A Madness So Discreet

by Mindy McGinnis

  “Oooooh,” Nell said, her eyes popping wide and matching the form of her mouth. “Dr. Thornhollow, eh? I wouldn’t mind letting ’im know me pleasure, if you get the meanin’.”

  “One look at your chart and he’d be disinterested, I’m sure,” Elizabeth said.

  “You leave me chart out of it,” Nell said, eyes narrowing.

  Grace sat up in bed, bringing both girls’ attention back to her. “Sorry, luv,” Nell said, throwing herself onto Grace’s mattress with a huff. “Elizabeth and I, we know each a bit too well. Sometimes we ’ave conversations that get temperamental.”

  “Yes, a bit like sisters, I suppose,” Elizabeth said. “Affection tinged with suffering.”

  “Suffering.” Nell rolled her eyes. “Elizabeth’s a wee bit of a wet blanket. But ye get used to ’er. She’d pass for normal if she didn’t insist ’er string tells ’er all she knows.”

  Grace smiled tentatively at Nell, wondering what had landed her in the asylum. Her black wavy hair flowed freely, setting off a porcelain-white face and eyes that Grace’s mother would’ve said would lead a man to trouble.

  “It is String,” Elizabeth corrected her friend. “Not her string, or my string. Simply String,” she said with a dignity that her friend waved off casually.

  “Aye, it’s got a name all right,” Nell said. “And if ever a string was too big for its britches, it’s that’un.”

  Elizabeth gave up the argument with a wave of her hand and sat by Grace’s head, burying her hands in Grace’s hair and weaving tiny, delicate braids without another word.

  “Don’tcha mind wee Elizabeth,” Nell said, shaking her head. “She gets a bit puckish when you insult String, beings as it tells ’er all she knows. She’s terribly attached to it, though it landed ’er in this ’ere place.”

  “I’d say you’re a bit attached to your own cause of residency,” Elizabeth said.

  “Aye, well.” Nell sighed and reached between her legs suggestively. “There’s no separatin’ me from it, is there?”

  Even though Grace heard Elizabeth sigh in frustration, she could feel repressed laughter running through the other girl’s fingers as she tied off one of Grace’s braids. “There you are,” Elizabeth said, patting her on the head.

  “Enough of this fanciness,” Nell said, raking her hands through Grace’s new braids so that her hair fell wild like Nell’s own. “Janey—she minds our floor of the women’s ward—she said we was to show you the grounds.”

  Grace rose from her bed, eyes searching for the dress she’d worn the night before.

  “We sent your dirty linens down the chute in the hall,” Elizabeth said, pulling Grace to her feet. “Although how you managed to dirty three pairs of underwear in one night is outside my knowing.”

  “Maybe she’s like that Mr. Feiffer over in the men’s ward, can’t ’old his piss,” Nell said.

  “Enough,” Elizabeth said. “We took a guess at your size at the laundry.” She smiled at Grace. “Brought you some fresh things. They’re not particular about how you dress here. If your family sends you something lovely, then you can wear it and no one will fuss at you. But Nell and me, we . . . we . . .”

  “Neither of us got nobody,” Nell said. “None that care fer us, anyway. Why do ye stand there a-starin’ like ye got no sense? Up and over with the shift. We’re the all of us lassies.” Without any further preamble, Nell jerked Grace’s nightgown over her head.

  Grace immediately crossed her arms in front of herself, but Nell and Elizabeth kept up a lively chatter between the two of them while they dressed Grace in the clothes they’d brought her. Nell glanced up at her skeptically while she buttoned Grace’s boots, fingers dexterously looping each button. “Janey said the doctor claims yer bright, but I’m beginning to wonder, meself.”

  Elizabeth slapped her friend’s hand lightly. “You’ve only awakened her, made lewd suggestions, and stripped her in a matter of minutes. If you’ve driven the sense from the girl, there’s no wonder in it.”

  Nell stepped back and took in Grace from head to toe while Elizabeth combed out her hair with her fingers and wrapped it into a bun. “You’ll do,” Nell said. “Though I don’t know about this no-talkin’ business.”

  Elizabeth put her hand on Grace’s elbow. “Can you write?”

