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“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?