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America's First Female Serial Killer. Mary Kay McBrayer
Читать онлайн.Название America's First Female Serial Killer
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781642502084
Автор произведения Mary Kay McBrayer
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
If Jane had been born Elizabeth…she thought about this fatal birth often, particularly during her most strenuous or disgusting chores. How she, Jane, would have used that position, not squander it as Elizabeth had. What she would have seen and experienced. Jane would have gone to Paris. She would have made friends with people unlike anyone she knew now. She would have gotten her education, would have read books, would have written books, would have written scandalous romances. One would have been titled Sweet Blue Eyes after the man who would fall in love with her in Bordeaux. Jane would have had many lovers, not all of them in vineyards, but Sweet Blue Eyes would love only her. He’d write poems to her about the bloom on her cheeks that Auntie said was whorish, and about her hands, which in this fantasy would be smooth with long tender fingers and clean, shiny nails. The poems would be written in French, and Jane would have read them in French. Jane would never sew another stitch. She would dance and sleep till noon and never come back to Lowell. Elizabeth never left Massachusetts. Even Jane’s parents had traveled to America. Elizabeth married the old deacon from down the street, and now she barely saw him. Even Jane’s mother had married her adventurous father…he went insane, but at least he was interesting and interested in improving their station. Elizabeth was thin and lovely, fair and fragile, smart, but not smart enough to scare anyone. Her eyes were vaguely dull, and her hair shone but flatly. She drew no attention, she was unexceptional in almost every way, yet she wore fineries, her hands were soft and smooth, she was not punished for the doings of others, she was allowed attention from good men, she got to play outside, she did not have chores, she could meet the eye of anyone she wanted to see, could talk more plainly than almost anyone, eat at the table, sleep in the cool, in the warmth, wear clothes made for her. Elizabeth had birthdays to celebrate, had friends, and options, and a future.
On Jane’s eighteenth birthday, her indenture ended according to the contract Auntie signed. Jane never realized how foolish she was to expect any celebration other than an afternoon walk as in years before. For eleven years, she had prepared cakes and feasts for Elizabeth’s birthdays. Jane was shocked when, on the first one she celebrated with her, Elizabeth revealed she was turning thirty-two years old. She looked so young, so small, Jane thought. She cried at such small provocation. Every year, Elizabeth returned for her own birthday celebration, and she spent more nights in the Toppan house than she did at her husband’s.
On Elizabeth’s most recent birthday, her forty-fifth, Jane paid particularly close attention, the way a child learns to behave well in advance of asking for favors. She remembered the ache in her arms the morning after she whipped the sponge cake batter into a froth. She remembered collecting eggs for a week from their normal stores, siphoning off the cream from every pail for the filling, scavenging for berries at the beginning of a hot summer, hiding them in the cellar so that no one would find her surprise, soaking them in honey water to mask their bitterness. Jane remembered her frenzied run to the kitchen to pull the pans from the oven in the nick of time. She remembered how late she stayed awake to build the cake with its layers, how carefully she went down the wooden steps with her arms outstretched, a doilied serving tray clutched in her chapped hands. She remembered rising early the following morning to snip the blooms off the wisteria—Elizabeth’s favorite—before the dew set, and setting the prettiest, opened flowers on the top of the cake and at its base. She remembered her pride when Elizabeth grinned at the cake at the end of the feast she had with her friends and how she hugged Jane and thanked her for all her effort. How frail and bony Elizabeth felt against her, even inside of her corset and cage crinoline. Auntie had even smiled at Jane and nodded curtly when her neighbors said how well the cake complimented the other desserts Jane had made, and how well the center of it had risen despite the humidity. Elizabeth’s husband, Oramel, had an extra slice and said he thought cake like that was probably what spirits ate in heaven, which meant something to her then, since he was a deacon of the First Trinitarian Church.
She was foolish, Jane realized as Auntie held out the fifty dollars to her on her own birthday that fall—cloth bills with no envelope, no calling card, no letter, no ceremony—to expect anything more than the minimum. Jane’s face hardened in acceptance as Auntie said, more than asked, “Do you expect you will stay on in our household, now that your indenture has ended?”
Jane held more money in her hand now than she ever had in her life, since Mrs. Toppan never trusted her to pay bills for her. The first time Jane had come home from errands empty-handed after a store had asked her for payment, Auntie had said, “When a child knocks over a glass of milk, you don’t blame the child. You blame yourself for leaving the milk within her reach. What kind of fool would I be if I left a Catholic in charge of my money?” It was this that Jane remembered, and the days of vomiting after Elizabeth’s cake turned everyone’s stomach, as she held the bills in her hand.
Even as Auntie had brought the paddle down on her, despite her near adulthood, Jane maintained she did not know that wisteria was poisonous. She had only known that it was Elizabeth’s favorite flower, and that she seldom got to enjoy it because it was so seldom in bloom, and she wanted to make her sister happy. That had not gone well, either. “She is not your sister,” Auntie had screamed, and then turned and retched. After that beating, Jane had cleaned up the vomit, too. The cake made everyone sick. Except for Jane. Jane, of course, was not allowed to have any of the cake because dessert was for guests. She was sore for days afterward, even though Auntie was elderly, and even though she was sick.
Jane folded the bills in her fist and tucked them into the band of her apron.
“Well?” Auntie said, her face solid.
“I expect so,” Jane said. “I expect I’ll stay on.”
“Very well. You’ll continue in the same capacity. You may take your walk once your afternoon chores are completed,” she said, and left.
It was very little solace that when Elizabeth woke she insisted that she and Jane have their coffee together in the parlor. Elizabeth flipped slowly through the scrapbooks of criminals that she had clipped from the papers to entertain her many frilly acquaintances who stopped by on their walks in the afternoons. Jane did not enjoy watching Elizabeth raise one eyebrow and read the crimes aloud. She instead noticed the way that the skin rippled above that eyebrow, her face so placid until Elizabeth expressed emotion. When she smiled after the litany of euphemisms, Jane watched the creases sprout from beside her eyes, the parentheses open around her mouth, and she said politely that she still had, after all, so much to do that day. And every other day.
Nonetheless, after Jane helped her dress, Elizabeth begged to accompany Jane on her walk, despite Jane wanting to be alone—she was so seldom alone. Auntie entrusted her to do everything, but trusted her to do nothing well, and so she was constantly hovered over by the other maids, the neighbors’ laundresses, anyone who could tattle on Jane if she cut a corner or did anything out of the order in which Mrs. Toppan would prefer. They walked together, taking the front road as Elizabeth insisted, so that they may run into some of her friends, not the paths through the backyards, as Jane would have liked. They passed her fellow servants as they hung sheets on lines or tended plants alone while their mistresses reclined on fainting couches after braving a set of stairs in the heat, or dried their hands on old handkerchiefs to keep the needle from slipping through their fingers as they embroidered new ones.
Elizabeth prattled about herself, about the children of her schoolmates, as they took baby steps around the neighborhood, Elizabeth under a new parasol, Jane under an old parasol that Elizabeth had tatted the edges of, indiscreetly, during her parlor visits. It felt ridiculous to hold the umbrella overhead when she regularly did errands without one, her skin darkening in the sun with no consequence, but she followed Elizabeth’s instructions as she always did because she must.
It wasn’t until that night, after the house