Bedlam: The Further Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë

by Laura Joh Rowland

  At first I was shocked by this news, and jarred out of my certainty that the man I’d seen was Slade.

  “It’s just as I suggested,” George said gently. “You made a mistake.”

  Then I recalled that his work often required Slade to use aliases. Adept at foreign accents and languages, he could easily have styled himself as a Polish refugee. But I couldn’t tell the detective inspector any of this, for I was sworn to secrecy.

  “I want to see him,” I said. “Where is he?”

  “I’d like to see him, too, but that’s not possible at the moment,” D. I. Hart said. “He’s escaped.”

  Relief vied with fresh horror in me. Slade wasn’t under arrest, but he was a wanted man, a fugitive.

  “Why was this Josef Typinski committed to Bedlam in the first place?” George asked.

  “I’m not allowed to say,” Matron Hunter answered. “Information about the inmates is confidential.”

  I had to find Slade. I had to hear, from him, the truth about the murders. “Where might he have gone?”

  D. I. Hart’s eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t be thinking of looking for him yourself, now would you?” He rose from his seat and stepped back from me, as if he’d finished picking my carcass down to bare bones. “Information concerning police investigations is confidential. You’d better go home and stay out of this, for your own sake.”

  Walking through the asylum with me, George said, “I didn’t care for the detective inspector, but he’s right. I’ll take you home. You can rest and forget this whole business.”

  “No! I can’t!” As I resisted the pressure George applied to my arm, I saw some hospital staff members standing idle, watching me. One of them was the foreigner. I pointed and said, “That’s the man I told you about—the one I saw with Mr. Slade!”

  The foreigner met my gaze. His gaze was as pale as if bleached by lye, and menacing. I felt a chill, like a cold draft from a distant climate. Intuition warned me that I should avoid this man’s attention, but it was too late, and he had knowledge I wanted.

  “I must ask him what he was doing to Mr. Slade yesterday,” I said. “Maybe he knows what’s become of Mr. Slade and who really killed those nurses.”

  The foreigner turned and disappeared around a corner.

  “What man?” George craned his neck, saw no one, and shook his head in confusion. “Charlotte, we must go.”

  As we passed down a corridor in the women’s ward, I heard a soft voice call, “Charlotte.”

  I saw Julia Garrs peeking out of a doorway. She beckoned me. Today she didn’t resemble Anne as much as I’d thought; today I knew she was a murderess who’d killed her own baby. But I pitied her because she was so young and apparently doomed to spend the rest of her life searching for the baby and incarcerated in Bedlam.

  “Please excuse me a moment,” I said to George. I hurried to Julia. “Hadn’t you better go back to your room before you get in trouble?”

  Julia put her finger to her lips and pulled me into a closet that contained a washbasin, brooms, mops, and buckets. She shut the door and smiled her sweet smile. “You were so kind yesterday. I wanted to thank you.” She added wistfully, “I like you. I wish we could be friends. Nobody ever comes to visit me.”

  Probably her friends and family had disowned her. As a parson’s daughter I felt a duty to comfort the unfortunate, but I was nervous being alone with Julia. “How did you get out?”

  “A madman has escaped. There was so much confusion, someone left the door unlocked.” Julia studied me, her gaze frankly curious. “You’re interested in the madman, aren’t you, Charlotte?”

  “Yes, but how did you know?”

  A hint of slyness crept into her smile. “People talk. I listen.”

  Gossip must have traveled through Bedlam even faster than it did through literary society. “What do you know about him?” I asked urgently.

  “I saw the police bring him in. They said he’d done terrible things.”

  “What kind of things?” I dreaded to hear, but I had to know.

  “They didn’t say. But they did say where they’d arrested him.”

  My heart leapt at this meager clue. “Where?”

  “At Number Eighteen Thrawl Street,” Julia said. “In Whitechapel.”

