I sat on the edge of Lizzie’s bed, my eyes trained on the flickering of her lantern. The flame was weak, likely the product of Mr. Borden’s miserly ways with oil. Soon, we’d be sitting in a dark room. A darkness that, right now, I didn’t welcome.
I hadn’t gone back to bed. The silence of the house kept me awake. I’d come back in here a few hours ago to check on Lizzie. I stayed because I hoped the presence of another living soul would ease my fears.
“Lizzie, talk to me,” I begged. She was sitting by the window staring out into the nearly vacant street. The pale gray of her irises looked silvery in the lantern light as she turned to face me. She looked lost, defeated, and utterly dismayed. It broke my heart to see her that way, to see the outspoken, odd, and uniquely feisty Lizzie Borden I’d come to know completely lost within herself.
“Maybe I can help,” I said, knowing full well I had nothing more to offer than a bent ear. “Please, tell me what has you so troubled.”
“Go back to your own room, Bridget.”
“No. Tell me what happened down there. Please.”
“You wouldn’t believe me, and even if I thought you would, I can’t tell you anyway.” She paused and traced the pane of the window with a shaking finger. “I don’t want you to be involved.”
Frustration bore through me. I was already involved. I’d gotten sucked in that first week of my employment, when I found Lizzie wandering around the barn at two in the morning wearing nothing but her dressing gown. Back home, Cara used to wander in just the same way. I used to tell people the night air helped with her breathing. I used the same excuse with Mrs. Borden when she caught me and Lizzie coming back in.
I’d continued to defend Lizzie from that day forward, omitting certain information from Mr. Borden, and sometimes even downright lying about her whereabouts. Just last week, I’d found Mr. Borden’s pocket watch hidden in the cellar behind the ash bin, the same watch he’d accused me of pilfering. I gathered Lizzie had taken it from her father’s room, but I’d yet to say anything to either of them about it. I had tucked the memory in the back of my mind and left the watch where it was, hoping I could forget about it.
“No. I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what is going on.” Being in this house every day, waiting to lose my mind, was bad enough, but for Lizzie to even suggest I wouldn’t believe her, that I wasn’t on her side, was simply intolerable. “Why were you fully dressed at two in the morning? And what did you mean by ‘she’s not well’?”
“I’m not messing about, Bridget. Leave me be.”
I straightened up and shook my head, irritated that she was shutting me out. “Have I yet to tell any of your secrets, Lizzie? Even one? What about the time I said I slipped, tearing your only good pair of stockings from the line as I fell, because you wanted a new pair and your father refused to give you the money, said he wouldn’t replace them until they were beyond repair? He took the cost for the new pair out of my pay! Or what about when the barn was broken into and your father blamed you. Again. Who took the blame for that, who claimed to have accidentally left the barn door unlocked? Never once have I told them that you read their mail. You owe me, Lizzie Borden!”
Lizzie cocked her head as if confused, then shook it off. “I know what you’ve done for me. You’ve been more of a friend than Alice. But the secrets this house hangs onto are terrible, Bridget. Worse than you can ever imagine.”
“I can’t imagine anything much worse than you not trusting me, and that’s exactly what you’re doing.”
I got up to return to my room, embarrassed by the tears stinging my eyes. It was true. Lizzie and I were close, had been for a long time, but something had changed in these past few days. Lizzie had changed.
“I’ll see to your chores this morning,” I said as I quietly turned the knob on the door. “And I’ll make sure to bring your breakfast up so you don’t have to see any of us.”
“Wait. I’m sorry. Come back and sit for a minute, will you?” Lizzie’s voice was soft, the words coming out on a sigh as if she was hoping to coax me back with a bit of information. “You know my father’s Uncle Lawdwick used to own the house next door.”
I nodded. Mr. Borden had mentioned his uncle once at breakfast. It was one of those rare occasions when he actually spoke to me. Lawdwick was long dead, but apparently he had once owned the land next door. It’d been divided and this house built before Lizzie was born, her great-uncle Laddy, as she called him, residing in the low cottage next door until the day he died. But what any of that had to do with Lizzie shutting me out was beyond me.
“Great-Uncle Laddy had four wives, you know, but it was his second one, Eliza, that I’m going to tell you about.”
A chill crept into the room and scuttled up my back, and I wrapped my arms around me. I wasn’t in favor of talking ill of the dead, was sure the soul of the departed would find a way to curse me.
Lizzie’s tone was even as she spoke, as if she’d rehearsed the story a dozen times in her head. “I don’t remember Eliza. She died before I was born, but Father said she was quiet and kept to herself most the time. I was named after her, or so Emma tells me.”
I couldn’t help but look out the window and wonder if Minnie knew how connected her employer’s house was to the Borden’s. To Lizzie.
“She bore him three children. Holder, Eliza Ann, and Maria.”
“The same Maria—”
“Yes,” Lizzie cut me off, obviously irritated that I’d interrupted her story. “You’ve met her; she’s married to Samuel Hinckley, although he’s never been right since the war. Quiet, portly, not too bright.”
I’d heard her use the same words to describe her stepmother, even her sister Emma on occasion. “What about the other two . . . Holder and Eliza Ann?”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, waving a dismissive hand. “It is their mother that you should be concerned about. According to Father, she was prone to fits of hysteria, but they always seemed to get better. She holed herself up in her room after Holder was born. She refused to come out for days, refused to eat. Father said it was a hot summer, not unlike this one. Perhaps it was the heat that caused her madness.”
Lizzie paused as if considering the possibility, perhaps wondering if the heat was to blame for her own recent state of fugue. I couldn’t help but wonder the same thing.
