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To the Manhattan Well and back. In a sleigh, the ground could be traversed much more quickly than on foot.

The Van Nordens, who lived nearer the well than anyone, had claimed they heard a cry at eight or nine at night. They couldn’t narrow the time to anything more specific than that. Catherine Lyon, a neighbor of the Rings, had done better. She had come forward immediately, saying she had been helping a woman who had fallen in the street outside the Ring house just after eight when Elma had stopped and spoken to her. A male voice—no, she hadn’t seen him, it had been dark—had said, “Let’s go,” and Elma had gone. Less than half an hour later, Catherine Lyon had heard Elma cry out for help from the fields around Lispenard’s Meadow.

If Elma and Levi had walked together to the sleigh and then taken it on their supposed elopement they could have been at the well within that half hour . . .

“Did you see who was in the sleigh?”

Mrs. Broad snorted. “On a dark night with no lights on the sleigh and none of the streetlamps lit? You need to talk to them fancy friends of yours and tell them no one’s cleaned the streetlamps since they been set out—nor lit them neither.”

“You can be sure I will, Mrs. Broad,” said Cadwallader sincerely. If he ever had anything to do with city administration, fixing the lamps and getting rid of those disgusting feral pigs would be among his first priorities. He had many thoughts on the matter. “Would you be willing to come to court and say there what you’ve said to me here?”

“I’ll do what’s needed to help that poor girl. I helped lay her out, you know.”

“So you said.” Cadwallader paused, struck by a thought. “Did your son or his wife see the sleigh?”

“I don’t know as they did—it left before they were home—but there’ll be others abroad who did.” Her mouth set in a thin line. “A sleigh without bells! Even if he didn’t kill that poor girl, he shouldn’t be allowed to drive reckless.”

With that, Cadwallader sincerely agreed. It was all he could do not to kiss Mrs. Broad’s withered cheek and spin her around in a jig, but he suspected she wouldn’t approve of either.

A sleigh without bells . . . She was right, someone else would have remarked on it. But where to find them? A notice in the paper, perhaps. His first impulse was to go running to Josiah, to tell him of the marvelous news and ask his advice, but Cadwallader checked himself.

Bad enough that he’d had that embarrassment over the Malone woman who’d been found strangled and stuffed in a cistern, when he hadn’t even been able to pull together enough evidence against the woman’s husband for an indictment.

He couldn’t go running to Josiah for everything. Cadwallader wished he had Josiah’s effortless talent, his incisive mind, and his broad knowledge of the law. It had stung last fall when General Hamilton had insisted that Josiah prosecute the case against the publisher Frothingham personally—instead of leaving it to Cadwallader.

Well, he would show them, thought Cadwallader staunchly. This time, he’d blaze into the courtroom with an unassailable case and impress them with his brilliance. Starting with a sleigh without bells . . .

He thought of going home, but Maria had one of her meetings this afternoon, the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, and the parlor would be filled with women, including Mrs. General Hamilton and Josiah’s mother, Mrs. Hoffman, who always looked at Cadwallader as though his boots were muddy, even when they weren’t.

On an impulse, Cadwallader abruptly switched course and hurried into the Old Coffee House instead. On the middle of a Monday, it was only half-full, the green baize curtains marking off the private booths drawn back. A cluster of foreign merchants murmured over their coffee; a country cousin come to town smoked a pipe and slowly perused a paper. A group of men had moved on from coffee to cherry bounce and were talking merrily in one corner.

The proprietor, John Byrne, put down the rag he’d been using to sop up a spill of coffee. “It’s not a lodge night, is it, Mr. Colden?”

The commerce of the city might have moved to the new Tontine Coffee House, but the members of the Grand Lodge remained loyal to the Old Coffee House, holding their meetings in the long room upstairs.

“No, I was just in need of convivial company. Mrs. Colden is holding a meeting of the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children.”

Mr. Byrne reached for a pot and a cup. “I’ll add a tot of rum to your coffee, then, shall I?”

Cadwallader looked at the merry group in the corner. “No, just the coffee—but might I beg a favor of you?”

“I’d never say you nay, Mr. Colden. I know you’d never ask anything to my dishonor,” joked Mr. Byrne.

Unless he wasn’t joking. He actually seemed quite serious about it. Cadwallader suspected that made him very dull. It might be nice, just once, he thought wistfully, to be the sort of person who asked mad and impossible favors, who became embroiled in duels and raised notices in the papers.

Like Brockholst Livingston. Or Alexander Hamilton.

Sadly, Cadwallader resigned himself to a life of unremarkable virtue. “Would you mind asking if anyone saw a sleigh running without bells on Sunday before Christmas? That would be the night of the twenty-second of December.”

The Old Coffee House might no longer be the hub of commerce it once was, but a broad array of people still wandered through those old doors.

John looked up from filling the pot. “The night of the twenty-second of December? That’s the night that girl—”

“It is. So you see why it might be important.”

John raised his voice. Over the assembled chatter of the company, he bellowed, “Gentlemen! Anyone here see a sleigh running without bells the Sunday before Christmas? There you are,” he added to Cadwallader, passing over his tray. “Well, then. You! You look like you’ve something to say.”

The man Cadwallader marked as a country cousin took his pipe from his mouth. “I didn’t see a sleigh, but I saw a sleigh track, hard by the Manhattan Well—up the new road Colonel Burr had built. Monday before Christmas, it was.”