A Death Along the River Fleet

by Susanna Calkins

  “Such letters are treasonous,” Mr. Sheridan commented. “I suggest that you not bring them up again.”

  Lucy was about to reply indignantly, forgetting all St. Paul’s admonitions for a woman to be chaste, silent, and obedient, when she happened to look at the physician’s face. He was clearly lost in thought, his mind intent on something else. “That event was bothersome to the whole family, I can assure you. Miss Octavia was quite distraught by the whole affair, and only worsened her condition.”

  “You knew Miss Octavia fairly well, then.”

  “I could see from the first time I met her that she was terribly unwell. But oh, so fragile and lovely,” Mr. Sheridan said, seeming to forget with whom he was speaking. “A local family in Cambridge had put together a ball, and I had seen her dancing. As she passed me, I knew then, even with the scant knowledge of anatomy that I possessed, that her mind was not as it ought to be. I remember heading into the gardens, with only the glow of a great moon to guide our way.”

  “You followed her,” Lucy said softly when he paused, not wishing to break the spell.

  “I did. And she collapsed, and she had a fit as you have seen her, right there in my arms. I wanted to protect her, to help her, but there is so little that could be done.”

  “And how did her family treat her?” Lucy asked, thinking about the way Miss Belasysse had spoken about her mother.

  “As well as could be expected, I suppose. Her condition left her unmarriageable, of course.” There was a longing in his voice then, a long-held wistfulness. For the first time, his sharp, angular features softened a bit, and he no longer seemed his cold and dismissive self.

  They fell silent after that.

  “We are almost there,” he said.

  For the first time, their pace slackened a little. They had reached Bishopsgate and what Lucy took to be the east wall of the old hospital. Lucy stared at the great building that loomed before them, her heart beginning to pound painfully in her chest. Suddenly she wondered about the folly they were about to undertake.

  Unaware of Lucy’s sudden nervousness, Mr. Sheridan surveyed the vast stone building in a detached way. “Once a hospital for pilgrims, it was. For those collecting money and solace prior to setting out on the Crusades,” he commented. “Bethlehem hospital, it was called, ere it became called Bedlam. Before our good King Henry dissolved all the Catholic strongholds, it was still run by the papists. A place for London’s mad it has been for several hundred years.”

  As they approached the open gate, Lucy could feel herself sweating more as she wondered what it would be like to walk among the mad. To calm herself down, she began to sing a little of “Mad Tom of Bedlam,” a ditty that Lach liked to sing while he set the type in the press. “The man in the moon drinks claret, with powder-beef, turnip, and carrot—”

  Mr. Sheridan stopped and looked down at her, pushing his glasses back on his nose. “Miss Campion. Do you mind?”

  “Pardon, sir,” Lucy said, stifling a giggle. “It is a rather merry song, you see, and—” Seeing his face, she stopped. “I am sorry, sir.”

  As they approached the front entrance, he said pointedly, “May I remind you that I am going in alone?”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” Lucy replied. “Try to leave the door behind you open if you can. If not, I will try to find another way inside. Let us plan to meet in three-quarters of an hour, by that tree there.” She pointed to a tree on the road, outside the hospital gates.

  “I am not going back in after you, if you are not there,” he warned her, as he pulled sharply on the bell at the front door.

  Deep within the building they could hear it clanging.

  Mr. Sheridan looked about. “Step back!” he hissed. “I hear someone coming. Move over there. In the shadows!”

  Lucy darted behind a tree, and not a moment too soon, for a moment later, a stout man with a bald head opened the door. “What is it?”

  Did a flash of fright cross the physician’s face? “I should very much like to speak to the keeper, if I may,” Mr. Sheridan said blandly.

  “He is busy,” the man snarled, looking to shut the door.

  “I am a physician. I would like to converse with him about a patient I am attending. I may wish to place him here, but I would like to know more about the treatments that are offered.”

  The man stared down at him. “Wait here.”

  Mr. Sheridan glanced back at Lucy, who was poking her head out. “Well? Did you recognize that man?”

