The Asylum

by John Harwood

  “Believe me, Miss Ashton; I understand how hard it must be. Allow me to take your pulse.”

  I could not repress a shudder as his fingers touched my wrist.

  “I beg your pardon; it is a cold morning, and my hand is doubtless cold as well.”

  His solicitude was like that of a slaughterman, scratching a lamb’s head affectionately as he prepares to cut its throat. He was going to tear my soul out of my body, but in as humane and enlightened a fashion as the demands of his experiment allowed, sincerely regretting any distress I might suffer in the process. I wished I could stop my hand from trembling.

  “Hmm . . . a little fast, but then you are agitated this morning. Tell me, is there any reason—any specific reason, I mean—for your agitation? Have you remembered anything of those weeks before you arrived here?”

  “No, sir, I have not.” The fear in my voice was all too genuine.

  “A pity. I had a note from Miss Ferrars only the other day, asking whether we had found her writing case. She is still threatening to press charges against you. Of course, you are perfectly safe so long as you are with us, but if you could only remember where you hid it, that would be one less obstacle in the way of your release.”

  “I do not understand you, sir,” I said dully, dabbing at my eyes to conceal my face.

  “Well, Miss Ashton, it would be unfortunate if we discharged you as cured, only to see you arrested at the gate.”

  “How can I ever be discharged, sir, when I have no home, no money, and no name?”

  “But you will have a name . . . Are you saying that you no longer believe you are Georgina Ferrars?”

  My sob of terror was quite involuntary; I clutched my handkerchief and prayed he would take it for distress.

  “I do not know what I believe, sir. My reason says I cannot be, but my memory says . . . that if I am not Georgina Ferrars, I am no one.”

  “Interesting,” he said. “And encouraging, though I know you cannot see it. Try to have faith, Miss Ashton; it will not be long now.”

  The words echoed like a warning bell as the door closed behind him.

  It rained all of that day, but the following afternoon I was back in the garden, walking slowly around the perimeter until weariness overtook me, and I sat down on the bench to rest in the pale sunlight.

  What had Dr. Straker said about my writing case? “If you could remember where you hid it . . .” It was surely not in his interest that I should recall anything of that time; yet he kept on pressing me to remember what I had done with it. What if it was not in his possession? Might there be something in it that he wanted—or feared?

  Of course: the journal I had presumably kept throughout those missing weeks. I had told Frederic all about Aunt Vida’s gift, and how she had encouraged me to keep a record of every day’s events, no matter how trivial.

  If I had brought my brooch here—assuming I had not been kidnapped—I would have brought my writing case as well.

  But the key had not been round my neck when I woke in the infirmary.

  A dark figure emerged from the shadows at the far end of the garden and began to walk toward me. I saw with a jolt of alarm that it was Frederic Mordaunt, looking as woebegone as ever. Which was all the more reason to fear him, especially as Dr. Straker was doubtless watching from one of the windows above.

  “Miss Ashton, I know I promised not to trouble you again, but I have come to tell you that I have persuaded Dr. Straker to move you back to the voluntary wing.”

  I stared at him for several seconds, mute with astonishment. It could only be a trap, but what sort of a trap?

  “You had better sit down,” I said, indicating the place on my right, so that I would be facing away from the windows.

  “Thank you. I’m afraid there are conditions. He refuses to lift the certificate; and you must take all your meals in the closed ward, as at present. But you will have your old room back—the room you were in before the seizure, I mean—and be free, during the day, to walk anywhere in the grounds, so long as you do not try to escape again, which I beg you not to attempt, for your own sake. You will be closely watched; he insists upon it; and if you so much as pass the gate, he will wash his hands of you, and have you transferred to the county asylum as incurably insane.”

  I had no need to feign bewilderment. Why would they move me to a room I had probably never occupied, and give me the freedom of the grounds? Did they want me to try to escape again?

  “Why has Dr. Straker agreed to this?” I said at last.

