“I held myself again in readiness,” Elizabeth wrote, “to be offered a sacrifice on the altar of unjust legislation to married women.”10
They carried her out of her room. They carried her out of her hall. Elizabeth, throughout, called out loudly for help, determined to use the voice she’d gained in the asylum to protest this persecution. She called for friends, for attendants, for anyone at the asylum to stop this scandal.
But she said sadly, “None came… Not even one man, woman, or child appeared to help me; and none, to my knowledge, protested against this outrage but Mrs. Sophia N. B. Olsen.”11
But as much as she may have wished otherwise, Sophia was impotent to stop it. And it all happened so fast. With just a few staggered steps of the men down the corridor and out through the door, Elizabeth exited Eighth Ward with as little ceremony as when she’d entered. They carried her down three flights of stairs: Dr. Tenny at the front, then Elizabeth with her porters, and finally her female attendants bringing up the rear.
There was no one left to defend her. She was carried swiftly through the downstairs hall, under the white arching frame that surrounded the front door, and down the asylum’s stone steps. And there she saw her husband, waiting patiently at the foot of the stairs, standing beside the carriage that he’d booked to take her away.
“Mr. Packard’s wishes were so generously anticipated,” Elizabeth sneered, “that he had nothing to do but to stand holding open the door of the ’bus, while my betrayers brought me in their strong arms and rested my feet on the steps of the omnibus.”12
Upstairs on Eighth Ward, the women all rushed to the windows. They saw Elizabeth being settled in the carriage, the asylum’s employees joining her inside lest she make a fuss at the station. They saw Theophilus seating himself and Dr. Tenny reaching a hand inside the carriage in a gesture of farewell. He would be the last person to say goodbye to Elizabeth, just as he’d been the first to greet her, three long years before.
Elizabeth stared in astonishment at his proffered handshake.
“No, sir,” she said shortly, turning away from him, and her words were ice. “I don’t shake hands with traitors.”13
He withdrew from the carriage. He gave the signal they could leave. As the horses began to trot, the sound seemed an ominous drumbeat in Elizabeth’s ears.
“I knew not where I was bound to, whether into another Asylum, a Poor-house, or a Penitentiary,” she said. “But…I supposed [my husband] was going to put me into an Insane Asylum at Northampton, Mass.
“For life.”14
Sophia watched the carriage draw away with a “throbbing heart”15 and “fast gathering tears.”16
“She has gone,”17 she whispered, and the empty words did no justice to the import of the moment nor the gravity of her loss.
In the wake of Elizabeth’s departure, the other patients mourned. A kind of wake was held in which they talked out their grief. “Some lectured on the oppressiveness of husbands,” recalled Sophia, “others on that of State institutions; a few on ‘Woman’s Rights,’ but a larger number still upon a subject with which I think they had a much better acquaintance, namely, Woman’s Wrongs.”18
Elizabeth saw none of this. Her friends and the institution in which they were held merely receded in her eyeline as the carriage bore her away. And although she said, “I maintain, that I entered this institution as sane a person as I left it,”19 the hospital logbook contained no such record. Instead, in a small, neat line beneath her name, the doctors noted, “June 18/63. Dis[charged] Order Trustees.”20
As the carriage passed out beyond the asylum gates, she felt McFarland’s power dissipate entirely. Her feelings hardened as her new reality sank in. As she stared across the omnibus at her husband—at this cold, unforgiving man who’d already fixed her fate—she thought of the doctor: “The one [I trusted] above all others to defend me against my enemy, proved to be the very one to put me into his hands.”21 She was almost stunned by the revelation: “I had found that the best man I had ever found could do the worst act I had ever known.”22 Too late, she realized he had not reformed at all.
Far too soon, the Packards arrived at the station. The asylum staff bid her goodbye.
“We shall miss you, Mrs. Packard, at the Asylum,” said one, “for there never has been a person who has caused such a universal sensation there, as you have.”23
But universal sensation or not, all that was now in the past. A different future awaited. Elizabeth was left alone with Theophilus—left alone with the man who planned to lock her away for life.