The Secrets of Lizzie Borden

Chapter 7

Even though I knew I was guilty, I believed implicitly in my innocence. That is what saved me and saw me through the dark days that followed when I languished, for ten months, my fate uncertain, in a prison cell and the shadow of the hangman’s noose hung always over my head like the sword of Damocles. That and the gallantry and gullibility of men.

Chivalry, I discovered, had not died; it wasn’t just the stuff of legends and fairy tales, and it went much further than doffing hats, offering chairs, and opening doors for ladies. Not a man upon my jury could believe that a prim New England spinster, a virtuous old maid who taught Sunday school, and was a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Fruit and Flower Mission, could ever be guilty of such a bloody and violent crime. They could not imagine my ladylike hands wielding any sharp, steel object more threatening than an embroidery needle.

It also helped that Fall River at large abhorred the possibility of posterity remembering the city as the home of a murderess. They wanted this over and done with just as much as I did. We were all ready to sweep it under the rug. Every time an enterprising hack driver met an arriving train at the station and bellowed out an invitation to see the notorious Lizzie Borden house, we all cringed and looked ill.

And my gallant jury, my twelve New England knights in black broadcloth suits instead of shining armor, were far too fastidious to consider that menstruation might have helped mask murder. That very night, when Emma and I were left alone, though under guard, at the house on 92 Second Street, I had descended the cellar stairs, lamp in hand in my dressing gown, with Alice Russell, who had volunteered to stay with us, hovering anxiously at my side, walking right past a policeman, with the pail of bloody towels in my hand. He had politely looked away and pretended not to see us. I left the pail shoved out of sight underneath the sink to await laundering in time for next month’s need and thought nor heard no more about it. Since Bridget had broken her promise and left us—left me!—to divert suspicion away from herself, she had made a fine show of panic and refused to sleep another night under our roof, I have no idea who eventually did the laundry; I suppose Emma hired someone, or sent it off to the Celestials.

Later, during the course of my trial, that one tiny speck of blood, the size of a pinprick on the back of my petticoat, that “flea bite” as they politely called it in lowered, ill-at-ease voices, had caused the men no end of embarrassment, so they gave it the shortest possible shrift. When it was brought up in court, ladies and gentlemen alike blushed and averted their eyes as the lawyers steered me past the issue as quickly and discreetly as possible. It was obvious to all that it could have nothing to do with the murders, and why the prosecution felt the need to mention it at all was something no one could fathom, unless they thought the humiliation of having my intimate female functions discussed in open court would cause my composure to crumble entirely and lead me to confess just to have done with it.

The morphine Dr. Bowen gave me and the paint-stained housedress that I had burned a few days after the murders further muddied the waters, making it impossible for anyone to clearly divine my innocence or guilt.

Everyone argued and took sides, but it was just too cloudy to ever be settled for certain. I fancied myself living out the rest of my life as a mystery wrapped in an enigma. There were days when I would sit in court, my chin pillowed on my palm, and imagine myself in an embroidered silk dress of shifting shades of blue covered all over with countless question marks and an ermine opera cape with the little black tails dangling down like even more question marks, an ensemble evocative of the eternal question of my guilt, the one that would never die; it would outlive me, and everyone I knew.

In truth, I recall little of my trial, it passed in a muddled and perplexing litany of drab dresses, blue dresses, Bedford cords, and bengalines, corded cottons, and heavy silks, a light-blue ground with a dark-blue figure, or a dark-blue ground with a light-blue figure, diamond patterns, nondescript, or unmemorable patterns, stylish town dresses, and ordinary, common, not particularly attractive housedresses, unsullied by any stains detectable to the naked eye or ruined by unsightly smears of reddish-brown paint suspiciously similar to the shade of dried blood, a stylish town dress presented in court, and one conspicuously absent paint-spattered old cotton housedress that refused to rise before their eyes like a phoenix from the ashes of our kitchen stove. Everyone who had seen me on August 4 was called to the stand to describe what I had been wearing at the time, and none of them, it seemed, had a particularly good memory or eye for fashion, with the notable exception of a handsome young policeman who made quite an impression upon the ladies when he described in meticulous detail the candy-pink-and-white-striped housedress with the red belt I had changed into after the murders even though it wasn’t particularly relevant. When called to account for these precise remembrances, he sheepishly explained that he liked to paint in his free time and had always had a keen and appreciative eye for colors and patterns. Many thought it downright lamentable that he had never seen me in the blue; his sharp memory could have cut through the confusion like a knife.

Alice Russell forfeited our friendship by testifying in great detail about the day I burned that faded, filthy old housedress in broad daylight, shoving it into the kitchen stove, right in front of her astonished eyes.

On and on, day after day, the confusing litany continued—my lingering so leisurely and long in the baking oven of the barn on a blistering hot day, the pears I claimed to have eaten, one, two, or three, maybe four, iron scraps and sinkers for a proposed fishing trip to Buzzards Bay versus a torn window screen, whether or not the dust on the floor of the loft had been disturbed by my footsteps or the sweeping hem of my skirt, handkerchiefs and heating flatirons, dirty windows, locked doors, the dress goods sale at Sargent’s, and whether Bridget and I were upstairs or downstairs, indoors or out at any given time; every second must be accounted for.

My imprisonment made a far greater impression upon me than my trial ever did. I spent the better part of ten months in the Bristol County Jail in Taunton, as the one in Fall River lacked accommodations suitable for the long-term housing of female prisoners, they apparently being somewhat of a rarity in wholesome, hardworking Fall River. It shook and scared me as nothing else ever has. It gave a whole new meaning to the word trapped. Whereas before I had felt stifled and trapped, like a prisoner in the grim, outmoded confines of my father’s house, now I was confined to a single cell, allowed out only for an hour’s exercise each day and when my presence was required in court. And the stark iron bedstead, washstand, and single chair made my room at the house on 92 Second Street seem luxurious as a grand hotel suite in comparison.

The worst part was being left all alone in the darkness at night, unable to sleep; even the drugs, all the sleeping syrups and calming injections I tried, failed to usher in a few blessed hours of quiet, restful oblivion. Some thought it symptomatic of a guilty conscience; others said fear. The course Justice would take could never be predicted with absolute certainty; murderers had gone free before and truly innocent souls had languished decades behind prison bars or lost their lives upon the scaffold, so I had every reason to be afraid.

Although the matron, Mrs. Hannah Regan, was kind and quite lax about enforcing many of the rules, like letting me wear my own clothes instead of prison garb and having my meals brought in from fashionable restaurants in lieu of the usual prison rations of fish hash, bread, and water, and my cell was constantly filled with flowers and boxes of candy from well-wishers, and lots of books to read, including my Bible and a complete set of Dickens, no matter how I begged and cajoled she would not permit me a light when I needed it most—at night. My lamp must go out at the same hour as all the other prisoners’ did. I think it was a punishment, that we all must sit, or lie, restless in the darkness, alone with our thoughts and fears, and any guilt, remorse, or regret our hearts might be harboring.

