My name floated through the thick air, the sweet sound of Liam’s voice breaking through the vicious white noise. But he sounded angry, enraged, and much too close. I pried my eyes open, the edges of my vision growing hazy as I blinked back tears. I saw the wooden axe handle, stared at it in horror as it struck the back of Mr. Borden’s head. His entire face bloomed with anger, then went slack.
He fell, his body slumping sideways onto the couch, pulling me down with him. My feet slid against the floor as I tried desperately to find purchase. I gasped as a thick stream of blood began flowing down the right side of Mr. Borden’s head, coating his gray hair with red. I stayed still, half-lying under Mr. Borden’s unconscious form, watching, waiting for him to move.
It wasn’t the muted thump of the axe hitting the floor that brought me back to my senses, rather a strong set of arms pulling me to my feet and the sweet scent of sweat and stale beer that I’d come to love. That I’d come to associate with only one person. Liam.
“Are you all right, love?” Liam asked as he turned me in his arms, his fingers whispering over my face as if looking for some injury. “Did he hurt you?”
Trembling, I looked up at him, completely incapable of responding. I wasn’t all right. This house . . . this family was far from all right.
“Abi—” My words were choked off by movement on the couch. Mr. Borden was coming around, mumbling incoherently as he struggled to get his bearings. It wasn’t the axe handle Seamus used this time to knock him out, but his fist. It slammed into Mr. Borden’s face, his head snapping back before he rolled over onto his side.
A tiny bottle slipped from his pocket, teetering on the edge of the couch before falling to the floor. I waited for it to crack, to splinter into a thousand pieces. It didn’t. It simply settled there by his feet, the name of the poisonous acid etched into the clear glass, staring up at me.
Lizzie shoved Seamus out of the way, all but knocked him over in her attempt to retrieve the bottle. She picked it up and uncorked it, holding it up to her nose as if to confirm what she already knew.
“Prussic acid,” she whispered.
She held the bottle up for me to see, but I didn’t need an explanation or even visual proof of what Mr. Borden had been planning. It wasn’t Lizzie who had tampered with the mutton stew. It wasn’t she who had caused the previous maid’s sudden departure. It was Mr. Borden.
I leaned over and retched, nothing but dry air heaving from my stomach. He’d made us sick—Abigail, Lizzie, even me—and then refused to call the doctor, claimed he saw no need to part with a single dime over something that would pass in a day or two.
“He’s the reason Mrs. Borden was sick. He’s the reason we are all sick. And when we didn’t die fast enough, when his wife got better, he . . . he . . . ”
Liam leaned down so his eyes were inches from mine, as he took my head in his hands and willed me to calm down and tell him what had happened. I couldn’t. The fear, the guilt for questioning Lizzie, the anger . . . it was all too unfathomable.
“She’s upstairs . . . the axe . . . hacked. Hair . . . all gone.” The words sputtered from my mouth as if I were a child. Despite Liam’s grip on me, my body sank to the floor as I prayed for the blackness dancing in my vision to take me, to pull me under, to where I didn’t have to think. Where I didn’t have to smell the rotten stench of mutton stew and vomit, or see Mrs. Borden’s dead eyes staring back at me.
“Seamus, go.” It was two short words, but Seamus understood what his brother meant. If neither Lizzie nor I had the presence of mind to speak, then he’d go see for himself.
Seamus’s heavy treads stopped abruptly at the top of the stairs, the sudden thud against the wall telling me he needed the dark wall of this cursed house to hold him up as he took in Mrs. Borden’s body.
I didn’t recall him coming back down the stairs or what he said. I just remembered him walking past me, past his brother until he stood dead center in front of Lizzie.
“Did you do that?” he asked her.
Lizzie’s eyes flicked towards Seamus, clouded and as dark as the coal used to heat the house. She didn’t respond, didn’t even acknowledge his presence, just gently placed the bottle of prussic acid into her pocket and skirted around him.
“I asked you a question, lass,” Seamus hollered as he latched onto her wrist. “And I expect an answer.”
