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She shook her head at him. “This isn’t your bank. There are no accounts and no lines of credit in a marriage.”

“Aren’t there?” Alexander said wryly. “All the same. Once this is over, I mean to pay my debt to you with a house all our own. Once he’s free, Levi Weeks can design it for us and Ezra Weeks will build it.”

And with any luck, his gratitude would extend to a substantial reduction in fee.

Eliza took up the candle. “Are you coming to bed?”

“Not just yet.” Suddenly, the mutton seemed extremely appetizing. He was, Alexander realized, tremendously hungry. “But I’ll be up shortly.”

Eliza took a candle from above the hearth, lighting it from her own. She set it down beside him, to light his way back to her.

“Don’t be too long,” she said. “You have important work to do tomorrow.”

A woman to be avenged, a murderer to be accused, and Burr to be put entirely out of countenance when Alexander delivered one of the best speeches he had ever penned.

Outside the window, the night’s black was beginning to lighten to gray. “Not tomorrow,” he said. “Today.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Question by the Assistant Attorney General: Suppose, Doctor, a person had been strangled by hand, would it not have left such an appearance upon the body?

Answer: I think it would.

—From the testimony of Dr. Skinner at the trial of Levi Weeks

New York City

April 1, 1800

“Dr. Skinner, are you not a surgeon in this city, and did not you see the body of Elma Sands after it was taken out of the well and examine it? Pray, sir, inform the court and jury.”

“I follow a branch of surgery, but I do not pretend to be a professed surgeon. I,” Dr. Skinner declared proudly, “am a dentist.”

Hope sat next to Caty, just as she had yesterday. Levi stood in the dock, just as he had yesterday. But everything else had changed. Yesterday, they had been here with one purpose, united in their hatred of Levi. At least, Hope had thought they were united. She had never imagined that Caty—her Caty!—could keep such secrets from her.

Hope snuck a glance at Levi in the dock and found him looking at her.

He’d left with Elma—or, rather, Caty said he had left with Elma. Once, Hope would have fought anyone who had cast doubts on her sister’s word. But Caty had lied to her. She could understand why Caty would have kept the truth of Elma’s miscarriage from her, as much as it made her writhe with annoyance. There were times Caty seemed to think Hope was still Rachel’s age and needed to be shielded accordingly.

But Elma—and Elias!

It was impossible, it was sickening. Hope hadn’t slept last night. She’d walked her room, wondering, remembering. The way Elias expanded like a toad explaining his inventions to Elma when all the rest of them had long since stopped listening, since Elias’s inventions never came to anything anyway. The way Levi had hustled Elma off to the country. To get her away from Elias.

He’d offered to marry Elma, he’d said, but not in December.

Hope felt like the room was swaying beneath her like the ferry they took up the Hudson back to Cornwall when the roads were too bad for a carriage, tipping just when she thought she had her footing.

There had been something between Levi and Elma. They all knew it. Hope had seen it with her own eyes. But what if she’d misunderstood what it was?

But there had been Levi’s apprentice yesterday, speaking of Levi going downstairs in his shirt and staying away until dawn.

Only for conversation.

It was like poking at a sore tooth, but Hope couldn’t seem to stop herself doing it. What if she had been wrong? What if this whole trial was wrong? They’d taken up Levi as soon as Elma’s body was found; there had never been any question of anyone else hurting Elma, only of suicide, and Hope knew, with a certainty, that Elma would never have done away with herself.

Just as she’d known for a certainty that Caty had no secrets.

Hope wanted to drag Levi out of that box and demand that he tell her the truth. But she’d tried that, hadn’t she? When Elma went missing.