Page 19

Cadwallader didn’t like the sound of this at all. He could only imagine what Burr would make of this—and of him—on the stand. “You’re quite certain of that?”

“If she had meant to drink it, she would,” said Hope firmly. “She only wanted us to beg her not to.”

“Was anyone else present?” Of course, someone must have been, or how else would the author of that piece in the paper have heard? But perhaps whoever it was had heard only a whisper, a rumor, and not the whole of it. . . .

“My sister. Elias. I don’t recall whether Levi was present. I don’t believe he was.” Cadwallader had a moment of relief, before she added, “Oh, and Timothy Crane, one of our boarders.”

Cadwallader had an unpleasant sinking feeling. “Isn’t he one of Ezra Weeks’s journeymen?”

“Most of our boarders are,” said Miss Sands. “We’ve only two who aren’t.”

A house full of men dependent on Ezra Weeks, at least one of whom had witnessed Elma Sands threaten to take her own life. This got worse and worse. “She held the whole vial to her mouth.”

“In jest! She only meant to tease us.”

“A strange sort of jest.”

“She was angry Caty hadn’t sent for the doctor when she was ill in November,” said Hope Sands, in a forthright way that impressed Cadwallader. He hoped it would impress a jury as well. “She wanted to make us see how much she suffered.”

“Why did no one tell me this before?” demanded Cadwallader, aggrieved.

Miss Sands set her chin. “Because it had nothing to do with anything.”

He hoped she was right. “Do you believe your cousin might have taken her own life?”

“No.”

“You seem very sure.”

“I’ve never been more sure of anything—except my redeemer,” she added as an afterthought. Her father, Cadwallader remembered, was rather famous as a preacher. He wondered if that would lend her testimony more credence. “Elma would never have done anything to harm herself. She intended to have a grand future, she told me—married to Levi.”

“And you’re quite sure she said she was going to be married to Levi?”

Hope Sands paused slightly before answering. A shadow crossed her face. Remembering her cousin, thought Cadwallader approvingly. It was a becoming show of emotion.

“Yes,” she said at last. “She told me the week before. We were trimming hats. I ran a pin through my finger when she told me.”

She rubbed her thumb absently against her finger as though she could still feel the remembered wound.

“She—she told me she was to be married the following Sunday. She told me I wasn’t to tell, not even Caty. He’d wanted complete secrecy—she wasn’t to have told me, but—but she thought I ought to know.”

“Why so much secrecy?”

“We know that—now—don’t we?” Hope spoke in short bursts, her hands curled in fists in her lap. The passion in her voice made a mockery of the sober gray of her dress. “If she hadn’t told me—if I hadn’t told Caty—she might have disappeared and none the wiser. He could have stayed here—talking, laughing, pretending to goodness—and all the while, Elma—”

Cadwallader gave her a moment to compose herself before asking, “On the day of her, er, wedding . . . did she seem—apprehensive? Unhappy? Melancholy, even?”

“Melancholy? She was elated,” said Hope Sands fiercely. “She bedecked herself for him. She put on her finest clothes—she borrowed Peggy’s handkerchief—she adorned herself like a sacrifice for the altar.”

A memory stirred. Cadwallader’s Loyalist father had sent him to be educated in England; he remembered sitting in the Drury Lane theater, watching the legendary Kemble as Hamlet. Sarah Siddons had played Ophelia. He’d imagined himself in love with her, like half the bucks in the audience. What it had been to be sixteen years old, thrilling to imaginary tragedy, not stumbling through the aftermath of the reality of one.

“I thought thy bride-bed to have deck’d, sweet maid / And not have strew’d thy grave,” murmured Cadwallader.

“Is that what they’re saying in the papers?”

“No, it’s—never mind.” Cadwallader got hold of himself. Perhaps Ophelia wasn’t the best comparison. Ophelia had drowned herself.

Cadwallader forced his attention back to the matter at hand. “You are quite positive your cousin had no idea of drowning herself?”