A Madness So Discreet Read online

  DEDICATION

  For all who struggle in darkness

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ads

  About the Author

  Books by Mindy McGinnis

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  They all had their terrors.

  The new girl believed that spiders lived in her veins.

  Her screams sliced through the darkness, passing through the thin walls of Grace’s cell and filling her brain with another’s misery to add to the pressures of her own. Grace pulled her pillow tight over her ears, ignoring the feather shafts that poked through the cheap muslin and pricked her skin. On the other side of the wall she could hear Mrs. Clay shifting in her bed, sleep stolen from both patients by the new girl, who hadn’t learned yet that screaming didn’t bring help.

  Quite the opposite.

  The ward door crashed open, the metal clanging against the stone wall and bringing cries from all corners as patients rushed away from the noise and whatever fresh hell it brought. The girl screamed louder, ignorantly drawing her tormentors to her. Grace identified the dragging gait of the women’s ward administrator as they passed her cell, followed by Dr. Heedson’s lighter step.

  An unintelligible string of words from the new girl was silenced by a sharp crack. Another slew of syllables that meant nothing brought the harsh snap of a kick. Grace jammed her fingers into her ears until all she could hear was her heart as it pushed blood through her body, no matter how she wished for it to stop. The new girl wasn’t learning the efficacy of silence, the art of invisibility. Grace had given up speech long ago. Once the words no and stop had done nothing, the others refused to come out, their inadequacy making the effort necessary to voice them an equation too easily solved. Grace curled into a protective ball as Croomes and Heedson left the ward, the whimpers of the new girl trailing in their wake. Grace could deafen herself with her own hands and squeeze her eyes shut so tightly that the muscles in her face twitched in agony. But the acuity of her memory was a dark artist at work in her mind, painting pictures without her permission.

  She moaned, pressing her forehead into the sharp ridges of her kneecaps. They poked through her threadbare nightgown into her eyelids, sending sparks across her sight, defying her dearest wish—to stop seeing. Faces were the most painful and the most likely to surface in the dark hours of the night. The spider girl’s moans had conjured her mother’s face in exquisite detail, each finely etched wrinkle apparent as she grimaced under whatever new indignity had been brought upon her, the edges of her lips permanently stained with wine.

  Grace turned her head from the apparition, tentatively drawing her fingers from her ears. The ward had returned to silence, but her brain would almost welcome strings of gibberish in the dark, anything to send her thoughts on another avenue than the one it had chosen. It barreled on, resurrecting her father’s face twisted into a paroxysm no daughter should ever witness.

  Her cry broke the stillness, bringing movement from Mrs. Clay’s cell. A soft humming threaded through the air, the only comfort her friend could offer through the walls that separated them. Grace latched on to the notes, following the pattern until she learned it. She joined in soundlessly, the silence she’d enveloped herself with too sacred to break. Her mind toyed with the notes, happy to be busy. She relaxed as it allowed itself to be bent to her whim, tracing the pattern of the lace cloth at home instead of the faces around the table. Grace’s hand fell to her belly as she drifted into sleep, cradling the life that grew there.

  They all had their terrors, but at least the spiders that lived in the new girl’s veins were imaginary. Grace had learned long ago that the true horrors of this world were other people.

  TWO

  It was still dark outside when they were called to breakfast by the sound of Miss Marie walking the hall with her cowbell. Even though the clanging noise seemed to perforate her lips and bounce off her teeth while she dressed, Grace preferred Marie’s method of waking the inmates as opposed to Croomes’s; she was more likely to unlock the door and barge in, hoping to catch some infringement that she could punish.

  Grace’s nightshirt went over her head, a flimsy shift taking its place. There were no undergarments to bother with; she’d been stripped immediately after her admittance, her corset, chemise, and petticoat whisked from her bare skin to reveal the guilty bulge of her belly while she was given a bath, Croomes scrubbing unnecessarily hard over her tender abdomen.

  The lye soap had left burn marks on her skin, some laced with the deep scratches from Croomes. They scabbed over while she lay crying that night, the last of her voice seeping out of her while the Grace Mae who had worn a red velvet dress hours before fell asleep to wake only as Grace. Her family name had been stripped from her along with her clothes. There would be no record of a person with the last name of Mae in Wayburne Lunatic Asylum of Boston. Her father wouldn’t stand for it.

  As her first days in the asylum had passed, she began to think of her body as a scab that served only to protect the tiny movements inside of her. Eventually she would be able to protect it no more; it would be forced into the world kicking and screaming, wanting nothing more than the protection and silence that the darkness had offered.

  She understood babies now, and their reluctance to be born. Once hers was forced into the light and taken away, her body would be of no more use. She could only hope it would be allowed to slough off the world, unnoticed. Until then, she had only to wait.

  Grace combed her light hair roughly with her fingers, catching the split ends in the ragged tips of her nails. Miss Marie gave a perfunctory tap on the door before unlocking it, taking one glance at her, and saying, “Well, you’re one less I’ll have to help dress, at least,” and moving on.

