“It hurts, Mary, hurts.” She pulled a handful of her own hair as hard as she could, beat her fist on her pubic bone, thrust her hips back and forth, making noises like an animal in heat.

I stroked her wet hair. “What hurts, Eliza? Tell me what hurts.”

“He makes me. On my knees, on the rug. I have burns.” She rubbed her red knees with her knuckles. “Pulls his pants down. Pound-pound-pound. It hurts, Mary, it hurts.”

“Meredith?”

“Pulls my hair, pound-pound-pound. Every night. Till I’m dead.”

“You’re not dead, Eliza. You’re alive. You’re here with me.”

“Not safe, Mary. Not here.”

How reluctantly I walked her to her room that night. I put the babe to her breast to suckle, which was the only thing that seemed to calm her. She twirled a ribbon on the little one’s cap, and whispered, over and over, “Sweet girl, sweet girl.” Until Bishop came to join her. He stood beside her in the chair, stroked her hair, but it seemed like petting a cat. She closed her eyes and let her head fall back, but I couldn’t tell, was it relief, or surrender?

I retreated to my room and wrote Everina to say I couldn’t help pitying Bishop, but his misery was a small portion of our sister’s. I wrote to Fanny that Eliza seemed to think she was maltreated by him, but couldn’t bear to say the rest. What she was describing, whether true or false, was the same fornication my father had visited upon my mother for most of my remembered life. I had never seen it, but I’d heard it, lying on their threshold, imagining the worst things Eliza was now giving voice to. And while I thought my brothers and sisters didn’t know—that I was shielding them from it—they must have known, all the children, the walls, the windows, the doors. The whole house had borne witness. Was it possible that Eliza, in her madness, was conflating her married life with theirs?

When each day continued like that, whether I was dressing her or sitting just holding her hand, she’d begin again, describing awful scenes, some words I’d never heard, some I wish I hadn’t. These were things Eliza could never have seen with our parents, and could not have made up. Despite her agitation, the nail-biting, the nonsense talk, I began to believe her.

“Why would you suggest such a thing?” Bishop asked when I tried to broach the subject as delicately as I could.

“I only wonder if perhaps there’s a … roughness in your relations that makes her feel ill used.”

“What would you know about the sharing of a marriage bed? You’re a twenty-four-year-old spinster, Mary.”

“Quite by choice, I assure you.”