As she forced down each dry mouthful, she wondered what her husband was eating that night as he dined at the doctors’ table. It was renowned statewide for its magnificent meals, at which were served “all the viands, dainties and luxuries of the season.”18
Not long after she’d been shown to her room, a bell began to toll. Elizabeth listened to its mournful song. It came as a full peal at first, incongruently joyful, before morphing into a steady, somber sound that kept pace with her breaking heart.
By the time it reached its very last stroke, all the lights in the asylum were out.
Curfew had been called.
Elizabeth pushed her food aside. She swung her legs up onto the uncomfortable settee. There was no pillow. She bent her weary head to her folded hands instead and lay as though in prayer.
It was dark in the small room, light filtering fitfully through the barred window. In the sudden stillness after the silenced bell, she had thought, at first, there was quiet.
But there is no such thing in an asylum.
Gradually, “unearthly sounds”19 reached her ears. Cries and calls, screams and songs, uncanny laughter and a torrent of tears. The unsettled soundtrack of the troubled souls who lived within these walls.
Despite that chorus lifting all around her, rising from the floors below, Elizabeth had never felt so lonely. In this private room, she heard only her own breaths. She wasn’t used to sleeping alone. Even after her husband had left her bed, her children had taken his place. A fever had recently afflicted the three youngest, so they’d all needed nursing through the night. Where were her children’s bodies now, their sweet, snuffling sighs? Where was her darling Georgie boy, his tiny torso curved against hers, safe and sound and snug?
After eighteen years of mothering, Elizabeth was suddenly on her own again, but it wasn’t like before. It felt as though something was missing, those “dear fragments”20 of herself now as much a part of her as toes or fingers. She didn’t know who she was without her children. So her mind was filled with them, even as her bed was empty. Who was putting them to bed tonight? Who would comfort them when they cried?
She tossed and turned, question curling after question, but no answers came to ease the ache. She felt their absence almost as a phantom presence, yet soon even the imprint of their ghosts was gone, chased away by chattering cries.
Then, she was haunted only by madwomen, their voices rising through barred windows, carried to her on the hot night air.
CHAPTER 6
She stirred from sleep at the tolling of the bell. Despite all her worries, in the end, Elizabeth had slept. As the morning bell reached a crescendo, she reached for her watch: 4:05 a.m. Time to rise into this new world.
The night before, she’d begged of Mrs. De La Hay a bowl of cold water and a towel so she could at least take her sponge bath as usual. The familiar routine was reassuring. Carefully, she combed through her dark hair with the accoutrements she’d brought from home, angling her small mirror to see herself.
Her dark-brown eyes looked levelly back at her. Elizabeth Packard had not given up yet. She truly believed “submission is no virtue.”1 Another day, another chance to show that she was sane. Because she knew this whole enterprise was simply her husband’s attempt “to secure her subjection.”2 With typically shrewd insight, she wrote, “That class of men who wish to rule woman, seem intent on destroying her reason.”3
But Elizabeth’s reason was not destroyed yet. Though she didn’t quite know how she would do it, she intended to accompany Theophilus back to Manteno, to return to her children as soon as she could.
At 5:30 a.m., a two-minute peal of the ever-present bell brought an attendant to her door.
Breakfast was served.
Elizabeth ventured out into the hundred-foot-long corridor that ran through the center of the ward. It was almost fourteen feet wide, its walls hung with a smattering of attractive engravings. Several doors branched off it to dormitories and private sleeping rooms. Although the hospital’s original design had included parlors for the patients’ relaxation, overcrowding meant these had long ago been converted into sleeping quarters too. Approximately twenty-eight patients were allocated to each of the asylum’s eight wards. Elizabeth could hear the low, murmuring voices of the women of Seventh Ward as she walked toward the dining hall.
A ladies’ ward at the Illinois State Hospital
At each step, a noxious smell infiltrated her every breath; the ward’s water closets were separated from the other apartments by only a single door, and the pungent odor of the waste of so many patients was omnipresent. Though Elizabeth did not know it, the smell was particularly toxic at that time. A devastatingly bad summer drought meant there was insufficient water to flush away the sewage. The resulting stink made the ward “almost uninhabitable from this source of offense.”4 But Elizabeth just had to endure it and try to breathe through her mouth instead.