I gave the window a little push, pigeons sounded in trees, and Bridget was escorted into the middle of the backyard by an officer, his hand a rock on her back. Bridget cried and the officer said, ‘Please take your time, but do tell me if you saw anyone follow Mr Borden home.’
She shook her head. ‘No, sir. I just let him in and then Lizzie called to me a short time later that someone had killed her father.’
Someone killed Mr Borden. This unexpected thing. What was going on in the house? John better not have changed his mind, done this by himself. I moved away from the window. I noticed the changes to the barn floor below—a lady’s journal strewn on the ground, large boot prints, sections of dust wiped away. Someone had definitely been there. How had I not heard anything? The barn was the heat of sun-fire, and an officer yelled, ‘Stand back. Stand back.’
I noticed small blood droplets patter along the floor of the loft towards an old, heavy blanket. I followed the trail and lifted the blanket: an axe head, blood-thick, was covered in tiny grey hairs, human moss. The metal had been snapped away from the handle, the piece annealing from use. ‘My, my, my.’ Underneath blood, underneath grey hair, two long strands of auburn hair. I picked up the axe head, smelled it. That caramel static stench. ‘My, my, my.’ Someone killed Abby. Someone killed Andrew. I’d have to keep the axe, take it to John, demand answers, demand my payment. I put the axe head in my trouser pocket.
Outside, voices. I took another look from the window, saw two police officers. One kicked the dead pigeon in the yard, the other helped himself to a pear from the arbour. He turned around. Blue-purple eye. I knew him, knew my work. The officer from yesterday. None of this was working to my favour. I jumped up, pulled myself back into the crawl space, lay on my stomach, found it hard to breathe. I thought about John. We’d have to have words. I listened to them all, listened to pigeons on the roof.
ELEVEN
BRIDGET
3 August 1892
LATER THAT DAY I was sweeping the kitchen floor when I heard voices trail from the back stairs. Mr and Mrs Borden. I wondered if she had told him about me leaving, what he might think. It would be nothing for Mr Borden to replace me. I was a girl among girls who had replaced a girl. But he would care about the money, would care that I had been receiving more than my worth.
I swept the floors, hunkered the broom underneath the stove, forced the straw bristles as far as they could, collected soot, collected black-green rot food scraps over the white-painted tiled floor. Out came a small piece of orange skin, hard and dried. I put the orange peel under my nose, bitter citrus. Someone had been feasting and I hadn’t noticed. Eating in secret, burning the remains. Lizzie. This was something she would do. I sniffed the peel again. A memory of fruit.
Last summer when Mr and Mrs Borden went to the Swansea farm, Lizzie and Emma bought southern fruits from a Boston market. Orange, peach, apricot. The eating that had been done on the side steps. The smell of orange, burst juice tang, a dance for the tongue and nose. The way peaches wept down fingers, wet lips. The sisters bent over their parted knees, sat a way Mr Borden would never allow. They slobbered the fruits, suckling babies. Emma had asked that I keep watch, make sure nosy neighbours wouldn’t drop by for a visit. Oh, how I was happy to be outside, to be near deliciousness. Emma and Lizzie sat close together, their elbows hitting. They didn’t seem to notice how their bodies knocked against one another.
‘This is as good as the orange I ate in Rome,’ Lizzie said.
Emma rolled her eyes. ‘How many times are you going to bring that up?’ They laughed, like sisters do. Like I had done with mine.
‘Until I’m tired of talking about it.’ Lizzie grabbed another orange from the basket, dug her nails into the skin and ripped it open. Peel to the ground. It was a colour rarely seen back home. Lizzie split the orange in half.
‘Bridget, would you like some?’ Juice, fingers.
‘Are ya sure?’
Emma nodded. ‘Have you eaten one before?’
‘Not really.’ In another house I worked, the lady there went through a southern mourning, wanting to go back to her Florida childhood. She got herself some oranges and I made her marmalade, made her Madeira cake. I licked orange peel and juice from my fingers, the closest I got to eating the fruit.
‘Let us treat you,’ Lizzie said, the way you would to a guest at your manor home.
I took the orange and my teeth went in. It was like sour sugar. My fingertips were sticky. I ate it all.
‘Have you been to Rome?’ Lizzie asked.
‘Lizzie, don’t be rude.’ Emma wiped her mouth.
Lizzie gaped her mouth. ‘How is that rude? I’m making polite conversation.’
‘No, miss. I’ve not been anywhere ’cept home and America.’
‘Well, you could one day.’ Lizzie matter-of-fact.
‘Lizzie . . .’
‘She might marry a rich man.’ Lizzie grinned.
‘Where do I meet ’em? Not in the kitchen.’ I laughed at that, at how Lizzie believed that someone from her walk of life would notice me.
The sun came through the tree canopy, was only a whisper on the shoulder. A small white dog ran past us down the street. The cotton mills steamed in the distance. The smell of fruit, a secret feast. I didn’t question how they got the money for it. I licked my fingers, let the afternoon be.
There would be no summer fruit for me this time. The girls had kept it for themselves. Mr and Mrs Borden kept up their talking and I scooped up the dust and the mess in the dustpan, put it in the bin, threw the peel on top. The clock struck three thirty. Borden voices continued from upstairs and so I went towards them, one step at a time, quiet. It was Mr Borden speaking as I neared their bedroom door.
‘I dare say she won’t keep another flock of pigeons again.’
‘When will you tell her?’
‘Before long.’
‘Andrew, you should do it sooner. She’ll be upset.’
‘They’re pigeons! She can see them all over Fall River if she really misses them.’
Lizzie had started collecting the dead flock in the fall, when she’d found a pigeon with a broken wing in the backyard. She’d asked me to fetch a small wicker basket and so I did. The bird was placed inside and she put the basket in her room. She cut long strips of her bedsheet, bandaged the wing.
Lizzie asked the father of one of her Sunday school pupils to build her a small aviary. Mr Borden was not impressed. ‘You’re inviting trouble. Get rid of it.’
‘No! Don’t be savage. It’ll be eaten alive out there.’
The bird healed and the collecting began. It seemed easy to do: offer up food and wait to close the cage. The pigeons fattened and I thought about them in a pie. Every now and then she sang the morning to them, sang, ‘As the Lord liveth, there shall no punishment happen to thee for this thing,’ and she cooed and tweeted, cooed and tweeted.
‘I don’t want to even think about what she’ll be like if any of them escape,’ Emma had said.
‘It wouldn’t be that bad, would it?’ I asked.
Emma looked at me, like she was seeing right inside. ‘You don’t know my sister.’