The Blessings had a plan for that. A “public indignation meeting”12 was scheduled for June 30 in Manteno, intended to rouse the townspeople into helping her en masse. Letters would also be written to the hospital, the governor, lawyers, and judges—anyone they could think of who might be able to set her free. Should all that fail, they had a trump card: they’d apply for a writ of habeas corpus.
Habeas corpus had been a cornerstone of American justice since the time of the Founding Fathers. It provided specifically for “the liberation of those who may be imprisoned without sufficient cause”13 and was of “universal application in cases of unlawful confinement.”14 It guaranteed Elizabeth would be brought before a court for a ruling on whether her incarceration was legal. It sounded like just the ticket.
Elizabeth bade her friends farewell with a newly lightened heart. It is not known if she shared their plan with McFarland—given their blossoming friendship, it’s possible—but he soon received her friends’ letters at any rate.
Curiously, “the gentlemanly Superintendent”15 did not mention them to Elizabeth.
The days and then the weeks passed. June 30 came and went. Elizabeth watched each day for a letter with an update or for a lawyer to come a-calling, but nothing happened. She started to worry. What had happened to the plan? She eventually wrote to the Blessings but received no reply.
Then, on July 13, there was a delivery, but it was not what she’d been waiting for. Into the ward that day came two porters, awkwardly carrying “a monstrous-sized trunk.”16 It had been sent by Theophilus. The other women crowded around, noting its size with shock. Their words echoed her own thoughts: “Is Mr. Packard going to keep his wife here for life?”17
To date, Elizabeth had been wearing the limited array of clothes that Theophilus had packed for her the day he took her to Jacksonville. She had at least three dresses, two petticoats, two pairs of pantaloons, and her shawl and bonnet. This small wardrobe might have inspired hope her stay would be short, but Theophilus had dashed that before his departure, telling her the trunk would be sent on. Now, he’d finally done it.
Was that because the Blessings’ planned public meeting had failed in its mission? Shut off from society, Elizabeth did not know.
As she always tried to, she looked on the bright side. The trunk, to her mind, came not only from her husband but from home: “One ray of comfort gleamed forth…now I shall hear from my dear children.”18
She wanted to savor the moment, after nearly a month apart. She’d already missed Isaac’s sixteenth birthday; George’s seventh was in five days’ time. When McFarland considerately came to see how she was after the trunk’s arrival, she asked to be allowed to unpack it alone, in her room with her door locked. She wanted no disturbances. She wanted this simply to be a silent communion between herself and them. She could almost taste her anticipated joy—sweet as the sugarplums Georgie so adored. McFarland, understanding, locked her in himself.
Elizabeth knelt down on the floor and opened up the trunk.
Her first shock was that it was largely empty, only one-third full. The second was that the clothes her husband had enclosed were not her good ones. She’d specifically asked him to send her black silk dress and white crepe shawl, the ones she wore for church, so she could be decently dressed for chapel prayers at the asylum, but this outfit was notably absent. Elizabeth felt her heart sink as she reviewed the trunk’s contents. She really would look like a madwoman in this eclectic assortment.
She started rifling through the trunk. All the items were “in a state of the most tangled confusion,”19 with her clothes thrown about with rotten lemons and even a large mirror, which had luckily survived its unconventional transportation. She lifted each item out with tender care, unfolding chemises, unrolling stockings to the very ends of their toes, searching every nook and cranny with an archaeologist’s accuracy, not wanting to miss a thing. Because she knew that somewhere in this trunk were the letters from her children. To find them would be “next to finding my child, for his own fingers must have held it and kissed it for his mother.”20 So she handled each lemon, each shawl, each dress, with infinite care, wanting nothing to spoil the moment of discovery, wanting to take no chance of tearing those precious paper gifts.
But no letters did she find. At long last, though she had eked out its evacuation, the trunk stood empty—empty as her heart. She held in her hand just a single scrap of paper. It was from Libby. Yet her daughter’s words brought no comfort, just a sharp, stabbing pain.