Bedlam: The Further Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë

by Laura Joh Rowland

  “Have you a ring?” Captain Arnold asked.

  Slade took from his pocket the ring I’d bought for myself. I proffered my hand, which was steady now. He slipped the gold band on my finger. My eyes filled with tears, through which the ring sparkled as brightly as if set with diamonds.

  “I pronounce you man and wife.” Captain Arnold said to Slade, “You may kiss your bride.”

  The crew grinned as Slade drew me into his arms. Our kiss was brief, possessive, and fierce. Captain Arnold offered his congratulations. The crew cheered. They improvised a wedding breakfast of bread and cheese enlivened with rum. Afterward, they played wild, exotic music on drums and peculiar stringed instruments. Imagining what Papa and Ellen and my other friends would say if they could see me, I felt a stab of sorrow because they were absent. But I would not ruin this day by dwelling on what I’d lost instead of on what I had. Slade and I danced, exhilarated and laughing.

  After the celebration, the captain and crew went back to work, but we lingered on the deck. We were both impatient for what necessarily followed a wedding, yet anxious because it might not live up to our expectations. At last Slade said, “You can go in first.”

  “All right.” Quaking, I went to the cabin where Captain Arnold had said we could stay now that we didn’t need to hide anymore. It was small, but the linens on the berth were clean, and it had a porthole that admitted the sunlight and sea wind. I undressed, then put on my plain white nightgown. My reflection in the mirror over the washstand looked less like a bride than a nun, I thought ruefully. I sat on the berth, pulling the sheets up to my chin.

  Soon Slade entered the room and shut the door. He looked as nervous as I felt. I watched him undress. Although I blushed, I did not turn away. We were married; I could know him as well as I wished. Slade stripped off his shoes, socks, shirt, and trousers, his motions clumsy and self-conscious. Wonder filled me as I saw him completely naked, his muscles lean and strong, his skin sleek with black hairs. The only nude males I’d ever seen before were Greek statues, and these had not prepared me for my first full sight of my husband. Slade’s aroused manhood moved me profoundly. I burned with need for him. Forgetting modesty, I undid my night-dress and let it fall around my waist.

  Such delight I took in the sharp breath that I heard Slade draw; what pride in the desire I saw in his eyes!

  He slid under the sheets with me. The press of his body against mine as we embraced was shockingly personal. There is no warmth like the warmth of bare flesh touching bare flesh. It consumed me as flames consume dry kindling. This physical part of marriage seemed an ordeal by fire. At first we were awkward together. His hand caught in my hair when he stroked it; when we kissed, our noses bumped; knees and elbows jarred as we attempted to meld ourselves together. I didn’t mind the awkwardness; it made our lovemaking seem real, rather than a fantasy of the sort I’d had during lonely nights. Nor did I fear what must happen, even though I’d heard married women speak in whispers about how painful it was. Rather, I feared that I would fail to please Slade, that he would find me lacking or offensive.

  But the fervor with which he kissed me soon convinced me that he found me as desirable as I could hope. And my own desire banished my inhibitions. When he caressed my breasts, I shamelessly moaned with pleasure. I eagerly caressed him, greedy to acquaint myself with his body, smug in my wifely right to enjoy him. I gloried in the exclamations of pleasure that I provoked from him. Between us we conjured up the ancient magic that all lovers do. We moved in graceful rhythm on the bed, turning and entwining and arching together, as if in a dance. I heard the ocean, and we became one with it. I smelled the sea on Slade, tasted salt on his skin. When I stroked his manhood, it pulsed with the swift current of blood inside. An urgent tide of desire rose in my own loins. I grew wet and slick with it. I gasped out, “I am ready.”

  Slade hesitated. “I fear I’ll hurt you.”

  “I don’t care!” I lay on my back, opening myself to him.

