In 1872, the journalist Julius Chambers had feigned insanity in order to be admitted. He was released ten days later, and the exposé that followed spoke of barbaric practices: patients slowly starved, surviving only on spoilt food; blind men being beaten; young children made to stand naked in the elements; the most basic tenets of the United States Constitution violated at every turn.

Nothing of this unpleasantness appeared on the outside. There was only a pretty, snow-covered house, and a white-clad nurse wheeling an elderly man inside.

Inside, too, there was little sign of squalor. The front room, obviously intended as a comfortable waiting room for well-to-do family and friends, was open and spacious, the furniture in good repair. Only the faint sound of screaming in the background informed visitors they were, in fact, standing in one of the most notorious asylums in the country.

Alva asked a woman at the front desk about Rose’s records, and after a subtle exchange of money she hurried through the double doors at the back of the room and down a dark hallway. Alva and Sam sat down to wait on a settee near the large front window, Alva running her hands over the upholstery.

“It’s not precisely what I imagined,” she said, her tone dry. “I suppose I thought we’d drive up under a thunderstorm, hearing manacles clanking and the piteous wails of the damned.”

Another cry sounded from behind the double doors, followed by a loud crash.

“Of course,” she continued, her mouth compressing into a thin line, “one out of three isn’t bad.”

“It makes it worse,” Sam said, staring at the room. “For us, at least. I can’t imagine it makes much difference to the inmates.”

“No,” she agreed, and they lapsed into silence.

The woman returned, holding an old, dusty folder. “Here’s all we have on her, ma’am.”

Alva stood and took it from her. “That’s it?”

“Doesn’t look like she was one of the troublemakers,” the woman replied, shrugging. “It’s most likely just treatment plans.”

“I see.” Alva nodded, dismissing the woman, and turned to Sam. “Let’s look at it after we leave.”

He rose, not sorry to be leaving, and keenly aware of his freedom to do so. Once they were in the carriage he nodded towards the file. She propped it open across both their laps.

For fifty years of involuntary incarceration, Rose de Boer’s file was pathetically thin—less than one page per year, Sam estimated. Most of it was a cornucopia of quackery, every discredited treatment of those five decades making an appearance somewhere in the file. As they quickly thumbed through page after page of changing treatments, Alva frowned.

“But what was she in for in the first place?” She flipped back to the beginning and started again. “I see what they did to her, and her yearly evaluations, but what exactly was she being treated for?”