But it was only a fantasy.
Instead, another day at Goldengrove was gone, the day of my reckoning one day nearer, my sister still only a ghost.
Without incident, I slipped back down the stairs to the first floor, joining my wardmates on their trek to dinner. Even the woman with the rag bundle was there, Winter’s hand firmly on her elbow. With the distraction, we clearly hadn’t been counted in the move from dayroom to dining hall, and though Martha jabbed me in the ribs lightly as I fell in line, it seemed I hadn’t been missed by the nurses. My joy in that success was fleeting.
Dinner was a leg of rabbit, which I was too tenderhearted to touch, and a potato cooked so long it had shrunken away from its jacket as if in fear. Three bites of potato sat in my mouth like paste no matter how long I chewed. Most of the other women seemed to have a handful of red radishes on their plates, but someone had nicked mine. I thought longingly of the egg I’d refused at my last breakfast on Powell Street. Like so much else, it was lost to me now, and I had no one but myself to blame.
As we lay down to sleep, Nora looked over at me. I could see the hope on her face. I shook my head and crumpled instantly, sobbing under the sheet. I heard a nurse’s footsteps and told myself that was why Nora didn’t reach out to comfort me. She wouldn’t want to give anything away. That might not have been the reason, and anyway, it didn’t matter. A pat on the back would change nothing. I was alone here, truly alone, and no one could make that better.
* * *
The hopelessness washed over me in the dark like a wave, only it never seemed to ebb. Instead, it closed over my head, heavy, suffocating. I desperately cast about for some memory that would take me away from where I was, some happy scene that I could lose myself in.
I found a memory, and although it wasn’t a happy one, I would take anything over the dark pit of loss I felt in the present. I pushed away from the reality of the iron cot beneath me and dove in.
We all assumed Phoebe would marry first, being the older of us two. I knew Mother had her heart set on making us advantageous marriages, but she only spoke to me of heirs and matches and duty once a week or so; with Phoebe, it was nearly every day. It had seemed like love for us at the time—her unflagging attention to our prospects, our wardrobes, our activities—and only after Phoebe was cast into Goldengrove did I question who was intended to benefit most from these carefully crafted marriages.
While my sister later kept a running tally of all the families that wouldn’t have her, the truth was that she had sabotaged Mother’s matchmaking attempts from the first. When Mother made arrangements for her to meet the eldest Crocker boy, she simply failed to show up at the appointment and repeated the insult to his younger brother. She danced clumsily with the Pickering heir, her legs stiff and her arms limp, even though she was a lovely dancer with a particularly graceful waltz when she chose to be. To Mother, she apologized sweetly for her unbearable clumsiness, promising to do better next time; to me, she complained that Mother would’ve tried to engage her to Aleck Goldenson himself, were he not inconveniently jailed awaiting trial for Mamie Kelly’s murder.
What turned the tide seemed at first to be good fortune, not bad. Just when Mother was reaching the very limit of her wits, Phoebe did at last become engaged to be married and to a very suitable boy from Russian Hill, the next best thing to Nob Hill, both socially and geographically. Her fiancé was a polite young man named Jack Burdick whose family was in banking. Everyone rejoiced.
At first, I could see what she liked about Jack; he seemed friendly and patient, and he always had a smile for me, though I was only his fiancée’s little sister and of no great importance. It was only after several months that I realized he had a smile for every girl on nearly every occasion, and he was not always as patient as he had initially seemed. I wondered what he knew of Phoebe’s moods. I particularly worried about what might happen if he remained unaware until after the wedding, after the marriage ceremony had linked their fates forever.
It did not come to that. Instead, the dream crumbled to dust at a birthday supper for a mutual friend, a sweet-tempered girl we’d known forever by the name of Mariah Gladwyne. Phoebe had insisted on bringing me along even though I wasn’t invited. Looking back, I should have taken that as a warning of trouble to come.
