The Asylum

by John Harwood

  “No, I suppose not—for fear of her father,” I said. Lucia shook her head in seeming bewilderment; she was studying Rosina’s letters again. A horrid realisation struck me.

  “If he is still alive, he may have seen my advertisement, too. You may be in danger because of me.”

  She looked up from the page and smiled, a little wanly.

  “If you had not advertised, Georgina, we should never have met. As for Thomas Wentworth, he would be an old man by now, and surely—”

  “Lucia . . . why did you call him Thomas Wentworth?”

  She started, and glanced at me fearfully. “I must have read it here.”

  “I am sure she never mentions his Christian name.”

  We went through the letters again, line by line, without finding it.

  “Lucia,” I said, “you see what this means. You must have overheard your mother—or someone—speaking of him. Just as Rosina’s name came to me.” Our shoulders were touching; I could feel a faint, continuous vibration thrilling through her body.

  “Of course you must be right. The grey-faced man, perhaps . . .”

  “Did you ever see him again?”

  “No, never.”

  “He, at least, was your friend. Did Rosina—your mother—not leave you any letters or papers?”

  “Nothing. She received very few letters—few, at least, that I saw—and those she burned as soon as she had read them. All she had were her clothes, her articles de toilette—I have forgotten the English word—a few necessities—everything she owned would fit into one small trunk, and she brought me up to do the same. ‘Possessions are a snare and a burden,’ she used to say. ‘They only weigh us down. The fewer things we have to carry, the freer we are.’”

  “And your income? You said you have a hundred a year; do you know where from?”

  “Until today, I assumed it came from the estate of Jules Ardent. I suppose I could write to the advocates—the lawyers in Paris. But they are French lawyers; if you forgot your own name, they would find reasons for not telling it to you.”

  “English lawyers are no better,” I said. “Somehow I must discover what it is I must do to see the rest of the papers my mother left me. These letters—did I explain?—only came to me by mistake. I wonder—might she—my mother, I mean—have been protecting Rosina? By not letting me see the letters until her father was safely dead? Which would mean—”

  “That he is still alive,” said Lucia, and shivered. “And that monster was—is—my grandfather! It is horrible to think of.”

  “Why didn’t Rosina go to Nettleford?” I exclaimed. “After Felix Mordaunt abandoned her, I mean. Mama could have kept her hidden until you were born. And after my father died, we could all have lived with Aunt Vida at Niton; you and I could have grown up together . . . Such a waste of happiness!”

  “Yes,” said Lucia, looking through the letters again, “but do you really not see why?”

  “She says, ‘I could not bring my father’s wrath upon you,’ or something like that, but I know Mama would have taken her in, without a second thought, and so would my aunt. You would have been far safer—and far happier—with us, than wandering the Continent alone, where nobody even knew who you were.”

  “But the shame, Georgina, the shame! All of London must have known that she ran off with Felix Mordaunt. And then to bear a child out of wedlock . . . What a burden I must have been to her!”

  “You must never think that, never!” I said, taking her in my arms. I tried to imagine what I would feel in Lucia’s place: anger at Felix Mordaunt, certainly; sorrow for my mother; but not shame, either on her behalf or mine. Was I somehow deficient in moral sense? Aunt Vida, certainly, had never cared about the world’s opinion. I heard, in what I had just said to Lucia, the echo of my aunt’s cry: “You were her joy, her happiness: hold to that, and ask no more!” I stroked Lucia’s hair and made soothing noises, half wishing I had never shown her the letters (but how could I have withheld them from her?), yet delighting, for all my unease, in the warmth of our embrace.

  When she was calm again, I began to talk about that day by the lighthouse, when I had come to suspect that giving birth to me had strained my mother’s heart, and what a comfort my aunt’s words had been to me ever since.

  “You and your mother loved each other dearly, did you not?” I said.

  “Oh yes . . . I never doubted her love for me.”

  “Then think how much lonelier she would have been without you. The doors of society closed against her the day she ran off with Felix Mordaunt. But her real friends—like my mother—would not have cared . . .”

