Nothing on Earth & Nothing in Heaven

by Susan Fanetti

But finally, at dusk on a cold Friday in January, Hardy, Chris, and William pulled a hired delivery truck up to a rear service entrance at the enormous hulk that was Bethlehem Royal Hospital.

  “I’m told she’s in active treatment and in one of the better wards, but please. Steel yourselves,” Hardy admonished as they stepped from the truck and walked toward the door. “This place earns its reputation. Keep your focus on our goal here, no matter what you see or hear.”

  A white-jacketed orderly let them in and led them to, and up, a set of dim, enclosed stairs. They saw nothing but the walls of the stairwell, but howls, shrieks, and moans filtered through the walls and echoed around them as they climbed.

  “This is a bloody nightmare,” Chris muttered.

  William ignored him, intent on only one thing. But the thought that Nora might be among the wailing souls lending their voices to this eerie chorus froze his heart.

  The orderly finally stopped and put his hand on the knob of a door. He turned and met the eyes of each man with him. “This here’s the ward she’s in. There’s other ladies in here, too, and I’ll not have you disturbin’ them. They’ve just finished tea, and it’s rest time. Fanny’s at the desk. She’ll help us.”

  “Thank you, Arthur.” Hardy held out a jangle of coins. “I know this puts you at some risk.”

  The orderly pocketed the coins. “You make it worthwhile, Mr. Hardy. Just don’t forget to write that letter after.”

  “I’ll do so first thing in the morning.” Hardy intended to write to the doctor in charge of Nora here and lay out the myriad benefits of his silence regarding her stay and her disappearance from their care.

  “That’s good, then.“ Arthur opened the door. Immediately, the harmonic sound of wailing intensified. They all stepped through the door, and found themselves at the end of a long corridor. They followed Arthur to a door on the left side.

  The room beyond that door was large and dreary, and quieter. High windows ran the length of the far wall, so maybe it was brighter in sunlight, but here at a winter dusk, with only dim lights on the walls, the room was colorless. Hopeless.

  Two dozen beds were arrayed in rigid formation against the longest walls. Each one had a numeral painted on its whitewashed iron frame. Each bed held a sleeping, or at least resting, woman. Each woman was bound to the bed, either with ankle and wrist restraints, or, in a few instances, straitjacketed, with straps across the full bed. William’s gorge rose. One of these poor souls was Nora?

  “God help me, but I don’t want it to be her.” Chris’s voice was nearly too low to carry.

  At the far end, a nurse sat a desk. Fanny, William assumed. When Arthur led them deeper into the room, she rose and came to them, her posture stiff and her aspect guarded. “Arthur tells me you think one of my patients is your missing sister?”

  “Mine, yes,” Chris took a step forward and offered his hand, but not his name.

  Fanny shook his hand limply. “And why should I trust you? I can hardly let you come onto my ward and simply carry off one of my charges.”

  Chris looked back at Hardy, surprised. “I thought you’d arranged—”

  “I have.” Hardy fished in his jacket and pulled out an envelope. “This is what you require, I believe.”

  The nurse opened the envelope and peered into it. William couldn’t see what it was. He assumed it was some number of pounds. “Yes, that’s evidence enough. Bed four.” She waved toward a bed behind her.

  William pushed past Hardy and the nurse and hurried to bed four. A straitjacketed woman lay, tiny and frail. She slept, her breaths huffing in rough rasps, but steadily. She was blonde, but her hair was short and choppy. Her face was badly bruised, her mouth swollen, her lips split. Dark circles pressed into the hollows around her eyes, and shadows carved caverns beneath her cheekbones.

  God, was this Nora? He couldn’t be sure; he almost hoped it wasn’t. Though he wanted more than anything to find her, not like this. Please God, not like this.

  He looked back at Chris. His friend’s eyes flashed horror and confusion—he didn’t recognize her, either.

  William thought of one way to be sure. An image that had tormented him with longing for more than a year. He unfastened the straps across the bed and turned the slight form to her side.

  A constellation of three tiny moles just at the base of her neck. “Oh, dear God.”

