31 Bond Street. Ellen Horan
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and in a matter of weeks he had fallen in love. He wooed her with his small salary, his best wit, and invitations to entertainments that they never reached, instead walking the streets of New York, lost in conversation until the moon shone through the quiet elms and it was time to take her home. She had a passion for the Romantic poets and had devoured Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill. Without much resistance, she had married him, making her Elisabeth Clinton Clinton. Had there ever been a woman lawyer, she would have been a superior one, and he often imagined their partnership, with twin names painted on a door.
He glanced at her from across the table. Now, nearly thirty to his thirty-six, there was not a moment of their habitual domestic life that failed to suit him. They had not been blessed with children, a circumstance that had once filled them with melancholy. Sometimes he still found her alone in the sitting room, paused over a book, looking sadly out past the lilac bushes, but as the years passed, each of them seemed to have eased their own personal wound of regret.
“I see you have already read the paper,” he said. The newspaper showed evidence that his wife and the maids had been picking through it in the kitchen for news of the murder.
“The cook fears that the murderer has satisfied his revenge for dentists, and lawyers are next,” said Elisabeth.
“Well, if an assassin is lurking in our alley, she will take good care of him. She wields a fierce knife. I have seen her butterfly a lamb,” he replied, scanning the many pages of bold headlines.
“Do you remember you visited him once?” asked Elisabeth. “You had an abscess, and he removed it,”
“Dr. Burdell?” said Clinton. “He persecuted me mercilessly, with clamps around my head and steel calipers in my jaw. It appears he had his throat sliced from ear to ear—a just retribution for a dental surgeon, I’d say.”
“Henry, please,” said Elisabeth. Inured to the cruelties of life, Elisabeth could be happy if only everyone would eat a full breakfast every day.
A maid entered and passed biscuits with dried apples and nut breads thick with walnuts, crocks of butter, honey, and peach preserves and a stack of corn cakes drowned in syrup. She carried a pot of tea back and forth from the sideboard.
‘“Intense excitement in Bond Street!’” Clinton read from the paper, piercing a breakfast sausage with his fork and waving it for emphasis. “My dear, I know you had hoped we’d escaped the intense excitement of my profession by moving uptown, but here we have it, practically at our doorstep.”
“They’ve locked everyone up in the house, even the cook. The police have turned the parlor into an interviewing room. No one has been permitted to speak to a lawyer,” said Elisabeth.
Clinton flipped through the pages. “Do you know why the editors are trumpeting this crime, when there are murders in the poorer wards every day?”
Elisabeth said, “Because, Henry, as you like to tell me ceaselessly, our illustrious, but corrupt mayor, Fernando Wood, has so polluted our metropolis, that this city is going to hell.”
“Precisely,” said Clinton waving his sausage in the air and taking a bite, for he loved to spar with her at breakfast. “However, as much as I enjoy blaming everything on Mayor Wood, I sense other motives afoot. Politics and crime make comfortable bedfellows and the District Attorney is about to throw his hat into the ring. A population roused to a fearful state by a frenzied press will be easy to deliver at the next mayoral election.” He stuffed the sausage in his mouth.
“Henry— “
“Don’t you agree, darling,” he said, interrupting her, “that if this murder had occurred in the poorer wards, we would not be supping on it for breakfast?”
“Listen to me,” she urged. “There is someone in the front parlor, to see you.”
“Here? Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I was sure he could wait until you’d finished your meal. It is a messenger with a packet from your office.” Messengers were often sent from his office to deliver urgent news.
“Well, excuse me, my dear, while I attend to the man. He is, no doubt, wondering why I am dallying over sausage.” He pulled his napkin from his lap and dropped it on the table.
Clinton went into the front parlor, where a man sat on the edge of a seat with his satchels and parcels on the floor beside him. “Good morning, sir,” said Clinton. “I am sorry to keep you waiting. My wife has an obsession with breakfast and I regret to say, as her spouse, I am a prisoner of the meal.”
“Mr. Clinton,” said the man, rising. “I was sent this morning to bring these to you.” He bent down to untie the elaborate laces on his satchel.
“Has Mr. Armstrong been into the office yet?”
“No, not yet, sir, just the morning clerk.” Armstrong was Clinton’s partner, his senior by twenty years, who had distinguished himself as one of the city’s top attorneys with formidable legal skills and a permanent air of reproach. The contrasting style of the two law partners was a source of entertainment for the junior staff. James Armstrong was sober and exacting, his clients a roster of the rich and socially connected, while Clinton was impetuous and dynamic. His cases were more exciting, with dramatic consequences at the eleventh hour. The firm of Armstrong and Clinton was one of the most notable criminal firms in the city, built by the reputation of both partners. Clinton had made a name for himself with a string of successes at trial, but he chose his cases differently than Armstrong. He was forward-looking and preferred cases where the principle of the law was at stake, championing the wrongly accused, or the newly arrived, often representing those who could not pay.
The messenger handed Clinton a clerk’s note with the address of Josiah Livingstone, a mansion on Lafayette Place, not far from Bleecker Street. The case was about property disputes, with multiple lawsuits and fractional divisions arranged around lot lines. Such cases bored Clinton, for the outcome was always the same, with the bluebloods getting richer, simply by juggling pieces of earth and air.
“Mr. Armstrong would like you to stop over to Mr. Livingstone’s, sir,” said the messenger, “and witness his signature on these papers. They need to be filed by noon. And here’s a letter for you.”
“This came from the office?”
“Yes, sir, the morning clerk said it’s been at the door since Sunday.” It was a thin envelope on blue paper, with his name in ink across the front, in a shaky hand. When he opened the note he could see that it was written by a woman.
Dear Mr. Clinton,
I have gotten your name from my solicitor and I hope that you might come and see me. I am in need of legal assistance, but am told I can speak to no one, and have not spoken with anyone who can counsel me. This is about a murder, occurring
Friday night, at this house where I am sequestered, perhaps you have heard.
Please respond, as I am confined to house arrest, Sincerely,
Mrs. Emma Cunningham, 31 Bond Street
According to the newspaper, the murder scene had been turned over to a Coroner’s inquest, whereby the Coroner and his minions occupied the crime scene until they finished interrogating all possible witnesses, to gather facts while the crime was still fresh. In Clinton’s view, calling a jury to the scene of a murder was an antiquated custom, descended from English law, no longer suited to crime in modern cities. In addition, he knew that the Coroner, Edward Connery, was a blustery blowhard with a flair for theatrics. In Clinton’s mind, there was no greater obstacle to justice than the reckless ambition of an incompetent man.
Clinton returned to the breakfast room to find the table cleared. It was now eight thirty and his morning was slipping away. Elisabeth appeared with his overcoat.
“I’m off,” he said, distracted.
“Henry,” she said, looking at the envelope. “That’s not about the Bond Street murder