  Eager to please the other girls, Grace nodded before considering if Dr. Thornhollow would want her communicating with the other patients at all. But the smile that lit up Elizabeth’s plain face told her she’d made the right answer regardless.

  “We’ll get you a slate then and some chalk. Then you can say whatever you like.”

  “Aye, it’s a fine plan for them’s that can read,” Nell said.

  “I’ll tell you what she says,” Elizabeth said, steering Grace toward the door.

  “And who’s going to keep ye honest?”

  Elizabeth came to a dead halt and stamped a dainty foot so hard Grace jumped in alarm. “Nell O’Kelly, if you’re suggesting that I would tell a falsehood—”

  “Ooooh, a false’ood, is it?” Nell said, throwing her hands in the air. “As long as the first thing the poor vacant dearie ’ere says is tha’ I’m the prettiest girl she’s ever seen, then I know you’re sayin’ it true.” She took Grace by the other elbow and the two of them walked her out into the sunlit hall.

  Grace had escaped Boston under the cover of dark. When the other girls dragged her outdoors into the sunlight she recoiled as if struck, her hands going up to her eyes.

  “Is it your bandages?” Elizabeth asked, misjudging Grace’s pain.

  Grace shook her head, though she kept one hand on each of the girls’ shoulders for her first few steps. She blinked quickly, allowing her eyes time to adjust.

  “’Ave ye got somethin’ wrong with yer ’ead?” Nell asked, peering at Grace’s temple. “On the outside, I mean?”

  “Nell, shush,” Elizabeth said. “There’s no point pestering her with questions she can’t answer without a slate.”

  “True enough,” Nell said, removing Grace’s hand from her shoulder, but not before giving it a squeeze. “I’ll be back, and when I do I’ll be expectin’ ye to write me a fine story.”

  Elizabeth frowned as the other girl disappeared into the towering expanse of the asylum. “She’ll get a slate off one of the boys, no doubt. And I pity him if he takes any more in return than a smile.”

  Grace tucked her hand into Elizabeth’s elbow and raised an eyebrow in question.

  “Nell is a syphilitic,” Elizabeth explained, her mouth forming the word with distaste. Grace looked down at her shoes as they walked across the gravel path, accustoming herself to the unfamiliar pinch of having any to wear. “Don’t think worse of her for it,” Elizabeth added quickly. “She’s not had an easy life—” Elizabeth cocked her head suddenly as if she’d been interrupted. “String says it’s not my place to say more.”

  Grace was happy to take in the grounds in companionable silence. The asylum in Boston had worn a skin as ugly as the heart beating inside of it, the darkness seeping from inside and staining the bricks that contained the mad. But this asylum was beautiful, its bricks an honest red that soaked in the sun’s rays and reflected the heat back onto those inside during the night. Even in the darkness of her room Grace had felt a calm that the building itself seemed to translate into her skin, a tuneless melody that sang her fevered brain into sleep.

  Acres of green grass rolled beneath her feet, and Grace strayed from the gravel path with Elizabeth as a silent shadow. Green leaped at Grace’s eyes, and though the sun had slipped behind a cloud, the healthy colors beat into her pupils like a pulse she’d been separated from too long. The air was so fresh that Grace could feel it cleansing her lungs of the last fetid gasps of Boston air and could only wonder what secrets Falsteed could pull from it.

  The faintest wisps of rose oil leaked out from under her bandages. The itch of healing had settled in, and Grace knew that soon her wrappings could go. Everyone would see her scars then
, but she could wear them with pride here in this new world where the insane wandered freely in their own clothes. The pair crested a hill to see a rippling expanse of water below them and Grace gasped, almost exclaiming out loud to her new friend before she remembered herself.

  “It’s a sight, is it not?” Elizabeth said, smiling as if she were responsible for it.

  Grace smiled in return and spotted a man over Elizabeth’s shoulder who had his arms wrapped tightly around a tree. In her current state, she almost felt like hugging one herself. She’d been so long separated from anything except the dark that words wanted to trip out as they piled on top of one another in her throat in their need to proclaim the joy of finally feeling safe.

  “You make good time, fer a pair of idiots.” Nell huffed over the hill, hot spots of exertion on both her cheeks, slate in hand. “I even cut short makin’ eyes at Charlie when I saw ye comin’ fer the lake. You coulda waited,” she chided Elizabeth. “I woulda liked to seen ’er face.”

