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But he might have guessed. Caty knew it wasn’t fair to unleash her frustrations on this child, only a boy, with his skinny neck and arms, his hands and feet too large for his frame, his voice still squeaking. But he was there and Levi wasn’t. Levi hadn’t dared come back himself.

“Did thee know they were courting?”

Courting. Such a dainty term for what had been going on in her house, beneath her roof. Richard Croucher had told everyone about their “courting” in lurid detail. He made it sound as though Caty had been running a bawdy house instead of a respectable boardinghouse.

“Did thee? Did thee know what they were about?”

William Anderson flushed a deep, beet red, straight up to the tips of his ears. “I—I might— There was one night—he thought I was asleep—”

“He had Elma—in here—with thee?” Caty thought she might be sick. In her own house, where her babies slept below. Where she was meant to be keeping Elma safe.

“No!” The boy looked genuinely distressed—for her. He was trying to comfort her, Caty realized, and didn’t know whether to be touched or offended. “Levi left the room—in his shirt—and didn’t come back until morning. But I didn’t know where he went. He might have been walking. Or sitting.”

Or lying. With Elma.

“It wasn’t anything—I might have been mistaken. And when I asked him—” The boy stuttered to a stop, realizing he was damning himself with every word. “When I asked him if he meant to—to marry Miss Elma, he said I mustn’t get the wrong idea.”

“I see,” said Caty, her voice glacial.

“He said it wasn’t for courtship—or for dishonor—but only for conversation.”

The boy looked at her eagerly, as though that could make it all better. Only for conversation. The sort of conversation that occurred lip to lip, and thigh to thigh.

“Get thee back to thy master,” said Caty hoarsely. “Take his things and get thee back.”

The boy hurriedly shoveled Levi’s belongings into a small trunk, smashing them any which way. Caty itched to pull them from his hands and put them into order. But she forced herself to stand and watch, his movements growing more and more clumsy beneath her unwavering stare.

“Thee forgot that.” She pointed to a scrap of black on the floor. The ribbon Elma had used to tie back Levi’s hair one month ago today. “Thy master’s ribband.”

The boy lunged for it, shoving it into his pocket. “I thank you, Mrs. Ring. I wish—Elma—she was always kind to me.”

With another mumbled word of thanks, he scurried past Catherine, down the stairs.

Caty let him go.

Levi’s key burned like a brand against her palm. The room was only a room now, the bed slightly askew, a month’s dust dulling the floor. Levi couldn’t have entertained Elma in that bed, not with his apprentice sleeping on the floor. Caty remembered William that night, the night Elma disappeared, drowsing on the front room settle, waiting for Levi to come home and let him into their room, following him like a faithful hound up the stairs to bed.

Had Levi crept out in his shirt at night and met Elma in her room? Just the once, William said, but what did William know? He was a boy and boys slept sound.

Only for conversation.

There had been that other night, the night Elma had said she had slept at the Watkinses’ house, but when Caty had tasked Elizabeth Watkins with it, with letting Elma catch a chill sitting up too late by the stove with her daughter Fanny, whispering and giggling, she said she didn’t know anything about it; Elma had never been with them.

This wasn’t the country. A boy and girl couldn’t slip out and spend the night behind a hedgerow—as Aunt Lizzy had done with her soldier. Besides, it had been December and cold, too cold for trysting outdoors.

Did they have a place they repaired to? A secret place of their own? Had it been just the once? Or had there been other nights, nights Caty didn’t know about?

She couldn’t attend to everything, Caty thought, aggrieved. There were her own four children, on top of the work of the boardinghouse and the millinery. At nine, Rachel was a help already, but four-year-old David was a boy with a boy’s energy, Phoebe, at six, couldn’t be trusted not to tease David and provoke him to trouble, and baby Eliza had careened from one bout of drippy-nosed misery to the next this winter, constantly sick and sneezing.

Caty had been so busy and so tired, and yes, maybe she ought to have noticed, but Elma was a woman grown, and how could she be expected to see everything, always?

It would be different if Elias took on more of his share of the burden, but—Caty cut off that disloyal thought. She could manage well enough on her own, just as her mother had before her. Men were different, that was all. They had different concerns. Like her father, answering the call to bring the word to the people of England, the German states, and wherever else he felt he might be needed. Last they’d heard, he’d been in Ireland, visiting Friends in the vicinity of Dublin, with plans to journey into Ulster.

He didn’t even know Elma was gone.

Caty went slowly to the bottom of the stair and shut the staircase door behind her, resting her head against the wooden boards that enclosed the stair. She had stood here that night, just where she was standing now, and listened for Elma and Levi to come downstairs.

Caty heard Elma all the time. She heard Elma’s step on the stairs, racing up too fast for decorum. She heard Elma laugh; she heard Elma whisper; she heard the floorboards creak above her head. Looking out the window, Caty would see a flounce of a calico skirt and run out, searching for that elusive form in the crowd, only to find it was someone else entirely. Her bread burned and her stitches snarled. She snapped at Phoebe and forgot to change the baby’s clout, only to grab them tight and hug them so hard they demanded to be let down again.