The chapel bells began their dolorous noonday tolling. Move, I thought again, just move, you must move. And yet still I could not, even as the word move became as metallic and meaningless as the chiming, which seemed in that moment to go on forever.
It wasn’t until the last ring had echoed into nothingness that I finally pushed my trembling limbs back into motion. I shuffled first toward the Esquirol doors, mainly because they were there. But the thought of encountering Babette—of being questioned, as I surely would be—stopped me after only a few leaden steps. Then I saw Marie rounding the infirmary corner, striding purposefully toward Hysteria.
Turning away, I hurried off in the opposite direction—toward the reformatory school and the kitchen. With each trembling step I reminded myself that I’d had no choice, that I was as caught in the marquis’s web as Josephine was. It dawned on me, in fact, that there was no way now for me to even leave for Dijon on my own, for mad or not, Josephine would surely tell someone where I’d gone. Moreover, now that the marquis had his knobby hands on her, he’d assume I was willingly in his service, would want me there to keep delivering her to him on demand. And when he was done with her—probably when she, like Rosalie, had been transferred to Lunacy—he’d have me handle the next hysteric who caught his fancy. The only way to escape him, and prison, was to do his bidding for now. That meant betraying Josephine not just this once, but over and over again, until either she succumbed entirely to her madness or his twisted interest in the damaged women of the hysteria ward was replaced by whatever foul fancy came next.
The idea was nauseating, unthinkable—especially after the revelatory sweetness of the night we’d just spent together, the breathless optimism we’d shared in the garden just a few hours earlier. And yet, I thought wretchedly, I had no choice—not if I was to see Amélie again. No choice. I have no choice. The words became a kind of dull drumroll and I a toy soldier, marching mechanically and unthinkingly to their cadence. I don’t think I was fully aware of where it was I was heading until I found myself passing through the asylum cemetery, with its unmarked crosses the color of weathered bones, steps away from where Père Julien had left the chapel’s heavy oaken door propped open as he often did on warm summer days.
Inside, I found the nave as empty as I’d found the asylum grounds; but for lazily floating dust motes illuminated by the chapel’s single stained glass window, all was utterly still. The only other human figures in sight were those of Mary, Christ, and the assorted saints, tucked into their worn sandstone niches. Surveying them from the threshold, I had the passing thought that they actually seemed more alive—and more human—than I felt. I listened. But beyond the faint sounds of conversation outside, the only sound I made out was that of my own thudding heartbeat. Following an urge I had no energy to question, I kicked the lamb-shaped doorstop from the door, watching dully as the latter swung heavily shut.
Then, throwing my gaze up toward the aged and sand-colored cupola, I opened my mouth—and screamed.
I screamed until my head ached, until my throat was raw and tears streamed down my stinging cheeks. I screamed to drown out my searing shame over my helplessness, over the way I’d let a wicked man turn my own cowardice into the very chains that now rendered me helpless. I screamed to fill the scorched abyss of all my losses—not just my family, but all the failed futures I’d envisioned for myself: Daughter of two loving parents. Daughter of a respected doctor. Sister of Amélie, soon to be living happily with her in Morvan. Along with my best friend—and now lover—Josephine. The most extraordinary girl I’d ever met.
My eyes were still squeezed shut, but I suddenly saw her again: Josephine. Not wild and delusional, as I’d just left her. But as she’d looked last night, after our union; lying in my arms, her heart-shaped face limned in moonlight. Her skin coated in my scent, and mine in hers. Just before she’d drifted off, I’d reached a wondering hand up to touch her hair as it lay with mine on the pillow. Iron and copper, intermingled.
“What is it like?” I asked her.
“What?” she murmured.
“To be beautiful.”
I’d expected her to protest the compliment, or at least smile self-consciously. She did neither. She thought a moment, seemingly in earnest.
“I hate it, mostly,” she said at last.
“Hate it?” I repeated. “Why?”
She sighed. “Men want to possess you. Women want to dismiss you. Everyone wants to claim you in some way.”
“So you don’t want it?” I was incredulous. “You don’t want your beauty?”
“I don’t want that,” she said wearily. “To be constantly claimed by strangers.”
“What do you want?”
