Читать книгу The Murderer's Maid - Erika Mailman - Страница 18
ОглавлениеNOVEMBER 17, 1889
In the morning, Bridget rose to the lambent light. She went to the window. Mr. Borden was down in the backyard dumping his night soil, trousers pulled up under his linen nightshirt. The sky was stamped with rose-tinted clouds and the beginning grit from the factory chimneys stoking up at that hour.
She brushed her hair, long strokes through the brunette, as she circulated the small room, looking for evidence of Miss Lizzie’s having entered. The nightstand with its Irish lace doily appeared untouched, and she opened her trunk to tally its humble contents. She pulled the curtains closed to wash and dress and then opened them again to catch the light.
The cedar waxwings chattered their high-pitched notes, and as Bridget pressed her hand to the glass to melt the frost that hovered by the bottom, she felt the events of the night before subside into a haze of unreality.
She opened her door and saw the stairwell undramatic, plagued by nothing more than dust that she’d do well to sweep out. She descended into the bowels of the house to fetch coal and wood for the kitchen stove and start its fire, the ashes spavined and ready for shoveling. That done, she pumped water, brought in the milk cans, and commenced slicing bread and boiling millet.
Mr. and Mrs. Borden came down first for their breakfast, ringing the bell for her. She served them, and they spoke quietly of their day’s plans as she came in and out. When they finished, she cleared away the plates and bowls, their pattern a simple blue and white positioning of peacocks beneath a willow tree, all spreading their pride-filled spray. She used the brute of her hand to sweep away crumbs and set the table again.
The sisters arrived so promptly that she wondered if they had waited upstairs listening through the wall for the sounds of their elders resettling in their rooms or the front door closing behind them.
Miss Emma appeared in the doorway in a dress of blue lawn, a brooch at her neck, while Miss Lizzie came in behind in pink dimity with brown thorns, a glossy ornament pinned to her breast. Bridget stiffened at the sight of Miss Lizzie.
Her posture was firm and straight, yet her shoulders hunched a bit or perhaps her neck was short, providing her a distinctive profile, last seen as sable upon sable in the night stairway.
“Good morning,” said Miss Emma as she took her place at the table.
“Good morning, Maggie,” Miss Lizzie echoed carelessly, walking rapidly to her side of the table and sitting with no sense of polish. She bore a confidence that Bridget had never felt. The Borden girls basked in their father’s money even if they could not freely spend it. In their dowdy clothes, they appeared to still feel the height of their station, like princesses kept in hiding by cunning regents.
“Good morning,” replied Bridget.
“Millet,” Miss Lizzie pronounced, looking at her bowl with distaste. “This is what I feed my pigeons.”
“It’s all right now and then, Maggie, but we don’t prefer it,” said Miss Emma. She tempered the correction with a smile, but all Bridget heard was the dismissiveness of calling her another servant’s name.
“I’ll remember,” said Bridget. “Shall I take it away?”
“Not this time.”
“The doughnuts you made previously are in keeping with our hopes,” said Miss Lizzie. Her voice, low and flat-toned, had the hush of gentility that her graceless body lacked. She looked up, and their eyes caught. It was a fleeting moment, but Bridget thought she sensed the other woman’s triumph at not being questioned for her odd behavior the night before. She knew she’d been seen, but that Bridget was powerless to do anything about it.
As Bridget stepped back into the kitchen, Emma asked her sister, “Could you not sleep last night? I heard you pass through and stay away quite some time.”
Bridget waited on the other side of the doorway to hear the reply. “I sat downstairs and read,” lied Miss Lizzie calmly.
Bridget fumbled with the plates, nearly dropping them. She bent over, capturing them against her apron, gaining a smear of slimy millet for her trouble. And of course, the stain fell in the middle of the blank field of the apron, glaringly visible and embarrassing in its placement, as if she’d lost control of her natural functionings. She’d have to change into another, and God help her if that became tinged for there were only two.
So the miss could baldly lie; could she? Sitting and reading, was it, rather than hovering outside garrets in the dark?
She blotted the apron quickly. As soon as she’d got the coffee made, should Mr. Borden want another round, she’d go upstairs for the other apron. She went back into the dining room for the other plates.
“I wonder at you, Lizzie,” said her sister. “Why come all the way downstairs when you might simply read abed?”
“I was restless,” said Miss Lizzie. “And it was close.”
“The rooms do get stuffy upstairs,” Miss Emma agreed. “I wonder how it is in the attic.” The two Borden women looked at Bridget, but she was already on her way out, keeping her back turned to them to prevent their seeing the stain, so she threw Miss Emma a smile over her shoulder and continued on.
She quickly ground the coffee beans, rotating the wooden-balled handle while the aromatic beans gave way unto coarse grains. The smell filled the whole kitchen, and she opened the drawer at the bottom of the grinder to shake out the ground coffee into the pot, adding water and then putting it on the stove to boil.
She untied her apron and shrugged it off, going to the wash pail to work out the stain before it set. She used the flakes of detergent to make a weak lather to dab on the spot. She relaxed as she worked at it, for the day stretched ahead of her with not much to do in it.
