him to the asylum.
One of the lady guests agreed with Jonathan’s assessment of the staff. “I declare, Dr. Seward, I must have you interview servants for me.”
“My wife’s taste in servants tends toward the lazy and the dishonest,” said her husband, and everyone laughed.
“Thank you for the compliments,” said Dr. Seward. “Most everyone on our staff is also a patient, or a former patient.”
This news stunned me. I wanted to turn around and look at the girls who had served the food to see if I could detect any traces of mental illness on their faces.
“Work has been the cure for so many of our patients,” Seward said. “And it is good economy too. We provide the most advanced modern treatments, but they take time and are administered at great cost, especially the labor.”
I saw a way into my purpose and spoke up. “Dr. Seward, before my husband and I married, we agreed that I would devote a goodly amount of my time to charitable works. While Jonathan and I are your guests, I would very much like to volunteer my time to help you in any way that I can.”
The doctor did not seem receptive to my idea. “That is a very noble wish, Mrs. Harker. Ladies often have the best intentions, but patients do not exactly mind their social graces. I would not want you to suffer any insults at their hands.”
I wondered if he had something to hide and I became more determined.
“I doubt that your patients could be any worse than some of the little girls I have taught.” Everyone laughed at that.
“What do you think, Dr. Von Helsinger?” I asked.
The gentleman turned his wide, insect stare on me. His mouth was set in a smile, but the rest of his face remained sober. “If Herr Harker would postpone our meeting tomorrow, I would be happy to spend the day escorting the beautiful lady through the asylum. It would be a pleasure greater than any I expect at my age.”
Something about the way he looked at me made me shrink back in my chair, though I tried to maintain my smile. Jonathan must have seen it too.
“I cannot postpone our business together, sir. I have important matters in both London and Exeter that must be attended to,” he said sternly, which gave me a little thrill. I had not seen him play the protector since before he left for Styria.
“Then it is up to me to satisfy you, Mrs. Harker,” said Dr. Seward, smiling.
All night long, I heard moaning sounds. I slept fitfully, awaking several times and sitting up in bed. But then, the noise would stop. I must have been having nightmares, but I could not recall their substance. I woke with a headache.
At an early hour, an attendant delivered a breakfast tray to our room, and then, at eight o’clock, as no one was allowed to wander the asylum unescorted, a man came to take Jonathan to see Dr. Von Helsinger. Fifteen minutes later, Mrs. Snead came for me. I wondered if she too had once been a patient. She spoke clearly, but her face twitched almost imperceptibly, as if she intended to wink but could not complete the action. We walked down the wide staircase together, and as we reached the set of stairs nearest the ground floor, I heard the same voices I had heard in my sleep. I stopped to listen. It sounded as if the very walls were moaning.
The sounds escalated as we walked across the reception hall. Mrs. Snead took a ring of keys out of her apron pocket and opened a pair of tall double doors. The groaning assaulted my ears-grunts, whimpers, cries, moans-and came together in a cacophonous song of collective misery. Some sounded guttural, others were high-pitched. All sounded female, and I inquired as to why this might be so. “This is the women’s ward,” Mrs. Snead explained. “The men’s ward is separate.”
Mrs. Snead paid no mind to the din and walked ahead of me down a corridor with many doors, some with peepholes and some with bars. Whereas the private part of the mansion where we were quartered had a faint scent of dry wood and dust common to old houses, this wing smelled of iron and rust, and the air itself was damp. We climbed another stairwell, narrower and darker than the one that served the main house, and arrived at the door of Dr. Seward’s attic office.
He was sitting at a desk in a room with a pitched ceiling and tiny windows, speaking into a phonograph in an oak box on a little wrought-iron stand. He heard us enter and turned around. “Good morning, Mrs. Harker,” he said. “I was just recording my physician’s notes into the phonograph. Such a convenient contraption. You are familiar with them?”
“Why, no,” I said. I remembered Kate’s admonition to feign ignorance. “Do you record everything that happens here in the asylum?”
“Everything important,” he replied. “It is a superb record-keeping tool.” He tried to interest me in a cup of tea, but I assured him that I was all too eager to begin our tour of the facility.
“Very well, then.” He picked up a stack of charts and led me back down the stairs and into the hall, where we passed two women in blue aprons who nodded politely. “A moment, please,” he said. “This is Mrs. Harker, who is visiting us and will be volunteering her time.” He introduced the two severe-looking women as Mrs. Kranz and Mrs. Vogt, hall supervisors. “Most of our patients are quite peaceful, but these ladies are on duty in case of an incident,” he said before dismissing them.
“I wish you would dispense with these formalities,” I said, smiling at him. “I would be delighted if you would simply call me Mina.”
“Then you must call me John,” he said. “But we mustn’t let the patients-and others-know of this little intimacy.”
“Of course not,
He opened double doors to a small library with a tall paneled ceiling and a lazy fire in the fireplace. Two elderly women playing cards occupied a game table, while a young girl lay on the divan, mumbling to herself and rubbing her breasts. The two old women paid her no attention but wordlessly flipped cards onto the table.
The doctor and I stood in the doorway. No one looked up. “That is Mary,” he said, gesturing to the girl. “I admitted her three months ago. She is fifteen. Her parents brought her to us when the commencement of puberty incited a mental illness. Would you like to see her chart?” He handed it to me.
Written in thick blue ink and a scratchy penmanship, I read it with some difficulty:
Facts Indicating Insanity: Causeless laughter alternating with obstinate silence. She is wicked and excitable in the company of gentlemen. Her parents were alerted to the disturbance when she turned cartwheels on the lawn in full view of observers of both sexes. The family doctor was brought in to examine her, but she refused to comply with him and would not stick out her tongue for the examination.
I scanned the page to read what Seward had written after his last visit with her a few days prior:
She takes but little food and sits for hours with her eyes closed, patting her breasts. Water cure, isolation, etc. completely ineffective. Vaginal lavage with potassium bromide to calm the excited tissue give only temporary relief. She is particularly excitable in the menstrual state, but at other times can be made docile with medication.
“I am not going to interrupt her,” he said, taking the chart from me and making a note on it. “She appears to be calm enough.”
One of the older ladies slapped the last card in her hand on the table. Her shock of long hair was like marble, stiff and white with caramel streaks. She might have been sixty or eighty-I could not tell. She caught me looking at her, and I was struck by the color and vivacity of her eyes-vivid green and as bright as a baby’s. Her eyes looked as if they belonged on another face, a face that still had many years left in this lifetime. Her body, however, looked brittle with age.
“That woman is staring at me,” I whispered to Seward.
“Vivienne has been here for many years. I cannot introduce you to her in front of her card partner, Lady Grayson. She thinks that Vivienne is the queen, and it upsets her terribly to hear otherwise.”
We walked down the hall, with him at a faster pace and me trying to keep up, to a door with a small opening slashed by two iron bars. I could not see inside because the doctor blocked my view. The asylum’s ambient moaning filled the hall, but none seemed to be coming from inside this particular room. He put a large key in the lock and left it there as he spoke.