My sister wore one of her favorite gowns, too elaborate for the occasion, with sprigs of green on the bodice and a generous swag of colorful satin roses—pale pink, cherry red, snow white—atop the bustle. The Gladwyne home was a short walk from ours, but it had rained that morning, and although Phoebe had promised our mother we’d take the carriage to save our shoes, she pulled me out the door and into the street without even glancing at the waiting vehicle. Even when I tried to protest, she wrapped my arm around hers and insisted that the day was too lovely to waste. I did my best to evade the puddles, but she waded right through them, heedless.
When we arrived, she fairly bounced with excitement coming in the door and thrust her wrapped gift at Mariah so eagerly, the act looked more violent than generous. When the hostess murmured politely that there was no chair for me, Phoebe drew one up anyway, and the servants were forced to scramble for another place setting. I should have left then. I didn’t. The only thing I feared more than society’s disapproval was Phoebe’s, and my feet would not carry me back to the threshold.
Phoebe patted my hand and moved down the table to her own seat, greeting her fiancé with arms thrown wide, far more effusively than was suitable. He smiled indulgently while everyone was watching, but I saw him whisper something to her after, rapping his knuckles on the table for emphasis. Once seated, I kept my eyes down and tried my best to fit in. Phoebe did no such thing.
Her giddy mood grew, rose, spiraled. When it was time to toast the birthday girl, she straightened up in her seat next to Jack, her cheeks pink and her eyes sparkling, raising her glass and crying too loudly, “Hear, hear!”
Her reach was too wild, and the red wine in her goblet sloshed onto the white sleeve of Jack’s dinner jacket. We all knew he was vain, but I was taken aback when he hissed at Phoebe immediately, his temper lost, his hand so tight around her upper arm that his fingertips disappeared into her flesh. He cursed under his breath that she was a clumsy fool. Almost no one heard the exact words of the insult, but everyone in the room witnessed what came next.
Eyes flashing, my sister rose with her glass of wine in hand, and she poured what was left in the glass all up and down Jack’s sleeve until it was scarlet from shoulder seam to cuff. He sputtered and cursed; she laughed more and more loudly the madder and madder he got.
After she’d emptied her glass, she then did the same with his, then those of her two nearest companions, all of whom were agape, too shocked to stop her. Everyone was staring, and Jack couldn’t even form words, his face flushed with rage. Phoebe laughed and laughed and laughed. He reached out as if to slap her, and she recoiled. I heard her sharp intake of breath. The tense moment stretched out, all of us afraid to move, all of us waiting.
Then she reached for the elegant cut-glass carafe of wine that the servants had been pouring from, gripped it like a cudgel, and upended it down the front of her own gown, soaking the sprigged green bodice with claret, her laughter a cacophony of hysterical notes, gone far beyond words.
When her laughter faded, the entire room was utterly silent. There were not even whispers, only the sound of ragged breathing. Pale, unbelieving faces turned toward my sister and her fiancé, not knowing what impossible thing might happen next.
After some time, a butler came and showed Phoebe out of the room, not touching her but guiding her by gestures away from the table and out through the pocket doors of the kitchen. She followed as she was bid. The low murmuring music of rumor caught fire the moment she was gone.
Once I realized she wasn’t coming back to the dining room, I hastened to join her. In the kitchen, I found her in a corner next to a hulking china cabinet, a maid dabbing at her dress hopelessly with a small wet c
loth. Tears gleamed on Phoebe’s cheeks. She did nothing to wipe them away. I lent her my cloak to cover her dress so our parents wouldn’t see the stains when we got home, though, of course, I must have known that they would eventually find out. We walked home together in silence, my arm around her shoulders, her own arms folded under the cloak and hugging herself around the middle, eyes down.
The next day, Jack Burdick’s mother sent word on crisp off-white stationery that the engagement had been dissolved. It was perfectly folded and elegantly worded and left absolutely no doubt that Phoebe was no longer welcome in the Burdick house. After that, though nearly the same number of invitations came to our house as before, my name was the only one on the envelope, never Phoebe’s. Jack Burdick’s name was never spoken in the house again. My parents did not ask either of us what happened, nor as far as I knew, did they try to correct or change the consequences.