I passed a lonely Christmas behind bars. Emma knitted me a big black wool shawl trimmed with thirty-two tassels, one for each year of my life. It shrouded my shoulders like a silent and perpetual reminder that I was supposed to be in mourning and reminded me that I might not live to see thirty-three if the tide of the trial turned against me. At least it helped keep me warm on those cold, cold nights when only lustful thoughts about Lulie Stillwell or Bridget Sullivan reminded me that my blood was still hot even when my limbs felt like they were turning to ice.

Unable to sleep, I sat up on my cot, wide awake and alert to every noise, hugging my knees in the dark, watching the sky through the iron bars, waiting for it to lighten, and longing for a glimpse of the moon, praying for a flash of lightning, as over and over in my mind I relived the days after the one rash, mad one that had changed my life forever, for worse or better.

The doctors the police sent had no sense of decency. They stripped Father and Abby stark naked and laid their bodies out on the dining room table and autopsied them there. Emma and I glimpsed them as we fled, sickened, upstairs. We would never eat at that table again; we both agreed we would have it taken out and burned as soon as it was seemly. The doctors’ assistant threw the bloodied clothes carelessly down the cellar steps so that I tripped over one of Father’s boots and entangled my slippered feet in Abby’s bloody mint-sprigged housedress and would have fallen had Alice not been there to catch me when we descended to the privy. Red water sloshed out of my pail and the soiled napkins floating inside it swirled like angry white fish, churning sickeningly in the bloody water. I felt so sick that I set the pail down and lurched unsteadily to the privy, braced my hands against the wooden box seat, and vomited until I thought my eyeballs would pop out. Then I saw Father’s eye, dangling, bloody, and broken, against the exposed ivory bone of his cheek, that I had laid open with the hatchet, and I vomited again, even though I hadn’t eaten anything since the few nibbled bites that had been my breakfast and brought up only bile, I didn’t think I would ever stop until I disgorged my very heart and stomach.

Then the undertaker, Mr. Winward, had come. He dressed Father and Abby in their Sunday best, and laid them out in the sitting room where Father had died. Abby looked so serene it was as though she were only sleeping; the lace-bordered white satin pillow she laid her head upon and the undertaker’s finesse with reattaching her switch of long, thick black hair hid all the damage my rage had inflicted on the back of her skull. Had one not known otherwise, she might have died peacefully in her sleep. Father’s head was swathed in layers of cotton bandages, wound round and round, creating a perfect plump white ball. He looked curiously like a featureless, blank-faced snowman whose jolly round body had melted into gauntness and been dressed in a severe black suit and tie worthy of the undertaker he had been in his ambitious youth.

I couldn’t bear to look at them for more than a moment. As Emma bent, dutifully, to kiss Father’s bandage-swaddled brow, I squeezed my eyelids shut tight as hot tears seeped out and clamped a hand over my mouth and fled as the burning bile rose like a geyser in my throat. When I came back, the caskets were mercifully closed.

I didn’t have a black dress and even with the tightest lacing I was still too fat to fit into any of Emma’s. I felt like a hippopotamus when I stood beside her before the mirror in my petticoat and stays and glumly regarded my bulging arms, broad shoulders, and bounteous hips. Rather than brave the crowd of curiosity seekers still gathered outside the house, or send Alice out shopping on my behalf, I wore my darkest blue, one that might easily be mistaken for black. But the August sun showed me no mercy; like an accusing beacon, it shone down upon me and everyone knew I wore blue to my parents’ funeral. “Blue!” they whispered in damning disapproval. “She wore blue to her own parents’ funeral!” As though my disrespect would kill them all over again! Every time they looked at me they damned me with their eyes.

What kind of girl didn’t own a black dress suitable for funerals or move Heaven and earth to procure one in time for her own parents’ funeral? all Fall River, it seemed, was asking. A guilty girl who didn’t care what anyone thought. To them it was plain as day; that blue dress was my way of flaunting it. I was not a good daughter; I was not a dutiful daughter like sorrowful black-clad Emma in her plain, somber, and sweltering high-collared, long-sleeved heavy silk, bereft of ornamentation, even lace, proper black gloves, stockings, and sturdy, practical black leather shoes, black-bordered mourning handkerchief, and trailing crepe veils. She looked just like a bride who had fallen into a vat of ink, weeping sorrowful tears when she led the procession to Oak Grove Cemetery; all that was missing was a groom for her to lean upon. They said I was cold, indifferent, and devoid of emotion, that I just didn’t care. I didn’t even cry. I didn’t even pretend, or leave people to wonder by shrouding my face in a veil. I left it bare, stark naked in my brazen lack of feeling, for everyone to see that my eyes were dry. They thought I had no tears, but the truth is I had no tears left; I had spent thirty-two years crying them in secret.

While the preacher’s sonorous voice spoke words I don’t remember, I stood between the pair of stark black caskets and laid a sheaf of golden wheat on Father’s and an olive branch atop Abby’s. It was my way of thanking Father for his bounty there was now no barrier to our inheriting and my sad, silent way of making peace with Abby. I was sorry, and yet I wasn’t. I had done the right thing, even though it was wrong. If only things, if only we—all of us—had been different it might never have come to this. If only, if only, if only . . .

The funeral procession was like a parade, only without the cheers, costumes, and flag waving. People lined the streets thousands strong all the way to Oak Grove Cemetery. I think the whole population of Fall River except infants and bed-bound invalids at death’s door must have turned out. People confined in wheelchairs had even had their nurses or spinster daughters wheel them out to gawk as the pair of glass-enclosed hearses bearing the coffins of Father and Abby, and our carriage, rolled past. Did I only imagine it, or did I really see Lulie in a royal-blue satin and black lace gown, her perfect porcelain-white complexion shaded by a big black leghorn straw hat trimmed with blue satin roses and a black lace half veil, standing on the sidewalk idly twirling a black lace parasol trimmed with royal-blue satin bows amongst the throng of fashionably dressed women who had assembled on the sidewalk to watch us pass? They weren’t in mourning, so they didn’t have to wear black; they could trick themselves out like tropical birds and no one would criticize them. As we rode past, my hand ached to reach out and rip her veil off just so I could see her face again. But there was too much distance between us. I imagined she was as beautiful as ever; everyone knew Lulie was Mother Nature and Father Time’s favorite child.

At Oak Grove Cemetery, as the coffins sat beside the open graves, a hysterical old Irishwoman with rosary beads wrapped around her gnarled fingers broke from the crowd and threw herself down on top of Abby’s casket. She claimed to have been the Grays’ Maggie before “Miss Abby married Mr. Borden.” Maybe she was? Or she might have been exactly what she seemed—a crazy old woman avid for attention. The undertaker’s men had to forcibly tear her away; she was clinging so tight to the lid I was afraid she would take it with her.

But to the crowd surrounding us, this was barely a ripple upon a pond; they could hardly bear to tear their eyes away from me. That poor madwoman could have torn her clothes off and danced a lascivious Can-Can right on top of Father’s casket and I would have still been the star, center stage in their attention. They just kept staring at me, watching intently, scrutinizing my every move, my every gesture, if I blinked my eyes or twitched my nose, brushed back a stray wisp of hair, rubbed my ear, tugged at my glittering jet carbobs, or adjusted my collar or a fold of my skirt. I heard the word fidgety whispered several times behind my back. They were waiting for me to crack and break down. They wanted to see me weep, tear out my hair, and fling myself into Father’s grave no doubt, throwing myself instead of a clod of earth down onto his coffin.

