Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(27)
And so I twist myself around and around again, never certain if I made the right decision, but quite certain that I couldn’t have made another one. Not if I wanted to live with myself.
Now, if I wish to speak of the matter to Lizzie, I may threaten this weird balance between us. Our polite deferral of the topic, and a mutually agreed-upon (yet never openly discussed) pact to avoid it. My knowledge of the night before they died. Her knowledge of everything that came before and after.
What if she were to make some slip, drop a few stray words by accident—words that incriminated her? What if I am forced to confront the possibility that I was wrong to stand by her side? Would I be compelled to report the matter? Would it mean anything if I did? I don’t believe she could be tried again, but public opinion has long since had its way with her.
It might well be that I fret for nothing but exposed feelings, and unpleasant truths that reveal nothing and mean even less, given that the time for consequences has passed.
? ? ?
So it seems my only excuse for avoiding Miss Borden the younger . . . is a squeamishness on my part. For all I know, she has no such squeamishness; for all I know, she has no polite agreement with me—a gentleperson’s imaginary agreement, assumed in order to avoid an unseemly topic. This might be entirely one-sided, and it might be entirely in my head.
I believe I’ll have a word with her after all, at Emma’s next appointment.
Because I went back to see Matthew Granger today.
And just look at how many inches of script I’ve dedicated to avoiding that subject! But this is what happened, and I will not be squeamish about it. I’m a doctor, for Christ’s sake. I’ve seen the worst the human body has to offer. This should not bother me, deter me, or disgust me. This should be recorded.
I will record it.
? ? ?
In only a matter of days, the boy’s condition has deteriorated. His shoulders are sloping more steeply. His face is becoming fuller. He moves his hands as if he’s forgotten he has fingers, slapping at things as if his appendages are only paws or flippers.
His godparents are beside themselves. They can no longer pretend that his condition is youthful depravity—and now they’ve removed him from his duties gathering the sea glass and knitting the nets. They’ve locked him inside their home, in the back rooms of their shop, under the guise of giving him rest in order to recover. I’m not so stupid as that. They’ve hidden him away so that others won’t see what’s becoming of him.
Mrs. Granger is a prayerful woman, and she sings her petitions to God, day in and day out. She’s given the boy a Bible, which he ignores. She’s left small crosses and holy baubles about the boy’s room, and he ignores those, too. If he even sees them.
I don’t know how much of anything he sees. His eyes are filmy, almost that same blurry fog of an older man’s cataracts, but this is something else—something overlaying the exterior structure of the eye, almost like the nictitating membrane of a sickly housecat. When I made some efforts to examine this membrane, Matthew did not object or resist. And finally I noticed that he didn’t merely appear unblinking . . . he had stopped that unconscious behavior altogether. Not in the twenty minutes I kept his company did his upper lid so much as twitch.
But he covered his eyes with his hands, when I brought the light too close. It was dark in that room. Sickrooms often are, but whatever is sickly about him, the darkness and quiet aren’t helping it.
They’re incubating it.
I had thoughts of asking for blood or saliva samples, but twenty minutes was all the time with the boy I could bear. I left his family with suggestions for soup, tea, and continued prayer.
Who knows? The soup or tea might actually do him some good.
As for the prayers, I suppose they can’t hurt. I’ve never found much good in them, I’ll confess that here, though I keep such thoughts private when in public company. Who would confide in a physician who claimed no affiliation with God? I still must feed myself, and keep my house. I still need my patients. But too many people believe with too much conviction in what amounts to, at best, a superstition.
I’ve seen science change a patient’s diagnosis, but I’ve never heard a prayer that changed God’s mind about a damn thing.
Lizzie Andrew Borden
APRIL 13, 1894
Emma bared a bit of her soul to the doctor, and I’m not sure how I feel about it.
I suppose if she must unburden herself to someone other than me, she’s chosen wisely; better Seabury than the postman, or the grocer’s delivery boy.
She insists she told him nothing that would give him any real insight into our research, and she only said that yes, our family had fallen ill before they fell to the axe. She told him this much, and furthermore suggested that he speak with me. Really, I suspect, her motives are twofold: one, she’d prefer to have him come around more frequently, even if it requires his involvement in our secret activities; and two, she thinks we may have information that could be of great help to one another.
She swears that the latter is her true desire. If I brought up the former, she’d deny it with such vehemence as to harm herself with the effort. So I restrain myself.
But she might have a point.
Apparently one of the boys in town has come down with something like our father and Mrs. Borden, and that’s a troubling development indeed. I’ve seen hints of that sickness, here and there about town, but nothing so fully formed. A paleness in the face of a man on the street. A slowness in the speech of a woman at the store, on the rare occasions I venture out. It worries me deeply, but until the doctor mentioned this new case, I’d seen no progression like the one that so upended our lives two years ago. It was as if whatever poisoned us had stopped with us. Or else it was otherwise spread so thin that nothing truly tragic resulted from any further contact with . . . with whatever it was.