‘Yes,’ I said.
‘At first glance she might appear to be as much a lady as one might hope to find anywhere.’
‘She seems quite perfect to me,’ agreed Will.
‘And yet she is not,’ murmured Dr Christie. He pulled out his pocket watch and regarded it, open like an oyster, in the centre of his palm. It was as though he were counting down the seconds until Susan Chance went mad once more. ‘The temporary sickness of an otherwise lucid mind is quite fascinating. Especially in the female – a creature already at the mercy of her own bodily weaknesses. The womb, gentlemen. Need I say more?’ He snapped the watch closed, and looked again at Susan Chance. He shook his head. ‘What might we do with her if she may not be hanged? Rehabilitation is an unpredictable approach. I fear we will find that out soon enough. That leaves us with incarceration, and yet incarceration changes nothing if the confinement is merely custodial—’
At that moment there was a commotion on the far side of the room. The musicians came to a caterwauling halt as a voice cried out: ‘Rutherford! Rutherford! Where are you?’
We pushed our way through the crowd. Dr Golspie was standing in the doorway, his coat missing and his collar awry. His hair stood up from his head, the face beneath it pale and sweaty-looking. His eyes were red-rimmed, the pupils dilated, giving him a wild, nocturnal appearance.
‘Rutherford!’ He lurched forward, his arms wide. ‘Christie! Oh this is glorious! Glorious!’ He seized hold of Letty and swung her around in a crazy, lopsided polka.
‘What’s happened to him?’ hissed Will. ‘Jem, what’s wrong with him? What’s he doing?’
‘Dawamesc,’ I muttered. ‘That’s what’s happened.’
‘Has he lost his wits?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’
Will clicked his tongue. ‘For God’s sake, Jem, you’re not making any sense.’ He looked about at the ring of faces that had turned to see what all the noise was about. ‘Help me get him away.’ He stepped forward and took Dr Golspie’s arm, but the doctor shook him off. He had become distracted by something in the air above Letty’s head, and he pointed upwards, his face ecstatic.
‘Oh!’ he cried. ‘Look! Look there! It’s Mary. Mary, my dear sister, d’you not see her? Floating above us in a circle of light! She’s an angel now. I knew she would be!’
‘Tom,’ I said gently. ‘Come back to your rooms.’
‘You!’ Dr Golspie grabbed me by the shoulders and peered into my face. ‘You’re the devil! The very devil himself. I see it in your crimson face. And look! Look!’ He put his hands up and seized two handfuls of my hair. ‘Horns!’
‘Tom.’ I pulled his hands away. ‘Stop this.’
‘Shh!’ He held a finger to his lips. ‘Shh! The mice will hear you. They will hear you and they will come for me.’ His eyes grew wide and fearful and his voice sank to a whisper. ‘Oh, but the mice are gone! I saw them! I saw their faces in the fire!’ He put his hands to his head in an attitude of despair, and then drew them away again with a cry. ‘Ugh!’ he shouted. He held out his fingers. ‘Insects! Thousands and thousands of them!’
‘Tom!’ I cried. ‘Listen to me. Concentrate.’
He looked at me, and for a moment I knew he was quite lucid. ‘I cannot,’ he said. ‘I will not.’ And he began laughing, laughing as if he would never stop.
Dr Rutherford and Dr Christie appeared at my side. They surveyed Dr Golspie’s grinning red face with disgust. ‘What’s going on?’ said Rutherford.
‘Perhaps Mr Pole ought to bring the strait waistcoat,’ said Dr Christie.
‘Dr Golspie has consumed dawamesc,’ I said. ‘It’s a paste made from cannabis. Taken in excess it’s said to produce a state akin to mania. The condition is intense, but it is usually self-conscious and – fortunately – only temporary.’ I watched Dr Golspie trying to wipe the ‘insects’ off his hands, and I cursed myself for not being more insistent that he exercise caution – and for not bringing my notebook. I looked about and was glad to see that Miss Mothersole was scribbling away – someone at least was taking notes. Then I saw the expression of glee on Dr Rutherford’s face and I wished with all my heart that Dr Golspie had waited until we were alone before he consumed the hashish paste I had so carelessly given him.