  Chris saw them, too. He howled like a rabid beast and spun around. He grabbed Arthur and hurled him at the wall. “WHAT DID YOU DO? WHAT DID YOU DO?”

  The patients began to stir and fret at the disturbance. Hardy and Fanny tried to calm the situation.

  William understood everything that happened around him, could hear Chris’s distress, but he paid it no mind at all. “Nora,” he whispered, as he found the fastenings of the straitjacket and released them. “Oh, my darling, oh love, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  As he freed her and scooped her into his arms—dear lord, there was nothing left of her—her eyes fluttered and he caught just a glimpse of lovely turquoise.

  She moaned and struggled, nothing more than a weak flail of her arms. Her wrists were bruised, too, braceleted with dark, raw skin.

  “Shhh, my darling. It’s over now. I’m here, and I won’t let you go.”

  “One of us should tell your father.”

  “Absolutely not, Auntie. Will’s right. Nora should decide. We lost her for so long because Father couldn’t face the thought that she’d run from him—worse, he couldn’t face the idea of it being known that she’d run from him. If he hadn’t pushed that absurd abduction story, perhaps the Yard would have found her before any of this horror happened.”

  William let Chris and his aunt bicker while he paced the room and stared at the closed door. Lady Martha had taken a cottage for them all in Bath, for maximum privacy. In other circumstances, he’d have found the place cozy and quaint. It was probably lovely in summer; the garden showed signs even in January of its lush life. But for now, his mood was too black and his thoughts too bleak to find anything charming.

  Behind that door, Nora lay. Battered and bruised. Weak. Confused, when she was conscious at all. There were few signs in that wasted body of the lively young woman he’d fallen in love with.

  Lady Martha’s physician friend was a woman. Dr. Stella St. John had been waiting for them when they arrived from London, and she’d shooed William and Chris from the room as soon as William had laid Nora in the bed. Since then, neither man had been allowed in, but both women, and the housemaid, had come and gone at will. Almost a full day had passed since they’d carried her away from Bedlam.

  A courier had come from London that afternoon, bearing a package from Eliot Hardy: Nora’s record from the hospital. Hardy had managed to win the doctor’s silence as well as the record of her care and treatment.

  Neither William nor Chris had had the stomach to read the file, but Dr. St. John had taken it into the room with her.

  He raked his hands through his hair. “I just need to know something. How is she? How will she be?”

  Lady Martha stood and stopped him from his pacing. The fire crackled beside them. “I told you all I know, and Stella will tell us more when she’s satisfied that she has more to tell us.” She tugged on his sleeve. “Come, William. You’ve hardly touched your tea.”

  The last thing he wanted was a ham sandwich, and if he never drank another cup of blasted tea again in his life, it would be too damned soon. “I’m not hungry.”

  “I know what you need.” Chris pushed away from the table and went to the liquor cart. “The same thing I do. Shall I make it a double?” He picked up a bottle of Irish whisky.

  “Triple. Fill the damned glass.”

  “One for me as well, Christopher,” Lady Martha sighed.

  “Auntie!” Chris chuckled. “There’s a touch of the rebel in you, too.”

  “You’ve no idea, nephew. No idea at all.”

  The door to Nora’s bedroom opened as Chris handed out
their drinks.

  “Is that scotch?” Dr. St. John asked, nodding at their glasses.

  “Irish,” Chris answered.

  “That’ll do. Two fingers, if you don’t mind.”

  With another chuckle, Chris obliged.

  William couldn’t waste time with niceties. “How is she, Doctor?”

  Dr. St. John sat in a small chair near the window. She nodded gratefully when Chris brought her drink, and took a long sip before she answered. “She’s asleep, and I think comfortably so at last. She was given a steady regimen of strong drugs for several weeks, and it will take some time for their effects to leave her. She’s quite weak, but with nourishing food and the right rest, she’ll gain her strength, and her injuries will heal. There are few, I think, that will leave lasting scars. On her body. As for her mind, only time will tell.”

  “As you saying she truly is mad?” Chris asked.