Lizzie lowered her eyes, her attention fully focused on the fingers Seamus had banded around her wrist. “Take your hand off me.” There was no hitch in her voice, not the slightest hint of anger or fear. Just that same, eerily calm determination I’d heard moments ago from her father.
Seamus’s hand flexed tighter, Lizzie’s fingers going white under the pressure. Without so much as a second warning, she latched onto him and dug her nails in, scoring their sharp edges down the back of his hand until he jolted back in pain and let her go.
“You asked me if I killed my own stepmother,” Lizzie said as she picked up the axe. “You expect an answer, boy? Well, here it is.”
It took only a second for Lizzie to adjust her grip, to spread her hands further apart on the handle and widen her stance. Liam shoved me hard behind him, my back connecting with the corner of the mantel. Seamus joined him, his hand sweeping out, cornering me behind their bodies.
I caught the glint of the blade as she swung it through the air and I clearly recall the sound of it melding with her father’s skull, the dull crack of the bone, and the way his head clung to the axe as she tugged it free. I remember it all, every crushing blow, every drop of blood coating the wall.
Chapter 39
“No, I did not kill Abigail,” Lizzie hissed as she raised the axe above her head and swung it down again. It caught the side of Mr. Borden’s face this time, leaving his flesh hanging from a massive, jagged hole. The axe slid free from his head with ease, and she swung it again and again, each hit punctuated by a declaration . . . each born of thirty-two years of pain and repressed fury.
“I would never kill Abigail, and I would never poison Bridget.” Her last declaration came with the fiercest of blows, her strength shattering her father’s skull, splitting his left eye socket in half and taking his nose.
Every injustice Mr. Borden had ever served his daughter came out that day. The pigeons. The corsets. The house on Ferry Street. Every maid she had befriended, whom he’d purposefully scared away. Every horrible lie he’d ever told to make her seem weak and unworthy in society’s eyes. The death of her mother and the alienation of Emma. All of her anger, every last bit of vengeance, was set free in the eleven blows she delivered to her father’s head.
None of us stopped her. Part of it was our own fear, and part of it was awe. Mostly, we didn’t stop her because what she was saying as she struck her blows, the dirty secrets she was spewing forth, had earned Mr. Borden this fate. If what Lizzie was saying was true—and I’d wager my life that it was—then neither me, nor Liam, nor Seamus saw fit to show this vile man mercy.
Lizzie caught the top of his skull with the last blow, the axe so deeply embedded that it refused to let go. She yanked back hard, nearly lost her footing as her feet slipped in the blood collecting on the floor. Not in her right mind and determined to strike again, she anchored her feet against the legs of the couch and pulled with all her might. The handle splintered, small shards of wood raining down before it broke off entirely.
Lizzie fell backwards, the handle still melded to her hands, the head of the axe still wedged in Mr. Borden’s skull. In a second, she was back on her feet, her hands outstretched towards the heavy piece of flint.
Seamus tackled her, his body rolling to the floor with her. She screamed as she struck at his face over and over again, leaving behind ribbons of pink. He refused to let her go, just pulled her back into his chest and wrapped his feet around her waist, holding her there until her body and mind gave in to exhaustion.
“Shh, lass, it’s all right,” he soothed, whispering to her in the same gentle tone I’d heard him
take countless times with Minnie, when the ale wreaked havoc on her senses and her stomach. “You can stop now. He’s gone; he can’t hurt you anymore.”
Never once had I seen Lizzie cry. Not when her own father slaughtered her pigeons. Not over the insidious gossip that seemed to plague her. Not when she talked about the mother she’d lost or when Emma made it her purpose to escape Fall River as often as possible, leaving Lizzie alone to suffer. Now her tears ran freely, streaming down her face, mingling with the blood that coated both her hands and Seamus’s.
It wasn’t until her body stilled that Liam let me out from behind his sheltering stance. I slid to the floor in front of Lizzie and reached for her hand. “I’m sorry.” Those two words were more a shallow attempt to assuage my guilt than a true effort to comfort her. “I never meant to doubt you. I didn’t know.”
