“I’m sorry,” she said at once. “I didn’t...”
“Don’t touch me!” her stepmother said.
“Mother, I...”
“Mother?” Mrs. Borden said. “Don’t you dare!”
“Please, I meant no...”
“Stay away from me!”
“I beg of you...”
“Monster!” Mrs. Borden said. “Unnatural thing!”
The words were like a physical blow, staggering her.
In blind retaliation against the words, she bunched her fist as a schoolgirl might and struck out ineffectually at her stepmother, the punch only glancing off her shoulder, her eyes nonetheless widening in fear. Lizzie’s own fear was suddenly replaced by unreasoning anger. Her stepmother’s look of terror, her instantly defensive posture, served only to confirm the hurtful surmise that she was indeed monstrous and unnatural, a creature capable of inflicting serious harm. She immediately rejected this deformed image of herself, blind anger rising to dispel it, suffocating rage surfacing to encompass and engulf the hopelessness of her secret passion, the chance discovery by this woman who stood quaking now against the closed door to the guest room, the fearsome threat of revelation to her father, the unfairness and stupidity of not being allowed to live her own life as she chose to live it!
Her stepmother turned away suddenly, fumbled with the knob on the door and threw the door open. She slammed the door shut behind her, tried to hold it closed as Lizzie shoved against it, and then stumbled back into the room, almost falling, when Lizzie shoved against it with all her might, the door banging back against the wall from the force of her fury. Her stepmother regained her footing, backed away from Lizzie as she advanced, darted as though to run toward the windows, rushed instead into the narrow space between the dressing case and the bed, discovered the wall, made a small, squealing sound, turned yet again — and found Lizzie standing there in silent, savage rage, blocking all escape. Unseeingly Lizzie reached for the candlestick on the dresser’s marble top, her hand closing familiarly and fiercely around the stem, the base turning up, the taper toppling from its pricket.
“No, don’t,” her stepmother murmured, and Lizzie struck her.
She swung the candlestick downward from the right, catching her above the left ear and opening a bloody gash some two inches long. Stunned, her stepmother backed away from her, twisting her head to avoid any further blows, and Lizzie struck her again, on top of the head this time, a little back of the crown line, the edge of the candlestick penetrating the scalp and the skull, and yet again immediately, the next blow nearly parallel to the other, blood splashing onto the dressing case’s marble slab and upper drawer, her stepmother twisting away, stunned, turning, falling to her knees, blindly grasping the air for support as Lizzie struck her again from behind.
The blow caught her stepmother on the back, to the right of her neck where it joined the shoulders, splashing blood onto the lower drawer and faceboard of the dresser case, and she fell flat to the floor and tried to clasp her hands behind her twisted head, her face close to the wall as Lizzie straddled her and struck her again, and again, and again, blood splashing up onto the northern wall and the faceboard of the bed, Mrs. Borden’s fluttering fingers stopping, her body quite still now. And now the candlestick fell with frenzied regularity, a dozen blows raining upon her stepmother’s head, opening a large crater in her skull, the cuts radiating out from it like the ribs of a fan or the fingers of a hand, smashing the bones and laying open the brain, drops of blood spattering up onto Lizzie’s face and naked arms, her shoulders, her breasts.
Behind her, she heard Maggie’s muffled scream.
Breathlessly she sucked in great gulps of air, sitting astride her stepmother, the candlestick still clutched tightly in her fist, droplets of blood on her hand and her wrist. She was drenched with sweat, her hair matted against her blood-spattered forehead. She kept trying to breathe — if only she could catch her breath — her chest and her shoulders heaving, her mouth open. In the doorway Maggie was whimpering now, small snuffling sounds like those a frightened animal might make. Lizzie’s breathing became more normal. She looked down at her stepmother’s shattered skull. She looked over her shoulder to where Maggie, fully dressed, stood in the doorway. She got to her feet. The white candle lay near the dressing case, broken in half, its separate segments held loosely together by the connecting spinal cord of the wick.
“Am I covered with blood?” she asked numbly.
“Some, ” Maggie said. Her knuckles were pressed to her mouth; she seemed unable to stop whimpering.
“Fetch me some towels,” she said. “The bottom drawer of my dresser.”
Maggie hesitated, and then turned from the doorway.
She stood exactly where she was, looking down at her stepmother, feeling nothing, knowing only that she must clean herself now, thinking ahead only to that and no further, holding the blood-smeared candlestick in her hand, loosely at her side. When. Maggie returned with the towels, she wiped the blood first from the candlestick and then from her hands and her breasts, and then looked at the towels and wondered what she should do with them now. She kept staring at the towels. “The slop pail,” she said at last. “In the kitchen. Would you fetch it, please?”
Maggie ran out onto the landing. She heard her footfalls as she scurried down the stairs. She stood where she was only another moment, and then went into her bedroom and wiped the blood from her face and her shoulders and her hair where it was matted to her forehead, looking at herself in the glass, studying her own pale eyes until Maggie returned. She looked at her blankly, and then dropped the soiled towels into the slop pail.
“I shall need to wash,” she said.
“Your father...” Maggie said.
Lizzie glanced at the clock.
“Yes,” she said, “but I shall need to wash.”
She put the candlestick into the slop pail, cushioning its base on the towels, and went down the steps into the sitting room, Maggie following her, and through the kitchen and into the pantry. At the pantry sink she washed her face and her hands and her shoulders and her breasts, studying herself for any vagrant blood spots, ascertaining from Maggie that there were none, and then drying herself with yet another menstrual towel which she dropped into the pail. She washed the candlestick as well, the silky feel of it, cleansing it of any blood, leaving it on the pantry counter, and then carrying the slop pail with its towels down to the cellar and over to the wash sink, where she emptied it into the pail containing the towel she had left there earlier this morning.
When she came upstairs again, the pantry and the kitchen were empty. The clock on the kitchen wall read a quarter of ten. She found Maggie in the parlor at the front of the house, nervously peering through the window at the street outside.
“What is it?” Lizzie asked at once. “My father? Is he home?”
Maggie shook her head.
She went to the window, stood a trifle behind her so that she could not be seen from outside, and saw first the carriage standing by the north gate between here and the Churchill house next door, the team of horses motionless in the bright sunlight, and then the pond lilies at the back of the carriage, and then Mrs. Manley who lived up the street, and Mrs. Hart who lived in Tiverton but whose sister lived nearby. And then she saw, standing in the gateway, his left arm leaning on the gatepost—