Page 10 of The Girl from Greenwich Street

One day my master said to me, “You must not think it strange of my keeping Elma’s company—it is not for courtship nor dishonor, but only for conversation.”

One night I pretended to be asleep, and the prisoner undressed himself, and came with the candle and looked to see if I was asleep or not. Supposing I was, he went downstairs in his shirt, and did not come back until morning.

—From the testimony of William Anderson, apprentice, at the trial of Levi Weeks

New York City

January 22, 1800

“It’s only to collect my master’s things.”

Catherine watched stony-faced as William Anderson sidled past her toward the stairs, the key that had been Levi’s clenched in his hand. He tripped on the bottom step and bumped against the wall, wincing as much with shame as with pain.

“Give it me,”

said Caty shortly. “I’ll let thee in.”

Meekly, Levi’s apprentice followed her up the stairs to the room he had shared with Levi. No one had entered since Levi had been taken up by the constables nearly a month before. Levi’s spare shirt hung on a peg on the wall; his sketches littered a small table; and an untidy heap of blankets lay snarled on the pallet where his apprentice had slept.

“I—I am sorry,”

the boy stammered. “About Elma—Miss Sands.”

“Take what thee came for.”

If he was looking for exoneration, Caty wasn’t going to provide it.

She stood there, in the doorway, as the boy hastily gathered together Levi’s belongings: his clothes, his few books, his papers, the shaving kit that sat next to a basin and ewer still filled with weeks-old dirty water.

She’d have to clean that. She’d empty and scrub and re-let the room to someone else. But right now Caty could only stand there, consumed with emotions she couldn’t even begin to name as she watched Levi’s apprentice creep about, removing his things as though he’d never been there, never caused them this shame and grief.

“Did thee know?”

The words tore out before she could stop them. “Did thee know what thy master and Elma planned?”

The boy paused, a clumsy pile clutched to his chest. “I—no. No, they never told me.”

But he might have guessed. Caty knew it wasn’t fair to unleash her frustrations on this child, only a boy, with his skinny neck and arms, his hands and feet too large for his frame, his voice still squeaking. But he was there and Levi wasn’t. Levi hadn’t dared come back himself.

“Did thee know they were courting?”

Courting. Such a dainty term for what had been going on in her house, beneath her roof. Richard Croucher had told everyone about their “courting”

in lurid detail. He made it sound as though Caty had been running a bawdy house instead of a respectable boardinghouse.

“Did thee? Did thee know what they were about?”

William Anderson flushed a deep, beet red, straight up to the tips of his ears. “I—I might— There was one night—he thought I was asleep—”

“He had Elma—in here—with thee?”

Caty thought she might be sick. In her own house, where her babies slept below. Where she was meant to be keeping Elma safe.

“No!”

The boy looked genuinely distressed—for her. He was trying to comfort her, Caty realized, and didn’t know whether to be touched or offended. “Levi left the room—in his shirt—and didn’t come back until morning. But I didn’t know where he went. He might have been walking. Or sitting.”

Or lying. With Elma.

“It wasn’t anything—I might have been mistaken. And when I asked him—”

The boy stuttered to a stop, realizing he was damning himself with every word. “When I asked him if he meant to—to marry Miss Elma, he said I mustn’t get the wrong idea.”

“I see,”

said Caty, her voice glacial.

“He said it wasn’t for courtship—or for dishonor—but only for conversation.”

The boy looked at her eagerly, as though that could make it all better. Only for conversation. The sort of conversation that occurred lip to lip, and thigh to thigh.

“Get thee back to thy master,”

said Caty hoarsely. “Take his things and get thee back.”

The boy hurriedly shoveled Levi’s belongings into a small trunk, smashing them any which way. Caty itched to pull them from his hands and put them into order. But she forced herself to stand and watch, his movements growing more and more clumsy beneath her unwavering stare.

“Thee forgot that.”

She pointed to a scrap of black on the floor. The ribbon Elma had used to tie back Levi’s hair one month ago today. “Thy master’s ribband.”

The boy lunged for it, shoving it into his pocket. “I thank you, Mrs. Ring. I wish—Elma—she was always kind to me.”

With another mumbled word of thanks, he scurried past Catherine, down the stairs.

Caty let him go.

Levi’s key burned like a brand against her palm. The room was only a room now, the bed slightly askew, a month’s dust dulling the floor. Levi couldn’t have entertained Elma in that bed, not with his apprentice sleeping on the floor. Caty remembered William that night, the night Elma disappeared, drowsing on the front room settle, waiting for Levi to come home and let him into their room, following him like a faithful hound up the stairs to bed.