Outwardly, it was all very proper, of course. One could expect nothing less from Fall River. No one said a word aloud, but the whispers were deafening. “She didn’t shed a tear!” “Not one tear!” “She wore blue!” “Unnatural!” “Unfeeling!” “Unseemly!” “Heartless!” “Cold!” “Improper!”

They were about to lower the coffins into the ground when a pair of policemen came hurrying up and spoke in hushed, hurried words to the minister. They had come for the heads. We could do what we liked with the bodies, but they must have the heads. To boil the flesh from the skulls, to bare the broken and naked white bones, to better see if any of the blades of the various hatchets they had found fit into the wounds.

I thought all hatchets were more or less the same size, but what would an old maid know about such matters? It made me feel as though I would vomit my heart out, right into Father’s empty grave. I had no idea what had become of “the Great Emancipator.” I didn’t want to know; now that I didn’t need it anymore, I only wanted it to be gone, to forever disappear. I just wanted to forget and not think about any of it anymore!

My ignorance upon the subject of the hatchet was never feigned. I heard the police had found the head of a hatchet in a box in the cellar, the handle broken off, and the blade coated in ashes as though someone hoped to fool the police into believing it was dust, but the glimmer of gilt betrayed it was not as old as someone might like to pretend. If this was indeed Bridget’s handiwork I thought it quite clever of her; it was just like something out of a detective story. I, for one, would never have thought of it. When they said they found a second hatchet, rusty and red, caked with blood and hair, it gave me such a fright, I almost died. I felt my heart jolt like Frankenstein’s monster coming to life, but some clever scientific gentlemen at the college at Harvard did some tests that proved it was very old and the blood and hair belonged to a long-dead cow.

While Emma protested this desecration of the dead and wept on the Reverend Buck’s shoulder, I stood a little apart from them all, lost in my own little reverie, watching dispassionately—everyone said—as the police, assisted by the undertaker’s men, carried the coffins into a nearby vault and a pair of doctors, toting black leather bags, followed grimly in their wake. We didn’t wait to see them come out again.

That night the mayor himself came to the house at 92 Second Street with Marshal Hilliard, the chief of police. They gathered us—Emma, Uncle John, Alice Russell, and me—in the sitting room and delicately informed us that it would be better for all concerned if we did not leave the house for the next few days.

They were worried about the crowds; the curious continued to congregate outside from dawn’s first light to well after dark. Word had spread far and wide thanks to the newspapers, and enterprising cabdrivers met every incoming train, crying out, “Come and see the Borden Murder House! Only twenty-five cents a head!” They would park outside and regale their spellbound audience of out-of-towners with vivid accounts of the murders, and should they spy anyone peeping out from between the curtains or any female coming in or out of the house they would point and cry out, “THERE SHE IS NOW, FOLKS! THE MURDERESS—LIZZIE BORDEN HERSELF!”

Alice Russell nearly died of shame when one of the hackney cabdrivers brandished his whip at her when she was returning from an errand for us. She spent the rest of the day sitting, shaking her head, while her whole body trembled, feeling “mortified, simply mortified, to think that people would think that I . . .”

Doubtlessly if any of their passengers recalled from the news accounts that I was a redhead, not a blonde, the clever cabbies would retort that it was a wig on the lady’s dome and the cunning killer was in disguise to avoid being lynched by the outraged populace for daring to venture out amongst decent God-fearing people.

The denizens of Fall River were angry and afraid, news was spreading across the nation, and even the ocean, and they didn’t like being the center of this macabre spectacle, or worrying that if I was indeed innocent then that meant that the real killer was still at large and they might be murdered in their beds at night or some ax-wielding maniac might suddenly burst in on them in broad daylight while they were sipping their morning coffee or buttering their toast.

Someone might be hurt, the Mayor said. Someone might hurt us, the Marshal said. So it was best that we stay inside.

Emma nodded mutely, and Uncle John worriedly posed a question about how we would get our mail. But I boldly met the Marshal’s and the Mayor’s eyes and asked, “Why? Is someone in this house suspected?”

Of course, gallantry having been ingrained in them since birth, they were reluctant to tell me. There really weren’t any suspects at all beyond our threshold. It was true Dr. Handy claimed that he had seen a person he described as a “wild-eyed young man,” dark haired and mustachioed and of approximately twenty-four years, loitering about on our street the day of the murders, but the police didn’t think much of his story. Fall River was full of dark-haired young men and mustaches were the fashion, so the police were hardly going to go chasing every one down and asking him to account for his whereabouts the day old Mr. and Mrs. Borden died.

To my mind, Dr. Handy’s description sounded suspiciously like David Anthony, and I wouldn’t put it past him to be lurking about, waiting to claim me as his own, like the Devil hankering after another lost soul, but his was a name I’d rather cut my tongue out than speak aloud. The murders seemed to have also killed his “love” for me, and I was heartily glad of it and hoped it would never be resurrected and that David Anthony would stay away from me forever.

“I want to know the truth,” I insisted, staring the Mayor straight in the eye, then favoring the Marshal with the same unwavering gaze. I already knew, but I wanted to hear them say it. I wanted to know that it wasn’t just fear and guilt or my imagination getting the better of me; I needed to hear them say my name and that I was suspected. Uncertainty is always worse than certainty. The unknown is a devil that gnaws and niggles at the mind and soul and only knowledge can stop him even if it also wounds.

“Very well, Miss Borden,” Mayor Coughlin said quietly, “if you must know, then yes, you are suspected.”

I nodded crisply and, calling up every drop of courage I possessed, I stood and faced them. “I am ready to go now.” I held my hands out, bracing to feel the cold steel embrace of the handcuffs closing around my wrists. But both the Mayor and the Marshal demurred; it was not necessary to subject a lady to such an indignity, they insisted, and I should just continue to bide quietly at home for the time being.

Emma wept, Uncle John shook his head and stared speechlessly at the carpet and heaved a heavy sigh, and I wondered how it would all end. Would I ever know the sweet taste of freedom again or would the last time I ever danced be the Gallows Jig when my feet kicked and dangled in the empty air to the music of my own neck snapping?

All we could do was wait, carry on this pretense of mournful seclusion, of politely acceding to an official request to remain indoors to avoid unduly exciting the populace. But we all knew it was only a matter of time before I would be taken away, to await my fate sitting in a jail cell.

We offered a reward, Emma and I, $10,000 to bring the killer to justice, but no one ever claimed it. How could they? It made my stomach ache with fear; I was afraid the lure of an easy fortune would tempt Bridget to turn on me. But Emma said we must, it would look odd if we did not, form must be seen to be observed. “It’s all for the best,” she said. We would discreetly send Bridget back to Ireland in grand style, in the ruched and ruffled green gown with gaudy bows all down the bodice and on the big bouncy bustle she had always “hankered after,” and the golden slippers she was always singing about, with a jaunty red feather waving good-bye to America and us on her hat.

