Red lines on my fingertips. Signs of hard work—the looms, he’d said. Telltale indents that made me more Cora than Vivienne. A breathy sense of panic filled my lungs, and I looked to Marcel, but he had vanished.

I took in the blue damask furniture on my left, but when I looked to the right it was a flat surface two inches from my face, stained and smelly. A padded asylum wall. I jerked my gaze back to the other side, but the generous damask was replaced by a heavy studded door with bars over a high window. The airy setting of that room in Vienna was sucked away, leaving the heavy reality of the asylum sitting on my chest. I tried to shake this dream off too, head moving back and forth on the pillow, but the gray walls refused to dissolve, to give way to my reality of home and safety—because this was my reality and I wasn’t safe. I’d fallen asleep and dreamed Vienna. Dreamed Rosamond.

My heart pounded. I lay there, still and panicked, my senses limp with an unnatural sleep and the haze of dreams. I felt my tenuous hold on reason slipping.

My shoulders and back were stiff, and a painful pressure chafed at my wrists. I strained to see what held me—leather straps. I was chained to this awful bed that reeked of vomit and stale moisture. Frantically I took in the whole of that square confinement, the small cell of my nightmare. A dreadful purgatory. I turned my face to the side and wept. God, what has happened? Why have you left me here? You knew what they’d do—why didn’t you stop me from coming back?

I began to shake.

I planned to do more with my life than simply my charitable Christian duty. So much more. Didn’t you see? I’d planned to give my whole life to helping the weakest ones. To rescuing women. You’d have done the same. Why do you repay me this way? Several deep breaths, then out poured the question I’d managed to shove down through years of motherless solitude, a lifetime of living under my father’s cruelty—Why me?

18

Truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for music.

~Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

I lied. The moment that bland-faced aid opened the door and asked if I was ready to cooperate, I lied. But the deception earned me release from that wretched box and a harsh scrub in icy water. Both of these felt necessary to the continuance of my life. The aid, whom I hadn’t seen before, tugged me along with an air of annoyance into a dark room with loose and broken tiles and several metal tubs lying in wait, grumbling about the mess I’d made of my clothes.