Had Levi crept out in his shirt at night and met Elma in her room? Just the once, William said, but what did William know? He was a boy and boys slept sound.

Only for conversation.

There had been that other night, the night Elma had said she had slept at the Watkinses’ house, but when Caty had tasked Elizabeth Watkins with it, with letting Elma catch a chill sitting up too late by the stove with her daughter Fanny, whispering and giggling, she said she didn’t know anything about it; Elma had never been with them.

This wasn’t the country. A boy and girl couldn’t slip out and spend the night behind a hedgerow—as Aunt Lizzy had done with her soldier. Besides, it had been December and cold, too cold for trysting outdoors.

Did they have a place they repaired to? A secret place of their own? Had it been just the once? Or had there been other nights, nights Caty didn’t know about?

She couldn’t attend to everything, Caty thought, aggrieved. There were her own four children, on top of the work of the boardinghouse and the millinery. At nine, Rachel was a help already, but four-year-old David was a boy with a boy’s energy, Phoebe, at six, couldn’t be trusted not to tease David and provoke him to trouble, and baby Eliza had careened from one bout of drippy-nosed misery to the next this winter, constantly sick and sneezing.

Caty had been so busy and so tired, and yes, maybe she ought to have noticed, but Elma was a woman grown, and how could she be expected to see everything, always?

It would be different if Elias took on more of his share of the burden, but—Caty cut off that disloyal thought. She could manage well enough on her own, just as her mother had before her. Men were different, that was all. They had different concerns. Like her father, answering the call to bring the word to the people of England, the German states, and wherever else he felt he might be needed. Last they’d heard, he’d been in Ireland, visiting Friends in the vicinity of Dublin, with plans to journey into Ulster.

He didn’t even know Elma was gone.

Caty went slowly to the bottom of the stair and shut the staircase door behind her, resting her head against the wooden boards that enclosed the stair. She had stood here that night, just where she was standing now, and listened for Elma and Levi to come downstairs.

Caty heard Elma all the time. She heard Elma’s step on the stairs, racing up too fast for decorum. She heard Elma laugh; she heard Elma whisper; she heard the floorboards creak above her head. Looking out the window, Caty would see a flounce of a calico skirt and run out, searching for that elusive form in the crowd, only to find it was someone else entirely. Her bread burned and her stitches snarled. She snapped at Phoebe and forgot to change the baby’s clout, only to grab them tight and hug them so hard they demanded to be let down again.

One month ago, Elma had been alive.

It seemed impossible that time should stretch on and Elma should be gone. Buried. A name on a marker in the graveyard. Not even their own graveyard in Cornwall, but the Friends burial ground here in the city, a place of strangers.

Perhaps Elma might prefer being buried among strangers—although not among Friends. She had never wanted to be a Friend. It had been a source of ongoing frustration to Caty’s father that he could convert the heathen of Rhode Island and Connecticut, but not his own niece.

Caty had thought that living with her and Elias, Elma might change. Elma could live in the city, the teeming, exciting metropolis for which she’d always yearned. Under Caty’s loving guidance, she’d free herself of her frivolous desires, meet a nice boy at meeting, and set her mind to a life of happy industry.

But it hadn’t worked out that way. By the time Elma had been under her roof a year, Caty would have been happy for Elma to have married anyone, just so long as she was out of her house.

That night, Caty had stood by this stair and heard their whispered voices: Levi and Elma. She had retreated hastily to her room, so they wouldn’t catch her listening. From her room, she’d heard the front door open and close. The relief of it, the incredible relief of it, knowing Elma was gone . . .

Caty jerked back as steps clattered down the stair. Not Elma’s tread, never Elma’s tread again, but Elias’s heavy clump and the mincing click of the heels of their lodger Croucher. They opened the door, nearly walking right into Caty in their absorption.

They made such an ill-assorted pair: her husband in his homespun, his baggy trousers and loose shirt; their lodger in a tightly fitted bottle-green frock coat over a waistcoat of cream brocade embroidered with birds of paradise.

“Mrs. Ring.”

Croucher tipped his hat to her. He contrived, as he always did, to make her feel like a scullery maid in her own home.

“Mr. Croucher. Does thee plan to do us the honor of gracing our table?”

