Bedlam: The Further Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë

by Laura Joh Rowland

  “Hey!” called a loud, gruff, masculine voice. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  I froze. A man emerged from a grove of trees. The twilight was fading, and I couldn’t see much about him except that he was stocky and wore a brimmed cap. He stood no more than twenty feet from me, but it wasn’t me that he’d seen: he aimed a rifle at Slade.

  “Come down,” he said, “or I’ll shoot.”

  I hadn’t come this far to have Slade killed before he could answer a few questions. I stepped off the path, angled through the shrubbery, and stole up behind the man with the rifle. I could see Slade clinging to the tree, staring at the weapon leveled on his heart. His face was set in hard lines that betrayed no emotion, but I read his mind: he was thinking that he’d escaped death at the hands of mighty villains all over the world, and now he was about to be brought down by a country caretaker in an English village. He couldn’t bear the stupidity of it, and neither could I.

  I turned my furled umbrella in my hands, grasping it near the pointed end. I crept up to the caretaker and brought the sturdy wooden handle down on the back of his head as hard as I could. He grunted, lurched, and dropped the rifle. I swung my umbrella and hit him behind his knees. He fell flat on his face. As he struggled to rise, something in me snapped. The passions and impulses I had controlled heretofore now overflowed like water over a crumbled dam. I lost all common sense, all self-restraint. I hit the caretaker again and again while he screamed. Slade jumped down from the tree and hurried toward us.

  “Charlotte, stop! You’ll kill him!”

  I didn’t care. Glorying in unholy wrath, I beat the caretaker until he lay still and moaning. Slade tore the umbrella out of my hands and flung it away. “Have you gone mad?”

  Laughter burbled from me, even though I was shocked and horrified that I had attacked a man who’d never done me any wrong. “That’s the pot calling the kettle black! You’re the criminal lunatic from Bedlam!” Now I was furious. “You thought you could avoid me, but you were wrong!”

  He shook his head, astounded and exasperated. “You never give up, do you? I suppose you came looking for Niall Kavanagh in an attempt to track me down, and you found his laboratory. I underestimated you.” Grudging respect crept into his tone; but then he said sternly, “You should go.”

  “I’m not going anywhere!” I snatched up the rifle and aimed it at Slade. “Neither are you, until you’ve explained everything to my satisfaction!”

  His hands went up. “Put the gun down. You’re not going to shoot me. You don’t even know how to fire a gun.”

  “Is that what you think?” I had gone shooting on the moors in Haworth, although I’d never managed to hit anything. How furious I was that Slade would patronize me after I had just saved his miserable life! I pulled the trigger.

  The gun fired with an ear-splitting roar. The barrel jerked upward. Slade dropped to the ground. I screamed in horror because I thought I’d shot him, which I hadn’t really meant to do. But the bullet hit the foliage high in the trees. Twigs and leaves rained down on him. He cautiously raised his head. We stared at each other, and the shock on his face was no greater than the shock I felt.

  That we had come to this! That I had almost killed the man I loved!

  I lowered the gun. When Slade jumped up and took it from me, I didn’t resist. He threw the gun into the bushes. I said, “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I.” But his manner was more impatient than conciliatory. “I can’t tell you any more than I already have. Because it’s not your concern.”

  My anger resurged. “After what I’ve gone through because of you, it certainly is my concern.” I played a card I thought he didn’t know I held. “Katerina has been killed.”

  “What?” Even more stunned than when I’d almost shot him, Slade demanded, “How?”

  I explained that I’d gone to Katerina’s house in search of him and found her tied to her bed, stabbed multiple times and bleeding to death.

  “Good God!” Slade was visibly shaken.

  I wondered if it was because he loved Katerina and her death grieved him. The thought fueled my rage. I told Slade I’d been caught by the police. “They think I murdered her. They sent me to Newgate Prison.” I related the indignities and terrors I’d suffered there. “So don’t tell me that your business is none of mine!”

  Dismay appeared in his expression. “I never wanted you to be hurt.”