“Uncle Laddy was out checking on one of his mills,” Lizzie said as she visibly shook that thought off and continued on. “Eliza came out of her room that day, dressed in her shift, her hair uncombed and hanging down to her waist. She dismissed her maid to her room and gathered the children, then brought them all downstairs to the cistern in the cellar. One by one she dropped them in, watched them drown. Maria got away and ran down the street screaming for help.”
The lantern sputtered out, leaving us with nothing but the faint glow of the pre-dawn sky to light our faces. I sat there paralyzed, so horrified by what Lizzie was saying that I could barely think straight. Eliza. Two children. Murdered in the well. It was all jumbled up into a wretched mess in my mind, a story I knew I would never be able to forget.
Lizzie was moving about, no doubt looking for some oil or a second lantern. Within moments a fresh lantern flared to life, illuminating her pale face once more.
“What happened to her? What happened to Eliza?” I asked.
“Great-Uncle Laddy found her sprawled across their bed that same day. She had taken his straight razor to her throat.”
I’d never seen a picture of Eliza, but that didn’t stop the image from flashing through my mind. Her body splayed out across the bed. Her blood seeping into the white linen. Her eyes lifeless as they stared into the darkness. Not unlike the pigeons’ eyes; not unlike Lizzie’s eyes.
“Why did your father buy this house if he knew what happened next door?”
Lizzie stood there silently for a moment, apparently lost in thought. “He said he bought it to be closer to his holdings in town, to keep better track of his tenants, and be closer to the bank. But the house on Ferry Street, the Grey house, even this one . . . it’s like he is collecting pieces of his own history, trying to contain the curse that follows this family.”
“Curse,” I repeated, stunned. “Is that what you think?”
Lizzie shook her head and adjusted the flame of the lantern slightly higher. “No, I don’t think he cares about what happened next door. I think he’s as mad as she was.”
Terror gripped me. Although I’d never admitted it directly to Lizzie, I was beginning to think she was right. Mr. Borden was more than simply peculiar. He was sinister. Warped. Touched in the head, as they would say back home.
“The fits you have, Lizzie, do you remember anything about them? Do you remember being in the kitchen or saying any of those things?”
Lizzie’s face turned grim, ashen, in the shadows. “I remember hearing the crying and the voices. I remember saying the words now, but I don’t know who I was talking to or why.”
“You were saying, ‘she’s not well.’ What does that mean, Lizzie? Is it you who’s not well?”
“Not ‘she’s not well,’ Bridget. What I was saying was, ‘she’s in the well.’”
Lizzie shook her head, and for the first time since I’d set foot in this house, I saw fear, real fear, in her eyes. “You don’t think it’s happening to me too, do you, Bridget? Do you think my family is cursed? The madness that claimed my Aunt Eliza . . . the madness my father claims took hold of my mother . . . do you think is taking root in me?”
I startled at her words. Not once had I ever heard claims of Lizzie’s mother being mad. What little I knew about her, what little I’d managed to glean from John Morse or Emma indicated that she was kind and gentle. That she had succumbed to an illness that often befell women. “What do you mean, your mother was mad?”
“Emma had some of my mother’s things stored away in her dresser. Nothing of value, just a monogrammed handkerchief, a picture, and tiny bottle of her perfume. I didn’t know she had them. I mean, I’d seen pictures of my mother, but I never owned any myself. Uncle John has a few, and he was always willing to answer all my questions. My father . . . well, I’d always assumed he was telling the truth when he claimed there was nothing of hers to keep.”
I thought back to the countless times I’d laid Emma’s delicates in her dresser. Never once had I seen any of the items Lizzie was talking about. “Where are they now? The things Emma kept, what happened to them?”
“Emma was packing her belongings the day before we moved here to Second Street. She had them on her bed and was carefully wrapping each of them in her stockings. I was twelve and excited to hold anything that once belonged to my mother. Emma told me no, and I yelled for my father, foolishly thinking he’d make her show me.”
My heart sank at her words. I gathered that since coming into this world thirty-two years ago, Lizzie had yet to “make” her father do anything.
“He burned them. When he saw that Emma had them, he took them and threw them in the fireplace, destroyed every memory Emma had of our mother that night. Emma begged him not to; she carried on for hours. Father told her she was tempting fate, cursing this family with the memory of a madness he’d ridded it of ten years prior.”
I quickly sorted through the rumors in my head as I tried to figure out what curse he was talking about.
“My mother,” Lizzie said, answering my unspoken question. “The curse of madness he was referring to was her. Father once told me he stayed by her day and night through the last days of her madness, reminding her of who she was and how much he loved her. And in the end, she died anyway, something to do with her insides being all twisted up. But I know the truth. Emma and John know the truth.”
“What truth, Lizzie?”
She turned away from me and sighed, her entire body collapsing in on itself. “What happened to my mother that night no longer matters, Bridget. But I do wonder if my father is right, if my mother was mad and I am damned to the same fate.”
I did my best to smile with confidence although that was most certainly the last thing I was feeling at the moment. Petrified would be more accurate. For all the times I’d woken to Cara’s mumbled words, for all the times I’d sat with her as she talked herself back to sleep, never once had her words been dark or tinged with the madness Lizzie spoke of.
“You’re not mad, Lizzie. A bit outspoken and more stubborn than any other woman I know, but you’re certainly not mad.”
I patted Lizzie’s hand gently, nearly gasped when she grabbed onto it and held it tight. “Don’t leave me, Bridget. Promise me, no matter what happens in this house, you won’t leave me here alone.”
“I swear it. I won’t leave you.” No sooner had those words parted my lips then I regretted them. But it was the truth. As much as I wanted to throw on my day clothes and go running to Liam straight away, I wouldn’t. If Andrew Borden really was a madman, if this house was filled with the spirits of drowned children and bleeding mothers, if there was any way that Lizzie was being dragged into the darkness herself, then I wouldn’t leave her.