  “No!” Lucy called back softly.

  A moment later, the man came back, and Lucy stepped quickly out of sight. “You may come inside,” he said to Mr. Sheridan. “Follow me.”

  Mr. Sheridan glanced meaningfully back at Lucy. His face had paled, but she could see he had drawn up his shoulders. He is afraid, Lucy realized. And yet he is braving those fears to go inside anyway. For a moment she almost felt actual admiration for the squirrelly man.

  Mr. Sheridan followed the man inside. From her vantage point he could see him pulling off his gloves, and he dropped one on the ground in the path of the door, so that it did not shut all the way. It was a sign, she thought.

  Before the man could become aware of her presence, Lucy pushed through the door ever so swiftly, hoping that the interior would be dark enough so that she might be able to hide.

  Once inside, Lucy had to blink a bit to help her eyes get accustomed to the darkness. She was in a main room of sorts, although one sparsely furnished. A few lit candles were placed in ancient holders along the stone walls, casting long shadows along the floor. She gagged as the pungent smell of piss and excrement assaulted her. In the distance, she could hear what sounded like a man’s screams, intermittent shouts that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. For a moment, her mind was cast back to Newgate prison, and she could feel her heart racing in her chest.

  Now, as she kept close to the mold-covered walls, a damp musty smell made her nose twitch. Before anyone could hear her, she managed to bury her nose in her cloak to let out a small sneeze.

  She could see the entrance to a hallway at the end of the great room, where she assumed Mr. Sheridan and the man had gone. Moving quickly, she crossed the room and peered down the long corridor. Doors lined either side, to rooms that had likely been cells for the hospitalers of old. She could see each door had two openings—one at the height of a man’s head, and the other at the floor, as a means to push in a bowl of food.

  With great trepidation, Lucy moved into the hall and stood on her tiptoes to peek inside the first of these chambers. She could tell straightaway that the screaming was not coming from this room. She could see a figure lying quietly on a bed. A great stench arose from the room, and she could see that the bed was covered with filth. As she peered about the dark room, she accidentally bumped the door, causing it to creak. To her surprise, the door was not locked, and it swung fully open.

  The figure on the bed tried to sit up. “Who is there?” a man weakly called, before sinking back onto the pallet. He was clad only in a simple shift, the kind a man would wear to bed. “Show yourself!”

  The heavy sound of a chain could be heard, and to Lucy’s disgust she could see that the man’s feet and arms were shackled to the bed.

  “Show yourself!” He began to scream. “Show yourself!!!”

  Backing out of the room, Lucy shut the door again and then pressed herself against the wall of the corridor, breathing hard. She half expected someone to come to determine the cause of the man’s shouting, but no one did. Evidently, whoever was running the place was used to the mad shrieks of the inmates.

  Lucy peered into each of the next five cells. Two contained rather bedraggled-looking women. One room was uninhabited. The last in the corridor was where the great screams were coming from. Hardly able to bear it, Lucy peeked inside. There she saw a man tied to the bed, ropes around his wrists and hands. He seemed to be trying to chew his way through one of the ropes in between his mad shouts.

  Seeing
the ropes that bound the man sickened Lucy. She remembered the marks around Miss Belasysse’s wrists and ankles. Had she been bound in a similar manner? Lucy stumbled away. Seeing a bit of daylight under the door at the end of the hall, she pushed it open and found herself in a courtyard with a wild garden of sorts.

  Hoping no one would see her from the slitted windows that lined the stone walls of the hospital, she moved toward a small stone bench that seemed to be located in the one patch of sunshine for the whole dreary place.

  Within a few moments, Lucy realized that she was not actually alone.

  There were a few people walking about, seemingly in their nightclothes, talking to themselves, gesturing a bit wildly. All were clearly touched in the head, but apparently harmless. At least Lucy hoped that was the case.

  Taking a deep breath, Lucy approached a woman dressed in a simple day frock, sitting alone on a stone bench. Her silvery hair was tangled and looked like it had not seen a brush in many a day or night. Her face was pale. “Good day,” Lucy called. “A pleasant fortune upon you.”

