Page 19 of The Girl from Greenwich Street

When my wife returned, I asked who went out? She said, “Elma and Levi.”

I answered that it was wrong, [Elma] would get sick. She replied, “He will be more careful of her than I would be.”

—From the testimony of Elias Ring at the trial of Levi Weeks

New York City

March 21, 1800

“I mended the door for thee,”

Elias said.

Caty dropped her rag into her bucket, placing her hands on the small of her back, which ached something fierce.

After Mr. Croucher’s room, she’d gone on and cleaned Mr. Lacey’s and Mr. Russel’s rooms, venting all her emotion into the grime and soot beneath the cracks. Sometimes it seemed like all the filth of the city found its way within their walls.

Caty hated herself for breaking down in front of Hope. She’d tried so hard to put up a strong front for the children. Hope might claim to be grown, but she was Caty’s child too, her little sister, hers to protect. To have Hope questioning her . . . offering to share her burdens . . . when she had no idea just how hard Caty had worked to protect her, to keep her in happy ignorance . . . it was all too much to bear. Caty wanted to sink down on the floor, cover her head with her apron, and howl like Eliza.

And now Elias wanted thanks for a task she’d first asked him to complete months ago.

“I thank thee,” she said.

Elias hovered in the doorway, casting a long shadow across the floor. He waited while Caty gathered up her bucket of filthy water, her dirty rags. He didn’t offer to take it from her.

When she went to leave, he stood in the doorway, blocking her path. “What did the lawyer want with thee?”

“Mr. Colden?”

She knew just who he meant, but she was tired and sore at heart.

“He was with thee for some time.”

“Only to tell me of new evidence against Levi—and advise me how to speak at trial.”

Meanly, Caty added, “I’m to tell the whole truth and all will be well.”

There was a petty satisfaction to watching Elias flinch. “Thee won’t. Will thee?”

Caty’s bucket was very heavy and her temper was short. The scene with Hope had been bad enough. She didn’t have the energy to soothe Elias’s sore conscience. She hoped it pricked him like a thousand fiery pitchforks. “Would thee have me lie in a court of law?”

“There are things they have no need to know. . . .”

Elias put a hand on the wall behind her, his voice low and urgent. “Thee would not betray me.”

“As thee betrayed thy marriage vows? Thy children?”

Including the child who had never been born. By Caty’s calculations, the baby would have been due in May. By now there would have been no hiding it, no matter how many extra petticoats Elma wore. “What would thee have done if Elma had carried thy child to term?”

Elias took a step back, his expression wary. “What child? There was no child.”

“Thee didn’t know?”

Even as she said it, the full truth hit her. Of course he hadn’t known. He was a man. He didn’t have to know such things. He just did what he’d wanted and ignored the consequences. It was Caty who had borne the consequences for him, just as she always bore the consequences for him.

The laughter tore out of her, high and hysterical. She couldn’t seem to stop it, any more than she could stop the sobs.

It was just like Elias. Do what he would and let someone else clean up after him.

“Did thee think Elma’s illness merely a distemper of the stomach?”

He had. She could see it in his face. Come home, he’d written her, and she’d come home and solved his problems for him.

“At the autopsy,”

he said. “They said there was no child.”

“Was.”

Caty drew a shaky breath. “Fortunate for thee she lost it before they cut her open.”

Lost. What an utterly inadequate term, as though Elma had misplaced her baby, instead of being scoured from the inside out with blood and fever. If Levi hadn’t sat by Elma’s side, hadn’t guarded her and sponged her forehead and held her hand and demanded preparations of willow bark and broth, Elma might well have expired with her baby.

“It might not have been mine,”

Elias muttered.

Caty looked at him. She felt as though she was seeing him clearly for the first time: the weakness hidden by the strong features of his face, now beginning to sag as he passed his fourth decade. She remembered being sixteen, listening rapt to Elias as he told her of his plans and inventions, of the fools who stood in his way, who didn’t appreciate his genius. It wasn’t his fault; nothing was ever his fault.

It wasn’t that he had changed; it was only that she had finally realized what he was.

