Lizzie Borden (5 page)

“I’m going to leave.”

“Emma, no.”

“I cook for him, I clean for him, and he cannot even speak to me with a civil tone. The household budget makes allowances only for swill. We are ordered to wear very few dresses made of inexpensive fabric. We are never allowed to entertain. In fact, we have no friends, Lizzie.”

“That’s not true, Emma. . .”

“It might as well be. I’m going to ask the wretched old man for my inheritance, and I will leave.”

“Leave!” Lizzie was stunned. “Where will you go?”

“We have cousins. Mother has many relatives in Fairhaven. I can be in touch with them, surely there are opportunities for a woman of my talents.”

“Oh, I’ve no doubt about that, Emma, but whatever shall I do here without you?”

“You could come with me.” She took a deep breath, “if only you didn’t have to be a nursemaid to him.”

“Oh, no, no. I could never leave Father like that. I couldn’t go. . . to another town, I don’t think.” Please don’t make me choose between you, Emma.”

“Why? That might force his lovely wife to start washing his underwear and drying his pots and pans. She might have to start earning her inheritance.” Emma’s face began that tight redness again. “That farm belonged to our mother, you know, Lizzie. He has no right to deed it to that woman.”

Lizzie knew there would be no talking to her in this state. “You talked with him again, didn’t you? Why didn’t you just let it rest for a while, Emma?”

“I got nowhere.”

“Let him think about what you’ve said for a couple of days. Maybe what you said will make him think about what he’s about to do. Maybe he’ll change his mind.”

“Maybe.”

They both heard the front door open and close. Emma sat on the edge of Lizzie’s bed, looking at her hands in her lap, while Abby Borden’s heavy footsteps stopped at the coat closet, continued through the dining room to the kitchen, stopped at the stove, then clomped up the back stairs to her bedroom. They both heard the door to their parents’ bedroom open. Lizzie had pushed her dressing table up against the connecting door, but sounds were clearly heard.

“I can’t stand to listen to the existence of that woman,” Emma said, and walked through to her own room, leaving Lizzie to sit with her cold cabbage stew and sour stomach.

She set the food on the floor by her door, unlaced her shoes and took them off. Then she lay on her bed and brought a quilt up over her. She knew her dress would wrinkle and that someone was sure to comment on it, but for the moment, she didn’t care, she didn’t care, she didn’t care. She settled herself comfortably, unclenched her fists and tried to think of happy thoughts. She tried to think of some happy memories, but they somehow eluded her. She tried to remember her mother’s face, but all she knew was one photograph of a young woman, a young Emma, really, and a description of her personality from her father. She tried to remember games she and Emma used to play when they were little, but it seemed as though there never were games in this house, it seemed there never were children in this house.

So Lizzie went to the only place she knew that never let her down. She went to a place filled with warmth and beauty and solace.  In the midst of turmoil around her, Lizzie closed her mind, closed her eyes and went fishing.

Emma finished wiping down the kitchen counters and hung the soiled dishrag over the sink in the little utility room off the kitchen. Her stomach still burned from the confrontation with her father. Her unreasonable father. Her elderly, unreasonable father. Then she unlocked the kitchen door and threw the basin of dishwater into the snow. The dining room clock chimed the half hour; Emma assumed it was eight-thirty. Her father and his wife had gone to bed an hour before, as had Bridget, the maid. Lizzie had never come down after dinner.

She fit a fresh candle into a candlestick, lit it and blew out the lanterns in the kitchen.

Why was it, she wondered, that she so cherished time alone in this house during the day, yet at night she longed for company? She walked through the empty dining room, places carefully set for breakfast by Bridget before she retired for the night. The candle she carried threw exaggerated shadows on the walls as she walked. They weren’t satisfactory company at all.

She checked the front door to make sure it was tightly locked. For over two years—ever since the threats against Andrew Borden by his ill-treated employees began—security at the Borden house had been tight. Extra tight. Obnoxious. Every room in the house had its own key, and every personal room was always locked, whether it was occupied or not. The front door had three locks, the back door two, each the bedrooms one.

What was there to steal, anyway? Abby Borden kept a few dollars and a few pieces of jewelry on hand, but there was nothing of value, there was nothing even of sentimental value, in this house.

Except, perhaps, the suspicion. The locking and unlocking of doors had created an air of suspicion about the house. Whenever Emma left her bedroom, and locked it with a key, she always tried the knob one more time, to make sure it was locked. To make sure no one could get in. No one. And even though she
knew
that there was nothing kept in any of the other rooms—to which she could have access had she wanted—just knowing that the other rooms were locked made her wonder what they were hiding. Emma had her secrets—oh yes, she had her secrets all right, but they were not in her room and they could not be found by prying eyes.

Even so, the thought of some stranger in her bedroom, next to her bed, looking around and having thoughts, or making comments, touching things or passing judgment on her state of affairs in the bedroom, made her sick to her stomach. It made her skin crawl.

The locking of doors had started with the threat from a former mill employee. Andrew Borden was not a kind man, and his manner of doing business was profit-motivated. As a result, those people who made his businesses actually run were frequently ground under the heel of his enterprising zeal.

Andrew took the threat to heart. He would never let his family be left to the mercy of those inadequate souls who could not even cut the mustard at the mill.

Emma wandered into the sitting room. There should be storytelling going on in this room. A fire in the grate, gaslights in every corner and a spirited game of chess, or Hearts, or some music or something. Something should be happening in this house at night, but there was nothing. There had been nothing since Mother died.

The gaiety died when Mother died. This house died, this family died when Mother died. And now the whole household goes to bed when the sun goes down, because there is no gaslight in this house, and Father begrudges the expense for lamp oil and candles. “Go to sleep and save the candles,” she had heard him say on more than one occasion.

