Reaching the door, I peered around it. Into my face blew a cold draft that smelled of urine and lye soap. I saw a dim, dismal corridor with an arched ceiling, its only light from a barred window at the end; I heard wails and gibbering. A not entirely disagreeable fear shivered through me. I had a premonition that the corridor led to something I should not see but must. My heartbeat quickened with anticipation; I looked over my shoulder. No one was about. No one saw me step through the door.
The wails and gibbering echoed around me as I tiptoed down the passage; they sounded like utterances from Hell. On either side of the passage were doors, each with a window covered by metal grating set at eye level. I peeked through these. In one locked cell after another, through a maze of corridors, I saw a man or woman imprisoned. Some crouched in corners like animals in pens, but others were in wrist and ankle cuffs, chained to beds. How they struggled and moaned! These were scenes from a medieval torture chamber. I’d stumbled upon the dark heart of Bedlam.
I was headed back the way I’d come when I felt a touch on my shoulder. My heart vaulted up into my throat with a mighty thump. Gasping, I whirled. Before me stood a young woman, small and thin and pale. She wore a plain gray frock and a white shawl. A white bonnet framed brown, curling hair and delicate features. Violet-gray eyes too large for her face calmly met my gaze. Shock paralyzed me, and not just because she’d crept up on me so unexpectedly.
I am haunted by those I have loved and lost. Although they are dust in their graves, I encounter them time and again in persons I meet. This woman was my sister Anne in every lineament.
“Excuse me, madam,” she said, and her voice was Anne’s, sweet and gentle.
The terrible memory of Anne’s passing swept over me like a black wave. Anne had meekly accepted every remedy we pressed upon her; foul medicines and painful blisters added to her suffering, but she patiently endured. I took her to the seaside for a change of air, a last-resort treatment recommended by her doctor. Alas, it didn’t work. Anne died at the age of twenty-eight, in Scarborough. She was buried there, on a headland overlooking the sea she always loved. But here, with me, was her ghost.
“Who are you?” was all I could think to say.
“I’m Julia Garrs,” she said, and curtsied. “What’s your name?”
“Charlotte Brontë.” Now reason overpowered fancy. I saw that she was not my sister reincarnated. She was some ten years younger than Anne had lived to be, and prettier; she had a full bosom, Cupid’s bow lips, and thick, black eyelashes. She was a stranger.
Relief flooded me as I said, “What do you want?”
“I’m lost,” she said. “Will you help me get home? My baby is there. He needs me.”
I deduced that she was a visitor who’d wandered here by chance just as I had. “Certainly.”
She smiled, and as I escorted her along the passage, she took my hand. Her fingers were cold and frail, and I shivered: it seemed that Anne had reached from her grave to touch me. I lost my sense of direction and could not find the door. We turned corner after corner until we came upon a matron. She was a heavy woman with a coarse, red, common face. “Julia!” she said. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Julia shrank behind me. I wondered how the matron knew her name and why she was frightened. “We’re visiting the asylum. We got lost,” I explained.
The matron sneered. “You may be a visitor, mum, but she ain’t. She’s an inmate.”
I was shocked. “But—”
“But she looks so normal.” The matron laughed. “I know. All the visitors think so. You’re not the first one she’s tried to fool into helping her escape. She charms the attendants into letting her out of her cell.” The matron’s tone hinted at the sort of wiles Julia employed. “Then she goes looking for her next mark.”
“Is this true?” I asked Julia.
She clung to my hand but averted her eyes from mine.
“Oh, it’s true, all right,” the matron said. “She’s in Bedlam ’cause she killed her own baby. Born out of wedlock, it was. She drowned it in the bath. Afterwards, she went mad. Thinks it’s still alive.”
I stared at Julia in horror. The matron yanked her away from me and said, “Come on, then, girl. You’re going back to your cell.”
As she led the reluctant but meek Julia down the corridor, she said to me, “You hadn’t ought to be here, mum. This wing’s not on the public tour. It’s for the criminal lunatics.”
Stunned by fresh shock, I said, “How do I get out?”
The matron pointed. “The door’s that way.”
