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Brockholst lowered his voice, glancing over his shoulder. “We’ve no time for this. We have Colden ready to break. The only compelling argument he has is that Weeks knew where the body was found before being told. Once we deal with that, we’ve won.”

Alexander dug in his heels. “Have we really won if the murderer isn’t brought to justice? If we get Croucher on the stand—”

“By all means,” said Burr smoothly. “Should he confess—or should Elias Ring confess—or should the man who cleans the streetlights confess—we shall all rejoice. But in the meantime, we must proceed as planned. I believe Justice Lansing is about to call us back to order.”

Brockholst glanced sideways at Burr. “You have the opening statement?”

“Oh yes,” said Burr gently. “Yes, I have.”

The justice’s gavel pounded the table. The jurymen hastily swallowed the last of their bread and cheese. Court was back in session.

Burr rose, bowing to the judges at the bench, looking from the spectators to the jurors to the prisoner at the bar.

“Gentlemen of the jury, the patience with which you have listened to this lengthy and tedious detail of testimony is honorable to your characters.”

It was a wonder to Alexander how a man who preferred to surround himself with fine things, could, when he wanted, have such a common touch. Burr’s manner with the jury was rueful, solicitous, man-to-man, as if he were one with those laborers and they were one with him.

“It evinces your solicitude to discharge the awful duties which are imposed upon you and it affords a happy presage that your minds are not infected by that blind and indiscriminating prejudice that has already marked the prisoner for its victim.”

Several men were scribbling away, recording their impressions, taking down the words of Burr’s speech. They would appear in dozens of handbills and pamphlets across the city by the day after tomorrow.

They might be listening to Burr now, but Alexander’s oration was the one they would remember. Alexander put his hand to his breast pocket and felt the comforting bulk of paper: his closing speech.

Burr’s posture was relaxed, his tone frank. “You have relieved me from my greatest anxiety, for I know the unexampled industry that has been exerted to destroy the reputation of the accused and to immolate him at the shrine of persecution without the solemnity of a fair and candid trial.”

Alexander could feel himself freeze, disbelieving, wondering if he’d misheard. He could have sworn those were his words Burr had just voiced.

“I know that hatred, revenge, and cruelty, all the vindictive and ferocious passions have assembled in terrible array. The thousand tongues of rumor have been steadily employed in the fabrication and dissemination of falsehoods,” Burr went on, speaking without a paper, speaking as though the ideas were his, as though they had only just rolled from his mind to his tongue. “We have witnessed the extraordinary means which have been adopted to enflame the public passions and to direct the fury of popular resentment against the prisoner.”

Alexander felt as though he had returned to his home to find Burr sitting at his table, wearing his clothes, embracing his wife, wearing them as of right, as if Alexander never was, never had been, as if there had never been anyone but Burr, stripping the inner recesses of Alexander’s mind and wearing them like the pelts of a conquered enemy.

“Why has the body been exposed for days in the public streets in a manner most indecent and shocking? Such dreadful scenes speak powerfully to the passions: they petrify the mind with horror—congeal the blood within our veins—and excite the human bosom with irresistible but undefinable emotions.”

Petrified, yes, Alexander was petrified. Burr had planned his strike brilliantly; there wasn’t a thing Alexander could do. If he complained, he would only weaken their case and make himself look small. Alexander’s speech weighed useless in his pocket.

Fool that he was, he’d given it to Burr. He’d had his own clerk make Burr a copy.

He didn’t miss the way Burr glanced at him, such a quick look that no one else would have noticed it, but Alexander did, and it burned.

Blandly, Burr went on, “Notwithstanding there may be testimony of an intimacy between the prisoner and the deceased, we shall show you that there was nothing like real courtship, for it will be seen that she manifested equal partiality for other persons as for Mr. Weeks. We shall show you that if suspicions may attach anywhere, there are those on whom they may be fastened with more appearance of truth than on the prisoner at the bar. Certainly you are not in this place to condemn others, yet it will relieve your minds of a burden.”

That wasn’t part of Alexander’s speech. That was Burr. It was dizzying and disorienting, this interweaving of Alexander’s words with Burr’s argument.

“There will be two modes of giving a solution. First, that the deceased sometimes appeared melancholy, that she was a dependent upon this family, and that a gloomy sense of her situation might have led her to destroy herself. As to the incident of the sleigh, we shall account for Mr. Weeks’s whole time during that evening, except for about fifteen minutes, which was employed in walking from one house to another.”

That was all Burr, pure Burr. Alexander didn’t understand how others couldn’t hear the difference, couldn’t know two different hands had written the words Burr spoke.

Burr paused, glancing again at Alexander before looking back to the jury, as Alexander’s words oozed off his lips. “The story, you will see, is broken, disconnected, and utterly impossible. In cases depending upon a chain of circumstances, all the fabric must hang together or the whole will tumble down.”

Alexander made the same mistake every time. With the Manhattan Company—a boon for the whole city, Burr had sworn, and Alexander had done all the work for him, when, in the end, it had been a boon only for Burr.

And now—this!

While Alexander stood there, sick and furious, Burr and Brockholst between them began calling the witnesses, carrying on without him, quizzing Ezra Weeks’s apprentice about the sleigh and the key to the gate and the bells on the harness, coolly taking apart Colden’s story about the sleigh, as if Alexander weren’t here, as if it were just the two of them for the defense, following their own strategy they’d agreed upon without him.

Brockholst had known, of course. They’d planned this between them when they’d left Alexander’s office the other day. He’d been a fool not to suspect something of the kind.

But, more fool he, he had thought they were all working together. For Levi. For justice.