  He mounted me. The instant his manhood touched between my legs, my excitement leaped too high. I could not wait for Slade. I cried out as I soared to the crest of the ecstasy that I’d experienced for the first time, with him, three years ago in the forest in Scotland. As I rode the waves of pleasure, he entered me. I felt a resistance within, then a tearing sensation. My pleasure numbed the pain. Slade thrust, his breath coming faster, his eyes closed, his face and muscles straining. I held him tight, savoring his pleasure as much as my own. He arched his back and shouted. I felt his hardness break, then the warm flood of his release. As he lay against me, panting and exhausted, drenched in our perspiration, I clasped him as if he were a drowning man I’d pulled from the sea.

  We spent most of the next two days in our cabin. The crew tactfully left us alone. They set food and drink outside the door. Slade and I were lost to the world, occupied with mutual exploration. Our first lovemaking had dissolved the boundaries between us. My natural reserve was gone. Marriage negated the fact that Slade and I had known each other for but a short time. There was no intimacy in which we did not engage. I grew as familiar with Slade’s body as my own. But our discoveries were not confined to the physical. We talked for hours, sharing the most private details of our lives. I learned about Slade’s family and childhood, his years in the East India Company’s army, and his greatest experiences as a spy. He was surprised to hear about my newfound fame as an author and the literary friends I’d made. Everything we said and did had a serious, urgent significance, as if we were trying to cram a life’s worth of experience into these few brief hours.

  Perhaps they were all we would have.

  Two days after we’d left London, the ship neared the high cliffs, long beaches, and jagged rocks of the Normandy coast. Slade and I stood on the deck, ready to resume our search for Niall Kavanagh.

  35

  CAPTAIN ARNOLD LET US OFF AT THE DOCK IN CHERBOURG. THE afternoon was cloudy, with a damp, chill wind that rocked the ships in the harbor and chilled me to the bone. Cherbourg was a medieval town no more remarkable than any English port village. Slade and I walked through drab, malodorous streets so narrow that one could almost touch the gray buildings on either side. The people spoke French in a dialect I found hard to understand. This was not the France I’d always yearned to visit. If Cherbourg had any fine museums or monuments, I did not see them. We were a hundred and seventy miles from Paris, that great capital of fashion, art, and literature, but I didn’t care. I was living a miracle.

  I had boarded the ship a spinster and disembarked a married woman. I looked at Slade and thought, “That is my husband.” No other man was as handsome, strong, or dashing as mine. Glowing with pride, I wanted the whole world to see us together. I felt more confident about the future than I ever had, as if our marriage rendered us invincible.

  That was an illusion, as I would too soon discover.

  Slade scrutinized the scene for threats. “France seems quiet. There shouldn’t be any revolutions to bother us.”

  During the revolutions of 1848, the French populace had rebelled against government corruption and repression, high food prices, and unemployment. Radical societies staged public demonstrations in Paris. The government sent in the army, which fired on the mobs. Violent insurrection spread. King Louis-Philippe abdicated. The radicals formed a new government, but their haphazard reforms dissatisfied workers all over France. Three days of civil war against the army ensued. The streets of Paris ran with blood. Some fifteen hundred people were killed. The revolution was eventually suppressed by the military dictatorship that took power. From the turmoil rose Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, purported nephew of the first Napoleon. He symbolized revolution and authority, tradition and social reform; he promised everything to everybody. Elected President of France in December 1848, he spearheaded the formation of a new republic. I understood that it was a severe, oppressive regime, but it had indeed calmed down the country.

  “We’d better find lodgings,” Slade said.

  His
French was better than mine; I marveled at his facility with foreign languages as he quickly obtained a room in a modest inn. To fortify ourselves before we assailed Niall Kavanagh, we ate a good luncheon of chicken cooked in a sauce of cider and cream, fish stew with shrimp and mussels, cinnamon rice pudding, and a strong apple brandy. Then we set out for the château.

  Following the directions given us by Sir William, we walked east out of town. The château was a sixteenth-century miniature castle, built of gray stone in hybrid Gothic and Renaissance style, whose two round towers with pointed roofs rose above woods surrounded by orchards. On this gloomy late afternoon it had a foreboding, sinister aspect; but I, in my high spirits, thought it romantic.

  “What is our plan?” I asked Slade.

  “To hell with plans,” he said. “Little good they’ve done us. We’ll play it by ear this time.”

