She drew herself up a little, shaking in earnest. “No. I don’t.”
He gave her a half smile. “I’m amazed it is taking you so long to remember you were there that day.”
“What do you mean?” She pressed a hand to her stomach.
“It doesn’t matter now. You’ll soon forget I was even here or that I exist for that matter.” He turned to the door when it swung open.
Roger stepped inside, his focus on Edyth, his expression void of any hint of hope that she so desperately longed to find. “You can leave her to me, Mr. Foster. We will start with the freezing treatment tomorrow to keep the mania at bay. Rest assured, it is perfectly normal for the patients to become anxious before their treatment begins.”
“Then I shall leave her in your capable hands. I shall return tomorrow to see how the first injection takes.” He shook Roger’s hand. “Now, shall we expect you for dinner tomorrow afterwards, Doctor?”
“I would be honored, sir. Will Miss Birch be present?”
“Of course. Now I really must get home to my wife.” And without so much as a glance back at Edyth, Uncle left her.
Edyth lifted herself to rest on her heels to look up at him. She couldn’t keep herself from whispering, “Roger? You don’t really agree with him, do you?”
His eyes on her, he called out, “Wait for me, Mr. Foster. I have a question for you.” And without so much as a reassuring shake of his head to Edyth, he slammed the door in her face, nearly breaking her.
Roger is pretending. Pretending! Remember that, Edyth. He couldn’t say anything in front of Nellie. I shouldn’t even have mentioned it. Bane will be coming for me tomorrow. She could hardly keep from laughing. She quietly swallowed her mirth and stared at her hands to compose herself. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Nellie. But perhaps she was growing paranoid. Surely she could tell her friend, couldn’t she?
Nellie grasped Edyth’s hands and pulled her to her feet. “Don’t worry. My contact should be here by tomorrow morning at the latest.”
Edyth rubbed a hand over her swollen eyes and forced herself to maintain a tremble in her voice. “A contact? What on earth do you mean?”
She squeezed Edyth’s hand in both of her own. “My contact from the World.”
“What?” Edyth gaped at her, the idea of madness as an explanation for this outlandish turn of events flickering to the forefront of her mind.
“I know you’ve seen me scribbling away in my journal each night. That’s because I’m keeping careful account of what happens within these walls and taking down the women’s stories. My name is not Nellie Brown. It is Nellie Bly, and I am writing an exposé for Joseph Pulitzer, owner of the New York World, on the asylum and how the nurses and doctors treat their patients. I’ve only stayed silent so long to keep my cover. That day when you tried to swim across the East River, I almost said something to you, but you were so confident in your swimming abilities, I thought maybe you might make it.” She twisted her hands as if overwhelmed with guilt.
Hope soared within her as she dared to trust Nellie was telling the truth. They would not perish in the asylum if Bane’s plan failed. Thank You, Lord. “Do not fret about that day a moment longer. I almost made it.” She squeezed her friend’s hand, not quite ready to tell of her own plan yet. “So tell me about your idea for an escape, Miss Bly.”
“I can tell my contact about your case in the morning and he will help me get you out of here before your appointment. I’ve watched people I met on the ferry ride over here be driven insane in such a short time from the doctors’ so-called treatments. It would not rest well with me for the remainder of my life if I stood by and allowed such abuse to befall you when it was within my power to stop it. And when I am released, I plan on helping every woman in this pit.”
Chapter Nineteen
Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;
I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell.
~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Edyth walked stiffly to the benches in the morning before breakfast. She had tossed and turned all night, dreaming that Bane’s coming to rescue her was simply a fabrication of her mind. But once her feet touched the floor, the reality of Roger and Bane’s plan flooded her being, leaving her feeling quite giddy.
At the nurse’s lifted brow, Edyth erased her smile and once again dropped her shoulders. You are not out yet. Don’t give them a chance to find you out, she chided herself and took a seat beside Poppy, whose eyes were locked on a window.
“Poppy?”
The girl stared, unblinking.
“Poppy, whatever is wrong?” Edyth whispered, feeling the trembling overtaking the girl’s body.
