Squiffers was about to nod his assent when C.J. stopped and whirled around, planting her feet. “What are you going to do to me?” she demanded, her voice rising.
“Finest care in the kingdom, pretty one,” the madhouse keeper replied. “Regular bleeding, purging, and vomiting. We’ve got some two hundred inmates who receive a steady diet of water gruel every day for breakfast, porridge at lunch, and rice milk on Saturdays at dinner. Three meals a day! And of course at Bethlehem, we believe that the moral force of the ‘eye’—my eye—will lead these mad sinners to God,” Haslam gleefully told the physician.
“I am not mad!” C.J. shrieked, and summoned all her force to shake loose from Squiffers’s grasp. She raced away from the mad-doctors, down the corridor, heart pounding, adrenaline pumping.
But her freedom was short-lived, as she found herself lifted off the floor by two enormous guards who seemed to have materialized from the ether, men as tall as Haslam, but with perhaps thrice his bulk. They bore her back to the doctors, still attempting to elbow her way out of their firm grasp and kicking her legs as fiercely as she could, given the narrowness of her hem.
When the duo reached Haslam and Squiffers with their prey, the keeper unlocked a cell, and pushed back the door. A huge metal contraption, like a giant black birdcage, hung from a chain of heavy links attached to the low ceiling. The bottom of the cage remained suspended about two feet from the floor of the cell. “This’ll keep her from doing injury to herself or the others,” Haslam explained. “It will stop her kicking, for sure.”
No! They couldn’t! C.J. thought. In an instant, she became a living thing inside what nearly passed for a gibbet, the cage barely big enough to contain her slender body. Haslam slammed the door of the cage, rattling it to be sure that the lock held fast. He removed a gold pocket watch from his waistcoat and checked the time. “Ahh. How fortuitous of you to arrive at this time of day, Miss Welles. You are just in time for lunch.”
The apothecary turned and escorted Squiffers from the cell and down the corridor, their retreat greeted by a chorus of cries and jeers from the unfortunate incarcerated souls.
There she was, trapped in an iron cage, in a walled cell, in an airless stockade, which itself stood behind two impenetrable gates. All C.J. had left was her mind, which she was sure to lose for real, the more time she spent imprisoned within these walls. So this was where society locked away its undesirable element, its untouchables. Certainly, there were genuine madmen and madwomen in Bethlehem, but how many others had lost their minds in the asylum, who had been shut away simply for being homeless or helpless?
And the more she thought about it, the more C.J. realized that the barbarism to which she was currently subject was not entirely unknown in her own century. Too often C.J. had come across headlines of abusive and appalling conditions in mental wards and nursing homes. Her heart had gone out to the victims she had read about and whose stories were played out in the nightly news, but they had always been more or less fictional characters to her. Now she was one of them.
How could she retain her wits and devise a means of escape? How could she convey a message to those who still cared about her? C.J. tried to shift her weight; her legs had already fallen asleep. Even the mound of straw in the corner of the dark cell seemed inviting by comparison.
Something rustled in the dark. For a moment, C.J. thought she saw the straw move. Perhaps she was losing her mind sooner than she feared.
A woman’s head, covered with long, matted gray hair, poked through the smelly reeds. The head was followed by a body resembling nothing so much as a sack of potatoes. The colors of whatever garments the lady had been wearing had faded into nondescription. Her breasts sagged to her waist. It was nearly impossible to tell her age. But she fixed upon C.J. with piercing blue eyes. For several moments, the two women simply regarded each other, with more curiosity than wariness. Finally, the other spoke, never releasing C.J. from her bright blue gaze. Her voice sounded like aged whisky. “I’ve been here twenty years,” she said.
“How old are you then?” C.J. asked curiously.
“Nineteen . . . and twenty-three and sixty-five if I’m a day.”
This did not seem a satisfactory answer to the new inmate. “If you are but nineteen years old, how can you have been here for twenty years?” she queried.
The haggard woman sat up and began to rock herself, singing a ballad with a lyric of her own devising, set to a familiar tune.
“Alas, Lord Featherstone did me wrong, for to get me with child on a mild midday; my maidenhead died the same day as my father, and . . . look you!” The madwoman staggered to her feet.
C.J. noticed that her cellmate was pregnant, immediately putting her in mind of her own dire plight. “Lady Rose?” she asked, horrified.
“I was once a lovely pink rose, but my bush was pruned,” Rose continued in a singsong. She lifted her skirts. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” she chanted, displaying her privates. “Oooh, I’ve lifted my skirt for men much better than you, I warrant.”
Rose rubbed her belly and began to cough; it was a dry, hacking sound. “Pray, sir, have you got anything to drink? I am parched with thirst.” She looked about the ratty straw until she found a tin cup. Rose stared into the bottom of the cup, wishing it full, then turned it over and demonstrated to C.J. that there was nothing in it. She stumbled over to C.J.’s cage, still clutching her cup and