Whatever darkness had consumed Lizzie slowly faded, her eyes blinking rapidly before she crawled out of Seamus’s embrace and took in the room. Her eyes landed on Liam. He had kicked the axe handle out of her reach and was slowly prying the metal head from Mr. Borden’s skull.
“Leave it,” she said.
“We can’t,” Liam replied as he slowly rocked the axe head back and forth until it popped free. “Bridget, you need to go. Right now. They will blame this on you.”
“No. They won’t.” Lizzie fired back. “I will protect her, you have my word.”
“Ah, lass, your word means very little to me,” Liam said as he tossed the head of the axe next to its mangled handle. Ignoring Lizzie, he turned his attention to me. “Come now, love. Seamus and I will speak to the fact that you were in my flat with me all morning and nowhere near here.”
“No,” I said and stood up. “I won’t leave Lizzie here alone. She will hang for this just as clearly as I would. I won’t let that happen.”
“Difference is, she actually did kill him,” Seamus said.
The sarcasm I could hear in his voice pitched my anger to a new level, and I nearly lashed out at him. “What are you doing here, anyway? How did you even know to come?”
“Eli Bence,” Seamus said, and both Lizzie and I swung our heads in his direction. “I stopped by the pharmacy on my way to the iron works. I wanted to check and see how his brother was faring. He told me about the . . . ah . . . purchase Lizzie tried to make and that he hadn’t seen you in a few days. Liam had mentioned that you weren’t feeling well, so . . .”
“So you assumed I had poisoned her?” The shock in Lizzie’s voice was pure, filled less with anger than remorse. “I would never. Bridget means more to me than my own sister. I did this for her,” she said sweeping her hand out in her father’s direction, “to keep her safe and free from speculation.”
Her eyes traveled down to the pool of blood beneath her feet. “He would have seen her hung for this. My father would have stopped at nothing until she was ruined.” The words were no more than a hushed whisper, but I heard the truth lingering beneath them. Lizzie cared, would rather see herself jailed than me.
And Liam and Seamus just expected me to leave her here, coated in her father’s blood, exposed to whatever story this city, these people, wanted to dream up.
I watched in horrified silence as Liam picked up the head of the broken axe and silently strode from the room. Seamus just shrugged, as if he was torn between following his brother and physically picking me up and dragging me with them. He knew better than to do the latter. No matter where they took me or how hard they tried to keep me close, I’d be back in an hour, a week, a month, to stand by Lizzie’s side.
The door to the cookstove slammed shut, the smell of mutton stew permeating the air. “Give me your clothes,” Liam said with a resigned sigh. His hands were covered in ash, the blade of the axe now as black as the night sky. “I’ll burn them in the furnace at the mill.”
I ran up the back staircase and fetched Lizzie a new dress, brought it down to her along with a few extra pins for her hair. I prayed her undergarments were unsoiled. The clean ones were still hanging on the line to dry, and I didn’t want to risk being seen as I pulled them in.
She was down to her corset by the time I returned. Liam was seven shades of red, Seamus as calm as anything. She gave Liam her dress, and he handed her a rag from the kitchen, motioning for her to clean the blood from her face and hands.
“Don’t open the stove,” Liam said as he leaned in to give me a kiss. “The handle to the axe is in there, and it will take a good hour for it to burn clean through. The head won’t burn but the ash should take care of any blood. I’ll throw it in the barn on my way out.”
I nodded and headed into the kitchen, where I tossed an onion and an entire jar of dried pepper into the stew, to cover up the scent of burning wood.
“Listen to me, Bridget,” he said as he pulled me into his arms. “Seamus and I are going to leave. I want you to count to one hundred, then you and Lizzie are going to run out that front door, screaming as loud as you can. Carry on about a prowler and stumbling upon the Bordens’ dead bodies. Get the police, the doctor, anybody who will listen, and tell them that neither you nor Lizzie saw anything. Got it?”
“Yes,” Lizzie said from behind me.
“And you,” Liam continued, refocusing on his brother. “You’re going to take that off.”
