“You won’t,” she said firmly before I could even complete the thought.
I saw in her eyes that she was dead serious. Even if I undertook this at her behest, she wouldn’t speak up for me if I were caught. She’d pretend to never have met me if she could get away with it. Loyalty was not in her blood, and I needed to account for that. Nora was who she was.
So I asked, “Why do you need the soap?”
“You’ll thank me when you know. For now, the less you know, the better.”
“Nora, I need to—”
“You don’t,” she said, snapping the words off short. “Stop asking questions. You came here on purpose like a fool. I keep people around because they’re useful, and if you’re not going to be useful, I won’t keep you around.”
At that, I fell silent.
Wisely or no, I went along with what she’d asked exactly as she’d asked it. The next day, when we laid out a batch of lavender soap, I snuck two bars out with me, one tucked under each armpit. It seemed the safest place. Between my legs, they would have affected my walking, and my bosom was not large enough to form a hiding place. They burned a little, being still warm from the fire, but I could stand it. I was learning a great deal about what I could and could not stand.
Half an hour later, I was sitting next to Nora at the lunch table, and in tones hushed enough to elude those around us, we settled on the details of the transfer. It was Monday, and the cold baths awaited us. When we stripped off our dresses, we would stand next to each other, letting our clothes fall in neighboring heaps. After the baths, frozen and shivering, we would switch places, putting on each other’s dresses. No one would know the difference, but Nora would have the soap, and the transfer would be complete. The matron sometimes observed the baths, and I feared her eagle eyes, but this time, she only watched a few minutes of our humiliation and was gone long before Nora and I effected the switch according to plan.
The next day I spent in silent suspense. I wondered whether I should ask Nora what had happened. She didn’t seem upset or worried, but that meant nothing. Why did she need the soap? For a bribe, to a nurse or attendant? Had she simply wanted it to freshen herself before a rendezvous? Or was it a test, to see if I would do what she asked without question? I was on edge, but she was edgeless, as calm and cool as if the icy water in which we bathed ran in her veins. But I did not ask. If it was a test, my ability to keep silent and carry on might in fact be part of the test. I chose not to show my curiosity.
Two nights later, I was rewarded. After the lights were out and the door was locked, as we lay down to sleep, she whispered, “In your shoe.”
I peered over the edge of my cot in the dark. I could barely see the shoe, but I drew it along the floor close to me and let my fingertips explore inside. Almost instantly, I felt cold metal.
Slipping my hand back up under the sheets, I felt the metal, turning it in my fingers. Mostly it was a straight bar, but on one end, there was a series of jagged teeth, and I couldn’t help but smile when I realized what she’d given me. A key.
“Just like mine,” she said.
I breathed out a word, almost as much to myself as to her. “How?”
“The soap,” she said. “Press a key into soap, and it becomes a perfect mold of the shape. Then you pour in metal at just the right temperature, it firms up, and you break the soap away. I didn’t suppose there’s any way that you would know that. You always were a sheltered creature.”
She spoke with disdain, but for once, I didn’t mind the insult. Out of whatever impulse, she had given me a priceless gift. If it truly was like hers, this key would open any door in the building. I could sneak out of the ward. I could slip back into the records room.
I could find Phoebe.
“Any door?” I asked.
“Any door,” she said. After a long pause, she added, “Just not the gate.”
Of course, I thought to myself, not the gate. Freedom within Goldengrove was not the same as freedom from it.
My fingers gripping the ridged metal of the key, I whispered, “Thank you.” There was no reply. Perhaps Nora had already fallen asleep, or she thought no answer was needed. I knew I owed her more than I could ever repay. I wondered when and how she would ask me to repay it.
Chapter Fourteen
I knew when to ask for help and when to act alone. The next step was mine, though I did as Nora had taught me, with no improvisation. I repeated our feat of sneaking out at night, carefully watching for the change of shifts and making myself as small and silent as a mouse. Smaller. An ant.
