Mena gaped at the nurse in sheer disbelief.
“That simply isn’t true,” she gasped, then turned to entreat the doctor. “Please, she’s mistaken, Dr. Rosenblatt; it was another patient, Charlotte Pendergast, who scored my arm with her nails. And I swear I’ve never—” She didn’t want to say it, didn’t want the heat to flare in his wrinkled, murky eyes at the thought of her touching herself. Though, at this point, she’d do most anything to avoid the ice bath. “I’ve never once done myself harm … and I’ve likewise refrained from … any … amoral compulsions.”
She’d informed the doctor of this before, of course, in their initial sessions together. She’d confessed that her bruises and scrapes were not, in fact, self-inflicted, but inflicted upon her by her sadistic husband, Lord Gordon St. Vincent, the Viscount Benchley. In her first days as an involuntary patient here, she’d done all she could to emphatically deny any madness or lunacy or sexual misconduct, because it was the absolute truth.
In fact, she’d frantically confessed everything about herself upon her arrival here at Belle Glen Asylum, as she’d been frightened and utterly alone.
At first, Dr. Rosenblatt had reminded Mena of her father, doling out the milk of human kindness from behind his stately office desk. Possessed of a pleasant round face complete with chops and an extra chin, jolly red cheeks, and a portly belly, Dr. Rosenblatt seemed to be a mild-mannered, middle-aged professional gentleman.
She should have known never to trust her instincts when it came to others, especially men. Somehow she was always wrong.
Dr. Rosenblatt snapped open her file, reading it as though he weren’t the sole author of the lies contained within its depths. “You’re getting agitated, Lady Benchley,” he said in that soft voice, the one people usually saved for crying children and the insane.
“No!” she cried, louder than she’d meant to, as Nurse Schopf tugged her toward the bath. “No.” She schooled her voice into something more pleasant, more ladylike, even though she dug her feet against the tile floor. “Doctor, I’m not at all agitated, but I would very much prefer not to take the ice bath. Please. I—isn’t there something else? The electrodes, perhaps—or just put the mittens on me and send me to bed.” She didn’t want to consider the alternatives she’d just suggested. She dreaded the electrodes, abhorred the chafing little prisons locked about her wrists, rendering her hands useless for anything at all.
But she feared nothing so much as the ice baths.
“Please,” she entreated again, frightened tears welling behind her eyes.
“You beg so prettily, Lady Benchley.” His gaze never touched hers, but drifted lower, to her mouth and then to her breasts that tested the seams of her tight and uncomfortable black frock. “But, you see, I am your doctor and my first obligation is the treatment of your illness. Now, if you please, remove your clothing without further incident, or they will be removed for you.”
Nurse Schopf’s grip tightened on Mena’s wrist with bruising strength unusual for a woman. She pulled Mena toward the tub, securing her other hand around Mena’s upper arm. “Are you going to fight me today, Countess Fire Quim, or will you behave for once?”
Countess Fire Quim, it was a name one of the patients had given her that first awful day in Belle Glen. They’d been stripped bare in a room full of fifteen or so women, poked, prodded, deloused, and then doused with buckets of cold water. Someone had remarked on the uncommon shade of her red hair, and then on the darker shade of auburn between her legs. Mena had been called many cruel things in her life, most often by her family, the St. Vincents, and generally pertaining to her uncommon height or her wide hips and shoulders, but “Countess Fire Quim” was somehow the most humiliating. Especially when used by the nurses or the staff at Belle Glen.
“I’ve done nothing wrong.” Mena sent one more panicked, entreating stare to Dr. Rosenblatt, who quietly shuffled the papers in her file without even glancing down at them. “Don’t put me in there!”
“You’re being hysterical,” he said softly. “Which only proves to me the extent of your madness.”
The nurses, one on either side of her now, dragged her by the arms. Once she was close enough, Mena kicked out at the tub with both feet, hoping to upset it. The sturdy tub didn’t move, but as Mena was not a small woman, her struggles were enough to free her from the grasp of the nurses.
“Wot’s this ’ere?” The cheerful voice of Mr. Leopold Burns could have brightened any room that he entered. But to the patients of Belle Glen Asylum, his arrival always brought darkness. The ogre-sized orderly was closer to his twenties than his forties, but an unfortunate potato-shaped nose and thinning blond hair belied his youth. “You’re no’ makin’ any trouble, are you, Lady Benchley?” A fist of dread squeezed Mena’s lungs as Nurse Schopf’s grip was traded for Mr. Burns’s. “Now let’s take those clothes off.”
Mena fought them this time. She’d tried being prim and obedient. All her life, she’d been timid, pliant, and gentle, and it only served to produce the same result. At least this once, she was not a willing participant in her own humiliating tragedy.
She struggled and jerked as the nurse’s deft fingers undid the buttons of her coarse frock, yanking it down her waist and over her hips and legs. She cried and pleaded, kicked and stomped when they ripped her chemise away—no one in an asylum bothered with a corset—exposing her breasts to Mr. Burns’s and Dr. Rosenblatt’s greedy eyes.