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“Why, you would nurse me back to health. As you did before.” Elma looked hard at the top of Caty’s bent head, daring her to look up and meet her eyes. “Just as you did before.”

“Tonight . . .” Caty took a step back, her work-reddened hands clasping and unclasping, unaccustomed to emptiness. “Hope told me. She told me thee mean to be married.”

“It’s a fine thing when one’s family won’t keep a confidence.” Elma felt a curious sense of elation. She’d known Hope would never be able to resist telling Caty; Hope would be bursting with it, all self-righteous good intentions. And jealousy. Mostly jealousy, made worse by having to cloak it in virtue.

“You—thee—ought to have told me.”

Oh ho, Caty was flustered if she was falling into secular ways, saying you instead of thee.

“Why? So you could make me my bridal clothes?”

“Thy family—” began Caty, and faltered.

The steps outside creaked and they both jerked toward the door. It was a heavy tread, not Hope’s light step or Peg’s cheerful bounce. Elma retreated behind the curtain of the bed.

“Where’s Elma?” It was Levi’s voice, a deep, cheerful baritone. Elma felt her breath release, raising a faint cloud in the cold air.

“She is hid behind the bed.” There was no need for Caty to sound so prim about it.

Elma stepped out from behind the curtain. Levi smiled in relief at the sight of her, and she was struck, as always, by the vitality of his presence, the simple, uncomplicated joy. She loved him and hated him for it.

He limped forward, favoring the leg he’d bruised at his brother’s timber yard that morning. Elma had plastered it herself, sponging the blood and giving him a good scolding. “Don’t mind me. I want you to tie my hair.”

“Couldn’t your apprentice do that?” Elma took the black ribbon he held out to her, as he turned his back, bending his knees to make himself shorter. His light brown hair was loose around his shoulders, untouched by powder. She gathered it into a queue.

“And have me in knots? You’ve a gentler touch.” He cast a glance over his shoulder at her, inadvertently pulling his own hair. “Ouch.”

“Stay still and you won’t hurt yourself.” Elma could see Caty’s eyes going from one to the other of them. Elma hastily tied the ribbon, giving Levi a light push. “There. You’re fit for company. Now go away and leave us be.”

He looked at Caty, and then at Elma. Elma gave him a slight shake of her head. He took it in good grace. Levi took everything in good grace. He’d never been out of grace, couldn’t imagine what it was like. “As you command.”

His steps creaked away, up the stairs, to his own room on the third floor.

When Caty was away in September, Elma had stayed in the big room in the front on the second floor, right below Levi’s.

But that had been in the last blazing of the summer heat, when the sun burned off the sidewalks, and those who could afford it fled the yellow fever, piling into boats and wagons, off along the Hudson. The world had felt overripe, everything set to burst; one had to grab while one could, while one was alive, while the fruit hung heavy on the trees, abandoned in the half-empty city. What was one to do but pick what one could?

But that was September. The yellow fever had gone; the wagons with their coffins rattling to the graveyard had been replaced with the sound of carriages bringing home the lucky ones who had escaped to the country. The acrid scent of the gunpowder from the cannons fired to drive off the sickness had faded, the tang of the sea blowing again through her window with the cooler air, with just a hint of the stench of the glue manufactory when the wind was in the wrong direction. There were knockers put back on doors, businesses reopened, and life went back to the way it was. Caty, Hope, and the children came home from Cornwall. And Elma retreated to this dark chamber in the back of the house where the shadows fell early and the small windows caught no light.

There were times Elma could scarcely remember the girl she’d been in September, the dreams she’d dreamed in that big front room. When the trees blazed red and gold, one last burst of wonder before the fall.

Now all was gray and sharp with frost. What she did tonight wasn’t for passion, but for cold, hard sense. She’d learned her mother’s lesson and her own.

Caty looked meaningfully at Elma. “Levi seems in good spirits.”

“Yes,” said Elma, not trusting herself to say more.

“I had thought, with his leg, he might not be fit to go out tonight.”

“It was only a scratch, hardly worth the fuss.” Any elation she might have felt was gone. It was no fun taunting Caty. Not now. Elma just wanted to be left alone. Tonight, she’d leave this room, leave it for good. Down the stairs, out the door, to the meeting place in Lispenard’s Meadow. She was making the right decision, she was.

But the game of teasing Caty had lost its savor.

From downstairs came the wail of a child, Caty’s youngest, one and a half years old. Caty looked distractedly toward the stairs, clearly torn. “Thee promise to keep warm?”

“Oh, we shall.” It was too easy to make Caty blush, even after four children.

Caty took refuge in the petty details in which she delighted. “Thy hands—those mittens will scarce keep thee warm. Thee ought to have a muff, to keep off the chill. Elizabeth next door . . . I might borrow it for thee.”