Poppy lolled her head onto Edyth’s shoulder and moaned. “The nurses … they left the windows open last night in my r–room and it was s–so cold.”
Edyth pressed her hand to Poppy’s forehead and nearly groaned at the heat. She was burning with fever again. She had hoped after seeing Poppy dancing last night that she was on the mend, but that wretched pair of nurses were doing their best to torment their patients into an early grave. She swallowed, wishing there was some way she could free her friend once she escaped today.
“Papa, I will be joining Mama in glory soon.” Poppy murmured to the empty air before them. “No, I am not frightened. Why would I be?” She gave the ghost a reassuring smile that soon dissolved into her quivering body.
Edyth bit the inside of her cheek against the pain of watching Poppy surrender. “You will be well, Poppy. Please, you must fight the fever. You cannot let the asylum win.” You cannot die a captive.
“Fever,” she repeated, her gray-blue eyes rolling about in an attempt to meet Edyth’s gaze. “I almost didn’t survive the first one all those years ago that took my mama and left Papa and me here. I’m not sure I can a second time, and we miss her so. Papa has only lingered this long to stay with me.”
“We need to move you to the infirmary and get you well,” Edyth insisted, shifting to wave over a nurse. But Poppy’s hand stayed her.
“No. Don’t fetch the nurse yet. I will be well again, though not on this earth. Jesus will be taking my hand soon, but first, I’m supposed to give you something.” With great effort, Poppy unfastened the top three buttons of her gown.
“Whatever are you about?” Edyth nearly stood then to get the nurse but refrained out of respect for whatever Poppy had in mind.
She pulled the small leather Bible from her bodice and placed it in Edyth’s lap. “I want you to have my Bible. Keep it hidden. They will not let you keep it if they find it, and I do so want you to continue your reading.”
Edyth’s fingers stroked the worn cover. “I can’t possibly.”
“Didn’t you hear my papa? He said to leave it with you. I have no need of it anymore now that I’m being called home at long last. Promise me you’ll read it? Lean on it?” Her glazed eyes met Edyth’s, her voice growing hoarse with the intensity of her need to hear Edyth’s vow.
“I promise.” Edyth slipped the Bible inside the waist of her gown and gripped Poppy’s hand.
“Good.” The girl returned her head to Edyth’s shoulder. “I’ve always liked you, Edyth. I hope you are reunited with your love….” Her voice drifted off as her full weight sagged onto Edyth.
No! She picked up Poppy’s hand, giving her a shake when the nurse glared in her direction, but at the gentle pulse beneath her fingertips, Edyth could not suppress a little cry of relief.
“Silence,” Nurse Madison hissed from behind a copy of Ladies’ Home Journal.
“Please, could you take her to the infirmary? Poppy has passed out from a fever.”
“And that’s your expert medical diagnosis?” The nurse crossed the room, roughly throwing back Poppy’s head. She pursed her lips and motioned for another nurse to join her. “Help me take her to the infirmary. Nurse Camden, I’ll need you to be in charge for the few minutes I am gone. Try not to let them get into any trouble. You are too soft on them.”
> Edyth rose, staring in horror as the women unceremoniously draped Poppy’s arms over their shoulders and pulled her down the hall, Poppy’s feet dragging behind them and the door slamming in their wake.
“Return to your seat, please,” Nurse Camden called, slowly shuffling to the head nurse’s desk where she picked up the journal with withered, shaking hands.
Edyth bowed her head, saying a prayer for her dear friend. Heal her, Lord, and help me to gain my freedom so I might obtain hers too. Feeling the book against her stomach, Edyth couldn’t keep herself from breaking away from her stiff position on the bench and joining Nellie two benches down. She buried her face in her friend’s shoulder and moaned. When will the cruelties end?
Mistaking her grief for anguish over the impending treatment, Nellie twisted her hands. “I’m so sorry I don’t have any news for you. My contact hasn’t come yet, but do not lose heart. He’ll come for breakfast. I’m certain of it.”
The sound of heeled shoes shuffling alerted Edyth to the ancient nurse’s approach. She expected rough hands to wrench her and Nellie apart, but instead, a gentle hand lifted her chin to meet the old nurse’s watery eyes and kind smile.
