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This boy couldn’t be much older than Philip. Their features were nothing alike, but there was something of that youthfulness—something of that confusion, that thin line that divided the grown man from the boy—that touched Alexander to the core.

Levi lifted his head from his arms. “Elma—what are they—what do they think—?”

“They say you did it,” said Ezra bluntly. “The coroner’s jury has brought in a verdict of murder.”

“I’m ruined.” Levi rocked back and forth on the straw. “When they took me, they showed me—they asked me— Oh God, they’ll hang me. They’ll hang me. And I never did it, I swear, I never . . .”

Alexander crouched down beside Levi Weeks, ignoring the squelch of whatever lay in the straw. “I will not allow you to hang,” he said, the same way he might have once told Philip there were no monsters under the bed. “But we can discuss this in a more congenial setting. Your brother has arranged the payment of bail. Come. Let me help you up.”

The younger man’s hand was larger than Alexander’s and heavily calloused, but he put it into Alexander’s like a child, like Philip in his younger days, when he would still hold Alexander’s hand. Levi winced as he slowly levered himself off the foul ground. He favored one side, Alexander saw, and his trousers were ripped as well as his shirt.

Ezra’s chest swelled. “Who did this to you?”

Levi swallowed hard and shook his head.

“We’re honest thieves here!” someone called out. “We don’t hold with women-killers!”

“Who said that?” Ezra swiveled, searching for the source of the sound, hands already forming into fists.

Alexander put a hand on his arm. He could feel the heavy muscles. Ezra Weeks might be a man of business now, but he’d put in his share of heavy labor. “A public brawl will only make matters worse.”

Ezra hesitated, but after a moment, he nodded curtly and stepped aside, flanking his brother as he and Alexander escorted Levi through the jeering, gibbering mob, down the stairs, and into the cold night air, which might be scented with manure but felt positively clean compared to what they had just departed.

Ezra Weeks had secured a closed carriage, not his own, to bring his brother away. It rattled over the short distance from the Bridewell west to Greenwich Street, while Ezra frowned out the window, keeping an eye out for pursuit, fists opening and closing as though he were itching to punch someone.

When the carriage turned north on Greenwich Street, Levi lifted his head. “We’re not going to the Ring house?”

Ezra choked. “Are you mad? They’d tear you limb from limb.”

“When you said home, I thought you meant—” The light from the carriage lamps wasn’t sufficient to illuminate Levi’s features, but Alexander could hear the pain in his voice. “I hadn’t thought. I can’t go back.”

“It’s a boardinghouse, not your ancestral acres,” said Ezra impatiently. “You were only there since July. Once it’s safe, I’ll send Demas to fetch your things.”

Ezra Weeks’s home and lumber yard sat at the corner of Greenwich and Harrison, only a few minutes from the Ring boardinghouse by carriage, but a world away otherwise. Here, the closely built streets gave way to open land—but not for long. Alexander could see the beginnings of new construction on the plot opposite. The city was growing up around Ezra Weeks’s lumber yard, creeping toward the open land between the city and Greenwich Village to the north.

In between lay the wilderness known as Lispenard’s Meadow. And the well in which Elma Sands had drowned.

A well which Ezra Weeks had dug.

These were exactly the sort of men he needed for the Federalists, Alexander reminded himself. The sort of men Burr had so successfully courted. But this time, he was going to get in ahead of Burr.

A servant came out to light them up into the house, holding the candle as Ezra helped his brother up the steps. The house wasn’t what Alexander would have expected for a man of Ezra’s growing wealth and stature. The room into which they were taken was no formal parlor but a farmhouse kitchen, with an open hearth and a well-scrubbed wood table. At Ezra’s nod, the serving boy threw more wood on the fire—a grand gesture given the price of firewood this winter—and sat Levi in the seat nearest the blaze.

Ezra bundled a pile of plans out of the way. Alexander caught a glimpse of a complicated diagram of doors of various sizes; a sketch of a fanlight.

If he could clear Levi’s name, he could build his Eliza a house with a fanlight like that, a house of elegant classical lines that would make Burr’s Richmond Hill look outdated and fussy. Alexander’s father-in-law had already promised him seasoned logs from the Schuyler lands upstate.

“That’s fine work,” said Alexander, nodding at the plans.

“That’s Levi’s work,” said Ezra shortly.

Alexander looked again at the boy—no, not a boy, a man. The firelight played off the planes of his face, showing the five days’ stubble of his prison stay. “You have a fine sensibility for classical forms.”

For a moment, Levi’s eyes lighted. “I have a book of designs—The New Vitruvius. Elma said—”

The words ended as though choked off. His face went blank.

“Here. Eat.” Ezra shoved a plate of cakes in front of him, ripping off the napkin that covered them. “You look half-starved. What did they feed you in that place?”