“Who?”Matron White demanded, brow contracted.The assembled inmates had gone quiet.
“The psych patients!”Emily shouted.“Why didn’t you evacuate them?!”
Matron White scoffed, her meaty hands coming to her hips.“We can’t justlet them out!”she said.“The fire was minor.What if they’d got loose, or tried to murder us all?”
“What if the fire had been major?”The pain in Emily’s throat was dry and sharp.“Was your plan to just leave them locked in their cells to burn to death?!”
Just then, a baby, wrapped tightly in the arms of her mother, began to cry.Emily hadn’t even thought of the nursery, the infants there, who were now spending the night outside in the cold.What had June been thinking?
“You’re out of line, Radcliffe,” Matron White warned.“Step back!I assure you the isolation cells are still perfectly intact for your immediate reception.I suspect one of these fine officers would be more than happy to assist.”She gestured to the two policemen standing off to the side with the warden, who wore a coat over her thick cotton nightdress, hair still rolled in curlers.She had evidently been called or woken from her private residence at the northwest corner of the property.She and the police were all looking sternly at Emily.
After a brief moment of internal debate, Emily stood down.She’d already drawn more than enough attention to herself.She glanced around at the tall wrought-iron fence that surrounded the prison grounds; there would be no escape tonight, not with a swarm of able-bodied firemen and police who could chase her down in a heartbeat.She wanted to say as much about the psych patients’ chances of escape, but held her tongue.Satisfied, White turned around and walked over to the other matrons, and the excited inmates began chattering again.Emily fell back into the crowd, in search of June.Eliza was at her heels.
“Do you know what happened?”Emily asked her.
Eliza shivered and wrapped her little arms around herself.Emily stepped forward instinctively and rubbed Eliza’s back to create some friction.
“Fire was set in the factory.Firemen’re tryin’ to sort out what ’appened but Lucy Bothwell says the sheets all caught like a dry feckin’ forest and up it all went.”
The factory was, at least, about as far as June could have gotten away from the cells—but the basement would have been safer.With the factory’s location, there had still been a chance the nursery and chapel wing could have become blocked if the fire had gotten out of control.
In the dim light cast by the moon and streetlamps, she finally found June, who skulked near the back of the crowd of women with her usual two accessories, Anna and Irene, and Maria, the hairdresser.June looked as though she were trying to hide behind Anna, despite the fact that her stature and flaming hair rendered her about the most conspicuous person Emily had ever clapped eyes on, even in the dark of night.Her arms were crossed over her large bust.June mumbled something to Maria and the other two young women, who melted away into the crowd at her evident bidding.
Emily stalked over to confront her.“What the hell was that?” Emily spat.“What happened to the fight?”
“I never said I’d start a fight,” June said defensively.“I said that was anidea.We needed a good diversion.This one presented itself, and I figured it was both easier and more likely to give you the time you needed.”
“What did you do?Eliza said—”
“I got Maria to get the gasoline jugs from the hair salon,” June said quietly.“Doused some piles of sheets in the factory and lit ’em up with matches from the kitchen.I knew the fire would burn longer with the gas.”
That explained the strange smell that tainted the smoke.
“And besides, with the factory destroyed, we can’t be forced to make sheets for the government machine,” June continued.“Let’s see how they like it now that their free labour force has disappeared.It’s one of the reasons they keep this place open, isn’t it?”
Emily was silent.Though she appreciated June’s act of dissent, she knew that if the administration needed the funding provided by the inmates’ factory labour, they would find a way around it.She thought of the empty, useless classrooms.Emily would bet new sewing machines would appear and the classrooms would become the factory within a few weeks, at most.
Eliza stood beside them, and Emily suddenly realized how suspicious this might look, since the three of them weren’t normally seen together.Although, she thought, perhaps not.Onlookers might just assume she and Eliza were new recruits.Everyone knew June’s game.
“So did you get it?”June’s eyebrows were raised, not a trace of shame or guilt on her face.
“Yes, I got it,” Emily said, patting the bulge beneath her apron, then went into a coughing fit again, doubling over.“Nearly killed me, but I got it.”
“She stayed after I bolted,” Eliza said, nodding impressively at Emily.“Crazier ’n the Blues, I say.”
It occurred to me, as I stood on the lawn gasping cold air into my seared lungs, that society always calls a woman crazy when she knows she is right about something, or when, like the ill-fated Cassandra of lore, she sees something the others cannot—or will not.And when a woman knows she is right and refuses to give in, well…that’s when they lock her up.
It was nearly two o’clock in the morning before the fire marshal gave the all-clear and the half-frozen women tramped back inside.The four babies from the nursery were sent over to St.Joe’s Hospital for the night, though their mothers were not permitted to go with them.Emily was still hacking, and the pungent smell of smoke hung in the air.She was certain that in any other building or institution, the residents would have been transferred elsewhere until the smoke had entirelycleared and the building was aired out, but there was nowhere to send a hundred and twenty delinquent women in the middle of a frozen December night.
The matrons had opened the barred windows at either end of the long north–south corridor on each floor, but it had to be at least minus five degrees outside and, as had been the case since October, the stone walls of the prison retained the cold.Opening the windows now for fresh air would mean the place remained frigid for days, maybe even weeks afterward, as the old furnaces struggled to remain relevant.These women would pay for June’s disastrous—though effective—diversion long after Emily had left the Mercer.
With a glance over her shoulder at the empty corridor, Emily withdrew the files and scroll of notes from inside her dress.She inserted the scroll back into the tap, but the only place she could possibly hide the files was beneath her mattress.It seemed obvious, but there was nothing else for it.As she settled down onto her bed and pulled the thin wool blanket up over her shoulders, her thoughts were still an agitated, uncomfortable battle between outrage and gratitude.
The psychiatric inmates’ doors were destroyed by the axes of the firemen, so tonight, because there were no doors to lock, the women of that wing had all been strapped to their beds with restraints.Emily knew this because at least two of them kept screaming about it, bemoaning the pain and pleading for release until their wails eventually seeped into background noise.It nearly brought Emily to tears imaging Annie lying there on her own slim cot, leather-and-chain belts strapped around her torso and limbs as she stared at the ceiling.Emily hoped to be able to see her tomorrow, but had no idea if the prison’s daily routine would carry on as usual after such a disruption.
As her brain hummed, Emily realized that after tonight, her ruse might finally collapse.Dr.Stone’s office was a disaster, and the matrons had all witnessed Emily emerge from the prison on her own, and well after the rest of the inmates.She’d shouted about the psychiatric prisoners’ treatment.It was only a matter of time before they discovered thatpatient files were missing, including her own.After that, it would be all too easy to put the pieces together as to who had stolen them.
So now, the question became: Would they be able to narrow it down and uncover Emily before her release in forty-eight hours?
