Title- Mary
Author- 4give4get
Rated- T
Disclaimer- I own nothing.
Serena- Thanks for reading.
Thinkoutsidethebun07-Thank you, thank you, thank you! Thank for saying I'm a good writer, it means a lot! :P
pottergirls- Thanks for the compliments and thanks for reading.
mabel- Why not?
Chapter Seven…
The gentle reader must now know that as the author, I will not leave out one single horror of the many Mary Bennet faced in a London asylum in 1811. At the time, England was considered one of the few modern countries, seeing as it actually had a facility for mental health, or the lack, thereof. But in 1811 these facilities were little more than prisons and torture chambers, these "doctors" convinced that the insane were not human.
The last thing Mary saw of the outside world was a small orphan boy shining shoes for a penny on the street—she was then ushered into the cheerless, dismal, stone building that whose sign read plainly, "Haddock's Insane Asylum." No candy coating.
"They do not put forth a very fastidious veneer, do they?" Mary questioned, conversationally, but both Jack and Porter did not seem to understand what she was saying.
The inside resembled the exterior of the building on the dismal note. An office on the first floor was their first stop. A pale, thin man with beady eyes stood by the window and turned to see them enter. He did not smile—indeed his disposition seemed quite incapable of it, and hardly acknowledged Jack and Porter by a slight inclination of the head. The suit he wore was simple, drab, and black, it did not say much about his character. He had long, dark sideburns on each side of his face, but was so thin Mary could make out his cheekbones nonetheless. As an estimate, she considered him to be perhaps forty years old.
"Evenin' guv'nor," Jack greeted him, shoving Mary foreword and leaving her to catch herself by way of the man with the sideburn's desk. Slowly, as if in a dream, Mary looked up and met the man's cold, unfeeling eyes. She realized one would have to be cold and unfeeling to work in such a place.
"This is the new girl?" he questioned, looking down at Mary's slight form and the dark circles under her eyes.
"She is."
"Her size is small, what is her age?" the man posed the question.
Both men shrugged and then all three looked to Mary to answer it. She wondered what would happen if she just didn't speak. They'd likely think her even more insane. She tried to straighten up her body and stand normally, but she found she had not the strength to lift herself off of the desk.
"Nineteen," she swallowed and answered them.
"So much?" the man looked back to the window and out on the gray streets of London. Mary noticed the nameplate on the desk that read, Hiram Yates. So that must be his name.
"And her case?" he continued, facing Jack and Porter again. His voice was deep and gravelly—exceedingly unfriendly.
"I don't know, do I?" Jack protested, "The lady just said ter come an' we did, didn't we?"
"Indeed," Yates looked back down at Mary and his pale face seemed to study her own, his eyes moving back and forth, "She looks the very image of trouble, would you call such an accusation unfounded?"
"Not at all, guv'nor. All lip she was the way 'ere."
"Her eyes are intelligent and unhealthy looking," he noted, "We had, for our best interests, keep her under out eye at all times," as he said this, he looked right at her, and Mary felt an emotion in which she was not very familiar. Real, actual fear.
"Yes, guv'nor," Jack answered, and he and porter both dragged her up two flights of stairs.
The hallway was long and dark and simply full of doors with small, bared windows on the top. Through these windows, Mary could see pale, wide-eyed girls shivering, curled up in corners, some crying silently, others whispering things under their breath. The walls of the hall seemed to bear memory of all of the horrors it had witnessed and sagged alike the prisoners. The very building itself was miserable. Mary did not even count how many doors they passed before Porter retrieved a key from his waistcoat pocket and opened one of the doors and shoved her in. The door slammed shut with a bang that chilled her straight to the core.
Mary stumbled forewords and had no desk to fall upon this time. Her cheek slapped the hard floor, bloodying her lip. The cell she was in, echoed with the sound of slow, steady breathing. As she picked her head off of the ground, she saw that she was now cellmates with four other girls. Two huddled together in the corner, their body racking in sobs of fear.
One girl stood above her, looking down with a hard, dirt-smudged face. The girl's golden hair was long and shaggy, reaching down her back and her eyes were a dead shade of sea green. Her face was the same deadly pale as all of the inhabitants of Haddock's.
She looked at Mary with a stern eye, her mouth in a straight line. As Mary pushed herself and against the wall, the girl's face broke into a small smile. The smile was not insane as the gentle reader might image—but the smile of a normal girl.
"A new girl?" she questioned, cocking her head to one side.
Mary wasn't sure how to answer. Wasn't the girl insane? Or perhaps wrongly accused, like herself? She nodded her head.