  6

  SATURDAY IS MARKET DAY IN WHITECHAPEL, AND DESPITE THE rain, the East End of London was jammed with wagons and omnibuses. The crowds in the high street slowed the carriage in which I rode with George Smith. Piles of fruits and vegetables spilled from storefronts in tall buildings with slate roofs and smoking chimneys. Housewives bargained with vendors at stalls that sold toys, carpets, fish, crockery, furniture, hairbrushes, flowers, and all manner of other goods. In the meat market, hundreds of carcasses hung. I smelled cesspools and rotting garbage; I saw itinerant peddlers, legless beggars, organ grinders accompanied by monkeys, and women selling fortunes. This was not the elegant London of the fashionable literary set, but it had a raw, invigorating vitality.

  George hadn’t wanted to come. The madman was better left to the police, he’d said. But I’d argued just as strenuously that I would not be able to rest until I’d done all I could to learn more about the madman I still believed was John Slade. In the end George had given in.

  Our carriage turned off the high street, and we left the bright market-day bustle. The back streets of Whitechapel were narrow, the gray day darkened by buildings that towered and leaned. The odors strengthened into a powerful stench. This was London at its poorest and most squalid. Dank passages, doorways, and staircases swarmed with children. Women called out windows, speaking in languages I couldn’t identify. Stores displayed sausages and peculiar foodstuffs in windows labeled in Hebrew script. Immigrants from the Continent loitered, smoking pipes by a tavern. They eyed George and me with suspicion as we disembarked from our carriage outside Thrawl Street.

  “I don’t like this,” George said.

  Thrawl Street was a particularly malodorous, dim alley. Number Eighteen was one in a row of soot-stained tenements. A sign that said Rooms to Let hung by its doorway. A line of people extended along the sidewalk and up the stairs. The people included women with babes in arms, surly youths, and a dark, muscular man in a butcher’s bloodstained apron. When George and I attempted to climb the stairs, the butcher blocked our way.

  “You wait your turn.” He spoke with a rough, foreign accent.

  “Our turn for what?” George asked.

  “To see the murderer’s room.”

  A bad feeling crept into my heart. “What murderer?”

  “The Pole,” said one of the mothers, a London Cockney holding a little boy. “Josef Typinski. The one what killed those three women. Mary Chandler, Catherine Meadows, and Jane Anderson.”

  “Stabbed ’em and cut out their innards,” a youth said with relish.

  George questioned these folk; I was too upset to speak. We learned that the three victims had been women of the street. They’d been killed in alleys late at night and found there in the morning, lying in pools of blood, their female organs missing. Rumors of a monster on the loose had spread through Whitechapel. A witness—nobody knew who—had seen Josef Typinski near the scene of the latest crime, which had taken place last summer. The woman with the little boy had seen the police drag Typinski out of his lodgings in Number Eighteen.

  “He were in handcuffs,” she said. “They threw him in their wagon and took him away.”

  “Well,” George said to me, “that explains why he was in the criminal lunatics’ wing in Bedlam. He’s not only a multiple murderer—he must be insane, to do such horrific things.”

  “The landlady is giving a look at his room for a penny,” said the youth.

  Londoners must be the most avid curiosity seekers in the world, I thought. They flocked to the Great Exhibition, to Bedlam, and to the lodgings of a murderer. “But maybe he didn’t do it,” I protested. “The witness only saw him near the scene. There’s nobody who saw him kill those women, is ther
e?”

  Heads shook, but an old man with a cane said, “He must have done it. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been arrested.”

  His statement was met with general agreement. George said, “Charlotte, we’ve learned enough.”

  “No.” Although sickened by what I’d heard, I walked to the end of the line and stood there. “I want to see.”

  George sighed in exasperation as he joined me. “You need to consider the possibility that even if this Josef Typinski is your friend John Slade, he’s not the man you knew.”

  I wondered if something had happened to Slade, had changed him from a sane man of honor into a crazed murderer. As to what it might be, I couldn’t imagine. I had to know the truth, and Josef Typinski’s lodgings seemed the only source of clues.

  We waited an hour, inching up a foul staircase so narrow that people coming down had to squeeze past us. Finally we reached the head of the line, outside a door on the second floor. There the landlady stood, like Cerberus guarding the gates to Hades. Indeed, she resembled a small, fierce bulldog. A neat black frock and white cap gave her a veneer of respectability, which was compromised by the tobacco pipe gripped between her sharp yellow teeth.

