of noonday sunlight.
Sergeant McArdel of the Night Watch, having entered the small room from the corridor, now stood in the doorway behind him, clearing his throat.
“What is it, Sergeant?” Hays inquired, turning to his ham-faced, ginger-headed aide.
“A gentleman has been here to see you, sir,” McArdel said.
Thirty-nine years old, Sergeant McArdel was seventeen on the force, but only three years full-time. Before that he had worked days as a hod carrier, chiefly in the Third Ward, around Columbia College. Such employment as the sergeant’s, outside the force, was not an exception, nor was it singular. Most of the Watch held outside work in order to supplement their meager salary (officially, eighty-seven cents a shift) afforded them by the city’s Common Council and Board of Aldermen.
“If I may say so, sir,” McArdel added, “the man was in a general state of alarm.”
The prison, in whose bowels Hays maintained his office, had been built three years previous, in 1838, replacing the old Bridewell. Properly titled the Manhattan House of Detention for Men, or, in some circles, the Hall of Justice, the somber building, built on pilings and constructed from gray Weehawken stone block at the intersection of Elm, Centre, Anthony, and Leonard streets, on the western shore of the old freshwater Collect, a large pond, once the primary source of all New York City drinking water, was, from the day of its initial ground-breaking and ever after, popularly known as “the Tombs.”
The high constable’s office was located on death row, off the large Bummers’ Cell, where a continual string of drunks, rowdies, and bingo boys were paraded daily, to be held until such time when they might sober up, pay their fine (typically $2.50), and be on their way.
The day was unseasonably hot, even for the deep New York summer of late July, the humidity cloistering and oppressive, particularly for a man of the high constable’s age. The combination of weather and miasma rising from the poorly filled-in swamp below the prison was taking its toll on his constitution. He swabbed at his forehead with a large handkerchief as he swatted away from his yellow oak desk one of the prison’s many cats, tolerated to keep the jail’s rodent population somewhat at bay, his attention momentarily taken by a deep voice lecturing at stentorian volume to those incarcerated in the Bummers’ Cell. The topic: the devil Intemperance.
“My apologies, sir,” Sergeant McArdel continued, “but he, the gentleman in question, gave his name as Mr. Arthur Crommelin, was here this morning. It seems a young woman with whom he has some history has turned up missing, and his concern, and evidently that of others who know her, including her own mother, is mounting. This gent, therefore, come in to have a word with you, but you not being here, he’s had a word with me, sir.”
“Just so,” said Hays. “Who is she?”
“This Crommelin gave her name as Mary Rogers, sir.”
Hays’ eyes narrowed. “Mary Rogers?”
“Is her name familiar, sir?”
“It is.”
“Do you know her, sir?”
“If it is the same Mary Cecilia Rogers of Pitt Street who was once employed at the segar shop of Mr. John Anderson on the Broadway near the Publishers’ Row, it seems to me she went missing once before about three years ago. Did your gentleman mention such an occurrence?”
“He did not, sir.”
“If I recall kerrectly, her mother came in at that time, too, also in a state of general alarm. She claimed the girl had left a suicide note, but Miss Rogers turned up, not more than a week later, saying she had been visiting with an aunt in Brooklyn, and knew nothing of her mother’s concern. I suspected at the time she was somewhere else.”
“Where would that have been, sir?”
“With her paramour.”
“I would not be surprised if it were a similar occurrence now, sir,” McArdel nodded.
“Nor would I,” said the high constable as he turned from the iron-barred window and the yard beyond. “Nor would I.”
Two days passed as usual for one in the position of high constable.
With stultifying summer heat stifling the metropolis, crime boiled out of the dank Five Points, bubbled from the polluted colored enclaves along Minetta Creek, spewed along the moist docks of the fetid and unwholesome waterfront.
On Rose Street a sallow-faced barrowman was murdered by a cutthroat for his wheeled cart, four puncheons of rhum disappeared off the wharf at James Slip, three autumn morts were discovered strolling uneasily east on the Fourteenth Street, fully swathed beneath their dresses in bolts of watered silk, pilfered not five minutes before from the Endicott dry goods emporium. A young doctor from the City Hospital, accused by a medical colleague of buying the bodies of a diseased mother and child out of the bowels of that rank harborer of human distress, the Old Brewery, was found dissecting his victims’ corpses in a basement operating theater on Hester Street. Three toughs affiliated with the Charlton Street gang, out for a night of pirating, drowned in the Hudson River (here called, as it often was, the North River) when their stolen dory was struck and capsized by an oceanbound three-masted bark.
SO FOR OLD HAYS went the inimitable current of the city, the daily and nightly course of the constabulary, leading him to that Thursday morning, some minutes before ten, when a nervous young man in a plexus of high agitation, giving his name as Daniel Payne, his profession corkcutter, appeared at the Tombs’ gate and asked for High Constable Jacob Hays.
“I am the fiancé of Mary Cecilia Rogers,” the sallow-faced cull, escorted in by Sergeant McArdel, announced to Hays in a voice thin and much tinged by anxiety.
Until that moment the high constable had barely given second thought to Mary Rogers and her newest disappearance, having judged the girl to be enjoying another assignation with another beau.
As soon as the corkcutter introduced himself, however, Hays knew he had been mistaken.
“I am informed my rival, Mr. Arthur Crommelin, has visited here yesterday to inform you of certain circumstances surrounding my intended, and probably to implicate me,” Payne continued. “No matter. She has been found.” He did not look at Hays, but at the floor. A tremor passed through his body, and his words caught in his throat. “I fear she is d-dead,” he stammered.
A cold hand crept up from the high constable’s bowels to seize his intestines. “Dead?” he demanded. “How so, sir?”
“Mr. Crommelin is a onetime lodger at the Rogerses’ rooming house, where I myself am a lodger. Before my arrival, he