"Catalina Bradford," the girl introduced herself, "And we hope you enjoy your stay at Hades Insane Asylum."
"Hades?" Mary repeated.
"Yes—that is what the girls here call it. And with good reason, too," Catalina smiled again and sat before Mary, "You do not seem mindless as the others. What is it with you?"
"My parents simply disapprove of me," Mary sniffed, turning her head away.
"That is the way with most of the girls in Hades," her new blonde friend nodded, "Too free of a mind, perhaps? I wish I could say it was the same case with me."
"What is your case?" Mary leaned closer to the girl.
"I hear voices," she said it lightly, "Most of the time I'm perfectly normal, just every now and then… I'll hear them."
Mary's mouth opened in a gape of awe. What a place? These sort of things aren't even in horror novels! The truly gruesome truth hit her in the face so hard, she was stunted for all of about five seconds. Indeed, it was five seconds before she could speak again.
"And them?" she asked Catalina, pointing to the two trembling girls in the far corner of their cell.
"Them?" Catalina repeated, shaking her head in sorrow, "I don't know their names, but that's pretty much all they do. Their minds are broken and unhinged. And they've been like that since as long as I've been here."
"And her?" Mary pointed to the fourth and last girl in the cell. She had frizzy dark hair, completely matted and dark eyes. Her jawbone was largely defined and she looked at Mary harshly once she realized she was being addressed.
"I'll thank you not to speak to me like I am not even here," she snapped, glaring at them both.
"That is Sarah Newberry… well, except for when she's Nina Parker. A double personality, you see, but perfectly sane otherwise," Catalina giggled.
"Oh, yes, perfectly sane," Mary muttered.
"I shall tell you how to tell Sarah apart from Nina," she continued, "Nina speaks with an East London accent."
"But I've never heard an East London accent," Mary reminded her.
"Trust me," Catalina winked, "You will know it when you hear it."
Life at Haddock's was… interesting. One of the first things Mary noticed was that each of the girls' bare feet was bloody and scared. She did not feel the need to ask why, for some reason. The girls spent most of their day locked up. The asylum was mostly to keep the insane away from the general population.
There were "doctors." They were stern old men, much like Yates. They often pulled specific girls aside and harshly interrogated them, while taking notes on their "progress." Mary had yet to have this happen to her. Meals were served in the mess hall and consisted of room-temperature porridge and hardtack.
And Mary ate the porridge and the hardtack. Nothing revolted her anymore. The porridge was hard and gritty and more often than not had live mealworms wiggling in it. And Mary ate them too. Soon, she no longer spat the flies and maggots out of the hardtack but simply chewed them as well.
"No one remains a picky eater for long in Hades," Catalina commented, plucking a squirming mealworm out of her bowl and placing it in her mouth.
After meals, most of the girls were given materials to knit socks and caps. Luckily, Mary learned to knit at nine years old. And I say "luckily" because Haddock's seemed to be the place where the less you said to the guards, the better. She instantly picked up the knitting needles and rough, thick yarn as Catalina did, next to her on the bench.
"And this, New Girl, is the government's solution on labor. Ours is free!" Catalina laughed, and Mary looked at her oddly, not finding it so funny. She seemed to notice this.
"Well, if you prefer to be a little rebel, I suggest you sew the toes shut, or make the sock impossibly large, or impossibly small," the blonde girl told her, pointing at Mary's beginnings of a sock with her own needle.
"Is that what you do?" Mary asked, untangled a knot she accidentally made from not paying attention to the yarn.
Catalina nodded, "But it was Sarah's idea. Clever Sarah," she elbowed Sarah Newberry who sat beside her on her other side, knitting her own sock.
"Or," Sarah spoke to Mary for the first time, "You can leave one of the small sharp needles inside it, and let someone poke their toe on it. Let them have a nice cut down there," Mary observed her sticking a needle in the toe from the outside.
"You are evil, Sarah Newberry," Catalina laughed. By now, Mary had analyzed both of their characters for the most part. Catalina was the laugh-herself-through-her-sorrow-type, and even when she was absolutely miserable, she would smile and laugh about it. How else could a girl laugh so much in a place that was nicknamed "Hades" by its inhabitants? Sarah was snubbed by the whole world, and therefore decided to be mean back to it—that was the only explanation Mary could find. And as for Nina Parker… Mary had yet to find out about her.
"What did you say your name was again, New Girl?" Catalina asked, conversationally.
"I didn't," Mary looked at her dead, green eyes, and wondered if soon her face would be just as smeared with dirt and have such a gray tone to her skin as the girl before her. She introduced herself and named from where she came.