  “That’ll be a tuppence,” she said. George paid. “You’ve got five minutes.”

  We stepped into the room. The landlady hovered inside the door, to make sure we didn’t steal anything. The room was a tiny cell, its window so begrimed that little light came through, furnished with an iron bed and a washbasin on a stand. A travel-worn black valise stood in a corner. I breathed a scent that brought forth a flood of memories.

  Scent is a time machine that can instantly transport one to places and people long lost. My surroundings faded. I lay in a forest with Slade, his arms around me, our mouths locked in a kiss. It was Slade’s scent—masculine, faintly salty with sweat, but fresh despite the squalid conditions in which he apparently now lived. The sensations of nostalgia and yearning were so powerful that tears sprang to my eyes.

  “There’s not much here.” George Smith’s voice snapped me back to the present.

  He was examining clothes strewn upon the unmade bed. I surreptitiously wiped my eyes before I joined him. The clothes were such as a poor European immigrant might own—worn trousers, shirt, undergarments, coat, a pair of socks. I didn’t think Slade would have left his possessions in such disorder. He had once stayed at my home for a while, and he’d been a tidy, self-contained guest.

  George opened the valise. “This is empty.”

  I eyed the landlady. She must have put all of Slade’s things out, the better for curiosity seekers to gawk at. I wanted to snatch up the shirt, bury my face in it, and inhale the vestiges of Slade’s presence, but I didn’t want to betray my feelings. The washstand held a towel, comb, soap, cup, and shaving brush. I saw a black hair tangled in the comb. My hand made an involuntary movement toward it, but the landlady snapped, “Don’t touch.” I snatched my hand back. She added, “The police took away his razor. They figured he used it on those women.”

  I couldn’t control the shudder that passed through me. George said, “Even if he isn’t the killer, let us hope that your friend John Slade is not the same man as Josef Typinski. That he would use an alias is extremely shady.”

  However, I could think of a legitimate reason why Slade would pose as an immigrant Pole. Maybe he was on a secret assignment for the Foreign Office, the branch of the British government that employed him. Maybe Slade hadn’t contacted me because he could-n’t risk breaking his disguise. But I couldn’t tell this to George. Not only was I sworn to secrecy; he would never believe me.

  “Time’s up,” the landlady said.

  “Not yet!” I couldn’t bear to leave without the answers to my questions, and here I felt close to Slade. I cast a frantic gaze around the room and saw, under one leg of the washstand, a folded piece of paper. It must have been put there to prevent the washstand from rocking. I bent and picked up the paper. The landlady was instantly at my side.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  I unfolded the paper. It was a handbill printed on cheap paper, which read, “The Royal Pavilion Theater Presents Katerina the Great in The Wildwood Affair.” A crude illustration showed a dark-haired woman with haunted eyes.

  “Give me that.” The landlady snatched the handbill from me. She laid it on the bed with the clothing, for the next gawkers to view.

  George shot me a look that said he knew what I was thinking. “No, Charlotte. I would do just about anything for you, but I am not taking you to see The Wildwood Affair.”

  “That’s quite all right,” I said. “You needn’t.”

  I had a better idea.

  7

  THAT EVENING, IN MY ROOM AT THE SMITHS’ HOUSE, I PUT ON my best gown. My hands trembled as I smoothed the folds of gray satin that glowed with an emerald sheen. I supposed that other women all over London were preparing for a night out, but I felt none of the frivolous gaiety that they must have felt. I donned the gown as if it were armor for a battle.

  I arranged my hair in a simple knot. The face in the mirror was as plain as ever. Once my plainness had caused me much grief, but these days I liked my visage better: it belonged to Currer Bell, the author who’d fulfilled my childhood dreams. And the dress brought back happy memories of the first time I’d worn it, three years ago, the first and only time John Slade and I had danced together. His admiration had made me feel beautiful. I saw my eyes shine with tears. Had I lost him forever? Or would I find him tonight?