  “I wish I could believe that,” said Lucia.

  “I am sure that when we see the rest of the letters, all your doubts will be set at rest. And Lucia—?”

  “Yes?”

  “This will be our secret; no one else need ever know. We shan’t even tell my uncle. Not that it would matter if we did; he cares for nothing but his shop and would forget it all five minutes later. To the world you will be simply my friend Miss Ardent.”

  As I spoke those words, I was seized by a dizzying sense of unreality, as if I was looking down upon the two of us from somewhere near the ceiling. Surely this must be a dream? So powerful was the sensation that I dug my nails into the flesh of my wrist.

  “You are so kind,” I heard Lucia saying. “And yes, I cannot quite believe it, either.”

  I looked up and saw that she was smiling.

  “I am sorry,” I said. “I did not mean . . . It is only that . . . I have been so lonely here and have longed and prayed for a friend. And for you this must be a hundred times stranger—your whole life changing before your eyes.”

  “Yes, it is—and yet I think I always expected something like this. Mama is still my mother, after all; it does not mean she loved me any less than I believed. More, indeed; much more . . . when I think of what she faced each day.”

  I knew already that I could not bear to lose her. Uncle Josiah would be utterly nonplussed, but if I paid for her keep . . .

  “Lucia,” I said, “instead of staying in that hotel, why don’t you come and live here with me? You could have the bedroom below this: we shall have to air it and find you some furniture, but that is easily done.”

  Her lips brushed my cheek; the warmth of her breath lingered against my skin.

  “I should love to, but I could not impose myself, and besides, your uncle . . .”

  “Uncle Josiah will need persuading, but I shall see to that. And if you don’t mind helping in the shop sometimes, it will be all the easier to persuade him. Why don’t you stay to supper—it is Tuesday, so curried mutton, I’m afraid—and meet him? And then we can come up here again and talk for as long as we like.”

  She made a polite show of reluctance, but her delight, and her relief, were plain as I rang for Charlotte and told her to warn Mrs. Eddowes that there would be three for supper.

  “One thing I am sure of,” I said when we were alone again, “is that our mothers kept on writing to each other. They loved each other; you can see from the letters that Rosina trusted Emily implicitly. We must persuade Mr. Lovell to let us see the rest of the papers. Suppose . . . would you be willing, Lucia, to trust him with your secret, if we tell him in the strictest confidence? He is my solicitor, after all; I am sure he would not betray you.”

  “I suppose not,” she said doubtfully, “but in truth, Georgina, I would much rather tell no one else, for the time being at least. There is so much to comprehend—to take in. Could you not simply say that something has happened which makes it vital for you to see those papers? Or if he will not do that, insist that he reveal what you must do to satisfy this mysterious condition?”

  “Yes, of course I will. I wonder . . . Mama would have known about you; perhaps that was her condition—that you and I should have met?”

  “Perhaps,” said Lucia, her face still shadowed, “but I should still like to keep my secret for now.”

  “Of course; w
e shall not tell a soul. Oh, if only we could have met sooner! I still don’t understand why you couldn’t have come to Niton. Once your mother had established herself as a widow—perhaps she really did marry a Jules Ardent; who else would have paid her an income?—she would have been perfectly safe with us. Even Thomas Wentworth wouldn’t have dared to hire murderers and send them to Niton. We knew all the farming people; they would have kept an eye out for us. And my aunt was quite fearless; she kept an old blunderbuss in the scullery, in case of burglars, and I am sure she would have used it. ‘Any ruffian shows his face around here, I’ll have him locked up before you can say Jack Robinson.’ That’s what Aunt Vida would have said. So how could Rosina have felt safer abroad, especially after what happened to poor Clarissa?”

  Lucia shook her head in bewilderment. “I can only think that she was more afraid of meeting people from her past—like that awful Mrs. Traill and her daughter—than of her father.”

  “But if everybody knew her as Mme Ardent—why should she have cared what the Traills thought? Compared to the risk of being murdered in some lawless place? You believed your father was Jules Ardent, until today. It makes no sense.”

