After several hours of work, Piper came to gather us at the end of our shift, still without Winter. I saw the confusion and concern plain on every face. It wasn’t just our ward either. After the work shift, we were walked away from the dining hall instead of toward it, and other wards were in the hallways as well, all heading outside, each with only one nurse at the head of the line and one attendant at the end.
When we found ourselves outside, under skies just lightly brushed with white wisps of cloud, I looked around for Phoebe but didn’t see her. I didn’t know the other members of Euterpe by sight, and the crowd was large. Soon, we were standing in our separate lines, and I had a clear view forward, only yards away from an upturned soapbox, clearly waiting for someone to address us from the perch. We waited a long and restless quarter of an hour, and when I overheard Piper whisper to the Melpomene Ward nurse, “They’re not going to wait for her much longer,” the other nurse whispered back, “Neither am I.”
But then I spotted Gus’s broad, hulking shadow at a distance, and behind him walked the matron, her dark brow knotted in fierce concentration. He stepped aside as she neared the soapbox, and she took the lead. When she stepped up to be visible, she beamed and raised her arms in what looked like joy, and I marveled at the change she’d managed to effect. Clearly, she felt it was worth playacting at cheer. I would not, however, join her.
This time, she had no visual aid, no Tranquility Chair, and stood alone to speak. She took a moment to survey us, and I saw pride in her face. She was relishing her power. Again, I was seized with the impulse for violence, wanting desperately to rush up and charge her, even feeling one foot shift forward against my will. I felt a sharp rap on my shoulder blade and turned. Nora was behind me. She shook her head slowly, somehow intuiting my mood, and I nodded to show I understood. It wasn’t the time, not here, not today.
The matron spoke at last, her voice loud and confident. “I spoke to you recently of new treatments. We relish these, we treasure them, but they are rare. We must ask ourselves, what can we do—every day—to improve the chances that our curable insane find their cures?”
She looked out over us as if we had answers and nodded as if we had offered them to her. “Yes, it is a powerful question. And we know of at least one solution, which I want to tell you about today.”
She gave a long pause for effect, letting her gaze sweep the crowd, again acting as if we were responding to her in some way, though all I heard from the assembled women was a vast, stony silence. While she waited, I turned to look out over the crowd as well and was rewarded with a brief glimpse of Phoebe far at the edge of the assembled women. The nurse of her ward—a woman of some thirty years, curved like a violin, dotted all over with freckles—was struggling mightily to separate two women who were scuffling. Phoebe herself was still and impassive. I could not catch her eye.
The matron went on. “It has been proven that what helps correct the mind above all other things is a sense of purpose. This home is like a hive, where every bee has its assigned role, and the success of the hive depends on each of its citizens performing the job assigned to her. And like bees, we have much work to do. In work lies our happiness. Therefore, all work shifts will immediately be doubled.”
All at once, I saw what she intended. It had nothing to do with happiness, nor with cure. She had a higher god to serve: profit. She had neatly disposed of her only superior, the superintendent. Until a replacement was interviewed, approved, and convinced to accept the position—a process that would take weeks, if not months—she alone was in charge. And what had the superintendent always said the committee cared about most? Money. She was going to make them money.
“Exercise of over half an hour will no longer be conducted, effective immediately. Lawn exercise within the fence will take place on a limited basis. I believe, of course, that the action of the body is essential to the functioning of the mind, but movement for movement’s sake is frivolous. Physical work will heal you by providing movement in service of purpose. You will be harvesting. Carrying. Hauling. In service, you will find true contentment and, God willing, peace in your troubled minds.”
I swiveled my head to look back at Nora, and she returned my look, no hope in it, no reassurance. Whether she could win Phoebe’s transfer to Terpsichore was moot, all in an instant. We had planned to flee during a hike, and there would be no more hikes.
We had waited too long.
Chapter Twenty-Two
After a brief lunch—a roll with no broth this time, and conducted entirely under the matron’s watchful eye—we were returned to our workstations. I barely knew what to do with myself, but it wasn’t up to me. Just this morning, we had formed bars and set them to cure, and now we started over with raw materials on a new batch: the ash, the fat, the fire.
It didn’t occur to me until after I was at the workbench again that the matron had not addressed what most of us were wondering. The bad news was piling up so quickly, I had already forgotten that the rug had been pulled out from under us twice in a single morning. When the terse woman from Polyhymnia asked me, “Which one of yours is gone?” I honestly had no idea what she was talking about.
She must have seen the confusion plain on my face and taken pity on me. She muttered the truth to me under her breath.
“Staff got cut,” she said. “Down to one nurse per ward. Seems mostly the younger ones stayed, older ones went. All gone this morning when we rose.”
“Doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “They were already barely able to keep control of us as it was.”
“Makes sense if you want to spend no money. Fewer nurses, fewer salaries.”
“No more jawing,” called the forewoman loudly, startling us both. “Quota’s been doubled. Eyes forward, hands busy.”
Of course, of course. One could either believe what we were told or view the truth through a more critical lens. Based on what I knew—money was the goal, the pinnacle, the panacea—I could see clearly in what direction we were headed.
She would work us to the bone.
