Читать книгу America's First Female Serial Killer - Mary Kay McBrayer - Страница 15

CHAPTER 4

On Jane’s eighteenth birthday, her indenture ended according to the contract Auntie signed. Jane never realized how foolish she was to expect any celebration other than an afternoon walk as in years before. For eleven years, she had prepared cakes and feasts for Elizabeth’s birthdays. Jane was shocked when, on the first one she celebrated with her, Elizabeth revealed she was turning thirty-two years old. She looked so young, so small, Jane thought. She cried at such small provocation. Every year, Elizabeth returned for her own birthday celebration, and she spent more nights in the Toppan house than she did at her husband’s.

On Elizabeth’s most recent birthday, her forty-fifth, Jane paid particularly close attention, the way a child learns to behave well in advance of asking for favors. She remembered the ache in her arms the morning after she whipped the sponge cake batter into a froth. She remembered collecting eggs for a week from their normal stores, siphoning off the cream from every pail for the filling, scavenging for berries at the beginning of a hot summer, hiding them in the cellar so that no one would find her surprise, soaking them in honey water to mask their bitterness. Jane remembered her frenzied run to the kitchen to pull the pans from the oven in the nick of time. She remembered how late she stayed awake to build the cake with its layers, how carefully she went down the wooden steps with her arms outstretched, a doilied serving tray clutched in her chapped hands. She remembered rising early the following morning to snip the blooms off the wisteria—Elizabeth’s favorite—before the dew set, and setting the prettiest, opened flowers on the top of the cake and at its base. She remembered her pride when Elizabeth grinned at the cake at the end of the feast she had with her friends and how she hugged Jane and thanked her for all her effort. How frail and bony Elizabeth felt against her, even inside of her corset and cage crinoline. Auntie had even smiled at Jane and nodded curtly when her neighbors said how well the cake complimented the other desserts Jane had made, and how well the center of it had risen despite the humidity. Elizabeth’s husband, Oramel, had an extra slice and said he thought cake like that was probably what spirits ate in heaven, which meant something to her then, since he was a deacon of the First Trinitarian Church.

She was foolish, Jane realized as Auntie held out the fifty dollars to her on her own birthday that fall—cloth bills with no envelope, no calling card, no letter, no ceremony—to expect anything more than the minimum. Jane’s face hardened in acceptance as Auntie said, more than asked, “Do you expect you will stay on in our household, now that your indenture has ended?”

Jane held more money in her hand now than she ever had in her life, since Mrs. Toppan never trusted her to pay bills for her. The first time Jane had come home from errands empty-handed after a store had asked her for payment, Auntie had said, “When a child knocks over a glass of milk, you don’t blame the child. You blame yourself for leaving the milk within her reach. What kind of fool would I be if I left a Catholic in charge of my money?” It was this that Jane remembered, and the days of vomiting after Elizabeth’s cake turned everyone’s stomach, as she held the bills in her hand.

Even as Auntie had brought the paddle down on her, despite her near adulthood, Jane maintained she did not know that wisteria was poisonous. She had only known that it was Elizabeth’s favorite flower, and that she seldom got to enjoy it because it was so seldom in bloom, and she wanted to make her sister happy. That had not gone well, either. “She is not your sister,” Auntie had screamed, and then turned and retched. After that beating, Jane had cleaned up the vomit, too. The cake made everyone sick. Except for Jane. Jane, of course, was not allowed to have any of the cake because dessert was for guests. She was sore for days afterward, even though Auntie was elderly, and even though she was sick.

Jane folded the bills in her fist and tucked them into the band of her apron.

“Well?” Auntie said, her face solid.

“I expect so,” Jane said. “I expect I’ll stay on.”

“Very well. You’ll continue in the same capacity. You may take your walk once your afternoon chores are completed,” she said, and left.

It was very little solace that when Elizabeth woke she insisted that she and Jane have their coffee together in the parlor. Elizabeth flipped slowly through the scrapbooks of criminals that she had clipped from the papers to entertain her many frilly acquaintances who stopped by on their walks in the afternoons. Jane did not enjoy watching Elizabeth raise one eyebrow and read the crimes aloud. She instead noticed the way that the skin rippled above that eyebrow, her face so placid until Elizabeth expressed emotion. When she smiled after the litany of euphemisms, Jane watched the creases sprout from beside her eyes, the parentheses open around her mouth, and she said politely that she still had, after all, so much to do that day. And every other day.

Nonetheless, after Jane helped her dress, Elizabeth begged to accompany Jane on her walk, despite Jane wanting to be alone—she was so seldom alone. Auntie entrusted her to do everything, but trusted her to do nothing well, and so she was constantly hovered over by the other maids, the neighbors’ laundresses, anyone who could tattle on Jane if she cut a corner or did anything out of the order in which Mrs. Toppan would prefer. They walked together, taking the front road as Elizabeth insisted, so that they may run into some of her friends, not the paths through the backyards, as Jane would have liked. They passed her fellow servants as they hung sheets on lines or tended plants alone while their mistresses reclined on fainting couches after braving a set of stairs in the heat, or dried their hands on old handkerchiefs to keep the needle from slipping through their fingers as they embroidered new ones.

Elizabeth prattled about herself, about the children of her schoolmates, as they took baby steps around the neighborhood, Elizabeth under a new parasol, Jane under an old parasol that Elizabeth had tatted the edges of, indiscreetly, during her parlor visits. It felt ridiculous to hold the umbrella overhead when she regularly did errands without one, her skin darkening in the sun with no consequence, but she followed Elizabeth’s instructions as she always did because she must.

It wasn’t until that night, after the house was cleaned, after she had served dinner and everyone was in bed, when Jane mounted the stairs to her attic apartment and undressed for bed, that the bills she was paid from her indenture fell from where she had stashed them. Their neat folds unraveled as Jane knelt in her short corset and drawers to retrieve them. How could she have forgotten that payment? The first she had ever received for any work. She thought of how smooth Auntie’s brow was, though her thin-plucked eyebrows rested low over her hooded eyes. Jane knew that her chin was wrinkled, and that Auntie tucked the folds of loose skin into the high neck of her dress. She thought of how old Auntie was, how she alone knew this because she was the one who tended her laundry.

How much she knew about everyone by tending their laundry. She could tell anything about anyone by washing their clothes. She thought about how little good that knowledge was doing her and, even so, how she might put it to use.