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Caty was so angry she could barely speak. “Thee has no notion of what I’ve done for thee.”

“Haven’t I?” Gone was all attempt to be conciliatory. “Thee tells me often enough! Thy ceaseless industry keeping us from the poorhouse. . . .”

“I never minded about the money!” Caty shouted.

Elias stared at her. Caty would have stared at herself. She’d never heard such a tone emerge from her own throat before, never imagined it could. She’d prided herself, always, on being calm and reasonable, the one who kept harmony in the household, just like her mother before her.

“My father was always far from home, spreading the word,” Caty said in a low voice. Her throat felt scratchy and raw. “I wouldn’t have cared if thee had never earned a cent if only thee were here with me and the children.”

She admired her father tremendously, but she’d wanted a husband who would be more than occasional bulletins delivered by post, someone who would stand by her, sharing life’s pleasures and burdens.

Elias stared at her in complete incomprehension. “It was thee left me to go away into the country.”

Caty felt weary to the bone. “Would thee have come away with me and the children if I’d asked thee?”

His eyes shifted away from hers. “Someone had to mind thy precious boardinghouse.”

No. Elias wouldn’t go back to Cornwall and live in her mother’s house, even for a month. Not even for the sake of his children’s health, or his wife’s. It had suited him better to preside over an empty kingdom with Elma as concubine.

Caty could picture them last summer before she’d left for Cornwall, Elias sitting next to Elma on the settle in the front room, regaling her with tales of his wondrous waterwheel. Just as Caty had once listened to him, wide-eyed, when she’d been sixteen and had no children to mind, no boarders to feed.

What a fool she’d been, to think that if she tried hard enough, worked hard enough, she could make their marriage what it ought to be, what they’d pledged in the new meetinghouse. Elias had never wanted a wife, not a real wife, the sort of wife she had tried to be.

It had all been for nothing, all of it.

“That night,” Elias said hesitantly. “The night Elma didn’t come home. Thee gave me the child to fix.”

“Eliza.” He couldn’t even be bothered to use his own child’s name. “Thy youngest child’s name is Eliza.”

“I know my own child,” he said impatiently, although Caty wasn’t at all sure he did. “Thee remembers? If they ask thee—thee gave me the child.”

“To fix and put to bed.” Caty was still smarting over Elias’s failure to use his own child’s name. His legitimate child. “But that was after Levi had come back already. What thee did before that I have no notion.”

Elias bristled. “What does thee mean by that?”

“Exactly what I said.”

Elias loomed over her. “Thee knows I was here with thee. Thee came into the sitting room and I asked thee who had gone out and thee said Elma and Levi.”

“And then thee went too,” Caty said relentlessly. “And I had no more sight of thee until I brought thee the child to fix.”

“I didn’t go out—only into the garden to have a pipe!”

“For two hours? In the dark and the cold?” Caty’s father had forbidden the use of sugar and tobacco in their household because it was the fruit of the labor of their enslaved brethren, which meant that Elias had got in the habit of sneaking outside for his evening pipe. But it didn’t take a man that long to smoke a pipe.

Elias’s expression turned ugly. “How would thee know? Thee weren’t here when I came in.”

“Because I was putting thy children to bed.”

“I looked in and saw them asleep—but thee were nowhere to be seen. I heard the door,” he added ominously.

“The door thee hadn’t fixed?” Caty spread her arms wide, daring him to look at her. Hope took after the tall side of the family, the Sands side, but she and Elma were both slight, like their grandmother Mercy. “Thee had best go tell Mr. Colden to call off the trial. Thee has found the true murderer. I lured Elma to the Manhattan Well—under what pretense only thee can imagine. I lured Elma there and I pushed her in over the side. Go. Tell thy children their mother is a murderess.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Elias muttered.

It was all absurd, from the piles of handbills in Mr. Croucher’s room, making up all manner of stories about Elma’s restless ghost, to the fact that her husband had betrayed her with her own cousin in her own house.

Caty didn’t understand how she had gone from simply trying to make a home for her family, to be a good wife and a good mother and a good sister and abide by her father’s strictures as best she could, to this. It was the Lord testing her, sounding out her weaknesses, her hidden pride, her hidden resentments.