If I was caught, there was no telling what the punishment might be. I’d heard harsh tales of women forced to march into the wintry hills until frost froze their faces into masks, but I had to believe that was a story from another asylum. The tellers of tales often grew confused. Bess swore up and down she’d had her teeth pulled by a doctor here named Bellwether, but there was no doctor at Goldengrove by that name, and we could all plainly see that she had a complete set. Over a pot of rendering tallow, I’d been accosted by one of my Polyhymnia colleagues who insisted on showing me the hole in her head that the doctors had drilled to let the demons out. There was no such hole. Regardless of the specifics, I was taking a great risk. But I saw no other way forward. If I didn’t follow this thread, I might as well give up.
I had come too far to give up.
All went smoothly at the beginning. At shift change, I found my way out of the ward and down the long hall to the records room, and my copy of Nora’s key worked as well as the original, turning almost soundlessly in the lock as I let myself in.
Once inside, I paused to let my eyes adjust, but even then, I was nearly blind. Yet it was too risky to use a light. I would have to make do with my other senses, at least until I was far enough away from the door that no light would betray me in the darkened hallway. Moving slowly, reaching my fingertips out ahead of me so I would catch the leading edge of any obstacle, I moved through the dark.
Once I found my way to the cabinets, I tried my best to remember. I closed my eyes, because even though I couldn’t see anything with them open, I found the flat blackness disconcerting. If my eyes were closed, I could at least pretend that I had a choice of whether to see.
I only had six matches. My challenge was to find the file I needed before the last one burned down to my fingers.
The only name I had was the woman’s first name, Natasha, but I knew she was Russian. Her last name would give her away. I had no idea what it started with, only that I would know it when I saw it. It could be Abramov or Zlaty, Dobrev or Denisovich. What would work? Starting at the beginning? The end? The middle? All I knew was I had to work fast and trust to luck to be on my side.
I found her in the Ms: Natasha Maximova.
My fifth match went to studying this file, and my heart raced faster and faster with every word. Diagnosed with mania and melancholy, alternating spells of joy and despair. I knew that rhythm. The admission date was right, not yet two months in the past. No detail here clashed with anything I knew about Phoebe. Perhaps their names had been accidentally switched—their diagnoses were certainly similar—though that would not explain why Natasha herself had claimed to be Phoebe when questioned. I read on, devouring every entry, until I came to the information I most needed. Where was my sister being held?
I found a word in the place I should have found a word, but it was meaningless: MNEMOSYNE.
There was no Mnemosyne Ward. Mnemosyne was not a Muse. I knew that. Knew the floor plan of Goldengrove inside and out. Not just because of the map, which of course I couldn’t vouch for the accuracy of, not knowing its creator, but because I’d been an inmate long enough now to pace every floor to its limit, and I knew their full extent.
I was pondering whether to put the file back—Could I take it with me? Where would I hide it?—when the choice was taken, quickly and terribly, out of my hands.
I didn’t hear the attendant until he was upon me, and by then, it was far too late.
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br /> His fingers wrapped around my wrist, and I yanked away from him instinctively, tumbling hard against the file cabinets with a crash. A sharp drawer handle dug into my upper arm as I slid. He reached for me again and hauled me upward, lifting me off my feet, but I wrenched my body away, heedless of where I might fall. Anything to get away.
He breathed a single word like a prayer in the darkness. “No.”
This time, my skull struck a drawer, and for a moment, all I could see were stars. I fell, blinked, breathed, crawled. His white uniform gleamed out of the darkness, radiating light like an angel’s raiment.
Pages scattered and slipped across the floor, their pale fluttering barely visible in the dark.
Then the attendant was lifting me with big meaty hands, encircling my entire waist with them, so I finally recognized him as a giant, and I thought to myself, Oh yes, Gus then, right before all the dark around me became a deeper dark, and I thought no more.