  “Not at all. She’s deeply confused at the moment, and experiencing dissociation—she is having trouble recognizing this new reality. I suspect that she’s spent great portions of her conscious hours during these weeks escaping in her mind, somewhere she felt safe. Now she can’t hold on to the reality she has.”

  Something in the doctor’s words, or maybe just her tone, caught William’s hope. “She’s spoken to you?”

  “No. She hasn’t said a word. I’m interpreting what I’ve observed.”

  Chris went back to the liquor cart and refilled his glass. “You’re describing a madwoman, Doctor.”

  “No, my lord. I’m describing a sane woman in maddening circumstances.” She finished her own whisky and set the glass aside, then stood and walked to the fireplace. Staring at the fire, her back to the room, she said, “This is what men do, you see. When women behave in ways they don’t like, or don’t understand. They say we’re mad, we’re ‘hysterical,’ and they drug us and isolate us, they lock us away, and they torment us until we break. Then, either we are what they want us to be, or we are exactly what they said we were.”

  She spoke from experience; it was clear in her voice. William turned to Lady Martha, who watched her friend sadly, and was sure it was true. The doctor had been treated for hysteria as well. “My aunt is a physician in America,” he offered, like an olive branch for the abuses of his sex on hers. “She says that the hysteria diagnosis is nothing but the ploy of men demanding control over women who will not be controlled.”

  Dr. St. John turned and smiled gently at him. “Your aunt is right. You’re Lady Nora’s betrothed, as I understand it?”

  “I hope so, yes. If she’ll still have me.”

  “How much do you know about your aunt’s profession? How much has she told you, from a medical perspective, about the hysteria diagnosis?”

  “A great deal, I think. Honestly, more than I would have asked to know.”

  His admission earned him another gentle smile. “Do you know the treatments for hysteria?”

  A cold stone settled on the floor of William’s stomach. “Yes.”

  “When I tell you that her hospital record shows that all the conventional treatments were performed on Lady Nora, you understand what I mean?”

  “Bloody hell,” Chris muttered.

  “Yes,” William answered. He knew what she meant, and he knew that Nora had been tormented as well as brutalized, all in the name of medicine. The memory of their single night in Dover wavered into focus, the way he’d helped her learn her body, how delightful she’d been discovering her pleasure. Had she lost that?

  “Many women take satisfaction from some of those treatments, and even seek them out. But when it’s not a choice, it’s an invasion. In a place like Bedlam, it’s …. Please understand what I mean when I say you must be gentle and patient. Let her lead as she finds her way back. The very core of her has been stripped, and she will be tender for some time—her psyche as well as her body.”

  “I’ll never hurt her.” He wanted to kill the men who’d hurt her. And the women.

  “You seem quite in earnest, Mr. Frazier, and I’m glad. I think, therefore, that you might be a great help to me, and to Lady Nora. Perhaps if she sees you, is able to touch you, you might serve as an anchor to this reality. It’s risky, because she might not be ready to feel strong feeling, and she was alone in her mind for weeks. I can’t say what her feelings might be now. We’ll give her the night for a full, comfortable rest. In the morning, if she seems strong enough, we’ll reintroduce you. Perhaps love will ground her.”

  William held onto that hope like a drowning man clinging to the last piece of driftwood in the ocean.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Nora sat in a soft bed, covered in soft linens, propped high on soft pillows. She wore a soft cotton lawn nightgown, and soft sunlight filtered over the bed from bright windows, their squared edges softened by the white curtains draped softly over them. Her arms were free, and her legs. She could have got up from this strange soft bed if she’d wished, and if she’d had the strength for the endeavor.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so unencumbered. What was this new horror? Or had she finally gone fully mad, and her mind had carried her off so far from the world that she no longer even saw or felt it?

  If so, she thought that might be a blessing.

  A woman she didn’t know smiled softly at her and picked up her arm in her soft hand. She pressed softly at a point under Nora’s wrist and studied the watch pinned to her white blouse.