  I felt another horrid pang of doubt: how could I be certain that all this was not simply a bizarre coincidence?

  “I am not sure I ever did believe in him,” said Lucia, “not wholly. Mama was always so vague; I could never picture him.”

  “It was the same with my father,” I said. The thought was somehow reassuring, but my doubts persisted, until I remembered where she was staying.

  “Lucia,” I said, “where exactly in Marylebone is your hotel?”

  “In Great Portland Street.”

  “Which is next but one to Portland Place.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “Even when I saw the letters, I did not realise—it just seemed natural that I should have chosen that place. I must have been drawn there.”

  “Just as you knew—without realising that you knew—Thomas Wentworth’s name.”

  “And what else is lurking in the dark corners of my mind, waiting for me to stumble over? I don’t like it. Still”—she set her chin, and made a banishing gesture—“no matter what we find, we have each other now.”

  My uncle was quite bewildered by the prospect of anyone—let alone a young woman I had scarcely met—dining with us, but Lucia was so charming, and asked so many questions about the bookshop, that I feared we would never escape. Uncle Josiah, to my relief, showed no more interest in her history than he had ever shown in mine. I had always striven to please him, but now I found myself resolved that in the matter of Lucia’s staying, I would not give way, no matter how many objections he raised; indeed I promised her, as soon as we were alone again, that I would secure my uncle’s permission the following morning.

  It was after eight o’clock before we left the table; I expected her to say that she must return to her hotel, but Charlotte had lit the fire in my sitting room, and Lucia showed no inclination to leave. The firelight glowed upon her cheek and in her hair, sparking red and copper and burnt gold when she turned her head. The French intonation seemed to have faded from her voice, or perhaps I had simply grown accustomed to it. I longed to hear more about her life with Rosina, which I could not picture with any distinctness, but I did not like to press her, imagining how I would feel if my own history had just unravelled before my eyes. For her part, she wanted to know everything, no matter how trivial or mundane, about my childhood in Niton; when I showed her my dragonfly brooch, she gazed at it like a holy relic, turning it slowly in her fingers so that its jewelled eyes burned crimson in the firelight.

  We gave no thought to the time until the distant sound of the hall clock striking ten brought her hand to her mouth.

  “Georgina—I had quite forgotten. The hotel locks its doors at ten; what am I to do?”

  “You must stay here,” I said. “We can make up the sofa as a bed—or, if you do not mind, you are welcome to share mine.”

  She accepted gratefully; I fetched her a nightgown and left her to change in front of the fire while I undressed in my bedroom, by the light of the two candles above my dressing table. As soon as I had put on my own nightgown, I opened the door again to let her know that she might enter, and began brushing my hair in front of the mirror.

  “Let me do that,” said a soft voice in my ear, as the twin of my reflection appeared above my own. I turned with a start, relieved to see that Lucia was actually there; in the wavering depths of the mirror, the likeness was positively uncanny.

  “I am so sorry; I must have tapped too softly. I didn’t mean to startle you.” She took the brush from my hand and continued while I gazed, half hypnotised, at her reflected self, who smiled when our eyes met, exactly as if my imaginary sister had come to life.

  When she had finished, we changed places, but the change in the mirror was scarcely perceptible, which made the sensation all the more dreamlike. I had not done this since my mother died, and I had forgotten the intimacy of it: the soft tug and crackle of the brush, the warm scent rising from her hair. After a little, her eyelids drooped, and then closed, but small responsive movements of her head, and the smile that played about her lips, told me that she was not asleep.

  At last I set the brush aside. Lucia rose to her feet and embraced me, murmuring, “I did not realise how lonely I have been.” She went over to the bed and settled herself in it like a child, her faced turned toward the light. I left one candle burning and slipped in beside her so that we were face to face, each with an arm around the other. Her eyes closed again; within five minutes she was fast asleep, but I kept myself awake for a long time, feeling the soft rise and fall of her breast against mine, her breath stirring my hair. This, I thought, is what people must mean by wedded bliss. But would it be the same with a man? I remembered the bull-calf in the field, and my aunt saying, “Same with humans—never cared for the idea myself.” Most novels ended in wedded bliss, but novelists never mentioned the bull-calf. I had always imagined something rough and clumsy and painful; now, bathed in the warmth of Lucia’s body, I knew that this was everything I had hungered for, safe within the circle of my arms.