Emma took care of it all. She said it would be best if Bridget and I didn’t see each other again apart from the imminent legalities, since there was no avoiding that of course. When I resisted, Emma said I was acting silly mooning over a servant girl, and the tone of her voice, so scornful, venomous, and biting, and the piercing dark eyes that seemed to stab right into my soul made me give in. Bridget would land on her feet, just like a cat, Emma said, and catch herself a fine husband, and I knew in my heart she was right. But the heart is not an organ of reason, nor does common sense repose between our thighs. I dreamed of Bridget every night and prayed that when it was all over and done she would, of her own free will, come back to me.

But Bridget didn’t love me any more than Lulie Stillwell had. It really was all just a dream. We had no future, only a past that was best forgotten, one that owed more to my forbidden fantasies than any actual truth or tender feelings. Romance was just a word to describe the kind of literature that fed the flames of an old maid’s dreams; it had nothing to do with real life, at least not for the likes of me. Love was a beautiful gift given only to beautiful people who deserved a gift from Cupid.

While I might, if my last rendezvous wasn’t with the hangman, be a lady presiding over a grand house someday, Bridget would never come live with me and be my love. My poor Cinderella masquerading as a maidservant by day with slippers of gold, not glass or the sturdy black leather boots of a typical Irish Maggie, hiding beneath her plain hems, and lying naked in silken sheets in the golden glow of lamplight beside me every night, pampered like a princess, the queen of my heart. She would wear silks, velvets, and laces for me in private, for my eyes alone, so no one else could ever fall under the spell of her black Irish beauty and sparkling green eyes and steal her away from me. I would give her diamonds; I would give her pearls, emeralds evocative of the wistful green dream of Ireland, and rubies red as blood to show her how precious she was to me, she who always called me “macushla,” the Gaelic endearment braiding heart’s blood with true and sacrosanct lasting love. Every time I fastened a necklace of the sparkling bloodred stones around her lily-white throat I would tell her that she was worth more than all the rubies in the world to me. I would reign, as society and appearances dictated, but she would rule my heart entirely. But it was just a dream! Our fairy-tale castle was only in the clouds; it could never exist in brick and mortar in the world we knew. Reality blew it away, scattering it like ashes upon the wind, leaving me in the end with nothing but forbidden dreams and an aching yearning, an undying thirst, and a gnawing hunger I feared could never be sated.

Then came the morning when I had walked nonchalantly into the kitchen with the soiled and dingy blue diamond housedress wadded up in my hands. Emma had been pressing me to dispose of it and now, I knew, was the time to do it.

“I think I will burn this old thing up,” I announced as I headed for the stove, and had shoved it in before anyone had time to approve, or disapprove, of my intentions.

I tried to be blasé about it, treating it like any other old, useless rag I was disposing of. It bothered me how closely the reddish-brown paint mimicked the color of dried blood; I was worried that the resemblance might occur to the police and in some way damn me. I knew just how Lady Macbeth felt with blood that only she could see staining her hands, impervious to soap and water and vigorous scrubbing. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it! I kept seeing the glistening gilt head of the hatchet nestled in those paint-streaked blue folds, feeling it nudging against my leg like a living animal’s head as though a bloodthirsty silver demon possessed it, giving life to the inanimate. Faded diamonds of warring blues, the glimmer of silver, and the ugly brown-red smears all down the left side. They looked so much like blood, I was afraid if people sat and scrutinized those stains they would come to believe it actually was blood. Father had been unexpectedly generous and allowed me to choose the color of paint, and I, feeling grateful, had tried to choose a conservative color that he would like, hence the bloody brown. One thinks the oddest things at times and now I simply loathed that color and wished with all my heart that I had been true to myself and chosen something more charming and cheerful, like apple green, lemon yellow, dusky mauve, or apricot.

“Yes, why don’t you,” Emma said without glancing up from where she sat stirring her coffee at the kitchen table. “That’s a very good idea, Lizzie.” She hated that dress and never understood why I bothered to keep it, much less wear it, after my mishap with the wet paint. She thought it most slovenly and lackadaisical of me, and now that she knew there might be blood on it she didn’t even want it in the house. When she saw it hanging in my closet the night before she had told me it made her sick just to look at it, and that if she were me she would “burn it up.”

Alice Russell had stood right beside me at the kitchen stove and watched as the flames devoured it. Then, as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, that prim goody-good had looked me right in the eye and said, “If I were you, Lizzie, I wouldn’t have let anyone see me doing that. I’m afraid that burning that dress is the worst thing you could have done!” Besides killing your parents of course! her chilly blue eyes silently finished the sentence.

With wide, innocuous eyes, after it was already too late to snatch the dress back from the grasping flames, I turned to Alice, dug my fingers into her arms, and cried, “Oh, Alice, why did you let me do it? Why didn’t you tell me? I never thought . . . Oh, Alice! What have I done?” Whereupon I burst into tears and fled the kitchen.

I knew then that she would turn on me. A friend had become an enemy. And I was right. Alice went and tattled straightaway to the Pinkerton man hired to assist the investigation. Then, two-faced as the head of Janus, she came in tears and told us what she had done. Emma squeezed my hand tight and squared her shoulders and told our former friend, “You must do what you think right.” We would never speak to Alice Russell again.

To make matters worse, that ignorant, imbecilic ass of a druggist Eli Bence had gone scurrying, like the scurvy rat he was, straight to the newspapers to tell his story. LIZZIE BORDEN VISITS A DRUGSTORE TO INQUIRE ABOUT POISONS! the headlines screamed.

I chose to be dignified and deny it. “It’s a LIE!” I hotly insisted. “I was never in that store in my life! I wouldn’t be caught dead there; it’s on the wrong side of town!”

And when a rumor implying that my father’s discovery of a damning secret, that I was with child, provided fodder for more headlines, I demanded a retraction or else I would sue. I received an apology in print two days later, but the damage was done. I always wondered if David Anthony hadn’t been behind it and whispered his “theory” in the right ear. But in the end it didn’t matter. I never saw him alone again. He eventually married and had a family. I would occasionally catch glimpses of them from a distance riding out together, for a picnic I imagined, in first an open black carriage and later a shiny red motorcar. His wife always wore very large hats and kept her veil down—to protect her eyes from the dust or to hide the black eyes he gave her? I suppose both could be possible.

My inquest was like an open-invitation talent show, so many people turned up and took to the stage, seizing on anything they could to have a few minutes of public attention and see their names in the newspapers. And the ears of the reporters and the doors of the newspaper offices were equally open and inviting. I soon ceased to marvel at anything I might hear or read about myself. My hometown papers always used the most unflattering likeness of me they could muster, showing me scowling with protruding eyes and jowls like a bulldog, but the out-of-town papers offered their readers an idealized image, stylishly dressed with a flawless hourglass figure and curves in all the right places. There was one picture of me swooning in court while wearing a hat covered with petunias that I particularly admired, I looked so lovely, fresh, and enchanting. No wonder all the marriage proposals I received came from hundreds of miles away. It really is surprising how many gentlemen are gallant enough to want to offer the protection of their good name and holy matrimony to an accused murderess.

