But this was about her book. Her pet, her pride…her self. “This book is dearer to me than my reputation,” she realized. “I felt willing, and do still, to lay down my life for my book.”21
She saw she had only one thing left to offer him.
She could give him her heart. Her heart for her book.
“It is my last—my only hope,”22 she wrote slowly. She regarded the trade “as an act of self-preservation, or a justifiable means of self-defense.”23
But to save her book, to give it life, it would be worth it.
It was a dark exchange, such as one might find in a fairy tale. But as much as she might have wished it differently, Elizabeth was in dark times and they called for the darkest of acts. So Elizabeth pulled out her paper. Elizabeth picked up her pen. She told herself, after her unhappy marriage, that “my heart had never been appropriated.”24 This was a fresh trophy she could offer to McFarland, red and raw and true. She “willingly offered him a woman’s heart of grateful love…as the only prize left me to bestow.”25
On January 19, 1863, Elizabeth Packard pressed pen to paper and wrote:
Dr. McFarland—
My True Friend… I have never seen a man, before I saw you, to whom my whole womanly nature could instinctively pay homage, as my head, as the husband should be to the wife. To such a one, alone, can I entrust the key with which to unlock the fountain of conjugal love within me, whose depths no mortal has ever yet sounded. This key I entrust to you, Dr. McFarland, with all the trusting confidence of a true woman.
The only response I ask of you now is, to help me carry the heavy pack of lies before the public, which Packard has put upon me to bear so unjustly, as a vindication of my assailed character.
If, before I leave this institution, you issue the first edition of my first volume, however small, if not less than twenty-five copies, on your own risk, trusting simply to my verbal promise to pay you back the whole amount in less than three months’ time after leaving this institution, I shall regard the act on my part as an engagement sealed to be yours alone, until death part us. You can continue to be, as you now are, a husband in a Farland…until God’s Providence brings you near enough to recognize the relation with my bodily senses. I love your spirit…but I must not love your person, so long as that love is justly claimed by another woman—your legal wife…
I know this is a bold step for me to take, but…if [McFarland] is the true man I take him to be, it won’t offend him, or expose my honor or virtue to let him know it… I wish no one, except your own private soul, to know of this act. It must be a sacred, profound secret between us, trusted entirely to your honor…
Yours in the best of bonds,
ELIZABETH26
The first-name signature was notable; Elizabeth usually concluded all her correspondence as Mrs. E. P. W. Packard. But to use her married name on such a letter may not have seemed appropriate. What she was offering was herself, stripped of all societal encumbrances. Stripped of everything, in fact. Bare, she presented herself to him.
This is me. This is all I have to give. Do you accept?
Elizabeth believed strongly in an afterlife in heaven, which makes the nature of her offer all the more extraordinary. Because her vow to be forever his was undertaken namely for “our future existence”27 and not for this earthly life, in which they were both already married. She was almost literally signing her soul away, making a deal with a man who might yet prove a devil, in promising to be his for all eternity.
If only he would help.
“I did then, and still do regard this offering as none too costly to lay upon the altar of my personal freedom,”28 she wrote.
What price liberty?
So she let her words stand on the page. She folded over the paper. She’d decided to write as she wanted not one syllable of this offer to be uttered aloud, lest someone overhear and misconstrue her words. She resolved to hand the letter to the doctor the next time he visited her alone in her room.
When he did, she shut the door and handed him the note, asking him to read it there and then.
Perhaps confused, he took it from her and seated himself. Saying nothing, he read the letter through. She had written, “This note must be burned, since an exposure of it might imperil my virtue.”29 Perhaps the knowledge that the letter must be destroyed was why McFarland read it a second time, more closely.
Elizabeth watched him anxiously as his eyes scoured the paper, trying to interpret his expression. So much lay on the line, yet still she could not judge from his inscrutable eyes exactly what he was feeling. It was like when they had first met and he had been a blank canvas.