by Megan Chance
I heard moaning, someone singing “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!”—just that one line, over and over again, and someone else shouting “Ha! Ha!” and a constant and rhythmic clank clank clank, metal hitting metal, murmured voices. We passed a great room where women wearing gray, shift-like gowns gathered on settees and chairs, another with long tables and benches, and then a line of closed doors. Nurses passed with only a cursory glance at me. The combined smells of urine, sweat, unwashed bodies, and carbolic soap stank so unpleasantly that I wanted to pinch shut my nose.
At one of the doors, the chestnut-haired woman paused and knocked. At the grunted answer from beyond, she ushered us into an office before a ruddy-faced man with light brown hair. He was in his shirtsleeves. His eyes were small; when he peered at me I had the impression of shortsightedness, proved correct when he took up his glasses and settled them on the bridge of a bulbous nose.
“Miss Kimble is it?” His brief smile raised my hopes that here was someone who might listen to me. “Welcome to Blessington.”
The man who’d brought me took a sheaf of folded papers from his suitcoat pocket. He handed them to the man at the desk. “I believe everything is in order, Dr. Madison.”
“Hmm.” Dr. Madison barely glanced at the papers before he set them aside and looked again at me. “Do you know who you are?”
“May Kimble,” I said without hesitation.
“Where are you from?”
“Originally from New York. But I’ve been in San Francisco for some months now, living with my relatives.” Now was my chance. Surely he would see by my answers that I was not the least insane.
“The Sullivans.”
I nodded. “I don’t belong here. I’ve been most grievously betrayed.”
“I’m told that you suffer from dementia, Miss Kimble, and that you pushed your aunt down the stairs.”
“I don’t know who told you that—”
“Your mother suffered from dementia as well, did she not? And your aunt?”
I struggled to answer carefully and calmly. “My aunt suffered from laudanum. My—”
“You came to San Francisco to serve as a companion to your cousin?”
“A companion?”
“Was that not your understanding?”
“I’ve never heard such a thing. I was to be one of the family, as my mother had just died. I did not know that I’d inherited a fortune from my father. That was kept from me. Deliberately. This is all a cruel plan to relieve me of my inheritance.”
He’d been listening politely, but now his eyes glazed. “Of course.” To the two who’d brought me, he said, “Thank you. You may leave her to me and to Mrs. Donaghan. Tell Mr. Sullivan that everything is as expected.”
The two left. The chestnut-haired woman closed the door behind them. I was glad they were gone. I said, “I don’t belong here. You must see that. I didn’t kill my aunt. They want my money. They’re lying about everything. Please, Doctor.”
He tapped the papers my captor had given him. “We’ll take good care of you here, Miss Kimble. You’ve been lucky that your uncle cares so greatly for you. Otherwise, you might be in police custody even now, and then . . . who can say what might happen to you?”
Anxiously, I said, “I had nothing to do with my aunt’s death. They’ve planned all this from the start. They want my money. Please. You must believe me.” That was sympathy in the doctor’s eyes, wasn’t it? It moved me to greater urgency. “If you allow me to speak to a lawyer, it will all be made clear.”
He smiled and rose. “Let’s not think of that just now, shall we? Now, we must focus on making you well.” He gestured to the woman waiting. “This is Blessington’s matron, Mrs. Donaghan. She will show you to your room.”
Mrs. Donaghan touched my arm. “Come along now, Miss Kimble.”
“Dr. Madison, please. You can’t think I belong here. My father was of New York society. My uncle knows—”
“Miss Kimble,” ordered the matron.
“Go with Mrs. Donaghan, Miss Kimble,” the doctor advised.
“No!” I pulled away from the matron. “No. I tell you, I don’t belong here! They’re lying about everything!”
Mrs. Donaghan exhaled heavily. “Miss Kimble, ’tis best if you come along nicely.”
I tried to calm myself. “I am not insane.”
“Of course you’re not,” said Mrs. Donaghan soothingly, and though I heard the condescension in it, and knew I was being placated, I was so desperate for someone to believe me that I grasped at her words. “But we’ll talk about that later, miss. You come along now.”
