The Secrets of Lizzie Borden Read Online Free PDF

little foot in my hand, gently as a dove, before I eased it into a dainty, elegant slipper of gleaming gold with a French heel encrusted with diamonds that had come all the way from Paris, France, as my gift to her. If she came upon me and spoke to me when I was lost in this sweet reverie I would blush and grow so flustered I would have to leave her. I couldn’t even bear to look at her lest she read the truth in my eyes. The Thursday and Sunday afternoons she had off always seemed the dullest, darkest, and longest of the week, and I was always boorish and ill-tempered in her absence, perplexed and half-ashamed that I was having such outlandish thoughts about our Maggie. I spent countless restless hours pouting, pacing, and worrying about what she was doing, and who she might be walking out with. She was so young, lovely, and lively I lived in perpetual fear that some poor but earnest Irish Paddy would entice her away from us with the promise of a brass wedding band. I tried to curtail my emotions; I was terrified someone would remark the coincidence and link my bad moods to Bridget’s absence, but fortunately not even eagle-eyed Emma ever did.
    No wonder I was so eager to leave, to spread my wings and fly far, far away!

Chapter 2
    â€œM y sweet taste of freedom,” that is how I always think of the eighteen glorious weeks I spent in Europe that magical summer of 1890. It was my one, and I feared only, chance to truly live, to fly, and soar free, before I was shut back inside my cage where the bars were the cheapest base metal and not even gilded. I stayed in fully electrified hotels equipped with every comfort, modern convenience, and luxury. There were telephones on the bedside tables, room service, impeccably mannered servants who seemed to live only to please me, and private baths with hot and cold running water where I could lie back, stretch out my limbs, and soak for hours in rose-scented water and dream I was a mermaid sunning myself on a rock waiting for my prince to come along and carry me away to his castle in the clouds. I dined every night on gourmet meals in elegant restaurants, saw the scandalous Can-Can danced at the Moulin Rouge, and had my hair done by a real French coiffeur. I swirled and glided across high-polished ballroom floors in the arms of the most wonderful man in the world and wore my first ball gown, a dress straight out of my dreams, with yards of rustling peach taffeta billowing like a bell about my limbs, and feasted my eyes on great works of art and grand cathedrals so beautiful they made me weep.
    And to think I owed it all to the Central Congregational Church. That staid and proper institution that was the bedrock of every respectable maiden lady’s life in Fall River had sent me, like Alice, down the rabbit hole to my own Wonderland— Europe!
    Without the church I would have had nothing to do except sit at home reading romance novels and eating Abby’s cookies, pies, and cakes and just getting fatter and fatter. Though I longed to be one of the happy, carefree girls from up on The Hill being called for by handsome boys in tennis whites, gaily skipping away, racket in hand, in a white pique skirt and starched white shirtwaist with a big sailor collar and wide-brimmed straw hat with long grosgrain streamers to ride to The Hillside Country Club in a smart pony cart for games and refreshments, and maybe a sing-along around the piano and some dancing, Father didn’t approve of ladies engaging in social activities unrelated to church or charity.
    Every Monday I attended a meeting of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, where we gathered to drink tea or lemonade and heatedly denounce the demon rum between passing around plates of cookies and dainty cakes and painting a placard or sewing a banner or two for us to display once a month when we stood outside a local saloon to protest their peddling of the Devil’s elixir, frowning, waggling a disapproving