My cousin Anna Borden, who had been with me on the Grand Tour but whom I had hardly seen since, turned up looking more beautiful, buxom, and voluptuous than ever, with her silver-gilt hair and violet eyes, complemented by a violet linen suit and a hat heaped high with a colorful array of silken pansies and green silk fern fronds, to tell the Attorney General how upon the return voyage I had often bewailed my misfortune at having to return to such an unhappy home. She looked so beautiful when she lifted her net veil to swear to tell the truth and nothing but, with her lace-gloved hand resting light as a feather upon the Bible; the sight of her made me dizzy.

My mind in a fog of fear and morphine, for three whole days I muddled and blundered my way through the inquest testimony, vexing everyone with my jumbled recollections of the story Bridget and I had hastily concocted at the kitchen table.

When the District Attorney, Hosea Knowlton, questioned me, like a tenacious bulldog, about Abby, referring to her as my mother, I blurted out rudely, raising my voice in a manner I admit was most ill becoming to a lady, “She is not my mother; she is my step mother!”

That caused quite a stir in court. Soon everyone who claimed to know me was running to the newspapers with a mean-spirited tale to tell or to quote rude comments I had supposedly made about Abby, like the dressmaker who said I had called her “a mean old thing.” Maybe I did; maybe I didn’t. I didn’t keep a journal of every word I uttered.

And when Mr. Knowlton asked if my relations with my step mother had always been cordial, I coldly retorted, “That depends entirely on one’s idea of cordiality!”

Cold, cold, cold! Everyone said I was, icy and unfeeling, a human icicle. But I didn’t care. Despite the sweltering August heat, I felt like an ice queen swathed in crystals and ermine sitting on a throne carved out of ice despite the blood-boiling heat of that courtroom. I knew that was how they must all imagine me. Cold, cold, cold! “That girl has a heart of ice!” I heard a lady seated behind me hiss to her neighbor, who was emphatic in her agreement. Cold, cold, cold!

Everyone kept waiting for the incessant and probing questions to wear me down, for my icy cold composure to crack, and finally it did.

“I don’t know what I have said. I have answered so many questions, I don’t know one thing from another!” I practically shouted in Mr. Knowlton’s face as I wiped the exhausted and angry tears from my eyes.

I saw triumph in his expression; he knew he had gotten the best of me, God blast him! He’d made me crack, and I wanted to slap him so hard his eyes would stay permanently crossed. How dare he smile at me in that condescending gloating fashion? That was no way to treat a lady!

Yet in spite of their private suspicions, publicly no one wanted to believe that I, a respectable New England spinster lady who taught Sunday school, had done it; that would have been unthinkable and shattered too many dearly cherished illusions. The New York Sun summed it up best: She is either the most injured of innocents or the blackest of monsters. She either hacked her father and stepmother to pieces with the fierce brutality of the ogre in Poe’s story of the Rue Morgue or some other person did it and she suffers the double torture of losing her parents and being wrongfully accused of their murders.

Of course, the public wanted to believe the latter, that poor innocent Lizzie was the living victim of this tragedy, but it was admittedly very difficult to do, even the most charitable souls were sorely tested. No one liked to think of a lady simmering day in, day out for years with such a potent stew of pent-up rage, grievances, frustration, self-denial, secrets, and maybe even—gasp!—repressed carnal passion, all bottled up for years just waiting to explode!

Yet what fool or madman would be so bold as to stride, hatchet in hand, into a house in the broad bright light of a summer morning, with the maid outside washing windows, and the womenfolk most likely still at home at that hour, and go right upstairs and kill Abby while she was bending over making the bed in the guest room, then linger about, hiding somewhere on the premises, for well over an hour hoping he would not be discovered while he awaited a fortuitous opportunity to kill Father, and me downstairs in the kitchen desultorily ironing handkerchiefs or lazily leafing through a magazine or loitering outside under the pear tree or out in the barn rummaging for bits of iron for one reason or another? It was just too mad, too brazen to believe; not even the most crazed killer would take such risks. Only Bridget and I were in the right place at the proper time, and Bridget, pardon the pun, “had no ax to grind.” She had always spoken highly of Abby, and had been seen by several passersby that morning outside washing the windows just as she always said she was and hanging over the fence having a gossip with Mary Dooley, the neighbor’s Maggie. So it had to be me. Practical, New England common sense could point the finger at no other culprit than Lizzie Borden. No one else had so much hate in their heart for the miserly millionaire and his fat cow of a wife.

I knew things were going badly. I barely made it back into the matron’s room before I vomited twice and my face broke out in mottled purple blotches and I could not draw a deep breath. When they came to arrest me I was lying slumped over on a sofa with my stays unlaced after receiving another injection from Dr. Bowen, with Emma and the police matron appointed to watch me hovering anxiously over me, one armed with smelling salts, the other vigorously rubbing my hands.

Since Fall River’s jail did not have suitable accommodations, they informed me I would be transported to Taunton in the morning, to the Bristol County Jail, there to await trial for my life.

I remember standing up. Then everything went black. The next thing I remember is the train station, walking sandwiched between Reverend Buck and a police matron, with uniformed officers trailing behind and all the people, curious and crowding close, hemming me in, pointing and hissing, “There she is! Lizzie Borden! The murderess!” while I stood there stoically with my veil down—the police had insisted on it, but no one was fooled—and not moving a muscle. Many took my air of detachment as proof of my guilt. I suppose they expected tears and terror or even for me to swoon. I remember the Reverend Buck holding tight to my arm and loudly insisting to all, “Her calmness is the calmness of innocence!”

Shellshock I think now would be a better word for it. Years later when I saw the walking wounded come back from the Great War stunned and scared, with that glazed, vacant look in their eyes, starting at every sound, I saw myself in them the day I was taken to jail.

Our family attorney, Father’s boyhood friend, Mr. Andrew Jennings, was most solicitous; he promised to care for me, and my interests, as though I were his very own daughter. A gentle, portly man with a horseshoe of white hair encircling his shiny bald pink pate and brows like snowy fat caterpillars, he held my hand in a fatherly manner and spoke softly, as though he were endeavoring to gentle a wild, frightened horse. “It’s going to be all right, little girl,” he told me over and over again until I almost believed him. He seemed so confident and sure, and so very kind, consoling, and warm.... If only my father had been like that! It might all have been a different story—one of the nice ones with a happily ever after ending.

Mr. Jennings urged me to have a greater care for my image and valiantly set to work trying to undo the damage I had done in the court of public opinion. Black dresses and nothing but until the verdict, he emphatically insisted; not even my darkest blue would do. And to redress the persistent reports of my icy indifference, he had me give an interview from my cell, filled to near bursting with flowers from well-wishers, and cards inscribed with such uplifting and inspiring sentiments as “God is with the poor storm-tossed girl. He will vindicate and glorify her.”

