Page 35 of The Girl from Greenwich Street

If the deceased was murdered, this at least was not the man. . . . By the evidence of the facts alone, is this young man’s innocence completely established.

—New-York Daily Advertiser, April 3, 1800

New York City

April 23, 1800

“It’s true, then. Thee are going. Elias said—he’d heard—but I didn’t believe—”

On a Wednesday, Ezra Weeks’s lumber yard was thrumming with the business of the shop. Apprentices carried stacks of wood and responded to barked requests for tools. But Levi wasn’t among them. When Hope hurried up to the yard, doing her best to hold her skirts up out of last night’s puddles, she saw him coming from the house, holding a small trunk up over his shoulder.

It was the same trunk he had brought when he came to live in the boardinghouse. Hope remembered seeing Levi carrying it in, how she and Peggy and Elma had all rushed to examine the new boarder as he climbed up the steps to the door; how Peggy had joked that this one was hers. In the first flush of summer, less than a year ago, when the greatest trouble they faced was getting the wrong ribbons to trim the hats, a new, handsome boarder had been a cause of innocent excitement.

“I’m going.”

Levi dropped the trunk with a thunk into the cart waiting by the gate. “You’ll be rid of me for good, although not so permanently as you’d hoped.”

It hadn’t been she who hoped—except that it had. Hope bit her lip, remembering how sure she had been in her righteous fury. She would have seen him hang, and gladly.

“Where does thee go?”

Hope asked. She could feel cold water creeping through her shoes, despite the pattens she had strapped on to raise her feet above the mud.

“Back to Massachusetts. I’m going to Bloody Brook.”

Levi smiled without humor. “It seems appropriate, doesn’t it? Since most of the city still believes I have Elma’s blood on my hands.”

“Not all the city.”

“No, not the people my brother paid to say otherwise.”

Levi leaned his hands on the side of the cart. “Did you know Ezra offered the clerk of the court fifteen hundred dollars to suppress his report of the trial? Or, if he preferred, five hundred just to add a single line saying I’d been completely exonerated.”

“Fifteen hundred dollars?”

Hope had never imagined such money existed.

“Oh yes. My brother is a warm man.”

Levi threw the words at her like a weapon. “Coleman refused. He said the city of New York hadn’t money enough to buy him. Now he and Ezra are bosom friends. He consults with Coleman on his transactions. What’s a mere brother to that?”

Levi made an ironic bow, sweeping his hat off his head. Where it had been, Hope could see a large scar, the stitches still visible, stretching from his hair all the way down to his left eyebrow.

“What happened to thy brow?”

Levi’s hand went to his forehead. “This? Someone pried up a cobble and flung it at me when I went to Forrest’s shop for tobacco.”

He smiled that same humorless grin. “But that’s nothing strange. Three men set upon me when I had the gall to try to order a drink at Rhinelander’s tavern. You did your work well.”

“I didn’t—”

“Your family, then,”

said Levi impatiently, clapping his hat back down on his head. “What does it matter? You’ve ruined me.”

The injustice of it struck Hope. “We only told the truth.”

Levi gave a derisive bark of laughter. “Oh?”

Hope could feel her cheeks heat. She’d forgotten about Elias; the thought of Elias embracing Elma made her flesh crawl. “I only told the truth. If thee hadn’t behaved as if thee meant to court her, we might not have thought thee had. I never told thee to close thyself into Elma’s bedchamber with her!”

“If every man who was ever alone with any maid was accused of her murder, the Bridewell would be bursting,”

said Levi bitterly. “What did I do more than any other man did? I wish I’d never set foot in your sister’s house. You’ve been a plague upon mine. Did you know Elizabeth lost her baby?”

Hope felt a sharp pang. Elizabeth Weeks had been kind to her. There’d been a time she’d imagined she’d one day call her sister. “How does she fare? Mrs. Weeks?”

“She’s recovering. Slowly. No thanks to you and yours.”

“I never meant to do thee ill—or thy family.”

Hope looked at Levi, trying to reconcile the man she’d known with the man standing before her. This man was leaner, marked with scars that hadn’t been there before, but it was more than that. Whenever she thought of Levi, it was with the sun shining on him, smiling, laughing, quick to come to anyone’s aid. She’d never known him to have a hard word for anyone. “I had hoped to see thee before thee left—to make amends.”

“Why? Have you decided I didn’t murder anyone after all? It’s a bit late for that. It doesn’t matter what that jury said. The city’s decided I’m a murderer, and worse for having been acquitted. They think I dodged a noose, and every man with a few drinks in him feels it his duty to try to fit me with one—or at least black my eye.”

“I am sorry, Levi.”

Hope had no idea what to say to make things right. “If thee are innocent, thee didn’t deserve this.”

“If.”

He repeated the syllable mockingly. “We were friends once. You might have trusted me farther.”