“I don’t want to go.” I knew I sounded like a child. I couldn’t help it.
“Must I call the attendants?” Dr. Madison asked.
Mrs. Donaghan looked at me. “Well, Miss Kimble? What will it be?”
I heard the steel in her voice, and I saw the determination in Dr. Madison’s expression, and there seemed to be no other choice. I was not helping my case. No doubt I looked as mad as my uncle had claimed. “I’ll go.”
Mrs. Donaghan became brightly cheerful again. “That’s the way. You’ll get along just fine, miss. I can tell. I can always tell.”
It would be all right. I could manage a night here. I had not slept for nearly two days. I was exhausted and weepy. Tomorrow, I would start the battle again, well rested. A night would not kill me.
She led me down the hall, and motioned for me to precede her up dark painted stairs. On the next floor, she said, “To your right, dearie.” The dimly lit hall ended at a dormitory with at least ten beds, most of them holding women in various states of undress. Some stared blankly into space. One stared out the barred window. One woman banged her head against the wall. Another sobbed helplessly. Still another sat on the floor, shouting, “Look out! Look out, I tell you!”
A woman sitting on her bed, braiding her hair into a dozen tiny braids, drawled, “Shut up, Millie.”
Millie snapped back, “They’ll take you first, you stupid whore!” and then spat on the carpet, which was muddied and frayed and curling at the edges, before she launched back into her shouting.
I stepped back. Mrs. Donaghan pushed me forward. The stench made me gag: stale urine, damp and mildew, the stinking rot of fabric, and again unwashed skin and hair, a miasma of close breath and sweat. The floor sucked at the soles of my boots.
“Wait—” I clutched at the doorframe. “This isn’t . . . this is not . . . You can’t mean to put me in here?”
The nurse, a large woman with green eyes, who sat at a small table by the door, looked up from her cards and laughed. “Oh no, missy, we got a nice plush room for you down the hall. All the a-coot-trah-mints.”
“Be kind, O’Rourke,” said Mrs. Donaghan mildly. “How are things today?”
“Not bad.” She nodded toward the woman on the floor. “Millie shut up for an hour.”
“Ah, that’s good.”
“But Costa’s late again. She was supposed to be up here ten minutes ago.”
“I’ll find her as soon as I get this one settled,” Mrs. Donaghan said. “This is May Kimble. Dementia. Murdered her aunt.”
“What? No!” I burst out.
They both ignored me.
Just then, a petite, dark-eyed nurse came hurrying into the room, smoothing her skirt and plumping her dark hair.
“You’re late, Nurse Costa,” Mrs. Donaghan warned.
“There was a fight in the toilet. We need to have another discussion about the Third Ward.” The newcomer narrowed her eyes at me. “Who’s this?”
“May Kimble. Dementia and murder,” O’Rourke said casually. Then, to Mrs. Donaghan, “Eight is open.”
Mrs. Donaghan frowned at Costa, but said nothing more about her late arrival. The matron led me to one of the beds in two parallel rows. This one—not mine, I would not believe it—was against the far wall, between two others, and some distance from the window, so the stink of perpetual damp gathered with that of everything else.
/> “Here you go, Miss Kimble,” she said, not unkindly. She turned to go.
I grabbed at her. “You can’t leave me here.” They were all looking at me. The woman on the floor spat again on the carpet and picked at her teeth. The stench dizzied with its foulness. “You don’t know who I am. I’m a . . . a—” What was my father’s name? “I don’t belong here—”
“So you’ve said.” Mrs. Donaghan gently unpried my hands from her arm.
“Please. Any other place. Please.”
“Now, dearie, I don’t want to have to strap you down. Be good, won’t you?”
One of the others laughed. The woman on the floor began to chant, “Strap ’er down, strap ’er down,” and the others started in as well, laughing and cackling, taunting. I backed up against the bed, uncertain, afraid, in the middle of a nightmare from which I couldn’t wake, and Mrs. Donaghan left.
