And if the hourglass ran dry? My parents would panic. They would tell the world. The last time my sister and I had gone missing, the day the fawn ate the apple from my hand, my mother had forgiven us for embarrassing her. If news of my absence went public this time—especially if the reason became known—she would not.
“I know you’re not insane,” I blurted.
She didn’t even look up, though a half smile turned up her mouth at the corner. “No, I’m not, dear girl. Lots of women here aren’t.”
“Then why are you here?”
“It only takes two things to make a woman insane: the word of a man who stands to benefit and a doctor willing to sell his say-so.”
“But don’t they need a reason?”
“Anything’s a reason,” said Nora, ripping a knot free of her roll and drowning it in the broth until it was soft enough to chew. “Anything you do, anything you are. Anything you want.”
I had trouble articulating a response. Instead, I tried to chew a strip of meat, with limited success.
“Was it your father who committed you?” she asked. “You have the look.”
“What look?”
“A pampered girl who stepped out of line. Messed up his plans. So you have to be swept under the carpet.”
Somewhat indignant, I protested, “I wasn’t swept.”
“Then why are you here?”
She’d been trying to trap me, but I saw it too late. Still, I could stall. “You first.”
“I married a man who cared nothing for me.”
I felt a twinge and held my tongue. Even if I had been telling the truth about who I was, I would not have spoken to her of my fiancé. In truth, I didn’t know whether he cared for me at all. I had desperately wished for a proposal and an engagement, and I’d gotten both of those things, yet such doings now felt like the work of a vengeful djinn. I would not breathe a word of this to Nora. It was not time to talk but to listen.
Instead, I said, “Many do.”
“But then I found out what love felt like. How good. How irresistible.”
Another twinge. “And you didn’t resist?”
“No. I pursued my pleasure.”
I had never learned the art of raising an eyebrow, so I formed my mouth into an O of surprise. “Scandal!”
“It’s never a scandal until someone finds out. When it was private, it was perfect.” Something crossed her face then. A shadow. She looked down at her hands.
I prompted her, “What happened?”
“One day, when my maid unlaced my corset, she found the laces at the small of my back tied with a knot instead of a bow.”
“And then your husband. . .”
She chuckled, oddly, low in her throat. She looked prettier then. “Oh no no. I don’t think he’d have minded. He’d never been. . . eager on that front. No, the maid tattled straight to his mother, and that was that. Two days later, I was off to the asylum. It would have been sooner, but they don’t take new patients on Sundays.”
“They don’t?” I tried to remember what day of the week I’d arrived. Twin shivers ran down the sides of my neck when I realized I couldn’t.
“My first asylum wasn’t Goldengrove. It was close to home in Massachusetts. After I escaped the third time, they sent me here instead, figuring I’d have no reason to leave if an entire continent lay between us. They were right.”
I thought it through. “And who pays?”
“His family,” she said. “But they’re not rich enough to keep me here forever. At some point, they’ll decide it’s not worth it. And then I’ll be out again.”
She grinned, though I remembered the wounds on her legs. She probably thought she’d be out long before now. Eventually, she would run out of leg.
“Now your turn,” she said. “Why are you here?”
I’d decided to fend off questions like this as long as I could, considering the possible lies before I settled on one. For now, I said, “I’ll tell you the story sometime.”
“Why not now?”
“Patience,” I said, acting the coquette, though it wasn’t my strength.
She rolled her eyes at me and turned her attention back to her plate. I couldn’t afford to offend her too badly. So far, she was my only friend, and she clearly knew a great deal about Goldengrove. I needed her on my side. I’d observed enough rivalries at Miss Buckingham’s to know that any powerful friend could make an equally powerful enemy.
A hush fell over the dining hall, and I looked up to find the cause. The nurses were already back in their positions, which had to be part of it—they were paying attention again—but then I caught the top of a dark head crowned with a pointed white cap, a set of narrow shoulders in a uniform of sky blue, and I understood.
