“Ooooh, a false’ood, is it?” Nell said, throwing her hands in the air. “As long as the first thing the poor vacant dearie ’ere says is tha’ I’m the prettiest girl she’s ever seen, then I know you’re sayin’ it true.” She took Grace by the other elbow and the two of them walked her out into the sunlit hall.

Grace had escaped Boston under the cover of dark. When the other girls dragged her outdoors into the sunlight she recoiled as if struck, her hands going up to her eyes.

“Is it your bandages?” Elizabeth asked, misjudging Grace’s pain.

Grace shook her head, though she kept one hand on each of the girls’ shoulders for her first few steps. She blinked quickly, allowing her eyes time to adjust.

“’Ave ye got somethin’ wrong with yer ’ead?” Nell asked, peering at Grace’s temple. “On the outside, I mean?”

“Nell, shush,” Elizabeth said. “There’s no point pestering her with questions she can’t answer without a slate.”

“True enough,” Nell said, removing Grace’s hand from her shoulder, but not before giving it a squeeze. “I’ll be back, and when I do I’ll be expectin’ ye to write me a fine story.”

Elizabeth frowned as the other girl disappeared into the towering expanse of the asylum. “She’ll get a slate off one of the boys, no doubt. And I pity him if he takes any more in return than a smile.”

Grace tucked her hand into Elizabeth’s elbow and raised an eyebrow in question.

“Nell is a syphilitic,” Elizabeth explained, her mouth forming the word with distaste. Grace looked down at her shoes as they walked across the gravel path, accustoming herself to the unfamiliar pinch of having any to wear. “Don’t think worse of her for it,” Elizabeth added quickly. “She’s not had an easy life—” Elizabeth cocked her head suddenly as if she’d been interrupted. “String says it’s not my place to say more.”

Grace was happy to take in the grounds in companionable silence. The asylum in Boston had worn a skin as ugly as the heart beating inside of it, the darkness seeping from inside and staining the bricks that contained the mad. But this asylum was beautiful, its bricks an honest red that soaked in the sun’s rays and reflected the heat back onto those inside during the night. Even in the darkness of her room Grace had felt a calm that the building itself seemed to translate into her skin, a tuneless melody that sang her fevered brain into sleep.

Acres of green grass rolled beneath her feet, and Grace strayed from the gravel path with Elizabeth as a silent shadow. Green leaped at Grace’s eyes, and though the sun had slipped behind a cloud, the healthy colors beat into her pupils like a pulse she’d been separated from too long. The air was so fresh that Grace could feel it cleansing her lungs of the last fetid gasps of Boston air and could only wonder what secrets Falsteed could pull from it.

The faintest wisps of rose oil leaked out from under her bandages. The itch of healing had settled in, and Grace knew that soon her wrappings could go. Everyone would see her scars then, but she could wear them with pride here in this new world where the insane wandered freely in their own clothes. The pair crested a hill to see a rippling expanse of water below them and Grace gasped, almost exclaiming out loud to her new friend before she remembered herself.

“It’s a sight, is it not?” Elizabeth said, smiling as if she were responsible for it.

Grace smiled in return and spotted a man over Elizabeth’s shoulder who had his arms wrapped tightly around a tree. In her current state, she almost felt like hugging one herself. She’d been so long separated from anything except the dark that words wanted to trip out as they piled on top of one another in her throat in their need to proclaim the joy of finally feeling safe.

“You make good time, fer a pair of idiots.” Nell huffed over the hill, hot spots of exertion on both her cheeks, slate in hand. “I even cut short makin’ eyes at Charlie when I saw ye comin’ fer the lake. You coulda waited,” she chided Elizabeth. “I woulda liked to seen ’er face.”

“She lit up like a candle,” Elizabeth said, her own eyes glowing. “As does everyone when they see it. String says the power of—”

“Yer claptrap can go on,” Nell interrupted. “Or we can see what the new lassie has ter say.”

She handed the slate and a piece of chalk with teeth marks in it over to Grace, who pinched it between her fingers for moment, the well-rounded tip poised inches from the slate.

“Well,” Nell prodded her. “What ya got ter say?”

Grace thought for a moment, then she wrote as the breeze pulled the edges of her bandages away from her temples, the faintly bloodied tips flapping around her face. She held up the slate for both girls to read, hoping that her new friends would ignore the sheen of tears over her eyes.

MY NAME IS GRACE

SIXTEEN

She did not see the doctor that day, except as a tall, silent shadow that stalked the grounds with others in attendance as they pointed to patients scattered across the grounds. He kept his head down, his notebook in his hand, and Grace reminded herself not to let her gaze follow him too often.

Elizabeth and Nell had stuck by her the entire day, explaining that their duties—Nell’s in the laundry and Elizabeth’s in the kitchen—had been excused so that Grace could be shown around the asylum and grounds.

“Ye’ve got perfect freedom here, as long as ye be’ave,” Nell had explained. “There’s nae even locks on the bedroom doors.”

“As long as you behave,” Elizabeth had added archly, raising an eyebrow at Nell, who had smiled wickedly.

The warmth she’d accrued from the sun in their afternoon walk was escaping her skin now, but Grace could still feel the benefits from it, as if her body had remembered in that short afternoon what it was to be alive.

The presence of the other girls had its own effect, and Grace felt a smile tugging at her mouth as she remembered Nell unabashedly laying claim to Elizabeth’s dessert that evening as they ate together in the women’s ward. “On account of ye ’aving the wrong color eyes,” she’d mock whispered to Grace, clearly meaning for Elizabeth to overhear. “String didn’t know that, did ’e?”

Her comment had caused Elizabeth a diatribe of objection to String having any gender at all, to which Grace had listened with half an ear while devouring her dish of strawberries, which Nell had later informed her came fresh from the asylum’s gardens.

Her hands lay crossed on her belly now, no longer in protection of an unseen presence but in remembrance. Grace closed her eyes not against the world but in an effort to trap it in the moment, so that she could know fully how lucky she was to have come to this place where the kindness of strangers deemed unsuitable for society had filled her day more fully than any ever spent with the higher echelons.

There had been friends in Boston, girls her own age who were approved for her to spend leisure time with. Walks in gardens and timid conversations that only touched on respectable topics had been all that were allowed them. Grace knew that the horrid truths of her nighttime hours would only seem like garish nightmares to these half-formed shadows of their own mothers who parroted manners and giggled behind their hands when boys’ names were mentioned.

That she could tell Elizabeth and Nell the truth of her existence without hesitation if she were allowed to speak, Grace knew without a doubt. Their lives were like her own, flavored with the misery of the past, which made the safety of the present all the more sweet. The bonds grown out of shared suffering were strong indeed, and though forged only that afternoon, Grace felt a closeness to them that had never existed with the well-bred friends handpicked in her former life.