I sat on the edge of the bed. The thin mattress sagged beneath me, and I caught a whiff of it, unwashed sheets, a rank damp I did not want to explore any further.
A woman with loose and tangled red hair crawled to the grate by a nearly nonexistent fire, huddled into a ball beside it, and began to sob so loudly and brokenly that her entire body shook.
The spitting, cursing woman—Millie—shouted, “What you got to cry about, bitch? I’ll show you what to cry about!”
The nurse at the door kept playing cards.
I understood why that woman curled into a ball because I wanted to do the same, to close my eyes and wish away the last few hours, the last few days. I wanted to take it all back, to pretend I’d never followed Goldie, that I’d never heard my aunt’s warnings, or Dante LaRosa’s, that I hadn’t read my mother’s letter. I take it all back. I want it the way it was. Make it the way it was.
My eyes watered from the stench; I unbuttoned my coat and fumbled in my skirt pocket for my handkerchief. Instead I felt the button from my uncle’s vest. I drew it out, rolling it in my fingers. I wondered how exactly it had come about. An accident? Had she grabbed at him and he tried to save her? Or was it something else? Something else. I pressed the button hard, imprinting it into my fingers, the reminder of my life, of who I was, taking solace from its materiality as I’d once taken solace from my drawings—gone now, in Ellis Farge’s office. No don’t think of that. I had bigger questions now than Ellis and Goldie and what their connection might mean.
A girl came over to me, barely a girl, skeletal, with dark hair so tightly braided it slanted her brown eyes. She stood too close, her shapeless gray skirt brushing mine. “Pretty,” she said, plucking at the jet trim on my coat. Then, “Pretty,” again, plucking harder. “Pretty.” Digging her nails beneath it, trying to rip it loose. I slapped away her hand instinctively. The button fell onto the mattress.
She grabbed her hand in shock, then screamed. “She hit me! She hit me!”
Nurse Costa moved more quickly than I expected. She was stronger than she looked too; she pushed the girl away and then twisted my arm hard enough to bring tears. “That’s not how we play here.” She released me when she caught sight of the button. “What’s this? Gold, is it?”
“It’s mine,” I managed.
Costa ignored that, picked up the button and dropped it into her apron pocket. “Go on now. Keep your hands to yourself.”
She bustled away.
Again, the woman on the floor spat. She shouted, “Look out! Strap ’er down! Look out!” over and over again until some of the others began to throw pillows and shoes at her. She ignored them all, and soon there was a pile of things scattered about the floor. Nurse Costa kept playing cards. The woman near the fire only rocked and moaned, and another woman cawed like a crow at irregular intervals, each time making me jump.
I could not stay here. I could not spend another moment here.
But then another nurse came in—long-faced Gould. She was not unpleasant, like Costa, but wearily efficient as she divested me of my clothing. She had obviously done this many times before. She took my burgundy skirt and striped waist, my yellow ribboned combination, stripping me in front of the others before giving me a coarse, stinking nightgown. Prior to bed, I was told to use the toilet, which was so incredibly loathsome that I could not bear to stay longer than it took to relieve myself. The room was airless, the only window high and painted shut. The floorboards warped from frequent flooding but not frequent cleaning.
“You’ll get used to it,” Gould told me in a tired voice, but her expression made me doubt it.
The nurses made the rounds with a bitter-tasting sleeping draught. I was going to refuse it until I thought it might be better to be drugged into an oblivious sleep, and I swallowed it without argument.
The medicine made me feel drunk and stupid, but at least then I cared nothing about the condition of the bed and the sheets. They didn’t turn off the light, and I had to bury my face in the ill-smelling pillow, and the noise continued, not just in this room, but from every corner of the asylum. It reverberated through the walls, rumbled through the floor. How could one sleep with such restless noise, such a burning light?
But despite all that, I must have, because at one point I was shaken brutally awake. I blinked and stared blearily up into a face that was inches from mine, a grimacing, distorted face—the red-haired woman who’d been sobbing by the fire.
