It was therefore extremely hard to leave her cousin. But Elizabeth could not countenance living the rest of her life like this, with her husband’s control over her as absolute as always. She had dared to defy him before; she would defy him now.
It took a while to put her plans in place. But eventually, four months after her release from the asylum, around October 20, 1863, Elizabeth boarded her train to Manteno. She traveled alone, one woman on a one-way ticket, heading back to the scene of her husband’s crime.
CHAPTER 37
The train pulled into Manteno on a cold October morning. In contrast to her departure three and a half years earlier, the station was deserted. And where June sunshine had incongruously crowned her when she’d left, on this day of arrival, a few inches of snow, heralding a harsh winter, had fallen overnight. Those few inches were fast melting. Elizabeth disembarked cautiously, the ground “wet and sloppy under foot.”1
She left her trunk at the depot, but as she started for home, fear suddenly gripped her that Theophilus might intercept it and destroy her book; under the law, her property was his, so he could easily lay claim. She turned abruptly, intending to double back to instruct the stationmaster further.
As she turned, she saw for the first time that she’d had a shadow since she’d left the station. A small boy, with a cap pulled down low upon his head, was following her. Not wanting to slip on the platform, she asked if he might run back to the stationmaster with her message.
“[Tell him] Mrs. Packard wishes Mr. Harding to not let Mr. Packard take her trunk,”2 she instructed politely.
But to her surprise, the boy hesitated. It was hardly an outrageous favor for a lady to ask. The child was perhaps ten—old enough to know his manners.
“An’t you willing to do this favor for me?” she asked brightly. “It is so wet I don’t like to go back.”
The boy wriggled awkwardly. And in that restless wiggling, she perhaps had a sudden flashback to a child she’d once known who’d never liked to sit still… Just as she was thinking it, the child burst out, “I don’t want to say anything against my Pa!”
Elizabeth froze, her heart suddenly colder than the swiftly melting snow. She grabbed at the boy and raised his cap. She looked him full in the face.
Dark hair. Dark eyes. How could she not have known him?
“Who are you?” she whispered. “Is this my little George! Didn’t I know my darling boy!”
She’d been away so long she had not recognized him. But three and a half years is a long time in a child’s life. He’d been just six when she’d left; now, he was well on his way to eleven. He was taller, of course, his arms and legs longer, as though he’d been stretched. His face was already losing its childlike shape, the bones of the man he would become pushing through. Nevertheless, she knew that somewhere inside his oddly outsized frame was that same sweet boy who’d once loved to serve her strawberries.
She caught him to her and hugged him. “My darling George shall have his mother again,” she told him breathlessly. “We shall never be separated now. Kind people are going to protect me and your Pa can’t take your mother from you again.”
But at her affectionate embrace, George pulled back roughly. “My Pa has done right,” he parroted, as though the message had been drilled into him. “He has not done wrong.”
Elizabeth’s heart sank, even though she’d known this indoctrination would have been happening for three long years. She sighed patiently. “Yes, George,” she insisted, albeit lightly, “your Pa has done wrong to take your mother from you and imprison her, as he has, without cause.”
Then she grinned at him suddenly, a smile that came from their “good talking times.”3 “An’t you glad to see your mother?”4
“Yes, mother! Yes!” he cried instinctively before he could stop himself. Yet the lessons he’d so painfully learned were burned into him. “But—but—” he burst out. With those stuttered words came tears.
Elizabeth stopped his misery. “We won’t talk any more about your father,” she promised. She reached out a gloved hand and took his still-small one in hers. “Go with me, George,” she said, intending to walk on.
“No, mother, I can’t,” the child replied. “Pa said I must get the mail and come directly home…”
“You may go, then, my child,” she said, releasing him, “and I will come by-and-by.”
By this time, the gossip that the notorious Mrs. Packard was once more walking along the plank sidewalks of Manteno had spread throughout the village. Elizabeth soon encountered her old friend Mr. Blessing, who insisted that she dine with him at his hotel.