went.”
Elias was up now as well, and Mrs. Ring shooed him away.
“I’m surprised she should go out so late at night—and alone,” the carpenter mused.
“I’ve no reason to think she went alone,” Mrs. Ring said primly.
Levi, sitting by the fire, considered this thoughtfully for a moment, and then rested his head heavily against his hand. He wasn’t going to bother asking who she might have gone out with. Except for Croucher, the boardinghouse residents were young—even the Rings themselves were still in their twenties—and for a hardworking carpenter, the subtle currents of courtships could be too much trouble to work out.
Dawn broke the next morning over a cold and cloudy sky, and Levi readied himself for the usual breakfast. You could expect bread, cheese, preserved apples, eggs, and a solid draft of warm beer. Tea and coffee were only slowly taking hold at breakfast in the finer houses, and the city’s old Dutch families still drank cocoa at breakfast—but for a kitchen full of groggy apprentices and artisans, warm beer remained the drink of choice in the morning. With the new water service installed in only a few households, warm beer was the best way to start the day’s work without being seized by dysentery.
Not everyone was at breakfast, of course—Croucher, living cheaply as he did, refused to pay for a home-cooked meal, and Elma hadn’t gotten up either, though she was enough of a layabout that it was hardly worth noting. When Levi got back to the boardinghouse for lunch, though, he still did not find her at the table.
“Is Elma got home?” he asked as he came in.
“I have not seen her,” Mrs. Ring said plainly. “I expect she is upstairs.”
“She’s not in the second story,” he called back down in a puzzled tone, and then headed back out to work again. If the weather had been a bit rough, Elma might well have simply stopped off and turned in at the boardinghouse of Henry Clement, up by Lispenard’s Meadow; and yet, as hours passed, and as the other boarders returned home, there remained a curious silence from Elma’s untouched room.
Have you the muff that Elma borrowed last night? asked her neighbor Elizabeth.
Mrs. Ring sat Elizabeth by the fire and sent over to Clement’s for it; surely it was still there with Elma.
“I guess she has gone to be married,” sighed Elizabeth. A rather scandalous theory, to be sure, but young women were known to resort to running off—particularly when decency demanded that they do so.
These were things little spoken of, and even less written of. Oh, there was the occasional gossip during a trial—just recently, when eighty-two-year-old Gideon Washburn got caught in sin with his horse, and both were sentenced to death—that got talked about. And there were the books, never shown openly but purchased surreptitiously from a pharmacist or printer, or obtained by asking around down by the docks—guides such as Aristotle’s Master-Piece, which amid its painstaking explanations of generative organs and medieval humors, promised forbidden knowledge. A new illicit local edition was circulating around the city, cheekily attributed on the title page to “The Company of Flying Stationers.” Hiding on page 85 was a recipe of chamomile, fennel, and mallow roots that promised to induce abortion. For more fortunate readers, it reminded them that “the action of the clytoris in women is like that of a penis to man,” and the key to “brifk and vigorous” enjoyments—especially with “cares and thoughts of business drowned in a glafs of rofy wine.”
Such things might be done—but not spoken of aloud in a decent boardinghouse. Marriage, particularly when Elma was an illegitimate child herself, was perhaps the least scandalous reason that she might have left. And what else could account for a girl borrowing nice clothes and running off like this?
“Married or not,” Mrs. Ring clucked over Elma and the missing garment, “I think it very ungenerous not to return it.”
But then word arrived back from Henry Clement himself, and the ladies were almost startled out of their sitting-room chairs.
Elma hadn’t been over there at all last night.
As the day passed, the two women continued their searching looks at the carpenter. Had he gone out that evening with Elma? I have looked into her room some fifty times waiting for her, Mrs. Ring snapped at him. I looked more than fifty, he replied sorrowfully. Little more was spoken that day: Little more needed to be. If she had not gone out with him, or with anyone else in the boardinghouse, then the reasonable supposition was that she had needed to resort to a procedure—one of a hidden birth, or the quelling of a new pregnancy. And the longer she was gone, the more likely it was that something had gone very wrong.
Night fell, and she had still not returned.
THE NEXT morning’s New-York Daily Advertiser ran a new notice pleading for the help of its readers at solving a mysterious disappearance:
STOLEN
Twelve Silver tea SPOONS, marked on the handles with the initials S.B. in cyphers. The spoons are large and plain, and have been but little used. Any information respecting them will be thankfully received, and if the spoons, or any of them, can be recovered, a handsome reward will be given, and no questions asked. No. 112 Chatham Street, two doors above the tea water pump.
There was not, however, any word of Elma. One might advertise for missing spoons, but not a missing woman—for unlike cutlery, a woman may want to be lost. But if Elma had not quietly gone to a midwife, then where was she? Some kind women in Boston had recently started a Female Humane Society for those who found themselves in a delicate situation, but such help was not so readily found in Manhattan.
Breakfast passed uneasily; the worry could now be read on Mrs. Ring’s face. One by one, the boarders stood up and departed for work, until only Levi and the landlady were left at the table. She then paced back and forth across the parlor, over and again, until Levi stood and took her arm.
“Mrs. Ring, don’t grieve so.… Things will turn out better than you expect.”
She looked at him in a long, painful silence: What did he know that would give her hope? But he had nothing to add. Gently releasing her arm, the carpenter pulled on his hat and—awkwardly, without another word—shook open the stubborn front door and stepped outside.
It was a busy day, with scarcely any token at all that Christmas was approaching. While German settlers down in Pennsylvania made much of hoisting a pine tree in honor of St. Nicholas, in Manhattan the old Dutch traditions merely regarded December 25 as a rather subdued holy day. This one, though, was looking like it might be particularly joyless. The hours stretched into afternoon and then evening at the Ring household, with still no trace of Elma; their neighbor Elizabeth was growing a g
ood deal less concerned about her missing muff than about the girl who had borrowed it.
Where had she gone?
The passing of another evening brought no answer. Christmas, as ever in Manhattan, passed with so little notice that many shops didn’t even close for the day; the theater stayed open, and the new issue of the New-York Spectator arrived at coffeehouses, ready to fuel the day’s latest arguments. A snowfall that week had made for a white Christmas, though the only man much interested in that was Noah Webster, who hobbled clubfooted along the frozen streets. Dr. Webster was not one for sentimental nonsense about snow on Christmas—he was, a local mused, of “passionless immoveable countenance, sarcastic and malicious even with children”—but he was a great believer in hard winters warding off pestilence.
“A green Christmas makes a fat Church-yard,” he snapped.
But for the few people who felt festive enough to struggle through the snow, there was still the old Christmas tradition of slogging out into the swamps and meadows to go fowling. The sport had become rather more refined with the arrival of French refugees from the Revolution; the exiled gentry were fine marksmen at shooting on the wing, and had started a new fashion in Manhattan for beautifully carved double-barreled shotguns. The reports of fowling pieces could be heard cracking over Lispenard’s Meadow, where turkeys and pheasant fell from the sky and bled into the snow. The city had tried every once in a while to end these hunts, but the meadows retained a little of the wildness of old times; and so, for that matter, did some of the hard-bitten old Dutch and new Scotch families living on its borders.
But watching the festive slaughter, one might have spotted a peculiar detail on one of these tough and impassive women dwelling by the meadow: On her hands, she wore a scuffed and curiously familiar quilted muff.