Phoebe had always enjoyed games and dances, but she didn’t seem to mind her new state of affairs. She never said she missed going out, nor did she ask after her former friends. I missed having her with me, but I was afraid to tell her so, not knowing how she might respond. I had begun to tiptoe around her without meaning to. Just the thought of her laughter as she’d merrily ruined her favorite gown beyond repair made me nauseous and uncertain.
So when she asked what had happened at a particular event, I would tell her. I would climb up on her bed and hold her hand and describe everything down to the tiniest detail, from the rosettes on the toes of Sarah Walsh’s new Parisian slippers to the hitch in Bert Bennett’s voice when, after cornering me for three dances in a row, he’d begged me with great ceremony to tell Annie Larkin he thought her the most beautiful woman in all the world. I told her every last thing I could think of: the dresses, the shoes, the games and favors, the things said and left unsaid. But I never told her I missed having her there with me, to see everything with her own eyes. In the week after she’d been sent to Goldengrove, I wished I’d told her every single day.
But the giddy Phoebe was only part of her. When one of her dark spells was coming on, I could always tell. She would shade her eyes in the morning light and fall silent in the evening. That was how they began. The older she got, the longer they lasted and the more often they came, every few months toward the end. Yet our parents sailed ahead, heads high, as if an iceberg on the horizon could be avoided by insisting it was only a cloud.
When Phoebe wouldn’t come down to breakfast for the sixth day in a row, lying in her darkened room, Mama only said, “Oh, girls, they do have their moods, don’t they?” But I knew it was no mood. She could not snap out of it. I’d cling to her bedside for hours, holding her hand, doing anything I could to engage her. I sang songs. I recited everything from Mother Goose to Cato. I asked her question after question, some silly, some not, leaving a silence after each as if listening to the answers she did not give. After trying for hours to get her to rise or even speak more than a syllable at a time, I wanted to climb up into that bed with her. If I had, I feared I might never climb out.
Instead, I would fall asleep in the chair next to her bed, feeling her darkness pulling me down. I would wake halfway through the night, my neck aching, her hand still gripping mine. I freed myself bit by bit, inch by inch, to avoid waking her. If she was ever disappointed that I wasn’t there when she woke, she never said so, and I continued to sit up with her the same way as long as the spells lasted.
But Mama always called her down to breakfast, morning after morning, and in each spell, there came a time when she responded to the call. She would appear at the breakfast table, fully dressed but with a slight something askew—an unbuttoned cuff, mismatched shoes—and a faint, apologetic smile. By the next morning, she was back to her usual self. Although the dark Phoebe was herself too. The adventurous Phoebe, the dark Phoebe, the pliant Phoebe—they were all my sister. I loved them all.
And now, was that sister lost to me? Had I come to the end of the possibilities in Goldengrove? I’d been so sure the file was the answer, but it was simply another blind alley. Without Phoebe, I could only return home a failure, back to parents who played me like a copper in a game of faro, my mother the casekeeper, my father the bank. When I returned home, the dealer would rake in the bets, and I’d be handed off to the fiancé who’d won me, his treasure then, not my own. I would be just as imprisoned there as I was here, if not more so. Freedom was an illusion, it seemed, no matter where I went.
As I came back to myself and stared up at the far-off, dark ceiling of Terpsichore Ward, I struggled with the last vestiges of my hope. I wanted to hold on, but it was hard. There was something seductive in the idea of letting go of hope entirely, of surrendering to this place and its flat, unblinking version of eternity.
I was crying as I thought of my lost Phoebe and my own dear self, nearly as lost. I was alone, so alone. On that unhappy note, I drifted off into slumber, and my dreams were worse than usual, full of dark faces and skulking animals, demons lingering just out of view. The tears continued to wash my face, slipping down to soak my pillow, until the dark of night had become the dimly lit morning.
