My new acquaintance emitted a manic giggle, delighted at the opportunity to tell her stories to someone who hadn’t heard them several times, and gave her name as Margaret Laine—“Mrs, that is, but you can call me Maggie, hehehe”—before leaping into revelations about the woman who had just left the chair. “Do you know Miss Powers? That is, you can’t have met her Outside, of course (hehehe) but it’s always possible you were here earlier and our paths didn’t happen to cross…”
“As far as I know, this is my first time here. And I just met Miss Powers this morning.”
“Oh, well, she’s one of our more (hehehe) what you might call infamous residents, had a child”—her voice dropped—“ ‘out of wedlock,’ and when it came about that her young man was already married, she was thrown out on the streets. After the child died—starved, I hear—Miss Powers got some acid and went to his house, but there was a struggle because she was too weak to throw it, so he lost his hand but she lost her face. They put her here instead of in Broadmoor. Can’t imagine he’s comfortable, knowing she may get out in a few years.”
“Do people ever get tired of waiting, and simply escape?” I asked, helping myself to a length of rather pretty orange yarn from the tangle she’d arrived with.
“Ooh, that’s not easy. Even a man’d find it hard to go over the wall—I’ve not heard of it happening. And a woman? Never. People don’t escape from Bedlam—except (hehehe) if they’re not here.”
Hiding my smile, I urged her to explain, and heard the story concerning The Vanishing of Lady Vivian. It was mostly patent nonsense and wild speculation, with a climax of the lady holding a shotgun on her nurse and family and making away wickedly in the family’s Bentley. But I nodded, and made occasional sounds of appreciation, and waited until she had exhausted the imaginary exploits of this feminine Scarlet Pimpernel.
“What about the nurse?” I asked when she had run dry.
“Oh, she never came back, she was that frightened by the whole thing. Sent in her resignation by letter. Or perhaps she wired it—in any event, no one here has laid eyes on her since the two of them left for Waterloo station.” I drew breath to prompt her into a description of Nurse Trevisan, but a prompt proved unnecessary. “Just as well, that nurse was a most peculiar woman. Not bad, I’m not saying that, but she was all hoity-toity. Kept to herself, like. Though not with Miss Beaconsfield—oh, I know she’s Lady Vivian, but we don’t have much time for titles and such here, the nurses usually called her Miss like everyone else. Nurse Trevisan seemed to like her just fine. The two of them would talk on by the hour. It was funny to see them walking, the one all tall and dark, the other tiny and pale.”
“Do you think they might have gone off together?”
Such was the power of societal assumptions—a nurse would never side with her patient against an institution—that even the mad did not question it. And when they did, they leapt to a conclusion that I would not have considered the obvious one.
“You think Miss Beaconsfield paid her off, to help her escape? They do say she robbed her family blind. I’ll bet that’s what they did, plotted how to do it. That would explain all those long talks, wouldn’t it?”
“Still, merely getting outside the walls wouldn’t be enough, would it? If she paid the nurse to help her escape, where would the nurse take her? Did either of them ever talk about Cornwall, for example?”
“Why Cornwall?”
“From the surname—Trevisan. Isn’t that Cornish?”
“Far as I know, she’s a Londoner like me.”
“But her family. Did she ever mention…I don’t know, Falmouth? Newquay? St Ives, perhaps?” Weren’t there loads of artists in St Ives?
But Mrs Laine was shaking her head. “I’d go to Paris, I would. They have caffs there on the pavement, sit and drink your tea—coffee, more like—and watch the world go by, nobody to know you. Nobody to find you and make you come back here, wash the dishes, make the beds, cook dinners out of nothing…”
Mrs Laine was not talking about Bedlam. Mrs Laine was talking about her own home, a place from which at least twice, to judge by the scars I could see at the edge of her sleeve, she’d made an attempt at a final escape.
I let her prattle for a while, about nothing in particular, until my lack of replies drove her in search of a more responsive audience. In the relative silence—the woman tormenting the piano had been taken out for her airing, the birds were dozing, and the room had settled into the buzz of a dozen conversations—I let my fingers perform their clumsy work while my mind nibbled away at what I had learned, and what I had not. As always, the latter began to loom ever larger, until finally I thrust the needle to a resting point and looked around for my next informant.
Instead, I saw a thin young girl sitting right up by the window, face turned to the brightness. Her head was covered by a snug, old-fashioned cap, tied beneath her chin. Her hands were similarly covered, not by gloves but by mittens, the padding too thick to permit her to turn the pages of the small book in her lap. As I watched, her hand came up to her temple, encountered the various layers of resistance, and dropped down. A moment later it rose again, this time to swipe the mitten cloth across first one eye, then the other.
I gathered my ladylike handicraft together and crossed the room to stand in the window near the girl. Her head came up. She gave me a vague and unfocussed smile. I returned it, then stood for a time looking out. Next to the building was a drying yard, rapidly filling with bed-sheets that had waited for the rain to stop. Over its head-height wall I could make out gardens, with lawns and gravel paths, flower beds and mature trees rising above the high surrounding wall at the back. Off to my left were the gates and lodge-house, with the men’s side beyond the drive. Women with nurses were strolling the paths, while others—the securely non-violent patients, one assumed—were working their mallets through a soggy game of croquet.