  Mrs. Clay was in the hall, deftly working her dark hair into a bun with the pin she was allowed to keep even though it was against the rules. Grace stepped over a writhing woman, well aware of her own untidy hair and what price Mrs. Clay paid for her small luxuries. To be an exemplary patient meant she was paraded about when the Board came to inspect the asylum, her hairpin a prize won at a carnival where she was the animal on display.

  “Hello, dear.” Mrs. Clay smiled, the tiniest of lines around her mouth edging more deeply as she did. “I hope you slept well.”

  Grace shook her head as Mrs. Clay tucked her hand inside of Grace’s elbow to steer her toward the dining hall. Unperturbed by her walking partner’s continued silence, Mrs. Clay kept on. “Come and have your food before there’s none left for you or the babe.”

  Food was a constant struggle. The kitchens provided only what they could
afford for the day, regardless of how many mouths there were to feed. Many inmates never made it to the tables in time to see food but made the best of it with crumbs and scraps that fell to the floor. If not for the driving necessity of eating for two, Grace would’ve been happy to be a forgotten one who died quietly in her cell.

  But for now her appetite was a pit, and she fed it with the abandon of the desperate. They made for the tables and the food piled there, the press of unwashed bodies on all sides of them breaking any pretense of a line. Mrs. Clay snatched two slices of bread, rolling one into a ball and hiding it in the folds of her skirts for Grace later. Grace dove for her own piece, slapping away the filthy hands of the girl on her right, who hissed at her. She jammed the bread into her mouth, ignoring the threat.

  Grace chewed as quickly as possible, grinding the heavy bread with her teeth and peeling it off the roof of her mouth with her tongue. Even without knives and forks, her training wouldn’t allow her to stuff her fingers in her mouth. Across the table from her, Cracked Pat had no such compunctions. Fingers caked with food went into her mouth, along with fistfuls of her hair that she’d managed to pull free from her head. Grace turned away, her delicate stomach turning. Mrs. Clay followed with the concealed bread, and they retreated to a corner by a window rendered nearly opaque by streaks of bird droppings.

  “Here then, eat up,” Mrs. Clay said, passing the bread tightly in her fist over to Grace. She leaned against the window and watched as Grace devoured it. “Whoever thought the idea of sitting while you ate your food would seem like a treat, eh?”

  She was rewarded with a tiny smile, but Grace’s thoughts slipped away again, to the days when sweet Alice’s angelic face was what she saw across the table, not Cracked Pat’s bleeding scalp.

  “Fresh bruises on that one.” Mrs. Clay jerked her chin toward the door where a patient not much older than Grace was making her unsure way to the table. “Must be the new girl that was screaming about the spiders.”

  Grace nodded but didn’t turn her head to look.

  Mrs. Clay reached out and touched her chin, pulling Grace’s blue gaze to her own. “Have a care, girl. Show me you’ll take an interest in something around you, bleak as it all may be. You can keep your words inside if you want, but I see your eyes looking far off and your arms crossed over your belly. They’ll take it from you when it’s born and after that I won’t see you again even if I should get out of this place. I don’t think my kind is welcome at your home address.”

  Grace’s eyebrows drew together.

  “It’s your hands that give you away,” Mrs. Clay said, taking one of Grace’s in her own. “All smooth and lily-white, never done a lick of work in your life. I’ve got the calluses of twenty years at the plow, and every penny earned from it right into the husband’s pocket once he shucked me in here.”

  Grace pulled her hand back to rest on her stomach, and Mrs. Clay’s mouth tightened. “You’re not the first young woman of your class I’ve seen in here, heavy around the waist. However that child was got on you, your family will want you back once it’s gone. You storing everything up on your insides won’t do you no favors once you’re past these walls. Find something outside to bring you back to the world, or you may end up here for good.”

  Grace’s eyes returned to the window, where a light morning rain began to seep through the layers of grime, allowing splashes of color from the outside world into the gray interior. Mrs. Clay sighed heavily and rested a hand on her shoulder.

  Kind as they were, Mrs. Clay’s words were lost on Grace. She knew the baby would be born, and with its exit would come her reentry into the world she’d known. They would sew her back into her red velvet dress she’d arrived in. Her father’s black lacquered carriage would gather her after hours, the rolling wheels taking her back home to her own room, her own bed. Her own terrors.

  She had already decided she was never leaving.

  THREE

  “Water treatment for you today?” Mrs. Clay asked, as they strolled arm in arm through the halls, stepping over inert bodies.

  “For you today? For you today?” Cracked Pat kept pace alongside them, echoing Mrs. Clay’s words. Grace nodded as Cracked Pat reached up and plucked at Grace’s blond hair, which Mrs. Clay had neatly tucked into a bun using her pin.

  “There’s the little lady,” Croomes’s voice bellowed down the stony hall, as she waddled toward them. “Keeping time with the farmer’s wife, a fine pair of friends they are. I’m sure the two of you are plotting rather a nice picnic. Perhaps you’ll go for an afternoon ride on your matching ponies afterward? In the meantime it’s my clock you’re on, and it says you’re next for your treatment.” Croomes made a mock bow.