Reaching over, she put a finger on my cheek, stroking down to my jawline, to my chin, to the dimpled hollow of my neck.
“I want you to claim me,” she’d said. “Only you.” And then she’d pulled me to her again.
The memory was so fresh, so close, that at that moment the words seemed to reverberate in the dust-scented air. It was only as they faded that the realization hit me, as devastating and disorienting as the retort of a secretly planted bomb: that all of my losses, and in fact all of them taken together, were dwarfed by the catastrophe of losing Josephine.
And I had lost her, of course, utterly, completely. Mad or not, the minute she woke up and saw the marquis, she would know the full extent of my duplicity. He’d tell her about the necklace, and she would realize I’d not only lied to her but had actively collaborated in her violation. That, intentionally or not, I’d served her up to him like a lamb on a platter, exchanging her trust and faith, her husky laughter, her brushing touch and whispered wisdom, for—for what? For a handful of blue jewels.
She’d resist the noble, of course. This might catch him off guard at first; he clearly expected his advances to be as welcomed as they had been with Rosalie. But I doubted Josephine would hold him off for long, given both her ether-weakened state and the ruthlessness I’d sensed during my own abduction by the man. She might end up as bruised and beaten as she’d been when she arrived here. She might even end up dead, her brain and body further desecrated by the doctor’s scalpels, before being buried in the cemetery beneath a blank cross. Even if she did survive, though, she would never forgive me. Not ever.
And she’d be right not to.
I don’t know how long I stood like that, my eyes shut, my heart aching like a raw wound, and my own scream still ringing in my ears. I listened for Père Julien’s heavy footsteps, or the slower shuffle of his half-deaf bell ringer. But no one came. There was only a faint fluttering somewhere in the rafters, some bird or bat startled by my despair.
I made my way to one of the pews, slumping onto the seat and staring up at the various dilapidated versions of Mary ornamenting the altar and nearby alcoves. She’d been captured by her sculptors in all stages of her life: Over Père Julien’s confessional, she appeared as a young girl, gazing demurely up at her own mother, Saint Anne. Beneath the sanctuary window she appeared twice: first as a pregnant Virgin, staring down in serene wonderment at her miraculously seeded womb. Then in middle age, kneeling beside her dying Son. The way the two statues had been arranged—the pregnant Mary above the older, her arms extended in a gesture of joyous welcome—it looked as though the younger Virgin was blissfully contemplating her own bereft future, opening her arms to her impending misery. Middle-aged Mary seemed barely more perturbed by her heartrending circumstances, something I’d always found nearly as bewildering as the idea of her immaculate Conception. For surely it had to be excruciating to watch someone you love—a child, no less—die in such a savage and brutal way: nailed to a cross, organs ravaged by spear tips, ears ringing with malicious insults and jeers. It had to be worse—far worse—than facing a few years in Saint-Lazare with the knowledge that your one surviving family member was alive and well.
And yet as she gazed down at her perishing firstborn, the Madone’s expression was resigned, even serene. As though she fully accepted the brutal predicament in which she now found herself. As though the loss of her Son was a mere extension of her love for Him, a sacrifice she was more than willing to make so He could return, resplendent in His divinity.
As I stared at her now, the worn mother of God with the blank eyes and the faintly chipped nose, the full extent of my own failure seemed to build within me, a cold, hard boulder of self-loathing and shame. Mary had sacrificed her Son—arguably, the one perfect man in all of humankind’s existence—so He could ascend to heaven and mend a broken world. I hadn’t even been able to sacrifice my own physical freedom to protect the person I loved most of all. Instead, I’d sent her—a girl who’d brought meaning and purpose and even joy into my bleak and suffocating little universe—to hell. Or at least, to the closest thing to it on earth she herself could have imagined. I’d done it to escape prison, and the prospect of a life alone there, without my sister. Only now did I see that I’d merely consigned myself to a different kind of isolation, a different prison. To the monstrous specter of my own selfishness and treachery.
“What do I do?” I whispered, fixing my gaze on Mary’s calm countenance. “How do I save her?”