  “You have an odd way of showing it.” Close to tears, I said, “That’s not the worst of what happened.” I described how Wilhelm Stieber had brought me to Bedlam and interrogated me. “He would have had me killed, if not for Lord Palmerston and the Queen.” I told Slade they’d rescued me and granted me a limited amount of time to prove my innocence and his. “Palmerston believed you were a traitor, but I defended you, and he’s giving you the benefit of doubt. Don’t you think I have a right to know what’s going on?”

  Slade inhaled a deep breath, then slowly exhaled. “I suppose I do owe you an explanation.” He looked around to see whether anyone was coming to investigate the gunfire, then moved under the shadow of the tree I’d shot, where we wouldn’t be seen from the road; he beckoned me to follow him. “Whatever you want to know, just ask.”

  Here was my chance to learn the truth. Perhaps it was my last because I would never see Slade again. Now was not the time to beat around the bush, to hesitate because of modesty, pride, or fear that the truth would hurt.

  “Do you remember that we were once in love?” I said. “Do you remember asking me to marry you?”

  The speed with which Slade turned away told me that he would prefer to discuss any other topic than this. “I do.” His voice was barely audible.

  “Then why have you been acting as if you’d forgotten? Why have you pretended we were strangers?”

  Slade shook his head, appearing helpless and ashamed, the way men often do when confronted with matters of the heart.

  I whispered the question that I was most timid to ask, whose answer I was most afraid to hear. “Have your feelings toward me changed?”

  He abruptly faced me and spoke with vehement passion: “My feelings for you remain exactly the same as when I proposed to you in that dreary, remote village where you live. I loved you then. I’ve loved you these three years. I love you now. If you think I’m so faithless that I would change my mind, then God damn you, Charlotte Brontë!”

  29

  I WAS TOO THUNDERSTRUCK TO SPEAK, AS ALARMED BY HIS LANGUAGE as overjoyed to hear that Slade was still in love with me.

  “For three years, I’ve missed you and longed for you, even though I tried to put you out of my mind,” he said. “One lapse of attention can be the death of a spy. Still, I kept wondering whether your feelings toward me had changed. I couldn’t write to you and ask—it was dangerous to smuggle letters out of or into Russia. I decided that I would finish this one last assignment, be done with spying, then go back to England and propose to you again.”

  This was a more ardent affirmation of love than I’d dreamed of hearing.

  “But when the time came, I couldn’t just waltz back into your life. I’m not the man you loved three years ago.” Slade’s features hardened into stoicism. “I’ve done terrible things since then.”

  A cold shadow of dread encroached upon me. I didn’t want to hear what Slade was going to say, but I’d forced him into a confession, and I must listen to it all.

  “While I was in Moscow, I befriended three Russian intellectuals.” Slade told me the story of Peter, Fyodor, and Alexander, which I have recorded in my tale of his adventures. “I betrayed them. I bought my way into the Tsar’s court with their deaths.”

  I felt a revulsion so strong that I took a step backward from Slade, down the path that led away from the workhouse. His gaze showed disgust at himself and pity for me. “I tried to warn you. Now do you wish you’d stayed away from me?”

  What I wished was that Slade had never gone to Russia. I hurried to defend him, even though
I deplored his exploitation of harmless men who would have been content to talk about revolution rather than take action if not for him. “You were doing your duty.”

  Slade gave me a bitter smile; he perceived my ambivalence. “The blood of those men is still on my hands. And they aren’t the only ones I’ve betrayed.”

  A cadence of foreboding drummed inside me. “The British agents? But you told me you weren’t a traitor.”

  “I didn’t give their names to the secret police, but I might as well have signed their death warrants.” Slade described how he’d worked as an informant for the Third Section while spying on the Russian government. He told me the story of the men and the firing squad in Butyrka Prison. “I used to meet with them on occasion, to share news. Wilhelm Stieber must have followed me to a meeting, although I never saw him—I swear, the scoundrel has a cloak of invisibility. He must have caught one of our agents, then tortured him into admitting he was a British spy and exposing the rest of us. I didn’t know what had happened until it was too late to save them. All I could do was run for my own life.”

