Duel with the Devil (6 page)

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.

“W
HAT 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 ear 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.

L
EVI
’
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.

T
HE NEXT
morning’s
New-York Daily Advertiser
ran a new notice pleading for the help of its readers at solving a mysterious disappearance:

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 good deal less concerned about her missing muff than about the girl who had borrowed it.

Where had she gone?