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Hope wasn’t going to lie. They’d had lies enough. “I went to the Weeks lumber yard to see Levi.”

Caty heaved Eliza up higher. “Why would thee want to do that?”

“Did thee know he was leaving the city?”

“Good riddance,” Caty said bitterly. “I shudder to think I ever indulged a favorable thought of him.”

“Won’t thee even consider the possibility that he might be innocent?”

“Was it innocent to try to get thee to sign a paper? Was it innocent for his brother to pay people to lie for him? All right, all right, I’ll set thee down,” she said to Eliza. Turning back to Hope, Caty said, “I know what I heard that night.”

There was no use in arguing when Caty looked like that.

Caty had been obdurate in her conviction that Levi had killed Elma and got away with it by clever tricks in the courtroom. It was, Hope thought, just like Caty. If Levi had killed Elma, then it didn’t matter as much about Elias. If Levi had killed Elma, then it didn’t matter that Mr. Croucher still kept his room on the second floor, beneath the room where Levi had once slept.

Caty had always been very good at seeing the world as she wanted to see it. It was the same way she had insisted year after year that Elias was a genius just waiting for the world to appreciate him as she did, the way she insisted their father was a saint, and it was perfectly right for him to leave them for years at a time whenever the call to spread the word came upon him—which it usually did the moment things were unpleasant or difficult at home.

Hope had always prided herself on her clearheadedness. But she was beginning to wonder if the Levi she’d fancied herself in love with had ever existed, or if he had been as much a product of her imagination as Caty’s Elias, a series of attributes grafted onto a handsome face and a pleasing manner.

Levi had been charming, that was true. And kind. He had always been kind. But it was the sort of kindness that took little effort on his part: a hand under her elbow to help her over a puddle, an invitation to go to the charity sermon.

All of it, the kindness, the charm, had dropped away now, like the petals of a spring flower when the sun beat on it too hotly.

What she had taken for goodness had been only—an easy sort of complaisance. As the rest of the household settled into sleep, Hope lay awake, remembering how Levi had first flirted with Peggy, easygoing, laughing Peggy, who had made it clear she welcomed flirtation.

When Peggy had gone, Levi had walked out with Hope—but never more than honor. A pleasant way to pass the time, enjoying her obvious admiration.

And then there had been Elma. What had truly passed between them, Hope would never know, although she suspected that there, too, Levi would have taken whatever was offered.

There was that night his apprentice had seen him leave in his shirt and not come back until morning.

Whatever Levi said now, about what might have been had things been different, Hope knew, with sudden certainty, that he would never have married her. He would, in the end, have married a woman of his brother’s choosing, not for love, but for advantage—and because his brother said so. He might even have persuaded himself he loved whoever it was, simply because that was easiest for everyone, but most particularly himself.

Could he have murdered Elma, if she complicated matters for him? If his brother told him so?

Hope wasn’t sure. But she didn’t think he had.

General Hamilton had made it clear that he thought Mr. Croucher had done it.

Outside her bedroom door, Hope heard a strange creak. Someone was going down the stairs, those stairs that had figured so largely in the trial, someone who was moving unevenly, who didn’t know which steps creaked and which steps didn’t.

Hope groped for the candle and flint next to her bed. All of Ezra Weeks’s men had found other lodgings; even Peggy had gone. There was only Richard Van Alstine and Mr. Croucher, but Mr. Croucher spent his nights with his new bride, Mrs. Stackhaver, returning only by day to use his room as a space to display his wares for such clients as cared to come to the Ring boardinghouse.

Hope stepped silently down the closed stair in her bare feet, shading her candle with her hand. The door to the stair hung ajar; she could make out a pale figure struggling with the door, trying unsuccessfully to pull it open, her breath coming in labored, ragged gasps.

Dark hair hung down over her shoulders in wild disarray. It was a girl, but not one of Caty’s girls.

“Hello?” said Hope, more curious than afraid.

The girl whirled, her back pressed against the door. Hope could see the whites of her eyes in the feeble light of the candle.

“Oh, Lord, I thought you were he. I thought you were he, come to get me. Please, please, for charity’s sake, help me get away!”

“Away from whom?” There was something familiar about the girl, the thin, pale face beneath that disordered hair. As Hope stepped closer, she saw with horror that the girl’s dress gaped open, the tie hanging drunkenly on one side, her shift torn. Reddish marks discolored the skin around her neck. “Did someone hurt thee?”

“He did,” she whispered, her eyes lifting up, toward the stairs. She shook her head wildly, fumbling for the latch of the door. “No, no one. I only want to go home. Please, the door . . .”

“Thee are Mrs. Stackhaver’s girl.” Memory furnished Hope with an image of a skinny girl in that same calico dress and a white cap, standing behind the brocaded form of her mistress, sent to clean Mr. Croucher’s room. Caty had been so angry. “What are thee doing here in the night?”