“The thing that hurts me most,” I dutifully confided in an exclusive interview with Mr. Edwin H. Porter, the reporter from The Fall River Globe Mr. Jennings arranged to have visit me, “is to hear people say that I don’t show any grief. Of course I don’t in public, I was not brought up that way, and I cannot change my nature now, the habit of containing my emotions is too deeply ingrained. They say I don’t cry,” I continued, pausing to blink back the tears from my eyes. “Well . . . they should see me when I am alone. I see nothing but the deepest shadows. I see no ray of light amid the gloom. I try to fill up the waiting time as best I can, with my Bible and volumes of Dickens, but every day feels longer than the last. I cannot sleep nights, and nothing the doctor gives me will produce sleep. The hardest thing for me to endure here is the night, when there is no light. They will not allow me even a candle to read by, and to sit sleepless in the dark all night is very hard. I know my life can never be the same again if I am ever allowed to leave this place and go home. But I know that I am innocent, and I have made up my mind that, no matter what happens, I will try to bear it bravely and make the best of it.”

When Mr. Porter took his leave I thought I saw tears in his eyes. Almost like a suitor, he bowed gallantly over my hand and brushed his lips fleetingly against my quivering flesh. His mustache tickled and I almost swooned.

“God be with you, Lizzie Borden,” he said.

I dreamed of him that night, that I was acquitted and when I left the courtroom he knelt down at my feet and asked for my hand in marriage. The very next day he sent me a box of bonbons tied with a big blue satin bow and a bouquet of lilacs to thank me for my graciousness in granting him such a personal and emotional interview. I hoped he would come to visit me again, to bring a breath of spring and maybe even romance into my grim, tiny cell, and he began to vie with Bridget and Lulie for a place in my dreams, but I never saw him again except as a face in the crowd. I was just another story to him, as time, a book about what he called “The Fall River Tragedy,” and further headlines would tell. He never really was my friend. He had a wife named Winifred; I alternately imagined her as sour as pickles or a honey-blond temptress. “Any way the wind blows, that is the way you go, Mr. Porter!” I used to shake my head and say with bittersweet tartness in years to come whenever I spied his byline.

On the legal front, things were looking brighter for me as the brilliant Mr. Jennings craftily scored several pivotal victories. He succeeded in having my inquest testimony stricken from the record, and since no trace of poison had been found in either Father’s or Abby’s stomach, he managed to bar any mention of that tattletale Eli Bence’s story from the trial. I thought it was an indecent invasion of privacy for a druggist to go about gossiping about what people bought, or tried to buy, in his shop, and I sincerely hope he lost numerous customers from the fear that he would be similarly indiscreet with their own personal business! It also helped that Hyman Lubinsky, an ice-cream man who had been driving slowly down our street August 4, hoping his cold treats would prove tempting on such a hot day, had unexpectedly come forward and claimed to have caught a glimpse in passing of a redheaded woman in a blue dress in our backyard walking in the direction of our barn. Who else could it have been but me? Mr. Jennings was also able to persuade our three-times former governor, George Robinson, to help represent me.

Despite his blue blood, old money, and Harvard education, Governor Robinson had a charming, folksy, backwoodsman style akin to Davy Crockett that juries just loved; they just ate him up “like deer eatin’ corn out o’ my hand,” he boasted proudly. And during his term of office, he had raised Judge Dewey, who would be presiding over my trial, to the bench, and Governor Robinson had an inkling that my trial might be the perfect occasion for Judge Dewey to again say “thank you.”

These legal triumphs made my hopes soar. I knew I had made a poor show at the inquest, and the story of my visit to Smith’s Drugstore kept coming back to haunt me. Everyone kept hounding me, insisting they must know if there was any truth in it, the better to safeguard my interests.

Finally, to shut them all up, I drew Emma down to sit beside me on my prison cot, and confided that I had been feeling so melancholy and miserable, stuck and stagnant, watching my life and all my hopes and chances pass me by, that I had decided to kill myself and I had gone to that drugstore on the wrong side of town where no one knew me, to buy poison to put an end to my wretched life. But I had changed my mind and didn’t want anyone to know I had been so foolish and weak or to think I might be a danger to myself and need to be locked away in some sanitarium somewhere for my own protection. I swore to her that my desperate thoughts had truly been just a fleeting fancy and had never darkened the threshold of my mind again. But if the public knew of my misery they might misunderstand and think it a just motive for murder, that I had not been in my right mind at the time, and the legal men might all put their heads together and decide to save themselves a lot of bother and just have me committed to an asylum instead of letting me hang or leaving me to rot in prison, and I just could not bear that.

“I just don’t want anyone to know,” I told Emma.

Of course she ran straightaway and told Mr. Jennings. I knew she would! But it gave me an excuse to sulk and avoid her tedious and tearful visits, at least for a few days.

“Emma, you have given me away!” I stormed the next time she came to see me, and turned my back on her even as she wept and swore on her heart, “Never! I swear, Lizzie, I did no such thing!”

As the fickle sprite of luck would have it, the matron, Mrs. Regan, overheard, and had to tell her little tale to the newspapers. But all she truly knew was that Emma and I had quarreled and fallen out about something. But when the journalists came clamoring, Emma loyally denied everything and kept her mouth shut. It really was just a tempest in a teapot, and soon my sister and I were weeping in each other’s arms and forgiving each other everything, including murder, though it remained unspoken of course, politely ignored like a bloodstained elephant in the parlor, and we went on offering a reward no one could possibly ever claim and pretending that some unknown audacious madman had snuck in and killed Abby and Father.

“It’s all for the best,” became Emma’s mantra. Whenever the need arose, and the specter of my murderous deeds loomed over us and cast too giant a shadow, my sister would hug me tight, pat my back, and whisper, like a devout Catholic saying the Rosary, “It’s all for the best; it’s all for the best. . . .” That was Emma’s way of dealing with it. In this life, appearances and reputations must be maintained, form and formality come first, but everything after that she would leave to God, for Him to dispense divine and final justice. She simply washed her hands of it. Of course, it helped that hers weren’t stained with blood. Lucky Emma! She may have looked brittle and bird boned, but her spine was solid steel; she never bent or broke.

But the luckiest strike of all, the golden mother lode of legal triumphs, came mere days before my trial began when Bertha Manchester, a rawboned redheaded dairy farmer’s daughter, was hacked to bloody bits with a hatchet in broad daylight in her own kitchen at nine o’clock in the morning by an unknown assailant who just walked in through the back door, then vanished like a phantom. In a demise eerily like Abby’s, Bertha took twenty-three blows, one for each year of her life, to her head and back while she was bending over putting breakfast on the table.

Clearly I could not have done it; I didn’t even know Bertha Manchester, and I was locked safely away in jail at the time. The culprit turned out to be a Portuguese farmhand who thought himself short-changed and ill-treated by Bertha’s father, and Bertha herself because she wouldn’t lift her skirts for him, but no matter, everyone knew that I hadn’t done it, and it cast a lovely cloud of reasonable doubt over my supposed guilt. I could not have been more grateful. Months later it came out that the Portuguese couldn’t possibly have killed Father and Abby, as he had not yet emigrated from his native country when they were slain, but my trial was all over by then, so it didn’t matter.

Despite all this, I was still afraid. I knew I had come off badly with all my contradictions and that worried me incessantly, even when both Mr. Jennings and Governor Robinson held my hand and promised me that everything would be all right. To help allay my fears, Dr. Bowen was called to the stand and queried about the effects of morphine upon an anguished mind. “Might it not affect the memory and change and alter one’s view of things and possibly even cause hallucinations?” Mr. Jennings asked craftily.

