Nora heard the rustling outside her bedroom door that said Kate was coming with her morning tray. She stood, her hands clenched against their trembling, and waited, ready. As soon as the lock clicked, she grabbed the doorknob and yanked the door open, ready to run the maid over if she had to—but it wasn’t Kate.
Her father stood there, looking pale and sad, and ten years older than he was. But he was resolute, and Nora’s half-crazed conviction that she could escape deflated like a balloon.
She’d been back at Tarrindale Hall for more than a month, she thought. The leaves outside her window had begun to turn. In all those days, she hadn’t been outside this room even one time. Her father had brought her home from London and imprisoned her, under the guise of a ‘rest cure.’
At least she now knew what they said was wrong with her: hysteria. Nora had learned enough Greek to understand the origin of the word. The thing that was wrong with her was womanhood.
She also knew just enough of the world she lived in to have an idea what they did to hysterical women. Lock them away, for one thing. If not in their bedrooms, in attics. Or asylums.
She wasn’t allowed visitors, not even her family. She wasn’t allowed books, or papers and pen, or needlework, or a sketch pad. Even Kate had been instructed not to talk to her. To get well, Dr. Davies said, she had to focus entirely on complete rest. No mental, emotional, or physical stimulation of any kind. Lie in her bed all day. Every day. Alone.
They thought she was going mad. And their cure was making it true.
But at least they hadn’t brought Dr. Stanhope and his horrific machine back.
“Nora,” her father said as he stepped into the room. He put his hands on her shoulders and led her back to her bed. Kate came in just behind him, carrying the tray Nora had expected.
As her father tucked her back in, he said, “Kate reports that you’re difficult to manage. You almost knocked her down yesterday.”
Nora threw a betrayed look Kate’s way. That had been an accident, and the maid knew it. Nora had only tried to get around her to the door. It wasn’t her fault Kate had tried to stop her.
The one thought that filled her waking mind was escape. She knew it was actual madness to think she could get anywhere away—Tarrindale Hall was an enormous, eight-hundred-year-old manor. It was a three-minute walk to the dining room from her bedroom. Someone would stop her before she could make it outdoors, and even if she managed to slink out, where would she go?
The hopelessness of her cause couldn’t dissuade her from the attempt. At the very least, it was something to think on, focus her mind toward, and the burst of energy she expelled when she made her feeble attempts kept her limbs from cramping with disuse.
“I only want to go outdoors, Father. I’ll be quiet, I promise. I only want to sit in the sun.”
He sat at her side and picked up her hand. “I’ve told you what Dr. Davies said. It’s too bright outdoors. You need calm and quiet. All these … these feelings that rule you, they’re destroying you, Nora. You need to be quiet until they go away.”
“You mean you want me numb.”
“I mean I want you well.”
“Why can’t you be like you were? Why can’t things go back to the way they were, when you loved me?”
Her father looked away. “Kate, leave us, please.”
“Yes, milord.” The maid scurried from the room.
Her father cupped his hand over her cheek. “I love you with all I have in my heart, Nora. From the day of your birth, you’ve been the sun in my sky. Since we lost your mother and Edmund and Peter, and almost lost you, too, you’ve been the centre of my universe. I did wrong by you before. I didn’t give you what you needed. I’m afraid I broke you, but I will make it right. I will make you right.”
Who she was, the person she truly was, was broken. Wrong. Deformed. In her father’s voice that verdict took the happiest memories of the best years of her life, ripped them to shreds, and set them afire. If he thought she was broken, then what was it he loved?
Like the moment at Lady Francine’s dinner table, when all those avid eyes waited for her to unleash her tongue, knowing her father truly didn’t love her gave her a surge of unruly freedom, and she sat back up. “It’s too late to fix me, Father. Didn’t Dr. Stanhope tell you?”
Her father’s pale blue eyes darkened under his furrowing brow. “We’ll not speak of it. All is not lost.”