More soap. More of everything we made to sell. More jams and jellies, more lavender sachets. More hauling and harvesting, as she’d said herself—both services we could be hired out to provide, and whatever money changed hands would land in her hands, most decidedly not ours. Nothing to help us, nothing to cure us. It was hard to imagine how they could feed us less or feed us worse, but if there was money to be squeezed from it, I knew she would do that too. I wondered if even the pampered ladies of Clio would lose their vegetables, or if she would leave those luxuries in place out of caution. Paid patients had to keep coming for the money to properly flow.
If Baumgarten could prove herself a canny operator, she might maintain control of the asylum, with no superintendent to dictate terms to her. Then she would have the power she craved, a position no woman would be appointed to but one she could claim for herself with dogged cleverness and ruthless ambition. Perhaps she’d set her sights even higher than running this asylum. Maybe she hoped that if she delivered, the Sidwells might place her somewhere else in their business empire, entrusting her with other assets, other operations. I didn’t know what her ultimate goal was, but one thing seemed clear.
She would stop at nothing to get there.
* * *
I agonized so much over this turn of events that I barely slept. The next afternoon in the dayroom, during a brief break between long, onerous work shifts, I found myself nodding off, almost sliding into a dream state, and then forced myself back awake. As we skated the brink of chaos, some had taken the opportunity to ramp up discipline, so we had to watch ourselves. The day that Winter disappeared, I’d seen Bess dozing in a sunbeam, which was apparently not to Salt’s liking. Salt struck her hard on the back, so she fell face forward, hitting the floor before she’d even had time to come fully awake. Today, her nose was bruised and both eyes blackened. I didn’t want to repeat her fate.
So instead, I forced myself to stand up and pace back and
forth across the room and wondered if I might enter a reverie while pacing, though I’d only ever done it while still. My body felt removed from my mind in any case—why not take my memory elsewhere while my poor legs moved automatically, marking out the same sad line over and over again?
But I had long ago exhausted the catalog of moments Henry and I had shared since his return from Patagonia, had plumbed the depths already of what I could barely call our romance. Thinking of Phoebe, I knew, would not relax me. I was too keyed up, too worried about what was happening to her when she wasn’t within my sight. Remembering moments we’d shared, however happy, was unlikely to dispel that worry. There was nothing in the past I wanted to disappear into right now. I decided instead to imagine the future, in the rosiest possible terms. There was a power in that, a comfort.
The feel of Henry’s hand. I began there.
His hand in mine, warm, strong, our fingers entwined. The sun warmed my face, a soft breeze tickling the sliver of exposed skin on the back of my neck above my high lace collar. We stood side by side in the garden behind his family’s house. My body wanted to press into his, but propriety allowed us no closer. Yet here we were, hand in hand, before God and the world. Imagining what would happen once we were allowed even closer brought a blush to my cheek.
Colors next. My gown brushed the grass, the white so bright and crisp against the green, it stood out like a boat on the horizon, visible from miles away. Henry’s morning jacket was a deep gray, the black-and-white ascot tucked into his vest covering the speed with which I knew his heart must be beating. I stole a look at his handsome face. The beaming pride I saw there made my own heartbeat quicken. I wished I had tied that ascot, my fingers dancing along the neck of my beloved. In the privacy of our own rooms, tonight, I would untie it.
“Dearly beloved,” the minister began. I could not keep the smile from my face, a sly secret under my veil. I wondered if everyone else was somber or smiling. A serious occasion but also a joyous one—which won out?
I swept my gaze across the crowd. A sweet, bright gem of a day, with no room for imperfections, so my gaze slipped easily across a sea of beaming faces. My mother, pleased; my father, proud. Phoebe, I saw, was wearing a smile, but as I watched, it froze on her face. Her eyes were empty. What had gone wrong?
I turned to my groom. Beloved Henry was no longer there. The man next to me, holding my hand, sealing our union, wore George’s face.
The reverie vanished.
I tripped and then fell, landing on my knees on the wooden floor, the heels of my hands bearing my crumpling weight.
Whatever became of me, I realized, this dream would never come true. I was wishing for something that was beyond my reach and always had been.
What lingered from the nightmare was not the shock of seeing George’s face but Phoebe’s. No matter who I married, my marriage would mean being sent from her.
The real villain who would separate me from my sister was me.
If I’d been given my heart’s desire—if Henry had proposed marriage, and I’d accepted, and the wedding had taken place, all without any need for Goldengrove—I would have been abandoning her. She would have been left alone in our parents’ house. There would have been visits, of course, even frequent ones, but it would not have been the same. I would no longer be her guardian and watcher, as I had promised Fletcher so long ago; I would not be able to protect her from the world, nor the world from her, and I did not know what would happen after.
I was finally beginning to see that there were choices each of us had to make, choices we had already made, choices we could not step back from. I could not be Henry’s wife and also live in companionable amity with my sister in our parents’ home. It pleased me to think of choices now, when it seemed I had none. If I could, I would, I told myself. I would marry Henry. I would grow old in company with Phoebe. Either outcome seemed rich with delight now, equally desired, equally impossible. I would never have had both, I realized at last, but now either was well out of reach.