Seamus looked down and nodded, then proceeded to strip down to the yellowing undershirt he had on beneath. I hadn’t noticed that Seamus’s shirt was covered in blood, but Liam was right. An Irish boy covered in blood walking around Corky Row might not warrant calling the police, but it surely would here.
Liam locked eyes with me, then pursed his lips into a tight line. “It’s going to be all right, you hear me? Just do exactly as I say, and it’ll be fine. You have my word.”
I stood there by the back door and watched them leave. Lizzie was counting quietly beside me, her gaze focused on Liam’s disappearing figure. “You ready?” she asked.
I shook my head, then ran straight out the front door with Lizzie by my side.
Chapter 40
It seemed as though the entire town was lurking in the streets, hoping, waiting, for one of us to pull back the curtains so they could get a peek inside. Emma had yet to arrive home, but Alice was upstairs tending to Lizzie. Dr. Bowen had given Lizzie a tranquilizer, something to calm her nerves, or so he said. Funny how he didn’t offer me anything, not that I would have taken it.
It had been nearly midday by the time the first police officer arrived. He took one look at Mr. Borden’s body and ran for the back door and proceeded to vomit for a good five minutes, before he composed himself enough to run to the station and inform the marshal what had happened.
By the time they returned, Alice, Dr. Bowen, even nosy Mrs. Churchill had trampled through the house. I thought it was sacrilege, the way Lizzie just let anybody who wanted to walk through the house, staring and poking at her parents’ dead bodies. I thought privacy would be more prudent, leaving fewer people to have to retell our story to. She laughed and told me this was better; any evidence Liam or Seamus had forgotten to clean up would be trampled out by the dozens of people traipsing in and out.
It was hours before they removed the bodies from the guest room and sitting room, and even then, they decided to toss them on the dining room table, cut them open, and empty the contents of their stomachs into jars. They took what was left of the stew and some milk as well, but not once did they think to open the cookstove, not once did they question the small smudge of ash on the kitchen floor.
“Bridget?” I turned at the sound of Mr. Morse’s voice. He hadn’t spoken to me since returning home that afternoon to find Dr. Bowen and the police surveying the bodies. In fact, he hadn’t talked to anybody. He’d shown up shortly after the bodies had been moved to the dining room. He hadn’t even entered the house, just cast a glance at Lizzie and then took a seat underneath the pear tree in the backyard. He’d reached up, picked a ripe piece of fruit from the tree, and bitten into it as if all this commotion were noth
ing more than a temporary inconvenience.
“Can I fix you something to eat?” I asked nervously. I poked around the ashes of the cookstove, moving the one tiny remaining piece of the axe handle into the center before restarting the fire. “Lizzie doesn’t seem to have much of an appetite this evening, so I didn’t prepare a meal, but it will only—”
He held up his hand, cutting me off. “No, I am fine.”
“I’m sorry about Mr. Borden. I know you and him were close.”
“Close?” he said, pausing as if considering the word. “Perhaps, but not for the reasons you may suspect.”
I shrugged. I had learned this morning not to question anything when it came to this family. “Will you be in need of anything before I retire, Sir?”
“Yes,” he said and motioned for me to sit down. “Alice has agreed to stay the night, so Lizzie won’t be alone. I would understand if you felt more comfortable somewhere else, and I’d be happy to make the necessary arrangements or escort you there myself.”
I shook my head. “No, sir. I promised Lizzie I would stay.”
“I know,” he said as he took a seat across from me. He pulled a small envelope from his coat pocket and laid it on the table. When I failed to inquire about it, he slid it in my direction. “I spoke with Lizzie. I know what happened today.”
I stared at the envelope. Seamus’s last words to me before he left were to say as little as possible to as few people as I could. I did as he’d instructed and stayed silent.
Mr. Morse tapped the envelope and went on. “Lizzie made me promise to steer the investigation away from you regardless of what it costs her. I don’t think it wise, she is my niece after all, but I will honor her wishes.”
I nodded, acknowledging nothing.
Sweet Madness Page 18
