The rain-lover and the shoe-hater stared at me, along with a third person at the table, a woman with some Orient in her ancestry. But the fourth one, who’d bent down to finish her meal—had that been a snort of laughter?
“I’m Mary,” I told my companions, then hastened to add, “I think.”
The Asian woman glanced at me from under plucked eyebrows, the girl assured me that it was a pretty day, while the shoe lady was distracted from her fixation long enough to enquire, “Don’t you know?”
“Not really. I mean, Mary sounds right, although it might also be Judith, so I’m not entirely sure. But Mary will do for now.”
“I’m Lesley,” said the shoe lady. “That’s Pretty, and Helen.”
The shy smile came to life again. “Pretty name, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely. And you?” The other woman—the woman I thought might have laughed—just gazed at me.
“She doesn’t talk,” Lesley informed me. “She has a tongue like a shoe’s, hard and leathery, and all it does is sit there and shield her mouth from the laces. Not that all shoes have tongues. Take your Wellington boot, say. It doesn’t have a tongue because—”
I tuned out this font of wisdom to focus on the last one, sitting on Pretty’s other side. Dull greying hair coming loose from its thread bindings. (Perhaps hair-pins, along with ceramic dishes and pointed table-knives, were seen as dangerous?) What skin I could see was as untended as one might expect in this place, but her finger-nails were neat rather than chewed, and her hands and wrists did not indicate a life of physical labour.
“The nurses here don’t seem too bad,” I commented, in a voice low enough to ride beneath the footwear lecture. My reward was a faint twitch of the head, so I persisted. “I mean, considering the power they have, there’s not as much bullying as one might expect. Even downstairs. I mean, when I was in line for the baths there was a woman decided she didn’t want to go, and it took three of them to bring her down. But even then they only did it as hard as they had to. Not vicious, like.”
A faint shrug of the shoulders, so I kept on. “Tell me: I saw a room with some chairs and writing desks in it, at the far end of the wing. I don’t suppose they have an actual library here?” Her head began to rise and then she caught herself, to retreat back behind her loosened wisps of hair. “If not a library, maybe the nurses have books that they lend out? I certainly hope so, even if they’re just romantic novels or something. I can’t imagine not reading at all, it would drive me, well…”
I saw her pull in a breath, then slowly exhale it. She laid down her spoon and straightened in her chair, causing Lesley’s monologue to cut sharply off. And then the grey-haired woman turned her face towards me.
I was more or less ready for what she decided to reveal. That is, I had assumed there to be a reason she was hiding behind her hair—a reason beyond unreason, that is—but this…
Acid or fire? Something had taken half her features, leaving a mask of shiny scar tissue on the right side of her face. The eye was frozen half-shut, with a pale sightless cornea behind what had once been a lid. The right nostril was a shrunken hole, while the left was almost normal. The worst of the scarring ended above her lips, and although that side of her mouth was speckled with scars, I thought the muscles themselves still functioned, allowing her to eat and drink normally.
And to speak. She finished my thought for me: “Would drive you mad?”
The smile I gave her was as twofold as her own face: an acknowledgment of my poor jest, and of my sorrow for her suffering.
But that was all the exclamation of horror that I permitted to show. “Truth to tell, it might be better to pick oakum than read too many romance novels. What is oakum, anyway? Does one still pick it?”
At that moment, an enormous woman at the far end of the table rose and upended her laden plate over the head of a neighbour. The resulting uproar diverted the astonishment of our own neighbours at the grey-haired woman’s lifting of her face, and various nurses leapt forward to break up the mêlée and to shift the breakfast gathering into whatever thrilling events were on the day’s schedule.
I was returned to the office of the physician, but having been fed and watered, I was quite able to deflect Dr Rawlins’ queries. After a brief conversation with my nurse over possible treatments—which seemed primarily to be a choice between a long soak in cold water, a long soak in warm water, or talk therapy—they decided to wait a day or two and see if my memories returned on their own. In the meantime, I could be put in with the general population—with limited privileges.
