all right. That’s just fine. We don’t remember every single dream, do we?”
Subject initiates and maintains eye contact. Visible trembling of hands first witnessed in October ’13 vanished. Hair combed and plaited. Shirtwaist neat.
“I understand you’ve been paying particular attention to another girl here. Hattie Boyd. Eleanore? Is that right?”
“Yes, sir. Hattie’s nice.”
“She certainly doesn’t seem to enjoy the company of anyone else. Intentionally speechless. Afflicted with unpredictable spells of rage or sudden screaming. Does she ever speak to you?”
“No.”
“No words whatsoever?”
“No.”
“Why, then, are you kind to her? What is it precisely that makes her nice?”
“Hattie … needs a friend. I understand that. So I try to be her friend.”
“I see.”
Subject demonstrates evidence of reemerging Feminine Virtues: Compassion. Docility. Tenderness.
“Tell me about the songs, Eleanore.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The songs you hear. Are they still haunting you?”
“No, sir. I don’t hear them any longer.”
“Truly? That seems peculiar, don’t you think? When you first arrived here, you insisted they were everywhere. In the stones of the walls, in the nails in the doors. The iron bars of the cells. Do you recall that?”
“Yes. But …”
“Yes, Eleanore?”
“I’m sorry. They simply aren’t here any longer.”
“Are you quite sure about that?”
“Yes. Quite sure. I suppose it was rather as if … they grew fainter and fainter during my time here. During the treatments. And now they’re no longer here at all, Doctor.”
“Excellent.”
Subject’s marked improvement in all Areas of Concern indicates treatment course successful. Recommend discharge in one month back to Blisshaven Home. In the interim, continue treatment course: Daily ice bath submergence, mercury tonics, biweekly harnessing/electrical shock.
“Doctor Sotheby?”
“Yes?”
“Is it true, what the nurses are saying? About the war?”
“What is it you think they’re saying?”
“That now that we’ve declared against the kaiser, we’ll be under attack. That he’ll send his aeroplanes straight to London, and his armies right after.”
“It’s really none of your concern. You need only concentrate on getting well.”
“But—a war—”
“This war, child, will be concluded in a matter of months. His Majesty will see to that. The Germans will never have a chance to reach us here, neither by air nor land nor sea. We are safe as can be. I assure you, there is absolutely nothing for you to worry about.”
Eight Months Later
Victoria station was cavernous, a fairy-work construction of wrought iron and steel and great canopies of glass, with locomotives that heaved and puffed into their slots by the platforms like groaning, overstuffed beasts. I’d never been in a place so big before. I’d never seen so many people amassed together at once.
I stood with my single suitcase clutched in one hand and my ticket in the other. Men and women in fine coats and hats pushed by me as if I was invisible—which, in a way, I was.
I had a coat, but it was rather obviously too small. Once it had been a decent black worsted, but that was several owners past. By the time it had been given to me, the dye had faded to more of a drabby charcoal, and the cuffs were frankly tattered. Sometimes, were I caught in the rain with it without an oilskin, my skirts would darken and my wrists would end up stained with bracelets of gray.
I had a hat, too, plucked straight from the donation bin. It was straw, a summer hat even though summer was very much done, and so plain that it couldn’t be termed in fashion or out. A hairpin stabbed through it into the thickness of my chignon, a pin that never stopped humming against my scalp. The buffed steel ribs stretching across the glass ceiling above me sang a deeper bass, great reverberating ba-ba-BUM-bum sounds that were nearly drowned out by—
Stop. We don’t think of that.
The canopy revealed a murky sky. It was not yet noon, but the sun had been swallowed by London’s ever-present miasma of fog and soot. A sheet of paper pasted to a pillar nearby declared in hasty lettering that the gas lines had been damaged in last night’s bombing, and there was no gas to burn in the jets along the walls. Everyone around me was wrapped in shadow. We were ghosts in the steamy stink of the station.
The East Smithfield Ladies’ Society for Relief—that’s what their banner read—had set up a table of free biscuits and hot tea for all the departing soldiers jamming the platforms. A quartet of pink-cheeked women was pouring cups as quickly as possible from the urns. Tommies surrounded them, laughing and shifting their rifles awkwardly from shoulder