  “Because I insisted upon it. I took to heart what you said to me—about my being the heir, and my duty as a gentleman. I have never crossed him before—I have never had occasion to—but after I saw you the other day . . . Well, I reminded him of his own guiding principle, which is never to cause a patient unnecessary pain. I put it to him that after several months’ confinement, we had inflicted nothing but torment upon you, and were no closer to solving the mystery of your identity. And that the best chance of restoring your memory was to enlist Miss Ferrars’ cooperation by any means necessary, and bring you face to face—so that you could speak to each other, I mean. He said that she would never agree to this unless we could recover her writing case; I said that her best chance of recovering it was to meet you, in as tranquil a setting as we could provide, and that if that failed, I would compensate her for the loss.

  “He replied that on the contrary, seeing Miss Ferrars again would cause you such agitation that you might well suffer another seizure—a fatal one this time. He is a physician; I am not: I could not argue with that. But I insisted we do something for you. It ended with his agreeing, most reluctantly, to move you back to the voluntary wing, on the conditions I have described. He says that if any harm comes to you because of this, it will be upon my head.”

  He spoke with what I would have sworn was heartfelt emotion.

  “But why did he not mention this himself, when he saw me yesterday?”

  “I did not speak to him until this morning, and then—he agreed that I might tell you.”

  “If you had kept your promise, sir, I would not be here now. But I thank you for what you have done. When may I expect to be moved?”

  “As soon as you wish. In fact, if you are willing to accompany me, I can escort you there now.”

  I rose, a little unsteadily. He offered me his arm, and blushed when I did not take it. Could he really make himself blush on cue? Was he Dr. Straker’s accomplice or his dupe? In either case, I could not afford to trust him.

  “If you will lead the way, sir, I will follow,” I said.

  He bowed with every appearance of mortification and set off toward the house. I could not help glancing up at the windows; there was a pale blur behind one of them which might have been a face.

  He led me back to the entrance, and across the hall to a door through which I had seen Mrs. Pearce come and go. An attendant unlocked it as he approached, and we passed along a dim, echoing corridor, emerging beside a staircase I recognised: this was where, during my escape, I had seen the tall, grey-haired man who had reminded me of someone—of Frederic, in fact. Edmund Mordaunt had been watching me.

  “Miss Ashton?”

  He was indicating the stairs; I wondered, as I followed him upward, whether I had misunderstood him, and they were moving me back to the infirmary. But from the first-floor landing he led me along another passage, very like that in the women’s ward, except that there were no names on the doors, until we came to one with MISS ASHTON spelt out in the familiar gilt letters.

  “I will leave you here,” he said reluctantly, with a look—or so, again, I would have sworn—of hopeless yearning. “If you simply retrace your steps at mealtimes, the attendant will let you through.”

  He opened the door for me, bowed, and departed, and there was Bella, calmly putting away the last of my things.

  “Very pleased to see you again, Miss Ashton, I’m sure. Will there be anything else?”

  Her smooth, childish face
now seemed a mask of deceit.

  “No, thank you, Bella.”

  She bobbed her head and withdrew, leaving me to my new surroundings.

  The room, papered in a blue floral print, which, though faded, was distinctly more cheerful, was furnished in much the same fashion as the one in the infirmary, with a small oak chest beside the wardrobe and a writing table by the window. The paved courtyard below was enclosed by the other three sides of the building, with row after row of windows overlooking mine; I was glad to see that there were curtains. Four metal bars were set into the stonework, but outside the glass, making it seem less like a prison cell. The door had no observation slot; there was even a flimsy bolt for privacy, but no key in the lock.

  I had not removed my cloak, and since there was still plenty of daylight left, I decided to test my newly acquired freedom at once to see if I really would be allowed out into the grounds. Two fashionably dressed women—visitors? voluntary patients? spies?—were conversing at the foot of the staircase; they glanced at me curiously but did not speak. My heart beat faster as I approached the door, but no one leapt from the shadows to seize me, and a moment later I was standing on the gravel path.

