“Will you be going to the post office?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” he said.
“I have a letter to Emma. I wish you’d mail it for me.”
“Where is it?”
“I have it here,” she said, and took the letter from the pocket of her dress.
“I may go, I’m not sure,” he said, but he accepted the letter.
“When will you be leaving?” she asked.
“In a few minutes,” he said. He looked again at the slop pail. “Get rid of this, would you?” he said, and walked out into the sitting room. Lizzie lifted the lid on the cookstove to check the fire. There were coals glowing within. She set her flatirons on the stove top to heat them. In the sitting room she heard the click of the key as her father replaced it on the mantelpiece shelf. She took another cookie from the jar and went out into the dining room, nibbling on it as she stood by the windows. Her father came in again.
“Don’t go getting crumbs all over the floor,” he said. “And see to that slop pail, will you?” He went out into the kitchen. She heard the screen door slamming shut. She watched him as he came into view on the walk. Across the yard she could see Adelaide Churchill in her kitchen, looking up, glancing at her father where he stood. He walked past the dining-room windows then, on his way toward the street. Sighing, she went into the kitchen, picked up the slop pail, and carried it through the kitchen entry to the back stairs. The stairwell was dark; she went down to the cellar slowly and cautiously.
It was somewhat less gloomy downstairs, where light filtered through the ground-level windows. She found her way to the washroom. There was a pail under the sink there. It contained the soiled menstrual towels she had used these past several days. She shook out the slop pail. The towel she’d replaced earlier this morning fell onto the other blood-stained towels in the pail under the sink. She opened the water tap and rinsed out the slop pail. Water tinted faintly red ran down the drain.
The house was utterly still when she came upstairs again.
“Mrs. Borden?” she called.
There was no answer; her stepmother had gone as well. She put the clean slop pail down near the stove, tested her irons, heard a sound outside the screen door and went to it. Maggie was standing there, just outside, holding a brush, setting down a wooden pail of water.
“Maggie,” she said, “can you come inside for a moment? I’d like to talk to you.”
“I have to wash my windows,” Maggie said.
“They can wait. Please come in, won’t you?”
“I have to get started.”
“He was here again last night, wasn’t he?” Lizzie whispered.
“I don’t know who you mean.”
“You know who I mean. He was here pounding on the lumber pile out back...”
“I heard nothing.”
“... trying to attract your attention.”
“I have to do my windows,” Maggie said.
“Come in here,” Lizzie whispered sharply. “I won’t talk to you through the door this way!”
“I have to do my windows,” Maggie said again, and turned away from the door. Lizzie stood watching her through the screen as she walked toward the barn, took the pin from the hasp and opened the door. She was inside the barn for just a moment; when she came out again, she was carrying the long handle for her brush. She closed the door again, put the pin back into the hasp and then came back to where she’d set down her pail and brush. Lizzie stood watching her until she disappeared from her angle of vision, moving past the corner of the house to the other side of the yard.
She stood motionless inside the screen door.
She was suddenly trembling.
And confused again.
She felt an overwhelming need to tell Maggie about what she’d tried to do yesterday, what she would have done if only she’d been successful in her attempt to buy the poison. But at the same time, given her very real decision, acknowledging that she would have made a covenant with death, might still do so if she could not shake free of this persistent depression, why then was she so eager to divulge this to Maggie? Did she expect sympathy? Penitence? What? And why, simultaneously, was she so troubled by the young man’s reappearance last night, for certainly it was he, there was no doubt about that in her mind. If indeed she wished to die, had in fact made every effort to purchase the poison that would have accomplished the deed in a convulsive instant — or so she believed — then why should it matter what Maggie thought, what Maggie did or felt, how Maggie responded to the terrible knowledge that her mistress wanted to kill herself?
We cannot afford the luxury of allowing any female employee to believe mistakenly that she — because of some indiscretion — is the true mistress of the house.
Alison’s words, the oracle of Cannes dispensing wisdom in the privacy of an indiscreet bedroom, the sheets damp with their spent passion, the sunlight streaming through the arched window to touch their naked bodies. But where was Mistress Puss on that cold and rainy day last March — It’s always raining when children make their most important discoveries, isn’t it? — her sister away, her stepmother and father away, the house as empty and as still as it was now, where was she then when in her loneliness and need Lizzie had ventured like a child to touch a hand slippery with suds, her heart leaping when Maggie at the sink did not recoil, and discovered in her a longing as deep as her own? Never, but never, let a female employee tempt your fingers or your lips. You shall be eternally sorry if you do, I promise you.
Ah, yes, Alison’s promises, swiftly forgotten. And her own as well, equally fragile, the pillbox she’d bought for her in the Burlington Arcade, Thine Forever, though eternity had lasted far too short a while, the summer contract broken on that dank and dismal day when she’d unbuttoned Maggie’s chemise to reveal her breasts (You have no idea how I’ve been tempted by the sight of voluptuous young Moira in her bath, those frisky Irish breasts spattered with freckles) the nipples stiffening to her touch, her mouth hungrily receptive.
An indiscretion, to be sure. Even now, she wondered whether she had been propelled less by passion than by a need to strike back at Alison, to prove to the woman who had abandoned her that she herself — now that the green leaf of loyalty had fallen and the white rose withered — was entirely capable of watering their love with the blood of usurping tyranny and allowing her insistent need to grow green again in her own country.
All this, you taught me, she remembered thinking on that day while lovelessly they embraced in the room upstairs, the rain lashing the windows. All that I am, you made me, she thought, and knew this to be untrue even as the words found slippery purchase in her mind: she could not blame Alison for what she was; perhaps she could not even blame her for the discovery of herself. The woman shivering beneath her on that stormy day, unskilled, virginal, a servant in every sense, could have been any woman, might indeed have been had Lizzie found the courage to satisfy her need beyond the four walls of this confining house. In helpless rage, lovelessly, she had ravaged her, suffocating on her peasant aroma, clinging to her when her release — less tumultuous than what she had known with Alison — shuddered through her body to reaffirm her female essence.