Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [45]
She flinched from the word.
He put his warm hand over hers. "I don't use the word in the layman's sense of female delusions. Hysteria is all too real a disease. You are a respectable young woman who has fallen victim to a terrible, but curable disease."
"Curable?" she repeated.
"Yes, indeed. By means of a revolutionary new treatment that I first pioneered in this very clinic two years ago. Recently I treated a working woman like yourself, a dressmaker from Yorkshire who had been so ill with paralysis of the arms as to render her unable to do any work for five years."
"And what happened?" asked Miss F., knowing the answer.
His face shone like a preacher's. "Two months after she entered this clinic she left it, restored to health."
"No."
"She has never had a day's illness since," he said, marking off each syllable with his finger.
Her head was whirling. Could it be true? "And, and what is this miraculous treatment?"
Mr. Baker Brown smiled, almost shyly. "My dear Miss F., I doubt your education—though clearly not negligible—has been such that you would understand the technical terms."
"Of course not," she said, mortified.
"But what I can assure you is that under my personal care you will soon become a happy and useful member of society, and the sister your brother deserves."
"You can cure me?" she asked, like a child needing to hear it again and again.
"Trust me," he said softly.
Often a great disposition for novelties is exhibited, the patient desiring to escape from home. She will he fanciful in her food, sometimes express even a distaste for it, and apparently (as her friends will say) live upon nothing.
She didn't want any dinner, that first afternoon; all she asked for was a cup of tea. It was bliss to lie in this snowy white bed and be exempt from all responsibilities. She fancied her back felt a little better already. She had a moment's guilt when she thought of what all this was costing her brother, and another when she wondered who would wash his collars and cuffs for next week, but then she put all that out of her mind. As Matron kept saying, "What you need is quiet."
There was a curtain hanging round her bed; it reduced her world to a pure rectangle. Behind her curtain, several paces away behind their own curtains, lay other women, she knew, but she had no idea of their names; Matron called them all Miss or Ma'am. In the next room was someone Matron spoke of to a nurse as her Ladyship, imagine that!
Mr. Baker Brown advised against conversation between the patients, according to Matron; when they gossiped they only increased each other's anxieties.
Quiet, that's what Miss F. needed, what all the intricate bones and muscles of her back needed, what her whole body and mind had needed for years. Nerve power; she thought of it, bubbling up in her like hot punch. Was this absolute rest the treatment, she wondered; was the miracle as simple as that? Her empty stomach gurgled; she felt light as air.
Later, the lights were extinguished. In the fragrant dark, Miss F. rolled over onto her front, to ease her stiffness. She was tired, but not sleepy. The hard mattress pressed against her chin, her ribs, her knees. She thought of that strange thing the doctor had said about touching herself, the question he had put to her after the examination. She thought of the examination. She moved, but only a little, back and forth against the mattress, as if rocking herself to sleep; so infinitesimally that someone looking in through a gap in the curtain would have noticed nothing. She thought of the doctor's hands.
Mr. Baker Brown visited Miss F. twice on the first morning she woke up in the ward, and twice again on the second day. He asked her about her memories of when she was a girl, and wrote down all her answers. She had never felt so interesting.
On the third day Matron woke her very early for a warm bath.
"Is this part of the treatment?" Miss F. asked eagerly, rubbing the small of her back to loosen the night's stiffness.
A brief nod from Matron. "It clears the portal circulation."
"What's that?"
"Nothing