  To my left was dense woodland, extending westward to the boundary wall, which looked at least a hundred yards off. A pale sun was sinking toward the treetops. Ahead and to my right, men were working in a patchwork of fields. Cattle grazed beneath the wall, which ran in a great curve round to the north and east, in the direction of the entrance. But for the great bulk of the asylum at my back, I might have been standing in the fields near Brighstone Forest, where my aunt and I had sometimes walked.

  I turned right, as I had done before, and followed the path toward the gate. Freedom seemed tantalizingly close; my heart was thumping and my mouth was very dry as I passed beneath the branches of the copper beech, now coming into bud, and onto the forecourt.

  The gates were closed. Further proof, if any was needed, that my escape had been contrived. I should have realised that no lunatic asylum would ever leave its main entrance open and unguarded.

  You will be closely watched. Imagining Dr. Straker’s cool, sardonic gaze fixed upon me from above, I fought down a wave of panic and kept on walking around to the right, across the entrance to the stable yard, and round behind the stable buildings, out of sight of the house.

  On this side of the estate, the ground sloped up toward the outer wall, which looked even farther away. To the east were open fields and meadows; to the south, more woodland. I came around the back of the stables into a large kitchen garden, bounded on my right by a very high brick wall. An hour earlier, I had been sitting on the other side of it. Two kitchenmaids were pulling up carrots from a bed nearby; they glanced at me curiously, but without any sign of alarm.

  I went on through the opening at the far end. Red brick gave way to the grey stone of the middle wing; ahead of me loomed a squat, rectangular tower, built of much older stone, so dark and pitted it was almost black. The windows on the upper levels were no more than vertical slots; the ones on the ground level had been bricked up altogether, along with the doorway.

  As I came closer, I saw that the tower was part of a long, rambling building made of the same blackened stone, plainly the original house. It stood about twenty paces from the main building; the two were connected by a flagged path, roofed in stone like a cloister. No smoke rose from any of the chimneys; the flagstones were strewn with rotting leaves, and weeds had grown up through the surrounding gravel.

  The walls of the two buildings, the grey and the black, seemed to lean toward each other, forming a lopsided chasm. If I walked to the far end, and turned right, I should be back where I started. High above me, the uppermost windows caught the rays of the sinking sun, but the ground where I stood was already in shadow. You were found unconscious on the path . . . Was this where I had suffered the seizure? What had I been doing here, in the middle of the night? And what had caused it? Something I had seen? Or heard?

  My feet began to move of their own accord, faster and faster until I was running over the gravel, around the last corner to the door from which I had set out, along the hall—which seemed to have grown much darker in my absence—and up the stairs, pursued by my frantically echoing footsteps all the way to my room, where I closed and bolted the door behind me and leant against it, shaking from head to foot.

  Whether Frederic was simply in thrall to his master, or in league with him, Dr. Straker would never have agreed to move me unless it served his purpose. Was he tempting me to escape again? I could think of no other reason. If so, he would surely expect me to make for Gresham’s Yard.

  Where something even more terrifying might be waiting for me. Or, at the very least, my arrest as an escaped lunatic claiming to be Miss Ferrars.

  Without money, I could go no farther than Liskeard. So if he meant to lure me back to Gresham’s Yard, there ought to be another purse conveniently hidden somewhere in this room. And then, when the trap had been baited, I would find the gates open again.

  So my one hope of escape was to find the money—if there was any to find—and flee, not to Gresham’s Yard, but . . . to Mr. Wetherell, the solicitor in Plymouth. I did not think—no, I felt sure—I had not mentioned him either to Frederic or Dr. Straker. I had never met him myself, but that might be just as well; my signature, at least, would match.

  The last rays of the sun were fading from the roof opposite, but there was still enough daylight left. Might they be watching me at this very moment? I glanced around the walls and ceiling, looking for spy-holes. Impossible to tell; I remembered my aunt showing me that you could see a whole coastline through a hole no bigger than the point of a pencil. If they were watching, they would be expecting—indeed hoping—that I would search the room.

