The crowds surged forward without any formal order, the people pressing around her. Yet their cries of congratulation, rejoicing “to have the truth known,”11 were drowned out by the continuing applause and scattered shouts of sheer joy.
Elizabeth stood, stunned, in the middle of the melee. There could have been so many emotions: relief, vindication, happiness—even grief or anger at the long lost years.
But when she described it later, she used just two words. In her heart, when she first heard the verdict, she said she felt simply a “grateful joy.”12
It was some time before the crowds could be quieted. The applause for the verdict rang on and on, sheriff and judge both powerless to stop it. When at last order was restored, Elizabeth’s counsel rose and asked Judge Starr that she be formally discharged. Starr agreed, instructing his clerk to enter the following in the official record:
It is hereby ordered that Mrs. Elizabeth P. W. Packard be relieved of all restraint incompatible with her condition as a sane woman.13
Starr signed the order, and justice was done.
Elizabeth’s thoughts turned at once to her children. No longer could their father teach them she was mad; the court had decreed she wasn’t. No longer could he tell them not to heed her; she would be able to love them any way she wished. She wanted to see them straight away, to return home to her green-shuttered house and look in on them sleeping soundly in their beds, little knowing their family drama was finally at an end. Her arms almost ached to hold them again. Thanking her counsel, she turned at once to leave, the freedom she’d just been given meaning she could go.
But before she’d even gotten out of the courtroom, she was handed a letter. She blinked down at it, surprised. Curious, she tore it open.
It was from her husband. Her husband, who’d received a warning on Saturday evening not to trust himself on the cars, who’d been told that plots against him had been overheard and his life was under threat. In consequence, as McFarland put it, “His troubles…unmanned him, and he could not brave the danger.”14
He’d planned to run away that very same night.
In the letter, he told Elizabeth he’d gone.
And he’d taken the children with him.
Elizabeth did not want to believe it. She could not. She summoned her friends, and they left immediately for Manteno. Theophilus had been at court only days ago; surely he could not have packed up a whole house in that time and organized this sudden flight?
The horses ran swiftly across the snowy landscape, hooves scuffing up dirty snow. They raced under an inky sky, dark as her fearful heart, the stars above single pinpricks of hope that she might return to find the house exactly as she’d left it.
But when she arrived, those hopes blinked out, black holes of hopelessness replacing them. Because her banging on the door brought only an unknown man to answer it: a Mr. Wood, who said he’d rented the house from her husband. As Elizabeth burst inside, the property was unrecognizable. This was not her home. The familiar pea-green closet, the embroidered ottoman, the maple bedstead…all were gone. Every piece of furniture she’d ever owned had been ripped out of her home and had vanished.
But worst of all, there were no children.
No children. No children. No children.
She felt “death agonies”15 that ripped her “soul and body asunder.”16 The searing pain felt like a “living death of hopeless bereavement.”17
“I want to live with my dear children, whom I have borne and nursed, reared and educated,” she thought desperately. “I love them…and no place is home to me in this wide world without them.”18
But as Elizabeth was ushered out of her former home, taken back to the house of her friends the Hanfords, she realized she now had no home at all.
“I am thrown adrift,” she thought numbly, “at [forty-seven] years of age, upon the cold world, with no place on earth I can call home.”19
She had been deemed sane. She was innocent of any crime. Yet regardless, she had been robbed of everything she held most dear. She was now homeless. Penniless. Childless. All she had to her name were the clothes she stood up in and a manuscript she’d been repeatedly told would never see the light of day.
Her victory in court should have been the end of it. But it turned out Elizabeth had only won the battle. Like the Civil War that still raged on that very same night, her long-term fight was far from over.
And there were campaigns ahead that even Elizabeth could not then conceive of.
CHAPTER 46
According to his letter, Theophilus Packard had moved to Massachusetts. The note itself was likely given to avoid charges of desertion; he kept certified copies that he showed to anyone who accused him of neglect. He hadn’t deserted her; he’d extended an invitation to follow him—“with the promise,” Elizabeth read bitterly, “that he would provide me a suitable home.”1