“Oh. All right, although I’m not sure how many answers I have.”
“Have you met her uncle?”
“The Marquess? Yes, in fact I dined with him last night.” At any rate, I’d started to dine.
“What did you think of him?”
With another woman, I might have shaded my response to the diplomatic. With this one, I was honest. “Pompous. Politically extreme. Socially offensive.”
“Did you notice a blonde housemaid?”
“Yes, I believe I talked to most of the household staff.”
“What did you think of that one?”
“Why?”
“You’re doing the answers, remember?”
“I thought her a bit impertinent. Both rude and overly familiar in speaking about her employers. But that’s not unusual these days, when girls have so many alternatives to service.”
“Hmm. Do you know the sequence of Viv—of Lady Vivian’s madness?”
This woman had a most peculiar style of conversation, composed of profound non-sequiturs. “Sequence? You mean, when it came on her? Well, her father died in 1914, when she was twenty-three. Her brother Thomas died the following spring. Shortly after that, the Marquess came home and she, Ronnie, and Lady Dorothy moved into the east wing. That seems to have been the final straw, because The Lady Vivian started showing signs of increasing imbalance. She attacked the Marquess in the spring of 1916, and went into her first asylum. After that, it was a series of asylums, treatments, de-committals, and periods at home before things would go south for her again.”
“And?”
“And what?” It was starting to prove irritating. “If you have something to tell me, Miss Bailey, just say it.”
But instead, she grimaced and rose, setting her empty cup on the table. “I need to bathe and shave my father before I make him lunch. He’s been ill, which is why I’m here. Give my greetings to The Lady Dorothy, would you please? And to Ronnie, she was always such a nice child.”
And with that, she turned on her heel and walked out. I scrambled upright to protest. “I wasn’t—can you at least tell me, is there someplace you know where she might have gone?”
“Someplace safe,” she called down the stairs, and that was it.
I looked at the cat. Its pink tongue came out to pull the drops from its whiskers, before it settled to the serious business of bathing.
That word again: safe.
The word had stuck with me ever since Ronnie’s aunt used it to describe Bedlam, three years ago. So if that looming grey monstrosity made for her idea of safe, what were similar alternatives? Would she have found a secure prison to check in to? A remote castle? A niche in some choking Underground tunnel? Perhaps we should be making the rounds of the country’s other asylums.
Everything I had seen so far indicated that the greatest threat to Lady Vivian Beaconsfield lay in her own troubled mind. Even the obnoxious half-brother had never responded to her physical attacks in kind. Still, ultimately, any woman’s safety lay in her income.
“Pawn shops,” I told the cat. Its paw went still for a moment as it thought the matter over, then went on. Time for me to do the same.
Chapter Nine
THE PROBLEM OF TRUNK TELEPHONE calls from the depths of Surrey proving insurmountable, I ended up sending Holmes a cable from the village: COULD USE YOUR HELP AM RETURNING TO LONDON R.
If he was bored, this would give him an excuse to drop everything and perform one of his miraculous self-conjuring tricks, that he might be leaning with utter insouciance against a stanchion at Waterloo when I got down from the train. If he did have something going on, be it amongst the hives, in the laboratory, or buried in some dusty archive, my choice of words told him it could wait.
Unfortunately, without Mrs Hudson, a telegram might sit for days on the step before anyone took notice.
I used the post office’s pen to mark up one of the photographs, and on my way through the railway station, showed a pair of them to all and sundry. One had Vivian au naturel. On the other I had drawn a moustache, darkened her hair, and coarsened her eyebrows, then cropped the edges to make it feel like a different image entirely. The ticket agent knew her, but he’d lived in Selwick a long time. A conductor thought he possibly recognised the young man, but it had been raining on Friday, so…
I found an unoccupied First Class compartment, and settled in.
