Bridget had no answer for that. She began to wish Lizzie would step aside so she could see the potato’s pockmarked surface better as she skinned it.
“The house was grand, I’m sure,” said Lizzie.
“I’m sorry?”
“The Remington home.”
Bridget couldn’t help a small sound of disbelief. Did she expect Bridget to sit here and tell the tales of that house, recite the value of each object, gleefully recount the lush fabrics used in the linens, the carpets, the curtains? Was she meant to catalog its splendors for this prying chit who would never set foot in the drawing room Bridget had dusted?
Bridget immediately saw the error of her response. Lizzie threw the rest of her apple into the dry sink with a certain amount of vehemence. “I’ve wanted to entertain here,” said Lizzie stiffly. “There’s no reason why I can’t return the favors of so many lovely dinners I’ve had out at the homes of friends. But my father can’t stomach the idea.”
Bridget tried not to frown. Did she wish Bridget to support her in this idea? But no servant would ever willingly ask for more work, and besides, what sort of clout could she ever hold with Mr. Borden?
“You may think you’ve come down in the world, to work in this house,” said Lizzie.
“Not at all. I’m grateful for the chance.”
“You’re not grateful. You took one look at this miserable place and shuddered. We’re two doors down from a grocery, of all humbling conditions!”
“There’s no shame in a grocery,” said Bridget quietly.
“It’s not indicative of our standing. We could have the finest house on the hill! Instead we live like drudges, five steps from the street.”
“The house is quite nice,” said Bridget.
“Our home isn’t even connected to the gas main, while our Irish neighbors freely avail themselves of that costly convenience.”
Bridget startled at the slight to her own kind, but Miss Lizzie interpreted it as shock for her father’s refusal to use gas. “That’s right; we are still using kerosene lamps, smoking and spluttering. And my father . . . sometimes he’ll sit in darkness to not waste fuel. That’s the man who holds the wallet and won’t open it up to save his own eyes as he reads.”
“How sad for his vision.” Bridget didn’t know how to hold this conversation. All her life, she’d witnessed people working extraordinarily hard to purchase the very barest of needs. A middle-aged woman bragging about the excess of money—while ranting about her lack of access to it—was a strange circumstance.
“I’ve begged him.”
“He’ll come to want to save his sight,” said Bridget, focusing on the one thing she could remark upon. How did one discuss a man’s miserliness without getting oneself fired? She was not unaware he was likely somewhere in the house. And she had been specifically warned against rumormongering.
“Oh, he won’t,” said Lizzie. “He’ll go blind to save a dime.”
Bridget stiffened. This was simply too much. She stood up, setting the half-peeled potato and paring knife on the table. She crossed to the stove and moved the kettle from one side of the hob to the other, then lifted up the eye to add a small piece of wood.
“Good day to you, Maggie,” said Miss Lizzie behind her.
Bridget whirled around, catching the smirk on Lizzie’s face. “Maggie” wasn’t just the former maid; it was a deprecating way to address any Irish servant whose actual name didn’t matter.
“It’s Bridget, miss,” she said.
“So it is, and I apologize!”
Lizzie moved closer, and Bridget couldn’t help but be drawn in and repulsed at the same time by the pale argent eyes. It seemed the coins Lizzie’s father couldn’t spend had landed in his daughter’s gaze. Bridget had been punished, she knew, for daring to stand up and walk away from Lizzie, casting tacit judgment on the cruel words spoken about Mr. Borden.
“Miss Lizzie, I must return to my work,” said Bridget softly.
“Indeed, you should. I’ll not stop you.”
Lizzie took a second apple from the bowl and walked away polishing it on her breast. Bridget listened until she heard the creak of Lizzie ascending the front steps to resume peeling the potato, its pale skinned flesh now browned from sitting in the air.
NOVEMBER 10, 1889
That night, Bridget blew out her lamp and went to the window. There was comfort in the closeness of the homes: the Churchills, unseen, to the north and, visible now, the lights of the Kellys, an Irish family that had somehow clambered up to respectability. She got into bed and closed her eyes.
But they opened.
She peered through the gloom. It was unsettling knowing that outside her door was the attic, open for the entire footprint of the house. Besides one small bedroom, a counterpart to her own, the enormous space was uncontrolled by walls. She didn’t like the thought of the asymmetric towers of crates and discarded, hulking furniture, the mice that made their nests there, the unknowingness.
Directly below her were Mr. and Mrs. Borden, and she could hear them readying for bed, the wife’s labored steps across the floor, the bed creaking as she sat to take off her shoes. The low murmur of husband and wife surprised her; after the stillness between Abby and her stepdaughters it almost seemed extraordinary that these two spoke to each other.
Bridget craned her head to catch a glimpse of the moon as she lay inhaling the cheap soap scent on her pillowslip, everything unfamiliar. She permitted her mind to drift back to her mother, surely awake now whatever her hour, bracing herself against the stiff wind off Ballydonegan Bay as she walked, skirts flapping, to old Mrs. Twomey’s for a packet of currants for her soda bread. It had been years since Bridget had seen her mother, and she begged God nightly to keep her well until she could see her again . . . yet the loss felt suddenly so raw that Bridget succumbed to tears.
There was no warmth, no hearth, no tales. No lingering by the fire of an evening, as the knitting needles clicked out friendly accompaniment to accounts told of the day. This family ate in shifts to not be with each other. Bridget served and cleared, served and cleared. She witnessed the contempt that had taken up residence in the eyes, there so long that it was a permanent lodger.
She pitied Lizzie and Emma the death of their mother, especially Lizzie’s having been so young and helpless. She imagined the young toddler might not have even been readied to use the chamber pot yet, and how Mr. Borden might have shrank from the womanly chores demanded of a widower. Emma must have taken on those duties, and herself a child, too. Perhaps these women’s coldness arose, Bridget thought, from this long-ago grief. Young Lizzie’s understanding of the world had been that all good things may be snapped out of one’s hands with an instant’s notice.
But knowing the route a character took in forming itself didn’t absolve it of its faults. How unfair that she who loved her mother so deeply must find an ocean between them, while in the same household people who cared not a grain for each other walked and ate in troubled circuits. Bridget wiped her tears on the sleeve on her nightgown, which still smelled of the lavender soap the Remingtons used in their laundering; she might never wash it again.
In Bridget’s trunk was a bit of blue copper from the mines her da worked. She wasn’t sure he was