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Soon, he’d promised her. Soon he’d step away from public life. They’d build an idyll in the countryside, near enough to town that they could enjoy the society of their friends and he could lend his aid as needed to his fellow Federalists, consult on the odd legal matter. . . . Soon. But General Washington had entrusted him with the organization of the new army—never mind how President Adams resented it, how he worked to undermine all of Alexander’s plans—and with the general in his grave this past month, Alexander felt more keenly than ever how strongly he needed to press the work forward.

Then there was the petty manner of money. Money, always money. Money for the children’s schooling; money to build their house in the country. Money to be earned from the legal practice that was suffering sorely as Alexander struggled to build an army that he knew was needed, if only the ignoramuses in Philadelphia could just be brought to see it.

Just a bit longer. A bit longer and he’d be able to move Eliza and their brood to the countryside, and live the life of a country squire, going out with his fowling piece to shoot ducks in the morning mist, his Eliza presiding clear-eyed at their own tea table. Soon. Eventually. Someday.

But for now, he could buy her a coffee biggin.

Or so he’d intended. Greenwich Street was impassable with this inexplicable crowd. Unlike the elegant brick homes lining Broadway, the houses here were of wood, ugly, clumsy structures so newly built that Alexander could practically smell the wood shavings and fresh-mixed plaster. It was a tinderbox of a street, but it wasn’t a fire causing this unaccustomed press of people; he would have smelled the smoke before this.

Only a block away, the students of his alma mater, King’s College—now Columbia—rushed to class in their flapping gowns, but this didn’t have the flavor of a student riot; there wasn’t enough Latin being spoken. Besides, the students were enclosed behind the high gates of the college, effectively locking them away from the city around them. When Alexander was in college, there’d been much made of the college’s proximity to the so-called Holy Ground, where pleasure could be found for a price and brawls sometimes broke out between customers and madams, or madams and enraged moralists.

But that was on the other side of the college. This was a street of respectable small tradesmen, running their businesses out of the front rooms of their homes: grocers and tobacconists and, most important, an ironmonger who was reputed to make excellent coffee biggins. Alexander could just make out the wooden sign creaking from one of the awnings, right at what seemed to be the epicenter of the excited crowd.

It seemed unlikely that half the city had experienced a simultaneous desire for a coffee biggin.

“Alexander!” A hand clapped him on the shoulder, and Alexander looked up into the face of his old friend and colleague Richard Harison, once his partner in law practice, still his partner in politics. “Or should I say Major General?”

“Never among friends.” Or possibly not at all if that ass Adams had anything to do with it, not to mention Aaron Burr and his Republican rabble, downplaying the threat from France, ignoring the dangers of a Revolutionary regime untrammeled, agitating for the disbandment of Alexander’s army. The United States Army, that was, or would be, if Alexander was given the supplies and support he so desperately needed.

“How goes the business of the army?”

“Busily,” Alexander quipped.

Even to an ally like Harison, Alexander could never admit the fear that it was all for naught, all his preparations and plans, the punishing pace he had set himself and his clerks. That ass Adams had never wanted the army and he’d certainly never wanted Alexander. Alexander had been forced on him, by the one person with the power to do so. The person who had lain cold and still in his grave these past three weeks. Alexander had marched in General Washington’s funeral procession; he’d listened to Gouverneur Morris deliver the funeral oration; but he still couldn’t quite entirely believe he was gone, that great man who had loved him as his own father never had.

And there was his Eliza with gray in her dark hair, their Philip studying at King’s College—not King’s anymore, but Columbia—and Harison, who had been in his prime when they had begun their practice together just after the war, now heavy-jowled, the new Brutus hairstyle not hiding the fact that his hair was thinning at the temples, and gray now, entirely gray.

How had they come to this? This wasn’t what Alexander had thought his middle age would be, scrabbling after pennies, after favor, after political advancement, surrounded by incompetents and opportunists.

Alexander cleared his throat. “What ruckus is this? Are the apprentices revolting again?”

“The apprentices are always revolting.” Harison chuckled at his own tired sally. “You must have heard, surely? About the girl. The girl in the well.”

The man in front of him had said something about the Manhattan Well, that misbegotten monstrosity. “Ah,” said Alexander, as if he knew more than he did. “Are all these people—”

“Here to view the corpse.” Harison shoved his hands in his waistcoat to warm them. “You haven’t come to gawp at the girl in the well, have you?”

“I haven’t. I came to find a coffee biggin for Eliza. The baby is cutting her teeth,” Alexander added.

“Did you try brandy—”

“Rubbed on her gums? Or for ourselves?”

“Either.” Harison grimaced in sympathy.

“Neither had the least effect, I regret to say. Poor Eliza has had no peace. And neither have I.”

“Cherish it. Cherish her.” Harison’s face drooped like melting candle wax. He was, Alexander knew, thinking of the much younger wife he’d adored, his Fanny, gone two years now, leaving Harison with their four young children. Alexander couldn’t imagine such a future, an existence without Eliza. She was the still center of an ever-moving world. “The time—it goes faster than you know.”

“I’ve promised Eliza to spend more time at home—as time allows.”

“Time—or your ambitions?”

That was the trouble with old friends. They felt comfortable asking awkward questions. “You haven’t come for the girl in the well, have you?”

“I’ve come as an officer of the court,” Harison said grandly. “And, I admit, out of a certain measure of curiosity. The family’s allowing the public in to see the body—fanning the flames. If I’m to sit on the case, I feel it’s my duty to see what every other man jack in the city will have seen.”

“That’s what they’re all waiting for? To see the girl’s corpse? It’s macabre—barbaric.”