When Holmes had a spell of thinking to do, he would build a cushion nest before the fire and work his way through a heap of his most disgusting tobacco. I, however, had never found combustion inspiring, and preferred to meditate on objects with more substance than a dart of flames or a wisp of smoke: a lengthy walk, the lick of waves on a shore, a solitary train journey.
The countryside went by: cropped grassland, farms, hedgerows, the back gardens in towns. For all the attention I paid, I might as well have been travelling through Stockholm as Surrey.
It is War time. A sensitive young woman is hit by two hard losses and a seismic change in the structure of her small corner of the aristocracy. Yes, the nation is in turmoil, but so is her private world: father and brother dead, her family’s domestic arrangements turned upside-down. Her much older half-brother, frustrated by his reduced circumstances and its resultant life in the country, finds himself living cheek-by-jowl with a difficult young woman he barely knows. A flighty and fragile girl who turns out to be not only unbalanced, but—the family must suspect it—a lesbian, unwilling to be caught by a husband.
So, faced with this difficult yet financially solvent person, why not simply lock her away? As far as the Marquess is concerned, “the gel’s” inheritance is rightfully his—after all, didn’t her mother replace his as the Marchioness? Surely his stepmother’s money should be regarded as part of the larger estate? She’d had no right to assign her money to the girl of the family, not when the heir was in need of it. In any event, Vivian was too mad to take care of her own inheritance, wasn’t she? Perhaps everything would be simplified if she just…went away.
The rich June countryside gave way to London sprawl, my thoughts and mood growing as stained as the buildings that closed around me. It was a good thing that Holmes was not leaning against a stanchion when I climbed down from the train compartment. Had he been, I would surely have heaped my ninety minutes of dark thoughts upon his male head, as a convenient representative of his half of the race.
By the time he caught up with me that evening at The Vicissitude, my outrage had cooled—but it had also hardened into resolution.
“Why are you here?” he asked, looking around him at the smaller and more idiosyncratic of my London club’s public rooms.
“When I got back from Surrey, I was in no condition to speak with Mycroft. Or you, for that matter. The Vicissitude seemed the best place for me.”
The Ladies’ club I had joined many years before offered temporary quarters for women on the move: in Town for a doctor, a colleague, or a research library, or passing through to a conference or political event in the bigger world. The women who took a room at The Vicissitude were not in London for a matinee or a fashion house.
Not, perhaps, the ideal setting in which to soften one’s disapproval of the male gender.
My husband cast a dubious glance at the card propped up on the mantel—the sort of image an innocent viewer would take at face value, while a more sophisticated eye could not help noticing that the object in the Victorian lady’s hand resembled a sharp dagger—and reached for his cigarette case. “They haven’t forbidden men smoking here, I take it?”
“That is an ash-tray on the table, Holmes.”
“Yes. And possibly, like most other amenities in this establishment, reserved for the use of women.” Before I could give this the response it deserved, he cut in. “Russell, I can see that something has severely ruffled your emotional feathers. Perhaps you might tell me, rat
her than simply performing the surgical procedure the woman on that postal card is about to enact.”
The patronising use of the term ruffled feathers nearly had me reaching for the heavy ash-tray—until I noticed the combination of wariness and determination in his grey eyes, and realised that he was deliberately pushing me towards the edge. There was only one possible response.
I dropped back against my chair and started to laugh.
Another woman would have missed the quick flash of relief across his sardonic features, since he hid it by the lighting of his cigarette. When the spent match was in the assigned container, he looked up at me. “It’s your friend’s aunt, I presume.”
“Lady Vivian Beaconsfield. Mad and sad and betrayed on all sides.”
“A stray chicken in a world of foxes,” he murmured.
“Oh please, Holmes—enough of the references to Gallus domesticus. This Lady may be unbalanced, but she is not without resources, or apparently wit. And if she has been ‘gobbled up,’ she will be missed,” I added, to show I was aware of his reference. “Unlike your Lady Frances Carfax, this is a woman who fought her way into a space that she could defend, even if that was only a patient’s cell at Bedlam. A damaged woman who, I’m beginning to think, managed to hang on to enough self-respect and independence that she could seize the opportunity for escape when it came.”