  I hope my retelling of his story has conveyed what Slade had experienced. When he described the wild chase through the Kremlin and living as a fugitive in Moscow, I felt as harrowed as if I’d gone through it all myself. “How did you escape?”

  “By an accident of fate.” He told me how he’d been ambushed on his way out of Moscow and the four men who’d tried to murder him had been killed by the secret police. “They were British agents, my comrades, disguised as Russians. I figured that my superiors had discovered that my fellow spies had been caught. They blamed me, and they’d sent the agents to deliver me to justice. But I didn’t know for sure until you told me what Lord Eastbourne said.”

  “Why did you let your superiors think you were dead?” I asked. “Why didn’t you tell your side of the story?”

  “I did,” Slade said, “after I came back to England. A friend in Russia smuggled me into Poland. The Polish people don’t like Russia, which has taken over their country. Some were glad to give me food and shelter and money and teach me their language. I went on to Amsterdam, then stowed away on a ship and landed in England this past April. I wrote to Lord Palmerston at the Foreign Office, explaining what had happened. I warned him about Stieber, Kavanagh, and the invention. But I didn’t trust Palmerston enough to meet him face to face or tell him where to send a reply to my letter. So I don’t know whether he received it.”

  “I’m certain he didn’t,” I said, recalling our conversation at Osborne House.

  “At any rate, I doubted that I could walk into the Foreign Office, turn myself in, and expect my problems to be straightened out,” Slade said. “All I could do was proceed with my plan to search for Niall Kavanagh. And I wanted revenge on Wilhelm Stieber.”

  I’d known that Slade was a man of strong passions, but I’d never seen the full power of his hatred until now. Stieber had better pray to God that he and Slade never met again.

  “My quest led me to Katerina.” Slade spoke with such sorrow that I felt a stab of jealousy. “While I was in Whitechapel, looking for Stieber, I learned that she was his informant. I struck up an acquaintance with her and persuaded her to work for me.”

  I envisioned him using his charms on her, engaging her affections. I couldn’t bear the images that my mind conjured up.

  “I knew it was dangerous for her. I knew what Stieber would do to her if he found out. But I was like a speeding train that can only go in the direction that its track is laid. I killed her as surely as if I’d plunged a knife into her heart.” Slade clenched his hand and pantomimed stabbing. The rage in his voice underscored the violence of his words. “Katerina’s murder is another death I’m responsible for. And my actions have also put you in trouble with the law.”

  My emotions were in turmoil. My horror at the carnage he’d left in his wake now reverted to fury at Slade. If he wanted to add me to the list of people he’d harmed, he should accept responsibility for his most egregious crime against me. “You say you love me; you purport to be sorry I’ve been charged with murder. If you really care for me, then why did you take Katerina as your mistress?”

  “I did not,” Slade said, adamant.

  “Couldn’t you have obtained her cooperation without making love to her?” I was too beside myself to use politer words.

  “I never made love to her,” Slade insisted.

  “You’re forgetting that I saw you with Katerina, that night at the theater. I saw you kiss her.” My voice quavered at the memory. “You didn’t even care if I saw.”

  “I kissed Katerina precisely because I wanted you to see.”

  “What?” This was cruel torment. “Why?”

  “To protect you.” Slade rushed to explain: “When I came out of the theater with Katerina and you suddenly appeared, I wanted to rush to you, seize you in my arms, and never let you go. But I couldn’t.” Agony glazed his eyes. “You looked so beautiful and innocent. I couldn’t touch you, lest you be contaminated.”

  Slade held up his hands and regarded them as if they were smeared with filth from his sins. “I had to drive you away. So I climbed in the carriage with Katerina, and even though she and I weren’t on intimate terms, I kissed her.” He smiled glumly; he rubbed his cheek. “You didn’t see it, but she slapped me. I resisted my urge to look back at you. I couldn’t bear to see the look on your face. I hated to leave you, but it was for the best.”

