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“I saw them—making the beast with two backs.” Mr. Croucher’s dark head, the hair pulled back neatly into a queue, bobbed up and down. “Shameless, utterly shameless.”

Caty wanted to grab him by that tidy queue and yank. Why couldn’t he be quiet? Why did he have to keep shouting their shame?

Never there when the rent was due; stickling over every penny; only a lodger, not a boarder; oh no, Caty’s plain cooking wasn’t good enough for Richard Croucher—but since Elma had gone and their house had turned into a traveling fair he was all over like mold on cheese, whispering in Elias’s ear, shaking his head over Levi’s perfidy, sharing scandalous stories of what had gone on while Elma was left alone without female supervision during the yellow fever. . . .

Scandal spurred the sales of silk stockings, Caty thought bitterly. Their tragedy was Mr. Croucher’s business opportunity. Share a delicious secret; sell a bunch of garters.

They were all looking at Caty, of course. Caty, who had let this happen in her house. Caty, who had left Elma. Unchaperoned. In a house of men.

During the fever!

Caty had taken the children away while yellow fever raged through the city that autumn; she’d had no choice. She couldn’t leave them to sicken. And her sister Hope—Caty needed the help with the children. It made sense at the time to leave Elma in the city in charge of the boardinghouse. She was a woman grown, Elma, twenty-two years old. By the time Caty was her age, she’d been several years married and had two children.

Elma would never marry now.

Caty pressed her lips hard together. If Mr. Croucher had really seen Elma in bed with Levi, he ought to have said something then, not stored it up to gloat over later. And why hadn’t Mr. Croucher told Caty then? Or Elias?

Caty’s husband stood behind Elma’s coffin, his tall form hunched, giving him a scarecrow aspect, as though he’d folded in on himself. Ever since Elma had disappeared, they’d none of them been themselves, that was fair to say, but Elias had been so strange, so furtive, huddling in corners with Croucher, hurrying out of rooms as soon as Caty entered them, prone to sudden outbursts and brooding silences.

A love fit, that was what Elias had said when two days, then three, then four had passed and Elma still hadn’t come home. She must have flung herself in the river in a love fit.

Elias had gone to Captain Rutgers and had him drag the waters around Rhinelander’s battery, never knowing, never imagining that Elma’s battered body was at that very time at the other end of the city, submerged in a well in Lispenard’s Meadow. It was the muff that had led them to her, Beth Osborn’s muff, floating on the surface, fished out by a boy and brought home to his mother.

Thou will remember to return it? The muff?

Caty’s head ached. The noise. The smells. The press of people. The effort to hold back tears, to be calm, serene, strong. Hide the tumult she was feeling.

It was the Saturday before Christmas that Hope had come to her, all indignation, to tell her that Elma had told Hope, in strictest confidence, that she was to be wed, in secret, the following night.

To Levi? Catherine had asked.

Who else? Hope had snapped back.

Heaven help her, Caty’s only feeling had been relief. Elma—out of her house. Elma married, safely. Levi was a good boy, a good match. He wasn’t a Friend, but then, neither was Elma, who had refused, persistently, to countenance coming to meeting.

Yes, Hope was disappointed to see Levi’s attentions go elsewhere, but Caty had never liked the idea of seeing Hope married out of their meeting. She’d pretended not to notice as Hope had experimented with you instead of thee, trying on the language of the godless as Elma might preen in a borrowed kerchief. Levi married to Elma? It was the answer to a prayer.

It must have been the devil whispering in Caty’s ear, making her close her eyes and her heart. Why in secret? she ought to have asked. She ought to have told Elias, urged him to remonstrate with Elma. She ought to have spoken to Levi, demanded to know his intentions.

But it had never occurred to her to wonder, or to worry.

Even when Elma had failed to appear that night, when Levi had returned to the boardinghouse without her, pretending ignorance, Caty still half thought it was only one of Elma’s tricks, that she’d appear, laughing at them, a ring on her finger. Wasn’t it a good joke? Elma would say, her arm around Levi’s waist. Didn’t I make you wonder?

But Caty hadn’t. She hadn’t wondered until it was too late. She hadn’t wanted to wonder.

She’d just wanted Elma safely married. Was that so wrong? Elma decently married, out of Caty’s house. Caty had been five when Elma had been born—the result of Aunt Lizzy’s lapse of conscience with a soldier from the Continental Army—and nothing had been the same since. Elma poisoned everything she touched—and Elma touched everything.

Pity her, Caty’s mother had advised her. Pray for her. The child cannot help that she was born into sin.

“—with child,” someone was saying loudly. “He killed her because she was with child.”

Next they’d be calling Caty’s respectable boardinghouse a bawdy house.

“The doctors examined her,” Caty snapped. They’d cut Elma open and peered at her insides. It made Caty sick to think of it. “There was no child.”

The woman gave Caty a nasty look, then turned away and muttered something to her companion. Now they were both staring at her, whispering about her, mocking her in her own house. Caty could feel her cheeks heating beneath her white cap.

Respectable, she’d always been respectable—it was all Elma’s fault, always Elma’s fault. Couldn’t she have just stayed gone?