“Can I help you, my dear Edyth?” Nurse Camden stroked back Edyth’s hair with such familiarity, she drew in a sharp gasp.
“How do you know my name?” Blinking through her tears, Edyth looked warily at the nurse. Was this another attempt to play with her mind? To pretend to befriend her in order to learn something about her only to tease her mercilessly later?
The nurse lifted her hand, but instead of striking her, she gave her a sympathetic smile and a pat on the cheek before slipping something hard into her hand.
Edyth opened her palm to find a piece of a peppermint stick. She popped it into her mouth before it could be discovered by any of the others on the bench, closing her eyes to enjoy the sweetness. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“Of course. Your grandmother used to love peppermint too. It would calm her right down whenever she had a moment.” The nurse smiled at her again and shuffled back to her station.
“My grandmother …?” she whispered, her voice cracking. The hard candy turned bitter in her stomach. She could hardly believe it. “Uncle wasn’t lying after all.”
“Or he merely paid the nurse to say such a thing,” Nellie reassured her even as she bit her lip in consternation.
Edyth thought of the scratched initials in the baseboard beneath the bed in the Lodge. E.H.B. Edyth Hortense Blakely? And the carved-out heart and second set of initials, B.B. Beatrice Blakely? Mama. “Oh, please God, no.” She gave a muffled cry and dipped her head, allowing her tears to fall at last, mourning Poppy and her grandmother and herself.
“Edyth, hush now! Please, you are drawing too much attention,” Nellie begged her, rubbing her hand over Edyth’s shoulder.
Unless it was a clever ruse from her uncle, her future was truly not her own. If her grandmother had been committed when her mother was still a Blakely, Edyth only had a few years left before she too followed in her grandmother’s madness. Her own mother had died before the malady had manifested, but Mother had possessed the same oddities as both her mother and, now, Edyth. Bane, my darling. I am so sorry. She thought of the children they could have had and how beautiful they would have been with Bane as their father. She could never have a family … she would always be alone.
A girl’s shrieking from behind a nearby door sent chills down her spine. Edyth grasped Nellie’s hand, frightened of her future. “That could be me. Even if I do escape, I will be returned when the madness comes upon me at last. My uncle will have his way and any memory of being loved will be destroyed. I won’t remember anything. I won’t remember Poppy, my father teaching me to paint, my mother kissing me good night, or Bane….” Her throat caught. She could no longer have the future she had dreamed of with him, but to lose the memory of his lips upon hers? His touch? His strength? Unbearable. If I can escape and run far enough away from my uncle’s grasp, then at least I can have my memories of Bane until my dying breath.
Roger had not shown up at the ferry to meet him, so Bane continued on with the plan without him and entered the rotunda alone. A nurse at the front desk smiled at him, fortunately remembering him from the previous night’s revelry, and waved him through. She didn’t seem as exhausted as Roger had claimed she would be since she still took the time to smile flirtatiously and ask him little questions to keep him by her desk. Hopefully, the rest of the staff would be too tired to stop him. He had to get to Edyth.
“Let me take your hat and cane. Since you are a specialist and don’t have an office, I can keep your things in the nurses’ retiring room.”
“Oh, that won’t be necessary,” he replied, rubbing his thumb over the decorative silver head of his peculiarly heavy walking cane. It had been a gift from Edyth, and he carried it today, thinking it made him appear more professional. He wanted to have something to defend himself and Edyth with if he needed to.
“No problem at all,” she cooed, and came around her desk, taking his things, her hands brushing suggestively over his. “You’ll find the women of Hall Six cleaning the rotunda today.”
Breathing a sigh of relief that the nurse still believed him to be the specialist acquaintance of Roger Hawkins, Bane tugged on his dull brown tweed suit. Hearing chattering coming from above, he watched the asylum women in thin gray gowns cleaning the spiral staircase. His eyes traveled to and from each wild-haired woman, trying to spot his girl. At long last, he found her, mopping the second floor. Her glazed expression, paired with her scabbed, bruised lips, made his heart lurch, pushing him up the stairs to claim her in his arms. Coming up behind her, still undetected, his heart broke at the sight of her trembling hands clenched around the handle of her mop.
