Evan Hunter - Lizzie

“We do.”

Not guilty, she thought, and covered her face again, and wept into her hands. Oh, dear God, innocent.

“So say you, Mr. Foreman? So say all of you gentlemen?”

“We do.”

“May it please the Court,” Knowlton said, rising. “There are pending two indictments against the same defendant, one charging the murder which is charged in this indictment on the first count, and the other charging the murder which is charged in this indictment on the second count. An entry should be made in those cases of nol-prossed by reason of the verdict in this case. Now, congratulating the defendant and the counsel for the defendant upon the result of the trial, I believe the duties are concluded.”

He was smiling, Lizzie noticed. As though in relief.

“The jurors may be seated,” Mason said.

“Lizzie Andrew Borden,” the clerk said.

She rose again, though she did not know whether she was supposed to or not. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.

“The Court orders that you be discharged of this indictment and go thereof without delay.”

For the tick of an instant, she thought the laughter from below was part of her dream, Moira and the cook clattering across the villa courtyard, George calling to them, the women laughing. The laughter came again, Uncle John’s, deep and gruff, splintering the dream sunlight, replacing it with wakefulness and the reality of true sunlight slanting through the windows across the room. She lay in her bed listening to the voices downstairs, the room slowly coming into focus.

The clock on the dresser read a quarter past eight.

It was far too early; she had not slept well. Last night — the sound of Uncle John’s footfalls on the stairs, awakening her when she had just barely dozed off, the further small sounds of his preparations for bed. And later, the pounding outside, someone pounding on wood. She had known who it was the moment she’d heard the noise. She awakened now with the gnawing knowledge of who it had been.

She lay quite still in her nightdress.

The bedclothes felt damp beneath her and for a moment she feared she might be lying in a pool of her own blood. She sat up and searched the sheets. Nothing. She lay back against the pillows again. She had slept last night with the door closed; the room was hot and sticky now. She watched dust motes climbing the shafts of sunlight that streamed through the windows, and felt the slow ooze of blood between her legs, Eve’s curse. She could still hear voices below. She closed her eyes against the morning sun, listening to the droning voices, hoping they would lull her back to sleep again, willing sleep to come again and with it the images, scents and sounds of that summer lost in time.

“... spend the morning with my nephew and niece,” Uncle John was saying.

“Will you be leaving now?” her father asked.

“Not for a bit yet. Give them time to finish their breakfast.”

It was no use.

The sounds in this house. Traveling from one room to the next like restless spirits. She opened her eyes and looked up at the ceiling. She did not want to remember what she had done yesterday — tried to do, would have done — but the memory was full-blown upon her, as though it had been lurking at the edges of her restless sleep all night long, waiting to pounce upon her the moment she was fully awake.

“Never make an important decision when you’re flowering,” Alison once told her. “Never even try to think during your period.”

But, oh, this depression had been with her for the better part of two weeks now, long before her courses had begun, the monthly rage of God bubbling in the rank cauldron between her legs, mingling blood and pain with the contradictory passion that overwhelmed her each and every time; never did she so yearn for fulfillment and relief as she did during her term, when it was severely denied her. And yet, she had suffered similar depression before, those months of waiting for word from Alison — but that had been different, the anxiety then had been tinged with hope.

In the beginning, during all of that long, cold winter after her return to Fall River, the letters had been incessant, crossing in the mail more frequently than not, full of passion and ardor, Alison’s meticulous hand declaring undying love, promising liaisons in New York or Boston, Lizzie begging her to hurry soon to America, urging her dearest love to join her in that time of budding...

“... when together and alone we can breathe of the heady air and recapture the harmony and bliss we knew in Cannes. You cannot realize how much I suffer in your absence. The weather here is bitterly cold, and I am headachey and chilled more often than not, though I cannot say for sure whether my malaise may not be caused solely by the nervous strain of my eternal longing for you. I have always been a restless sleeper (as well you know) but I find myself awake now half the night, yearning for the balm of Orpheus and the attendant dreams of that ecstatic time on the Riviera. If my Mistress has the slightest fond memories of her wee lonely Miss, she will book passage at once and fly to her side, en battant des ailes. Hurry, my dearest, I cannot bear the thought of a separation beyond this ghastly winter. Thine forever, Lizzie.”

Alison’s familiar stationery arriving at the house some two or three times a week, Lizzie’s trembling hand accepting the envelopes from her father—

“I see you’re enjoying a nice correspondence with this English lady,” he said one day, inadvertently provoking a stab of panic — had he discovered Alison’s letters? Had he read them? That very afternoon, the house empty save for Maggie puttering about in the sitting room, she’d taken the letters from their hiding place beneath her undergarments in the bedroom dresser drawer, and burned them all in the kitchen stove, an act she regretted later when the flow of mail became a trickle and she longed for the reassuring words and passionate outbursts of the preceding winter.

It had seemed virtually certain that Alison would be coming to New York in May—

“... primarily to be by your side again, my dearest love, but I confess to an ulterior motive as well. The very thought of enduring the start of another London ‘season’, as they would have it, is enough to set me trembling. How shall this season of ’91 be any different, I ask you, than that of ’90, or ’89, or ’88, or ad infinitum, back to the time of William the Conqueror, I dare say? I should hope to escape it even were it not for the knowledge of my sweet Miss pining, and the expectation of prolonged and blissful quatre a cinqs (cat that sank, indeed!) in some dim and cloistered hotel room while New York’s horsecars rumble past our curtained windows. I can scarcely wait, Lizzie!”

— but the trip was postponed until June (this after Lizzie had already booked a hotel for them in New York) and then again till July (“When the heat shall be intolerable, I know,” Alison wrote) and then till the fall (“I am aiming for no later than a September 15 departure, and have already made inquiries of the various steamship lines”), the letters less frequent now, once a week, and then twice monthly — and still no definite word that she had booked passage and would soon be on her way.

In October, Alison wrote:

“Oh, my dearest Lizzie, I am forlorn. My wretched husband, the Empire Builder, has decided it is imperative that he visit his money in India, planning on a November departure for arrival when the weather there will be less severely hot than it is just now. Normally, I should have gone dancing barefoot in the streets at news of his departure, but he is insisting this time that I accompany him, Lord alone knows why. Perhaps he wishes me to lead him safely by the hand through the scores of begging lepers in the streets. Perhaps he feels that dallying with twelve year-olds in vermin-infested cribs is less desirable than having his obedient wife by his side to serve as a sometime plaything, though I’m positive he’s long forgotten what scant pleasures I may have to offer.