room,” said Mrs. Borden, and then, “through here is Lizzie’s.”
Surprisingly, Lizzie’s room was an annex to Emma’s with only the one door. It was even smaller. What penury this family lived in.
“We have to go back downstairs to view the other rooms on this floor,” said Mrs. Borden. “They can’t be accessed from this staircase.”
On their way to the staircase, Mrs. Borden pointed to a door at the end of the landing, saying, “That’s the clothes press.”
As they began descending, Bridget glanced back at the spare room, whose door she had left ajar as she hastily left. The sisters were visible, quietly sewing, but by the time Bridget and Mrs. Borden reached the bottom, Bridget heard the door close above them.
They returned to the first floor and passed through to the kitchen in the back of the home, and to the side door entry, where Mrs. Borden mounted a second staircase. Bridget muffled a gasp. The master and mistress of the home used the servant’s stairs to reach their rooms?
Mrs. Borden showed her the master bedroom and the side dressing room, then they ascended to the third floor, and the room that would be Bridget’s. Up under the eaves, the room was tiny, the bed lodged beneath the slanted ceiling, but Bridget made only a cursory examination before nodding her approval—she wanted to return downstairs where it was slightly less oppressive.
They went outside where Mrs. Borden showed her the tools and the water pump in the barn. There was a kitchen garden plot now dormant for winter and a small yard. The entirety of her world now. Pinched and cramped and dim.
“And that’s the lot,” Mrs. Borden said, concluding. “I believe there’s nothing more to show.”
Bridget felt overwhelmed. “It’s all in order,” she said respectfully.
“That it is.” For a moment, Bridget saw on the older woman’s face something that she wished to say, perhaps something reassuring. After all, no one could have lived this way for years . . . surely, there was a time in Mrs. Borden’s life when she’d been carefree and laughed like a girl. A time when the sullen women upstairs had also laughed, and she had been their mother in deed and name.
NOVEMBER 10, 1889
Bridget came back the next day by hack with her trunk. There was considerable traffic on Second Street, and the driver, a man in his mid-twenties like Bridget, had to wait a bit for it to clear to pull over in front of the house.
While they sat, Bridget took a good look at the clapboard facade of the Greek Revival home. While nothing grand like the residences on the hill, the Bordens’ house boasted an off-center entry with two slim columns flanking the inset door. The inset was hardly enough to shake out an umbrella but gave the house a scant bit of style. A few stone steps led up to the door, while heavy shutters framed each window. A pitched roof, set aside by crossbeams as a triangle atop the house, supported several chimneys of varying heights. A neat, well-kept picket fence enclosed the pretense of a front yard.
The driver wedged the hack in between the two trees that shaded the front. Bridget climbed out, holding his hand, and wondered how to proceed. He removed her trunk and followed her to the side door. Luckily, Andrew Borden emerged from that door to greet her. He looked to be in his seventies, with pure white hair and a gaunt frame.
“Welcome, Miss Sullivan. I’ll take that up,” said Mr. Borden cheerlessly.
Bridget looked quickly at the driver. Mr. Borden didn’t seem up to the task due to his elderly build, and the driver was already protesting. “It’s the burden of a moment, sir, and I’ll spare your back,” he said.
“It’s unnecessary.”
The driver, not a bad-looking man, with dark coloring and ruddy cheeks above the scruff of black beard, shrugged. “So be it.” His services had been paid at the other end by her previous employers, and all that remained was to thank him.
She opened her mouth to do so, and he winked at her. She pressed her lips together and gave him her back. She knew what happened to maids who accepted winks.
Mr. Borden had already entered the slim entry hall with her trunk and started up the steps. She stepped inside, pulling the door closed behind her firmly.
Mr. Borden’s passage on the stairs was slow. Bridget regretted his laboring, but her trunk wasn’t heavy—no harp from Tara’s halls, she reflected, nor plate, nor silver. She wondered why he hadn’t let the driver take it for him, but as they approached the second floor, she suspected why: the strange layout of the home. The door they now paused in front of was Mr. Borden’s own chamber. Whether a stranger would know this to be the case, it may have made the older gentleman feel vulnerable.
Mr. Borden stopped to catch his breath, his back still turned to her. As she waited, she examined the stairwell. No windows brightened its narrow, steep pitch. Mr. Borden—a millionaire if the scuttlebutt around town was correct—lived like a tradesman in a tenement. No generously proportioned, cambered flight did he climb at night with his lamp, a statue posted at the landing to remind him of the glories of Rome. No thick carpeting to muffle his tread, soften his passage as he climbed. Just a threadbare rug covered the stairs to his chamber, and stark wooden boards for the remaining steps up to hers.
Bridget reflected that even the main staircase in the home’s front entry, the one that led to the sisters’ rooms, was unadorned and graceless. She hung her head, waiting for Mr. Borden to resume. Why didn’t the man make his lodgings more comfortable? He didn’t have to cut his meat with golden cutlery, but it was beneath him to live like this.
“We have some odd arrangements in this house, and I’ll welcome your keeping quiet on our personal matters,” he said quietly.
“Of course.” Bridget allowed a note of horror to creep into her voice. She’d been raised for a life of service, and her mother back in Allihies, County Cork, had instructed her that discretion was as important as a strong hand with the broom.
“Maggie, our previous maid . . . she was a bit too eager to share the doings of our household with her friends, and word came back to me,” said Mr. Borden. He did then turn and regard Bridget with a serious, but not unkind, visage. “We’ll reward your stilled tongue with continued employment. Avoid the gossips of Fall River, and we’ll have a long and fruitful association.”
“Yes, sir. I surely will,” she said.
“Good.”
At that, he hoisted up her trunk and resumed the climb to the third floor. In her chamber, he stooped to tuck it under the ceiling’s half slant.
“It’s nice our side of the home doesn’t convey the noise of traffic from Second Street,” he said, gesturing to the window. She pulled aside the lace to see the backyard and the stable.
To the side, the southern neighbor’s maid beat a rug on the line, a flume of smoke arising like she was mistress of her own small factory. Bridget smiled, about to posit this fancy