Emma set the candle on the end table in the sitting room, then pulled out its little drawer. She pulled it all the way out, trying to keep it from rattling, and set the drawer in her lap. She sat for a moment, listening. If anyone heard her rattling in the drawers, they would be down in a minute. If there was anything this family shared besides its aloofness, it was nosiness.

The photograph was still where she had first put it thirty years ago, in the little space behind the drawer. Emma reached in and pulled it out. A photograph of their mother. So young, so thin. People of Fall River always said Emma took after her mama, and so it was, she saw again. She was her mother’s daughter. They had the same cheekbones, the same fine nose, the same arched eyebrows and closely-set eyes in a narrow face. They had the same medium brown hair, but Sarah Borden had light colored eyes—blue, her father said he thought he remembered them to be, while Emma shared his deep brown eyes.

Mama was so young. The photograph Emma held in her hand was the last one, taken just before she died. Mother would have been about thirty—about Lizzie’s current age. . . .

Even though they told Emma that she was the one who had found her mother dead, Emma could not remember it, and she still could not remember the details of her death. Nor could she bring herself to ask Father.

Emma ran her finger over the photograph of her mother’s face as if to feel the delicate skin. “I know there’s a reason you died, Mother,” she whispered. “It’s taken me a long time to understand, but now I think I do.” She gently kissed the photo and thought of taking it upstairs to her room, where she could keep it, either privately or in a frame, and then decided to put it back behind the drawer again. It gave her pleasure to see Abby Borden sitting next to the end table, using it, with Mother secreted safely inside. Abby had destroyed everything in the house that remained of Sarah Borden, her predecessor in the bed of Andrew. Everything except a locket that Lizzie had, and this photograph that would remain forever next to that wretched woman without her ever knowing it.

“I understand, Mother,” Emma whispered again. “And I’ve raised Lizzie well. I know you’d agree. I know you’d be happy.” She touched the papered face, touched the picture to her cheek, then tucked it back into the hole in the end table and reinserted the drawer.

Since Emma had changed bedrooms with Lizzie, the only way she could enter her own bedroom in this odd little house was to walk through Lizzie’s. As a result, she always carried two keys in her pocket; a key to Lizzie’s perennially locked door, and a key to her own. It was a nuisance, and she had the smaller room now, but at least her bedroom shared a wall with Abby Borden’s dressing room and not the parents’ bedroom. Lizzie now had that honor.

She carefully unlocked Lizzie’s bedroom door, hoping not to wake her parents, not minding if Lizzie wanted to sit up and talk for a while.

She saw Lizzie lying on her bed, fully dressed, half covered with her quilt. Lizzie opened her eyes.

“Did I wake you?” Emma asked.

“I guess so,” Lizzie said, rubbing her face. “I didn’t intend to sleep.”

“My goodness, child, you’re fully dressed.”

“I just lay down for a moment this afternoon after the fitting, and then again after dinner. I imagine I needed the rest. What time is it?”

“About nine, I should think.”

“The house is quiet.”

Emma nodded, then sat in the rocking chair at Lizzie’s bedside.

Lizzie plumped up her pillow and set it next to the wall, then hiked herself up the bed to a sitting position. Something crinkled in her bed.

“What’s this?” She reached under the quilt, and fumbled with her skirts. Then she pulled out a piece of string and a brown-paper wrapped parcel. “Oh. The book. I forgot all about it.”

“What book is that?”

“It’s a book that Beatrice sent to me.”

“Well, open it. Let’s have a look.”

“Maybe later.”

“Why later? Aren’t you curious? You rip open every letter you get from her the very moment the post man puts it in the box.”

“I know, but. . .”

“Oh. It’s
personal
.” Emma couldn’t help her sarcasm.

“Yes, in fact.”

“Well. I never knew we had secrets.”

“We don’t have secrets, Emma, I just want to have a chance to look it over first, that’s all.”

“Hmmm. Your relationship with that woman is odd and I daresay a little dangerous, perhaps sick, Lizzie. I should be very careful, if I were you.”

Lizzie looked at her with wide open eyes. “You know nothing about her. You have no idea. . . You have no idea. . . .”

“Yes. Well. Nor am I interested. Mark my words, though, child.” Emma rose. “Shall I light your lantern?”

“No. I’ll do it.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, and unlocked her own bedroom door. Sometimes Lizzie could be so defensive. So confounding. Emma worried that she was so gullible. What on earth could this woman want from Lizzie, this woman from England? Something no good, that was for sure.

Emma undressed quickly, hanging up all her clothes, then donned her winter nightgown, leggings and cap, and knelt on the hard floor to say her evening prayer. She even included her father.

Duties done, she slipped between the cold sheets and blew out the candle, seeing the shaft of muted light under her door as it escaped from Lizzie’s room.

The girl could do so much with her life, Emma thought. If only she’d try. She has so much potential. She has so many gifts. Her youth, her looks, her closeness to Father, her friends at church. . . It’s all so
wasted
on her. Emma clenched her fists. Why
her
? What has
she
done to be the lucky one, while I wither, growing old in the house of my childhood, with a traitorous father and his. . . his. . .

A moan escaped her lips, and she clapped both hands over her mouth before she made more noise. Her face flushed hot and her hands trembled.

It was the same every night. Every night she went to bed and ranted and railed at the devastating blows life had given her, while her beautiful, clever younger sister got all the attention.

“I try to be selfless, Lord,” she whispered, then knuckled her lower lip hard until she got herself under control.

Then she turned on her side, away from the long slice of light that said that Lizzie even had friends in England, and she curled her knees to her bony chest and eventually fell asleep.