Elizabeth, by now, was a sister of sorts too.
So when Mrs. Hosmer noticed her eagerly scouring the sewing room for writing materials, she turned a blind eye to her illicit scavenging. In this way, Elizabeth successfully snuck tissue paper, brown paper, and even scraps of cotton cloth back to her ward. These foraged crumbs joined the torn bits of newspaper to form the blank canvas of her journal.
Mrs. Hosmer was more than happy to support her small insurgency. By that point, she considered McFarland “a man who has no higher aim than his own selfish ambition”;6 she believed he’d been corrupted by “uninterrupted power.”7 She’d been directress of the sewing room for two and a half years by December 1860 and was increasingly disillusioned with the job. In whispered words, she and Elizabeth shared their mutual concerns about the hospital. “The Doctor is a villain,”8 declared Mrs. Hosmer flatly. She told Elizabeth she could “tell facts of his treatment of patients here”9 that would make her “flesh creep to hear the recital of.”10 Elizabeth, naturally, asked to hear more.
Back on the ward, the spy had to find a hiding place for her treasures. When Minnie had taken her to the trunk room, one of the items she’d brought back had been her traveling bonnet. Now, fingers fiddling, she managed to hide the journal between the millinet crown and the outside covering of the hat. “I encircled this crown with so many thicknesses of paper,” she recalled, “that it sometimes caused the exclamation, ‘How heavy this bonnet is!’”11
But no one ever thought to look inside to find out why.
The days passed by. The days got colder. Even McFarland acknowledged that “the air in the old wings is with difficulty kept at proper temperature in extreme cold weather”;12 he blamed “the bad construction of the flues in the brick walls.”13 But that didn’t help the patients. Elizabeth shivered as she secretly scrawled, her eyes fixed on the army of skeletal trees outside, now providing not so much shade as a stark reminder that all things end. The newspapers from which she tore her scraps were full of advertisements for “Holidays! Holidays!”14 but Elizabeth had never felt less like celebrating. December 18, 1860, came and went, and with it her baby boy’s second birthday. She should have been at home. She should have been with Arthur. But instead she was here, stuck in this hospital, hundreds of miles away.
She’d had no letters from the children, except that worrying note from Libby in the summer. She wondered sometimes if they’d forgotten her. But, she said, “the mothers don’t forget their children.”15 It was torture to be separated from them, torn from her own flesh and blood, the edges of that wound still red and raw and bleeding.
Yet despite her immense pain, she had only to look around her to see worse. “The evils of this Institution are so momentous and aggravating, that my own private wrongs seem lost, almost, in the aggregate.”16
She turned back to her journal with increased commitment.
After December 20, 1860, the newspapers brought news indeed: South Carolina had seceded from the Union—the first state to make a break for freedom.
It would not be the last.
Although Elizabeth identified with Union interests, that symbolic strike for independence perhaps wove itself into her consciousness.
Because that December, she dreamed…
She dreamed she was high above a river, a rope pulled tight around her waist, a stagecoach at her back. The two were linked: her task to pull the coach across the raging river.
But even as she moved forward, the bridge on which she was walking thinned into a narrow slitwork just four inches wide. She could never pull the coach on that.
Elizabeth halted in her endeavors, tried to find a smart way forward. If she just walked on with the coach still attached, it would inevitably unbalance on the slender beam, dragging both herself and it into the rushing river below.
She seized the rope instead and disentangled herself from her duty.
Though she was now free from the incumbrance of the heavy coach, she was still in mortal peril. She could not go back; the stagecoach blocked her path. Yet the way forward seemed too hazardous, the chance of falling far too great.
Elizabeth cast her eyes about her. Her heart leapt when she noticed a group of men on the opposite shore. They appeared to be readying themselves to save her—gallantly manhandling a rope, discussing with fervor how best to reach her. For a time, she settled down on the thin beam and “trusted my deliverance, with all the trustful confidence of my womanly nature, to the care of manhood.”17