  “She lit up like a candle,” Elizabeth said, her own eyes glowing. “As does everyone when they see it. String says the power of—”

  “Yer claptrap can go on,” Nell interrupted. “Or we can see what the new lassie has ter say.”

  She handed the slate and a piece of chalk with teeth marks in it over to Grace, who pinched it between her fingers for moment, the well-rounded tip poised inches from the slate.

  “Well,” Nell prodded her. “What ya got ter say?”

  Grace thought for a moment, then she wrote as the breeze pulled the edges of her bandages away from her temples, the faintly bloodied tips flapping around her face. She held up the slate for both girls to read, hoping that her new friends would ignore the sheen of tears over her eyes.

  MY NAME IS GRACE

  SIXTEEN

  She did not see the doctor that day, except as a tall, silent shadow that stalked the grounds with others in attendance as they pointed to patients scattered across the grounds. He kept his head down, his notebook in his hand, and Grace reminded herself not to let her gaze follow him too often.

  Elizabeth and Nell had stuck by her the entire day, explaining that their duties—Nell’s in the laundry and Elizabeth’s in the kitchen—had been excused so that Grace could be shown around the asylum and grounds.

  “Ye’ve got perfect freedom here, as long as ye be’ave,” Nell had explained. “There’s nae even locks on the bedroom doors.”

  “As long as you behave,” Elizabeth had added archly, raising an eyebrow at Nell, who had smiled wickedly.

  The warmth she’d accrued from the sun in their afternoon walk was escaping her skin now, but Grace could still feel the benefits from it, as if her body had remembered in that short afternoon what it was to be alive.

  The presence of the other girls had its own effect, and Grace felt a smile tugging at her mouth as she remembered Nell unabashedly laying claim to Elizabeth’s dessert that evening as they ate together in the women’s ward. “On account of ye ’aving the wrong color eyes,” she’d mock whispered to Grace, clearly meaning for Elizabeth to overhear. “String didn’t know that, did ’e?”

  Her comment had caused Elizabeth a diatribe of objection to String having any gender at all, to which Grace had listened with half an ear while devouring her dish of strawberries, which Nell had later informed her came fresh from the asylum’s gardens.

  Her hands lay crossed on her belly now, no longer in protection of an unseen presence but in remembrance. Grace closed her eyes not against the world but in an effort to trap it in the moment, so that she could know fully how lucky she was to have come to this place where the kindness of strangers deemed unsuitable for society had filled her day more fully than any ever spent with the higher echelons.

  There had been friends in Boston, girls her own age who were approved for her to spend leisure time with. Walks in gardens and timid conversations that only touched on respectable topics had been all that were allowed them. Grace knew that the horrid truths of her nighttime hours would only seem like garish nightmares to these half-formed shadows of their own mothers who parroted manners and giggled behind their hands when boys’ names were mentioned.

  That she could tell Elizabeth and Nell the truth of her existence without hesitation if she were allowed to speak, Grace knew without a doubt. Their lives were like her own, flavored with the misery of the past, which made the safety of the present all the more sweet. The bonds grown out of shared suffering were strong indeed, and though forged only that afternoon, Grace felt a closeness to them that had never existed with the well-bred friends handpicked in her former life.

  It was easy to shut the doors of her mind on the faces of the past. Grace had done so without hesitation and thrown away the key. But Alice’s voice slipped through the keyhole, echoing into her dreams and bringing with it the image of her little sister’s face, still full with the baby fat of youth and wide, innocent eyes.

  “Grace.” Even her name sounded sweeter in those high, childish tones. “Grace, you haven’t eaten your strawberries,” Alice said, her small pink lips stained with the redness of her own dessert.

  In her dream, Grace lifted her eyes from the pattern of the lace covering on the dining room table, her stomach turning in revulsion at the red fruit in front of her. “I can’t,” she said weakly, her fingertips barely strong enough to push the china away from her as the nausea swept her body.

  “Mother,” Alice said, her thin blond brows creased with worry. “Why does Grace not eat her breakfast anymore?”

