Duel with the Devil (3 page)

But as the month wore on, the news of yellow fever watches in other cities on the Atlantic seaboard grew ominously quiet.
Philadelphia’s board of health, it was said, had stopped issuing notices of the week’s burials—and had stopped talking to New York at all about their mortality records. Over on Greenwich Street, a seventeen-year-old merchant’s daughter, Elizabeth de Hart
Bleecker, would be one of the first to find out why.

There’s a Negro man dying outside
, she told her sister one Friday.

Bearing water that the prostrate man was whispering for, they cautiously approached the shivering mass lying in their back alley. He was a sailor on the
Havannah
, he said, and had just landed a few days earlier. The girls quickly sent for a doctor, who immediately had the man borne off to quarantine on Staten Island. The symptoms were unmistakable and horrifying: As one of the fever’s very first chroniclers described its victims with brutal directness, “
they void and vomit blood.”

These were
the fever’s stigmata: sores and blood, seeping from the ears and eyes and orifices—even from the pores of the skin itself—and a loathsome black vomit that resembled coffee grounds. They were the signs of almost certain death within days, if not hours. Victims became delirious with fever and bled from eyes stained a frightening yellow.

A few held out hope that the cases were isolated: The editor of the
New-York Mercantile Advertiser
, zealous as always on behalf of merchants, insisted that Philadelphia’s mortality rate was “
by no means alarming.” Why should New York worry? But travelers arriving at the port told a different story: The yellow fever was now
in Providence, it was in
Newburyport, and it was indeed
in Philadelphia. Though Levi and Elma and Hope couldn’t leave town, the mistress of their boardinghouse could and did. By August, even the
New-York Mercantile Advertiser
hardly blamed her or anyone else with the means for fleeing the city. In fact, at that point the paper’s editor had nothing at all to say on the matter—for he himself
was dead from yellow fever.

B
Y
S
EPTEMBER
11, 1799,
THE DEATHS IN
M
ANHATTAN WERE GETTING
to William Laight. He sat down that day to mark out his journal, a humble affair with columns lined in by his own hand, where each day, at 8
A.M.
, 3
P.M.
, and 8
P.M.
, the Greenwich Street merchant faithfully recorded the wind speed, direction, and temperature. It was a peculiar fascination, one that few others followed. But now the inexorable and mysterious cycle of fever stared back at him in those figures. On July 3, a clear day of 72 degrees and southerly winds, there’d been the first fateful hint: “Rumour
of Yellow Fever at Philadelphia,” he’d penned into a margin. Days after showers on July 9, the fever struck New York. Within a couple of weeks dry heat had set in—“
Dog days begin,” he’d written on the twenty-ninth—and within five days, the fever disappeared. Then, on August 10, “
A shower in the night—Rumour of Yellow Fever.” It was the same mysterious and deadly cycle every time: showers followed by warm weather, an ominous pause of a few days, and then …

September was the worst.

“Above ten have daily died of the Fever during this Month.…
Oh, oh!!!!!!!!!!!!,” Laight wrote miserably in his journal.

The lucky ones had already left—“
near 1/3 of the inhabitants have removed,” he admitted in one annotation. Entire newspaper columns filled with notices of “
Autumn Residences” of those “removed for the sickly season.” One local observed, “
As soon as this dreadful scourge makes its appearance in New York the inhabitants shut up their shops and fly from their houses into the country.
Those who cannot go far, on account of business, remove to Greenwich [Village].”

Manhattan was still small enough that Greenwich Village was indeed something of a separate village. Two miles north of City Hall, and reached only after passing through meadows and pasturage, it was still remote enough that residents addressed their letters from “Greenwich, NY.” Its sandy soil had good drainage, which many suspected had something to do with its relative freedom from feverish miasma, though nobody was quite sure why.

William Laight lived farther south on Greenwich Street, in a neighborhood still deemed less hazardous than the docksides during the fever. But it was an uneasy compromise. No Manhattan street was entirely safe, not least because householders took to
firing off muskets and cannons, in the desperate notion that the percussive shock would destroy the miasma. Guns didn’t kill the fever, but—after one twelve-year-old boy wickedly loaded balls into a pistol—they did manage to
kill a little girl as she stood in her father’s shop.

Others reached in desperation for patent medicines. “Very efficacious in preventing the yellow fever,” promised
Lee’s True and Genuine Bilious Pills—which, conveniently, were also a sovereign remedy “after a debauch by eating or drinking.” For those who followed the fashions of Europe, there were
Four Herb Pills by “Dr. Angelis, of Italy”—a place where “sometimes the same Malignant Fever prevails.” More patriotic sorts had
New York Anti-Bilious Pills, which also brashly promised to cure “asthma, gout, pains in the head, fainting, worms, excruciating pains, frequent vomiting, bloody flux, piles, palsey, apoplexy, and last of all consumption.”

But among Manhattanites, the suspicion had formed that their many ills would not find true relief in pills or balms, and that any man who actually solved the problem might indeed deserve to be richly rewarded.
Laight had closely allied himself to local political mastermind Aaron Burr, who was undertaking an ambitious project that would save the city—and, perhaps, their Republican Party.

The solution, they believed, was in running water.