Since I guessed that “privileges” meant pacing up and down the garden like the inmates I’d seen from Ronnie’s car that day, three years before, restriction was no hardship—until it stopped raining, at any rate. Or until I wished to make my escape over the wall.
I was even permitted to change my drab dressing-gown for slightly less drab day clothes—and even better, in a one-bed room with a latch on both sides.
The nurse then ushered me to the day room I had glimpsed earlier, a space now crowded with women in more or less normal clothing—although even the newer garments looked somehow dowdy. After studying the room, I thought perhaps it was a combination of their lack of makeup and jewellery, and also that their clothing all seemed too large for them, as if Bedlam had a rule against form-fitting dresses.
The women were scattered across the threadbare chairs and worn chintz sofas with a variety of occupations: needle-work, knitting (needles, apparently, not being considered as threatening as hair-pins), card games, and letter-writing (pens, similarly). One woman was reading loudly to a trio of ladies with wispy silver hair. Two women playing Mah-Jong sat beside a cluster of women with a book of crossword puzzles. An ill-tuned piano against the wall emitted pained groans from under the fingers of a dramatically positioned woman, accompanied by the harsh cries of some caged birds, the drone of a woman discussing her children with the empty chair at her side, and half a dozen ongoing conversations among the more corporeal. Three women plotted the offerings at an upcoming Musical Evening, a ward Sister cajoled women to sign up for a basket-weaving class, half a dozen retired schoolteacher types discussed a list of lecture topics, and a thin, nervous creature methodically tore illustrations from a ladies’ fashion journal and placed them tenderly in a box labelled PATIENTS COSTUME DANCE.
And this was a place where the mad were intended to recover their equanimity.
I spotted my grey-haired neighbour at the far side of the room, sitting with her right shoulder to the wall. She was either staring off into space or listening to the conversation behind her—although, as I came close enough to hear, I decided it was the former, since I did not think a discussion of the relative dreaminess of Douglas Fairbanks and Ramon Navarro was to her taste. I pulled a chair around so as to face her. She acknowledged me with a swift glance, then looked straight ahead again.
In profile, her features were attractive—no, I decided: they were beautiful. Not in the current movie-star version of up-turned nose and baby-like roundness, but a more eternal idea of noble beauty, with high cheek-bones, straight nose, firm chin, arched brow. Had her hair not been grey, I would have thought her little more than thirty.
I had been among these people for a handful of hours, but one thing I knew already: the madder the woman, the more abrupt—blunt, even—her conversation was apt to be. Well, I could be as rude as the next woman.
“What happened to your face?”
The eye that fixed on me was the blue of cornflowers. “Does it matter?”
“I think so. I mean, it’s one thing if a spurned lover threw acid at you, and quite another if you were the one doing the throwing. If nothing else, it would mean I should take care not to irritate you when you’re holding a cup of hot tea.”
The eye blinked. After a moment, her body shifted away from the wall to gaze at me more directly, even
though her right eye could not give her any additional information. After a moment, her good eye narrowed. “Were you making a joke?”
“Not a very good one, I know. I shall try better next time. So what did happen to you?”
“I worked in an acid factory and the floor overseer was practicing witchcraft. So I pushed her into her vat, and got splashed.”
Good Lord. I felt myself draw back. “Really?”
“No.”
It was my turn to blink. I studied the blue eye in the elegant half of the scar-masked face, and saw a gleam of intelligence looking back. “Were you making a—” but could not finish before laughter took me. She was—and the faint crinkle beside her unblemished eye confirmed it. I held out my right hand. “Mary R—Ruth,” I told her, catching myself at the last instant.
“Isabella Powers. And I agree, Miss Routh: as I am led to understand these things, the nurses here are none too bad.”
