31 Bond Street (7 page)

C
linton entered the house, dropped his hat on the hall table, and then went to the back parlor where a fire was crackling and woodsmoke was curling from the hearth. Elisabeth was deep in her favorite chair, with a book on her lap. She had a tangled look when she was reading, far away inside a story. She looked up and brushed some hair from her face. He sank into an armchair with his coat still on.

“You’re home for lunch! What a surprise. Was it a hard morning?”

“It was,” he said, slumping back. Elisabeth got up and sat on the arm of his chair and started to unwrap his scarf. She put a finger across his temple and traced the lines of his forehead. He let his eyes close under the warmth of her touch. Then she lifted the coat off his shoulders, and he shifted, allowing her to gently remove each arm from a sleeve, like she was undressing a young boy. Next, she sat down on a footstool and began to unbutton his boots.

“I rode with James to the funeral. I met him at the ferry.”

“Well that’s enough to wear a person out—a carriage ride with James Armstrong and then a funeral. Was it very oppressive?”

“Both were quite oppressive.”

“Well, at least you are done with that dentist. Too bad I can’t say the same about James.”

“Actually, Elisabeth, I have some rather startling news.” She was still sitting on the stool by his feet and looked up, wary.

“Henry?” her tone was chiding, but he heard the tinge of alarm. She knew him too well, and this was not going to be easy.

He sat forward and took hold of her hands, holding them in his, examining them as if they were part of a strange species.

“First of all, I have decided I am taking on the case.”

“Oh, Henry, I suspected you would! Are you really defending that woman?”

“Yes.”

“You have decided this for sure? I hope you have thought it over—this case is a runaway train.”

“I was going to discuss it with you again after I conferred with James, which I just had the chance to do, this morning.”

“Is he in favor of this folly?”

“No, he isn’t. Not at all. I can’t say he is in favor of my taking this case.”

“Well, that’s something to commend him. At least he still has some sense behind that rigid façade.”

“Elisabeth, we’ve come to an impasse.” He had been rubbing her hand, and she pulled it away with a stunned look on her face. “Not you, darling,” he said. “James and I. We’ve had a parting of the minds.”

“But that’s been the nature of your partnership all along. I suppose you two will always disagree.”

“No—we shan’t disagree again, because I am no longer with the firm.” Clinton slumped back in the armchair, as if overwhelmed by the morning’s events. “I have quit, or perhaps it was James that fired me.”

She let out a gasp. “Henry, you are not serious? It came to that?”

“It did. But believe me, it is for the best. I was too comfortable there. I was not doing good work, and I was becoming something of a clown in the office—an affable, but righteous, defender of the oppressed. James was not happy working with a criminal lawyer who defended anyone without a substantial merchant’s bankbook. So I shall strike out on my own. I didn’t plan for it to happen this way, but it is for the best.”

“But what about the Burdell murder? How can you keep on the case? What will you do?” Elisabeth spoke softly, bewildered. He had just sacrificed his job and a large salary and a lesser wife would lash out, or even cry. She had a look on her face now that he had seen before—concerned, but ready to listen. When they had first met he would tell her a story about defending a hardened criminal, with all of its gruesome details, and she would be moved by his passion for securing the rights of both the innocent and the guilty. She would listen quietly, letting him ramble on, until he realized that he had piqued her intellectual curiosity, and she was mulling over the legal arguments, her mind leaping to the best conclusion.

Now, he sensed an opening, and he ran with it. “Darling, this case
is
a runaway train. It’s a runaway train to the gallows. Everyone who has been inside 31 Bond Street in the few days since the murder—Coroner Connery, the District Attorney, the Mayor, the Chief of Police—have a vested interest in pointing the finger at Emma Cunningham. They’ve found the perfect scapegoat in a bedroom upstairs. It’s as if they had commissioned a newspaper artist to draw up a portrait of a fictional murderess, and pinned her name to it. They’ve captured Emma Cunningham in a large frame and pasted the word
guilty
at the bottom. They’ll pass the illustration off to the papers, all the while hoping that mob justice will finish the job.”

“But what if she actually did it? You barely had a chance to interview her. Henry, what if you are defending evil?”

“I only interviewed her for a short period, but she is a woman not unlike yourself. She is a woman whose home was turned upside down during a circumstance of violence. I saw her terror at that upheaval. Regardless of her feelings for the murdered man, I saw that her surroundings were her greatest security. A woman does not desecrate her own home. Why would she commit this violence if it put her children at jeopardy and brought about everything she feared most?”

Elisabeth dropped a moccasin from her lap, and she sat, bewildered. “You really intend to keep on it?”

“I intend to. I intend to get an office, small as it may be, and prepare a defense, and take the case to trial. It will be difficult, but I believe that I am up to the task. Perhaps only I can do it. I will need money to float us for a while. The firm owes me money, and I’ll take a loan out against this house. But I promise you, darling; I will pay the loan back, every cent of it. You shall see.”