I gladly went in the direction she’d indicated. Then I heard a loud rattling of wheels. I saw, down the passage, four male nurses pushing a cart on which lay a patient wrapped in a blanket gown. He bucked and writhed; he grunted through the gag in his mouth. The sounds caused my own mouth to drop. My heart began a thunderous pounding.
The unintelligible noises that a human makes are as individual and distinctive as his voice speaking words. A sigh, cough, or groan can reveal identity. Every fiber of my being told me who that madman was, even though reason said he could not be.
The nurses pushed the cart into a room; the door slammed behind them. Torn between disbelief and fearful hope, I hurried to the door. I peered through the grated window and saw the nurses wrestling with the madman, removing the blanket gown. He was tall and thin, with sinewy muscles, clothed in a torn white shirt and black trousers. I strained to see his face, which was hidden by the gag and his disheveled black hair. A white-coated doctor with a tonsure of gray hair and a bland, bespectacled face tinkered with a strange apparatus—a clutch of squat black cylinders connected to a machine. Long wires protruded from metal posts at their ends. Nearby stood a wooden table fitted with leather straps with buckles and a set of clamps at the end. I watched the nurses heave the madman onto the table. They tried to buckle the straps over him. As he thrashed and struck out at them, his face turned toward me.
It was lean and swarthy, dripping with sweat, the nose like a falcon’s beak. His mouth was an agonized grimace around the gag. His eyes were a rare, brilliant, crystalline gray. I saw them in my dreams every night. He did not see me now. I clapped my hand over my mouth to stifle a cry of horror mixed with recognition.
My first, visceral impression had proved true: the madman was John Slade.
3
HOW HAD SLADE, THE MAN I LOVED, COME TO BE HERE IN BEDLAM?
Almost three years ago he had told me he was going to Russia. I had thought him still there. I’d had no reason to believe otherwise.
What was happening to him, and why?
I saw a door at the back of the room open. Through it stepped a man whose narrow figure wore a dark coat and trousers of a distinctly foreign cut. He had Germanic features—pale, hooded eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles, a long nose, a cruel mouth. His hair was close-cropped and silvery, his bearing imperious.
Reader, you will recognize him as the Prussian who conspired with the Tsar against England. At that time I had no knowledge of the man.
He strode toward Slade. An object glittered in his hand. It was a glass cylinder with a plunger, attached to a long, sharp needle. While the nurses struggled to hold Slade still, the man jabbed the needle into Slade’s arm. He worked the plunger. Slade jerked as the liquid contents of the cylinder ran into his body. His struggles weakened. His eyes closed. The nurses adjusted the clamps around his head. The doctor gathered up the wires connected to the strange apparatus. Each had a small metal disc at its end. He affixed these discs to Slade’s temples and forehead. He turned a crank on the machine.
Lights on its surface blinked. I heard a crackling sound. Slade stiffened as if from a convulsion. The foreigner moved to his side, whispered in his ear. I did not know what these men were doing to Slade, but it could not be good. I tried to open the door; it was locked. I beat my fists against it and cried, “Stop!”
The doctor, the nurses, and the foreigner looked in my direction. At the same instant I h
eard someone call my name. Dr. Forbes hurried toward me, saying, “There you are, thank heaven.” He seized my arm and propelled me away from the door, out of the dungeon. Soon we were in the ward where I’d left him, amid the staff, the visitors, and blessed normalcy.
“That was the criminal lunatics’ ward,” Dr. Forbes said. “I shouldn’t have let you wander in there.”
“In there—I saw—they—” With an effort, I composed myself. I stammered a description of what I’d seen.
“It’s a treatment called galvanism,” Dr. Forbes explained. “An electrical charge is administered to the patient’s head. It cures melancholia, hypochondria, mania, and dementia. It’s perfectly safe. Don’t be upset.”
“The patient. I know him. He—”
Dr. Forbes frowned. He led me down the staircase, toward the main door. “You should go home. Your experience has distressed you so much that you’re confused. You couldn’t possibly know that patient. He’s a lunatic who was arrested and brought to Bedlam by the police. He’s the suspect in a crime.”
