Page 18 of The Girl from Greenwich Street

While to my opponents it belongs as their duty to exert all their powerful talents in favor of the prisoner, as a public prosecutor, I think I ought to do no more than offer you in its proper order, all the testimony the case affords, draw from the witnesses that may be produced on either side all that they know, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

—From the opening statement of Cadwallader Colden at the trial of Levi Weeks

New York City

March 21, 1800

“Other than Levi,”

said Hope quickly. She didn’t like the way Caty looked at all. But then, she hadn’t liked the way Caty looked for weeks now.

“Of course,”

agreed Mr. Colden hastily. “But the workings of the law do not permit us to bring Levi Weeks to the stand. And even if we did . . .”

“He’d lie,”

Hope finished for him.

The way he’d lied the night he returned without Elma and said he’d no idea where she was. The way he’d lied when he wanted Hope to sign a paper saying he’d paid more attention to her than to Elma. The way he’d lied when he tried to make her think her sister knew something about Elma she didn’t.

“Precisely.”

Mr. Colden seemed relieved that she’d understood him so readily. Since their dress was simple, he seemed to think they must be simple too. “All we need of you, Mrs. Ring, is to tell the jury exactly what you’ve told me. How you helped Elma get ready, how you saw Levi come for her, how you waited for her return. . . .”

“Yes,”

said Caty woodenly. “Yes, I can do that.”

“As the first person the jury hears, you’re the one who will make the deepest impression on them.”

Mr. Colden looked at Caty, and Hope saw her sister through his eyes: a respectable matron in a modest dress with work-reddened hands. The mother of children. A Quaker. The epitome of all that was honest and good.

They wouldn’t know that Caty hadn’t been herself recently, that she jumped at shadows and snapped at the children. Not that it was strange, Hope told herself. They’d all been changed by this. Elias had become surly, Caty anxious. And Hope? Hope wasn’t sure what she’d become but she didn’t like it.

“What you say will set the tone for the entire trial. You have the ability to create the story, Mrs. Ring. Not that it’s a story! It’s all truth.”

If you want to know the truth, apply to your sister.

“The attorneys for the defense will try to discomfit you. They’ll question your words, your memories. They’ll twist what you say. They’ll try to make you doubt yourself and the evidence of your own eyes. They are,”

Mr. Colden said ruefully, “very good at that sort of thing.”

They weren’t the only ones who were good at that sort of thing. Hope could see Levi leaning against the fence, his eyes fixed on her, compelling, so compelling, making her doubt herself, making her doubt Caty—Caty! It was absurd.

Mr. Colden was right. It was nothing more than an attempt to create mysteries where there were none. And she was as simple as Mr. Colden seemed to think them for heeding Levi even for a moment.

“What do we do when they do that?”

Hope asked.

Mr. Colden beamed at her. “Don’t let them shake you. Hold firm and tell the truth as you know it. We know they mean to claim that Elma was melancholy, that she threatened to take her own life.”

“She was only melancholy after her illness,”

said Caty tightly. “I don’t even know that I’d call it melancholy. Being ill would make anyone low. She was right again by the middle of December.”

Ask her about Elma’s illness—her cramping of the stomach. Ask her why she wouldn’t let me go for the doctor.

“Anyone will tell thee Elma was of a cheerful disposition,”

Hope said loudly, as if she could drown out the sound of Levi’s voice in her head.

“Yes, her illness.”

Mr. Colden perked up, looking meaningfully at Caty. “I gather Levi was very, er, solicitous of Elma in her illness?”

Caty poked at the hotchpot on the hearth. “He was always very attentive to anyone who was sick.”

“But especially to Elma—when she had the cramps in her stomach?”

“She was much troubled by cramps in her stomach,”

said Caty, concentrating forcibly on the stew pot. “She’d been troubled by cramps for nearly a year.”

But that wasn’t true at all.

Hope should know. They’d been bedfellows most of their youth; they’d had their courses together; they’d washed their linens together. There were times, when the boardinghouse was too full to hold everyone, when they’d shared a bed as they had as children. If Elma had suffered from cramps in the stomach, Hope would have known. Elma would have told her. In great detail.