She closed her eyes for a minute. He could not tell if she was going to cry or lash out at him.

The cook appeared at the open door of the salon. Seeing them sitting so still, she cleared her throat and then rapped lightly against the doorjamb. Clinton swiveled around.

“Mr. Clinton, Mrs. Clinton, there’s a boy come round by the kitchen door. He comes from your office. He has some things for you.”

“A boy? Oh, yes. I’ll come down,” said Clinton. He stood up and slipped his stocking feet into the moccasins. He helped Elisabeth up, and they followed the cook downstairs where the boy, John, was standing just inside the kitchen door with a cardboard folder wrapped in string.

“John, my boy,” he said.

“I went to your office to find you, like you asked, sir, and they sent me here with a package,” the boy said, offering the document case.

“John, this is Mrs. Clinton, and this is our excellent cook, Mrs. Fullerton. As you see, between the two of them and these ovens, we have an unending source of shortbread.”

Elisabeth pulled out a kitchen chair for the boy.

“John is the young lad who worked at 31 Bond Street,” Clinton explained, “and had the misfortune of finding his master’s body. He continues on as a houseboy under the Coroner’s regime.” Clinton undid the string on the package.

“Are you hungry?” asked Elisabeth. John gave a shy shrug, but she was already reaching for some kitchen flatware and a napkin. “Mrs. Fullerton, pull him off a piece of the beef. And serve him some vegetables if they are ready.” Clinton unwrapped the parcel and looked over the papers.

“James certainly has not wasted time. This is the formal dissolution of the partnership.”

Elisabeth glanced at him as the cook placed a slab of roast beef on John’s plate and served up some roasted carrots and a potato. The boy began to eat the food hungrily.

“I’ll give you a basket to take with you,” she said. “Are they feeding you enough there, at the inquest?” Elisabeth asked John, concerned.

“I think his meals were scarce before, and now he’s just scraping by,” said Clinton, placing the legal papers on the edge of a cupboard. John tried awkwardly to slice the beef, which was very rare, and he chewed it with difficulty.

“Be careful swallowing now, if you’re not used to red meat,” said Elisabeth. She began to cut his meat for him in small pieces. “Henry, do you remember Thayer?” she asked.

“That young lawyer, fresh out of Columbia?”

“Yes, the fellow who came to dinner with his wife. They were going to have a baby; Thayer, wasn’t it?”

“Barnaby Thayer. Why do you ask?”

“He will do the work of ten James Armstrongs,” Elisabeth said. “He is bright and eager and has trial experience. I was very impressed by him.” Clinton was always amazed by how her mind worked. She had scarcely absorbed the news and she was jumping past him, already staffing.

“Mrs. Fullerton,” continued Elisabeth, “Mr. Clinton is the head of a new law office handling the Bond Street murder,” she said.

“My word!” said the cook, turning around from the stove with wide eyes. “The world will be watching this one.”

“If you’re going to be placing bets, keep in mind, we are the underdogs,” said Clinton, putting his arm around Elisabeth and squeezing her tightly. But the worry was not gone from her eyes, and he was terrified of disappointing her. He would go to the bank in the morning for the loan. There would be a slow reduction of niceties, of the things she was accustomed to, like flowers and chocolates and jewelry he brought home as a surprise, and their trips to Hastings in the summer months, where she grew a profusion of roses that rippled along trellises around the cottage.

“You are a courageous woman to be married to me, Elisabeth Clinton Clinton.”

“Brave or foolish, it is the way I want it,” she said back to him.

“Let’s hope our roof holds out. With a new mortgage, that nasty leak will have to wait.” He had been planning to hire a workman to make repairs to the roof of the townhouse after the winter thaw.

“If the roof fails, we’ll live under the stars.”

September 1856, New York City

E
mma sat toward the back of Taylor’s, a ladies saloon, facing the plate glass, watching the men assemble on the street like black figurines, checking their watches. As soon as she had returned to New York from Saratoga, Dr. Burdell had sent her a stream of invitations—to tour upper Manhattan in his carriage, to dine at Delmonico’s, and this evening, to the theatre, to see the Booth brothers in a Shakespeare play. It was a glorious evening, so clear that the city was framed by an iridescent sky and the windows along Broadway shone blood red with the setting of the New Jersey sun.

She sipped from a crystal glass, tasting the raisin flavor of a strong brandy, and poked at the flakes of a crème Napoleon with the prong of a tiny gold fork as yellow cream flowed from its crevices. She lifted each forkful to her mouth carefully, without altering her posture or the balance of her enormous hat.