A tall girl with brown, lank hair looked over at them from where she sat across the table. She was slightly less thin than the rest and her cheeks still had a tad of color left. She turned to Catalina.
"Did you say, New Girl?" she asked.
Catalina looked deep into Mary's eyes, as if in apology and then looked back to the tall girl and swallowed so loudly Mary could hear her doing it, "Yes."
Now the whole room was looking right at Mary, who felt her sweaty palms loosen their grip on her "sock" and listened to the clatter of the needles on the floor beneath her. Each and every girl stood up and began sort of circling around the table in which she sat. Suddenly, Catalina got up too, except she ran out of the circle and to the door, leaving her there, surrounded by pale, thin, malnourished, girls dressed in nothing but rags and their matted, tangled hair. Their almost lifeless eyes bore into her.
The tall girl climbed over the table and hit Mary so hard in the mouth, that for a second she thought that perhaps her jaw had become disconnected from her skull and blood flooding her mouth. She spat it all out—her dyed red saliva. And that was only the beginning. Each and every girl in the room seemed to want a piece of her. They slapped her and pinched her and kicked and punched and worse. Each hit hurt worse than its predecessor, and by the time only one girl stood before her, Mary could feel bruises forming on her face and body and how blood was smeared all over her face.
The girl in front of her was a dark form of Sarah Newberry. The girl looked at her with an emotionless expression, before grabbing Mary by her hair and slamming her forehead into the table. It knocked her all but senseless, and Mary coughed several mouthfuls of blood out. Her head was throbbing and the mess hall swayed back and forth.
With no longer the strength or the will to stand, she let herself fall to the ground and lay there, staring at the blurry cracked ceiling. Now the girls all cleared out and sat back down in their original seats, knitting, as if nothing had ever happened. Mary felt a cool hand on her painful forehead. It was Catalina.
Mary felt utterly betrayed. That was to be expected—why would someone like her be on my side? she thought. She pushed Catalina's hand away.
"Why did you let them do that to me?" she demanded, trying to sit back up.
Catalina pulled her the rest of the way up, and held her by her shoulder. When Mary looked into her dead, green eyes, she saw that they were actually filled with remorse, "It was for your own good, you know, Mary."
"My own good?" she repeated blankly, "How could that have possibly been for my own good?"
Catalina looked deep into her face and half-smiled, "There are all on your side, Mary," she gestured to the mess hall full of the girls who had been attacking her a second ago, "That is what they do to every new girl—to help."
"How is that help?" Mary wanted to know, speaking in a relatively sour tone.
"It is so you won't break," Catalina explained sheepishly, "We do not want you to—we beat you so you won't break."
Mary stared at her in shock, her mouth open in a gape of utter awe. It did sort of make sense in a sick way… Honestly, it sounded more like a Marques de Sade novel than real life. Or perhaps that was just it—Marques de Sade wrote of the horrors of real life, and if the ignorant, narrow-minded upper class would rather not read them and keep themselves small and in their own perfect fairy-tale world, that was fine with him. He wrote only the truth—the harsh, bloody, vulgar, unjust truth.
And what better heroine to have in a novel similar that of Marques de Sade than ours: Mary Bennet? Mary Bennet who was impossible to beat? Mary Bennet who did not need anyone else's kindness? Mary Bennet who was well informed of the ways of the world, unlike most other people (women in particular) of her class and status? And the gentle reader will find that characters like her do make the best of heroines because they tend to actually live to see the end of the novel.
As Mary will.
"I understand, Catalina," Mary said, and struggled (not without the help of her new friend) back to her seat on the bench and retrieved her "sock" and needles from the floor. As the girls knit, Mary looked up once to meet Sarah's dark eyes, as she slipped a small, sharp needle into her sock.
x.X.x.
Of course, on her first day, Mary did not fully soak in the realization that she was locked in an asylum, most likely for the rest of her life. It did however, hit her in just the fashion I have described to the gentle reader upon the next morning.
Mary, Catalina, Sarah, and the two other mindless and nameless girls slept on the hard floor of their cell. Mary's stomach was constantly growling with hunger pains, and she accepted that those feelings of hunger would simply be her regular companion from then forth. As she slumped against the wall of the cell, brooding over her situation, she watched her cellmates in their fitful slumber.
She would never see daylight again. She would never see Kitty or Lydia again. Or even Lizzy or Jane. Oh, for god's sake, not even Mr. and Mrs. Bennet! In fact, the only people she would see was thin, pale girls with questionable mental health. Well, I'll never see Mr. Ashby again, Mary thought, chuckling at that much. She would spend the rest of her natural life knitting socks and eating one meal a day of porridge, hardtack, maggots, and mealworms.
