Duel with the Devil (7 page)

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.

C
APTAIN
R
UTGERS WAS ACCUSTOMED TO HEARING STRANGE IMPORTUNING
requests as he took his
strolls up Greenwich Street. As
warden of the port, he wielded a certain power over all the incoming and outgoing merchant vessels, and could make life difficult indeed for any captain or wholesaler who neglected to pay the right dock fees or file the correct papers. But while Elias Ring was not quite an unknown fellow, the boardinghouse keeper was not the usual sort to stop him in the street.

Have you heard of a muff turning up anywhere?
Ring asked.

Today, of all Sundays, should have been a respite from what would be a busy week—and certainly from interruptions like this. New Year’s was just three days away, with all the new regulations that the turn of both the year and the century would bring, and there were new traders
coming into port from New Orleans and outward bound for St. Thomas to deal with. Captain Rutgers sized up his inquirer.

“It’s an
odd
question,” he finally said.

Ring’s high-pitched voice turned confidential; he explained that he was not so much looking for the missing garment but its wearer.

“
A young woman,” he explained hesitantly—a relation of his wife’s. “Gone a week.”

“What became of her?”

Well, that was just why he’d come to Captain Rutgers; Elias thought that one of the merchants or dockworkers might have
spotted the muff. He had reason to believe—impious as the notion was—that the young girl might have drowned herself.

“A love fit,” he added mournfully. In the muttered opinion of some in the boardinghouse, the fit was over Levi. Rutgers considered the matter for a moment, his breath hanging in the cold and still December air.

“Employ Mr. George Wallgrove,” the captain said finally. “An expert at sweeping the river on—such occasions.”

The need for such services arose often enough that the captain did not need to elaborate. It had not been so long since port
workers by Norton’s Wharf found a despairing man floating facedown in the Hudson, his hat and shoes left quietly on a nearby rock, awaiting an owner who would never return. Such acts of self-destruction were, at least, somewhat less alarming than the
gentleman who had recently stood in Bowery Lane and applied a pair of pistols to his own head.

But where in the river were they to start looking?

“
The nearest dock,” Mr. Ring reasoned, and he considered Greenwich Street carefully. There was a dock within a couple blocks of the boardinghouse—right
down their cross street of Barclay, in fact. The girl might have almost walked a straight line from his front door and into the freezing river itself.

“
Rhinelander’s Battery,” he mused grimly. “The handiest place—the most likely.”

Wallgrove was fetched and set to work. Grizzled by his years of work around the docks, George was a jack of all trades; though
trained as a cooper, he’d risen through the ranks to the
appointed office of Culler of staves and hoops, a wood inspector whose oath of office left no doubt as to his importance in a port’s economy. And when he wasn’t making inspections around the docks, George was just as
ready to man the local fire pumps whenever the alarm was sounded. His fearlessness would serve him well that day: Dragging the river at this time of year was hard and dangerous work that few could handle well. The heavy load of a recovered body meant that
capsizing or falling in was always a danger. Most men couldn’t last long in the Hudson’s waters even on the best of days, let alone a freezing one like this—for swimming was still so little taught that even
many sailors scarcely knew a single stroke.

Ice was forming in the river, and it bumped at the sides of Wallgrove’s launch as he made his way around the foot of Rhinelander’s Wharf;
the decrepit old fortifications at the dock gave the search an even more melancholy air. Long, rakelike tongs served like hands in the chilly water, as did
a “creeper,” a line dragging a claw of four hooks fastened together. In shallower water, Wallgrove might have even been able to resort to a favorite tool of river men:
a long tube with a glass bulb on the end, which served as a sort of telescope under the surface of the water. It was a fine instrument in the shadier pursuits of the sea, when recovery men were hired by smugglers to recover the loads tossed overboard when revenue cutters bore down upon them. But the deep and freezing currents of the Hudson would require painstaking and bone-numbing work with drag lines.

Hours later, George came ashore in defeat: He was no closer to an answer.

Elias Ring morosely made his way back to the boardinghouse, where a gloom was settling more deeply over his wife. Despite some whispers that perhaps Elma
had
gone out with
Levi that night, he still insisted that she hadn’t and that he didn’t know where she was now.

“Levi,” his wife asked their boarder, “give me thy firm opinion from the bottom of thy heart. Tell me the truth—what thee thinks has become of her.”

The young carpenter regarded a city still so deeply in mourning for the loss of a president that it seemed almost entirely unaware of the young woman vanished from its midst.