“Please.” Her voice matched her hands, completely unlike the confident woman he knew. “Please, don’t take me yet. Please,” she whimpered.
“Take you? Edyth, did they hurt you after I left?”
Her head snapped up, and her gaze collided with his. She gave a small cry, moving forward as if to throw herself into his arms, but he quickly grabbed her arm to still her.
“You are real! You really did come to the ball last night?”
“Of course, don’t you remember?” Bane was confused at the haze in her eyes, and he stepped back as a nurse appeared at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at them. “Now, now, miss, there is no need to be alarmed,” he said loud enough for the nurse to hear.
“Everything okay up there, Professor Lyons? Bring her down, would you?” A massive nurse joined the other nurse below and crossed her arms, nodding to Edyth. “I was told that if the duchess caused any more trouble at all that she would be sent to the Gray Chamber immediately to begin her therapy.”
He nearly froze but managed to riffle through his notebook as if looking for a schedule, which in reality was Edyth’s sketchbook that he had recovered from Jude, but she was too distraught to notice. He called down to the nurse, “I believe it is scheduled for next week, correct?”
“I was told it was today, but in any event, I have my orders, and you, begging your pardon, sir, are only a specialist and not Doctor Hawkins. He is personally in charge of the girl’s case, and until he arrives to say different, we will keep to his instructions and take her straightaway.”
His heart dropped. Doctor Hawkins ordered the treatment for today? If so, he was dangerously close to overplaying his hand in this facade of treatment to assist in her escape, especially since he had not shown his face today.
“Well, I’d like to have that procedure pushed back to December, which would still follow his orders for administering the treatment while giving me enough time to assess this woman’s state of mind to write my articles. Could you see to it?”
“December? I authorized for her to have that injection as soon as possible, and it is not in anyone’s right to change it,” a voice boomed from below at the front doors, footsteps sounding on the stairs.<
br />
“Uncle.” Edyth’s eyes grew wide. She gripped Bane’s arm, all thoughts of maintaining a cover vanishing as she whispered, “Bane, he means to wipe my memories. If Doctor Hawkins isn’t here to stop them from proceeding, I’ll be as a young babe. You have to get me out of here now, else your rescue will be for naught.”
Taking her by the elbow, he steered her up the stairs to the third floor of the rotunda, hoping to find some means of escape, trying the doors. Locked. He groaned in frustration.
With a cry, Edyth fell into his arms, dropping the mop she had brought up the stairs in the confusion. Tears streaked down her cheeks. “We are trapped.”
“I won’t allow them to take you. And besides, Doctor Hawkins only agreed to the treatment to maintain his cover. He wouldn’t betray us in such a vile manner. You’ll be safe. Roger will help us. You’ll see, but you must not give us away now. You must act like you are without hope when he appears.”
“And if they proceed without him?”
His heart hammered at the thought. “I won’t let them,” he whispered and drew her into his embrace as three orderlies and Mr. Foster appeared at the stairway’s third-floor landing.
“Let her go, Banebridge,” her uncle commanded. “You’re surrounded. What did you think could happen by running upstairs? All the doors are locked, and there is no escape. This is a madhouse, after all.”
Bane kept Edyth behind him while he scooped up the mop and flipped it around so that the handle was pointing to her uncle, wielding it like a broadsword. “You will no longer hurt her. You have committed her falsely, and now that I can act as her witness to prove her sanity, the asylum will have to release her.”
“Are you her husband?” Mr. Foster asked, a smirk forming on his lips as he leaned against the railing, crossing his arms.
Bane drew his brows into a point, knowing where her uncle was leading the conversation as Edyth sidled up to him. “No, but—”
“But nothing. In the eyes of the law, she belongs to me. And that allows me to decide what is best for my niece.” He motioned to the orderlies. “One of you, go fetch Doctor Hawkins and have him move the procedure up to within the hour.”
The Gray Chamber Page 18