Elias put a hand on her arm in a clumsy attempt at solicitude. “Tell me what I can do to make it right with thee.”

Go back and change it all, she wanted to say. Be the man I thought you were, rather than the man you are.

Caty said the only thing she could. “Thee might carry my bucket for me.”

Elias drew back, offended. “Don’t make mock of me. I meant it truly.”

“So did I,”

she said, and stepped past him, into the hall. Carrying her own bucket, filled with everyone else’s filth. Just like always.

She could hear Elias behind her. “Catherine . . .”

She used to thrill to his calling her Catherine. At home she was always Caty. When Elias called her Catherine, she’d felt like someone so much older and more mature than her sixteen years, the person he wanted her to be.

She was tired of being Elias’s Catherine, the excuse for all his failures. She just wanted to be Caty again.

Caty stopped in front of the door of the room that had once been Elma’s. “I will not share thy secret.”

Caty could see the gears turning in Elias’s mind, like one of the machines he designed, and just as effective. “If they ask thee . . .”

It hadn’t occurred to her that they might. But it did make sense. Levi knew. Why wouldn’t he tell the men working for his defense? The idea of her family’s shortcomings being exposed to the world made Caty feel ill.

“I will not expose thee but I will not lie for thee.”

It wasn’t what Elias wanted. “Thee are my wife.”

“Good of thee to remember that.”

Elias’s hands clenched into fists. “Will thee never let me put that behind me?”

They were the subject of hundreds of handbills and broadsides. They were about to stand in a courtroom in front of the eyes of all New York and pray the worst of their shame wasn’t aired. And Elias thought she should put it all behind her?

Caty was so angry she could barely speak. “Thee has no notion of what I’ve done for thee.”

“Haven’t I?”

Gone was all attempt to be conciliatory. “Thee tells me often enough! Thy ceaseless industry keeping us from the poorhouse. . . .”

“I never minded about the money!”

Caty shouted.

Elias stared at her. Caty would have stared at herself. She’d never heard such a tone emerge from her own throat before, never imagined it could. She’d prided herself, always, on being calm and reasonable, the one who kept harmony in the household, just like her mother before her.

“My father was always far from home, spreading the word,”

Caty said in a low voice. Her throat felt scratchy and raw. “I wouldn’t have cared if thee had never earned a cent if only thee were here with me and the children.”

She admired her father tremendously, but she’d wanted a husband who would be more than occasional bulletins delivered by post, someone who would stand by her, sharing life’s pleasures and burdens.

Elias stared at her in complete incomprehension. “It was thee left me to go away into the country.”

Caty felt weary to the bone. “Would thee have come away with me and the children if I’d asked thee?”

His eyes shifted away from hers. “Someone had to mind thy precious boardinghouse.”

No. Elias wouldn’t go back to Cornwall and live in her mother’s house, even for a month. Not even for the sake of his children’s health, or his wife’s. It had suited him better to preside over an empty kingdom with Elma as concubine.

Caty could picture them last summer before she’d left for Cornwall, Elias sitting next to Elma on the settle in the front room, regaling her with tales of his wondrous waterwheel. Just as Caty had once listened to him, wide-eyed, when she’d been sixteen and had no children to mind, no boarders to feed.

What a fool she’d been, to think that if she tried hard enough, worked hard enough, she could make their marriage what it ought to be, what they’d pledged in the new meetinghouse. Elias had never wanted a wife, not a real wife, the sort of wife she had tried to be.

It had all been for nothing, all of it.

“That night,”

Elias said hesitantly. “The night Elma didn’t come home. Thee gave me the child to fix.”

“Eliza.”

He couldn’t even be bothered to use his own child’s name. “Thy youngest child’s name is Eliza.”

“I know my own child,”

he said impatiently, although Caty wasn’t at all sure he did. “Thee remembers? If they ask thee—thee gave me the child.”

“To fix and put to bed.”

Caty was still smarting over Elias’s failure to use his own child’s name. His legitimate child. “But that was after Levi had come back already. What thee did before that I have no notion.”