  He rang the bell attached to the locked iron gate. No one answered our summons. A cold, thin rain began to fall. Slade said, “You could slide between the wall and the gate. I can climb over the top.”

  We did. Inside, we walked up a short road, beneath dense foliage. The owner liked privacy, Sir William had mentioned. He was a wealthy amateur wild game hunter who collected animals for zoos and specimens for scientists. He was presently away on an expedition in India. An expanse of paving stones encircled the château and separated it from the forest. We marched up to the front door, an iron-banded affair recessed in an arch. Slade employed the brass knocker.

  “Niall Kavanagh?” he called.

  There was no sound except the rain pelting leaves. I backed out of the arch, looked up at the château, and saw a movement in an upstairs window—a curtain lifted and hastily dropped. “He’s here.”

  Repeated knocking and calling did no good. Slade tested the door; it was locked. We circled the house, unsuccessfully trying other entrances. At the back we came upon mews and storage buildings. By the wall Slade found a square structure with a stone base, built on a slant, perhaps two feet tall on its high side, covered by two iron doors.

  “It must be the entrance to the cellar.” He cautiously lifted open one door, then the other. Inside, wooden stairs descended, vanishing into darkness.

  I have an instinctive fear of dark places underground. “We aren’t going down there, are we?”

  “We aren’t,” Slade said. “You stay here.”

  Marriage hadn’t changed his high-handed way of ordering me about. Vexed, I said, “I won’t let you go. It can’t be safe.”

  “We didn’t come all this way to be safe. And this appears to be the only way to get to Niall Kavanagh. Don’t worry—I’ll be careful.”

  Marriage hadn’t given me any power to control him, either. I could only watch nervously as Slade reached in his pocket and produced matches and a candle. Holding the lit candle in front of him, he cautiously descended the stairs, whose shaft had walls made of earth, stones, and timbers. The stairs were steep, their end too far underground to see. Suddenly he yelled, plunged downward, and vanished. I heard a series of bumps, then silence.

  “John!” Terrified, I bent over the entrance and peered down. Did Slade lie unconscious at the bottom of the stairs? I tried not to think that he might be dead. I saw nothing. What should I do?

  I had read enough novels to know that the heroine who ventures into dark cellars inevitably meets with disaster, but I could not abandon Slade. There was no one to rescue him except me. I crawled backward down the stairs, clinging to the risers above me as my feet groped for the ones below. The daylight framed by the doors overhead did not illuminate my way very far. I was soon engulfed in darkness, blind. Reaching the point where Slade had disappeared, I called his name; I received no answer. I tested the step with my foot. It seemed as intact and level as any of the others. Thinking that Slade must have slipped and fallen, I lowered my weight onto it.

  It gave way as I let go of the upper step to which I’d been holding. I fell screaming through a distance that seemed like miles. My feet hit a hard surface; then I tumbled head over heels down a steep, slippery ramp. My screams echoed in the utter blackness that surrounded me. The ground leveled out, and I stopped in mid-tumble when my feet struck something. It grunted and said, “Bloody hell!”

  “John?” Glad I was to hear his voice, but terrified that I’d hurt him. “Are you all right?”

  “I was until you kicked me in the back. Are you?”

  Sitting up, I moved my arms and legs. “Yes.” I ached all over, but nothing seemed broken.

  “What are you doing down here? I told you to stay outside.”

  “I followed you because I was worried about you.”

  “Well, now we’re both trapped,” Slade said glumly.

  My hand found his; we held onto each other in silence for a moment. “At least we’re together.”

  “For better or worse.” Slade chuckled. He withdrew his hands from mine. “Now where did that candle go?” There were fumbling noises. “Ah.”

  I heard a scrape, and a flame flared; Slade relit the candle. We stood, and he held the candle aloft. I saw ancient stone walls slick with moisture and became conscious of the dank, earthen, and animal smells in the chilly air. The flagstone floor was littered with dirt, straw, and rodent droppings. The light didn’t penetrate the farthest reaches of the cavernous room. We could barely see the rafters some twenty feet above.

