Read Online The Painted Bridge by Wendy Wallace - Free Book Online Page A

once again began to go over columns of numbers that denoted reasons for admission, conditions, modes of treatment, cures, lengths of stay. The figures were an attempt to explain something that Querios Abse increasingly believed was not subject to explanation: the female mind.
    *   *   *
    The dayroom was the gloomiest Anna had ever seen. The high ceiling, the length of the room and the doors at each end gave it the air of a grand and static corridor. Brocade curtains soaked up the light from three long windows. A line of gas lamps suspended from the ceiling gave off more noise than illumination, the mantles hissing overhead, spent fumes souring the air.
    Fifteen or twenty women sat at intervals around the room. Mrs. Violet Valentine and the other old ones clustered by the fire. The rest were stationed either alone or in groups of two or three on chairs and sofas. Lizzie Button paced about most of the time. Two of the women, Miss Todd and Miss Little, were inseparable except after one of their frequent quarrels. Then they made sure to sit at opposite ends of the salon.
    “Are you feeling stronger, Mrs. Palmer?”
    Talitha Batt’s face was composed under a mask of powder that to Anna looked suspiciously like flour; her hands unspooled a length of vermilion silk in rapid, efficient movements.
    “I’m perfectly well, thank you.”
    Anna answered without thinking, despite her resolution not to talk to anyone. Batt bit off a length of thread and smoothed out the fabric on her lap. The embroidered piece was large and densely worked, a complex, deep-colored tableau of exotic-looking flowers and insects. It was almost finished. She brought the tip of a needle up through a half-completed petal.
    “Generally, one is out of sorts after an emetic. The muscles ache. One feels fatigued. Low in spirits and without appetite.”
    She glanced at Anna again, her darkened brows raised. The ruff standing up under her chin gave her an old-fashioned look; a Queen Elizabeth with a pointed chin and small ears. She could have been carved on a cameo, she was definite and distinct.
    Batt had described so precisely how Anna felt that she might have been inside her body.
    “You needn’t bother about how I am, thank you. In fact, I would rather you didn’t.”
    “Why is that, Mrs. Palmer? We are thrown together in this place, after all.”
    “I won’t be staying long. I shouldn’t be here but my husband has misunderstood my state of mind.”
    “Husbands so often do.”
    Her voice was mild. Anna flushed.
    “He’s a clergyman. He’ll be coming soon to take me …” She thought she would say home but her lips refused. “Out.”
    “I do hope so. This is no place for a young woman. For any woman.”
    Lizzie Button was walking up and down, singing a lullaby, patting the piece of wood cradled against her chest. She moved like a mother in a nursery, her hand rhythmic, her voice soft. Anna made a long, low intake of breath. Poor thing had lost a child. It was obvious. She threw her a look of sympathy. Button glared at her.
    More photographs had appeared in this room, arranged in two long lines on the wall opposite the windows. Anna got up to look at them. Like the others, they were of women alone, against blank backgrounds. Some looked into the eyes of the viewer, others gazed at something or someone unseen, or gave the impression they saw nothing at all. All had names or initials written on them; some were also labeled by their illnesses. “Hysteria.” “Epileptic mania.” “Habits of intemperance.”
    Anna stopped at a picture in the middle of the top row. The woman’s face was grave, her eyes amused. She was sitting in a chair, her arms contained within its arms, a book open on her lap. Her hair, beginning to show the signs of age, was undressed. The photograph had the initials LM in ink, written in a fine italic hand and followed by “Melancholia.”
    Hanging next to it was a photograph of a different woman. Her hair was piled on