I am so tired of widowhood,
she thought. She had met her deceased husband, George Cunningham, when she was only fifteen, Helen’s age. He was a prosperous merchant, more than twice her age, and he had turned to watch her when she passed him on the
Brooklyn Promenade one Saturday evening. She went to the railing, looking out at the harbor, and he came over to point out the ships. He reached in his pocket and offered her a dollar. “Would you walk with me?” he asked. He was more distinguished than the mechanics and seamen that strolled along the river walk and offered local girls a trinket to hook arms for the length of the waterfront, and at the end of the walk they’d offer another trinket for a kiss. Somehow she felt safe on this gentleman’s arm, his elbow at her side, in wool broadcloth, scented with fine pipe tobacco. He’d gaze far away across the milky harbor, then back at her, with a caring glance.

They sauntered arm in arm until they reached the end near the sailors’ bars by the ferry slip. He bought two tickets for the boat, and they went to Manhattan, to the Broadway Hotel, which she thought to be the finest place she had ever seen, with a large room that dripped with damask, and he cuddled up against her all night, like a man would a wife.

The experience was a far cry from the weathered frame house on Myrtle Avenue near the Naval Yard, where her father reigned over his children with a wooden board from the broken picket fence. He beat her with it when she returned the following day, never asking where she’d been all night. Rigid with determination, Emma brought all her clothes in a canvas bag when she met Mr. Cunningham the next day, and she never went home again.

He put her up in the city, in nice hotels, and soon after, in a house. When Augusta was born, he rented a larger one on Irving Place, and he never failed to pay the rent. He remained with his wife in his large mansion on the Brooklyn side of the river. “Take pity on me,” he would say, “she is sickly,” if Emma tearfully implored him to stay longer after a short visit. His wife was an unseen specter, frail and nervous, that hovered for years until she finally passed away when Augusta was seven and his second child, Helen,
a toddler. After a ten-month absence, which Emma took to be a proper mourning period, George reappeared and brought them into his Brooklyn house, a gloomy pile, filled with the odor of dust and decay and room after room of family heirlooms. She became its mistress; it was more like a mausoleum, having encased an invalid for years.

They married quietly. Afterward, George retreated into his study with a tumbler of scotch and rarely emerged. His company, Cunningham & Cunningham, bottled spirits, liquor being the family fortune and its downfall. In a short matter of time, George’s drinking accelerated his own bad health, and he accumulated debts while casks of whiskey remained untended at the wharves. In 1854, he went out west to recoup his fortune and gambled the rest of his inheritance on prospects in San Francisco, returning with less than he started with, the gold rush being mostly over. He caught a feverish ailment there and died of complications from it when he returned, like a plague that claimed those who chased after gold. Her husband’s decline had seemed so fast—as if a demon had foreclosed upon his soul, secretly targeting her as well.

But Harvey Burdell is so solid. He rarely drinks
. Emma’s eye was trained casually toward the restaurant window, watching for Dr. Burdell’s arrival. If he came early, she would put on her gloves slowly, smoothing the soft leather on each finger, making him wait. When he did show up, he was twenty minutes late, which sobered her mood like the bitter swig of a root tea. She summoned her gaiety and joined him on the twilit street between the swaying of women’s hoops as the evening traffic thinned on Broadway.

They walked to the theatre, and he told her about his day, which included a difficult dental surgery, a story that lasted halfway to Astor Place. After his story was finished, they sauntered along in silence. After a long pause, Emma ventured to ask softly, “Why is it that you have never married?”

He gazed sternly ahead. “I have no reason to marry,” he answered. “At forty-six, I enjoy my solitary pursuits. I enjoy female companionship, but an independent arrangement suits me best.”

“I do not know what you mean,” she replied coolly, “by an ‘independent arrangement.’”

“Oh, yes you do, my dear,” he said dismissively. “I am not an anxious schoolboy, and you are not an ingenue. You are no doubt aware, at our age, that there is no need to hide behind convention. We can be free of the constraints that society places upon the young. There are many couples, quite prominent in New York, that remain unmarried, retaining their separate residences and who enjoy the physical side of marriage. It is a most sophisticated arrangement.”

The response stung. “I am indeed aware of such independent couples,” Emma said, choosing her words, carefully. “But I would have difficulty with such an arrangement myself. I have my daughters to think of. At their tender age, it is important that my actions stand as an example. They are still young, and I could not steer them toward marriage if I, myself, did not respect the vows.” He wants me, she thought, but is it love? For a moment she felt a twinge of panic, as if he had seen into her past. No, she assured herself, it was more likely that he had a bachelor’s dread of trespass, and she should tread lightly.

“As for your lovely daughters,” he replied, forcing a light tone, “a sensible parent requires only a large bank account to snare a successful suitor. And once that is secured, the job is done.” He laughed, clearly hoping to change the subject.