“You mean you’ll do what your father did to Aunt Martha and throw me at some old goat who won’t notice or care that I’m not a virgin?”
“Don’t say that! And what are you talking about? You know nothing of your aunt’s marriage. What did she tell you?”
As angry and desperate as she was, she knew to go no farther. Her aunt had failed her badly, but Nora wouldn’t cause her harm. Still, pushing at her father had given her a sense of stolen power, and she didn’t want to stop. She remembered how upset Christopher had got on the same topic, and how satisfying it had been to get under his skin. “Dr. Stanhope didn’t tell you everything. He couldn’t. He couldn’t know how much I enjoyed what I did with William. He couldn’t know all the things William showed me, like the clitoris. Do you know what the clitoris is, Father?”
He leapt from the bed. “Stop it, Nora! Enough!”
“I begged him for it. I went to his room and dragged him into mine and I begged him to take me. Then I begged him to do it again. And again. I wrapped my hands around his cock and begged him.”
His hand came at her faster than she could see, and she’d been hit, her head rocking to the side, before she could flinch and diminish the blow. A second blow followed it immediately. “STOP! STOP!” her father shouted.
She lay on her side, covering her flaming cheek with her hands, panting with the exertion of her words and the shock of his blows. Standing over her bed, her father sobbed, still muttering “Stop” with every gasping breath. He pulled the service bell.
By the time Kate eased open the door and stepped in, Nora’s father had composed himself. Nora hadn’t moved. Something important and terrible had happened when her father had, for the first time in her life, struck her, and she was afraid to enter this new world.
“You rang, milord?”
“Bring the box Dr. Davies left, please.”
“Of course, milord.”
Nora didn’t know what that box would mean, but she knew it couldn’t be good. She turned and sat up. “Father—”
“Hush, Nora. No more from you. I’ll hear no more.”
Kate came back holding a wooden cube, a small chest, in her hands. She gave it to Nora’s father. He set it on the table at her bedside and lifted the lid. Inside was a dark blue bottle with a cork stopper, and a small, oddly shaped spoon.
“What is that?”
He took out the bottle and opened it. “Medicine.”
“What will it do to me?”
“Make you well.” He poured some of the liquid into the strange spoon. The smell was strong and bitter.
If her father thought this medicine would ‘make her well’ after the violent exchange they’d just shared, then Nora was more afraid of that noxious potion than of anything else in her life. “I don’t … I don’t want it. I’ll be good, I promise. I’ll be quiet. Please, Papa.”
He winced at the name she never called him anymore, but it changed nothing. He held her head in one hand and lowered the spoon to her mouth with the other. “Take your medicine, Nora. Trust your father.”
She didn’t. Not at all. She sealed her lips firmly shut.
“Shall I call Fred and ask him to hold you still while I force this on you, or can you manage enough reason to take this on your own?”
“Please,” she whispered, and he shoved the spoon in her mouth. The vile ooze burned her tongue and throat. While she sputtered from that assault, he forced another spoonful down.
He handed the spoon to Kate. “Clean this, please.” While the maid went to the bathroom and cleaned the spoon, he closed up the bottle and put it away. Then he pushed Nora to lie down, and he covered her with the duvet. “All will be well, monkey. You’ll be well again. I know it.”
“Why don’t you love who I am?” she asked. Her tongue felt fat.
“I love the woman I know you can be.”
Those words made no sense. Kate came in and handed something to him, and he picked up an odd box and put it inside. He bent and kissed Nora’s forehead, and he and Kate walked away.
Then they weren’t there. Nora wondered where they’d gone.
Where who’d gone?
She stared at the windows, the drapes closed against the sunlight, and watched the bright square go dim.
Where was she?
Who
Nora lay in the warm water, floating, floating, floating. Her hair swirled on the surface and spread out into lacy patterns like golden spider webs. Kate lifted her arm and pushed the sponge over it, leaving tracks of soapy bubbles. She couldn’t feel the sponge move. Her limbs had turned to wood some time ago. Some time. Long time. Once upon a time.