Flutters and flickers of light broke through. I was in a long hall, the glow of a single lamp only enough to give the suggestion of where we were. The light bobbed, and the shadows shrank, leapt, swirled. We were climbing stairs. I was passing through a doorway, cradled like a child, the giant’s palm cupping my head so it didn’t strike the doorframe. I was in a small room with a large desk and a woman in blue. The matron’s voice said, “Yes. Do what I tell you.” I was in the air again.
I awoke in a different kind of dark. The back of my head was sticky and wet, and if I’d been able to see the fingers I touched it with, I knew I’d see the thick dark-red stain of blood. But there was no light to see by. The room was close but not warm. The air was stale. Nothing moved. Under me was a cot with no mattress, no sheets.
Darkness, then. I could be nowhere else.
There was no way of knowing how long I had been here, nor how long I would be here yet. I understood now what Damaris had meant by Darkness. It was a confinement, a punishment, an abandonment alone. I understood where I was now and why. But I didn’t know for how long. It might be mere hours, or a fortnight, or forever.
I forced myself to explore the limits of my cell. All four walls were India rubber. My father had a pair of waterproof shoes made from the stuff he’d once been gifted in Brazil; he was quite proud of them. I pressed my shoulder into one wall as an experiment. It gave way gently and sprang back, no doubt intended to protect me from doing myself harm. I was not the one I wanted to do harm to. I lowered myself to the floor and flattened both palms against it. Linoleum instead of wood; harder to stain, easier to clean, and more affordable now that it could be made in America. Even lingering over these explorations, repeating them, took only minutes. I found my limits quickly. With a sense of resignation, I fumbled my way back to the bare, hard cot and collapsed upon it.
At some point—who knows how long it had been?—a shapeless flicker of light came from a direction that must have been the door, and then I heard a clink and a thud. Desperate and thrilled, I moved toward the sound and light, but both were gone by the time I’d moved. There was no light again for a long time.
If I had thought the benches torture, Darkness was far worse. I’d been alone with my thoughts on the benches, but at least there had been other people to look at, movement and sound, textures to feel. The dark here was unrelenting. It didn’t matter whether my eyes were open or closed, the sight was the same: nothingness. I pushed on my lids to make white stars pop in the darkness, but they vanished quickly, and the dark was back too soon. I felt dead and buried. I could easily picture my body laid out under the ground, my pale hands reaching up only to find the lid of my own coffin closed against my escape.
I had freed myself from the monotony of the benches and my unsettled nights with reverie, but I wasn’t sure I could do it here. The dark was so dark, my thoughts so fierce and foul.
Still, what choice did I have? I had to try.
I stretched my body out on the cot as if to sleep, its rigid planks unyielding against the back of my injured head. I closed my eyes against the dark, pretending there were sights to shut out, and struggled my way into a better memory.
It took a long time—ghosts of vision kept leaping up behind my eyelids, tricking me into thinking I might see—but once I finally settled in, a long lawn of emerald green opened up to me, and I saw Henry there, outlined in light, and I lost myself in remembering him.
* * *
My first wonderful evening alone with Henry was also the last. We had always met in daylight before, and though I adored every moment of those daytime assignations, there was something special and secret about walking out together in the dark. It felt sacred, illicit, even though I knew my parents had given their blessing. He’d invited me to the opera, saying that his mother was unable to attend, and would I like her ticket? I was terrified my mother would find a way to attend even though there was no ticket for her, but she didn’t kick up a fuss and wished us a pleasant evening, telling Henry exactly what time he was obligated to deliver me home. We would sit in the box with two family friends, but we would make our way there and back together, just us two. I was nearly vibrating with excitement.
I wore an elegant dove-gray gown in silk, my finest, with intricate pearls and beadwork all along the bodice, a bustle perfectly sized to this year’s fashion, and matching elbow-length gloves. Etiquette required the gloves. I burned to remove them and set my bare fingers on Henry’s bare skin, to feel his warmth under my fingertips. Left to our own devices, of course I would want to touch other things of mine against other things of his, but at the opera, fingers to fingers were the best I might hope for. I cursed the gloves roundly but silently.
