It took two entire days to find out that Miss Schroeder wasn’t in any of the regular patient rooms or wards. To be fair, it took the first day to acclimate to the facility, an asylum for gentlewomen, they called it. A fairly inoffensive place on the surface, with clean rooms that had lace curtains, rugs, comfortable beds and chairs, tables with games, a piano that was usually locked in the public room, and three meals that contained more than just gruel.
The staff was mostly women, with a few men to provide extra force if needed, and one doctor who strode about the place like the ruler of a small principality. The patients, or residents as they were to be called, all wore identical limp blue dresses and had had their hair cut short. So it could not be pulled by other patients, the staff said. To Pip it seemed more so they forfeited their individual identities.
Calm, Pip was told repeatedly, was the motto. Calm staff, calm quarters, calm patients. And at first it seemed like that was the extent of it. The patients wandered about fairly freely, their feet shuffling, their meals eaten in silence, their calm undisturbed by visitors.
Even the staff followed the edict. Pip had expected to gather gossip at the dinner table, but meals were eaten in silence, and easy interaction among the staff missing except between Matron, two of the aides, and Dr. Whaley. They always seemed to be in conference.
It should have reassured Pip that this seemed a place like some of the new Quaker institutions that insisted on treating mental patients with compassion and dignity. But it didn’t. It felt…wrong, somehow. Unnatural. She noticed that the patients never made eye contact and seemed to edge away from Dr. Whaley in the halls. And the few times a patient cried out or swung at a staff member, they were simply taken out a door at the back of the building. To the ‘quieting’ rooms, she was told. A place she didn’t have access to yet.
All she knew was that she saw one woman return, held on either side by an aide. The woman shuffled more than the others, her head down, and retreated to her room where she sat in the chair not speaking to anyone.
Pip’s own quarters were spartan, but no worse than she had seen in other servants’ quarters, maybe better. She was alone in a two bed room. She had a bed, a hook for her clothes and a small bureau to hold her brush and comb. She was allowed a fair amount of freedom, which meant that when she got up in the morning no one protested her taking a constitutional around the grounds. They didn’t see her leave a blue rock outside in the garden to the right of the front door to let Mr. Hilliard know she was all right. When she quit for the day after dinner, she left another. She also had yellow rocks if there was danger.
And when she readied for bed, she slid her knife out from the holder on her ankle and put it under her pillow along with the muff pistol she pulled out of her pocket and checked. She grinned, thinking of Diccan Hilliard’s surprise when she had cleaned and loaded the gun in a matter of seconds. He had offered her a full-time job in his Household Army.
It was on the third day she made several vital discoveries, although not about Miss Schroeder. About how the inmates were kept so calm. In the pantry, she stumbled over several bottles of laudanum. Next to cones of sugar. Next to the tea.
Blessed Bertram’s bicycle. The women were being drugged. Every one of them. Not only that, there was a way to dispatch them if they became problematic. Her chances of success had just dropped precipitously.
After finding the laudanum, she took a few minutes to see what other surprises were stored near the giant tea urn.
There was a treasure trove. Ginger for stomach upsets, feverfew and willow bark for fevers, chamomile for anxiety, cowslip for catarrh.
Foxglove.
Did the staff here know of the herb’s use for strengthening the heart, or was its presence more malicious? She vowed to keep an eye on it.
And then Pip was introduced to the treatment room. Her task was simply to clean and restock after its use. On that third morning she saw the evidence of its use, round red wheals on the backs of a patient who had just returned, shuffling and mumbling.
“Cupping,” the Matron pronounced, nodding her scrupulously tidy head with what Pip thought was uncomfortable enthusiasm. “It draws out evil humors.”
It caused pain when superheated air was caught in a glass cup and laid against bare skin creating a vacuum.
Then there were the ice baths. Nobody could actually say what those helped, except to torture the patients who misbehaved. The more Pip saw, the more determined she became find Miss Schroeder.
But her old headmistress wasn’t to be seen. Which meant that if she was truly still here, she was in the ‘quieting’ rooms that existed somewhere beyond the main building. Somewhere underground, from what Diccan had said. Worse than that, Pip could find no mention or record of the Mrs. Baxter who had allegedly shared the information they needed.
The more Pip saw, the more she wanted to tell Diccan to just shut the whole place down.
And then she stumbled over the worst surprise. She was walking down the hall with an armload of towels when she needed to sidestep two aides guiding another shuffling, muttering woman down the hall.
“This is Mrs. Mary Meyers,” one of the aides said with that false, cloying smile that said to treat the patient like a slow child. “She is joining us for a bit. She had to visit the quieting room for a few days first to acclimate, but she’s fine now.”
Pip didn’t recognize the woman at first, since her head was down. She wore the ubiquitous blue dress and kid slippers.
“Welcome, Mrs. Meyers,” she said with a dip of the knee as she’d been instructed.
Mrs. Meyers never reacted. So the women led her into one of the better decorated rooms that almost looked like a personal bedroom, with the usual lace curtains, a pale yellow rug and a soft blue quilt. There was also a comfortable navy armchair faced to look out the window, although the view was compromised by the bars that gave lie to any comfort.
It was also near the linen closet, so that as she stacked towels, Pip could see how the patient was handled. The staff was calm and efficient helping Mrs. Meyers but didn’t waste time on words or gestures of support as they left her lying under the covers staring at the ceiling. Pulling a red card from a pocket one of the aides slipped it into a holder by the door on her way out, leaving the door open.
Pip had seen those cards by a few other doors and was going to ask about it, when she took a look back at the patient.
Pip stopped cold, suddenly distracted. She recognized the woman. The woman whose breasts were impressive even under covers. The woman whose shorn hair was a rich chestnut color. The woman with empty green eyes. The woman she recognized. But not Miss Schroeder.
Pip instinctively made a move to the room but pulled herself up short. No one needed to see her interest. Her profound shock and suddenly sick stomach. She had wanted to make sure, but she didn’t really need to. She knew her. In fact, she had seen her no more than a few days earlier at the duchess’s house party.
For a long moment Pip could do no more than simply stand in the hallway staring into the room at the woman who was definitely not anyone named Mary Meyers. That woman’s name was Lady Pamela Smythe-Smith.