“It is not so simple as that,” she replied, her voice edging upward. “Even with means, a parent needs to be vigilant. This city provides many traps for young ladies. Many suitors are not what they seem. Some are scoundrels, intent upon a large dowry. A parent must protect a daughter’s interests.”

“If a suitor cared more for the fortune than the bride, he would
need to be after a hundred thousand dollars to make it worth his while,” he said, looking at her, to gauge her reaction.

She hesitated, wondering if he thought she was worth that large a sum. She decided it was best not to reply, for he would guess that he had hit the number close to the mark, exposing her wealth and stature.

Dr. Burdell scratched his chin, summing her up. “We were speaking about our own situation. I am preoccupied with important business at the moment and am in no position to marry right away. I cannot press events. I have a large sum of money at stake, which, if all goes as planned, will soon see a most lucrative return.”

“What is the use of money if it comes into conflict with personal happiness?”

“When speaking of your daughters, you have just implied that you consider a successful marriage to be one where money is of utmost importance. I would think you would see fit to dispense with hypocrisy.”

She was startled by his abrupt turn. She was not used to a man who disregarded the dance of courtship, with its delicate art of concealment.

“Perhaps I can make a suggestion,” said Dr. Burdell, more gently now. “There are often solutions when one is not blinded by convention. My housemistress, Mrs. Jones, has just departed, leaving the upper floors of my house vacant. You and your daughters could come and live at 31 Bond Street. I need a refined woman to oversee my home. It is not an uncommon arrangement, and in the eyes of the outside world, it would not compromise your integrity. You and your daughters might find my house most suitable.”

Stunned, Emma was not sure whether to be insulted or pleased. A bachelor sharing the upper part of his house with a widow was not uncommon, although the widow was usually an elderly woman, with thick legs and a sagging jowl. “A housemistress? For pay?” she asked.

“You could have the rooms without rent; in exchange, you would oversee the servants. I could help you with your investments,” he added gently. “I could offer the protection of a fine home, and we might consider the suitability of marriage at a convenient date, possibly by the spring.”

Emma sensed a window opening where previously doors had been shut, and this sounded very much like a marriage proposal, although an unconventional one. Her lease was soon up, and her funds were perilously low, and there were few options she could afford as grand as the house on Bond Street. The term “arrangement” could mean many things. “Bond Street is a very respectable location,” she said carefully. “My daughters are very active, and I should need the parlors to entertain on their behalf.” She hoped to sound skeptical.

“My patients use the parlor as a waiting room during visiting hours, usually in the morning. After that, the rooms would be at your service. You shall consider my offer then?” he asked. He gazed into Emma’s eyes as if he was searching for approval. “I have something to tell you if you can keep a secret,” he added. “I have a great deal of money invested with a group of prominent financiers, even a politician or two. If my interests prevail, my land in New Jersey, which I have spoken about, will be very valuable. I must conclude my business by the end of the year, or nothing will be gained, for there are others with interests in opposition.”

He lifted a curl from her cheek. “If you were to turn over to me, say, a sum of ten thousand dollars, your investment would help to speed the process. I will certainly see that you—no I say ‘we’—shall enjoy the most handsome returns.”

Startled by the sudden request for money, she stalled. “Well, sir, this seems to be a separate issue. As I have told you, I am not interested in land speculation.”

“There is no need to make a hasty decision. However, I would
like to invite you on a tour of my land,” he said. “I can assure you that any investment will grow greatly. With my own profits, we might build a larger, more modern home on Fifth Avenue.”

Mrs. Cunningham stopped abruptly. “We’d live on Fifth Avenue?” she asked, then color spread across her face when she realized that he had said “we” and she had automatically assumed possession of their next home.

“Well, why not!” he answered jovially. “Fifth Avenue has the largest lots, and plenty of room to build. Soon enough, we will need a bigger residence.”

They had reached the theatre and they entered, arm in arm. Dr. Burdell encountered acquaintances and patients who nodded in greeting. He proudly made introductions. She knew she appeared attractive at his side. The curtain came up, and the actors marched across the stage spouting Shakespeare, wearing embroidered costumes, and gesturing from the turrets of cardboard castles, but she could barely concentrate on the play. She thought about his offer, and the need to maintain appearances, wary not to make any decision that might compromise her. His enthusiasm for their future plans belied his hesitation toward marriage. Her feminine instinct told her that if she were to move in with him at Bond Street, and show him the satisfaction of an intimate domestic life, they would certainly be married by spring.

The play ended with a blaze of trumpets, and the audience rose to the exits. Samuel, Dr. Burdell’s driver, sat waiting atop his carriage outside the theatre. They got in and drove to her home on Twenty-fourth Street. In front of her house, Dr. Burdell engaged in a parting kiss that was more ardent than the others, and she skillfully edged out of the carriage, leaving him longing for more.
A mansion on Fifth Avenue,
she thought,
would be a brilliant place for weddings
.