  I went downstairs and met Mr. Thackeray and two ladies, one buxom and willowy and fair, the other slight and dark, both dressed in silk gowns and glittering gems. “Good evening, Jane—er, Miss Brontë,” said Mr. Thackeray. “Please allow me to present two dear friends of mine.” He introduced the slight, dark lady. “This is Mrs. Crowe, your fellow authoress.”

  Mrs. Crowe had huge, intense, unblinking eyes. She might have been pretty were she not so thin. “It’s a privilege to meet you,” she said in a hushed voice. “I so admire your work. Perhaps you’ve heard of mine?”

  “Yes.” I understood that she wrote about mediums, séances, and the spirits on the Other Side. I thought it utter claptrap, but I said, “I look forward to reading your books.”

  “And this is Mrs. Brookfield,” Mr. Thackeray said.

  Smiling, conspiratorial glances passed between him and the fair woman, a rich society hostess. Although not young, she was beautiful. She was also Mr. Thackeray’s paramour. “I’m glad to make your acquaintance,” she said in a friendly fashion. I took an immediate dislike to her. Mr. Thackeray was himself a married man, and I could not condone adultery.

  “You look splendid tonight,” Mr. Thackeray said to me with such sincere admiration that I forgave him his sins. “Are you ready for our expedition to the theater?”

  Here I must describe other events that occurred outside my view. The details, based on facts I later learned, are as accurate as I can make them. Reader, you will see that when I went to the theater that night with Mr. Thackeray and his friends, I was in grave danger.

  As our carriage rattled down the road, the street seemed deserted; the pools of light beneath the lamps were empty. A warm hush enveloped Hyde Park Gardens. I didn’t notice the figure standing in the shadow under a tree near the house I’d just left. It was the foreigner I had seen in Bedlam, the Tsar’s Prussian conspirator. He had followed George and me from the asylum to Whitechapel, and from Whitechapel to the Smith house. Now he watched the house until a maid stepped out the front door, on her way home for the night.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  She gasped and paused. “Lord, you gave me a scare.”

  “Who is the master of this house?”

  “Mr. George Smith,” the maid blurted.

  “Who was the lady that left in the carriage?”

  “Which lady?” The maid stepped back from him, wary of strangers, sensing that he was more dangerous than most.

  “The small
, plain one.”

  “None of your business, I’m sure.” Offended by his impertinence, she was haughty as well as frightened.

  He took a sovereign from his pocket and offered it to her. Her eyes bulged with greed. She accepted the coin. “The lady’s Charlotte Brontë, also known as Currer Bell. The famous authoress.”

  “Does she reside in the house?”

  “No. She’s just visiting.”

  “Where does she reside?”

  “Haworth. In Yorkshire.” The maid slid a nervous glance toward the house. “I can’t talk anymore. The mistress doesn’t like us to gossip.” She hurried away.

  The Prussian walked around the corner, to a waiting carriage. He climbed in and sat opposite the two men already inside. Their names were Friedrich and Wagner. They sat rigidly upright, foreign soldiers in British civilian garb. Friedrich was a fine specimen of strong manhood; Wagner his lanky, puffy-faced, distorted reflection.

  “Did you find out what you wanted to know, sir?” Friedrich asked.

  “Yes.” The Prussian relayed the intelligence gleaned from the maid.

  Wagner said, “Sir, is this Charlotte Brontë a problem?”

  “Obviously. She witnessed our operation in Bedlam. If she tells the police what she saw, they may investigate because she is a woman of position. And we do not want the police snooping in our business.”

  Wagner frowned. “She could make trouble for us in Bedlam.”

  “Also in more important spheres,” the Prussian said grimly. “She is acquainted with John Slade. Maybe they spoke before we got to him. Maybe he told her something.”

  “What should we do, sir?” Friedrich asked.

  “For now we’ll watch her,” the Prussian said. “If she appears to know too much—” He removed from his pocket a long, slender knife and slid it out of its leather sheath. The sharp blade reflected his pale eyes, which were devoid of mercy. “We follow standard procedure.”