  Slade shone the candlelight on the ramp down which we’d tumbled. “I’m ready to leave this pit, aren’t you?”

  We crawled up the ramp. At the top, we stood and looked up at the trapdoor through which we’d fallen. Slade raised his hands, but there was at least three feet of space between his fingertips and the door. “Climb on my back,” he said.

  I obeyed, clutching at him while he swayed. Kneeling awkwardly on his shoulders, I pushed up on the door. “I can’t move it.”

  Slade lowered me. “There must be another way out of here.”

  We slid down the ramp, then explored the cellar. The candle’s flame elongated. “That draft must be coming from a door,” I said.

  As we forged onward, a large square object came into view. It was a cage with thick iron bars that looked big enough to contain the Minotaur.

  “The owner must use this for the wild animals he brings home,” Slade said.

  A creaking sound came from overhead. We looked up as a rectangle of brightness opened in the ceiling. A shaft of daylight beamed upon us. An object came hurtling down. It crashed on the floor with the sound of glass breaking. It was a large bottle, now in fragments. The liquid it had contained spread over the floor. From the liquid rose fumes that smelled of chemicals, pungent and sickly sweet, disturbingly familiar.

  “It’s ether!” I’d had an unfortunate and unforgettable experience with ether in 1848.

  Slade and I dodged more bottles that shattered. We covered our noses and mouths with our sleeves and hurried toward the far end of the cellar, but the fumes overtook us. Slade said, “I have to put out the candle or they’ll ignite the fumes.” He blew on the candle. Above us, the trapdoor slammed shut. We were plunged into darkness. The fumes filled the cellar. I couldn’t help breathing them. Lightheaded and drowsy, I collapsed, then fell into deep, impenetrable unconsciousness.

  A throbbing headache awakened me. I opened my eyes to dim, hazy, yellow-tinged light. My body was stiff from lying on the hard surface under me. Slowly the world gained definition. I saw a ceiling made of rusty metal a few feet above my face. When I turned my head to my left, fuzzy vertical stripes, crossed at wider intervals by horizontal ones, emerged from the haze. I blinked, and the stripes turned into iron bars. My wits came back in a cold rush of dread. I remembered the cellar, the cage, the breaking bottles, and the ether fumes, which I no longer smelled. But where was Slade?

  I turned my head toward my right. He lay near me, flat on his back. His eyes were closed, but his chest rose and fell with even breaths. He was unconscious but alive. My sigh of relief caught in my throat as I realized tha
t we were inside the cage . . . and that there was someone else in the cellar with us. I could hear breathing that had the ragged, wheezy sound of bad lungs. Paper rustled; a pen scratched. I smelled liquor and a fetid, sour human scent. A man sat on a stool some ten paces from the cage, a lamp on the floor beside him. He hunched over a notebook propped on his knees, writing furiously. His white shirt and dark trousers hung on his thin body. Tousled, shaggy red hair partially concealed his face; I could only see a beaked nose and the glint of gold-rimmed spectacles. He lifted a wine bottle, his hand trembling as he gulped a thirsty draught. His visage struck such a bolt of dreadful recognition into my heart that I sat up and stared.

  During the earlier part of the adventures I describe herein, I had encountered the ghosts of persons beloved to me, and now it was happening again. Many times had I seen the man before me in just such an attitude, on nights when drink and drugs tormented his mind and he scribbled poems until he collapsed from exhaustion. Many times had I heard him laboring to breathe while the consumption ravaged his lungs. Three years ago I had stood by his deathbed. And here he was, resurrected.

  “Branwell,” I said, my voice raspy from the ether, cracking in disbelief.

  He started, dropped his pen, and turned to me. Now I realized that this apparition was not my brother. His nose was not as long or sharp as Branwell’s, his face not as gaunt. Branwell had died at age thirty-one; this man was at least a decade older. Yet the resemblance was still astounding. He had the same coloring, the same flush of liquor on his cheeks. He, too, had once been handsome. He had a similar loose, sensual mouth, and brown eyes that were sunken and bloodshot, fevered by madness. He rose and walked toward me with Branwell’s unsteady gait. Stopping short of the cage, he glared at me.