Friends. It was a word that could imply so much or so little. Hope wasn’t sure they had ever really been friends, not the way he and Elma had. “It was hard to—when thee acted so strangely.”

“So you would too, if you were accused of murder.”

Their eyes locked. After a long moment, Levi said slowly, “You’ve made your amends. Now I’ve got the stage to catch, and I need to say farewell to my niece and nephew before I go. I need to explain to them why they won’t ever see their uncle again.”

Hope had been so busy grieving for Elma, she had never thought of what Levi had lost. He loved that niece and nephew of his; he had always been fashioning toys for them, speaking proudly of their exploits.

Hope’s throat ached. “I wish you well in your journeys.”

For a moment, she saw a glimpse of the old Levi beneath the bitter mask. “And you. You were always the best of them. If things had been different . . .”

The door of the house had opened, and Hope saw Ezra Weeks on the threshold, a child on his hip, the niece Levi might never see again.

“I’ll leave thee to thy leave-taking,”

said Hope, and floundered off through the mud, before Ezra Weeks could send her away.

It had been so much simpler when she’d believed Levi guilty.

Now—Caty’s husband had been exposed as an adulterer, Levi had been hounded out of the city. And Elma was still gone.

Back at the house, the door stuck. Elias’s repairs had been no match for the April damp. Either the wood had swelled since he’d fixed it, or his repairs had been as clumsy as everything else he did.

Hope tugged at the panel until it finally gave with a long groan. Caty bustled into the hall, her face flushed from the fire, Eliza on her hip.

“Where has thee been? I’ve been half-distracted.”

Hope wasn’t going to lie. They’d had lies enough. “I went to the Weeks lumber yard to see Levi.”

Caty heaved Eliza up higher. “Why would thee want to do that?”

“Did thee know he was leaving the city?”

“Good riddance,”

Caty said bitterly. “I shudder to think I ever indulged a favorable thought of him.”

“Won’t thee even consider the possibility that he might be innocent?”

“Was it innocent to try to get thee to sign a paper? Was it innocent for his brother to pay people to lie for him? All right, all right, I’ll set thee down,”

she said to Eliza. Turning back to Hope, Caty said, “I know what I heard that night.”

There was no use in arguing when Caty looked like that.

Caty had been obdurate in her conviction that Levi had killed Elma and got away with it by clever tricks in the courtroom. It was, Hope thought, just like Caty. If Levi had killed Elma, then it didn’t matter as much about Elias. If Levi had killed Elma, then it didn’t matter that Mr. Croucher still kept his room on the second floor, beneath the room where Levi had once slept.

Caty had always been very good at seeing the world as she wanted to see it. It was the same way she had insisted year after year that Elias was a genius just waiting for the world to appreciate him as she did, the way she insisted their father was a saint, and it was perfectly right for him to leave them for years at a time whenever the call to spread the word came upon him—which it usually did the moment things were unpleasant or difficult at home.

Hope had always prided herself on her clearheadedness. But she was beginning to wonder if the Levi she’d fancied herself in love with had ever existed, or if he had been as much a product of her imagination as Caty’s Elias, a series of attributes grafted onto a handsome face and a pleasing manner.

Levi had been charming, that was true. And kind. He had always been kind. But it was the sort of kindness that took little effort on his part: a hand under her elbow to help her over a puddle, an invitation to go to the charity sermon.

All of it, the kindness, the charm, had dropped away now, like the petals of a spring flower when the sun beat on it too hotly.

What she had taken for goodness had been only—an easy sort of complaisance. As the rest of the household settled into sleep, Hope lay awake, remembering how Levi had first flirted with Peggy, easygoing, laughing Peggy, who had made it clear she welcomed flirtation.

When Peggy had gone, Levi had walked out with Hope—but never more than honor. A pleasant way to pass the time, enjoying her obvious admiration.

And then there had been Elma. What had truly passed between them, Hope would never know, although she suspected that there, too, Levi would have taken whatever was offered.

There was that night his apprentice had seen him leave in his shirt and not come back until morning.

Whatever Levi said now, about what might have been had things been different, Hope knew, with sudden certainty, that he would never have married her. He would, in the end, have married a woman of his brother’s choosing, not for love, but for advantage—and because his brother said so. He might even have persuaded himself he loved whoever it was, simply because that was easiest for everyone, but most particularly himself.

Could he have murdered Elma, if she complicated matters for him? If his brother told him so?

Hope wasn’t sure. But she didn’t think he had.

General Hamilton had made it clear that he thought Mr. Croucher had done it.

Outside her bedroom door, Hope heard a strange creak. Someone was going down the stairs, those stairs that had figured so largely in the trial, someone who was moving unevenly, who didn’t know which steps creaked and which steps didn’t.

Hope groped for the candle and flint next to her bed. All of Ezra Weeks’s men had found other lodgings; even Peggy had gone. There was only Richard Van Alstine and Mr. Croucher, but Mr. Croucher spent his nights with his new bride, Mrs. Stackhaver, returning only by day to use his room as a space to display his wares for such clients as cared to come to the Ring boardinghouse.