L
EVI
W
EEKS
’
S
landlady hadn’t stayed around to find out if they were right. Instead, Mrs. Catharine Ring was being jarred and jostled, enduring the rutted path out of the city with all the patience her Quaker faith could muster. The coach’s carriage seating literally used a suspension: It rested on leather belts strapped to the frame, sending every shock slamming through the compartment. More miserably, her sister Hope and her cousin Elma were not with her, even though they were some of her closest family; Hope Sands had grown up with her in upstate New York, and Elma Sands—the offspring of a single mother, her father long departed for South Carolina—had now been living with the Rings for three years, working in the family millinery when her precarious health allowed. The three women were all nearly the same age, in their early twenties, and Hope and Elma would have been welcome company for Mrs. Ring. But help was needed at the boardinghouse—and like so many others, Elma had been sickly a good part of that summer. It was possible that she simply couldn’t withstand the slow, jolting carriage ride over rough roads into the countryside. And so, with the meadows and old Dutch farmsteads of Manhattan receding behind her, Mrs. Ring left Levi, Elma, and Hope in a city burning with fever.

The running of the boardinghouse, and the vital income that it produced for the Ring family, would be left to her husband, Elias. He was not the most practical man, it had to be admitted. First there was the
flour mill he’d tried with his friend Caleb in upstate New York, a fifty-four-acre spread in Dutchess County on the worryingly named Murderer’s Creek. That arrangement hadn’t quite worked out. Next Elias had brought his wife, her sister, and her cousin to the city; he first tried to make a go of it as
a mechanic and an inventor, then at
running a general store, and then at
running a millinery. Now he was stuck in the city, in charge of a boardinghouse that even his own wife didn’t want to stay in anymore.

The Rings did not demand that the remaining boarders abide by their Quaker religion, but they expected them to remain dignified in their life and labors. And labor they did: Levi left the house each morning for his brother’s work sites, trailed by his
apprentice, William Anderson. Even with the yearly fever, the city was booming: The annexation of Loyalist property and the rebuilding of entire city blocks had made Manhattan a place of wild growth and speculation. The stock exchange that was run from the Tontine Coffee House ruled over the rise and fall of fortunes in shipbuilding, furs, and timber, and with this new wealth came new mansions.

Lagging behind the other workmen was the newest boarder, a
recently immigrated English merchant named Richard David Croucher.
Dapper and beginning to gray
as he approached the age of forty,
his tall and thin form could be seen on the streets as he set out to haggle over cloth and linens. Back at the boardinghouse, he’d talk animatedly to proprietor Elias Ring and the three unmarried ladies of the house—cousins Hope and Elma, and
another boarder, named Margaret Clark. Croucher couldn’t help but keep a watchful eye on them; as did, it seemed, the other men in the house.

W
ITH THE
streets half-emptied by the fever, Croucher proceeded over to the market daily. He made frequent outings for food, having insisted on being a
roomer
but not a
boarder
at the Ring house: He paid each week for his room and fireplace but did not sit at meals in the dining room. When he was in the mood to spend, there was always roast joint at the tavern, or dubious local specialties like
Humbert’s bread and Aunt Roach’s pies. For everything else, there were the city markets, where you could buy plate-sized oysters and leeks, and—if Hebraically inclined—could stop off at a kosher
stall placarded
JEW
’
S MEAT
.

To a well-dressed Englishman like Croucher—an expert in cloth, and the kind of man who would keep his collars stayed and wig powdered even in the summertime—walking up Greenwich to
the market was a sartorial nightmare. Americans didn’t appear to
care
about clothing in the withering summer months.
Girls went barefoot in the street, or kicked off their shoes and walked in stockings, perhaps inspired by the newly fashionable peasant wear of the French Revolution. Men stripped down to cotton frocks, like sleepwalkers in their nightclothes; that some still donned their powdered wigs made it more of a travesty. But worst of all was the alarming appearance of vagrants—dirty, disheveled, even worse dressed than the servants, and peering hungrily into vacant homes.

“
Our streets are filled with straggling fellows,” the
New-York Daily Advertiser
complained on September 19, 1799, right after Croucher had moved in. “Under the pretence of begging, [they] are no doubt making observations on houses and stores, to commit nightly depredations on those that are left unoccupied.”

It was true: Neither wealth nor piety shielded residents. That week no less than Willett Hicks, a rotund merchant nicknamed “the Bishop of the Quaker Church,”
found his Pearl Street shop broken into, and a iron chest carried off. Inside was a gold watch and dozens of pieces of his monogrammed silver—everything from spoons and tongs to teapots and milk pitchers. Then the nearby
Flood and Tracy grocery shop was raided. Another local burgher, John Sickles, happened to walk past his darkened clothing store at midnight and out of habit tried each of its three doors; the third unexpectedly swung open to reveal
thieves robbing him of fifty vests, and he was promptly stabbed in the face for his trouble. When the thieves were pursued back to a hideout, confederates were found melting silver into crude ingots that still had bits of stolen spoons sticking out.

As each night fell and the city burned with fever outside, residents barred their doors to thieves and waited. The wakeful boarders of
208 Greenwich could hear … 
something
. Unable to sleep in the humid evening air, Levi’s apprentice might have been the first to notice the hushed movements across the creaking wooden floors, the bedroom doors locked in the night, the stirrings in the very frame of the building.
Something
could be discerned through the
walls. Not the rifling of any thief. It was the sound of two people—and not the sound of Quaker chastity.