Free The Secrets of Lizzie Borden by Brandy Purdy Page A

twinkled when she winked at me. Without thinking, I flung myself at her feet and yanked her cobwebby white drawers down right in front of everyone at the Moulin Rouge and buried my face between her legs, wallowing and kissing with such a powerful, hungry passion that I had never in real, waking life experienced.
    I woke up with a start, feeling so hot and wretched, shaky and weak, that I staggered into the bathroom with blood trickling down my legs and filled the tub with cold water and sat weeping and shivering in it until I turned blue as a penance to mortify my shameful flesh.
    Nothing was ever said about the Moulin Rouge or the Can-Can: we were all too proper and polite to mention it. We never went back, and we left Paris soon afterward. On our last afternoon I defiantly went out alone to a dress shop and, flying boldly in the face of every word of fashion advice that had ever been given to me, bought the two gaudiest dresses I had ever owned—an iridescent raspberry silk that gave winks of purple and blue whenever I moved, and a caramel-and-apple-green-striped linen suit that came with a necktie and a straw boater with a matching band to wear with it. Without a comment or word of complaint I paid extra for rushed alterations as though it were the most natural thing in the world for me. I didn’t care if Father dropped dead when he saw the bill.
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    Though Miss Mowbry and I could have done without the Riviera—we heard all sorts of unsavory tales about gamblers and suicides and crimes and affairs of passion—the others insisted. They were keen to see the grand casinos and parade about in their finest jewels and dresses with feathers in their hair pretending to be more sophisticated than they really were. So I let them lead me where they would. A certain ennui had by then stolen over me and I was too tired to protest; it simply wasn’t worth it. My heart was no longer in this trip, but I didn’t want to go home.
    They had great fun—and a great laugh at my expense, I suppose—dressing me up like a life-sized doll. Albert—snootily pronounced albear without the t —a genuine French coiffeur, with a fussy, fastidious manner, washed and combed out my long red tresses, then coiled and braided and twisted them up into an intricate arrangement entwined with strands of blue-green glass beads and, as the pièce de résistance, a fan of tall peacock plumes at the back of my head, all to match my first—and only—French ball gown, a shimmering peacock satin that looked at once blue and green, with a long train and a daringly décolleté bodice covered in glass beads. A French corset, a beautiful Nile-green creation of whalebone sheathed inside satin embroidered with gold and azalea pink roses, that was really more like a medieval implement of torture in disguise cinched my waist so cruelly that it felt like the stem of a champagne glass and my bosom and hips overflowed above and below it. I was almost scared to sit down or breathe! For once, Anna laced me and I felt the impersonal, imperious touch of her hands flying over my skin like brisk white doves. I almost had to sit on my hands not to grab and kiss them when she used her very own pink puff to powder me. Coughing amidst clouds of rose-scented powder, I wanted to lay those lovely hands on my breasts and whisper “linger awhile!” And Carrie applied shimmering blue-green paint mixed with gold dust to my eyelids and, despite my protests that it wasn’t ladylike, Nellie blackened my lashes and rouged my lips a vivid scarlet. When at last they led me to stand before the full-length mirror, I almost didn’t know myself; I thought it was a stranger reflected in the glass.
    We must have looked like a flock of tropical birds as we entered the casino, all painted and decked out in our bright, showy finery, not at all like the prim New England girls we really were—Carrie in her canary satin garnished with