Elias bristled. “What does thee mean by that?”

“Exactly what I said.”

Elias loomed over her. “Thee knows I was here with thee. Thee came into the sitting room and I asked thee who had gone out and thee said Elma and Levi.”

“And then thee went too,”

Caty said relentlessly. “And I had no more sight of thee until I brought thee the child to fix.”

“I didn’t go out—only into the garden to have a pipe!”

“For two hours? In the dark and the cold?”

Caty’s father had forbidden the use of sugar and tobacco in their household because it was the fruit of the labor of their enslaved brethren, which meant that Elias had got in the habit of sneaking outside for his evening pipe. But it didn’t take a man that long to smoke a pipe.

Elias’s expression turned ugly. “How would thee know? Thee weren’t here when I came in.”

“Because I was putting thy children to bed.”

“I looked in and saw them asleep—but thee were nowhere to be seen. I heard the door,”

he added ominously.

“The door thee hadn’t fixed?”

Caty spread her arms wide, daring him to look at her. Hope took after the tall side of the family, the Sands side, but she and Elma were both slight, like their grandmother Mercy. “Thee had best go tell Mr. Colden to call off the trial. Thee has found the true murderer. I lured Elma to the Manhattan Well—under what pretense only thee can imagine. I lured Elma there and I pushed her in over the side. Go. Tell thy children their mother is a murderess.”

“Don’t be absurd,”

Elias muttered.

It was all absurd, from the piles of handbills in Mr. Croucher’s room, making up all manner of stories about Elma’s restless ghost, to the fact that her husband had betrayed her with her own cousin in her own house.

Caty didn’t understand how she had gone from simply trying to make a home for her family, to be a good wife and a good mother and a good sister and abide by her father’s strictures as best she could, to this. It was the Lord testing her, sounding out her weaknesses, her hidden pride, her hidden resentments.

She’d always hated Elma, from the time Elma had first entered and upended their household by being born.

They’d been a proper family before then. It was only after Aunt Lizzy had fallen pregnant that her father had felt the call to preach in the farthest reaches of New England, abandoning them to make their own way as best they could in the midst of a war in which they were suspect and mocked for her father’s refusal to fight.

If he’d been there, her father might have used his eloquence to spare them the slights they’d endured. As it was, they’d had to beg him to send a letter, attesting that they weren’t loyalists. It had taken months to arrive, and in the meantime, they’d been robbed, spat on, threatened.

All because of Elma.

The Lord couldn’t have found a harsher trial to test Caty than her husband betraying her with Elma.

Why was she being punished? It was Elias who had sinned. Elias and Elma.

“It was thee came to me with thy unquiet conscience,”

said Caty mercilessly. “It was thee wanted me to lie for thee. Are thee so lost to all feeling that thee would put thy crimes on thy wife?”

“Not my crimes!”

Elias cried. “My only sin was of the flesh. It was Levi killed her; we all know it was Levi killed her. Thee saw her leave with Levi.”

“I thought I heard her leave with Levi,”

Caty corrected him. “I didn’t see them.”

“But thee knows it was he Elma meant to meet.”

It was dangerously satisfying watching Elias grovel.

Caty lifted her chin. “I know what Hope told me. I never heard it from Elma’s own lips.”

Elias’s face looked like a skull. “Thee will not say that—in court.”

“Maaaaaamaaaaaaaaa,”

Phoebe called from downstairs.

Caty took a quick, sharp breath. What had she been thinking? The children. Elias was their father.

The only peace they’d ever have was if Levi was convicted for Elma’s murder and soon.

“Coming!”

she called, and then faced her husband. “No. I’ll not say that in court. Thee has the right of it. We both know it was Levi killed her.”

“Thee shouldn’t have teased me,”

he said sternly, masking his fear under an air of authority.

“No, husband,”

she said, and turned to go down the stairs to Phoebe.

“Catherine?”

he called. He held out the bucket of dirty water to her. “Thee forgot this.”

It was with extreme strength of will that Caty prevented herself from emptying it over his head.