With the decision postponed, there was nothing more for Elizabeth to do that day. At this juncture, with her return to the ward imminent, McFarland would usually have summoned a burly porter to transport her to her room, knowing she would refuse to walk there. But on this day, he chose not to.
He carried her back to the ward himself.
Elizabeth felt herself pressed against the doctor’s chest, her body secure within his firm embrace. “I am satisfied and gratified, both,” she thought. “There could not have been a more complete victory. My case is now known to [the trustees] to be one of persecution for opinion’s sake. Not one of them believes me to be an insane person. They know I am not.”42
She was carried carefully through the long corridors. McFarland’s arms around her felt like a hammock and not a cage: something to support her, not confine her. Because it was true, what she’d said in the meeting: she did now trust him. And she knew from what had happened that day—from all that had happened, which had not yet been revealed—that she was right to.
Outside the asylum, the moon waited patiently below the blue summer sky to rise. Yet despite its invisibility, its influence could still be felt. It tugged at the world with inconspicuous strings, which were no less powerful for that.
“The tide has turned,”43 Elizabeth thought triumphantly. And she knew, in her heart, that she had been the one to turn it.
Because downstairs in the room, before the board, McFarland himself had recommended her release. “I proposed to the Board of Trustees,” he revealed, “to discharge her.”44
After all this time, Elizabeth and her doctor were finally fighting on the same side in their age-old war.
CHAPTER 27
The following day, the doctor called on her for a debriefing.
“Well, Mrs. Packard,” he said, “the Trustees thought you hit the mark.”1
Elizabeth smiled. “I see none of them believe me to be an insane person, after all.”
McFarland, like her, was all grin. “Mrs. Packard,” he said, “won’t you give me a copy of that document [you wrote]?” He seemed very keen on the idea. “What is worth hearing once, is worth hearing twice.”
Elizabeth felt gratified by his interest. “Yes, Doctor,” she said, enthused. “I am perfectly willing to do so, for I should like you to have a copy, and the Trustees also.”
It seemed to Elizabeth that these two documents she’d prepared for the trustees might now take the place of those precious Bible class essays she’d long ago lost. What better way to assert her sanity and prove to all that she was kept here under false allegations? She wanted them to have as wide a circulation as possible.
“But,” she said to the doctor, seeing a flaw in the plan, “it is very irksome for me to copy [by hand]. How would it do to get a few printed in handbill form?”
The doctor nodded his agreement and even offered to pay the printer. “You re-write it,” he encouraged, “and add to it…and I will see that it is done.” He added with special emphasis, “Write what you please!”2
“Well done, for Dr. McFarland!” Elizabeth cried, bowled over by his support. “If you are going to give me such liberty, I shall feel that I am a free woman; and this may possibly prepare the way for my liberation.”3
Because it seemed to her that these documents could prove paper stepping-stones: “to liberty—to darling children—to home—to life itself.”4
True to his word, McFarland provided her with a plentiful supply of paper. Elizabeth got straight to work that same day, preparing her documents for the press.
But a strange thing happened as she sat in her private room, with a huge stack of paper piled up beside her and her mind at last given the freedom to express itself howsoever it wished.
Elizabeth had a vision. A writer’s vision. A vision of a big book.
Because how could these few pages do true justice to her story and all the implications it had for her country? “It seems to me self-evident,” she later wrote, “that this Great Drama is a woman’s rights struggle. From the commencement…this one insane idea seems to be the backbone of the rebellion: A married woman has no rights which her husband is bound to respect.”5 She needed to set out that she did have a right to think for herself and explain her own personal background, yet she also wanted her story to highlight that she was not the only one this had happened to. Her “hitherto prison-bound intellect”6 rapidly expanded as her pen lay idle in her hand, thoughts and theories and missions taking flight. “The subject so opened before my mind,” she later said, “that I could not find a stopping place.”7