Читать книгу The Murderer's Maid - Erika Mailman - Страница 10

CHAPTER 3

Bridget

NOVEMBER 10, 1889

Bridget came back the next day by hack with her trunk. There was considerable traffic on Second Street, and the driver, a man in his mid-twenties like Bridget, had to wait a bit for it to clear to pull over in front of the house.

While they sat, Bridget took a good look at the clapboard facade of the Greek Revival home. While nothing grand like the residences on the hill, the Bordens’ house boasted an off-center entry with two slim columns flanking the inset door. The inset was hardly enough to shake out an umbrella but gave the house a scant bit of style. A few stone steps led up to the door, while heavy shutters framed each window. A pitched roof, set aside by crossbeams as a triangle atop the house, supported several chimneys of varying heights. A neat, well-kept picket fence enclosed the pretense of a front yard.

The driver wedged the hack in between the two trees that shaded the front. Bridget climbed out, holding his hand, and wondered how to proceed. He removed her trunk and followed her to the side door. Luckily, Andrew Borden emerged from that door to greet her. He looked to be in his seventies, with pure white hair and a gaunt frame.

“Welcome, Miss Sullivan. I’ll take that up,” said Mr. Borden cheerlessly.

Bridget looked quickly at the driver. Mr. Borden didn’t seem up to the task due to his elderly build, and the driver was already protesting. “It’s the burden of a moment, sir, and I’ll spare your back,” he said.

“It’s unnecessary.”

The driver, not a bad-looking man, with dark coloring and ruddy cheeks above the scruff of black beard, shrugged. “So be it.” His services had been paid at the other end by her previous employers, and all that remained was to thank him.

She opened her mouth to do so, and he winked at her. She pressed her lips together and gave him her back. She knew what happened to maids who accepted winks.

Mr. Borden had already entered the slim entry hall with her trunk and started up the steps. She stepped inside, pulling the door closed behind her firmly.

Mr. Borden’s passage on the stairs was slow. Bridget regretted his laboring, but her trunk wasn’t heavy—no harp from Tara’s halls, she reflected, nor plate, nor silver. She wondered why he hadn’t let the driver take it for him, but as they approached the second floor, she suspected why: the strange layout of the home. The door they now paused in front of was Mr. Borden’s own chamber. Whether a stranger would know this to be the case, it may have made the older gentleman feel vulnerable.

Mr. Borden stopped to catch his breath, his back still turned to her. As she waited, she examined the stairwell. No windows brightened its narrow, steep pitch. Mr. Borden—a millionaire if the scuttlebutt around town was correct—lived like a tradesman in a tenement. No generously proportioned, cambered flight did he climb at night with his lamp, a statue posted at the landing to remind him of the glories of Rome. No thick carpeting to muffle his tread, soften his passage as he climbed. Just a threadbare rug covered the stairs to his chamber, and stark wooden boards for the remaining steps up to hers.

Bridget reflected that even the main staircase in the home’s front entry, the one that led to the sisters’ rooms, was unadorned and graceless. She hung her head, waiting for Mr. Borden to resume. Why didn’t the man make his lodgings more comfortable? He didn’t have to cut his meat with golden cutlery, but it was beneath him to live like this.

“We have some odd arrangements in this house, and I’ll welcome your keeping quiet on our personal matters,” he said quietly.

“Of course.” Bridget allowed a note of horror to creep into her voice. She’d been raised for a life of service, and her mother back in Allihies, County Cork, had instructed her that discretion was as important as a strong hand with the broom.

“Maggie, our previous maid . . . she was a bit too eager to share the doings of our household with her friends, and word came back to me,” said Mr. Borden. He did then turn and regard Bridget with a serious, but not unkind, visage. “We’ll reward your stilled tongue with continued employment. Avoid the gossips of Fall River, and we’ll have a long and fruitful association.”

“Yes, sir. I surely will,” she said.

“Good.”

At that, he hoisted up her trunk and resumed the climb to the third floor. In her chamber, he stooped to tuck it under the ceiling’s half slant.

“It’s nice our side of the home doesn’t convey the noise of traffic from Second Street,” he said, gesturing to the window. She pulled aside the lace to see the backyard and the stable.

To the side, the southern neighbor’s maid beat a rug on the line, a flume of smoke arising like she was mistress of her own small factory. Bridget smiled, about to posit this fancy to Mr. Borden, an actual factory proprietor, but he had soundlessly exited.

She went to the open door and watched him plod down to the story below. She wondered what she was to do. There was no need to unpack, although she did take out her two dresses and hang them from the hooks to avoid wrinkling.

She went again to the window. Was this the maid Maggie had gossiped with, to her detriment? Bridget determined that she would be careful.

It was Mary Doolan, creating factory smoke out of domestic grit, and Bridget would indeed listen to her friend’s idle chitchat despite her resolve, but that would not be the cause of her service ending. Would that it had been, and she merely disgraced, while Mr. and Mrs. Borden continued their safe, if not wholly happy, lives.

Downstairs, she acquainted herself with the kitchen. She raked the ashes in the stove and fed in a log. She opened drawers and cupboards until she’d formed a mental inventory of the dismally small collection of knives, spoons, serving platters. She descended to the cellar to tally the root vegetables stored there and the twine-wrapped meats hanging from the rafters.