“Get out,” she snapped. “You’re in my bed.”
I could not make my thoughts cohere.
“You’re in my bed! Get out of my bed!”
“Calm down, Josie,” said the nurse wearily from what sounded like a far distance.
But then Josie’s hands were around my throat, squeezing, strangling. I tried to pry them loose, but I was drugged and she was preternaturally strong. I could make no sound. I could not shove her off. I kicked and flailed and she did not budge and I could not breathe. The room began to go black around the edges.
I heard a snap! then a scream. Suddenly the vise around my throat was gone, and Josie was cowering, the nurse beating viciously upon her head and shoulders with a leather strap. Josie put up her hands to ward off the blows, whining, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. I won’t—”
Another blow smacked against Josie’s lower back. She screamed and rolled on the floor. Other patients murmured and twisted in their beds. Costa blew a whistle, and minutes later Gould and O’Rourke came in, looking resigned.
“Looks like it’s the hoses for you again,” sighed O’Rourke as they plucked Josie off the floor—literally plucked her, as if she weighed nothing, when I’d been unable to budge her. The bruises on my throat burned.
“Go back to sleep now, all of you,” ordered Costa as they took a whimpering Josie out.
No, none of this could be real. I hugged myself, trying to still my shaking. I was not here.
But I could not make myself believe that, and even the chloral could not help me find my way out of this nightmare.
Josie was brought back hours later, soaking wet and shivering. They strapped her to the bed, where she keened softly until the relentless ringing of bells at five thirty, when the world outside was only a swampy miasma of dark.
I was groggy and stupid. There was no dawn here. There would never be dawn. We were yanked to our feet, the beds stripped of their filthy sheets so we could not crawl back in between them. We were given shapeless gray dresses to wear, not much different than our nightgowns. By then I was so used to the fetor that I could not tell if they too reeked, but I recoiled at obviously stained underwear until the nurse—one I hadn’t seen before, whom the others called Findley, shrugged and said, “Dr. Madison won’t like that,” and called to the other nurse to make a note in my file. I could not afford for the doctor to think poorly of me. I relented with gritted teeth.
I went with the others downstairs, to the room with the long tables I’d seen on my arrival. They and the benches flanking them were scarred, but there were pictures on the wall, framed paintings of peaceful landscapes and placid waters. No one spok
e. The silence was punctuated only by the clank of spoons on bowls of lumpy, tasteless oatmeal, and the shuffling of inmates being led in and out.
The bells rang again. Gould, who, besides her long face was skinny and pale, with ropy arms, took me to my examination. “Dr. Scopes for you today.”
“Who’s Dr. Scopes?”
“The assistant to the super.” Then she offered a helpful “He likes for you to be nice.”
My spirits rose at the thought of someone different. Someone who might understand. She took me to an office with only an examination table and sparsely filled bookshelves. Dr. Scopes was younger than Dr. Madison, bearded and handsome, with tired and compassionate blue eyes.
I sat on the edge of the table as he glanced over a folder. “May Kimble,” he read, and then said, as if he’d asked the question thousands of times, “Can you tell me why you’re here, Miss Kimble?”
How exactly did one sound sane? I drew myself up straight and answered him plainly. “The reason I was sent here are lies, Dr. Scopes.”
He inhaled deeply. “I see.”
The wrong thing, then. I tried again. “That is, my uncle believes I am mad, but I can assure you that is not the case. I have been wrongly accused of murder.”
He scrawled something.
“I have an inheritance. I believe my uncle had me committed so that he might take it for himself.”
“What has that to do with murder, Miss Kimble?”
“My aunt tried to warn me. I believe my uncle killed her for it.” I spoke urgently, taking his questions as interest, an opportunity.
But Dr. Scopes’s expression did not change; he only set the open folder on a nearby desk. His hands moved over my face, my jaw, brushed the bruises on my throat above my collar. When I flinched, he said, “Nurse Costa says that you got into a fight with another patient last night. Are these bruises from then?”
