Hearing her seemingly amorous words read aloud, the whole room “silent and attentive,”22 Elizabeth felt her feelings “writhe.”23 She knew exactly how society would react to her letter. No one would think it a spiritual offering, as she herself saw it, nor acknowledge the fact that it was really a promise for the afterlife as yet unlived. No one would understand the desperate situation she’d been in: denied release by the trustees, believing her book to be the only way out and McFarland the only man to help her. “The most abusive weapon which Dr. McFarland has used against me,” she realized bleakly, “is one which I myself put into his own hands.”24
When she could bring herself to look up, shock and scandalized disapproval were written all over the faces of everyone in the room. Where before there had been admiring glances, impressed by her lucid arguments and unsurpassed intellect, now people would not meet her eye.
Yet there was nothing she could do about it. McFarland had fired his weapon, and her own bullets were striking at her body, a body people now saw in an entirely different light.
“It must be a sacred, profound secret between us, trusted entirely to your honor,” Fuller was saying. “Yours in the best of bonds, Elizabeth.”25
A heavy silence met the final pant of her name, itself already seeming far more sensual. With disquiet, Fuller laid the letter in the file of evidence. He seemed not to know what to say. On first reading, the letter appeared to the committee to be “a brazen offer of marriage by a married lady to a married man.”26 Fuller could choose to take it two ways, neither of which was especially appealing: it was either “the production of a diseased and disordered intellect, or a degrading invitation…of illicit intercourse.”27
He had not known Elizabeth Packard to be such a woman.
Then again, he had not thought her mad.
But with this letter, surely, she must be one or the other?
Thoughts were flying fast through Elizabeth’s mind, none of which she could articulate. She could not say that McFarland producing this letter, which undermined her credibility, was no substitute for the doctor defending himself on the serious charges he was facing. Where really he should have been on the back foot, providing excuses for his own behavior, he had instead gone on the attack, pointing the finger at her when all she’d done was point out his own failings. As a friend of hers later put it, “[It] proves the doctor to be very severely straitened for self-defence, or he would not have resorted to such a straw to save himself from drowning.”28
But Elizabeth felt as if she was the one who was drowning now. McFarland knew, he knew, that her character was stainless, yet he’d still launched this “most cruel and wanton attack…upon my moral character.”29 But without her character, where was she? Who was she? It had been hard enough to claw back a place in society with the stigma of insanity haunting her, but her efforts now would be that much harder—if not altogether impossible. Because this letter, to the wider world, meant that she was either mad or bad.
Either way, not a woman society should listen to.
Either way, not a woman who should be given the care of her own children.
Her every dream, every hope, every reason for living hung in the balance.
And it was the doctor who had hung her out to dry.
He’d acted “in defiance of every principle of manly honor, decency, and integrity,”30 she raged silently in her head. Despite everything she’d already been through at his hands, she still felt betrayed. “I have done all I knew how to do to raise this man, from the low level of selfish policy to the higher platform of Christian principle, but all in vain,” she later wrote. “I am [now] forced into the unwelcome conviction that he is a most unprincipled man, and on this ground is unworthy of confidence as a man. And much less as a public servant… I [therefore] leave him with his own worst enemy—I leave him with himself.”31
But these were fighting words she found long after the event. In the fading light of that summer’s day, she felt in the twilight of her whole existence. Sunset was coming soon, and with it, the end of everything.
“Mrs. Packard,” Fuller said at last, his words breaking through her reverie, “do you recognize that as your own letter?”32
Elizabeth straightened up. She was still under oath. “I do,” she said assertively and without shame.
“Then you acknowledge it as yours?” the general asked, as though he rather wished she might disown it.
“I do,” she said again. She took a deep breath, her tired brain trying to think of an impromptu explanation, when Fuller interrupted.