That was something Elizabeth and her friends had known—for months. They’d known it ever since their first attempt to free her from the asylum had failed. They’d certainly known it since that fall, when they’d visited lawyers in Kankakee and then secretly plotted behind locked doors…
And it was something Elizabeth had known that past November, when she’d stolen the house keys from her husband and buried them in the sodden earth beneath her bedroom window.
She took them not to use them but to ensure he locked her up.
“Thus was my imprisonment in my home secured,” she wrote triumphantly, “whereby a writ of habeas corpus could be legally obtained.”10
He had thought it was her he was imprisoning as he’d nailed shut her window and locked up her door. In fact, Theophilus had unwittingly boxed himself into a corner: hammering home the nails in his own coffin, dealing himself a fatal blow, sealing his own dire fate with every heavy hammer blow he’d rained upon her window.
CHAPTER 41
Theophilus scanned the writ with angry eyes:
We command you, that the body of Elizabeth P. W. Packard, in your custody detained and imprisoned…[be brought] before Charles R. Starr, Judge…at his chambers, at Kankakee City…on the 12th instant, at one o’clock P.M.1
One o’clock was only three hours away.
It was, therefore, a rushed goodbye. Elizabeth barely had time to call Libby, George, and Arthur to her, to plant upon them a hurried parting kiss, before she and Theophilus headed straight to Kankakee, the clock against her husband all the while.
As they rode the twelve miles through the snow-strewn countryside, Elizabeth may have noticed “a rise of the mercury [and] snow that has lost its crunchiness.”2 The impasse between herself and her husband was not the only thing that had broken; the weather was beginning to thaw too.
As they traveled, Elizabeth let her mind sweep back over the whole operation. Though the doctors’ visits had scared her, it had been a discovery on the day she’d cleaned the cookstove that had really lit the dynamite of her planted bomb. When she’d exchanged places with Theophilus in her nursery after the spring clean, she’d realized that in his haste to leave her room, he’d left a package of his letters behind. She did not notice them until nightfall and at first had thought it would be wrong to examine them.
She’d soon concluded, however, that she’d be a fool not “to avail myself of every lawful means of self-defense which lay within my reach.”3 She’d therefore spent several hours carefully reading the letters.
And there, laid out as plain as day but seen by the light of the moon, was Theophilus’s recent correspondence with McFarland and the superintendent of the Northampton asylum. The latter had happily agreed to admit her “as a case of hopeless insanity, upon the certificate of Dr. McFarland that she is ‘hopelessly’ insane.”4
It was the first Elizabeth knew of that damning certificate, which allowed Theophilus to imprison her as soon as blink. The treachery took her breath away. But worse than McFarland’s machinations was the date of her planned admittance.
It was just days away.
Immediately, Elizabeth had become frantic, memories of her Jacksonville experiences exploding in her mind. “O, when one has been thus degraded [in an asylum], to come back again! Can anything be more dreadful!”5 she thought. Though she’d suspected Theophilus might carry out his longtime threat, to see the proof of his plan made his cruelty suddenly concrete. “Three long years of false imprisonment does not satisfy this lust for power,” she raged. “No—nothing but a life-long entombment!”6
And she truly feared what her treatment might be like at Northampton, should her husband succeed in his plans.
“I should run a poor chance of being well-treated, there,” she realized, “since [Theophilus] would be very apt to tell them that I was so troublesome under Dr. McFarland’s care, that they would not receive me a second time. And he might tell them that Dr. McFarland kept me in a ward with the worst maniacs in the house… How could my word or representation be relied upon, under such circumstances? Could I expect anything but the reception, and treatment, of a maniac, there?”7
Seeing the dates on the correspondence, she realized bleakly, “In a few days I should be beyond the reach of all human help.”8
She needed to set the wheels of her own plan rolling—and fast. But how could she get word to her friends that she needed help immediately when she was not permitted to communicate?