Maria weeps, kneeling by her mother, who splutters a single sentence.
‘Free, Maria, and none shall remember you.’
Then she falls silent. Maria speaks some soft female words which Abigail cannot hear. She finds she cannot move, and next to her she feels her husband pinned by the same invisible chains.
Finally Maria stands, and looks down at her mother. She shakes her head – once, twice, three times – as if to dislodge something within, and then raises her head to the ceiling of the chapel and lets out another scream, one which seems to shake the wicked old fabric of Brooke House just as the thunderclaps had done. Abigail feels that pressure again, even stronger than before, and the noise is everywhere inside her as well as everywhere outside, like a cannonball thundering down from her brain to her body.
Then it stops. Maria steps away from her mother’s body and walks towards the door. She stops beside the hunched figure of Charles Horton, and places one hand on his head. She looks at Abigail.
‘He will recover soon. But he will forget me. It was my mother’s scheme. I see it now. All this sin will collect upon her; all these terrible events and stories must be hers alone. She made the doctor kill her. She has cursed her own soul, in order to save mine. God will know whose hand drove the knife.’
She takes the hand from Horton’s head, and places it on Abigail’s cheek.
‘I suppose I will live a life, after all,’ she says.
Abigail senses a crackle of something like electricity beneath the fingers which stroke her face, and a pressure behind her eyes.
‘She is gone from your mind, Abigail. The princess who haunts you is no more.’
She takes back her hand, and smiles at Abigail. A beautiful smile, but a sad one.
‘And now, you will forget me.’
And she leaves.
PART FIVE
The Forgotten Woman
Persons who have children are more difficult to cure than those who are childless.
Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind (1812)
Madness is a distemper of such a nature, that very little of real use can be said concerning it.
John Monro, Remarks on Dr Battie’s Treatise on Madness (1758)
A Treatise on Moral Projection
Within the finer classes, it may only be military officers who can be said to have seen unspeakable things. I have read of numerous cases where such men lose their sanity, temporarily or permanently, as a result of the awful scenes which play out inside their minds night after night.
Just such an awful scene awaited me on that long-ago morning in Brooke House. I awoke to witness the most terrible of mutilations. I lay on the floor of the madhouse chapel, with no recollection of how I came to be there. Beside me, laid out at the feet of the priest on the wall, was a strange woman, dead from a terrible wound in her throat.
It is impossible to describe the sense of panicked shock I felt at that moment. Try, if you will, to put yourself in my position. Try to imagine waking on a cold floor, with no conception as to how you arrived there, next to the body of a dead woman whom you do not recognise. It is the stuff of the very worst of nightmares.
But then, the nightmare darkened even further. Because by my side, lying on the floor next to me, was my letter-knife. The way it lay on the ground told an obvious tale: I had dropped it as I had fallen. The dark red stain on its blade told another tale, and I glanced from it to the poor woman’s open throat, and I struggled not to run from that place, screaming.
Squatting on his knees above the dead woman, inspecting her injuries with an awful calm was a man, dark and quiet and pale, who looked up from the body and looked at me intently. It was Constable Horton – a flash of memory, disconnected from anything I was then experiencing, came to me then, of him visiting me in my study while I burned papers in the fire. But which papers? And why did I burn them?
Sitting on one of the benches to the side of the room, quiet and eyes downcast and moving her lips in prayer, was Horton’s wife.
I stood, and saw another figure, a shadow in the back of the chapel, his head down. It was John Burroway.
I forced my mind to travel backwards in time. I tried to make sense of dozens of images and sensations, but none of them would adhere to an Idea. They were as useless as the gibberish of idiots. There were flashes of memory – such as that rendering Constable Horton and I in my study – but they did not serve to enlighten me. I knew where I was – the former chapel at Brooke House. I knew the people who were there with me, the ones who were living, at least. But I did not know this dead woman. And I did not know why she was there.
I stood, slowly, and at the same time Constable Horton rose from his position by the body. He walked over to me and put a hand under my arm, helping me to stand on two feet. I thanked him, but then he looked into my face and said:
‘Dr Bryson, I am arresting you for the murder of this woman. Please stay calm while I secure us a carriage to convey us to Wapping.’
Such was the madness of the scene that I did not at once debate this with him. It was a mistake, of course, but it was an understandable one. The woman was killed with my own knife. Anyone with eyes to see would know that.
But why would I have killed her? This was a question which much vexed Constable Horton over the following hours and days; one word he used, over and over, was motive, and as I insisted on telling him, I had no such motive.
