Duel with the Devil

D
UEL WITH THE
D
EVIL

A
NDREW
B
LANCK HAD JUST BEEN SITTING DOWN TO LUNCH WITH
a horsebreaker when Elias Ring and Joseph Watkins showed up and battered on his door. It was a bitterly cold day, and it took a fairly tough sort to live out in Lispenard’s Meadow—but the boardinghouse owner and his neighbor, an ironmonger, were not to be trifled with.

Where did you get it?

The well
, Blanck replied. One of Aaron Burr’s new municipal wells was out in the meadow, and Blanck’s son had found a muff, for covering the hands in cold weather, floating in there more than a week before. On Christmas Eve, in fact—just as the bells were tolling for the death of General Washington.

I went to the well the next day and looked in
, he explained,
but I saw nothing
.

Joseph and Elias marched out to the meadow, followed by the horsebreaker. The men threw off the wooden cover and ran a long pole down into the dark hole. Mr. Ring could feel an object in the water, a heavy and inert mass, but he couldn’t hook it. The local boys were now gathering to look, and one was sent back for some rope, with which they created a simple net. This time the mass came up.

There was a tangle of hair floating in the water—a wet shoulder—and a face looking upwards …

I
T WAS A FINE DAY FOR WONDERS
.
G
IANT LOBSTER CLAWS, A LITTLE
pagoda, some unburnable asbestos paper—these were the peculiar riches of a collection that the late Gardiner Baker had begun for his museum nearly a decade earlier, during General Washington’s triumphant first term in office. But in July 1799 the museum wilted in the drowsy Manhattan summer, its hush scarcely broken by the arrival of two young women in plain Quaker dress. Accompanying them was a strapping young man in the simple garb of a carpenter on his day off.

Elma?

The younger of the two women fell all too readily into morbid reverie, and sometimes her cousin Hope had to rouse her. But in a such a place as this, how could one not stop to gaze in wonder? Towering above them was
Gilbert Stuart’s grand oil portrait of Washington—the great man looked out over the museum, a reminder of when the country and the museum itself were both still new and wondrous. Back then, Manhattan was the infant country’s capital, and Baker’s Museum was still housed down on Wall Street in a lovely sky-blue antechamber of the Stock Exchange. Customers paid
two shillings to view an immense and intricate clock that waltzed through an entire concert, get shocked by one of
Baker’s splendid Electrical Machines, and stand in awe of a marvelous work of glass sculpture—
“a
TRANSPARENT MONUMENT
,” the ads promised. A figure of Christopher Columbus, it was lit to a fiery glow by a cunning arrangement of lanterns and chandeliers.

But now the glow was fading.

The sounds of commerce from
Greenwich Street filtered into the new quarters that the old curator’s widow had been reduced to. Not so long ago, the museum had been wildly awake with Gardiner’s latest scheme—
a menagerie of “Living Animals”—including everything from a pair of wolves and a bald eagle to a monkey and a “Mongooz, a beautiful animal from the Island of Madagascar.” Now they had lapsed into silence. Elma’s cousin, Hope Sands, wandered past the nailed-shut storage boxes—filled, perhaps, with old Mr. Baker’s hundreds of volumes of philosophy and natural history—and their fellow boarder Levi Weeks could pause before the
wax figures of the great boxers Mendoza and Humphries, still posed as if ready to clobber each other. Nearby, a figure of Ben Franklin gazed impotently among waxworks of once-titillating feminine “beauties of New York, Annapolis, Salem, and New Haven.”