Читать книгу The Murderer's Maid - Erika Mailman - Страница 12
ОглавлениеNOVEMBER 11, 1889
The next morning, she made the acquaintance of the Kelly maid who’d beaten the rug while she watched out the window. The woman hailed Bridget as she stepped outside to cool her face after hovering over frying onions. And so Bridget walked to her across the hardened, and in places icy, yard. The maid stood standing on the other side of a short picket fence.
“Hello and welcome!” she said. “I’m Mary Doolan.”
“I’m Bridget Sullivan.” The two women shook hands over the fence. There was frank curiosity on the other maid’s face.
“And how are you getting on?” she asked.
“It’s all very new, but as time will tell, it should be satisfactory.”
“Isn’t that a mouthful for a red-haired lass! It should be very satisfactory, says the mistress of the house.”
“Ah, don’t mock me!” said Bridget, but without offense.
“How can I not, when you put coal in your mouth and talk around it?”
Bridget laughed.
“There now, that’s better!” said Mary. “Is the family treating you all right?”
“I can’t complain on the second day,” said Bridget carefully. “All is well.”
“You can complain on the second day, and the third and fourth too! Fill my ears.”
Bridget bristled. Would no one on Second Street keep their unpleasantness to themselves? “I’ll keep my own counsel.”
Mary burst into laughter. “You’ll have to! But there’s aught to tell; I see it in your eyes. And I know it, too. Your family holds themselves so very high. They won’t even talk to the family I serve.”
“Whyever not?”
“Stupid girl, you know why. Their name’s Kelly! They’re as Irish as you and me.”
“And the Bordens won’t speak to them on that account?”
“Aye. And Mr. Kelly a doctor, even!”
Bridget looked down at her own hobnailed boots, her hem that needed a good cleaning of mud and dust. If the Bordens refused to acknowledge the existence of the Kellys, decent homeowning citizens on an equal economic par, what did they think of Bridget, sleeping under their roof with nothing to her name but the items that fit in a trunk?
“Makes you feel low, don’t it?” observed Mary. “But they aren’t much themselves. The missus weighs the same as a pony, I’ll wager—”
“Oh, hush!” said Bridget in a panic, looking to be sure they weren’t overheard.
“And him an old man; he must be seventy if he’s a day. The whole city knows he’s a miser who loves his money too dearly to ever spend it. Lizzie and Emma are spinsters that none’s touched despite all that lovely family money—now, why do you think that is?”
“You’re like to get me sacked, and I’ve been employed all of one day!” said Bridget.
“They’ll do nothing to you,” said Mary.
“Mr. Borden told me himself that Maggie, the girl afore me, lost her post for telling tales.”
“That’s not what Maggie said.”
“And what did she say?”
“She left of her own accord. She said she was scared.”
“Whatever of?”
“The people in that house.”
Relieved, Bridget laughed.
“Ye can laugh at that?” Mary asked.
“Foolish Maggie, and her loss is my gain.”
“Well, aren’t you the cat that swallowed the cream,” said Mary with some disappointment. It was clear she’d hoped for some more dramatic reaction from Bridget.
“Bitter cream, but yes,” said Bridget, and Mary indulged in peals of laughter.
“I think we’ll get along famously. Might you join me of a Saturday night at Nancy Spain’s Pub for a ceilidh? They do it once a month and open the doors for the women.”
Bridget’s eyes widened. “I would!”
“You’ll be crying at the sound of the uilleann pipes again, as if the green turf were under your feet again. You are from County Cork; are ye not?”
“Aye, from Allihies.”
Mary nodded. “I’m from Mitchelstown. This whole neighborhood’s been transplanted from Cork, it seems. The Bordens better watch themselves if they don’t like our sort encroaching!”
Bridget eyed the other woman and made a point of turning around to survey the windows of the Borden household. “Sound travels,” she observed.
“That it does,” agreed Mary. “And instructs, even. Now then, miss, I’ll collect you out front at half four on Saturday.”
“We’ll walk?”
“Aye, ’tis only five blocks this way,” said Mary, pointing toward Main Street.
Bridget clasped Mary’s hand in sudden emotion. To hear the ballads again! To dance to the rhythms of pipe, fiddle and bodhran and leave behind, for an evening, the oppressive nature of the Borden home. She longed to hear in full force a roomful of the lilting language she grew up with, the tones soft even in anger, what the world called a brogue, for some reason attaching a soft untanned shoe to the glory of the dulcet.
“I’m beholden to ye,” she told Mary. “Truly so.”