As if in answer, I heard a burst of throaty cooing somewhere above me, followed by the sound of desperate fluttering. Looking up, I saw something was hurling itself at the window over the younger Mary’s head, flailing and scrabbling against the pink-and-purple mosaic before flapping off in the direction of the doorway.
It was a pigeon, one of the many that found their way into the chapel and belfry. As the creature swooped its way across the chamber, though, a ray of sun burst through the small circular window, briefly limning it in tinted light. I saw then that it was the last of Rosalie’s beaux bébés, the one whose tail feathers she’d dyed a garish purple. Cooing convulsively, it flew to the door I’d shut, hitting it with a thud before tumbling to the flagstones. I caught my breath, afraid it had concussed or even killed itself. But it quickly righted itself, stalking to and fro before the threshold as if waiting for an important delivery there.
Another thing I’ve trapped, I thought miserably.
As if hearing the thought, the bird jerked its gaze up. Then it fluttered back toward the apse, landing squarely on the younger Virgin’s veiled head and peering at me with eyes the color of bright copper.
Heaving myself to my feet, I made my way back to the chapel door and pulled it open.
“Come,” I said. “You can go now.”
The pigeon cocked its head inquisitively, as though weighing this invitation.
“Come,” I called again. “Don’t you see? You can leave.”
With a whir of its wings, it left its virginal post, flapping back through the nave, over my head, out into the daylight. I shielded my eyes as it made a swooping southern arc toward boulevard de l’Hôpital, before abruptly turning north, toward Hysteria.
And just like that, I knew what I had to do.
I was back at Esquirol moments later. As I flew by the building’s front courtyard, the reposantes glanced up from their knitting in bemusement. “Eh, fuck off, Laure,” Tante Maubert called genially. “There’s no fire in the fucking lake!”
I raced past them, pushing through the double doors of the building, finally stumbling into Hysteria in a clatter of slammed doors and staggering steps. Babette was standing by the nurse’s station with Marie. As I burst through the entranceway, the two of them turned to face me. The old nurse’s brow creased with displeasure as I drew up short beside them both, the steel of my corset digging damply into the undersides of my breasts.
“Laure,” she snapped. “Where on earth have you been? I’ve had Julienne out looking for you.” Craning her neck in a way faintly reminiscent of the pigeon, she peered around me expectantly. “Where is Josephine?”
“He has her,” I said, still gasping for air. “He took her from me, and now he has her.”
“What?” Babette snapped. “What are you talking about? Who? Where is Josephine? The director wants to see her—see both of you—immediately in his office.”
“He has her,” I repeated, still panting. “The marquis. He has her. He was blackmailing me. Over the bracelet.”
“What bracelet? What are you going on about now?”
It was my last chance, I realized—I could still take it back, save myself. But I didn’t. I barely stopped to take a much-needed breath. “The sapphire bracelet. The one the marquis tried to give Rosalie. I never returned it. I kept it for myself. And the marquis found out. He told me he’d have me thrown in prison if I didn’t—if I didn’t give him time alone with Josephine.”
As what I was saying registered, the old woman’s expression shifted from confusion to disgust to a kind of vicious glee. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew that man was a scoundrel. And you—I knew about you from the moment I first saw you. Doctor’s daughter or not, I told them—”
“Josephine,” Marie interjected, roughly pushing the old woman aside. “Where is she right now?”
“Claude took her,” I said. “He’s been in the marquis’s pay. He said he was taking her to the softs.”
We raced together across the grounds toward Rambuteau, Marie’s long thin legs and arms pumping in a way that might in another situation have been almost comical, his apron strings fluttering behind him like small white flags. Babette kept nearly apace with him, her seamed face somehow both grim and gleeful. I stumbled ahead of them both, my lungs aching, the words I’m sorry and Please hold on and We’re coming, we are coming and Please please don’t let it be too late filling my head like unspoken prayer. And yet I remember thinking—as we rushed back past the baths and the chalets des folles and the front entrance to the amphitheater, around which a few straggling audience members clustered in small, gossipy groups—that it was taking too long, that my feet weren’t moving quickly enough, that I was in one of those dreams where the ground slickens like unmarred ice and the air thickens like aspic and it’s impossible to get traction or make headway or even breathe.
