Page 3

“There’s no need to fuss,” said Elma.

“Catherine! Where are thee?” A masculine voice bellowed up the stairs, in tune with the baby’s wail: Caty’s husband, Elias, home from Sunday services.

“Back from meeting already?” Elma could see Caty’s mind revolving like the clock in Mr. Baker’s Museum, all wheels and gears, checking all the tasks done and undone, tea to be got, children to be minded, boarders to be fed, her husband to mollify, her unwanted cousin to be speeded on her elopement—but with warm hands, a sop to Caty’s conscience.

“Catherine!” Elias’s voice was high-pitched, querulous. Elma could hear the stomp of booted feet on the stairs, as the sound of the baby’s howling grew louder. “The baby wants fixing!”

“Presently!” Caty called. She turned back to Elma. “Thy cheeks—they have turned so pale. If thee be frightened . . . He’s a good man, Levi. I shouldn’t think . . .”

“I’m not frightened. I’m just cold.” Elma moved quickly to the door. “You’re right. I’ll get the muff from Beth.”

Caty trailed after her, a furrow beneath the plain white line of her cap. “Thou will remember to return it? The muff?”

“If I don’t, I have no doubt you’ll remind me.”

Caty was good at that. She was good at reminding Elma that this wasn’t her house, these weren’t her things; everything she had, she had on sufferance.

It didn’t matter now, Elma told herself. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered.

Caty could keep her dull house and her dull husband and her runny-nosed children. Elma would be a great lady, like Mrs. Church. Her lover had promised that she’d sweep through town in a coach and four, with plumes in her hair and jewels on her heels. No Quaker meetinghouse for her. She’d attend church at Trinity, in a pelisse tailored in Paris and her head modestly bent over a calfskin hymnbook.

Perhaps she’d come back from time to time, and let the children marvel at her, at her soft, scented skin and her soft, scented silks, at the rustle of her petticoats and the curve of her curls.

Yes, Elma rather liked the thought of that.

Let them know the brand from the burning might be a phoenix in disguise, ready to blaze far above them.

Averting her face, avoiding Elias and the howling child, Elma hurried down the stairs, through the sounds of the boardinghouse—the children shouting, the baby fretting, Caty bustling, journeymen laughing—letting herself out into the crisp, smoky December air. The street was busy with people paying Sunday calls, ironmongers and tobacconists, builders and grocers, bundled against the chill, dodging out of the way of the sleighs that jangled down the center of the street.

She wouldn’t miss it, any of it, Elma told herself.

To the south, above the close-crowded wooden houses, Elma could see the spire of Trinity Church on Broadway, where the houses were of brick, not wood; where the women wore silk from the ships whose masts pocked the sky; where she would have a home of her own where the beds weren’t rented out by the week.

Or perhaps they’d board one of those ships out there in the harbor and sail away to a real city, to London. What was New York, after all? Just a jumble of houses carved out of mud and meadow, filled with the refuse of the world.

Like her.

“Elma!” The ironmonger’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Fanny, waved wildly at her from the neighboring stoop.

Pretending not to hear, Elma turned sharply to her left, toward Beth Osborn’s house, to borrow a muff to wear to her wedding.

Chapter One

On Thursday last was found in a well dug by the Manhattan Company, on the north side of the Collect (but which afterwards proved useless) the body of Miss G. E. Sands who had been missing from the evening of Sunday the 22nd.

—Greenleaf’s New Daily Advertiser, January 8, 1800

New York City

January 6, 1800

“I heard they found her muff floating in a drain in Bayard’s Lane.”

“No—not a drain. The Manhattan Well.”

Greenwich Street heaved with people, shoving, pushing, jostling.

Alexander Hamilton slowed, contemplating this unexpected hindrance. His two clerks had been more than usually slow and doltish this morning, his correspondence more than usually irritating, so he had darted out of his office with the object of buying Eliza a coffee biggin. She’d looked so heavy-eyed at the breakfast table, bouncing baby Betsy in one arm while presiding over the coffeepot with the other. The coffee biggin, Gouverneur Morris assured him, produced a superior, stronger quality of coffee. Whether it did or not, Alexander had no idea, but it would be something to offer Eliza, to take that smudged, hollow look from her eyes.