The sponge went up to her shoulder and down, over her chest. It had been alive once, living in the water, somewhere far away. Fixed in place. Waiting to die.
Die.
Kate set her hand back in the water, and Nora watched it sink, the soap fizzing to the surface and wrapping around the ends of her hair.
“You just lie there and enjoy the warm, milady, whilst I change your bed. I’ll just be right through the doorway there.”
Nora lifted her hair on a hand and watched the strands glisten in the candlelight. When she looked up, she was alone in the bathroom.
The sponge sat on the little shelf at the side of the tub. A kind of animal, it was. Had been. Had lived in the sea. In the warm sea. Fixed in place. She picked it up and pushed it under the water. It filled and softened, its tiny tips moving slightly with the sway of the bath.
Nora let her head slide under.
Someone was beating her to death, slamming her back, locking up her lungs. She was strangling and breaking and drowning all at once. Everything was hard everywhere. Hard and cold.
She coughed, and water gushed from her chest, over her tongue, tasting of soap. The beating stopped. She took a breath and coughed again, more water, an ocean of it. And again.
“Thank God. Thank God!” her father cried, and she was dragged up and into his arms. “Nora, Nora, Nora. What did you do?”
She didn’t know. She didn’t understand. Somebody was crying. Somebodies.
Her father picked her up and carried her. He laid her in her bed and pulled the covers over her. She was wet and naked and under the covers, soaking the sheets. Papa would be mad. No, wait—Papa was here.
Not Papa. Never Papa. Nevermore.
A log fell in the fireplace and set a rush of crackling sparks up the chimney. Nora watched the flames dance with shadows on the ceiling.
With one hand cradling her head, her father lifted her and pushed the spoon at her. She hated that spoon and its foul contents. The world wobbled and fell over into black shapes after she swallowed what was on that spoon. The world always wobbled and fell over now.
“Take your medicine, monkey,” her father crooned.
She tried to ask him not to make her, but no words came out when she opened her mouth. The medicine oozed down her throat, and the black shapes rose up.
There were three hours in each day when Nora was Nora—or, at least, when she remembered Nora. The hour just before her father, or Dr. Davies, came in with the dark blue bottle. Three doses a day, three hours of knowing herself. In those hours, the world was still akilter and obscured, like she was wrapped in gauze from head to toe, but she could know enough, and think enough, to understand her plight.
She tried to use those semi-lucid minutes to think, to see beyond the walls of her bedroom and imagine what came next. What did she have to do to be freed? They wanted her to rest. How much more rest? How much longer until they believed she was cured? How much more?
She would do it. Whatever they wanted, she would do it. But when she tried to tell her father, the words wouldn’t come.
During each of those precious hours of knowing, Nora lay on her bed and stared up at the ceiling. At night, the ceiling danced with shapes from the firelight and made monsters that pulled her mind too quickly back into the dark, but in the day, it was only the ceiling, and a blank slate on which she could write her thoughts, when she remembered to have thoughts. Its pure emptiness drew her fragmented mind together, and she could consider her state of being. Each day passed without change. Still locked away, drugged, alone. Did they—in these moments of struggling clarity, she thought now of everyone outside the walls of this room as ‘they,’ a single organism opposed to her—mean to make an end to this, or did they mean for her to live out her days in this room? If there was a possible end, what was it? What did they wait to see in her before she would have satisfied their expectations?
Behind those thoughts beat a steady rhythm of feeling—faint and distant, but still palpable. An ache of memory she couldn’t quite grasp. Something she’d had once but no longer. Something she’d loved and lost. Or someone.
One day, while she looked up and wrote her thoughts above her head, Nora heard the baying of the hounds outside. At first, the sound only made her think of puppies and she didn’t mark it any other way, but as they continued with their barking and baying, she realised that she understood the story they were telling.