For a moment, I felt faint with it. Was it the deprivation of food and drink that made me weak, or was I weak already? Was my hold on sanity slipping? It could very well be. I’d found Phoebe, but the task ahead of me was becoming harder, not easier. I was trying as hard as I knew how to try and still failing.
I might never get out. It was time to admit it. I had set and sprung my own trap.
The dizziness swam up through my brain again and echoed around my skull. I leaned in the direction of the wall, thinking it was closer than it was, and missed it.
“Here, please, this way,” said an unfamiliar feminine voice, and a strong arm was guiding me over toward a seat.
As she lowered me into the seat, I realized she was a nurse but not one I had ever met before. I would have remembered a nurse showing me a kindness. That was not a qualification for working here.
Now that I looked at her, she looked a little familiar. Average height and a figure soft with curves, as best I could tell under her starched uniform. She had a long, straight nose, which on another woman’s face might have looked excessive, but it suited her. Her lips were fine and thin, her eyes a liquid, golden brown. All unusual. I struggled to place her.
“Do I know you?” I asked. It was a foolish thing to say, but I had realized that I was indeed a fool. So why not speak my mind?
“I’m not certain,” she said. “My name is Veronica Bell.”
“Oh!” The Bell family had lived on Russian Hill what seemed like a lifetime ago. Veronica was closer to Phoebe’s age than mine, and her family had moved away to New Orleans just after they finished school, nearly six years before. She’d been a legend at Miss Buckingham’s. When I stumbled in my practice for oratory, which I often did, it was Veronica Bell’s textbook composure my mother had urged me to emulate.
I opened my mouth to tell her my name, to make that connection for her, and then I thought better of it.
“Bell,” I said. “Silver bells. Jingle bells. Clear as a bell.”
Her expression took on an indulgent cast, and she stopped trying to place me. “Are you feeling all right? Any dizziness, weakness?”
“No and no,” I said cheerfully. She would find out my diagnosis soon enough if she joined our ward, but in the short term, impersonating an imbecile would allow me to ask whatever questions I liked without being expected to answer any. “Nurse Bell, Nurse, nurses help nurse us back to health. Why are you a nurse?”
“Well, my mama was a nurse during the war,” she said, “and I told her I wanted to try it too. I wanted to help people. She told me she’d seen such awful things. . .” She trailed off uncertainly, perhaps wanting to be careful of my delicate mind. “But I insisted, and she said it would be all right as long as I only worked with female patients. So here I am.”
“Patients, patience, you’re very patient.”
“Thank you.”
And I realized I needed to be patient too. She might be a great asset, but not if she figured out who I was before I was ready to tell her.
I said, “Thank you, thank flu, thank shoe. Is evening meal upon us?”
She blinked. “I’m not sure. Let me go find out.”
It wasn’t, of course, but I took a chance that someone or something more urgent would distract her along the way, and it seemed to work. When the time for evening meal did arrive, only our own nurses guided us into the dining hall. I felt a surge of optimism. It lasted a fleeting moment. What waited on my plate was a knob of bread with an obvious film of white mold spreading along one side and a bowl of liquid I could not identify.
As hungry as I was, I knew not to eat the bread and instead forced myself to drink the liquid, a sip at a time. It was viciously salty, but at least it didn’t taste spoiled.
I took advantage of my proximity to Celia to ask her for more of her story. I needed to know exactly what George had done, what role he’d played. She still didn’t like to talk and told me her story in whispers, supplemented with halting pantomime an
d fierce facial expressions that spoke volumes.
She had liked George well enough when they married. There had been no reason to think things would go wrong. She knew, of course, that he wanted her as an accessory, a decoration. The people wanted to elect a husband, not a bachelor, so a husband he became. The fact that she had no family was no hindrance; they’d been people of substance before they passed away, so the Sidwells welcomed her, the matriarch even growing attached, never having had a daughter of her own.
She had no way of knowing that the very first time she did something that displeased George, he would threaten to beat her. She found the idea so outrageous, she laughed. He followed through on his threat. She knew their marriage had fallen apart in that moment and would never be whole again. He was a man who would never accept being laughed at. But she told no one. They might not believe her, and if they did, what could they do about it? She had nowhere to go, no family but his. She soldiered on.
Things worsened with alarming speed. The more he pushed her, the more she pushed back. He threatened her. She mocked him. He muscled her into her bedroom and locked the door; to spite him, she climbed out the window. So he decided he would rather run for office as a widower. For the sympathy. He told her outright he would prefer her dead, but she never thought he would take her murder into his own hands. She was right, in a sense; he hired another pair of hands to do the work.
She was asleep when the fire started, but she woke in a smoke-filled bedroom. Coughing, she fled from room to room, trying every way out—all locked. In the front parlor, she saw the summer curtains piled high, out of season, and realized this was no accident. She broke at last through a window, shrouded in glass and fire, and fell at the feet of the handyman on the lawn watching the blaze. He would do almost anything for George—he’d set the fire, she could smell it on his gloved hands—but he wouldn’t kill a defenseless woman. So he put a cloth over her nose and mouth. An odd sweetness filled her senses, then all went dark.
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