I was sure a mistake had been made. John Slade a lunatic and a criminal? It was impossible!
He was a graduate of Cambridge, a former clergyman. He spoke at least four languages besides English. He’d been a soldier in the army of the East India Company, had served in the Middle East, and later joined the British intelligence service. Moreover, he was a hero who’d risked his life in the line of duty.
Now I told Dr. Forbes that I must save Slade; I begged him to stop the torture. Perhaps if I had behaved calmly and rationally he would have complied, but I was so agitated that I raved as if I were mad myself.
“Miss Brontë, you must leave at once,” Dr. Forbes said. “People are staring.”
That brought me to my senses. If the gossips should hear about this episode, what hay they would make of it! Famous authoress Currer Bell goes insane in Bedlam, the newspaper headlines would read. I had to let Dr. Forbes escort me out.
“This is my fault. I shouldn’t have let you come,” he said regretfully as he put me into a carriage. “I must apologize.” He added, “I am leaving in two days for a holiday in Ambleside in the Lake District, but if you should need my assistance, please let me know.”
Alone in my carriage on my way back to Gloucester Terrace, I conjectured that Slade must have gotten himself into trouble which had led to his arrest and incarceration. But what kind of trouble? I wondered if Dr. Forbes had sent me away from Bedlam because he was a party to Slade’s persecution and he didn’t want me to see it. But I could not persuade myself of that. He must truly believe Slade was a criminal lunatic and I had mistaken his identity.
When I arrived at the Smiths’ house, I would have liked to sit alone in my room and decide what to do, but George greeted me at the door and said, “I’m glad you’re back early. We’re going to the Great Exhibition.”
The Great Exhibition was a huge museum, opened just this month, that contained some one hundred thousand mechanical devices and works of art from many different countries. It had been conceived by Prince Albert, with the mission of advancing humanity and celebrating the progress achieved in the modern age. Although the Great Exhibition was the talk of England, I didn’t want to go because I was so distressed. Still, I could not refuse George. After a quick luncheon I found myself riding in a carriage with him, his mother, and his two younger sisters. They talked excitedly about the things we would see. Nobody noticed that I sat brooding in silence.
Why had Slade returned to England? Why hadn’t he let me know? I thought of the three lonely years I’d spent without him. I alternated between hurt feelings, fear for Slade, and the first pangs of doubt about what I’d seen at Bedlam. Was that inmate really Slade? How could Slade have become a criminal lunatic? My mind refused to believe he had, for I thought him to be a thoroughly sane, honorable man. But what else could explain his incarceration in the asylum, if indeed the man I’d seen was Slade?
The popularity of the Great Exhibition became evident long before we got there. Our progress slowed behind a crush of carriages and omnibuses. Pedestrians crowded the sidewalks. Eventually we reached a long avenue that led through Hyde Park, where merrymakers lounged on grass shaded by trees. It was such a bright, gay scene that my experience at Bedlam seemed unreal. Perhaps Dr. Forbes was right, and the man I’d seen wasn’t Slade. I’d mistaken Julia Garrs for my sister Anne; why might I not have made another mistake?
“Look!” Mrs. Smith pointed out the carriage window. “There is the Crystal Palace!”
The “Crystal Palace,” the popular name for the building that housed the Great Exhibition, was an enormous glass shell supported by a skeleton of iron, like a gigantic conservatory, more than a hundred feet high. The newspapers had proclaimed it “The Tenth Wonder of the World.” We disembarked from the carriage and joined the queue at the entrance. What a varied company we were in! Clergymen from the countryside shepherded flocks of parishioners; teachers presided over groups of barefoot schoolchildren; rich ladies and gentlemen waited amid soldiers in uniform. I heard foreign languages spoken by visitors from abroad.
As his mother and sisters chattered, George Smith leaned close to me and said, “You’re awfully quiet. Is something wrong?”
“No, I’m fine.” I couldn’t talk about what had happened at Bedlam; I didn’t want to worry him, especially if it had been a case of mistaken identity. Perhaps I’d wanted so much to see Slade that I had superimposed his face upon a stranger.