I kicked myself at the near-slip of the name: one would think that a person who had actually experienced amnesia would be better at feigning it. “I’m not sure if Ruth is my surname, or a middle name. They tell me I had a head injury,” I explained by way of apology. “Things seem to be trickling back a bit at a time.”
“What a blessing, to forget one’s past,” Miss Powers said evenly, then: “Have you chosen your make-work, Miss Routh?”
“Pardon?”
She raised her chin at the room, where one of the attendants was coming through to distribute an armful of needle-work projects among the patients. “Idle hands are considered the workshop of devilish thoughts, and the idea appears to be that applying coloured thread to woven fabric offers sufficient engagement for wayward minds. Ah, thank you, Nurse Abbott,” she said, taking a half-worked square from the woman in the blue frock and white apron. “I shall get right to work on this.”
Nurse Abbott looked down at my empty lap. “And what about us?” she said with the kind of hearty good cheer that makes the hands twitch with the strangling urge. “Would we like knitting or needle-work?”
“We would like simply to sit and talk, thank you.”
It was as if I had not spoken. “Oh, we’re the memory girl, aren’t we? Well, until we’re certain we know how to knit, maybe we ought to stick to needle-work. The tangles are less.”
She handed me an eighteen-inch square of that stiff woven base cloth I had seen Mrs Hudson use, a large but very blunt needle with an eye a blind woman could have threaded, and three matted skeins of yarn in dull brown, dull green, and dull red.
I energetically shook out the length of the first skein, stuck one end through my needle, and set to working the entire length of it up and down the grid-cloth, wilfully overlooking the faint floral design with which the cloth had been printed. Miss Powers watched me for a minute, then resumed her own, rather more obedient, work.
“How long have you been here?” I asked her.
“Here in Bedlam? Or here in this ward?”
“There’s more than one ward?” I asked disingenuously.
“Oh, dear child, yes. And I have been in nearly all—all the female sections, that is—apart from the Noisy Wing. I started out among the convalescents, and then moved in with the criminals. When time went by and I failed to show any further signs of violence, I was moved in with the incurables, although eventually, the chaplain went before the presiding physicians and pointed out that life in that ward had a certain…coarsening effect. Also, that if even were I not violently insane before, living with the incurables might push me in that direction. So I was transferred to the basement with the curable-yet-temporarily-uncontrollables. Last year, I was granted a space in the light and freedom above ground, amongst the palms and pianos. Hence, my willingness to participate in needle-work and tedious conversation. At least here, one can see the sky.”
I considered asking what she had done, to land her in the criminal wing of Bedlam. Was that too blunt even for this place? Perhaps. “So how long have you been here altogether?”
“What year is it now? 1925, I think? Seventeen years.”
I dropped the needle in shock. The woman had been here since 1908? “You must’ve been remarkably young.”
When her damaged mouth smiled, there was just the slightest sag at the right-hand corner. “How seldom one exchanges compliments in here—I scarcely know what to do with it. I am thirty-seven.”
Twenty when she was shut away behind the barred windows, for some act of obvious insanity that left her scarred. Had she been sentenced more harshly, she would have gone to Broadmoor instead, the permanent home for the criminally insane—filled with men and women who would have met the noose were it not for a humane judge.
I took up my work again, hoping like hell that Holmes was not flattened by a bus. And that he hadn’t forgot to tell Mycroft where to find me.
Because if I tried to get out on my own, by admitting the truth? If I went before that pleasant white-coated doctor to say I was the wife of Sherlock Holmes and had come to Bedlam in the course of a case, so would he kindly let me go now, thanks very much—that truth would kick me directly over to the incurables wing, if not the padded room.
Chapter Thirteen
NO: BLUNTNESS WAS ONE THING, honesty was quite another. I came to an end of the drab brown yarn and threaded my needle with the drab red, doing the same monotonous running stitch: up, down; up, down. “Do you think they’ll let you out, then? Eventually?”
“Well, I’m not still in with the incurables.”