A wave of fierce grief shook Hope. It always surprised her, the grief. Hating Levi tended to distract her, but then, out of nowhere, something would come that reminded her of the old Elma, the Elma from before Levi had divided them, and Hope would be left gasping, like the time she’d let Elma talk her into jumping into the pond in their shifts and been submerged in freezing water.

Elma had bobbed up laughing, shaking the water out of her face.

“Don’t you like it? Don’t you want to do it again?”

“Never,”

Hope had shot back.

Never, never, never. This time Elma hadn’t come up laughing. She was gone, gone forever, and Hope would have given anything to have her back, in all her moods.

You shouldn’t have jumped in that pond, Elma, she wanted to say. You shouldn’t have gone off that night to meet Levi.

Hope couldn’t shake the feeling that she had helped cause this; that if she’d been nicer to Elma those past months, she never would have felt she had to run off. But her feelings had been hurt at coming back from the country and finding Levi so intimate with Elma. And so she’d turned her back on Elma, pointedly focused on Caty and the children, made it clear who her family was and wasn’t.

She would give anything to take it all back.

“Did Levi come to breakfast as usual the next morning?”

The lawyer was still talking, taking Caty through the events of that night, the night Elma disappeared. Caty’s voice was stilted, hesitant, not like herself at all.

“Yes.”

“Was anything said about Elma at breakfast?”

“No, nobody mentioned her.”

Poor Caty looked utterly crushed, miserable at the clear imputation that she had failed in her duty.

“About ten or eleven o’clock the day after Elma went missing, I met Levi alone upstairs and attacked him about Elma,”

Hope broke in. “He denied knowing anything of her, although from his looks I was confident he did.”

Mr. Colden coughed slightly. “When it comes time for trial, Miss Sands, you must wait until called to give your testimony. You may discover things you wish to add to your sister’s testimony, or there may be statements other witnesses make that you know to be frankly untrue, but you may not answer unless you yourself are on the stand, and then only to reply to the questions that are put to you. That is why it is so important to think now of everything you might wish to say—and every possible question the defense might put to you—so you may answer clearly and not regret anything left unsaid.”

Statements one knew to be false, like Elma having suffered from recurring cramps in the stomach for a year, when it had only begun in early December.

Hope glanced at Caty, who had her hands twisted together at her waist, her entire form stiff with tension.

“I know it is an ordeal, but it will soon be over. All that is required of you is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,”

Mr. Colden said encouragingly. “If I may, Mrs. Ring, I’ll come to you the day before trial to go through what you remember and make sure it’s fresh in your mind. Mr. Ring too.”

Caty’s face looked like that of a much older woman. “I’ll make sure Elias is here.”

When the lawyer had gone, Caty took a bucket of water and some rags. “I’d best attend to my chores. Mr. Croucher leaves us to marry, but he wishes to keep his room to display his wares.”

“Why not tell him to go elsewhere? Thee never liked his running a store from our home.”

“What choice have we? Who would take a room here—now?”

Caty’s voice cracked. She turned quickly away, hiding her face. “I’d best go clean before he sees fit to send that girl again to do my work for me.”

“At least Elias fixed the door.”

Hope’s mind wasn’t on the door; it was in the road outside the Widow Broad’s house, Levi calling after her. “Caty? When Elma was ill, why wouldn’t thee let Levi call the doctor?”

“What does that matter now? I have work to tend to. And thee too,”

Caty added tartly.

“But why?”

Hope followed her up the stairs, toward Mr. Croucher’s room. “Why didn’t you want the doctor?”

“Words are cheap, but physicians cost money. Levi hasn’t children to feed.”

And never would now. Not if they hanged him.

Hope followed Caty into Mr. Croucher’s room. “Why did thee tell Mr. Colden that Elma suffered from cramps of the stomach for a year?”

Caty set her bucket down with a thump, dipping her rag in the water. “It felt like a year. Thee would think no one had ever been ill before.”