We entered the Crystal Palace. Its interior resembled a vast cathedral. Awestruck, carried by the tide of the crowd, the Smiths and I moved down a long transept roofed with a glass barrel vault. Iron posts, wrought to resemble classical columns, supported upper galleries on either side of a wide main thoroughfare.
“It’s over eighteen hundred feet long and four hundred fifty feet wide,” George said. “It covers nineteen square acres.”
“There are trees indoors,” his sister Eliza marveled.
I, too, was amazed by the live, full-sized elms that rose within the transept.
“The transept was offset to accommodate the trees that were on the site,” George explained. “The building isn’t completely symmetrical.”
I was so impressed by the Crystal Palace that I almost forgot about Slade. Sunshine poured through the glass ceiling and walls onto potted shrubs, flowering plants, and palmettos set along the main thoroughfare. White marble statuary gleamed. The voices of the spectators and their footsteps on the wooden floor blended into a deep hum, like the sound of the sea. Above it I heard the tinkle of falling water. We joined a crowd that was gathered around a huge crystal fountain.
“It’s twenty-seven feet high and weighs four tons,” George said.
At the center, a column like a splinter from an iceberg glittered with rainbow iridescence. Water cascaded into an enormous, overflowing crystal basin. As we moved on, George said to me, “Queen Victoria and Prince Albert held a grand opening ceremony for the Great Exhibition. I wish you could have come to that. But maybe you’ll see them here some other time. I hear they plan to make frequent appearances.”
I did not tell him that I was acquainted with the royal couple. They had played a part in my secret adventures of 1848.
The Smiths and I explored the displays arranged in courts beneath the upper galleries. Each was dedicated to a particular nation or subject. We saw silk carpets, shawls, and a model of a snake charmer in the Indian Pavilion. The United States Pavilion contained a nude statue of a Greek slave that caused much furor. In the Medieval Court we inspected an altar, vestments, candelabra, and chalices. We wandered among railway locomotives, hydraulic presses, farm and mill machinery, and a zinc Amazon on horseback. We saw vases made of human hair and of mutton fat. The grandeur of the Great Exhibition did not lie in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things, arranged with colorful, marvelous power of effect.
“What do you think?” George asked me as we listened to a bellows that played “God Sav
e the Queen.”
“It’s very fine, gorgeous, animated, and bewildering,” I said.
He smiled and agreed. “They say that thirty thousand people visit every day. Some come back again and again.”
One would have to, in order to see everything. Three hours later, we had barely scratched the Great Exhibition’s surface. Everything began to blur together. The only thing that stood out in my mind was a model of a steam-powered airship—a hot air balloon combined with a boiler, engine, and propeller. Overwhelmed and fatigued by so much ingenuity, I was glad to sit in the refreshment court and eat strawberry ice. Even gladder was I to visit what I considered the most wonderful attraction of all—the “retiring rooms,” the first public conveniences in Britain. A penny bought me a clean seat in a water closet, a towel, a comb, and a shoeshine.
I was also glad for a few moments alone, to think. Perhaps it was too big a coincidence that Slade should have been in Bedlam on the day I happened by. Perhaps the man I’d seen wasn’t he. But I firmly believe that coincidences do occur. One could call them fate. It was fate when Jane Eyre was rescued by her long-lost cousins after she ran away from Mr. Rochester. Fate had brought Slade and me together the first time. I realized then that I could not help believing that the madman in Bedlam was Slade, and that fate had brought us together again.
As I walked through the park to meet the Smiths, I heard someone call, “Miss Brontë!” It was a man perhaps twenty-eight years old, brown-haired, dressed in a brown coat and trousers. He hurried up to me, smiling radiantly.
“It is Miss Charlotte Brontë, the authoress, isn’t it?” he said.
“It is,” I said warily. I was often recognized by strangers who’d read Jane Eyre, but it usually happened at literary gatherings or in Yorkshire, where everyone knew everyone else. It had never happened in a public place in London. “Have we met?”
Bedlam: The Further Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë Page 3