“Yes, sir,” Dr. Bowen answered emphatically. “Most certainly!”

Across the crowded courtroom our eyes met and I knew that was his gift to me—a clouded mind and the perfect excuse to cover it. But why did he do it? Was it because he knew what my life was like in the house at 92 Second Street and felt sorry for me? Or was it one single frayed and lingering shred of affection he still held in his heart for me? I like to think it was the latter—a much-belated Valentine.

My trial, also known as “That Carnival in New Bedford,” began on June 5, 1893, at the courthouse in New Bedford. It lasted fourteen days. I sat beside Emma, my jaw pillowed on my fist, and wore the same heavy, boring, and distinctly unflattering black silk dress Emma had bought off the rack for me every single day. Sometimes I played with my fan. Fluttering it did nothing to alleviate the heat. But I must do something or go mad!

Even though it was mostly about me, the testimony was dull, dull, dull, and I sat there glassy-eyed and almost catatonic. There were times when it made my cramped little jail cell seem almost like a paradise I longed to return to; at least Mr. Dickens’s novels were there waiting for me. I did not take the stand; I let Mr. Jennings speak for me, and he did it quite well. He was almost worth the $25,000 bill he sent. Almost. The worst moment, by far—besides waiting for the jury to come back with their verdict—was when the skulls were brought in and the blade of the handle-less hatchet that had been found smeared with ashes in a dusty old box in the cellar was shown to fit the wounds. I leapt to my feet in a fit of panic, wanting to flee, only to turn green and teeter precariously. I almost fainted. Fortunately, Mr. Jennings, Governor Robinson, and Emma all rushed to catch me in time. Only later did I learn these skulls were made of plaster and the real skulls had been returned to Oak Grove Cemetery and interred above Father’s and Abby’s coffins. It was a cruel, dirty trick for Mr. Knowlton to play upon a lady! I never forgave him for it!

The time the jury was out was the longest hour and six minutes of my life; each instant seemed to creep by like an eternity. The tension was unbearable. I gnawed my lips raw and shredded my handkerchief into my lap. My head began to throb with the searing red pain of a migraine and my vision wavered and rippled like heat waves with flashes of starry red Fourth of July fireworks. I had never been more afraid. Innocent, innocent, you are innocent! I kept chanting in my head, willing the jury to see it my way, to do the right thing for me and for Fall River. Later, when I learned that they had voted to acquit me in less than two minutes but had sat and bided their time merely as a formality, so no one would think they had reached a verdict in unseemly haste, I wanted to slap each one of them hard across the face for torturing me so needlessly. To my mind, if they had come immediately back it would have been a greater victory; it would have shown the world my innocence was so obvious they didn’t even need two minutes to debate it.

I was so relieved to hear the word not before guilty that I fainted dead away. I just dropped like a stone, right where I was standing. I fell so heavily I’m constantly surprised that no impertinent jokester in that hell-hot and overcrowded courtroom stood up and cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, Timber! like a lumberjack. When Emma, Governor Robinson, and Mr. Jennings helped me up, they had to repeatedly assure me that it wasn’t all a dream. When they had me in my chair again I covered my face with my hands and burst into tears. “Thank God! Thank God!” I exclaimed over and over again as relief and joy flooded me until I thought I would surely drown. And then I began to laugh. I was so happy and relieved I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stop.

“God has given me the greatest gift of all!” I exclaimed to everyone and no one. I was so happy, so very happy! Glory, glory hallelujah! It was all over now and I was truly free at last!

When I appeared at the top of the courthouse steps surrounded by Emma, Uncle John, Mr. Jennings, Governor Robinson, and the Reverends Buck and Jubb, everyone cheered and a band began to play “Auld Lang Syne,” and with tears in my eyes I declared, “I’m the happiest woman alive!” I just stood there dumbly with tears in my eyes and kept repeating it until the words lost all meaning.

Uncle John, his deplorable behavior disguised by the crush of the crowd, patted my bottom, then leaned even closer and whispered in my ear, “Lizzie, my girl, the afternoon before I arrived to see Andrew, God rest him, I visited a fortune-teller. She took one look at my palm and went white as death and shoved my hand away. She said she would not tell me what she saw even if I offered her fifty dollars, so I offered her one hundred dollars, waved it right in her face like a flag, but not even that would loosen her tongue and persuade her to tell me what evil calamity she saw in my palm. Curious, isn’t it?” Then he pinched my bottom so hard it brought fresh tears—tears of pain!—to my eyes, and tipped his hat to me. I never saw him again. As he strode down the steps, away from me, hands in his pockets, whistling a jaunty tune, I wanted to kick him, in the seat of his cheap, threadbare old pants, but I couldn’t very well risk it with everyone watching and thinking so well of me. It would not have been ladylike or at all becoming to a Fall Riverite descended from one of the first families.

As I descended the courthouse steps, with Emma’s arm clasped in supportive, sisterly fashion, around my waist, a church choir in white robes with bloodred hymnbooks appeared and began to sing, of all things, of all the songs in the world they could have sung, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

“Mine eyes have seen the glory
Of the coming of the Lord
He is trampling out the vintage
Where the grapes of wrath are stored
He has loosed the fateful lightning
Of His terrible swift sword
His truth is marching on

“Glory, glory, hallelujah
Glory, glory, hallelujah
Glory, glory, hallelujah
His truth is marching on

“I have seen Him in the watch fires
Of a hundred circling camps
They have builded Him an altar
In the evening dews and damps
I can read His righteous sentence
By the dim and flaring lamps
His day is marching on

“Glory, glory, hallelujah
Glory, glory, hallelujah
Glory, glory, hallelujah
His day is marching on

“I have read a fiery gospel
Writ in burnish’d rows of steel
‘As ye deal with my condemners
So with you My grace shall deal’

Let the hero, born of woman,
Crush the serpent with his heel
Since God is marching on

“Glory, glory, hallelujah
Glory, glory, hallelujah
Glory, glory, hallelujah
Since God is marching on

“He has sounded forth the trumpet
That shall never call retreat
He is sifting out the hearts of men
Before His judgment seat
Oh, be swift, my soul
To answer Him,
Be jubilant, my feet,
Our God is marching on

“Glory, glory, hallelujah
Glory, glory, hallelujah
Glory, glory, hallelujah
Our God is marching on

“In the beauty of the lilies”

At that moment a little girl, all dressed in angel white, with long red curls—was it mere coincidence that she reminded me of me?—stepped forward, curtsied, and presented me with a bouquet of beautiful white lilies.

“Christ was born across the sea
With a glory in his bosom
That transfigures you and me
As He died to make men holy,
Let us die to make men free
While God is marching on

“Glory, glory, hallelujah
Glory, glory, hallelujah
Glory, glory, hallelujah
While God is marching on

“Glory, glory, hallelujah
Glory, glory, hallelujah
Glory, glory, hallelujah
Our God is marching on”

Hearing that song at that moment felt like a punch in the stomach. I wasn’t sure if it was being sung in celebration of my victory or to remind me that I still had to face God’s judgment. The tenor who soloed was delectable—even if he was damning me to perdition with his glorious voice—Irish, I thought, with jade-green eyes and the waviest dark hair I had ever seen. One really does think the most peculiar things at the most peculiar times!

