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“Did she?”

Levi’s voice was hoarse. “It wasn’t like that. She didn’t mean it—not seriously.”

Ezra looked meaningfully at Alexander. “The girl was heard to say she wished she had no existence.”

“It’s your belief she did away with herself?”

“It’s clear, isn’t it? That’s what I told your colleague Colonel Burr. He agreed with me.” Alexander frowned at him, and Ezra hastily amended his tone. “Perhaps she did it for love, but if she did, that’s not the boy’s fault. He never promised her anything.”

“Her family claims he did. They claim he promised her marriage.” Alexander held Ezra Weeks’s gaze, staring at him until he blustered himself into silence. Now was his chance to mark himself as superior to Burr, more strategic than Burr. “This is only what the prosecution will say. If your brother cannot answer me, how can he answer them? Think of it as . . . setting the foundations for a structure. Without the correct underpinnings, the whole will collapse.”

“That’s not exactly how it works, sir—but I take your point,” Ezra said hastily.

“I will defer to you on matters of building if you trust I know how to build a case. I might have need of your expertise someday—as you do mine now.” Feeling he had made his point, Alexander turned back to Levi. “Did you mean to run away with her that night?”

Ezra controlled himself with an effort; the force of his disapproval was palpable.

“No,” Levi croaked.

“Might she have been disappointed in her hopes of your affections?”

“She—I—no.” Levi looked up wildly. “She made a joke of it, that I never asked her to walk out with me—but it was only that I knew she wouldn’t! When I asked her—”

“The girl felt slighted,” Ezra barked. “You heard what he said.”

When I asked her, Levi had said. Asked her what? To walk out with him? To run away with him?

“What do you think, Levi? Might she have done away with herself for love?”

A strange shudder passed through the boy. The words tore out of him. “Not for love of me, sir.”

“Then for whom?”

Levi shook his head wordlessly.

“Why would she tell her cousin you meant to marry her?”

Levi hunched his shoulders.

Ezra couldn’t control himself any longer. “With a girl like that, who can tell what they might say?”

Alexander ignored him. “Levi?”

Levi shook his head wordlessly. “I can’t think.”

Ezra pushed back his chair. “You heard him, sir. He’s so tired he can’t think. The boy needs rest after his ordeal in that hellhole. I wouldn’t be surprised if he contracted an ague. If he falls ill, it’s the Ring family who will need to answer for it. I should never have sent him to that place.”

Slowly, Alexander stood, looking around the shadowy kitchen.

A child’s wooden horse lay discarded on the floor, half-hidden by a washtub. Alexander’s own home was constantly littered with such things; with the little ones’ dolls and hoops, the older ones’ schoolbooks and dirty linen. He’d tripped over Noah’s Ark just that morning and barked his shin on a table.

No matter how crowded their hired house at 26 Broadway became, with their own seven children in and out, ranging in age from Philip at Columbia to baby Betsy with her teeth just coming in, Eliza somehow always found room for more. Orphaned nephews, orphaned daughters of old friends; there was always a bed, always a place at the table.

“Why did Levi board with the Rings rather than living here, with you?”

Ezra shrugged. “I’ve two children of my own and a new one on the way. And it’s good for a lad to have a place of his own. My journeymen board there too. It was convenient to the lumber yard. And I don’t have the space myself.”

“How many of your journeymen board at the Ring house?”