And Mary's body grew weaker yet. As the gentle reader most likely knows, Mary's body was never particularly strong. No, even in her best of health she was small and childlike in appearance. After her confinement to her chamber in Longbourn, she had lost at least five kilograms. By a few weeks in Haddock's she had easily lost another five. Her pale skin grew paler. Her hair grew as tangled and matted as any other resident of Haddock's.
One night, Mary was woken from what restless doze she had managed to fall into by someone shaking her awake. She forced open her bleary eyes and looked into the terrified face of Catalina. She rubbed her eyes and gentle held on to her friend's shoulder as she sat herself up.
"Cat—" Mary began but the girl's shriek interrupted her first.
"Mary!" her whole body began to tremble and her breathing was labored. Her eyes somehow no longer looked dead, but rather full of life. Too full. Her green eyes began to roll back into her skull, exposing only the bloodshot eye whites. In it all, Catalina gripped Mary's arms, digging her nails into her flesh as she had her fit.
"What on earth is happening?" Mary cried, and as she expected, did not get any reply of sane nature.
"The voices," Catalina whispered, "I can hear them…." She broke off into a blood curdling scream, that left Mary's ears ringing. Tears poured from her eyes now, "They say horrible things, Mary, you have to understand…" her eyes rolled back again and she let loose a similar scream, "No! No! NO!"
Mary could not take her eyes off of her, but nor could she make any movement with her body. She was completely frozen.
"Mary…" Catalina begged her, "The voices are going to come here. Tonight!"
"No, they are not, Catalina," Mary told her firmly, after clearing her throat, "Now go back to sleep."
But she did not go back to sleep. She continued to clutch Mary's arms and go in and out of screaming fits, where her eyes would roll back again. The two nameless girls in the corner hissed at her like cats, but Mary just glared at them, causing them to cower some more.
"Sarah, what should I do?" Mary asked frantically, knowing that no one could possibly sleep over such a racket.
The voice that came from Sarah's usual spot, Mary did not recognize, "Why ask 'er? She don't know nothin' 'bout fits, ike 'at."
Sarah Newberry sat perfectly rigid and looked calmly at Mary, smiling warmly, "Jus' let 'er get it out o' 'er system."
Mary stared in similar shock to when she regarded Catalina. She forced her lips apart and tried to bring her voice out of her stomach, "Nina?" she asked, the sound of her voice clear above the screams, bouncing off of the cell's walls.
"Yes, Mary?" Nina asked kindly, cocking her head to the side.
"You really are a double personality," Mary breathed in awe.
Nina nodded.
Marques de Sade never wrote of anything like this. But Mary had little time to ponder in amazement as such a thing. She needed to help Catalina first. She looked down at her, and held her face in both of her hands, forcing her to look at her.
"Catalina Bradford," she began firmly, "You do not hear voices. Do you know why that is? Because there are no voices. In fact, the only voice you hear is mine, because I am the only one in this cell speaking."
And suddenly, those lively green eyes died again, into their dull, sullen, sea green. The sea green Mary was used to. Catalina gulped a breath of air and wiped the tears from her face with her sleeve.
After such an event, Mary was quite sure nothing would ever surprise her in life again. She began to grow even restless. The more time she spent locked in that gray prison called Haddock's, the more she felt she might be losing her mind. She stole a needle, tucking it into her skirt once. And with it, she carved words into the walls of her cell. Words and pictures. It was sort of a game she played with herself—how she kept herself from completely losing her mind.
She constantly thought of Longbourn. And of Pemberly. Did Jane, Lizzy, and Kitty know what had happened to her? To where she had been sent? Did Mrs. Bennet ever feel any sort of remorse for where she had sent her own daughter? Did Mr. Bennet ever regret allowing such a thing? Somehow Mary knew that, all of her sisters knew (Kitty having told Lydia) where she was. And Lizzy and Jane likely had thoughts similar to Mrs. Bennet's—that it was for her own good. And something told Mary that Mr. Bennet cared nothing of her, or what became of her. He had said himself that she was a mistake.
He does not like me—but no matter, she told herself, to keep her tears back, I like myself. She carved the end of the story of Alice Strider. Whenever anyone would read it, perhaps any patient in this cell with a slightly sane mind who would be put here in the future, most likely long after she had died, would likely make no sense of it, since the entire beginning and middle of the story lay gathering dust in the drawers of Mary's desk at Longbourn.
The day she finished it, the cell door was suddenly forced open and a man who looked rather similar to Hiram Yates stood in the doorway, and proclaimed, "Mary Bennet?"
