“In a carriage,” Alison prompted.
“On the way home from a church social,” Lizzie said.
“Oh, the heathen!” Alison said, and burst out laughing again.
“I was shocked speechless!”
“I can well imagine!”
“His hands were cold!” Lizzie said, and began laughing so hard she thought she would choke.
“Oh, dear,” Alison said.
“Oh, my goodness,” Lizzie said.
“Your goodness assailed!” Alison said. “So tell me what happened. How did you rid yourself of the bounder?”
“I was obliged to return his ring.”
“Ah? That serious then, was it?”
“Not an engagement ring, no,” Lizzie said. “Nothing of the sort. But he’d given me a simple gold ring he used to wear on his pinky, and which I wore on the third finger of my right hand. I gave back the ring, but it came again in the mail not three days later, together with a note apologizing for his...”
“... beastly manners,” Alison said, nodding.
“He didn’t put it quite that way.”
“How did he put it?”
“He said he couldn’t understand what had come over him...”
“How original!”
“... and he promised it would never happen again.”
“Unless he first warmed his hands by the fire,” Alison said. “And did you forgive him?”
“I never saw him again. Oh, around town, of course, whenever he was visiting his aunt. But not as a beau.”
“Did you return the ring yet another time?”
“No.”
“You certainly didn’t throw it away, did you? Gold?”
“I gave it to my father,” Lizzie said. “He still wears it.”
“How clever of you,” Alison said. “I must confess that the first time a strange man began fumbling with my stays I was less embarrassed than I was surprised. The very thought of a grown man actually desiring to fondle my meager treasures...”
“Hello?” Albert called. “Anyone home?”
“We’re in here, darling,” Alison said, rising and smoothing her apron. “Come say hello to Miss Borden.”
He came into the drawing room, hatless this time, and dressed rather more somberly than he’d been on the train, wearing a black coat with a low, narrow, rolled velvet collar and trousers of the same cloth. He extended his hand, took Lizzie’s in it and lowered his lips to it, brushing it lightly in the European manner.
“How nice to see you,” he said. “Have you been having a pleasant chat? Is that clotted cream I spy?”
“Do help yourself, Albert,” she said, “I’ll ring for more hot tea.” She turned to Lizzie and added, “My husband is a glutton.”
“For punishment, if your tongue’s any indication,” Albert said, and smiled. “Has she been talking your ear off, Miss Borden?”
“Please call me Lizzie, won’t you?”
“Lizzie then,” he said. “But not Elizabeth.”
“Such a keen memory,” Alison said.
“We’ve had a lovely afternoon together,” Lizzie said.
“Yes, haven’t we?” Alison said.
“Interest rates will be going up from four to five percent,” Albert said, and reached across the table for a scone.
4: Fall River — 1892
Six witnesses were to be examined at the inquest on this Wednesday morning, August 10, and Lizzie Borden was to be the first of them. The clock on the wall read ten minutes to ten. Knowlton sat alone in the courtroom, a copy of the Springfield Republican open on the table before him. The editorial read:
All through the investigations carried on by the Fall River Police, a lack of ability has been shown seldom equalled, and causes they assign for connecting the daughter with the murder are on a par with their other exhibitions of lack of wisdom. Because someone, unknown to them and too smart for them to catch, butchered two people in the daytime on a principal street of the city, using brute force far in excess of that possessed by the girl, they conclude that there is probable reason to believe that she is the murderess. Because they found no one walking along the street with his hands and clothes reeking with blood, they conclude that it is probable, after swinging the ax with the precision and effect of a butcher, she washed the blood from her hands and clothes.
Well that, Knowlton thought. The fact that there had been no visible blood on the girl when the police arrived. True enough. But was it actually so improbable that she might have had opportunity to cleanse herself after the gory acts? To hide, perhaps to destroy, the garments she’d been wearing? Beyond reasonable doubt, he reminded himself. What might have happened was nothing for him to ponder. He was here this morning to inquire again into what had happened, to ask Lizzie Borden again for a recital of the events as she had experienced them and perceived them on that fatal morning.
As for the police, he had no doubt but that they were performing their duties as diligently and as carefully as was within their power. Only yesterday afternoon, after it was reported that a paperhanger named Peleg Blightman had found a bloody hatchet hidden in a laborer’s house on one of the Brayton Farms, close by one of the two farms Andrew Borden had owned in South Somerset, Marshal Hilliard had immediately dispatched Officer Harrington to the scene.
The policeman had arrived there at about four-thirty in the afternoon while Knowlton was still questioning Lizzie, and had talked first with a Portuguese woman who understood English only sparingly, and next to her husband, who was called in from the fields. The man said he knew nothing of such a hatchet, and when the officer searched the house, he found on the kitchen shelf only a hatchet without any blood stains. That very night, an order was adopted by the Fall River Board of Aldermen, stating, “Inasmuch as a terrible crime has been committed in this city, requiring an unusually large number of men to do police duty, it is hereby ordered that the City Marshal be — and he is hereby — directed to employ such extra constables as he may deem necessary for the detection of the criminals, the expenses to be charged to the appropriation of the police.”
The police were doing their job; of that, Knowlton felt certain. He closed the newspaper and looked up at the clock. It was five minutes to ten. Professor Wood was still at the Borden house, he imagined, examining the premises again, after which he would go to the police station to receive a trunk from Dr. Dolan. The trunk would contain, among other things, the two axes and the claw-hammer hatchet that had been found in the cellar of the house. Knowlton wished he were already in possession of the results of the professor’s examination, now, before he questioned the witness again, but that was impossible. He glanced toward the door as Clerk Leonard shuffled into the courtroom. The men exchanged morning greetings. Annie White came in a few moments later, followed by City Marshal Hilliard. If Knowlton had come to know anything at all about Miss Lizzie Borden, it was that she would arrive promptly at the stroke of the hour.
“I shall have to ask you once more about that morning,” he said. “I want you to tell me just where you found the people when you got down. That you did find there.”
“I found Mrs. Borden in the dining room. I found my father in the sitting room.”
“And Maggie?”
“Maggie was coming in the back door with her pail and brush.”
“Tell me what talk you had with your mother at that time.”