  Startled, the woman looked up, her eyes fearful. Then suddenly she smiled, a sweet angelic smile, despite several missing teeth. Her eyes were almost black, her pupils nearly completely dilated. When the sunlight hit them, she jerked back out of the sunlight with a slight whimper, as if she had been burnt.

  Cautiously, Lucy said, “I am looking for a friend of mine. Octavia. Do you know her?”

  “The birds will return now, will they not?” the woman asked. “The garden is too still without them. I miss them.” She paused and then pulled from her bodice an object hanging about her neck. “I have this, you see. To remember the bluebird by.”

  “How lovely,” Lucy said, taking a step closer to the woman. “May I see?”

  The woman held out the pendant. It reminded Lucy of the amulet that Miss Belasysse wore about her neck, but the gemstone was smaller, and the piece seemed more ordinary. Still, like Octavia Belasysse, the woman put her fingers protectively around the piece and stepped away.

  “Where did you get such a beautiful piece?” Lucy asked.

  The woman giggled, an odd childlike sound. “A quail gave it to me. He also gave one to the bluebird.” She cocked her head, looking at Lucy sideways. “Are you a bird, too? I have never seen you in the garden before. Sometimes the birds come and go. It is spring, and they are starting to return. At least I hope they are coming back.” She began to whistle then.

  “I am sorry, I do not understand,” Lucy said. There was something hidden in the woman’s speech, she could tell. Though her mind was clearly addled, there was something there. “What did you mean, that a quail gave it to you?”

  “The bluebird knew I could not fly. So she asked the quail to give this to me. She thought it would help.”

  “I see.” Lucy looked around, hoping no one was watching them. “And has it? Helped you fly?”

  “No! They kept me clipped. I cannot fly,” the woman exclaimed, the smile leaving her face. She moved over very close to Lucy’s ear and whispered, “Beware the brown bird, who is cruel with sharp tendons. I have not seen him for some time, but he may still be watching from his nest on high.”

  “The brown bird?” Lucy asked, confused. From the serious way the woman was looking at her, it seemed she was trying to tell her something.

  “He does the bidding of the falconer, who keeps us penned here.”

  A shiver ran up and down Lucy’s spine as she started to understand what the woman was saying. “What happened to the bluebird?”

  For a moment, the woman looked confused. “The quail helped her fly away. Why will he not help me? Are there not more letters to be written?”

  “Did someone write a letter for the bluebird?”

  The woman smiled secretively. “Many letters, with a long curling plume.”

  “Where is the quail now?” Lucy asked.

  She expected the woman to point to the sky or the trees, but instead she pointed to the other wing of the old hospital, where Lucy had not yet been. “There.”

  “Thank you,” Lucy said. “I shall visit the quail.” On a whim, she reached up and pulled her last ribbon from her hair and handed it to the woman. “For your nest.”

  The woman smiled in genuine pleasure. She looked about to flit away, then turned back to Lucy.

  “But then the lion came and roared at the falconer, for letting the bluebird escape. He was quite angry indeed. The brown bird went after her, for he does the falconer’s bidding. He never came back.” The woman began to whistle again, and hopped away toward a tree.

  Waving to Lucy, the woman reached up and grabbed a low-hanging branch. Then she swung herself into the tree, her shift pulled up so that her legs were immodestly showing. “I will fly away, too, you see. Fly away, fly away!” she called loudly.

  Lucy smiled at her, a bit sadly. I hope you do fly, she thought. Before she left, she crooked her finger in the old way to bring a blessing down upon the woman.

  21

  Lucy went back through the same door she had used to enter the Bedlam courtyard a few minutes ago, but this time she turned to the right, down a corridor that quickly led to another corridor with more cells for inmates. She glanced in each as she passed. A few seemed to be empty, and in others the inmate was asleep or staring up at the ceiling. In one, she saw a woman cradling a small sack in her hands as one would hold a baby. Lucy could hear her humming an old tune that she remembered her neighbors crooning to their babies as they lulled the infants to sleep.

