A WASP looks at Lizzie Borden

National Review, August 17, 1992 by Florence King

Bridget and Mrs. Churchill decided to search the house for Abby. They were not gone long. When they returned, a white-faced but contained Mrs. Churchill nodded at Alice Russell.

"There is another?" asked Miss Russell. "Yes, she is upstairs," said Mrs. Churchill. The only excited person present was Bridget.

By the Way...

BY NOON, when Uncle John returned for lunch, the cops had come, and a crowd had formed in the street. Knowing of the hatred between Lizzie and Abby, Uncle John must have guessed the truth, but he chose to exhibit so much nonchalance that he became the first suspect.Instead of rushing into the house yelling, "What's the matter?" he ambled into the back yard, picked up some pears, and stood eating them in the shade of the tree.

Meanwhile, the police were questioning Lizzie, who claimed that she had gone to the barn and returned to find her father dead. What had she gone to the barn for? "To get a piece of lead for a fishing sinker."

It was the first thing that popped into her head, less a conscious deception than an ink-blot association triggered by her seaside vacation. She was playing it by ear. It never occurred to her that she could have stalled for time by pretending to faint. Women often fainted in those tightly corseted days, but she even rejected the detective's gal- lant offer to come back and question her later when she felt better. "No," she said. "I can tell you all I know now as well as at any other time."

A moment later, when the detective referred to Abby as her mother, she drew herself up and said stiffly, "She is not my mother, sir, she is my stepmother. My mother died when I was a child." Before you start diagnosing "self-destructive tendencies," remember that the English novelists' favorite character is the plucky orphan, and she had just become one.

Miss Russell and Dr. Bowen took her upstairs to lie down. Lizzie asked the doctor to send a telegram to Emma in Fairhaven, adding, "Be sure to put it gently, as there is an old person there who might be disturbed." It's all right to disturb your sister as long as you don't disturb strangers; Wasps haven't kithed our kin since the Anglo-Saxon invaders wiped out the Celtic clan system.

Dr. Bowen must have sent the gentlest wire on record, because Emma did not catch the next train, nor the one after that, nor the one after that. She didn't return until after seven that night.

When Dr. Bowen returned, Lizzie confided to him that she had torn up a certain note and put the pieces in the kitchen trash can. He hurried downstairs and found them; he was putting them together when a detective walked in. Seeing the name "Emma," he asked Dr. Bowen what it was. "Oh, it is nothing," Dr. Bowen said nonchalantly. "It is something, I think, about my daughter going through somewhere."

Before the detective could react to this bizarre answer, Dr. Bowen, nonchalant as ever, tossed the pieces into the kitchen fire. As he lifted the stove lid, the detective saw a foot-long cylindrical stick lying in the flames. Later, in the cellar, he found a hatchet head that had been washed and rolled while wet in furnace ash to simulate the dust of long disuse.