She’d eaten quite well at the Remingtons’, but she’d merely make do here. The larder held slender fare, but her lot was not to complain. She’d begin with dinner. She could prepare a stew of the mutton she’d seen upstairs with a few carrots, potatoes, and onions. She’d get it started now, to hopefully soften the meat by the time they ate hours later. For supper, perhaps, turnips and gravy, with biscuits.

As Bridget set herself to peeling potatoes, Miss Lizzie came into the kitchen. Bridget hadn’t realized, seeing her seated the day before, how imposing the older woman’s stature was. She cut a nearly manly figure, with her sharp posture and broad chest and shoulders. She wore a calico day dress of sprigged maroon and walked with assurance. Going straight to the white bowl on the sideboard, Lizzie plucked out an apple. She polished the fruit on her dress as she turned and surveyed Bridget.

“Good morning,” said Bridget. Something in her years of training stretched her face into a smile. It was not returned.

“You weren’t able to make it here early enough to serve our breakfast,” said Lizzie.

“No, I served a final time for the Remingtons.”

“We scraped by for ourselves, as we’ve done now since Maggie left,” said Lizzie. “Will you be sure to make doughnuts for tomorrow?”

“Certainly, miss, if you wish.”

Lizzie took her first bite of the apple, standing so as to block the light from the window, creating her own batch of shadow in the close kitchen. Bridget wondered if it would be rude to lower her head and apply her knife to the potato again.

“I attend the same church as your former employers,” said Lizzie.

“Is that so?” asked Bridget, surprised. The church was far from Second Street.

“Yes, I’ve found the First Congregational Church to be fusty and old-fashioned in its views.”

Bridget had no answer for that. She began to wish Lizzie would step aside so she could see the potato’s pockmarked surface better as she skinned it.

“The house was grand, I’m sure,” said Lizzie.

“I’m sorry?”

“The Remington home.”

Bridget couldn’t help a small sound of disbelief. Did she expect Bridget to sit here and tell the tales of that house, recite the value of each object, gleefully recount the lush fabrics used in the linens, the carpets, the curtains? Was she meant to catalog its splendors for this prying chit who would never set foot in the drawing room Bridget had dusted?

Bridget immediately saw the error of her response. Lizzie threw the rest of her apple into the dry sink with a certain amount of vehemence. “I’ve wanted to entertain here,” said Lizzie stiffly. “There’s no reason why I can’t return the favors of so many lovely dinners I’ve had out at the homes of friends. But my father can’t stomach the idea.”

Bridget tried not to frown. Did she wish Bridget to support her in this idea? But no servant would ever willingly ask for more work, and besides, what sort of clout could she ever hold with Mr. Borden?

“You may think you’ve come down in the world, to work in this house,” said Lizzie.

“Not at all. I’m grateful for the chance.”

“You’re not grateful. You took one look at this miserable place and shuddered. We’re two doors down from a grocery, of all humbling conditions!”

“There’s no shame in a grocery,” said Bridget quietly.

“It’s not indicative of our standing. We could have the finest house on the hill! Instead we live like drudges, five steps from the street.”

“The house is quite nice,” said Bridget.

“Our home isn’t even connected to the gas main, while our Irish neighbors freely avail themselves of that costly convenience.”

Bridget startled at the slight to her own kind, but Miss Lizzie interpreted it as shock for her father’s refusal to use gas. “That’s right; we are still using kerosene lamps, smoking and spluttering. And my father . . . sometimes he’ll sit in darkness to not waste fuel. That’s the man who holds the wallet and won’t open it up to save his own eyes as he reads.”

“How sad for his vision.” Bridget didn’t know how to hold this conversation. All her life, she’d witnessed people working extraordinarily hard to purchase the very barest of needs. A middle-aged woman bragging about the excess of money—while ranting about her lack of access to it—was a strange circumstance.

“I’ve begged him.”

“He’ll come to want to save his sight,” said Bridget, focusing on the one thing she could remark upon. How did one discuss a man’s miserliness without getting oneself fired? She was not unaware he was likely somewhere in the house. And she had been specifically warned against rumormongering.

“Oh, he won’t,” said Lizzie. “He’ll go blind to save a dime.”

Bridget stiffened. This was simply too much. She stood up, setting the half-peeled potato and paring knife on the table. She crossed to the stove and moved the kettle from one side of the hob to the other, then lifted up the eye to add a small piece of wood.

“Good day to you, Maggie,” said Miss Lizzie behind her.

Bridget whirled around, catching the smirk on Lizzie’s face. “Maggie” wasn’t just the former maid; it was a deprecating way to address any Irish servant whose actual name didn’t matter.

“It’s Bridget, miss,” she said.

“So it is, and I apologize!”

Lizzie moved closer, and Bridget couldn’t help but be drawn in and repulsed at the same time by the pale argent eyes. It seemed the coins Lizzie’s father couldn’t spend had landed in his daughter’s gaze. Bridget had been punished, she knew, for daring to stand up and walk away from Lizzie, casting tacit judgment on the cruel words spoken about Mr. Borden.

“Miss Lizzie, I must return to my work,” said Bridget softly.

“Indeed, you should. I’ll not stop you.”

Lizzie took a second apple from the bowl and walked away polishing it on her breast. Bridget listened until she heard the creak of Lizzie ascending the front steps to resume peeling the potato, its pale skinned flesh now browned from sitting in the air.