  “I’ll remind you that I am not a farmer’s wife,” Mrs. Clay said, her voice cold.

  “That a fact?” Croomes asked.

  “It is,” Mrs. Clay said. “My husband divorced me soon after shuttling me in here. One word from him and the signature of a judge and I’m insane. My lands became his, the judge’s sister his wife, my children now hers.”

  “Sad story you got there,” Croomes said.

  “I am not a farmer’s wife. If you call me that again, they’ll have good reason to put me in solitary and you’ll be missing an eye.”

  Croomes watched Mrs. Clay for a moment, her jaw grinding her teeth together. “I’ve got a fine list of things I’d like to call you. How about I try some of those?”

  “I am not a farmer’s wife,” Mrs. Clay repeated.

  “All right then, get an idea stuck in there much, do you?” Croomes said. She gave Grace a push on the backside to move her along, but Grace noticed that she never turned her back on Mrs. Clay. Another small smile played on the edge of Grace’s lips and she squelched it quickly. It was the little battles that got them through their days. All in preparation for the bigger ones to come.

  To kill yourself in an asylum is a thing easily done.

  Plenty who wished to stay alive found themselves dying of neglect, while those who prayed for death woke each morning to the sun’s rays filtered through greasy windows. Grace had thought through her options more than once; to slide beneath the freezing waters during a treatment while the attendant’s back was turned or to simply cease eating.

  But Grace had sat through many sermons by her father’s side, heard about the perils of hell and the fiery brimstone that surely awaited her if she took her own life. She doubted that hell was hot and sulfuric. Instead, she imagined it was comfortable and smelled like her own bedroom. If fear kept her from ending herself, she’d be neatly deposited back between those sheets, as confining as any chains. An ethereal hell or the one she’d already lived through were her options. Croomes twisted Grace’s wrist, bringing her thoughts back to the body she was stuck in for the moment.

  “My, my, but you do walk pretty,” Croomes said. “Not a bone out of place on you. Forget balancing the book, I bet we could put a whole bookcase on your head, couldn’t we? You look like a picture in one of them lady’s magazines, except for that bit.” Croomes flicked Grace’s pregnant belly as they turned the corner to the baths. “Nothing much ladylike about that, is there?”

  Grace had buried the urge to speak so deeply that most words from others meant nothing, but Croomes’s voice always crept through the safe fog she’d veiled her mind in, demanding to be heard. Grace set her jaw and went to a tub already half-filled with freezing water. Miss Marie was dumping buckets over another patient, but moved to help Grace take off her shift.

  Marie offered her a hand as she stepped over the porcelain rim, and Grace took it, leaning heavily on the girl’s arm as she lowered herself into the frigid water. Though she’d forsaken sound, she couldn’t stop her teeth from chattering.

  “Right then, help her on into the tub. Let’s see if we can find some scented soaps while we’re at it,” Croomes said, crossing her arms. “’Course, Marie here would be wanting to make sure you get through everything safely. Did she tell you she’s taking your
baby?”

  Grace’s head jerked at the words and her wide eyes met Marie’s, who flushed and turned to hiss at Croomes.

  “What’d you have to go and do that for? No need to upset the girl.”

  Croomes produced a half-smoked cigarette from her pocket, struck a match on the stool, and lit what was left of it. “You going to pour it over her head, or am I?”

  “I will,” Marie said, fetching her bucket from the other tub, where the patient’s head lolled to the side, lips blue. “Though I don’t know as I see much of the point of it.”

  “And where’s your medical degree, I’ll ask you? Heedson says it’s too much heat in the brain that makes them crazy, and so we douse ’em.”

  “If that’s the case, this girl here should be talking normal as you or me right now. She’s as cold as the dead.”

  Croomes blew smoke out of her nose and watched as Marie poured the first bucketful over Grace’s head, the water loosening the pale bun and turning it into dark streaks that clung to her skin. “This one’s as cold as the water she’s sitting in, down past her bones and into her soul. Nothing wrong with her brain. It’s her heart that’s got no life in it.”

  Grace sat, letting the water numb her skin and apathy numb her ears as Croomes rose from her stool. “I’ve got Cracked Pat to tend to. Never comes to her treatments without my special encouragement.”

  “I’ll finish here,” Marie said as Croomes walked past Grace’s tub. “No need for you to trouble yourself.”

  “No trouble,” Croomes said, digging her fingers into Grace’s bun and pulling out the pin that held it in place, sending the loose hair cascading down her shoulders. “I’ll make sure this gets to its rightful owner,” Croomes said, lifting a hank of Grace’s dripping hair and grinding her cigarette out on the pale expanse of her neck.

  Words boiled in Grace’s stomach as she clenched down on the pain, her teeth grinding together to keep from rewarding Croomes’s cruelty by crying out. Marie gasped but cut it short at a glare from Croomes. “Anybody hears about that, I’ll know who did the talking, won’t I?”