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Caty felt the sting of tears, and blinked them away before the wet could touch his shirtfront.

If this had been six months ago . . . a year ago . . .

“I should have done better by thee,” he murmured against her hair.

Yes, he should have. “There’s no good in should,” Caty said wearily, moving away from him. “We can only do better from now on.”

From now on, she would know better than to trust her husband too far. Her mother had made her own compromises, and Caty would have to make hers. She could feel it like a burning in her chest, the loss of her hopes, the loneliness of knowing she would always have to be the one who made all the sacrifices. Elias might feel bad now, but he couldn’t be trusted to remain that way.

“We could go away somewhere,” he offered.

The only place Caty wanted to go was back to New Cornwall, to the house her grandparents had built. But New Cornwall was closed to them now. Everyone there would hear; everyone would look at Elias and imagine him with Elma.

“No,” she said. “No. If we go, they’ll think we did something wrong.”

Beds creaking in the night through the walls. Their neighbors gossiping and she’d never known.

Caty swallowed the bitterness. “We’ll need new boarders. I doubt Ezra Weeks will board his journeymen here now.”

“That man is capable of anything,” muttered Elias.

“Yes,” said Caty slowly. “He is.”

That judge had said the sleigh hadn’t gone out that night; that Levi’s time had been all accounted for. But who had said so? The only evidence that the sleigh hadn’t been out that night came from Ezra’s apprentice, Demas Meed. The only evidence that Levi had been at his brother’s when he claimed came from Demas and Ezra.

Caty’s brain was working furiously. Ezra Weeks hadn’t wanted Levi to marry Elma. Ezra Weeks’s apprentice had the key to the gate. According to the people Mr. Colden had spoken to, there had been a second man in the sleigh—a man who might have untied the bells and harnessed the horse, and brought the sleigh to Levi. A man under orders from his master, prepared to lie in a court of law.

Ezra Weeks was capable of anything.

“I hope Elma haunts them,” said Caty, so vehemently that Rachel sighed and rolled over and David stirred, lifting his head.

“Is it over?” he asked drowsily. “Has the bad man been punished?”

Caty looked to Elias, but Elias only shook his head. Caty had never hated her husband more than in that moment. If he had kept his hands off Elma . . . if he had refrained from spreading stories about Levi . . .

Ezra Weeks would still have paid his underlings to tell lies, she reminded herself. Elias’s misdeeds had only been so much good fortune for him.

“He’ll have his justice in heaven,” she said in a brittle voice. “Just thee wait and see. The Lord neither slumbers nor sleeps.”

“But we should,” said Elias, with an attempt at heartiness that annoyed her more than anything else. “Come to bed.”

Caty looked at her children, at her husband. She could hear the creaking upstairs as her boarders, returned from the trial, got themselves ready for bed.

Elma’s killer was free and Elias’s adultery was known to the world, but the children and the boarders would still expect to be fed.

“I’ve got to start the oats steeping,” she said, and went to go back about the business of living.

Chapter Thirty-Three

It is next to impossible to get men of weight and influence to serve.

—Robert Troup to Rufus King on the 1800 New York elections

New York City

April 15, 1800

“No one can deny that it is to the Federal party exclusively that we owe that unexampled prosperity which we have hitherto enjoyed. But beware of a blind confidence in our present situation!”