  Peering into the room at the very end of the hallway, she could see that this interior was far larger and laid out differently from the others. Unlike the cells, which contained only a bed, table, and chair, this room reminded Lucy of Dr. Sheridan’s study. There were shelves full of bottles and jars, and a table covered with books, mortars and pestles, and small pots. This, she supposed, might be the workplace of an apothecary.

  Seeing that the room was empty of inhabitants, Lucy went in. Immediately, she was overwhelmed with the strong scent of herbs, not unwelcome after the stench she had smelled in the corridors. She picked up one of the jars left open on the table and sniffed the sweet smell. Chickory, she thought, before setting it down and smelling another. Anise.

  A collection of amulets hung from a peg on the wall. They looked similar in quality to what the woman outside was wearing. By the table, there was a shelf of heavy leather books, very much like those Dr. Larimer kept in his own study. Above the table, someone had pasted comely woodcuts of flowers and herbs on the wall. Spread out along a shelf, there were quite a few tracts and broadsides describing herbal remedies, astrological influences, and even witchcraft, including the Daimonomageia.

  On the shelf below, someone had sorted a variety of cheap penny pieces into stacks. Atop each stack someone had written a single word on a small sheet of paper. Infanticide. Matricide. Self-Murder. Regicide. A last category simply read Melancholia.

  On the table, Lucy noticed, a cup half full of a dark tisane had been left next to several open tracts. She touched the cup. It was still warm, suggesting that the inhabitant of the room might be returning soon. She kept her head cocked, so that she would be ready.

  Flipping the tract to its frontispiece, she saw that it was William Gouge’s treatise on self-murder. Someone had underlined the opening passage. I suppose that scarce an age since the beginning of the world hath afforded more examples of this desperate inhumanity, than this our present age; and that of all sorts of people, clergy, laity, learned, unlearned, noble, mean, rich, poor, free, bond, male, female, young and old. It is therefore high time that the danger of this desperate, devilish and damnable practice be plainly and fully set out.

  She glanced at the tract that lay open beside it, as if someone had been reading them together. “The Self-Murder of a Tanner’s Wife,” she read out loud. Then, with a start, she realized what she was reading: The true and sad account of a most desperate woman, driven to madness and frenzy, after her husband, a
tanner, was mistaken for a highwayman, and killed by two ignoble noblemen, Henry Belasysse and Lord Buckhurst.

  Excitedly, she continued to read, quickly finding it to be a sad tale indeed. The tract described how the tanner’s wife had lost her livelihood and income because the tanners’ guild would not allow her to continue her husband’s trade, even though they did give her a widow’s pension. She did discover that her husband was in deep debt from a sickness with gambling. The guild would not pay off those debts, so ignobly accrued. With two young children clamoring for food, she set to begging and the meaner arts, until she had only her body left to sell. They found her not too long after, at the base of a bridge, where all presumed she had thrown herself in a final fit of despair.

  Lucy shuddered. A pathetic end indeed. And to think that these noblemen had been pardoned by King Charles. She could not help but curl her lip in disdain.

  A step at the doorway and a muffled exclamation caused her to whirl around. Despite her best intentions, she had gotten lost in the tract and failed to pay attention to her surroundings.

  Sure enough, the man standing there was the same one who had given her the concoction for Miss Belasysse yesterday morning. As before, he was dressed completely in black.

  “You!” he cried, looking nervously about. “What are you doing here?”

  “I needed to see you. You are the Bedlam apothecary, are you not?”

  “Yes,” he admitted. “Jonathan Quade. I procure the herbs, mix the elixirs and tisanes, and attend to the patients. There is no resident physician, so it falls to me to keep the inmates well. Such as we can.” He watched her, a question in his eyes.

  “Miss Belasysse was an inmate here,” she said. “Is that not the truth of the matter?”

  He nodded, still watching her nervously.

  The questions she had been holding in bubbled up. “Why did her family not know she was here? Or were they lying about not knowing where she was? Was she here for ten months? Who brought her here?”