Hope stepped silently down the closed stair in her bare feet, shading her candle with her hand. The door to the stair hung ajar; she could make out a pale figure struggling with the door, trying unsuccessfully to pull it open, her breath coming in labored, ragged gasps.

Dark hair hung down over her shoulders in wild disarray. It was a girl, but not one of Caty’s girls.

“Hello?”

said Hope, more curious than afraid.

The girl whirled, her back pressed against the door. Hope could see the whites of her eyes in the feeble light of the candle.

“Oh, Lord, I thought you were he. I thought you were he, come to get me. Please, please, for charity’s sake, help me get away!”

“Away from whom?”

There was something familiar about the girl, the thin, pale face beneath that disordered hair. As Hope stepped closer, she saw with horror that the girl’s dress gaped open, the tie hanging drunkenly on one side, her shift torn. Reddish marks discolored the skin around her neck. “Did someone hurt thee?”

“He did,”

she whispered, her eyes lifting up, toward the stairs. She shook her head wildly, fumbling for the latch of the door. “No, no one. I only want to go home. Please, the door . . .”

“Thee are Mrs. Stackhaver’s girl.”

Memory furnished Hope with an image of a skinny girl in that same calico dress and a white cap, standing behind the brocaded form of her mistress, sent to clean Mr. Croucher’s room. Caty had been so angry. “What are thee doing here in the night?”

“He brought me here.”

The girl wrapped her arms around herself, making herself as small as she could. “I wouldn’t have come if I’d known he meant to— He said there was a lady and gentleman coming to look at some linens he had and he wanted me to come and scrub his room for him.”

“In the night?”

Hope took a cautious step closer. As the small light of her candle reached the girl, she could see more bruises on her wrists, her shoulders.

The girl flinched back, away from the light. “I didn’t know— He told my mamma I could sleep with a servant girl here so I could get started scrubbing early in the morning.”

“Your mamma?”

“Mrs. Stackhaver—she adopted me. He wants her to get rid of me, they’ve no need of me now, unless I prove I can earn my keep. I only was here to scrub the room!”

Her voice rose in incipient hysteria.

“Hush, hush. It’s all right,”

said Hope nonsensically, since it clearly wasn’t all right.

“I didn’t know!”

the girl repeated. “He took me upstairs to a room in the third story. He told me the servant girl would come and sleep with me and then he locked the door, and took me and undressed me and put me on the bed—”

Tears were streaming down her face.

“Thee poor child!”

Hope hurried toward her, her mind working furiously. “It’s Mr. Croucher thee speak of?”

“Yes—no—I never meant— Oh, pray—pray don’t say I said!”

The girl’s voice rose again, the words coming out in a bubble of hiccups and snot.

“What is all this?”

The door on the other side of the stair opened and Caty came out, wearing her shift with a shawl about her shoulders, squinting in the light of Hope’s candle. “Hope? And who is this?”

Hope put her arm protectively around the girl, who shrank at her touch but didn’t push her away. Her bones felt like twigs. In a flat, hard undertone, she said, “This is Mrs. Stackhaver’s girl. Mr. Croucher took her here and robbed her of her virtue.”

“Robbed her—”

“He took her upstairs and took her to bed—against her will. We need to go to the constable—now! While he sleeps. We need to go to the constable and bring him up on charges.”

“No!”

The girl yanked away from Hope. “No! You mustn’t! You mustn’t tell! I only want to go home, please let me go home. . . .”

“No one is going to the constable,”

said Caty soothingly. “Come, I’ll get thee a warm posset and wash thee and thee can go home.”

“A warm posset?”

demanded Hope indignantly. “He raped her! Look at her! She looks younger than Rachel!”

“That’s why,”

said Caty, in a low voice. “If she complains of him, the taint will follow her. . . .”

“She did nothing wrong!”

Hope whirled back toward the girl. “If thee won’t go to the police, go to Mr. Colden, the attorney general. He’s a kind man. He’ll listen to thee.”

The girl shrank back, her face transformed with blank terror. “I can’t.”

“I’ll go with thee if thee like,”

said Hope. “Thee needn’t go alone. I will stand with thee.”

“No!”

The girl’s eyes were dark holes in her white face. “I can’t tell him. I can’t tell anyone. I wouldn’t have told you if—if you hadn’t been here.”

“But if thee go home, won’t he be there? What if he attempts thee again?”

Hope burned at the thought of that creature upstairs abusing this poor child. She wanted to whisk her away and make her safe—and see that Croucher hanged. “Won’t thee at least tell thy mistress?”

“I can’t! I can’t tell anyone.”

The girl’s back hit the wood of the door. With nowhere left to go, she looked from Hope to Caty. “He said—he said if I told anyone, he would do to me what was done to Elma Sands.”