Chapter 01: Taste of Iron
The charge against me was so vague that at first I couldn't deny it. I was told by the head of the household that the other servants had raised concerns about my conduct. They were not mistaken, in one sense. I had been sneaking out to do something --it was to read, to write, or at least to try, despite my lack of education. I wanted to write in order to give vent to my deepest emotions while waking, so that I wouldn't cry them out while I sleep. I am still made ashamed by what the others told me I said while asleep: strange, nonsensical things that they twisted into innuendoes while I blushed and stammered. I believed I could be cured if I could only write it out, the way authoresses do, and great ladies in their secret memoirs. To that end I sometimes slipped away from my duties of an evening, into a copse on the manor grounds or a hole in the mill. My quiet times, my times alone.
I knew it was wrong of me, so when the ancient head of the household called me into his study I entered with the downcast eyes and bowed head of a penitent. Wasting no time with pleasantries, he asked where I went in the evenings.
"To the copse by the stone wall. Sometimes to the mill." I said quietly. He flicked me a glance of mixed disapproval and suspicion.
"A young woman, alone in such places?"
"I'm not alone," I said, "I have friends whom I meet there." I was thinking, my books, my favourite authors, the characters I create. Thinking it would make me look less of a misfit, I said, "I go to meet my 'friends.'"
I often fail to notice innuendo. This time, it was my downfall. He, stern and silent, nodded his great white whiskery head and wrote something in his memorandum book, his book of days and costs and tasks. Then he told me to collect my things.
I thought I had been dismissed. So I was surprised when, having packed my bags, a hansom cab arrived, crunching out of the fog down the post road. Unmarked, unremarkable, it had come for me. The other maidservants giggled as I was summoned forward out of their midst by the cabbie, a shifty rufous type. He called me "Hanner" --my name is Hannah, but he pronounced it "Hanner"-- and took my little black bag from my hands without the slightest hint of care for my well-being.
The manor's groom, a tall man with a roman nose and hands coarsened by curry-combs, appeared in the barn door as I mounted the steps of the carriage. He stood squarely, framed centered in the open door with his hands on hips and a smirk on his face. The maids always whispered that he was sweet on me, though I never saw it. I was polite to him, or so I thought. Perhaps I was cold. Perhaps I held him at arm's length when he wanted to be closer. Perhaps. I simply lack the ability to interpret these cues. It was always so with me.
Into the hansom cab I went. It was curtained and, cosseted in darkness, I fell asleep. I woke to find my skirts in disarray, hitched up where I had curled myself to mid-thigh. The rufous cabbie was looking in on me with an odd sort of grin. I straightened my hair and clothing quickly, and disembarked with as much self-possession as I could. But my composure received a dire blow when I saw where it was I had been delivered.
A sanitarium. A prison. An institution. I could not tell, but the building was massive and modern, all brick and chimneys, like a factory. No converted country house this: it was built with a purpose, and that purpose was to house the deviant. I knew of such places but had never seen one inside. I did not want to now, and turned to the cabbie to implore him. But no cabbie was there to implore. He had gone into the mist. And when I turned my head back, there were two men, employees of the institution, come to take me inside.
Inside was a strange mixture of the dim and the sanitized. It was clearly organized as an efficient and rational place with many rooms and straight hallways. And yet, in the corners and in the badpans there was a blurring at the edges, a whiff of mildew and rot. A chill was in the air, and the memory of stone places. After an initial examination, I was not permitted to see anyone those first days. I was simply placed in a small room and observed.
When I know I am being watched, that is when the night-voices speak their loudest. When I try to suppress them, they come all the more. Like a stutterer or a hysteric, my verbal convulsions come on under duress. Day after day I woke with a raw throat, unable to know what I had said, only knowing that whatever it was, I had been screaming it out. The injustice of involuntary disclosure, and my subjection to interpretation I had no chance of contesting, strung my nerves high. I was sensitive. So very sensitive. They must have known.
On the fourth day of confinement, I was brought into the doctor's office. The smell of leather from his overstuffed chairs nearly choked me. I felt as insubstantial as a ghost in my white shift before him: a powerful man in his 30s, dark of hair and complexion, and with eyes as cold as black glass.
He asked me if I felt any shame over my conduct. I told him I knew it was inappropriate for a servant to seek into matters above her station. He asked me bluntly, forcefully, how many men I had lain with in the copse, in the mill. I was shocked into silence.
"I was not with men," I faltered out, and at this he raised an eyebrow. He murmured,
"With women, then?"
I did not know what he meant for a long moment. When it came to me, I coloured deeply and replied,
"No, sir, no, with books. That is to say, I went to read only. To learn. You must believe me. I was reading books."
At this he laughed. "Books! A country girl, a servant girl, with books! And what was it you were reading? Gothic novels? Or perhaps something French?"
Indignant, I stamped my foot and cried, "No, it was only improving works I read, and harmless fantasies like Crusoe. I only read so that I may learn to write, so that I can suppress--"
I stopped. He stared, piercing me with his gaze. And then he said to me,
