She let that sink into the minds of her audience before she continued. “My bread smelled of feces and often had whole spiders baked into it. If it was even baked. If the prisoners had been allowed to talk, we would have agreed that sour dough was probably set aside to harden into an inedible brick before being served to us.”
A few groans roiled up from the crowd. “But the butter...the rotten slime they called butter...made my ‘food’ come back up the first time I could bring myself to try it.”
Somebody hiccupped a wet hiccup.
“The women who had been there awhile were stealing other women’s food, tea, and everything. That’s how starving they were. And the weekly, humiliating, freezing baths...”
Katie’s hand covered her open mouth.
“A crazed woman stood in the tub filled with icy water with a bar of soap, which was used to scrub each of us, one after the other. When we were done, we were all dried with the same towel, and some women had weeping cysts on their bodies. It didn’t matter.”
Nellie continued. “The threadbare clothes we were forced to put on did nothing to keep out the ever-present chill, but made it worse. Then, the nurses would open the windows to let in the frosty air. Some women froze to death, some begged for death but the sweet release didn’t come for them during my ten days in hell.”
Tears pricked Katie’s eyes, but she wasn’t sure why.
“Enough of that sadness,” Nellie told the silent café. Her chipper voice did nothing to mask the dull sadness that had welled in her brown eyes. “We won a million dollars on behalf of the New York asylum patients, for their betterment. Now, onto a new project—beating the fictional literary record of circumnavigating the globe in eighty days.” She paused for intensity. “We shall do it in less!”
A raucous cheer broke the suffocating tone that had befallen the lot of them. The door leading to the train platform creaked open as the cheers died down. “Ten minutes to boarding time, Miss Bly.” The promise of fame lit the plump conductor’s rotund face.
Nellie nodded her thanks. “Like a rich boy on Christmas morning,” she muttered through a tight smile.
Katie glanced down at her forgotten dinner of duck, which didn’t look as appetizing cold, and pushed back her plate. At once, the brown-skinned waiter appeared and took it away. “So much different from the Amish way.”
“The way of your people,” Nellie agreed.
“Not my people anymore.”
Nellie dabbed at the corner of her mouth with her linen napkin, then paused. “How so?”
Katie squirmed in her seat beneath the heat of Nellie’s direct stare. “It was so simple and plain back in Gasthof Village. Every day the same. Everything expected. My future written before it had the chance to become mine.” Katie wet her lips again. This time, her mouth wasn’t dry. “If everything works like clockwork already, it will keep working whether I’m there or not.”
Nellie bobbed her head in a slow nod, a thoughtful look on her lightly-freckled face. After a moment, she opened her mouth to speak, but was cut off by the starry-eyed conductor.
“It’s time, Miss Bly.”
Nellie pushed back from the table and stood with a youthful hop. “Come with me then, Katie Knepp, if you’re discontented with your life. Come, let’s be adventurers.”
With a wide smile, Nellie skipped toward the train. Katie followed closely, but couldn’t make herself skip. Without a second look back, Nellie stepped onto the train.
“Can you place my bag in my overhead compartment please, Mister...”
“White. Raymond White, at your service, Miss Bly.”
“Ah yes, Mr. White. Now then. When Miss Knepp boards, do take as good of care of her things as you have mine.”
I only have the dress on my back. The rest of my stuff went back to Gasthof Village with Peter in his wagon. Katie pursed her lips. Did Nellie not notice?
Nellie’s voice trailed off into the deep recesses of the train car, still kindly giving orders to the workers who flocked after her like starved dogs. Since nobody was left to help her, Katie grasped the handle and lifted her foot to step onto the train, but stopped. Peter’s face filled her mind without warning.
Peter Wagler. The Englishman who showed up looking for his long-lost sister, Rebekah Stoll, and wound up staying on with the Wagler family as their Amish son. Peter’s handsome, tan face, framed in locks of sunshine yellow, made her wonder if leaving Gasthof Village was the right thing to do at all. The way he smiled as he walked up the dirt path to her parents’ house when he came to call on her. The jagged, white scar through his eyebrow, reminiscent of lightning, that bespoke of the terrors offered by the English world. His softly whispered promises of always being there for her, no matter what, brought knots to her stomach.
Joseph’s face, almost complete opposite of Peter’s with his darker complexion and hair as black as pitch tar, flashed into her mind with such intensity that Peter’s faded as quickly as it appeared. Joseph Graber. The only boy in Gasthof Village whose affections she couldn’t win, though it wasn’t for lack of trying. Years of trying. Despite all her efforts, Joseph held fast to the promise of forever with nobody but Rebekah Stoll.
Rebekah.
Rebekah.
Katie grimaced. Perfect Rebekah, whose wedding to Joseph she wouldn’t be sad to miss.
The train whistle blew a shrill shriek. “All aboard!”
With Rebekah’s flawless face haunting her mind, a fresh burst of hot anger sent Katie up the iron steps of the train. “As far away from her and Gasthof Village as possible,” she grumbled. “New York City it is.”
Chapter Six
Montgomery, Indiana Train Depot
“And I said no!” The wrinkled old man behind the ticket counter turned up his nose. “No more trains bound for New York until the morning. 8:00 a.m., on the button.”
“But sir...” Peter’s voice hovered somewhere between pleading and murderous. “We heard the train whistle. We know a train is coming.”
Joseph pointed to the train schedule hanging behind the counter. “And it says right there that this train, the one we heard whistle, is going to New York City.”
The man stared back at them, unsmiling, through wire-rimmed glasses. To Rebekah, he looked rather owlish. He adjusted them before he spoke. “The next available train, sir, is at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow morning.”
Peter pulled off his black wool hat and ran his hand through his hair. It stuck out every which way, blond and chunky. He looked wildly around the depot.
“Her!” He thrust his finger at the glass window that separated them from the café. There, sat a brunette woman in a brown tweed jacket and matching cap. “That’s Nellie Bly, is it not? We need to see her!”
The old ticket taker’s face softened. “Her newspaper bought the place out, son. To keep Miss Bly safe, probably to keep her safe from the likes of crazed fans like you.”
Rebekah’s mouth fell open. Before Peter could formulate a response, the man continued. “Let me guess, the madhouse bit is what appealed to you?”
Peter narrowed his eyes and shook his head, like he was trying to see through a rainstorm. “Madhouse? What are you talking about, mister?” His pale face grew pale, but a deep scarlet chased the paleness away and brought with it a fierce scowl. “You mean to tell me Katie’s running about with a woman from an insane asylum?”
The man’s gray brows furrowed until it was impossible to tell if there were two of just one. “Don’t you plain people read?”
He reached beneath the counter and produced a newspaper. Rebekah accepted it and began to read aloud.
“New York reporter Nellie Bly, made famous by going under...cover. Undercover. By going undercover as a patient in the...” She glanced at the old man.
“Notorious. It means very bad.”
Rebekah nodded as the train screeched to a halt outside the depot. “In the notorious Blackwell Island Insane Asylum, is set to make headlines again. She will attempt to cir—”
Before the ticket taker could help her, she remembered the word. “Circumnavigate,” she said proudly. “Circumnavigate the globe in less than the fictional eighty days.”
She looked expectantly at the old man.
