Yet his conclusion in fact said rather more about him than it did Elizabeth. To reach it, McFarland had been deliberately selective. He’d ignored all the many instances in her manuscript where Elizabeth made it perfectly clear she was speaking only metaphorically about her gender: “Is not a spiritual woman a personification of the Holy Ghost?”23 He’d also ignored—or was ignorant of—centuries of theological theories that the Holy Ghost might indeed be female. The argument ran that the Father was male, the Holy Ghost female, and the Son the fruit of their union. Otherwise, the Deity was solely male, but Elizabeth believed that “He can’t be a perfect being unless His nature includes both the male and female.”24 Though it should not truly matter in the question of her sanity whether Elizabeth’s beliefs were original or not, in fact there was a solid academic foundation to her ideas on which she’d let her faith flourish.
But McFarland saw only madness.
Yet if he’d expected his peers to congratulate him, he was disappointed. They focused on the fact that it had taken him two years to find this so-called delusion. They questioned whether that meant he did not believe she was insane for two years （in which case, how could he have justified her continued commitment?）。 But that was not the case. Elizabeth had hated her husband so aggressively that her madness was a given for McFarland. That was why he’d deemed her incurable, even before he’d discovered the delusion.
To have found it, McFarland may have reflected, was almost worth all the trouble she’d caused with that crazy book of hers. Because of course he’d then had to endure six months of her “stirring up the other patients to discontent and insubordination”：25 their refusal to work, their destruction of property, even merely their stronger wills that would not now bend so easily to his Prospero power.
But once he’d discovered the delusion, enough had been enough. What a “most welcome”26 day it had been when the trustees—finally!—had granted his wish to let her go. He knew her husband would be disappointed, so he’d written to Mr. Packard to explain.
“The extraordinary amount of trouble, which Mrs. P causes us,” he’d said, “and the disastrous influence which she exerts on the other patients, is the cause of this step.”27
But that was not all the doctor had done. Whether of his own volition or at Theophilus’s request, he’d decided to help the pastor with his plot. Earlier that month, on May 5, 1863, McFarland had issued a formal certificate to Elizabeth’s husband, stamped with the seal of the Illinois State Hospital:
I hereby certify that Mrs. E. P. W. Packard, the wife of Rev. Theophilus Packard of Manteno, Ill., was received into this Institution and has been in its charge for nearly three years… Of the existence of insanity I have no question… She is now ordered to be discharged, as having remained here as long as it is expedient to retain such a case, and not because the disease is cured, or because any doubt has arisen as to its existence.28
Elizabeth was leaving—and he was making sure she would stay gone.
Because as Elizabeth and Theophilus and McFarland all well knew, she would receive no trial before any second commitment. All her husband needed to lock her up were two certificates of insanity from two different doctors.
With McFarland’s certificate already in hand, Theophilus was halfway there.
Elizabeth felt safe at the asylum because she believed in her deal with the doctor. But their contract had always been one-sided, McFarland’s supposed signature as empty as the air.
“I care nothing whatever for the pages…which Mrs. P. has…wasted on myself,” McFarland later remarked coldly. “They are just about as important as her passionate love letters to me.”29
McFarland had indeed been a blank canvas to Elizabeth. But on the reverse of that vacant painting was a horror story that would have scared her senseless—if only she knew.
Because McFarland was in league with her husband. And in exactly one month’s time, her stay of execution at the asylum was up.
And there was only one way out.
With Theophilus.
CHAPTER 35
On the morning on June 18, 1863, Elizabeth’s attendant came bustling into her room with an order: “Mrs. Packard must be suitably dressed by nine o’clock to go with her husband on board the cars.”1
The pronouncement was not a complete shock to Elizabeth. On June 15, McFarland had warned her that Theophilus would be coming later in the week to take her away. Yet Elizabeth had remained blissfully confident that the doctor would never let it happen.