‘And how much has the fellow taken?’ said Dr Christie.
I shrugged. ‘A drachm, I would say.’
‘Is that a lot?’
‘Undoubtedly.’
‘And you supplied it?’ He sounded incredulous.
I blushed. ‘I did, sir. The effect will last some hours yet, though he will recover.’
Beside me, Dr Golspie was now on his knees, his hands over his face. ‘I am down a well!’ he cried. ‘Down a deep, dark well! Oh, help me! Mary! Mary!’
‘For God’s sake, man,’ bellowed Dr Rutherford suddenly. ‘Pull yourself together.’
Dr Golspie looked up at him, his mind suddenly clearing. ‘Can you not see how this can benefit our noble profession?’
‘I cannot, sir. I would not treat the mad with madness. No one would!’ There was a murmur of approval from the assembled doctors.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Dr Christie nod to someone in the crowd, and then there was Pole, flanked by two attendants, a strait waistcoat in his hands.
Oblivious to his fate, Dr Golspie threw back his head. ‘Oh Rutherford,’ he cried. ‘I don’t refer to the patient. I refer to the physician! Can’t you see? This allows us direct access to the abnormal mental states we spend our lives trying to treat. To comprehend the ravings of a mad man it is necessary to have raved oneself.’ He flung his arms wide. ‘I am travelling deep into the realms of delusion, mapping the very landscape of madness. Such insights! My dear Rutherford. My dear Christie, can you not see? Oh, you dolts, you utter fools!’ And he burst out laughing once more.
Angel Meadow Asylum, 18th September 1852
We worked at Knight and Day’s blacking factory six days a week, for fifteen hours a day. It was easy for me to see that Mr Day made more money than he admitted. The advertisements I wrote had increased his takings too, though I noticed he said nothing about it to Mr Knight. Mr Day kept his extra money at home. His wife and his daughter spent it on fine clothes and gowns; I had seen them with Mr Day on Oxford Street. Mr Day ignored me then, though when he was alone with me in the office above the boot and shoe repair workshop he was not so aloof. He stroked my cheek with his pale soft fingers.
‘You learn fast and you are good with words and figures, Miss Devlin. But there is so much more I can teach you. Will you sit on my knee so I can show you?’
‘No, sir,’ I said. Goblin had given me his knife, and in my pocket my fingers curled around its worn wooden handle.
‘Come, come,’ said Mr Day. ‘I will send you down to the polishing bench if you do not. ‘He slipped a hand into his trouser pocket. His breath was hot and stale, heavy with the smell of tobacco, boot blacking and dirty leather. At that moment the office boys returned from the fool’s errand Mr Day had sent them on. I had never been so glad to see their grubby smirking faces.
Mr Day caught me off guard. He told me that he needed me to work late, that he wanted me to stay for a little while after my shift. He said he had decided to pay me more for my work on his advertisements, but that he did not wish to reward me in front of the office boys or other staff. How naive I was! I thought I could manage him, that I could deal with his advances. I was soon to find how much I had underestimated him.
I had been watching him all day out of the corner of my eye for he was more bothersome and excited than ever. He wiped his sweaty hands continually on his waistcoat and prowled the office, passing up and down before the shelves of brown ledgers. At last, the two office boys were sent home for the evening. Their presence so far had proved useful as it had stopped Mr Day from making his advances more open and insistent. The boys were eagle-eyed. They did not talk to me, but only watched me, before wiping their noses on their sleeves and turning back to th
eir ledgers. But it was clear to us all that they made Mr Day self-conscious, and he could only lay a hand on my shoulder or steal a caress of my cheek when they were not looking.
And then the boys were gone. As I turned to dip my pen in the inkpot, all at once he was upon me.
Mr Day was stronger than he looked, his wiry frame taut as a harp string with expectation, his whole body quivering with lust and determination. In an instant he had my hands pinned behind my back. His pants and grunts sounded in my ear, and he had clearly planned his moment, for as I opened my mouth to scream he reached round and stuffed a polishing rag into it. My mouth was filled with the acrid taste of boot blacking — soot and fat and turpentine. I thrashed beneath him, revolted, filled with fury at my own stupidity, and damp with fear at what he was about to do.