Since I didn’t know what was intended by the choir’s singing of that particular song, I forced myself to just keep nodding and smiling and hoped no one could smell how badly I was sweating. Tears and sweat burned my eyes, my armpits were soaking, and my mouth ached from smiling. I just wanted to go where no one could see me so I could abandon all pretense. And, above all else, I wanted a cold bath!

“I’m the happiest woman in the world!” I said again, and again, to no one in particular, the smile straining painfully at my mouth, as tears streamed down my face to join the sweat soaking my black collar.

Then the whole enormity of everything I had been through seemed to strike me like a gigantic fist and I sagged weakly against Emma and laid my head upon her shoulder. “Take me home,” I whispered.

I clung to Emma and hysterically laughed and wept, as though I couldn’t make up my mind what I truly felt and must bounce like a rubber ball between one and the other, all the way to the carriage that was waiting to take us to the train station where a train would whisk us back to Fall River and, for the first time in almost a year, back to the house at 92 Second Street. But everyone seemed to understand. I was deluged with flowers, hugs and handshakes, and pats on the back, all the way to the carriage, and babies were held up for me to kiss and caress. People ran after us waving and flinging yet more flowers into the carriage. They aggravated Emma’s hay fever and she sneezed all the way to the train station. By the time we arrived, her eyes were almost swollen shut. I should have been more sympathetic. But I couldn’t help myself. I rocked back and forth on the leather seat beside her, hysterically spouting tears and spurts of wild laughter and crying out like some mad fool, “Thank God! Hallelujah! Glory, glory Hallelujah!”

If life were a theater play or a novel this is where my story would end—happily, in a spirit of jubilation, with me vindicated and set free.

But life is not like that.

Setting foot in the house on 92 Second Street for the first time in over a year, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. Everything seemed so foreign, yet painfully familiar. There was a conspicuous bare spot in the sitting room where the sofa where Father had taken his fatal nap had been, the wallpaper bore a pale outline of its back, and pieces of the carpet had been cut out, presumably to remove bloodstains as evidence or because they defied all attempts at cleaning. It made me shudder to be back in that room. I kept seeing myself standing over Father with the hatchet raised, so I quickly made my excuses and retreated upstairs.

In my room, I stood and stared at the prints and pictures, souvenirs of my Grand Tour, on the walls as though they belonged to a stranger. I ran my fingers over the spines of the books on my shelf. I had been away so long, I felt like I didn’t belong here, but then I remembered I had never belonged here, but now . . . I was a bird with wings and free to use them to fly away from this wretched, miserable place where I had known nothing but unhappiness! A merry giggle escaped me. I clapped my hands over my mouth and darted my eyes left and right, fearful that someone might have heard, and then I remembered—I was FREE! Free as the air! Free as a bird! Acquitted! NOT guilty! I was no longer a prisoner! I could laugh if I wanted to! At anything and everything! And I could snap my fingers in the face of anyone who didn’t like it! I could even dance if I pleased! I threw back my head and began to laugh and spin around in dizzy, delighted circles. “I’m not only the happiest woman in the world; I’m also the luckiest!” I cried as I collapsed on the bed and gave my pillow a fierce hug.

When I changed my dress that evening to attend the party the Holmes family on Pine Street were hosting to celebrate my victory I vowed I would never wear black again. I was done with mourning and regrets! I made my grand entrance in a royal-purple satin dress, with its full skirt draped back to reveal an underskirt of crimson satin, and gracefully arcing sleek purple and red feathers in my hair and framing my bare shoulders.

My appearance in such brazen attire stunned everyone speechless; even the orchestra fell silent for a long, awkward instant before hastily resuming their rudely interrupted melody. I knew Emma, trailing behind me looking like a tired old black crow, didn’t approve; she couldn’t understand how I could be so brazen as to appear in public in such a dress when I was supposed to be in mourning, but I didn’t care what anyone thought, and that included Emma. I was sick and tired of being told what to do! Of course, she made excuses for me, about the joy of freedom going like wine to my head, trying to justify my “peculiar conduct” and “brazen choice of apparel.” She was quite right, freedom had intoxicated me, I was giddy and drunk upon it and hoped to be so for the rest of my life, but I nonetheless resented her need to try to justify me. Justice had set me free, and what better way to celebrate it than by doing exactly as I pleased?

Dr. Bowen smilingly swept me away to lead the first waltz.

“The world is yours now, Lizzie,” he whispered in my ear at the end of the dance.

“Indeed it is,” I answered coyly as he bowed over my trembling hand. He still had the power to make my knees weak!

“And I wonder just what you will do with it.” He smiled back at me.

But I just shrugged and stood there smiling like a fool. Then Phoebe Bowen was there, all elegant but boring simplicity, in her ivory satin gown—not that it wasn’t a monumental improvement over the bridesmaids’ dresses at her wedding—with a forced and frigidly polite smile straining at her lips as though being nice to me was the hardest thing she had ever had to do in her life. The diamonds tipping the pins in the dark pompadour of her hair were as hard and cold as her eyes. Her gloved hand reached out to rest possessively upon her husband’s arm, fingertips digging in deep as she led him determinedly away for the dance he had promised her. She never did like me, and a part of me, in the secret heart of me, always wished I were her. She was so beautiful and poised, slender and superior—no wonder Dr. Bowen loved her so much!

As the orchestra began another waltz, I strolled out into the garden. Humming and swaying my crimson and purple feather fan in time to the music, I followed the white gravel path out into the warm summer night, to stand and stare up at the stars, blissfully unencumbered by high stone walls, iron bars, and the alert and vigilant eyes of authority. Free! No more prison matrons and guards! I sighed and breathed deeply, inhaling the heady, fragrant scent of the summer roses. Free! I am free as the air, free as the stars! The full moon above was like a milky crystal ball in which I could see my future, or . . . better yet . . . a blank page on which I could write my future! I trailed my fingers through the fountain and caressed the statue of Cupid. “Free to find love!” I whispered with delicious anticipation into his delicate little marble ear.

The very next morning I put on a smart navy-blue suit with bright cherry red lapels and piping and a gay pillbox hat trimmed with a clacking cluster of red-lacquered cherries and, with a smile on my face as cheerful as my attire, and Emma trailing disapprovingly behind me in yards of weighty black silk and crepe mourning veils, went out in search of my dream house on The Hill.

I was so happy and intent upon my purpose that it didn’t quite sink in that every time I nodded pleasantly and said “good morning” to passersby they turned away and completely ignored me. I simply smiled and shrugged aside their rudeness. I thought them, like me, preoccupied with their own business. I didn’t know it then, but for the second time in my life my world had changed completely overnight. Yesterday I had been Fall River’s vindicated darling; today I was their grudgingly tolerated pariah, their resident leper. I just didn’t realize it yet; happiness blinded me. I thought all my dreams were finally coming true. Freedom, riches, unbridled luxury, limitless decadence, and, God willing, at long last—love!