She heard the rustle of skirts as someone came into the kitchen. Lifting her eyes, she saw Miss Lizzie there, waiting for her to acknowledge her.
“What sort of trouble did you invite last night?” asked Miss Lizzie.
Bridget made no answer, aware her jaw must be open. Her fingers tightened around the folds of the apron in her hands.
“Off with the Kelly girl, who is trouble no doubt,” she added, and Bridget suddenly understood she meant trouble out on the town, not trouble in the back stairway of the home.
“’Twas only a night of merriment, and no harm done,” said Bridget.
“Were there men in attendance?”
“Aye, but none I spoke with.”
“And alcohol?”
“Not so much.”
“I campaign for temperance,” said Miss Lizzie. “So many lives have been destroyed because of its ruinous nature. I do not approve of alcohol.”
“Nor do I, and there was hardly any there, just enough to moisten and soften the tongue.”
“Did you drink an alcoholic beverage there, Maggie?”
Bridget stiffened at the false name. “I had tea.”
“And the Kelly girl?”
“Tea as well, I suppose, if she had anything. I saw her take none.”
“Was there dancing?”
“Aye.”
“And the men had taken drink?”
“Not to the degree that you worry over, Miss Lizzie. The evening was a respectable one, and not the carousing I fear you envision.”
Bridget tried to keep an even tone, but she felt a bit of Mary Doolan’s ire. She could do as she wished on her nights out, so long as it cast no shadow on the Bordens’ propriety.
“Well, I don’t envy you dancing and sweating in such a hot milieu,” said Miss Lizzie. “I’ve never understood the lower classes jumping around like crickets.”
Bridget’s dander was officially up like a post in the newest-plowed field, and so she made no reply. She pressed her lips tightly against each other to keep hot words from bursting out. She dropped her gaze and made herself busy as a whirlwind, tossing the apron aside and taking perverse pleasure in slamming down the mugs and crocks in their transport to another work surface, making enough noise to prevent Miss Lizzie from adding more egregious words to the ones already spoken.
She examined the smoking furnace of her feelings as she did so. Somehow Miss Lizzie had adjusted from an object of no small terror in the night, to the annoyance of bigotry and contrary opinions. Bridget hardly knew which was worse.
One was a subject she knew well. She was used to the cold shoulders for those of her race, identifiable by the thick and sweet timbre of their voices. At market, others might smile at you and extend a greeting, withdrawn when she opened her mouth and spoilt the charade of being a decent American. She’d even laughingly practiced with others, flattening her round, fruit-filled vowel basket until the hard, native tones of Massachusetts filled the ear, sounding as if the speaker was perpetually unpleased.
There were ill feelings against the Irish. They were second-class citizens only fit for the trades or the mills. Bridget herself especially hoped to avoid a station at one of the roaring machines she heard as she passed by. She’d never set foot in one of Mr. Borden’s several textile mills, but even upon a walk past, the very walls seemed to tremble with the clack-clacking of the mechanical shuttles going to and fro on the same task a woman could render in silence, if not as rapidly.
One heard tales, too, of the bosses who took pretty girls aside and abused them, for the girls desperate to keep their jobs would never dare register a complaint.
And of course the machines themselves enjoyed tugging at a girl’s skirts like an unwanted lover, crooking her backward for an insistent kiss, unraveling her threads until the others noticed and cut the power to liberate her. Fingers were lost to the machines’ ardent courtship. Hair was scalped as if the Wampanoags were still fitfully trying to preserve their impossible holdings. Girls died in the mills if the pulled fabric wrapped around their necks and suffocated them. Hair was so very carefully pinned up, but pins failed. Machines loved braids, adored apron strings, swooned for the fringe upon shawls.
A place even in an unpleasant home like this suited Bridget far better . . . especially given she was not worked so hard with the bedrooms being cleaned by the occupants. She had the luxury to lie down and let the sun plaster the window and her counterpane until she slept. She could stand by the fence and bandy words with Mary Doolan. There was a fair amount of freedom in this household, despite its cold and haughty nature.
And really—what servant finds warmth from her masters anyway? Surely none ever sit and eat together, nor engage in more than the most cursory of conversations. She was fine here, so long as she didn’t let Miss Lizzie bully her by lurking in the stairs to make sure she came home at a decent hour and not reeling with drink.
“The dancing keeps us trim, I find,” Bridget finally managed to say, a carefully crafted reply that answered insult with insult, for Miss Lizzie was beginning to drift into the jowled regions of middle age, her waist thickening. In fact, she was to have a dressmaker come in the next week to prepare new gowns for her and Emma, purportedly to be in mode but also because the present gowns were too tight on her broadening midsection.
She turned her head to see the effect of this sly affront, but Lizzie was already gone. How long had she been thumping around the plates and flatware, when she had no audience to madden?
She looked through the window and saw her enter the barn, going to care for her pet pigeons. Best that she have that task, thought Bridget, for with her spiteful personality she’ll never have children of her own.
