Prologue
1877 – Brighton, England

The hand I held was small, with translucent nails, thin, skeletal fingers and the flat, meatless palms of hands that had yet to do one day's work. The face on the pillow was yellow with jaundice, waxy and pinched from pain. Morphine no longer worked against the raging monster destroying her entrails, poisoning her blood. Despite her malnourished state, Lucinda was bloated, her belly swollen and encircled with the marks of frail skin stretched beyond its limit. Her breathing had become labored, deep gasps that came more infrequently as the hours passed. I prayed she was soon to depart this life, as she had suffered enough.

There were those who said she deserved this suffering, every bit of grinding pain, the constant ache of seizing joints and dying organs. There were those who felt her agony was the righteous judgment of a just and avenging God; that her insanity was the result of the evil that had miss-formed her mind, and the crimes she committed were only to be expected from such an abomination. To avoid being guillotined for her crimes before the crowds at the Place de la Concorde, her loving parents had sent her out of France, over the objections of her ex-husband, and put her here in Nettles Home, an institution for the mentally insane.

I was assigned as her primary caregiver immediately, mandated by her violent and combative behaviors, and her constant self-mutilation. She was not to be handled by any other staff, and I found myself working round the clock for days at a time, keeping Lucinda Mignon Abrigaun from killing herself or injuring anyone else. I became familiar with the raging demon I fought daily for her soul, and the evil that had been planted there by the man her parents had trusted to care for her.

To this very day, I do not know what finally won her; I could not tell you of a program, or discipline, or set forth the regimen that cleared the chancre from her heart, and the sickness from her mind. I merely held Lucinda's body as she spat and kicked and screamed of her wish to die. I bandaged her bleeding face when she abused it with her fists, ripping open her own flesh with the sharp edges of her braces. I held her hands and sang to her, rocked her and read to her. I massaged emollient into the hardened scars that ridged her body, from the top of her shoulders to the back of her calves that spoke of the horrendous beatings she endured in her marriage.

For weeks I went home to my little apartment and cried myself to sleep. I found myself in a battle for my own soul, for even as the hate and horror left Lucinda's mind and heart, it found a home in mine. I swore I would someday go to France and find this man, and visit upon him what he'd visited upon Lucinda.

God bless the wise and worldly pastor at the Brighton Presbyterian Church who gave so many Sunday afternoons to counseling me on God's grace and my duty to those who are overcome by the Evil One's sorcery.

There was then a day when the ugliness overcame Lucinda, and instead of ripping at her face, or battering her poor body, she held out her arms to me for comfort and soothing, sobbing in terror. One morning she was singing softly in her bed when I came in to awaken her for breakfast. Good days were followed by calm evenings, and gradually Lucinda Mignon Abrigaun became what God had meant her to be: an angel on earth; a loving child in the broken body of a woman.

Here, at Nettle's Home, she had spent the last years of her adulthood, from the age of 22 until she reached her 29th year. The staff loved Lucinda, for her sunny, cheerful attitude, her giving, loving nature, and child-like beauty. We had celebrated her last birthday three months before, with a cake and presents; hair ribbons for her long lustrous hair, and two pretty pastel jumpers to wear over the rather plain white hospital gowns that served as most of the female patients' clothing.

She had clapped her hands and squealed like a little girl…exactly as the little girl she had remained her entire life. Lucinda Mignon Abrigaun had never aged emotionally or developmentally past early adolescence, yet was given at age 15 in marriage to a man of social prominence who was nearly three decades her elder. Her parents, God help them, had thought they had done the best they could for her.

I've seen her wedding photo, a Daguerreotype of a true child bride, a vision in white satin, lace and tulle, petite and perfect, with diamonds in her ears and pearls encrusted on her gown, and scattered throughout her thick cascading brunette curls. I saw a tiny woman with the face of a child, the shining over-excitement of playing dress up on a grand scale blurring her rapt smile in the photo.

It made me sick.

On her last birthday she had eaten a bit of cake and drank the tepid sweetened tea. That night she had rocked and convulsed around her swollen abdomen, gasping with the pain, and crying in my arms. Louise, a fellow caregiver, and I sat with Lucinda in shifts until her body had expelled the minute amount of waste it contained and she could sleep in grateful exhaustion.

So her illness had progressed, in ten short months, with each week bringing an increase in her pain, an increase in medication. And just as she'd been every day of the past 8 years and as many months of her life while locked away here in the Sanitarium, she remained cheerful and sweet, with kisses and kind words for all who came within her sphere. To know her was to love her for her sweet child's lack of pretension and cupidity.

To watch her suffer, patient and without complaint, offering smiles of comfort or words of apology to those of us who must clean and tend her, was to sob quietly behind one's hands after she'd finally found sleep under the kind aegis of repeated doses of laudanum, and finally morphine.

I was now past tears…

I held her fragile hand and rubbed it mindlessly with my thumb, and prayed for her soul, my mothers' ruby glass-bead rosary in my other hand, slipping from worn bead to worn bead. I entreated my God for mercy for the wounded angel who gasped toward death beside me, and requested intersession from the Holy Mother of the Universe for Lucinda's blameless soul. I prayed for the souls of the four children she bore the twisted man who married her, who are now with Him in Heaven, if a merciful God indeed exists.

How many times had I made this death watch with the dying? How many hands had I held and rubbed gently while death raged through the attendant body, stealing function, stripping vitality, and ultimately life, fraying the tender threads that held the soul to body. I closed my eyes and prayed again for the soul of Lucinda. I dozed briefly.

Suddenly Lucinda sat upright, tearing her hand from mine. Her eyes opened wide, and she gasped, "Pierre! Mon Ange'!" Tears washed down her hollowed cheeks, flowing from rheumy eyes, which yet again blazed with light and joy. "Lizzelle! My sweet...My babies! Annette'...Felix! My little loves!"

Lucinda's words were slurred and her voice rose in tenor and force as she again beheld the faces of her much-missed children, visible to her alone. Her arms stretched out, unwavering in their reach for these beloved spirits despite her weakened condition, her fingers waggling in childish impatience for the anticipated embrace. Her smile was radiant, then serene...and as she sank against the pillows, all animation fled her face, and life left her body, crumpled and discarded, behind.

Harsh sobs pushed past the fists I had pressed to my lips. Shock and primitive fear flooded my body, and I felt the hair on my neck rise in reaction. "Dearest God in Heaven," I moaned, "I have prayed for absolution to this woman's soul. Oh, please, be merciful!" I fell to my knees from the chair to her bedside, and clasped her tiny hand, my grief and joy as one entwined. Lucinda must surely be bound to Heaven if these, her own beloved children, were to greet and accompany her through Death's grim door!

Her son, Pierre had been 4 years when he died, Lizzelle, her daughter, 2. Tiny Annette and Felix, her twins, had passed when but weeks old. Each had died held in their mother's arms...Lucinda's soft loving arms, as she drowned them, one by one in the family bath.