Mary looked back at the wall in which she had been writing on and reread her last sentence:
'And I pen this tale now, for tomorrow I die, but not my story. That shall live on in the wake of this very cell. Tomorrow I die, and my memory will haunt this earth forever. –Alice Strider'
She then looked back to the man, and pitifully crawled to her feet, for lack of any strength to stand up any other way. The man led her down the hallway (slamming the door closed behind them) and sparked up a conversation.
"Do you know who I am, Mary?" he asked, pushing her forward to walk ahead of him. Obviously, he felt an authority to just manhandle people at his will.
"I should think not," Mary answered stiffly, "I have never seen you before in my life."
"Quite so," the man agreed, "But you mistake my question, do you know what sort of person I am?"
"No."
"My name is Dr. Moore. I am a doctor, do you know what that is, Mary?" he spoke to her carefully and slowly, as if she were roughly five years old.
"Of course I know what a doctor is!" Mary snapped, "Why on earth wouldn't I?"
"I see," he rubbed his chin thoughtfully, and then stopped walking as they reached a door at the end of the hall, "Please, just through this door."
Mary entered the room, with him following. He held her shoulders and steered her straight to a chair in front of a desk as if she could not walk, and took a seat on the opposite side of her.
"Mary, do you know why you are here?" his face looked thinner in the light of the single lit lamp in the room. Mary was oddly surprised to see something so normal as a quill pen, or a lamp, or a portrait hanging on the wall.
"You are vague, sir," she replied, "Here in this room? Or here at Hades—I mean, Haddock's?"
"Here at Haddock's," the doctor confirmed.
"Yes, I believe I do," Mary cleared her throat, which was not much above a whisper courteous of her lack of strength, "My parents did not approve of me."
"And why would they not approve of you, Mary?" he asked, "You must stop trying to push the blame on anyone else if you want to become well again."
Mary opened her mouth to retort, but he simply plowed on, "I have always said that to become sane, you must do two things. One—realize that you have no one to blame but yourself. And two—recognize the fact that you are indeed a lunatic and therefore want to fix that."
"But I am not a lunatic!" Mary protested, leaning closer across the table.
"You speak far to factually. You do not consider yourself a lunatic. But that is certainly not a fact," Dr. Moore informed her, "And seeing as you do not yet consider yourself insane, I see that it certainly puts my job back further."
Mary glared at him.
"Now try to realize, Mary," he spoke slowly, "That you are indeed insane. Ask yourself—would your parents and family really put you in such a place unless it was for your own good?"
Mary looked down at her lap and weighed his question, "Yes, I do believe that my family would put me in such a place for no reason at all," she answered, "And if I had a daughter, even if she was insane I would kill myself before I'd send her to such a place as this."
His jaw clenched together and his face temporarily grew angry, but then he calmed himself at the last minute, "It is only natural that you would feel such hatred towards a place you believe you should not be. But as you attempt to realize that you are indeed a lunatic, try to realize that Haddock's is only trying to help you and your case."
"Sir," Mary breathed, "You do not even know me. How can you honestly say that I am insane?"
"I am a doctor," was his response, "And I will have no more of you denying it. Repeat after me, 'I am a lunatic.' Would that be so hard to say, Mary?"
"I am not a lunatic," she growled.
"Mary!" he said sternly, looking at her in a disciplinary way, "I do not want to use force with you."
"So use it!" Mary yelled, standing up, "I am not scared of you! I will not admit to being insane either, because I am not!"
Dr. Moore rang the bell on his desk, and two nurses rushed in, each one grabbing on of Mary's arms.
"She got violent," he reported to them.
"I did not!" Mary struggled in their grasp, "I only stood up!"
Mary felt her arms being forced through the sleeves of a straightjacket, and then felt the strain on her middle as it was fastened tightly around her beck. Realizing what had happened, she struggled in vain against it, and tried to kick Dr. Moore and both of the nurses. In that, she accidentally lost her footing and fell into the corner of the desk, bloodying her face.
"She is injuring herself now," Dr. Moore stated, pulling her off of the ground, "You'd best get her calmed down."
"I slipped, it was an accident!" Mary told them, but realized too late that no one was listening to her.
The two nurses led her down several flights of stairs before throwing her into a solitary cell. She dragged her feet the whole way and kicked over a few chairs. When they slammed the door to the cell, she leaned her bloody face on the floor and swallowed deeply.
Her body had literally no energy left. Mary wondered if after all that she had been through, she was finally dying.
End Chapter
Serena- Yup. Please review!