After Alice Fell(21)

“Keep to your task. A busy hand promises a productive day.” Mrs. Brighton sways down the hall on wide-set legs that give the impression she’s on a boat at sea. She looks over her shoulder. “They’ll eat you up, if you let them.”

I turn to see what Dr. Mayhew thinks of this, but he’s not paying attention and is crouched in front of a woman of middling age, with his hands curled over his knees.

“Hello.” He gives a dip of his head, smiles. Her shoulders tense and then drop. Her eyes careen around the room, as if she wants the comfort of anyone else. Her doughy cheeks pale.

“Hello,” he says again.

A string of a girl sitting near taps her cheek with her index finger. Then she smacks her chin before repeating the pattern. “Della Campbell. She’s Della Campbell.”

“Yes. Thank you, Agnes.” Mayhew bends toward the woman and lifts her chin. “Can you say hello, Della? Are you all right?”

I watch the woman’s mouth yaw open and shut. Her needle never stops, in and out it goes, piercing and repiercing a square of red cloth. There is no thread. Just the needle and the pricks of blood where the thread should be.

“She’s quite well, thank you so much,” Agnes says.

He lays his hand to the crown of Della’s head, as gentle as one would touch a child, then straightens and walks on. “She would benefit from the ice, Mrs. Brighton.”

“Yes, Dr. Mayhew.”

The needles whisper their journeys through squares of fabric. There a calico. There a plaid in green and blue. There a piece of black serge. Not one with thread, not one with a useful item to hold at the end of the day and admire.

Cathy’s fingers are like iron around my elbow, and my lower arm tingles with the threat of numbness.

“Can you let go?” I ask.

“Oh.” She stares at her hand clutched tight, then drops her grip.

Mrs. Brighton and Mayhew turn to another door. Another room.

It is a dormitory of beds. Twelve beds. At least here there is light, though it is flat white from the paint on the glass. On each bed, a plain wool blanket. To the side, a nightdress hung on a single knob. A writing desk next to each. On one, a brush. Another, a book with a torn spine. Three beds down, a tin cup with a sprig of white flowers.

“Why is there no thread?”

“It’s a therapeutic tool, Mrs. Abbott.” Mayhew pinches the lip of a tin cup on one of the bedside tables and slides it from the left side to the right. “A meditation, if you will. A way to strengthen the mind.”

Mrs. Brighton looks as if she will speak, then clamps her mouth.

“Not even thread.”

“Scissors come as a privilege,” she says.

My breath stutters in my ribs. I want to turn the beds over, grapple and search the mattresses, the corners of the pillow casings, the folds of linens for all that has been taken away. But I keep my fists closed tight, crushing my purse.

“Where are their trunks?”

“They are stored for safekeeping.” The doctor turns in a circle and beams. “We provide all the necessaries.”

I press my lips tight and bite down. “Was this her room?”

“One very like it,” Dr. Mayhew says.

“But not hers. I asked to see that room, Dr. Mayhew. And why she has bruises all over her body. And how she ended up on the roof. That is what I asked.”

His hands come up to placate. “Now, Mrs. Abbott . . .”

There’s a thrum from the hall, the muffled pound of slippered feet to the boards. Then another.

“This is what happens.” Mrs. Brighton makes for the door. “This is what starts. This is why there are visiting hours. Now, I’ll be . . .” She leans into the hall. “Eyes to the ground.”

Mayhew grips my elbow, pulls me tight to his side, and ushers us out to the hall. The stamps are louder, cacophonous and ringing.

A hand clutches my skirt and pulls at me. Agnes. She pats the top of her head, then points a finger to the ceiling, before poking her finger again to her cheek. “Once up there, you don’t come back.”

Mrs. Brighton clears her throat—ahem—and stares at the woman until she drops back to her seat. Then she turns to speak to me, lips thin, mouth too small. “You’ve upset my girls,” she says and shakes her head.

Dr. Mayhew corrals us to the landing. “Another time, ladies. Another time.” And the door clangs shut.

It is not just the women locked behind me that have taken up their voice. Across comes the rumble and pound of the men, caterwauls and drumming.

Cathy bites her bottom lip. She blinks and then stares. Her skin looks made of wax.

I am shaking. I stride back to the closed ward door. “You’ve answered nothing.” I slap my hand to the wood.

On the floor below, Northrup scrambles from his desk to the bottom of the stairs. “You must come down now.” His attention turns to someone just to his left. He nods and gestures up the stairs to us.

Mr. Stoakes peers up, out of his coat, his vest loose and collar unbuttoned, as if he’s just been interrupted from his noon meal. He takes the stairs, his eyes on mine, and I see the gold flecks amongst the pool of gray and the steadiness one needs to keep a deer from panic.

“It’s all right,” he murmurs, a soft hand to my elbow and another to Cathy’s.

“Don’t touch me.” Her voice is sharp. She twists away, then grips up her skirts and starts for the stairs. “I want air.”