Astride me, as though riding a beast to market, Mr Day was jubilant. His voice was high-pitched with excitement.
‘You’ll earn your pay tonight, my dear. You’ll make good on all those promises you made and find what kind of a master I really am.’ From somewhere to my right, far off amongst the vats of melted tallow, a bell rang. It was the bell that summoned Mr Knight to the office. My flesh turned cold. Were there to be two of them? After a moment I heard the sound of hurrying footsteps, and then Mr Knight was there too. Perhaps they will boil my body afterwards, I thought, as they pulled at my clothes and pushed their faces against my neck, so that I might be rendered down to fat, mixed with lampblack and turpentine and smeared onto the boots of men.
Mr Knight’s breath smelled of tallow – did he eat the stuff too? ‘Hold, her, Mr Day,’ he cried. ‘Tightly now!’
I coughed, gagging on the foul rag that stopped my throat. I had only one trick. I was sure they would not fall for it, but what choice did I have? I moaned, and fell limp beneath their hands. And then, as Mr Day’s grip loosened, I burst once more into movement. Before they could hold my arms again I had ripped out the dirty rag and screamed with all the breath left in me. ‘GOBLIN!’ I felt a blow to my head, and I fell forward on top of the ledger.
‘Shh!’ hissed Mr Day. They stopped and listened, but the workshop, and the factory, were silent.
Mr Knight laughed. ‘Your little friend will be half way to Prior’s Rents by now. You may scream all you like, he will not hear you.’
But Goblin would not have left the workshop without me, and I knew he would come. They stuffed the rag back in, ramming it down my throat so far that I feared I would choke to death, and shoved me onto the desk. Ink seeped from beneath me in a dark pool.
‘Careful, Mr Day,’ said Mr Knight. ‘You’re messing up the accounts.’
Mr Knight and Mr Day argued as they held me down. ‘I caught her,’ said Mr Day. ‘I should be first.’
‘But my name is first on the labels, and on the business, ‘replied Mr Knight. ‘I am always first.’
At that moment, the door burst open. I saw Goblin standing on the threshold. In his hands was a cobbler’s last. His face was streaked with tears and lampblack. He lurched forward, and before either man could move or cry out, he swung the last at Mr Knight’s head. I heard a moist crunch, and then a scream from Mr Day as Mr Knight crashed to the ground. Mr Day leaped off me. He could not get to the door as Goblin was barring his way, so he scuttled past the office boys’ desks to the back of the room. There, he ran up and down like a rat trapped in a server, babbling and crying out, his hands clawing at the air as though he hoped to tear a door in it with his fingernails. Before us Mr Knight stared up, a pool of red seeping from his head. Goblin dropped the bloodied last and pulled from his pocket a variety of boot-mending tools: a button hook, a hammer, a shoemaker’s awl, a bodkin.
I spat out the rag and snatched the sharp-spiked awl from Goblin’s hand. Suddenly I was blind with rage: rage against Mr Knight and Mr Day, rage against the father who had died and left me and my mother to make our way alone in the world, and rage against all the men who had used my mother in any way they pleased and who sought to do the same with me. I hardly know what happened next, but I came to to find myself crouched over the corpse of Mr Day. My fingers were bloody, and a cobbler’s awl projected from his right eye. The left eye, and his mouth, had been stitched closed using thread from the mending bench.
Chapter Five
The crowd about me was unmoving, frozen, like figures in a painting. I could listen to their thoughts, hear everything that passed through their minds, but I could make no sense of it. Dr Stiven banged on the mantelpiece with the silver head of his walking stick. Bang bang bang! We were no better than the mad with our noisy jabbering. Could we not be quiet and let a man think? The sound of it dinned in my ears so that I turned my head this way and that, this way and that . . . and all at once I saw that I was not at Angel Meadow at all. I was in my bed in the small whitewashed room above the apothecary and the hammering I could hear was at my bedroom door. Bang bang bang! My candle was out and the place was as dark as Hades.
‘What is it?’ I said, my voice sticky with sleep. ‘It’s the middle of the night!’ I struggled into my clothes in he pitch black.