But that wasn’t true either. Elma hadn’t made a fuss—not until later, with the laudanum, and that had just been the once. She’d had the laudanum vial, but hadn’t taken it, not even the few drops prescribed by the physician, not after those first few days when she’d been so ill that Levi had pleaded with Caty to call for the doctor now, before it was too late, and Hope had been barred from the room.

Mr. Croucher’s room was stuffy, thick with the scent of the dyes used on the fabrics he sold and the expensive snuff he took pinch by pinch from an enamel-and-gold box. “Why did Mr. Colden look at thee like that when he spoke of Elma’s illness? Why wouldn’t Levi let me stay with her? Why won’t thee tell me?”

“There are some subjects not suited to thy years.”

“I’m older than thee when thee married Elias! In a year, I’ll be older than Elma will ever be.”

Caty twisted the water out of the rag as if she were wringing the neck of a chicken. “If thee must know . . . thy cousin was with child.”

“With child?”

Hope gawked at her sister. “But—”

They’d come back from Cornwall toward the end of October, and Elma—Elma had left only a few days later, visiting friends in the country. Hope had missed her and been relieved all at the same time, because Elma in the country meant Levi to herself.

When Elma had returned, they hadn’t spoken much. Elma had been at her most provoking, returning any attempt at intimacy with mockery. She’d always, Hope realized, been infuriating when she was unhappy.

And Hope hadn’t seen it. Or hadn’t wanted to see it. All she’d seen was the way Elma leaned toward Levi, the way she whispered in his ear, the solid bar of Elma’s bedroom door closing behind them.

“The baby—was it Levi’s?”

Caty slapped her rag against the sill. “Who else?”

Hope shook her head, too sick for words. Of course it was Levi’s; it couldn’t be anyone’s but Levi’s. But it was one thing to know they’d gone into that room alone together, one thing to hear Mr. Croucher whisper of what he’d seen, and another to be presented with the proof of it.

A baby was such a solid thing.

“I should have known she’d be just like her mother. Father warned me. Born of sin, he said. A daughter of Eve.”

Caty scrubbed at the grime on Mr. Croucher’s windowsill with quick, angry movements. “I wish she’d never been born.”

“Thee can’t mean that!”

Caty slammed the rag down. “We were happy before she came.”

“It wasn’t Elma’s fault,”

said Hope hotly. “We were happy before Levi came. Caty?”

Caty buried her face in her hands. It took Hope a moment to realize she was crying, her whole body shaking with sobs. Hope couldn’t remember ever seeing Caty cry before. Not when they were children; not when people robbed their father’s short-lived store; not when Elias’s businesses failed; not when Elma didn’t come home.

Tentatively, Hope put an arm around her sister. She always thought of Caty as so sturdy, but her bones felt as small and fragile as Rachel’s. “Please, don’t cry, Caty.”

“If only she hadn’t—”

Caty choked on the words. “Why? Why? Why?”

“It must have been the baby,”

Hope said, feeling sick. “That must have been why he killed her, because he didn’t want her to tell anyone about the baby.”

Caty made a horrible noise, deep in her throat. She shook off Hope’s encircling arm. Yanking a handkerchief from her sleeve, she wiped her ravaged face.

“We do not speak of this again,”

Caty said in a strangled voice. She straightened her cap on her tightly plaited hair. “If thee hasn’t hats to trim, then there’s Mr. Lacey’s room to clean.”

As if they could scrub it all away.

The bloody cloths in a bucket. Levi, begging Caty to send for the doctor.

Hope felt as though she’d just been through a tempest and emerged to find the world made unfamiliar with fallen branches and shattered glass. What else had she failed to see? What other secrets had Caty kept from her?

Poor Caty, always taking on everyone’s burdens, trying so hard to spare everyone else.

Hope held out a hand to her sister. “Caty—thee needn’t bear it all alone. I’m a woman grown. I’ll help thee carry thy burdens.”

Caty slapped the rag into her palm. “If thee want to share my burden, clean this room. I haven’t time to stand here all day gossiping like thee and Peggy.”

With that, she pushed past Hope and out of the room, leaving Hope standing in Mr. Croucher’s room with a damp rag dripping in her hand.