Yet even with both of us fully clothed and keeping a respectful distance, I could feel the warmth rising off him, and I savored it.
We arrived after Henry’s mother’s friends, an older couple I knew only slightly from church, and they had already taken the front two seats, the best ones. Still, we had a fine view of the stage. My heart quickened when they faced forward and showed no intention of trying to engage us. It was almost as if Henry and I were alone.
The soprano acting the role of La Gioconda was remarkable, of course, and the costumes and staging sumptuous. The Carnival costumes were a riot of color, spangled here and there with gold and silver, and my heart caught in my throat when the young sea captain revealed himself as a banished nobleman, beloved of both La Gioconda and her rival in love, Laura. Even without Henry, it would have been a night worth remembering. But Henry was there. So close. I couldn’t help examining his profile when I should have been looking at the spectacle on stage. I might have lost track of the plot of the opera, though I remember Mother opining that of all the reasons to go to the opera, no one ever worried about the plot.
I stole a look at La Gioconda onstage in her brocade gown, howling to the moon with her tale of woe, and then my gaze slipped back to Henry. I watched Enzo extend his arms and declare his love in a pure, clear tenor, and then I looked at Henry. There was nothing the paper dolls on stage could do that could keep my attention, not anything.
As the third act began, I found that more and more often, when I was looking at Henry, he was looking at me too. The half darkness around us hid nothing. He placed his open palm on my knee, facing up. Barely breathing, I lay my gloved fingers across it. He held my hand loosely, as if it were a bird that might fly away, and the love story unfolding on stage had nothing on the one that unspooled inside my heart. The couple sitting in front of us, only inches away from our knees, had no idea. I savored the feeling even more in secrecy.
And yet we said nothing until it was over. Together at last, Enzo and Laura fled Venice forever, hand in hand, breathless; with a sharp dagger and even sharper nerve, La Gioconda sacrificed herself nobly for the sake of love and virtue. The curtain fell, and we drew our hands apart in order to applaud.
Henry murmured under his breath, “Over too soon,” and then we rose, nodding politely at the other couple, the man settling a heavy shawl over
his wife’s shoulders. Henry thanked them, and they accepted his thanks, everyone the picture of politeness. Then Henry and I followed the rest of the audience toward the exits, dragging our feet all the way. We did not touch.
As we rode back in the carriage, I faced him and couldn’t keep the grin off my foolish face. He patted the seat next to him, and I lurched over, graceless in my rush, and plopped onto the seat. He seemed undisturbed by my lack of elegance.
“Did you enjoy the opera?”
“I did.”
“I—” He seemed to be searching for words. He reached out and stroked my hand.
I could wait no longer. I withdrew my hand—his brow knitted in consternation, but nothing would halt me—and rolled down my glove, easing the silk off each finger until the whole hand was bare.
I held my hand out again. He grabbed it in both of his. His fingers were warm, even warmer than I’d imagined, and he raised my hand to his lips and gave it the gentlest of kisses, his mouth barely brushing my skin. A shiver ran through my entire body, tingling up my arms and down my legs until my very toes twitched with it. Our hands went back to our laps. Mine still tingled.
“Dear Miss Charlotte,” he said. “I’m so glad you were my companion tonight.”
“I couldn’t be gladder.”
“We make a lovely pair.”
I blushed at that but agreed. “We do.”
“That story onstage. . . Did you. . . Would you have wanted it any different?”
“Of course,” I said. “No one wants a tragedy.”
“Tragedy is a matter of perspective, don’t you think? Laura and Enzo emerge triumphant, together at last, and love wins the day.”
“Yet La Gioconda is the heroine, and it is her sacrifice that the audience applauds.” My mother, I realized, would have been thrilled with La Gioconda’s decision to choose family duty over love. I looked forward to sharing this insight with Phoebe. It would delight her.
Henry said, “But do you not agree the ending is happy for Laura and Enzo?”
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