Matron Baumgarten strode through the room, her gaze gliding over the tables. Her hand pressed the keys at her waist against the blue fabric of her dress, muffling their clatter. Gus trailed ten feet behind her, looming hugely, a blank look on his enormous features. Uneasy silence accompanied them both as they walked without pause from the entrance to the exit. Once the door closed behind Gus’s broad back, whispers immediately began to race down the tables.
“Did you hear?” Damaris’s words were soft as breath on my ear. “She dismissed that attendant this morning. Perry. He’d cornered an inmate, hand up her skirt, poor girl begging him to stop.”
“No,” I whispered back in horror. “And then?”
“They argued, him and the matron. I heard, next minute, he was on his hands and knees picking up his teeth.”
“Hush it up,” shouted Winter over a chorus of simmering murmurs, gasps, sighs.
“Gone now anyway,” Damaris finished with grim satisfaction.
I stared at the door they’d left through. We all did. The murmurs softened and almost disappeared.
* * *
Once Nora confirmed for me that insanity had very little to do with why women ended up in Goldengrove, it all came clear. For every true madwoman I met, there was another woman who was here for other reasons. There had to be a better word for us than madwoman. But I could not countenance lunatic, which linked madness to the cycles of the moon, which also fell harder upon women, like so many other things in the world.
Each time we visited the dining hall, I saw a hairless woman, number 13, who sat like a broken puppet, vacant eyed, as if her strings had been cut. Each day, a male attendant would deposit her at the breakfast table, where she sat with a slack jaw in front of an untouched plate. The pattern repeated itself at midday and evening meals. No one seemed to take any notice of her, and even while I stared across the room to see if I could ever catch her stirring, half my attention was on the soft whisper of a red-haired beauty from Los Angeles, condemned by her cousins when she vowed that she wished to live as a nun but without religion. She had no love for men—nor, she confessed in a lower voice, for women—but felt no attraction, no stirrings, no romantic interest or desire. For this, she was labeled aberrant and sent away. It stunned me that both an excess of physical feelings and the absence of them were cause to lock a woman up against her will.
We were given two hours of time in the dayroom on my second full day in Terpsichore. The room itself had nothing in the way of ornament, but it did have windows and a modicum of furniture. There was a piano in the corner, which I itched to play. I remembered that Nellie Bly had written of a piano at Blackwell’s Island, badly out of tune; when she informed a nurse, the nurse had sneered, “What a pity. We’ll have to get one made to order for you.” I decided not to chance it.
Instead, I was holding a whispered conversation with a sweet, plump girl named Hazel as we pretended to read two of the dayroom’s Bibles. My fingers idly, dumbly turned the pages of Judges; hers, Deuteronomy. She was telling me how she had been consigned here by her parents for refusing to marry her father’s widowed business partner and asking instead to be sent to one of the Eastern colleges for an education. I was about to ask what subject she’d wanted to study wh
en we all heard the scream from somewhere above us, coming down, ending with an awful thud.
The nurses rushed out immediately, and the rest of us pressed against the windows. The dayrooms faced the open front lawn, drawing in the sunlight. We had a direct view of the paving stones in front of Goldengrove’s impressive entrance, where a coral dress lay with an unmoving body inside. I forced myself to look away before I could see more.
A voice behind me whispered, “Mary.”
I turned to see Damaris clutching her own borrowed Bible, her cheeks and her knuckles both washed bloodless. When she paled, her dark birthmark stood out even more than usual, and it looked exactly like a man of great size had left the print of his enormous hand on her throat. It was unnerving. I wanted to ask how she knew who the woman was, but I was stunned into silence. Had Mary, whoever she was, jumped? Was hers the scream we’d heard?
The nurses rushed, too late, out onto the stones and to Mary’s side. Now I could see the blood, staining the coral dress and the bricks and the hands of the women who bent over her. Her hair was dark and loose. Her face was hidden, her back facing away. She didn’t move, and judging by the distance she’d fallen and the amount of blood on the stones, she would not move again.