  The hatbox and valise were placed exactly as they had been in the infirmary. I went through them both very carefully, and felt all around the linings, without success. There was no money concealed amongst my clothes, or underneath the mattress, or in the oak chest: the bottom drawer opened an inch and stuck fast, but when I removed the other two I saw that it was empty, and there was nothing attached to the inside of the cabinet except dust and grimy remnants of cobweb. I examined every piece of furniture in the room, even removing the drawer from the writing desk to look into the cavity, without finding a single farthing.

  Defeated, I knelt down beside the oak chest, intending to replace the drawers, but instead began to fiddle with the one that had stuck, rocking it diagonally back and forth until it began to emerge in tiny increments. I braced one hand against the cabinet for leverage. As I did so, I had a sudden vision of a serpent coiled in the darkness beneath, waiting to strike.

  I shuddered violently, and the drawer shot out, colliding painfully with my shin. Something gleamed faintly in the dusty recess: not a serpent, but a gold clasp—the two gold clasps of my writing case. Kneeling closer, I saw that it was covered in a fine layer of dust, floating up around me as I lifted it out with unbelieving hands. The impression left in the dust was plainly visible.

  Part Two

  Rosina Wentworth to Emily Ferrars

  Portland Place,

  Marylebone

  10 August 1859

  Dearest Emily,

  You will scarcely believe what has happened. Clarissa has eloped! With a young man called George Harrington, the one I told you about. She was flirting quite shamelessly with him at the Beauchamps’, but I never dreamt that anything would come of it—I thought she had resigned herself to marrying that horrid dried-up Mr. Ingram—but I must try to tell you everything in order.

  On Monday, my father took the early train to Manchester. He was to be away two days, and that same afternoon Clarissa left—as I believed—to spend a week with the Fletchers in Brighton. She took an immense quantity of luggage, even for her, but I was looking forward to having the house to myself, and thought no more of it until my father returned on Friday evening. I was playing the piano in the drawing room whe
n I heard him berating one of the maids; as usual, he did not even look in but went straight to his study.

  A few moments later I heard him tramping along the hall; I assumed that he was going out again, but he burst into the room, seized me by the arm, and lifted me right off my feet, waving a letter in my face and shouting, “Where is your sister?” All I could reply was, “In Brighton, with the Fletchers,” which only enraged him more, until I understood that the letter was from Clarissa, telling him that she had run away. He ordered me up to my room to await his summons. By the time Lily brought me my supper, the news was all around the servants’ hall, but she knew no more than I did.

  When he called me into his study the next morning, he was his usual cold, implacable self. “Your sister’s name is never to be spoken in this house again,” he said. “Henceforth it will be as if she never existed. And be warned: I will not be embarrassed a second time.” He told me that he had dismissed Miss Woodcroft—did you ever meet her?—without a reference. “I will have no more paid chaperones,” he said. “I have written to your aunt; she will be coming to live here, and you will be in her charge until I find a suitable husband for you. In the meantime, you are not to leave the house: if I hear that you have disobeyed me, you will be confined to your room.”

  He did not even raise his voice, but I have never been so afraid of him. I had always assumed—perhaps I mean hoped—that beneath that cold exterior must be some feeling for me, but I saw in his eyes that there is none. I am a piece of property, a negotiable security, as he would say, and that is all. It is what poor Mama must have realised, and I am sure it is what she died of. She was a failure as an investment, because she gave him daughters when he wanted sons. And now that Clarissa has run away, he is all the more determined that I, at least, will yield a profit.

  He went out soon afterward, and I retreated to the drawing room, too shaken even to open the piano. I still knew nothing of where Clarissa had gone, or why, but a little later I heard the doorbell, and Mrs. Harkness came barging in, with Betsy trailing helplessly behind her. She took great pleasure in telling me that Clarissa had fled to Rome with George Harrington—“quite the rake, my dear, and so untrustworthy, and fancy you not knowing, all of London is agog”—until I could bear it no more, and showed her out myself. When I went upstairs, I found the entire contents of Clarissa’s room—clothes, ornaments, bedding, curtains, furniture, even the carpets—heaped in a great jumble on the landing, and the footmen stripping the paper off the walls—“master’s orders, miss”—because she had chosen it, I suppose. Everything was carried off in a cart, to be burnt, for all I know.