I hung my work skirts on the back of the door, taking care to smooth out any wrinkles I could with the palm of my hand. Not that it really mattered; the sticky air of my room would do as good a job as any iron. I didn’t have a lot of clothes—three dresses and two pairs of stockings, to be exact—but I put on the nicest of the three and headed out, hoping that Liam wouldn’t see me for the poor, plain Irish girl I was.
The flat Liam shared with his five brothers was where everyone tended to meet. They all worked together at the Borden Mill; all but the youngest, that is. Seamus was employed at the iron works, making nails. Rumor had it he’d applied at the mill too late, missed getting one of the last jobs they were handing out, but I didn’t buy it. I always assumed he wanted some space. If you ask me, Seamus purposely took up a job where Liam wasn’t always looking over his shoulder, reminding him to mind his place. I couldn’t blame him, not when I knew how it felt to be under a watchful eye twenty-four hours a day. Still, even if Seamus didn’t see it now, he would have been better off at the mill with his brothers. Fewer people seemed to get hurt there.
If I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine Liam there, his nimble fingers working with the fine thread that would eventually become sheeting. I’d never been in there myself, and he claimed I never would. Something about not wanting me to breathe the foul air. But I knew the truth. He didn’t want me to see what he’d become. How the son of a landowner in County Cork was now spinning thread for pennies an hour.
I groaned at the pinch in my aging corset, wishing I’d get around to saving the money I needed to buy a new one. Lizzie had offered to get me one herself. When I refused, she’d tried to give me one of hers, even offered to help me alter it to fit my smaller frame. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I’d seen her corsets when I did the laundry. They were no better than mine.
The once white cloth of her undergarments was yellow, stained from the murky water of the wash. The bones of her corset were so sharp they shouldn’t touch the hide of a barnyard animal, let alone a woman of Miss Borden’s station. She’d asked her father for a new one a few times, requests he never gave in to. First, he’d laugh, then he’d yell, and then he’d stop talking to her altogether. It was a cycle I’d witnessed so many times I had it memorized, yet Lizzie had never learned how to make it play out differently.
I sighed, recalling an incident no more than a month back when Lizzie and Mr. Borden’s raised voices echoed off the walls.
“Who’s going to be seeing your corset, Lizzie?” Mr. Borden yelled, a telltale sign that she was pushing him to his limits.
“No one,” Lizzie snapped back. “Doesn’t mean I don’t deserve better than this, that I should have to suffer through the day only to go to bed with aches that never seem to dull.”
“A new corset would cost at least one dol—”
He went to argue, no doubt to tell her how frivolous she was being, when she held up her hand for him to stop. “Money you well have.”
I’d heard this argument a thousand times, the whole bit about Lizzie being denied luxuries the daughter of someone with her father’s wealth should enjoy. It used to bother me at first; I’d thought she was ungrateful, but not anymore. Not after listening to John Morse and Mr. Borden go over the rental incomes of his properties. Not after serving them tea as they went on about the farm’s profit or the interest the bank was paying on his savings. Mr. Borden could well afford a new corset for Lizzie; he simply didn’t want to.
“You have seven corsets, Lizzie. That’s five more than your mother had at your age, and dare I say, six more than you need.”
I watched Lizzie cringe at the mere mention of her mother, knew right then and there that any chance Mr. Borden had of backing her down peacefully was gone.
“Your precious Abigail has more corsets than she knows what to do with, but heaven forbid I have a new one.”
That was a lie, and I knew it. I took care of Mrs. Borden’s wash every Thursday afternoon. She had two corsets and they were in worse shape than Lizzie’s.
Mr. Borden laughed, a deep, sarcastic sound that reverberated off the parlor walls. Apparently he knew Lizzie’s words for the childish lie that they were. “Abigail is none of your concern. You need to focus on your charity work and preparing your Sunday school lessons. Worry more about making yourself useful around this house and stop dwelling on what you have or don’t have.”
An angry Lizzie I could tolerate. Even her yelling and carrying on like a spoiled child was easy to take. It was times like these, when she pushed all her emotions aside and spoke with a lethal calmness that made me nervous, made me fearful she was plotting something. Something that would have this house in disarray for weeks and me escaping to the dark attic until it passed.
I turned to leave, uncomfortable with the silence bleeding into the room and the tension in the air between her and Mr. Borden.
“That woman is not my mother,” Lizzie said, and both Mr. Borden and I turned around, following Lizzie’s line of sight to the back staircase. Lizzie knew Abigail Borden was standing there, had watched her stepmother pale at her words and then continued on anyway with absolutely no regard for her feelings. “Yet you treat her and her sisters with more affection than you do your own blood. You buy them houses to live in rent-free. But a corset for me, your very own daughter . . . that proves too expensive.”
Lizzie stormed from the parlor, the front door slamming behind her as she left. No doubt she was going to find Alice, complain to her one friend about how miserly her father was. What she missed was the sheen in Mrs. Borden’s eyes, the coins she had tucked in her hand, and the subtle way she tried to hide them in her dress pocket before Mr. Borden saw.
It wasn’t until the following Tuesday that I finally learned what Lizzie had planned. Mr. Borden was summoned to the Knox & Charlton Five and Ten Cent Store. Lizzie had gone in for a corset, put the new one on under her dress, and tried to hide her old one amongst the racks. When questioned, she dared the sales clerk to remove her dress and check for himself . . . a task that no sane man within ten miles of here would even attempt. Mr. Borden paid for the corset, even gave the clerk a little something extra to keep his mouth shut, but the news had made its way through the Hill and mills alike before the end of the day.
Embarrassment aside, Lizzie had won. She’d gotten her new corset at her father’s expense.