“Mary had a demon,” Damaris said matter-of-factly.
“Like you?” asked Hazel.
“Not like me. Different. She heard a voice.”
“Whose voice?” I managed to say.
“A bad one. No one ever hears good voices, never any guardian angels. Only devils, who speak too loudly to drown out.”
An attendant outside turned toward us and realized that we were watching; he made a shooing motion with his arm, which no one heeded. After a time, two nurses came back inside to move us away.
We spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on our beds in the ward, Winter and Piper whispering in the corner, stories traveling from bed to bed of other inmates who’d died here. The previous cook, who’d stuck her head into a full sink during preparations for an evening meal, drowning herself as the blind bustle continued all around her. A woman choked on accident by a tangled rope in the yard. A high-strung girl from Clio found stone-cold in her bed one morning when her wardmates awoke, which no one had ever been able to explain, thought slain by the power of her own nightmare. The stories turned my stomach, and I listened to every last one hungrily. When the nurses herded us to the evening meal, bringing an end to the stories, I breathed my relief. There had, at least, been no bleak tale of a recently arrived young woman matching my sister’s description.
If there was any other consolation to the tales of dead inmates, it was that most of them had chosen to end their own lives and taken no one with them. I had never been much for prayer at home, but I prayed in Goldengrove that night, asking God for a modest blessing: to make my life good enough that death would never seem a welcome respite.
Though I had leapt into the water of the Bay not intending to die, it easily could have been my fate. Intending a thing had nothing to do with whether it came to pass. Since the night of my engagement, I had learned this lesson time and again, and it seemed I was far from done learning.
Chapter Eight
At breakfast the next day, Nora patted the seat next to her, inviting me to sit, and I quickly complied. A generous serving of whitish porridge waited for each of us, one bowl and one spoon for each woman. I took a bite and swallowed it, and it tasted of nothing, so I set my spoon down again.
Across from us were Damaris and a woman I hadn’t yet met, who introduced herself as Jubilee. Jubilee looked like an exact cross between a white woman and a Chinese, though I’d never imagined such a thing was even possible. Her skin was as pale as Nora’s or mine but her eyes had that slant to them, and her black hair was pin-straight around her head.
“It’s not my true name,” she volunteered. “Got slammed in as a fallen frail.”
My face must have been as blank as my mind. She spoke a language that sounded like mine but wasn’t.
“Prostitute, honey,” Jubilee explained. “One of the finest on offer at the House of Open Flowers. And I’ll be back there soon enough. Working girls don’t stay here forever.”
“What’s your true name, then?”
“Ah, you almost got me,” she said. “Jubilee will do. I’ll guess you’re not really called Siren in your home place, neither.”
“No.”
“Certain doctors love names. Don’t like to call us numbers. Makes ’em uncomfortable.”
Damaris chimed in, “Who’s your doctor?”
“Concord,” I replied.
“Oh, he’s pleasant enough. Has he told you about his wife yet?”
“What about his wife?”
“Dead,” she said flatly and stirred her porridge. “Usually, he volunteers that right up front. Don’t know why.”
Jubilee volunteered, “Sympathy, most likely.” She had no trace of an accent, despite her clearly foreign origin. Tensions ran high against Celestials in San Francisco, especially now that it was illegal for new ones to enter the country. They kept to their own streets, a clearly defined Chinatown. I could count on my right hand the number of times I’d seen one in Nob Hill. I’d certainly never seen one who looked like Jubilee—not entirely Celestial, not entirely anything.
I asked, “What does he need our sympathy for?”
Instead of answering me, Jubilee pointed her gummy spoon in my direction and said, “Well, I don’t trust him.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t trust any of ’em. They wouldn’t be here if they were any good, would they?”