Chapter Thirteen
The next morning’s hike was a trial. It was almost as bad as the benches had been, those first days in the asylum. The benches made you ache and suffer, your mind burning a hole in your body like a bright inward sun. On this hike, the reverse was true, my body suffering so much from the movement, I felt I’d give anything in the world to be allowed to stop, to rest. Both activities were celebrated as unifying the body and mind; both could easily have the opposite effect, tearing your body from your mind and making you feel completely helpless, without agency, without will.
Yet on this day, my exhausted body operating independent of my swirling mind, an idea dawned in my head just as the sun broke over the horizon. It was a sight I’d seen more than a dozen times since entering Goldengrove, yet this time, an idea came with it that had never struck me before. You are never alone.
Last night, I’d lamented how alone I was, but that was foolish. Even on the hilltop, women stood to my left and right, all facing the sun together with me. Inside the fence below, there were dozens, scores, of women. Some were mad, and some weren’t. Some, mad or no, could be helpful to me. Beyond Nora, I had not sought their help. But I had come here to be on the inside, and now I was, and I was an idiot not to work with my fellow inmates instead of around them. What did I have to complain about, when everything I needed to find my sister was at my fingertips?
While we stood panting atop a beautiful hill, the empty land stretching out into the visible distance beyond us, I made a decision.
Someone here knew the name of the Russian woman. I only needed to discover who.
I spent every precious minute of the day murmuring and gossiping, spreading the words I wanted spread and gathering the ones that came back to me, sifting through the information for the gold nugget I needed. A few words to Hazel on our return hike downhill, to Bess over the lye vat, to Jubilee at lunch, to Martha in the dayroom. I even stole a moment to whisper to Celia from my old ward as we passed each other in the hall, knowing that she always knew more than anyone suspected of her, believing her to be mute when she wasn’t. Wasn’t there a Russian heiress here? I asked. The third daughter of the first Nicholas. What was her name? Sofia? Irina?
The answer came back to me by the time we sat down for our evening meal, having traveled through dozens of ears and back through dozens of mouths, emerging like a gemstone polished to a shine: There are three Russians here. I wonder which one the heiress is. I think it might be Sasha, the dark one, in Calliope Ward. There’s another one in the same ward. I forget her name. It’s something like Anastasia, maybe Ana. And then there’s the tall yellow-haired one—I bet it’s her. She looks like she could be royal. What’s her name? My friend here knows. Oh yes, the blond one. That’s Natasha.
Natasha.
If Natasha had become Phoebe, there was some chance that Phoebe had become Natas
ha. Perhaps my sister, clever as she was, had even engineered the switch herself. The only way to be sure—or at least to find my way forward—was to visit the records room again.
And although it took the larger network to deliver the truth to me, I also needed one more thing that only one person could give.
As darkness fell and the ward was buzzing with women preparing for sleep, I was just about to approach Nora when I came up short, seeing a pale head where I hadn’t expected to. Not Phoebe, but Damaris. She was back.
Her forehead was bruised but not bleeding, and she did not appear to have been beaten. A flicker in my brain was appalled that this counted as good news.
I wrapped my arms around her in an embrace. I could feel her cheek swell against mine; she was smiling.
“Where were you?” I asked softly.
“Darkness,” she whispered, and before I could ask what she meant, she squeezed my hand and moved away. She headed back to her cot and seated herself, folding her hands primly, as if she were settling herself into the front pew.
I had no time to ponder. Nora was next to me, and I needed something from her. In low tones, I told Nora what I needed, and she told me how I could get it.
She said, “All I’ll need is fresh soap.”
“How fresh?”
“When it’s soft. Right after you wrap it, before you store it away to cure.”
“How much?”
“One bar. No, make it two.”
“And maybe an extra to wash ourselves with.”
I was joking, but she didn’t smile. “Too risky. If they find it, even a scrap, they’ll hunt down the guilty party. Which will be you.”
“And you,” I reminded her.
“Not me,” she said. “They won’t make any connection.”
“But what if I—”
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