“Mrs. Ring,” he finally replied, “it’s my firm belief that she’s now in eternity.”

T
HE NEXT
morning they awoke to the sound of gunfire. It was the report of
sixteen rifles, marking the dawn of New Year’s Eve, and the shots were to ring out every half hour until sunset, echoing over the empty streets. Most
businesses were closing early or not opening at all, and carriages had been barred altogether, so that residents might journey through the snowy streets to one of the greatest spectacles the city had ever seen: a memorial parade for General Washington. Even with the gloomy spirits inside the boardinghouse, Levi could hardly ignore what was to happen outside.

“
Hope,” he asked between the cannonades. “Will you accompany me to the procession?”

She had little desire to stroll through a city that could indulge in extravagant grief for an aged president, and yet scarcely stir itself to find her cousin.

“I have seen processions enough,” she replied bitterly.

He would go without her, then—but he would not go alone, for it seemed as if everyone else in the city was attending that morning.
As ten o’clock approached, the streets thronged with thousands of New Yorkers, all lining a route that proceeded by City Hall and down Wall Street, and along Broadway to St. Paul’s Chapel. In the park by the almshouse, marchers congregated and took their assigned formations for the grand funeral of the late president.

It was not the actual funeral for Washington, of course—that had been held in Virginia days earlier, with its details covered minutely in newspapers across the land, right down to
woodcut diagrams of the positions of Washington’s pallbearers. Here, though, America’s largest city would give the new country’s most solemn and impressive expression of national grief.

At ten o’clock, the muffled bells struck and rifles crackled, and a grand column moved forward in a dead march through the snow. Leading the grand procession were regiments of dragoons pulling prize pieces of artillery seized from the redcoats—a minor slight to the British consul in attendance, perhaps, but forgivable at an old general’s funeral. They were followed by cavalry and militia, and
ranks of aging war veterans—many now in their forties and fifties, their uniforms fraying but dignified. Walking behind them, accompanied by his aides, strode the familiar form of a fellow veteran and political giant newly appointed as head of the army: Alexander Hamilton.

The erstwhile lawyer was resplendent in his major general’s uniform, made somber by the black crepe tied around his arm. It had been on his orders, issued on the occasion of “
this great national calamity,” that the procession was organized—Hamilton had planned the whole thing, every step and flourish, right down to the rifle shots and banners. Deeply trusted by Washington and grudgingly accepted by President Adams, Hamilton walked at the symbolic midway point in the procession: Here was the man who united its military vanguard and the civilian ranks that followed.

Behind him, in their peculiarly martial formations, marched the city’s fraternal organizations. There was the Tammany Society, with its political elite dressed in black as sachems and warriors, with bucktails pinned to their caps; the Mechanics Society, marching en masse for the first time since the funeral of “
our late brother mechanic” Ben Franklin; and most impressive of all, the city’s Freemasons. The old president had been a member from his youth, reaching the rank of master mason, and lodges now marched the streets in formation, headed by the ambitious young assistant attorney general Cadwallader Colden. In his hands, Colden gripped a Masonic black-and-white banner that bore the emblem of an emptied hourglass and sickle, its words snapping in the frigid wind:

Behind the lodge brothers came the city’s own great and wise: the boards of its banks, insurance companies, and chamber of commerce. At their head walked the principals of the newly formed Manhattan Company, led by the one man who could draw as many whispers as Major General Hamilton. More than just the person
in charge of newly dug wells and water lines, he was a lawyer and politico constructing a Republican network in the city—one aimed squarely at Hamilton and his reigning Federalists. The company chairman was none other than Hamilton’s fellow war veteran, brother lawyer, and political opposite: Colonel Aaron Burr, Esq.

There would be no debate today, no fiery rhetoric, no ripostes delivered from atop a hogshead in the square: just the slow, inexorable march of mourning. The procession turned onto Broadway, revealing a final great mass of the city’s professionals: the city council, the students and faculty of Columbia in full academic dress, and the assembled lawyers, surgeons, and doctors of Manhattan. Of the latter, the great personage was the brilliant young Dr. David Hosack—both the leading physician and leading professor of medicine in the city. At thirty, he had not one fleck of gray in his dark and wavy locks, and yet had in just four years already risen to chair of materia medica at Columbia. He could only bow his head before that inexorable defeat of his profession: Sometimes even a president could not be saved.