“I’ve other arrangements,”

said Mr. Croucher vaguely, by which, Caty knew, he meant he would call on acquaintances at the dinner hour and wrangle an invitation to eat, rather than paying the highly reasonable rate she charged to feed her boarders. “It’s such a busy season.”

“Catherine.”

Elias cleared his throat, looking somewhere past her rather than at her. “Mr. Croucher was just telling me that he is to be married—to the Widow Stackhaver.”

“I wish thee happy. I suppose that means thee will be not much longer with us?”

“Oh, there are affairs to set in order,”

Croucher said airily, waving one of his long, thin hands. Dull red glinted from a ring on his finger, not a gem, but polished stone. He looked meaningfully at Elias, raising all of Caty’s worst suspicions. “We shan’t be married for some weeks. You needn’t fear. I don’t mean to leave you without a lodger quite yet, Mrs. Ring.”

That wasn’t what she feared.

Swirling himself in a greatcoat with no fewer than five capes, Mr. Croucher took himself off, undoubtedly to batten at someone else’s table. Five capes! Caty could make breeches for David and cloaks for all three girls out of that material.

Elias would have gone too, turning toward their room on the other side of the stair, but Caty stepped in front of him, trying to put words to her misgivings. “That Croucher—thee are constantly in company together.”

Elias hunched his shoulders. “Is it so strange a man would want for companionship in this house of women?”

Most of their boarders were men. But that wasn’t what Elias was talking about, she knew. It was the millinery. He deeply resented the millinery, and the dozen girls who came and went, trimming hats, dropping bits of ribbon, and making more money for them than any of his projects had in a year.

Caty stepped up to him, tilting her head to look up into his face. She could see the stubble on his chin, where he hadn’t shaved since yesterday, the brown tinged with gray. “He has not persuaded thee to anything, has he?”

Elias’s expression went blank. “I don’t know what thee might mean.”

He was a terrible liar, her Elias.

“It’s the store, isn’t it?”

Caty doggedly kept pace with him as Elias strode toward the bedroom, trying to avoid her.

She wouldn’t let him avoid her any longer, not if he meant to embark on another of his ill-fated business ventures, with Croucher as a partner. When they’d first come to the city, Elias had opened a dry goods store in the space that Catherine now used for the millinery. It had failed miserably.

Caty caught up with Elias as he fumbled with the lock of their door. “If he wants thee to go into partnership for his frivolities . . .”

He dropped the key, lurching inelegantly for it. “If I did, that would be my business, not thine.”

Caty looked at him, thinking how different he looked from the man she’d married, the first marriage in the new meetinghouse. She’d been so proud. So proud to be a harbinger of future joy. So proud of the man she’d married, so sure he was destined for great things, that they were destined for great things together. She’d been seventeen, and he’d been thirty-one, and it had seemed wonderful to her that a man of his industry and vigor and obvious powers could take an interest in a girl like her.

Her father had blessed the match; her mother had made the fruitcake. The whole community had garlanded them with flowers.

She would always remember Elias like that, standing in the sunshine outside the new meetinghouse, the light bringing out the glints of red in his brown hair, standing tall and sure, his hand extended to her—to her—as they started their life together.

But that had been before the mill that failed . . . and the dry goods store that failed . . . and the patent waterwheel that Elias had sworn and sworn would make their fortunes, bringing clean water to the city . . . until the Manhattan Company had passed his plan over, the same way every other investor he’d approached had passed his plan over.

It galled him that the boardinghouse kept their children fed and clothed, the boardinghouse and the millinery Caty oversaw when she wasn’t cooking and scrubbing and mending, and she didn’t mind it, she didn’t mind it at all, if only Elias would stop dreaming and help just once in a while. She’d been telling him for weeks now the front door stuck, but he was too busy paying good money to stick advertisements in the paper for a waterwheel no one wanted.

It’s not money wasted when it makes our fortunes, he’d snapped, but the only fortune Caty saw was the amount they were spending on wood to heat the house through the winter. The cost had risen to sixteen dollars the cord, thanks in no small part to Ezra Weeks buying up every available log to make pipes for the Manhattan Well. That horrible, horrible well.

Was he now to enter into business with that Croucher, the man who had been spreading their shame throughout the city? The man who’d rather wear silk and beg his bread than dress in wool and pay for an honest meal?

“I don’t like that man,”

Caty said doggedly. “I don’t trust him. He wears finery but he’s always late paying his rent.”

“What does thee know of it—of anything?”

said Elias dismissively, and turned the key in the lock.