“I don’t know,” Damaris ventured. “It’s a lovely place. Seems an easy job.”
“Miles from anywhere,” said Jubilee.
“Some people enjoy that.”
“Some. Murderers and hermits,” she said.
“Oh you,” said Damaris. “You think the worst of everyone.”
“And they rarely disappoint.”
I interrupted, “What did she die of ?”
“Who?”
“The doctor’s wife.”
“No one knows. I only know it happened shortly after they were married.”
“Jube probably thinks he killed her,” said Damaris.
Jubilee shot back, “Well, who can prove he didn’t?”
I looked to Nora, assuming she would have something to say on the subject, but she was spooning the thin breakfast gruel into her mouth quickly, as if someone might take it away. Moments later, a bell sounded, and I realized she had been right to bolt her food. Despite their chatter, Damaris and Jubilee had also managed to empty their bowls. I realized it could be hours before we were offered food again, but it was too late. I fell into line, reluctantly leaving the rest of my own gruel behind.
We were led back to the ward, where our cots awaited us, but no one sat down or moved toward them. I was surprised when we were separated into groups. The other women seemed to know which group they belonged to, and only I stood for a moment, confused.
The younger nurse was leading a group of half a dozen women out the door. They were gone before I had a chance to speak. Then another group of women followed Salt out the door as well, and the older nurse lined up the remaining women clustering near the door, leaving me as the only one standing.
I called out to her. “Nurse! Where should I be?”
She looked back at me a moment without slowing her step and said, “Oh! I forgot about you!”
“Should I . . .” I trailed off, uncertain.
Her eyes, darting, followed the other inmates. “Just wait here.”
And then they were all gone, and the door closed behind them, and I heard the unmistakable noise of the bolt sliding shut.
I was locked in, alone.
After I calmed down, my first order of business was to check the door, although of course I knew what I would find. With the bolt on the outside lowered into place, there would be no escape for me. I located a small round keyhole at the far
right of the door, but it was useless without a key. Perhaps a talented thief would be able to pick a lock like this, but for me, there was no hope.
Though I didn’t relish being trapped alone in the ward, abandoned, I quickly saw the advantage. It wasn’t at all like the benches. I could—and did—move.
I went wild with it. I indulged in a few dance steps, a brisk two-step, a sweeping waltz; I sprinted for the far wall and fell against it, panting; I raised both arms above my head and stretched myself as tall as I possibly could, all for the joy of feeling my own body to be mine again, for however long this freedom would last. I decided against shouting, which might bring company. I didn’t want to be interrupted. I might not be able to go out looking for Phoebe, but I could see if there was anything here that might aid me in my search.
Systematically, starting with the first cot in the southwest corner and working toward the last cot in the northeast corner, I ran a hand under every mattress. More inmates than not had squirreled away some sort of contraband. I found everything from a stale dinner roll to a silver flask and a score of interesting objects in between.
Mouse had nothing at all. Nora’s mattress was a virtual treasure trove, with geegaws ranging from a small, tooled-leather purse, currently empty, to a teardrop-shaped gold pendant with a gleaming pearl at its center. But the most interesting thing I found was in Damaris’s cot. She had a Bible, which didn’t surprise me in the least, but that wasn’t all. The second object was wedged so far up under the metal headboard, I wondered if it actually predated her.
It was a map of Goldengrove.
Whatever its origin, I didn’t dare take the map. If someone missed it, it would be obvious that I was the thief, and I couldn’t chance the attention. Instead, I pored over it, memorizing the curve of every letter, testing myself by covering it up and visualizing the words in turn and the contours of the wards they described: Terpsichore here on the first floor with Clio and Thalia, then above us on the second floor, Melpomene, Calliope, Polyhymnia, and Erato; on the third floor were Euterpe and Urania, which looked smaller, then a long warren of small rooms with the word offices inked nearby. Phoebe had to be somewhere in here; I only had to figure out where.
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