  I would happily have stayed awake all night, but sleep at last overcame me, until I woke in darkness to feel Lucia, now lying with her back to me, struggling in the grip of a nightmare. Her voice rose to a shriek; for a moment she fought to push my arm away, then turned, shivering, into my embrace. “Hush, Lucia, hush,” I murmured. “You are safe now.” I stroked her hair and drew her close, and felt the answering pressure of her lips before her breathing slowed and settled again. Again I strove to keep awake, breathing the scent of her hair and picturing our life together, in a cottage by the sea . . . Uncle Josiah had managed perfectly well before I came here and could surely do so again . . . perhaps at Nettleford?—we must visit, at least, and see the house where I was born . . . or on the Isle of Wight, though not so close to the cliff this time . . .

  I woke to grey twilight and the smell of guttered candlewax, alone with the fear that Lucia had been nothing but a dream. Springing out of bed, with my heart pounding wildly, I ran to my sitting room. There was no trace of Lucia; except for my nightgown, neatly folded on the end of the sofa. And I had not even asked her the name of her hotel . . . I sank down upon the sofa, pressing the gown to my face. Out of it fluttered a slip of paper, on which was written in faint pencil, in a hand not unlike my own: “A thousand thanks—I did not want to wake you. I shall come to the shop this afternoon. L.”

  Persuading Uncle Josiah proved even harder than I anticipated. I cornered him at breakfast, as I had promised, even though I was more than half afraid that Lucia would change her mind about staying—assuming she had not vanished like a fairy. But, I told myself, if she does still want to stay and I have not spoken to him, she may think that I do not really want her to. And so I steeled myself to interrupt—he was intent on a catalogue that had just arrived in the post—by asking if he had liked Miss Ard
ent.

  “Yes, my dear,” he said without looking up, “a charming young lady.”

  “I am delighted you think so, Uncle, because she is coming to stay with us.”

  He set down his magnifying glass and peered at me in absolute bewilderment.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Miss Ardent is coming to stay with us,” I repeated. “In the spare bedroom, upstairs.”

  “But, Georgina, you cannot be serious. It is out of the question; we cannot have people staying here.”

  “Why not, Uncle?”

  “Why not? The expense, the inconvenience, the . . .” He threw up his hands in a helpless gesture. I had thought, watching him at dinner with Lucia the night before, how much frailer he had grown in the year I had lived with him. His skull was now entirely bare; even his drooping white moustache seemed thinner. My heart smote me, but I would not be put off.

  “There will be no expense, Uncle; Lucia will contribute fifteen shillings a week, just as I do, which is more than enough to pay for her keep.”

  The last part, at least, was true; I had resolved to pay him myself, without telling her. It would leave me less than ten shillings a week, but I did not care.

  “And there will be no inconvenience, either; Lucia will help in the shop, when she can, and we will take our meals upstairs in my sitting room, so that you can read at table in peace, without being disturbed by our chatter.”

  “Well—I shall think about it,” he said, folding his catalogue.

  “No, Uncle, we must decide now. She is staying in a hotel, and she needs a home.”

  “Mrs. Eddowes will not like it—she will complain.”

  “I will deal with Mrs. Eddowes,” I said, realising to my surprise that I meant it.

  “But, but—we know nothing about Miss Ardent.”

  “I know already that she is my dearest friend,” I said firmly. “She and I have a great deal in common.”

  “No, no, no; I really cannot allow it. The inconvenience has already begun; I was very surprised, Georgina, to find the shop closed when I returned from yesterday’s sale. If you are going to be gadding about with Miss Ardent when you should be minding the shop . . . and now I must get on.”