She turned back the covers and stood. The world pirouetted around her—she rarely stood unsupported anymore—and then rocked back into place, and she went to a window and pulled the draperies back.
“Oh!” she gasped. Frost laced the corners of the windowpanes, and the leaves were already fading from their autumn splendor. How long since she’d looked out her own window? The draperies were always drawn now, but she was alone in the room most of every day and all of every night. Why had she not looked? Had they taken from her so much that she had forgotten that there was a world beyond the walls?
A hound barked, and she looked down. Her breath stopped, and her heartbeat. Arrayed on the ground before the Hall were a dozen men on horseback—no, more. Some in red coats, others in black, all in tall hats. They were turned out for a hunt. A fox hunt.
Nora whimpered and put her hands on the glass.
Her father had brought her on her first hunt when she was twelve years old. He’d always insisted she ride sidesaddle, so as not to upset their guests, but he’d encouraged her to hunt with them. She’d rooted for the fox—they were such lovely animals; she wanted one for a pet, not a trophy—but she’d loved the hunt. Flying through the woods after the hounds, leaping over hazards and wheeling around obstacles—it was the one time that Nora could be herself beyond the circle of her family. She could ride free and be accepted.
It was happening today, right now, and she hadn’t known. There was Christopher, astride Richelieu, his big white gelding, beside their father, both of them in their scarlet coats. Christopher was here, at Tarrindale, and she hadn’t known. He hadn’t come up to see her.
No one ever did, except the maids to feed her or clean her, her father to medicate her, or the doctor to poke at her.
“Christopher!” she tried to shout, but her voice was hoarse from disuse, and she only croaked. She beat on the glass, but no one heard her.
She watched until the party rode out. Before her brother urged his horse on and away, he looked up, right at her window.
He saw her. Time froze. He raised his hand, and then he rode off after their father.
Nora let her head fall to the glass. She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t remember how.
Thunder exploded around her, and Nora pulled her eyelids open and heaved herself to her side. The room was dark, except for the amber glow of the fire behind its screen.
The door shook hard against another blast of angry sound. Quiet, and then another hard crash and shake.
She blinked and tried to focus. Something was trying to get her.
“NORA!” Another crash. The door seemed to bow in. “NORA!”
Christopher?
“Christopher, stop! NO!” Her father, too.
She put her hand down and forced herself to sit up. The room lurched woozily, and she lay back down.
The crashing stopped. “This is madness, Father,” Christopher said.
Madness, yes. She was mad. They were making her well. When she was well, she could be in the sun again.
“You don’t understand, son.”
“You’re right. I don’t.” A knock on her door. “Nora! Nono, are you awake? Are you there?”
Was she awake? Was she there?
“I’m so sorry, Nono! This is all my fault!”
What was his fault?
“Enough! You’ll upset her. She needs her rest.”
“She needs to live!”
“And she will! Do you think I don’t want that? I’m trying to help her!”
“You’re destroying her! You’ve locked her away for months!”
Destroying? Months? Months was a long time. Wasn’t it? Nora tried to sit up again. This time, she rode out the lurch of the world and stayed up.
“At least let me see her, Father. Please.” Her brother’s voice had changed; it was softer, less … just less. The door to her room no longer shook.
And then the world was quiet again.
Nora sat in the firelight and tried to make thoughts.
She was still sitting there when her father came in with the blue bottle.
When she took her medicine, he brushed his hand over her head and kissed her crown. “All will be well, monkey,” he said. Then he tucked her in and left.
Not knowing quite why she did it, Nora turned the covers back and stood up. Numbness roared in her ears, and the room spun like a whirligig. Grasping pieces of furniture on the way, she reeled to the bathroom. Remembering a long ago day, far, far back in her oldest memories, when she’d eaten some berries from a shrub in the garden and her mother, her beautiful, sweet, quiet mother, had grabbed her and made her sick them up, Nora put her finger down her throat and vomited into her sink.