I flung myself into Lunacy like a shipwreck survivor reaching land, bursting through the weighted double doors and barely noticing that the attendants who normally stood guard by them were nowhere to be found. Stumbling onto the basement level, I careened around the corner, bracing myself for the sight of the Basque. When I reached the corridor, though, it was unexpectedly empty—and so dark that I drew up short again, as if I were about to run into a pitch-black wall.
Normally, the isolation ward was lit by the kerosene lamps that hung at intervals on the walls, flickering at a low flame both day and night. Today, however, someone—Claude, I guessed—had doused them all, save for one faint light that I at first couldn’t locate.
I heard Marie’s footsteps on the stairwell behind me, Babette following like an off-rhythm echo. The two pulled up short behind me, Marie exclaiming in consternation as he registered the strange gloom. “What the devil?” he muttered. “Where’s—”
“He’s not here,” I said. “No one is.”
And yet as my eyes adjusted further, I realized I didn’t know if this was true, for I’d now traced the faintly flickering light to its source. It was coming from within one of the cells, the door to which had been left slightly ajar: number three. The same cell to which I’d brought Josephine’s breakfast that first day we met. Which made no sense; the soft cell doors were almost always kept closed and locked and—by Charcot’s decree—free of lamps, out of concern that the oilcloth that covered their floors and walls might catch fire.
“Where is she?” Babette rasped, catching up with us both. “Where’s Claude?”
Marie and Babette trailing in my wake, I took a trembling step toward the cell, my scalp tingling with a sudden, cold premonition: We were too late. I’d failed her. I’d open the door to find Josephine lying on the cell’s padded floor, delusional or unconscious. Or worse.
“Josephine?” I called quietly.
There was no answer.
Pulse skittering, I pulled the door all the way open. Once more, it took a moment for my eyes to adjust. When they did, I gasped in dismay. For yes, there she was, stretched out on the floor. A green gleam of silk, lying motionless, arms spread wide.
Then, though, I looked more closely and saw it wasn’t Josephine after all. It was her stage dress—the green gown we’d bought at La Samaritaine together. It had been laid out so that the skirt was full and smooth, the flattened arms opened to embrace the low, dirty ceiling. Next to the dress lay her corset, stays, and petticoat, all neatly folded. Beside these was a pair of expensive-looking men’s leather boots arranged so that the toes pointed out—like those of a dancer in first position.
I was still processing this bizarre tableau when Marie and Babette caught up with me. “Good God,” Marie said in a tone of disgust mixed with confusion. “Who on earth is that?”
“No one,” I said. “It’s her dress.”
It was only after I’d said it that I saw where he was looking. Not at the gown, but in the same darkened corner of the cell where I’d first seen Josephine herself.
Only now it wasn’t Josephine who was standing there, motionless, flickeringly backlit by a wall lamp that had been set on the floor. It was a man—and not the man I’d expected to find here. His face was familiar but so utterly different from the marquis’s that it took me a moment to place its features: The small and piggishly wide-set brown eyes. The crooked nose and sallow skin. The cleft chin beneath the sparse, scraggly beard.
It was Josephine’s judge, the same man I’d seen yesterday, in the portrait hanging in that horrible office.
Or rather, it was the same man—and yet not the same. For while the portrait’s subject had been finely and fully dressed, the man in front of us was not. There was no sign of his trousers, shirt, or jacket. He wore only a white silk undervest—through which I made out the bumpy outlines of a bandage—and white hose, which he’d apparently soiled. He was also standing awkwardly, with most of his weight on his right leg.
And there was another difference as well: In the painting, the judge’s expression had been amused and somewhat haughty, the eyes narrowed, the lips curved in a cold smile. Now, though, his face was as flat and lifeless as if an iron had passed across it. His eyes were wide and unblinking, the pupils dilated. They remained so as Marie cautiously approached him, as the young doctor waved a hand before the man’s stone-still face, then pressed two fingers beneath his ear, feeling for his pulse.
When Marie turned back to us, his own expression was shocked, almost disoriented. I knew what he was going to say before he said it.
“My God,” he breathed. “He’s been hypnotized.”
It was true: Josephine’s rapist was utterly, helplessly entranced.