It was all too much. Caty followed him into the bedroom, the children’s trundles pushed neatly under the bed. She followed him as he yanked his cloak off the hook in the corner. “Did he tell thee—that Croucher? Did he tell thee he saw Elma and Levi together while I was in the country?”

She could see Elias’s hands clench, his knuckles very white against the dark wool. That was it, wasn’t it? Caty didn’t know whether to be angry or relieved. It was why he couldn’t meet her eyes. He’d known. He’d known and he’d done nothing.

When she’d been in the country a month, he’d sent her a letter, begging her to come back to the city. At the time, she’d felt a perverse satisfaction over it, that he’d realized he couldn’t manage without her, that he was finally seeing all the work she did, unnoticed, unthanked. She’d decided to make him stew, to see just how much she was worth, and stayed another two weeks in the country before coming back.

Not just to make him stew, of course. The children were so happy in Cornwall with her mother, and her mother was so happy with the children. But letting Elias miss her was part of it too.

Caty took the edges of Elias’s cloak, drawing them together over his chest for him. “Was that why thee wanted me to come back?”

Elias’s eyes slid away from hers as Caty fixed his cloak at his neck. “It was thy place to be at my side.”

Caty’s hands stilled on the careful bow she was tying. “He told thee. Or thee saw.”

“What does it matter—now?”

She could feel the vibration in his chest as the words tore out, raw and horrible.

“It matters because—”

Because she might have stopped it. Because Elias never told her anything anymore. Because they had stood up in the presence of God and their families and pledged to be loving and faithful so long as they both should live. Because she was meant to be his helpmeet, living in the Light of the Lord, and one couldn’t very well be a helpmeet when one’s husband never told one anything.

This wasn’t what they had promised each other ten years ago in the new meetinghouse, the bees buzzing happily in the flowers her mother had planted outside, the scent of sawdust still fresh in the air, the nails Caty herself had carried over from the smithy at New Windsor gleaming brightly, holding the whole together. She’d thought her marriage would be as solid as the new meetinghouse, as pure and bright, nailed together with true respect and affection.

Her voice low and unsteady, Caty said, “Does thou rate me so low that thou cannot share thy troubles?”

His finger brushed her cheek, the barest trace of a touch. Like when they were courting and he would cup her face in his hands, looking down at her as if she were all the riches of the world and his hope for salvation.

Caty leaned her cheek into his palm. “I might have shared thy burden. If I had known. . . .”

Elias’s hand dropped, his expression turning ugly. “What thee means is that thee would have answered the problem better. Does thee think thyself so subtle? Thee make no secret thee think me a poor excuse of a man.”

“Elias—I never—”

“Didn’t thee? When was the last time thee shared my bed?”

“We’ve four children in the room with us!”

“Thee ran off to thy mother at the first opportunity—”

“—to spare the children from the fever—”

“Thee judges me, flaunting thy industry. ‘Oh, Elias, look how many hats!’ Hats! I might have brought fresh water to the city! And thee taunt me with hats!”

“Might doesn’t put bread on the table.”

Caty clapped her hand over her mouth but it was too late; the words were out.

Elias’s lips twisted into a sneer. “There’s the truth of it. Straight from thine own lips.”

“Elias—wait. Please. We can leave—go back to Cornwall—”

Back to the fields of her youth, to the meetinghouse where they’d been married, to the smell of snow and bread baking and green things ready to grow. Her mother would be there to help with the children; the children would have their cousins, her brother’s children. Elias could tinker with his inventions to his heart’s content, Caty wouldn’t care so long as they were home again, away from this horrible place. “Think how happy we might be there. Back in the Cornwall meeting . . .”

“And have thee telling everyone of my failure. No. We’ll stay where we are.”

“And have thee giving our hard-earned coin to Richard Croucher?”

Caty shouted after him.

But it was too late. Elias was gone, slamming the door of their bedroom behind him so hard that her cloak fell from its peg in a sad heap on the ground.

“Mama?”

Rachel stuck her head through the door. Her cheeks were pink from the kitchen hearth. Hope had fixed her hair that morning; her shining braids were slightly crooked. “I heard shouting.”

“It’s nothing, my lovely.”

Caty gathered the first child of her marriage into her arms, resting her cheek against the top of her head. Her hair was no longer wispy fine like Eliza’s; she was nine already, Rachel, and growing so fast. Ever since Elma died, she’d looked so solemn all the time, as though she’d aged a decade in a month. “Nothing to concern thee.”

Caty would see that it wasn’t.

When it came to her children, she would do whatever was needed to protect them.