Downstairs in the apothecary Pole stood beside the door. His one good eye regarded me balefully. The other, pale and moist in its melted eye socket, shifted from side to side, unseeing. He brought with him a breath of outside, an invisible shroud of cold damp air that reeked of sulphur and decay. He refused to say anything, only that we should come. Both of us, Will and I, should come immediately. Beside him the skeleton of Dr Bain that had once graced the out-patients’ waiting room at St Saviour’s grinned down at me in wicked delight. The game, I could sense it, was about to begin.
Outside, a thick pall of brown fog enveloped everything. When we had walked down from Angel Meadow Asylum some five hours earlier the air held nothing more than the usual taste of soot and effluent. Now, it was as though we were lost at sea, Pole’s lantern a dim beacon glowing in the depths of a muddy ocean. My own flame seemed cowed by the gloom, crouching low in its glass casing as the fog pressed in upon us. The apothecary clock had told me it was five o’clock in the morning. The sun, I knew, should be a dull glow against the eastern sky. And yet there was nothing. Nothing but a blank world hulking with dim shapes. Will took my arm, and I was glad of the warmth and pressure of his hand. We knew the way up to the asylum well enough, even on such a morning as this, and we walked quickly and in silence, the scarves across our noses and mouths muffling our breath and protecting our lungs from the choking fog. Ahead of us, a smudge of dirty yellow told us where the lamp blazed beside the entrance to the asylum. The door squealed on its hinges, the hallway within no more welcoming than the street where we stood.
Dr Hawkins awaited us, standing beside the corpse of Dr Rutherford though it was clear that he was trying not to look at the mutilated face of his former colleague. His fingers moved restlessly against one another, his hands clasping and unclasping, ‘Thank you, Pole.’ He addressed the bunched shadow still lurking behind me. ‘If you would see that no one else comes up.’
While Dr Hawkins went to fetch Mrs Lunge, and Pole was out in search of a constable, Will and I had examined the body as best we could in the dim lamplight of Dr Rutherford’s room. A post-mortem would reveal more about the inside of the body, but I could not help but think that we had already gleaned as much as would be useful. This crime was about what was visible to the eye, I was sure: the stitching, the position of the weapon, the place where Dr Rutherford’s corpse lay – all would tell us far more about who had done this, and why, than the state of his heart or what he had eaten for dinner. I slid the charred photograph of the faceless girl into my pocket book, alongside the fold of paper containing the fragment of suture I had snipped from the bloody stitches at the corner of the corpse’s mouth.
‘Shouldn’t we give that picture to the police?’ said Will.
‘Probably,’ I said. ‘Though I can’t think what they’ll do with it. Far better that we should keep it for now. But we have very little time before they’re he
re. Look about, Will. What of the room? Does it tell us anything useful?’
I had been in Dr Rutherford’s room many times – for it was here that he had conducted his monthly examinations while Dr Hawkins had been away. It was set out in the most orderly fashion, the fireplace flanked by a pair of wing-backed chairs, the desk at the shuttered window piled with books and papers. The books were arranged with their spines all facing the same way; the papers held still with paperweights, each one sitting in the centre of the sheaf. To the right, a pen and a pewter inkstand, blotter, and sealing wax were laid out side by side. On either side of the fire there were shelves of books, neatly ordered and dusted. On the opposite wall hung frame after frame of beetles and butterflies, gassed and pinned and set out in labelled ranks. Beside these stood display cases containing the skulls of birds and beasts set out in ascending order of size. On the lower shelves bottles of preserving fluid held worms, fish, macabre crustaceans, and lizards, all in silent suspension, alongside polished seeds and nuts of the most extraordinary kinds, so that even I, with my knowledge of botany, could not but be impressed.
‘Nothing,’ said Will. ‘It tells us nothing – other than the fact that Dr Rutherford was neat – meticulously so.’
‘Mmm,’ I said. I held up my lantern. At the back of the room, tiers of white-painted shelves covered the entire wall from floor to ceiling – a distance of some twelve feet or more. They stretched from one side of the room to the other, uninterrupted by window, door or fireplace. Each shelf was crammed with faces, men, women and children, row upon row of them – skulls of all sizes and white plaster death-masks, a ghostly sightless jury of long-dead criminals and lunatics.
Dark Asylum Page 7