Above the tree-line, even myopic eyes could see the hospital across the way, with the Roman Catholic cathedral behind it—dirty, blunt workaday buildings that made Bethlem look, somewhat ironically, like a green and friendly island loomed about by slums.
I took the chair next to the girl, startling her. She leaned forward to see more clearly. As I’d thought, the poor thing was nearly blind.
“No,” I said, “we haven’t met. I’m new—the name’s Mary, though I’m not certain of the rest. They took your spectacles, too, didn’t they? And honestly, what was the architect thinking, facing all the windows north? It’s not like London ever has sun hot enough to roast the inhabitants. Perhaps he was afraid we’d get too excited if we had a few rays of sunshine. Would you like me to read to you for a bit? That’s a book of poetry, isn’t it?”
The thick mittens tightened over the small volume as if I had threatened to toss it in the fire. Closer up, I could see the reason for her bindings: the hair at her temple was gone, with nothing but a ragged fuzz. Trichotillomania was known to Aristotle, who placed it alongside nail-biting, coal-chewing, and paederasty. For these arise in some by nature, and in others (such as those who have been the victims of lust from childhood) from habit.
Not that I thought this girl would benefit from a lecture on Aristotelian ethics. “I could read something else, if you’d prefer. Or we could just sit. I’m working on a piece of needle-work here, although it doesn’t seem to be coming out quite what the designer had in mind.”
We sat for a time, me filling in the stiff fabric with blots of coloured yarn, her listening to my coarsely-woven sleeve go up and down. Her hands relaxed, and eventually the left one took clumsy hold on the little book and held it out in my direction. I laid down my art and took it from her.
“Emily Dickinson? Cheerful sort of woman. Did you know that nearly all her poems came to light only after she’d died? And they say she was a gardener. Shall I read where the ribbon is?”
The cotton-covered head nodded, so I
pulled the ribbon aside to run my eyes down the page, becoming more uneasy with every line:
The Soul has Bandaged moments –
When too appalled to stir –
She feels some ghastly Fright come up
And stop to look at her –
Salute her, with long fingers –
Caress her freezing hair…
I could not help glancing over at what this girl had inflicted on her own hair. But she had an expectant look on her face—and she seemed familiar enough with the volume.
I cleared my throat and read aloud, through the goblin-sipping and the bomb-dancing, the shackled feet and the welcoming Horror.
Why couldn’t it have been Wordsworth? Even the bee in this poem was long-dungeoned before rising from his Rose. I read down to the last words—“These, are not brayed of Tongue”—and turned the page, only to see what was clearly the beginning of the next poem.
“Hmm. That seems to be the end of it. Can it be a printer’s error? Or is that actually how it ends? And you know, Miss Dickinson might have been a gardener, but she never studied honeybees. It’s the females that do the work, not the males. Typical, males getting the credit.”
The girl smiled, no sign of distress in her face now. I returned the smile, even though she probably could not see it, and turned the page to the next unsettling, agoraphobic, grammatically challenging poem.
Chapter Fourteen
THUS PASSED MY DAY AMIDST the lunatics. Bedlam was a most efficient machine: dinner at 1:00—perfectly edible, with several courses and vegetables that were not cooked to a pulp—followed by supervised airings in the garden, tea at half-four, then a poetry reading and group singing before our supper. The nurses counted every patient going outside, every patient coming back in, and every knife and fork taken from the locked cutlery box. The ward’s scissors were kept at all times on the nurses’ chatelaines, which made for multiple trips back and forth when a patient was working with something requiring much snipping.
All day, patients were kept fully occupied—if not with group activities, undemanding jobs, and outdoor time, then with water treatments, massage, and talk therapy. The nurses were watchful, and skilled at easing tensions, getting us through the day without bloodshed. Or at any rate, without anyone shedding someone else’s blood. And the haggard woman with the heavily scarred arms only managed a small cut on her forearm before the nurse caught her, prising away the scrap of broken glass the patient had found in the flower bed during her airing.
(I surmised, from the tired exclamations of the nurses, that the place was still living with the results of a bomb dropped on the front lawn by a Zeppelin, which had destroyed every window on the north side. I also gathered that there were plans to move the asylum to the suburbs, down near Beckenham, a move that was much anticipated.)
By the time we sat down to our evening meal, I was exhausted, shattered of nerves, and craving strong drink, but I had managed three more conversations—sensible conversations, that is, not those that spiralled into personal delusion and fixation—concerning Nurse Trevisan. My initial impression of her was confirmed: she was competent, efficient, somewhat aloof, and had a soft spot for Vivian Beaconsfield.
When it came to Lady Vivian herself, the consensus was surprisingly sympathetic, despite the title tacked onto her name. She had been here since 1920, and was regarded as one of the permanent residents, the small number of women who were theoretically curable (thus not housed with the permanently damaged) but too refined to join the paupers in a county asylum.