“Is this not a good thing?”
“Well, let’s see what you think.”
We were interrupted by the arrival of the tea-tray, which I had asked for when I realised we might be here for some time. I dropped the Privacy Please sign over the knob as the girl went out—for if The Vicissitude’s residents overheard the conversation we were about to have, it might well set off a storming of the gates of Bedlam.
* * *
—
The traffic outside changed from daytime deliveries to evening home-comings. During the lag while London was at its supper tables, I finished my tale.
The ash-tray was half-full. The teapot was long empty. Holmes rolled the end of his last cigarette back and forth between thumb and forefinger, then sat forward to smash it into the mess before him. “We need to eat.”
I blinked. Had I eaten that day? Breakfast, back in Selwick, yes—and a cup of tea with Miss Bailey. But to have Holmes be the one to suggest bodily attention was unusual. “I’m surprised you can summon an appetite. Doesn’t the situation infuriate you?”
“Lady Vivian will not be better served by our malnourishment, Russell. And I have thrice heard footsteps hesitate over the sign on the door.”
“I suppose we have monopolised the room a bit long. I’ll get my wrap, we can take a walk.”
Outside, Holmes tucked my arm through his, and donned an air of earnest attention. Relieved at his interest, I talked on, little noticing that his chosen path took us not into the open reaches of one of the parks, but before a series of cafés and bistros, each more tantalising than the next. At the fifth teasing wash of rich aromas, I grew suspicious; at the eighth one, I gave in. “Oh very well, Holmes, I will eat. You choose.”
It was a Spanish place, unfamiliar to me although the waiters greeted Holmes as a long-lost friend, automatically guiding him to a private table at the back. Cold soup, warm bread, and a dark, harsh red wine arrived in moments, evidence that they either knew their customer’s taste, or employed a psychic reader in the kitchen.
As always, food and drink took the edge off my sense of distress, permitting sensibility to surface. When we had our main courses before us—paper-thin cured ham buried under some kind of olive relish for Holmes, and a spicy cabrito for me—I took a mouthful, then shovelled in several more before I allowed my fork to rest.
“Holmes, what do you think I should do?”
“You’re worried about the nurse.”
“I’m worried about Vivian, because of the nurse. The women in Lady Vivian’s family have been woefully blind—maybe even wilfully blind—but still, they do love her.”
“Just so I am clear: do you wish us to bring her back, or let her go?”
I admit, I cherished that “we.” Still, it took a while to reply. “Don’t you suppose that will depend on what we find when we locate her? I thought I’d start retracing Ronnie’s steps tomorrow. I know she telephoned to various hospitals and police stations, but—”
“Lady Vivian is not in London.”
I blinked. “She’s not?”
“Not unless she is better at the game than I.”
“What do you mean?”
“I looked. Yesterday and today, all the places to which a woman of her position would gravitate, and many she would not. I am satisfied that unless she is disguised as a Whitechapel fish-wife, or has taken to the gentil suburbs, she is not in Town.”
“Holmes, I thought you had…well, work to do.”
“It seemed to me that your friend’s missing aunt took precedence over my history of contrapuntal significance in Bach’s cantatas.”
I stared at him. It was one of the sweetest things he’d ever said, and the gruff abruptness with which he pushed away his plate and looked around for the waiter made it clear that he was aware of the slip.
Instead of the waiter, the owner came over, carrying three glasses and a naked bottle of some viscous amber liquid that cleared the sinuses and electrified the nerves. That and a table-spoon-sized cup of near-Arabic coffee and I was set for a day or six of unbroken labour.
