‘And you’ll have the gag as well if you don’t shut up,’ said hatchet-face, and they went on shearing her hair.
‘We shan’t mind if we have to gag you,’ said Higgins. ‘Quite enjoy it, in fact.’
‘We quite like punishing unnatural creatures who get into bed with other women,’ said hatchet-face, and they both laughed in a horrid jeering way.
Maud sobbed with despair and frustration, but neither of them took any notice.
‘If we take off the restraints for the bath, will you behave properly?’ said hatchet-face at length.
‘Or have we got to drop you in with the straps still on?’ said Higgins.
‘Take them off, please,’ said Maud, hating herself for pleading but hating the straps even more. ‘I won’t struggle again.’
‘That’s better,’ said hatchet-face. ‘But keep the gown on. We don’t want to see all you’ve got.’
‘We aren’t Thomasina Forrester,’ said Higgins. ‘Nor one of her pretty little sluts from Seven Dials.’ Both women laughed coarsely.
Maud clambered over the high sides of the bath. The granite scraped her skin through the canvas gown, and there was a scummy line where it had not been properly scrubbed out. The nurses brought two tall cans of water and poured it in a quick splashy torrent. Maud gasped because it was much too hot, and her skin had turned bright pink where it touched her. But when she tried to climb out, they held her down.
‘Stay where you are,’ said Higgins, and hatchet-face fetched something that had been lying ready in an enamel bowl. At first Maud thought it was a bathing cap, fashioned from the same scratchy canvas as the gown, and wondered if they were protecting her shorn head from the hot water. They clamped the cap tightly down over her head, and Maud screamed, the sound echoing in the enclosed space. The cap was icily cold, and sent spears of pain slicing through her entire head.
‘Pounded ice,’ said Higgins. ‘You’re having the cold treatment, see. Hot to the body and cold to the head. Very effective.’
‘Only quarter of an hour, though,’ said hatchet-face. ‘Don’t want to…What is it we don’t want to do, Higgins?’
‘Inflame the membranes of the brain,’ said Higgins, reciting this parrot fashion. ‘And we replace the ice every five minutes.’
Maud had no idea whether the two women followed this regime, because by the time they put the second application of ice on her head, she had already entered a world where there was no room for anything but the spiking pain in her temples. When finally they carried her back to her own room, she was dizzy with the contrast between the fiery heat in her limbs and the icy agony of her head. Thomasina and Simon were there, of course, still hammering their way out of Twygrist as they were on most days, but for once Maud could not pay them any attention.
As the day stretched out and the light began to fade, she had the beginnings of an idea for escaping from this place. There was an irony about this, because it was almost as if the ice-cap had made her brain work again. Ways and means for escaping wreathed in and out of her mind: half-remembered snippets of things that had happened in Quire House; fragments of gossip and conversations and things found and heard. Little by little Maud began to see a way of getting out of Latchkill. And, what was even more important, she began to see a way of ensuring that she stayed out.