She was melancholic, rather than manic. When she first came, she talked little and was liable to fits of silent weeping. Nurses had to urge her from her bed, urge her to place food in her mouth. They would lead her out of doors, and prompt her to move rather than stand in one place, head down. She was not permitted visitors in those early months, and when it was noticed that letters from home sent her back into her bed, those stopped, too.
Once the outer world had been thus walled away, the fragile creature began to make timorous ventures from her protective shell. A smile, a nod, the occasional brief conversation. She would actually choose a chair in the day room rather than wait to be placed in one, and participate in the arrangement of her hair, clothing, and room. Her equanimity faltered when Nurse Denver, one of her favourites, left to care for an ailing mother, but a few weeks later Nurse Trevisan arrived, and returned to the patient the sense of security she craved.
I was puzzled at the thought that Lady Vivian’s continued presence at Bedlam was by her own choice. However, the view was unanimous: many patients less balanced than she had been long since de-committed and sent back into the world. She looked to be here for life (or, at least, for as many years into the future as her family would pay).
If this was true, I was left with three possibilities. One, the doctors knew something about Lady Vivian that her fellow patients did not. Or, Vivian herself strongly wanted to stay here, where it was “safe.” Third, that despite the laws and reforms of the Victorian era, Vivian’s family—namely, Lord Selwick—was quietly paying the hospital to lock his sister inside walls.
I dreaded the first; I doubted the third. And if staying here was in fact Vivian’s choice—at least, until the previous week—then I for one would have been happy to let her be.
I sighed down at the warped tin plate on the table before me.
However, she had not chosen to stay.
Thus, I needed another head injury.
* * *
—
I picked my nurse with care: one large enough to be somewhat clumsy, young enough to be inexperienced, and among those who had been there since the morning, that she might be going home soon.
I helped gather up my neighbours’ plates, setting off with a precariously balanced armload towards the scullery window. As I came even with my chosen victim, I stopped dead, emitting a faint sound of distress. I swayed; the tin plates rattled; and I fell—directly into the young nurse.
She collapsed beneath me with a shriek, hands pushing against my inert torso. By the time she rolled me off, I had what I needed—and as I made a dramatic recovery from my swoon, scrambling upright with the help of her skirts, I returned the chatelaine with the remaining keys back onto her belt.
Fortunately, it was late enough in the day that no one was eager to drag me off to have my skull x-rayed, least of all me. Doubly fortunately, I appeared hale enough that they returned me to my room and not to the sick wing.
My private room with the lock mechanism on both sides.
A mechanism that gave way to my stolen key—the one that had been bright with wear.
It was well after midnight when I put my head out into the dimly-lit hallway. Seeing no motion, hearing nothing but the hive-like chorus of many snores, I stepped out. Shutting the door noiselessly, I padded down the gallery towards the asylum’s central rooms. But when I tried my key on the door to the physician’s office, it did not work.
I’d expected it might not: master keys sometimes had their limits. However, a nearby room that I’d seen the nurses going in and out of did open to it. Inside, I found some comfortable old chairs, three small tables, a schedule on the wall showing the dates for upcoming concerts, poetry readings, and lantern-slide lectures, an ice-box, and a gas ring for making cocoa or tea.
Too much to hope for some meat skewers or old-fashioned hat-pins, but in a basket near the door I found a jumble of broken and confiscated items, including a choice of impromptu pick-locks. I helped myself to a sturdy hair-pin and a splayed paper-clip, and returned to the doctor’s door, where I was soon inside. And as I’d hoped, I found the key to the file cabinets inside a desk drawer: male doctors did not wear chatelaines on their belts, nor did they spoil the cut of their clothing by loading their pockets with keys.
Lady Vivian’s file was surprisingly thick for a patient who had bee
n here barely five years, but it proved to include records going back to 1916: the admissions papers from her very first asylum. I read through them, then skimmed through the six other periods of hospitalisation that followed, from four different institutions. All the pages had words and phrases in common: brought by family, voluntary admission, mania, violent outburst, certified insane, melancholia, delusions, and self-harm. Again and again, Vivian would arrive in a state of desperation; she would slowly calm; she would return to normal; and she would be discharged as cured.
Except for Bedlam. Oh, the same words were there, but whereas the longest she had spent in any of her previous asylums was nine months, she had remained here since her involuntary arrival in 1920—becoming a voluntary boarder in 1921.
Towards the end of the file, there was a notation by the same young doctor who had interviewed me that morning. Dr Rawlins’ handwriting read:
Patient asked if her certification had been rescinded and was told that yes, she was on the records as voluntary. Patient asked if that meant she was permitted to leave, and was told yes, given a 72-hour notice.
I looked at the date: a little over four weeks ago.
So, why had the dratted woman not simply given her notice and moved out? Or if her departure was a sudden whim, why not write a note to her niece and sister-in-law, to tell them that she had decided to fly away? Vivian was a woman of thirty-four, with an inheritance. Once Bedlam had pronounced her sane, she could go where she wished. So why not follow the brief formalities?
Possibly, because she had made no such decision. Possibly, because someone had decided that she should not return to the place she considered home.
I returned the file to its drawer and locked the cabinet. Where had they put me? I wondered. Under “A” for Anonymous?