  “Grace is not feeling well,” their mother said, a permanent line in between her brows darkening as she rose to stand beside her oldest daughter. “Perhaps you had best go to your tutor alone this morning, Alice. Grace and I need to talk.”

  “We did talk.” Grace seethed, her words tasting like the vomit she tried so hard to keep down. “I told you and told you and YOU WILL NOT LISTEN.” The rage she’d held on to in reality burst forth in her dream, and Alice’s small face collapsed in tears as Grace grabbed her fork and drove it through her mother’s hand. Mother’s blood flowed and her hand turned to a man’s, the silver tines of the fork exposing bone and gristle while Heedson yowled in pain, and Alice’s cheeks hollowed out, the ends of her lovely hair splitting while she shoved handfuls of it into her mouth in an imitation of Cracked Pat.

  “You wouldn’t listen,” Grace cried out, sitting up in her bed and trying to stop the words before they seeped through the walls and betrayed her to her neighbors.

  Though she knew she could share parts of her story if she chose, her slate was small and no words were big enough to encompass her past. Grace wiped at her mouth, almost wanting to spit to rid the aftertaste of the nightmare and the memories that had rushed at her unbidden. It seemed safer to lock it away and leave everything behind along with her last name in the murky darkness of a Boston asylum.

  And it would be so easy if not for Alice, whose sweet face had greeted her every morning and whose tiny fingers had once wound through Grace’s own. The very fingers that might that moment be pressed to red-rimmed eyes as she mourned for a sister dead at the hands of whatever lies her parents had fed her to cover the trail of the ones before.

  Grace flung back her covers, all sleep stolen at the thought of Alice mourning for a death that hadn’t happened. Lies had covered her home for so long that Grace had accepted them as a matter of course, as ever-present as the smell of drink on Mother’s breath and strange perfume on Father’s coat. She’d been born and bred on them, and now she’d turned the tables, using all the tricks and trumperies she’d learned by watching to deliver herself from their web.

  But her escape meant a shield was removed from her little sister. Alice had been born too late to foster anything other than resentment for a ruined figure from their mother and grumblings about another wedding to pay for from their father, but those words had never found her delicate ears. Grace hovered near her always, drawing the angry glares herself, and suggesting outdoor activi
ties when the barely restrained arguments seeped through closed doors.

  Grace reached through the decorative iron grille on her widow to trace her fingertips along the glass, now cool with the night air. She wondered if Alice sat at her own window, or if Falsteed thought of her behind his bars.

  “Miss Madeleine Baxter,” Grace said softly to herself, remembering the false name Falsteed had told her to write to Reed under. A smile formed as a mockingbird sang on the lawn, echoing the gibberish of the inmates he’d encountered that day.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if Miss Madeleine Baxter has a little sister,” she said.

  Falsteed—

  I hardly know what to call you. Mister? Doctor? Friend? Fiend?

  Dr. Thornhollow has told me of your past, but how can I find fault with your deeds when without them our paths would never have crossed? If you are mad then I owe my life to a madman, and he is no less dear to me for his actions. Truly evil people do exist, this I know, but I do not count you among them. Instead, I choose to see you as a good person who has done bad things, and who among us cannot be dubbed so?

  Somehow you smelled out the dark origins of my incarceration. Perhaps you also smelled mixed with my own scent a lighter one. So much time was spent holding this one close to me that I would not be surprised to learn that her smell clung to my skin, even in the darkness. As we are, after all, one flesh.

  She is my sister, a small, lovely creature who I shielded daily from the secrets in our shared home. That the pall of our parents’ lies should descend upon her now, I can hardly bear. I know what it is to live in that house. Even before the worst, life there was bearable only because I had her to coddle and protect. She must have some comfort, for she is surrounded by anger and deception. I recognize the danger in correspondence, but fear more the results should I not take some action.

  Though she sheds her childhood now, once there was an imaginary friend she held dear, who she claimed would meet her in the gardens and leave small presents on a certain rock. That I was the bearer of these, you no doubt realize, and I would be that again. A carefully worded letter from the same friend need not be associated with me. If Reed would endeavor to be the bearer, I can tell him of a hole in the fence surrounding the house, long hidden by ivy. If ever I find myself in a position to repay both you and Reed, it will be done tenfold.