Page 58

She’d always hated Elma, from the time Elma had first entered and upended their household by being born.

They’d been a proper family before then. It was only after Aunt Lizzy had fallen pregnant that her father had felt the call to preach in the farthest reaches of New England, abandoning them to make their own way as best they could in the midst of a war in which they were suspect and mocked for her father’s refusal to fight.

If he’d been there, her father might have used his eloquence to spare them the slights they’d endured. As it was, they’d had to beg him to send a letter, attesting that they weren’t loyalists. It had taken months to arrive, and in the meantime, they’d been robbed, spat on, threatened.

All because of Elma.

The Lord couldn’t have found a harsher trial to test Caty than her husband betraying her with Elma.

Why was she being punished? It was Elias who had sinned. Elias and Elma.

“It was thee came to me with thy unquiet conscience,” said Caty mercilessly. “It was thee wanted me to lie for thee. Are thee so lost to all feeling that thee would put thy crimes on thy wife?”

“Not my crimes!” Elias cried. “My only sin was of the flesh. It was Levi killed her; we all know it was Levi killed her. Thee saw her leave with Levi.”

“I thought I heard her leave with Levi,” Caty corrected him. “I didn’t see them.”

“But thee knows it was he Elma meant to meet.” It was dangerously satisfying watching Elias grovel.

Caty lifted her chin. “I know what Hope told me. I never heard it from Elma’s own lips.”

Elias’s face looked like a skull. “Thee will not say that—in court.”

“Maaaaaamaaaaaaaaa,” Phoebe called from downstairs.

Caty took a quick, sharp breath. What had she been thinking? The children. Elias was their father.

The only peace they’d ever have was if Levi was convicted for Elma’s murder and soon.

“Coming!” she called, and then faced her husband. “No. I’ll not say that in court. Thee has the right of it. We both know it was Levi killed her.”

“Thee shouldn’t have teased me,” he said sternly, masking his fear under an air of authority.

“No, husband,” she said, and turned to go down the stairs to Phoebe.

“Catherine?” he called. He held out the bucket of dirty water to her. “Thee forgot this.”

It was with extreme strength of will that Caty prevented herself from emptying it over his head.

Chapter Nineteen

On Friday last, Croucher came running into the store and said, “What do you think of this innocent young man now? There is material evidence against him from the Jerseys, and he is taken by the High Sheriff, sir, and carried to jail; he will be carried from there, sir, to the court and be tried; from there he will be carried back to jail, and from thence to court again, sir, and from thence to the place of execution, and there be hanged by the neck until he is dead.”

—From the testimony of David Forrest at the trial of Levi Weeks

New York City

March 28, 1800

“She lost the baby.” Levi slumped in a chair in the room the governor of the Bridewell had so kindly allowed Alexander for his conference with his client.

Unlike the last time Alexander had visited him in the Bridewell, Levi was clean-shaven and neatly dressed. He’d only just been brought back to prison, having been taken before the grand jury and indicted on a charge of having with force and arms assaulted Gulielma Sands, and feloniously, willfully, and of his malice aforethought, cast, thrown, and pushed the said Gulielma Sands into a certain well, and there choked, suffocated, and drowned the said Gulielma Sands.

In case that weren’t enough, a second count had been added, accusing Levi of having cast and thrown the said Gulielma Sands upon the ground, beating, striking, and kicking her, with mortal strokes, wounds, and bruises, in and upon the head, breast, back, belly, sides, and other parts of the body.

That, Alexander thought, was overreach. The medical evidence didn’t support a charge of battery. Strangulation, possibly. But the bruising on the rest of her body had been such as might have been caused by immersion in the water, not a brutal beating.

Levi had sat through the litany of horrors like a man in a nightmare. He’d scarcely seemed to hear the words, so engrossed was he in his own private terrors.