“Yes, sir.” I tried to marshal my familiar good-girl face, to arrange my features in that dewy, biddable expression that served me so well in Locke’s world. It sat wooden and stiff on my face, unconvincing. “My father worked—works—for Mr. Locke. As an archaeological explorer. He is often away.”
“I see. And he passed away recently.”
I pictured Jane telling me that Locke was not God and that she hadn’t given up yet. Oh, Father, I haven’t given up either.
“Yes, sir. Please”—I swallowed, tried to reassemble my good-girl mask—“when can I go home?”
Home. See that H like a house with two chimneys? I meant Locke House when I said it—with its familiar labyrinth of hallways, its hidden attics and warm red-stone walls—but I was unlikely ever to return there now.
Dr. Palmer was reshuffling his folders again, not looking at me. I wondered how long Mr. Locke had paid him to keep me here, mad or otherwise. “It’s not clear at this time, but I shouldn’t be in a rush if I were you. There’s no reason you shouldn’t rest here for a few months, is there? Recover your strength?”
I could think of at least thirty good reasons I didn’t want to stay locked in an asylum for months, but all I said was, “Yes, sir. And can I—do you think I could have my book back? And perhaps a pen and paper? Writing… eases my mind.” I attempted a timorous smile.
“Oh, not just yet. We’ll discuss it again next week, if you’ve been on your best behavior. Mrs. Jacobs, Mrs. Reynolds, if you please—”
The door opened behind me. The sharp steps of the nurses clicked across the floor. A week?
I flung myself across his desk and seized the slick smoothness of the doctor’s pen. I tore it from his grasp, spun away, barreled into the nurses—and then they had me, and it was over. A starched white arm crushed itself against my throat, quite dispassionately, and I felt my fingers being peeled inexorably away from the pen.
“No, please, you don’t understand—” I scrabbled, bare feet sliding uselessly across the floor.
“Ether, I think, and a dose of bromide. Thank you, ladies.”
My last sight of the office was Dr. Palmer placing the pen fastidiously in his pocket and tucking my book in his desk drawer.
I hissed and cried and screamed down the halls, shaking with hate and need. Faces peered out at me through the narrow door windows, pale and blank as moons. It’s funny how quickly you descend from civilized young lady to madwoman; it was as if this beastly, boundaryless creature had been living just beneath my skin for years, lashing her tail.
But there are places built for holding beastly women. They hauled me into bed, fastened the cuffs around my ankles and wrists, and pressed something cold and stickily damp over my mouth. I held my breath until I couldn’t and then I drifted into tarry blackness.
I don’t want to talk much about the next few days, so I won’t.
They were dull and gray and long. I woke at odd, arrhythmic times of the day with the sick tang of drugs on my breath; at night I dreamed I was suffocating but couldn’t move. I spoke to other people, I think—nurses, other inmates—but the only real company I had was the silver queen on her coin. And the hateful, stalking hours.
I tried to hide from the hours by sleeping. I lay very still and closed my eyes against the dull sameness of the room and made my muscles go slack and soft. Sometimes it worked, or at least I achieved a stretch of time that was even grayer and duller than the rest, but mostly it didn’t. Mostly I just lay there, staring at the pink veins of my eyelids and listening to the shush-shush of my blood.
Nurses and orderlies appeared every few hours, slate schedules clutched in their hands, to unfasten me from bed and prod me into motion. There were meals to be eaten under close supervision, starched white gowns to be worn, baths to be taken in rows of tin tubs. I shivered beside the fish-pale nakedness of two dozen other women, all of us made ugly and unsecret, like snails pulled from their shells. I watched them furtively—twitching or weeping or silent as tombstones—and wanted to scream: I’m not like them, I’m not mad, I don’t belong here. And then I thought: Maybe they didn’t belong here, either, at first.
Time went strange. The hour-dragons stalked and circled. I heard their belly scales susurrating against the tile in my sleep. Sometimes they crept into bed and stretched out beside me the way Bad used to, and I woke wet-cheeked and terribly alone.
At other times I would be engulfed instead by righteous rage—How could Locke betray me into this hell? How could I let them hurt Bad? How could my father leave me here, alone?—but eventually rage burns out and leaves nothing but ash, a muted landscape drawn in charcoal gray.
And then on the fifth or sixth (or seventh?) day of my imprisonment, a voice said, “You have a visitor, Miss Scaller. Your uncle came to see you.”
I had my eyes screwed shut, hoping that if I feigned sleep long enough my body would give up and play along. I heard the click of the door, the scrape of a chair. And then a voice drawled, “Good lord, it’s half past ten in the morning. I would make a Sleeping Beauty joke, but it’s only half-true, isn’t it?”
My eyes snapped open and there he was: alabaster-white, cruel-eyed, hands like white-gloved spiders resting on his cane. Havemeyer.
The last time I’d heard his voice, he’d been ordering his men to get rid of the mess that was my dearest friend.
I lunged for him. I’d forgotten that I was despairing, weak, cuffed to my bed; I only knew I wanted to hurt him, bite him, rake my nails down his face—“Now, now, let’s not get excited. I’ll have to call the nurses in, and you’re no good to me drugged and drooling.”
I snarled and twisted against my restraints. He chuckled. “You were always so biddable, so civilized at Locke House. I told Cornelius not to believe it.”
I spat at him. I hadn’t intentionally spit on anyone since Samuel and I were kids holding contests on the lakeshore; it was comforting to see I hadn’t entirely lost my aim.
Havemeyer wiped his cheek with one gloved finger, his amusement turning brittle. “I have some questions for you, Miss Scaller. Cornelius would have us believe this is all blown out of proportion, that you simply eavesdropped on your betters, that you’re distraught over your father, that you’re no threat, really, et cetera, et cetera. I think otherwise.” He leaned forward. “How did you find out about the fractures? Who have you been talking to?”
I bared my teeth at him.
“I see. And how did you get out of your room? Evans was sure he locked you in, and he’s not foolish enough to lie to me.”
My lips curved into a not-smile. It was the kind of expression that makes you think That person is unhinged and Someone should lock them up; I found I didn’t care. “Maybe I cast a magic spell, Mr. Havemeyer. Maybe I’m a ghost.” The smile turned into a lopsided snarl. “I’m mad now, didn’t you hear?”
He tilted his head at me, considering. “That vile dog of yours is dead, in case you were wondering. Evans tossed it in the lake. I would apologize, but someone ought to have done it years ago, if you ask me.”
My body recoiled like a kicked animal. My ribs were shattered shards, pressing into the soft meat of my insides. Bad, Bad, oh Bad—