Page 103

“I’ve given my word,” Cadwallader said sadly. “I can’t with honor withdraw.”

Maria reached up, touching his cheek. “I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honor more—isn’t that how the poem goes? I couldn’t love you so much if you weren’t the man you are.”

“Maybe I’ll lose,” said Cadwallader. “I haven’t been very good at winning anything recently.”

“You won me,” said Maria, looking so winsome that he just had to kiss her.

“I’ve always worried that was a mistake,” confessed Cadwallader, as the kiss ended. “My winning you, that is, and that you’d finally realized it. And then I lost the trial. . . .”

“There will be other trials,” said Maria firmly.

Cadwallader bit his lip. “I asked Josiah if we could bring an action against Richard Croucher as the murderer of Elma Sands.”

“What did he say?”

“He said the evidence wasn’t there.” Like a small boy yanking off a scab, Cadwallader said despondently, “Maria, if he’s wrong—I brought charges against an innocent man. I let a killer go free.”

Maria squeezed him fiercely about the waist. “You brought charges against a man the whole city believed to be a killer—with good reason! And we don’t know Mr. Croucher had anything to do with it. He’s unpleasant, certainly, and has appalling taste in waistcoats, but that doesn’t mean he’s a murderer.”

Cadwallader thought of the way Mr. Croucher had looked, the strange, gloating note in his voice when he’d spoken of selling Rose Malone stockings for her wedding. “No, we don’t know,” he said slowly.

“You did what you thought was right—and if you think I’d be ashamed of you for that, then you don’t know me at all,” said Maria firmly. “I don’t rate your worth by the number of trials you win, but by the goodness of your heart. I only feared I’d lost it awhile.”

“If you think,” said Cadwallader earnestly, looking down into her dear, familiar face, “that I rate your worth by the number of children you bear, then you don’t know me at all.”

Maria rose on her tiptoes to touch her lips to his. “If you go to Albany, David and I go too.”

Cadwallader was torn between terror at how close they had come to losing one another and a deep feeling of gratitude that despite all of it, they had found their way back.

“Anywhere we go,” said Cadwallader tenderly, “we go together.”

“In that case,” said Maria, taking him by the hand, “let’s go to bed.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

If the deceased was murdered, this at least was not the man. . . . By the evidence of the facts alone, is this young man’s innocence completely established.

—New-York Daily Advertiser, April 3, 1800

New York City

April 23, 1800

“It’s true, then. Thee are going. Elias said—he’d heard—but I didn’t believe—”

On a Wednesday, Ezra Weeks’s lumber yard was thrumming with the business of the shop. Apprentices carried stacks of wood and responded to barked requests for tools. But Levi wasn’t among them. When Hope hurried up to the yard, doing her best to hold her skirts up out of last night’s puddles, she saw him coming from the house, holding a small trunk up over his shoulder.

It was the same trunk he had brought when he came to live in the boardinghouse. Hope remembered seeing Levi carrying it in, how she and Peggy and Elma had all rushed to examine the new boarder as he climbed up the steps to the door; how Peggy had joked that this one was hers. In the first flush of summer, less than a year ago, when the greatest trouble they faced was getting the wrong ribbons to trim the hats, a new, handsome boarder had been a cause of innocent excitement.

“I’m going.” Levi dropped the trunk with a thunk into the cart waiting by the gate. “You’ll be rid of me for good, although not so permanently as you’d hoped.”

It hadn’t been she who hoped—except that it had. Hope bit her lip, remembering how sure she had been in her righteous fury. She would have seen him hang, and gladly.

“Where does thee go?” Hope asked. She could feel cold water creeping through her shoes, despite the pattens she had strapped on to raise her feet above the mud.

“Back to Massachusetts. I’m going to Bloody Brook.” Levi smiled without humor. “It seems appropriate, doesn’t it? Since most of the city still believes I have Elma’s blood on my hands.”

“Not all the city.”