Out on the pavement, I discovered that my body was in a most peculiar state: swaying lazily, yet my feet—and tongue—moving very fast. “So I was thinking, Holmes, that we need to do the rounds of the better-known pawn shops, jewellers, any place that would purchase an old necklace, really—Ronnie’s mother gave me a fairly special—fairy pacific—a Fairly. Specific. Description. Of the necklace. Wonder if that’s something Billy would do, if he’s not still grumpy over Mrs Hudson leaving, not that we all aren’t grumpy over that, though I do wonder how she’s doing, that letter we had from her was not paricoloured—not Par. Tic. Ularly—forthcoming.”
“Good idea.” His voice seemed unexpectedly close, and I looked down to discover that at some point he had tucked my arm firmly through his, and our weaving progress had become a touch more linear. “I shall go to Bedlam, and interview the superintendent about Nurse Trevisan. I shall also ask to see Lady Vivian’s records, although that may take official intervention, from—”
I stopped so abruptly his arm pulled away from mine. “But what if the Marquess has been paying Bedlam to keep her there?” To me, the Victorian scandals of imprisoned heiresses was a thing I had heard about. For Holmes, the 1890 Lunacy Act had been the morning news.
“Russell, did you not tell me that her commitment was voluntary?”
I’m safe here. “True, but…”
“It would be easier to break into the headquarters of the Household Cavalry than into Bedlam. I could find someone to do it, given a few days. It might be simpler to have Mycroft issue a command that we be permitted a look at her records. Or Lestrade.”
“Or I could break in.”
He drew my arm through his again, to guide me down the pavement. “It would help to know where the records are kept,” he continued as if I had not spoken. “We would not wish to give the superintendent sufficient warning to edit her file into the flames.”
“I mean it, Holmes. I could break in. Not physically, over the parapets and through the bars. Do they have parapets in Bedlam? Walls, I suppose. No, I mean simply be brought in the front door. Nellie Bly did it, why can’t I? Do they take new patients through the front door? There’s probably a back entrance that the police wagons use.”
“You wish me to commit you to Bedlam?”
I pushed away the faint stir of horror at the phrase, and looked up into his eyes. “Oh, admit it, Holmes: you’ve often been tempted.”
Chap
ter Ten
IT WAS NOT A SIMPLE matter, plotting entry into Bethlem Royal Hospital. Nor was it a simple matter to prise specific dates and information from Ronnie the next day—particularly as young Simon was in an obstreperous mood, or growing a tooth, or something, which reacted badly against the pulse of morning-after pain that resided just behind my eyes.
However, I managed to extricate the necessary dates and details without causing alarm, by planting various suggestions that I would be going to each of the places her aunt had visited over the years. In any event, even friends are easily impressed with the solemn taking of notes, and willing to believe that it was all part of the investigatory routine.
The small centre of pain behind my eyes had grown considerably under the stress of our conversation, which mostly consisted of my question—“So, when was she sent to the Rawlins House private asylum?”—followed by Ronnie’s “Well, it was either 1918 or 1919—no, it must have been the spring after the War ended because I came home from Oxford and Mother was trying to convince me that I could do a Season even though I was already twenty and London was in shambles—Simon, dear, don’t pull the wheel off—oh dear, yes, sweetheart, it’s broken now, don’t cry, Mummy will fix it, see, all better—that I should do a Season, which honestly, even she had to admit was not exactly a patriotic use of resources, remember we were still rationing some things—petrol was it, or butter? Certainly we’d have had to re-make her old gowns since you couldn’t get silk for ages, so I said I wouldn’t and—oh yes, it would have been just before Easter because she was pleased she’d been able to buy a new hat for the first time in years, and I remember wishing Auntie Viv was there to back me up.”
“So: Easter 1919, she was in Rawlins House. And how long was she gone that time?” Which launched us off on another rolling barrage of retrieved memories and exhortations to the offspring, punctuated by full-throated protests from Himself.
Shattered, I crept away with my notes and a profound respect for the mental tenacity of mothers everywhere.
Island of the Mad Page 7