  He leaned closer, his eyes shining fiercely in the remains of the daylight. “Now I’ve told you everything. Now that you know the worst, do you still love me? Will you still have me?”

  My heart urged me to cry, yes! My love for Slade was as ardent as ever. I was humbled by his belief that he no longer deserved me, and moved by his wish to protect me. But as blind as love can be, my mind couldn’t ignore the fact that eight people were dead and Slade deserved at least some of the blame, no matter that he’d done everything he’d done in service to his country and I believed he was a good man at heart.

  “I see you hesitate,” Slade said. “At the risk of driving another nail into my coffin, I must remind you that I’m a fugitive. I can’t wed you in church, lest I be caught and arrested. If you choose to be with me, it would be on the lam, without the benefit of clergy.”

  Once more I found myself walking the same path down which I’d sent Jane Eyre. She’d had to choose whether to live with Mr. Rochester in sin or flee and retain her honor. Now I faced my own crossroads. Slade was a criminal in the eyes of the law, and although I had stepped outside the law in order to find him, I was bound by convention. My love couldn’t stand against my bred-in-the-bone belief in the sanctity of marriage. Choosing to be with Slade meant estranging myself from everyone else who mattered to me. I must renounce him or lose my family, my friends, and my virtue. My choice must be the same as I’d made for Jane.

  Slade’s face took on a look of triumph blended with devastation. “I see that I’ve succeeded in destroying whatever regard you had for me. You are offended because I made you such an insulting proposition. You despise me now.”

  Of course I did not! Yet I was so upset that I couldn’t find words to explain my decision or lessen his guilt and misery. I could hardly believe that our positions had reversed—that I was the object of his unrequited love, or so he thought.

  “You should go,” Slade said. He wasn’t Mr. Rochester, who’d begged Jane to stay even though it would compromise her. He was a stronger man, with higher moral standards.

  I realized that my path must diverge from Jane’s: running away wouldn’t save me from disgrace. “I’m not leaving.”

  Slade looked at me as if he thought he’d heard incorrectly.

  “Not until I prove I’m innocent and exonerate you,” I clarified. I didn’t admit that I wasn’t ready for us to part even though we must. Now that I had found Slade, I could not immediately give him up, and I had ample justification for delaying. “I can’t go home while I’m in as much trouble
with the law as you are.”

  “Damn your obstinacy!” Slade burst out, venting his emotions in anger. “Just how do you intend to clear both our names?”

  I was silent: I had no idea. I’d plotted my course up until this point, but no further. Alas, I was like a heroine in a novel whose author did not know how to bring the story to a satisfying conclusion.

  “Are you hoping to turn Niall Kavanagh over to the police and say he’s the Whitechapel Ripper?” Slade said, incredulous and scornful. He was trying to offend me and thus drive me away. “And after that, track down Wilhelm Stieber, drag him before Lord Palmerston, and make him confess that he, not I, was responsible for the deaths of the British agents?”

  I knew how foolishly simplistic it sounded, but I supposed I had entertained thoughts along those lines. “That would do.”

  Slade regarded me pityingly. “You are so naïve.”

  “I admit that I am,” I retorted. “It takes a certain amount of naïveté to think that one can write a novel that people will buy. It takes even more to believe that one can foil a plot against the British Empire. The fact that I’ve done both things indicates that God rewards naïveté.”

  Slade groaned. “She invokes God as her accomplice!”

  “Why not? I’m a parson’s daughter.”

  Night had come; the moon had risen. The workhouse appeared even more intimidating than ever. But I took my courage in hand, and I moved along the path, circling the mansion.

  Slade followed. “What are you doing?”

  “Having a look around.”

  “I wish you had shot me and spared me the trouble of protecting you from yourself!”

  The windows of the house were dark now that there was no sun reflecting from them. “Is Niall Kavanagh here?”

  “No,” Slade said. “I’ve been keeping watch on the place for two days. He’s gone. Nobody in town seems to know where. That’s why I was breaking in—to see if he left any clues, or if there’s any sign of his invention inside.”