  The woman wasn’t dressed in a uniform. Her greying dark hair was done up fashionably, and she wore the white blouse with a brown tweed skirt. When she was done staring at her watch, she set Nora’s arm softly on the soft linens.

  “Your pulse is much stronger this morning, Lady Nora,” she said in a soft, gentle voice. “Are you feeling clearer?”

  Nora understood the question, but she didn’t understand why she should answer. There was a fight to be waged, and her closed mouth was her only weapon.

  That seemed strange—ironic, even—but she couldn’t quite remember why.

  The woman turned to the table beside the bed and dug into a bag like a medical bag. She pulled out the thing doctors used to listen to a heartbeat. “Do you mind if I take a bit of a listen?”

  Was this woman a doctor? Nora didn’t understand, and she didn’t answer.

  But she didn’t resist when the woman moved gently closer and tucked her hand inside the soft lawn nightgown to set a cool metal disk on her chest. When she took Nora’s arm and drew her gently from the pillows, Nora let her.

  The woman set her back against the pillows and looked down on her, considering. Her pretty, arched eyebrows drew together. “I’d very much like you to try to eat this morning, my lady. Perhaps a spot of tea and a dab of oatmeal? Your aunt says it’s been made the way you like it best, with cinnamon and honey.”

  Her aunt? This was a trick, then. A ruse to make her believe she had all the things she wanted and get her to give up her fight. Nora rubbed at her eyes with her free hands and stared hard at the world around her. Still four walls, always four walls that hemmed her in. It didn’t matter that the walls were papered in pretty blue flowers and yellow stripes, or that the windows were large and full of sunlight, or that the air smelled of cinnamon and scented talcum, and not of bodily excretions and rot.

  “Lady Nora,” the woman sighed as she pulled up a pretty chair with silk pads on the seat and back. “My name is Stella. Dr. Stella St. John. You’re no longer in the hospital, dear, or the prison. Your family found you, and they brought you here, where you can be well again. Do you remember that at all? The ride to Bath, perhaps? Or being here yesterday? Your aunt sitting with you, talking with you?”

  Nora thought about that. The room, she remembered. She’d been in this soft fantasy for a while now, it seemed. Did she remember leaving the hospital? She was in Bath now? Aunt Martha was here?

  No, it was a trick. This wasn’t a real place, and she hadn’t ridden anywhere. She was where she’d been. They wer
e trying to make her stop fighting.

  But there was a thought—a memory, or a dream only. Strong arms. A voice warm with love and worry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, my darling.

  William.

  Nora dropped her face into her hands. Even if it was a trick, she wanted to hold onto that memory, or dream, as long as she could.

  The woman—Dr. St. John—patted her leg. “I want you to try hard to remember that this is real, all this, right now. Hold to that for me, Lady Nora.”

  She rose from her chair, and Nora lifted her head and watched the doctor walk to the door.

  “I’ll be just a moment.” She opened the door and stepped out, closing her into this room alone.

  Nora stared down at her hands—her free hands. She studied her palms, her wrists—the skin cracked and dark red in bands—her frayed fingernails. She raised her arms high, over her head, then flung them out wide.

  She wasn’t bound. Truly, not a dream. Was this place real? She took a deep breath, filled with cinnamon. Did dreams have scent?

  Had Aunt Martha saved her?

  Or her father—was it Father who’d come for her? It was he who’d thought her mad. She remembered that, the old past, locked in her room while the days and nights rolled in waves through her. Was she locked in this room, too?

  Had she merely been moved to a different kind of prison, a softer, gentler madness?

  She turned the covers back, resolved to cross the room and test the door. If it was locked, she’d simply throw herself through one of the bright windows and be done. She managed to stand on her feet, but it hurt—from the bottoms of her feet to the top of her head, she suddenly hurt everywhere, and the room careened wildly around her. She grabbed a bedpost to steady herself and try to ride out the pain and lightheadedness.

  Leaning on the mattress with each step, willing away the blades of pain in her feet, and the rocking of the floor beneath them, she eased herself to the end of the bed. Just a few feet more.

  The door opened, and Nora froze, terrified. Would they hurt her for leaving the bed?