“And that’s all it takes? Convincing the doctor that you’re better?”
“Bedlam is an institution for those deemed curable, even if the progress is slow. In another year or two—less if I am very fortunate—I may be transferred to one of the upper galleries. And, if I pass that test of normalcy, sooner or later I shall be sent to Witley. The hospital has a farm there, where a patient may venture towards freedom.”
Half her life inside Bedlam’s walls: how would a person even begin to adjust to the modern world? “Do you have family?”
Isabella Powers’ body shifted, returning her damaged side to the wall. I did not think she was aware of doing it. “None that would want me.”
Friends? After seventeen years, that was unlikely. And if her family were denying her, there would be little support from them. So unless she had an inheritance…“Does the farm provide any sort of training, for jobs?”
Deliberately, she lifted her face, giving me a glimpse of that eerie pale eyeball. “Who would hire this?”
Neither makeup nor veil would be enough to let her move through the world—but wait. “A mask? There was an American woman in Paris, who made metal face-plates for wounded soldiers, beautifully painted to resemble their original faces. What about one of those?”
“This woman must be famous indeed,” she remarked. “I’d never heard of her before, and now she’s come up twice in the past few months.”
The needle slipped and jabbed into my finger—which, though too dull to draw blood, nonetheless hurt. “Really? Had the other person been to Paris recently?”
“She won’t have been recently, no. Though possibly some years ago.”
Catching the scent of Lady Vivian made my heart speed up. “Is this a patient or a nurse?”
“A patient.”
“What if you ask her to put you in touch with the American lady? See if she’s still making them.”
“That patient is no longer here.”
“Discharged? Or just down at the farm learning to be normal? Because if so, you could—”
“She is gone. No one seems to know where.”
“She escaped? From Bedlam? That can’t have been easy.”
“Not from Bedlam itself, no. She had a pass to travel home for a family event—a birthday, I think. She failed to return. Along with the nurse who accompanied her.”
&nbs
p; “What, the nurse left, too?”
“It’s possible the hospital simply dismissed her. Losing a patient is presumably a firing offence.”
“I should imagine so. Well, that’s too bad—I’d have enjoyed talking with a patient who had travelled to Paris. I was there once.” Damn: another slip! “At least, I think I must have been. I have memories of the Eiffel Tower in colour, and the Seine, and the texture of baguettes in the mouth. My!” I exclaimed cheerily. “This conversation seems to be doing me a world of good: remembering one of my names, and that I went to Paris. The rest of it is sure to come soon, don’t you think?”
“I should be careful what I wish for, were I you,” she warned grimly, and threaded some sky blue onto her needle.
I decided not to make further enquiries of this woman, who would surely begin to suspect my motives if I kept after the missing patient and her nurse. So I finished working my three skeins of yarn into the stiff grid, then set about picking them out again, since pointless work seemed to be the goal of the exercise. Rain ceased to stream down the tall windows; the room grew a fraction lighter. Half an hour or so after it ceased, a bell tinkled, prompting various patients to rise and leave for some task or another. Miss Powers was one of them. I re-threaded my needle with the drab red and started on another pattern, one that had nothing to do with the inked flower on the surface.
A short time later, as I’d expected, I had my first visitor, who arrived trailing snippets of multicoloured yarn.
She was one of the participants in the Raymond Navarro–Douglas Fairbanks debate (this one a vehement Fairbanks-ite) who had lost two of her four companions to the call of the outdoors. Since that had left her at the mercy of two vehement supporters of Navarro, she soon looked for an excuse to be elsewhere, and seized on me.
“Welcome, my dear, you’re new, aren’t you?”
One might have thought me a church visitor after a Sunday service rather than someone dragged in by uniformed police at midnight. However, I nodded and gave her as much of my name as I’d retrieved to that point, adding, “I don’t know if Ruth is my middle name or my surname. My memory seems to have a few holes in it.”
Island of the Mad Page 9