As we walked from the chapel, John Burroway looked at me, and I spoke to him.
‘What happened here, John? Did you witness it?’
He said nothing, and his eyes were murky and feeble. It occurred to me that whatever had happened might have deepened his own idiocy; that he may have been shocked into a kind of silence. This turned out not to be the case, but I did not question it further at that time.
I was taken to the police office in Wapping and was interrogated there by Horton. He was joined, soon after my arrival, by Aaron Graham, the man who had paid for the treatment of Horton’s wife. They seemed as perplexed as I by the story, such as it was. In any case, it soon became clear that my involvement in the matter was a secondary consideration. Of more paramount concern was the identity of the dead woman in the chapel. Her body was also taken to Wapping by Horton, and there she was identified as Maggie Broad.
To write of this now is to tell a tale which the whole nation recognises: how Mrs Broad made her fortune in New South Wales, having been sent there as a lowly Suffolk thief, and how she had returned to this country with, so it seemed, the single purpose of exterminating a group of men who called themselves the Sybarites.
The story has persisted down the decades, not least because it has never been established why or how Mrs Broad killed these men. She had no apparent relation with them. The men were locked up in their houses, and many of them were under the watchful eye of constables and watchmen (those days, of course, preceded the establishment of our modern Metropolitan Police). The magistrates responsible for investigating these matters were particularly close-mouthed, saying only that Mrs Broad had been the killer, and that this was the end of it.
There were unanswered questions littered throughout this tale. So confused were the magistrates that I was quickly released, for despite the apparently obvious nature of that scene in the chapel, it was not at all clear that I had killed Mrs Broad. It was certainly impossible to state why I should do such a thing.
And sitting behind that was the most telling confusion of all: I could not remember how I had come to be in the chapel, but neither could Constable Horton or his wife. What on earth can have happened? This strange emptiness at the heart of the story infected everyone’s thinking.
I had no memory of Mrs Broad arriving at Brooke House the night she died in our chapel. Why had this woman with this extraordinary history made her way to Brooke House? Which only led me to the most important question of all, to my own personal view: why had I killed her?
For it soon transpired
that I had, indeed, killed her. It is something I have never before admitted. But there was a witness to it.
Constable Horton did try and speak to poor John Burroway after that terrible night, but he abandoned the effort after a short time. John was almost completely silent, unable or unwilling to recall anything that had happened, anxious and miserable. Those who knew him, such as I, could clearly understand his trouble, but those who did not, such as Horton, ascribed it simply to his idiocy, and discarded him as a source of information. As it turned out, this was a great mistake indeed.
I did not return to Brooke House. Dr Monro decided this was for the best, and the magistrates agreed. I was given a new position, with immediate effect, at St Luke’s Hospital, an institution founded on more progressive principles than Monro’s. I had my own rooms, and was given the opportunity to work on more theoretical matters, undisturbed by the needs of individual patients.
About a fortnight after my arrest and release, John Burroway came to visit me at St Luke’s with his sister – one of the nurses in Brooke House and, as far as I was aware, a reliable woman. She said John had told her that he knew something important about the night in the chapel, and that he didn’t know whether to tell me. She had told him he must tell me the truth.
John looked profoundly unhappy with the circumstance. I asked him what the matter was, and he said he would only tell me in secret – that is, without his sister there. After a good deal of debate, she finally agreed to leave us alone. And then, after even more debate and prodding, he blurted out that I had, in fact, been the one to kill Mrs Broad with the letter-knife. He had seen me do so.
I had, of course, suspected this might have been the case. But it was what John said next which changed everything, and which set me on the course I have been navigating these past three decades.
‘She made you do it,’ he said.
I was astonished by this answer. It was so unexpected.
‘How can that possibly be?’ I asked him.
‘She can reach inside your head, and make you do things,’ John said. ‘She made you kill her, and then she made you forget.’
‘But why? Why would anyone do such a thing?’
‘She was protecting her daughter.’
‘Her daughter? Who was her daughter?’
John frowned, then, as if trying to work something out. And then his face cleared.
‘Doctor, you told me if this happened, I was to tell you where I’d hidden your secret notes.’
And then he told me about the notes I had made, about Maria Cranfield and her mother, about the strange powers I have described to you within these pages. He had brought the notes with him from their hiding place in Brooke House, and I read them with growing fear and amazement.
The course of my life’s work was set. And herewith I present its fruits, with this treatise.
Note from Dr Marchand: Bryson’s delusions persist and have not lessened with the years. Indeed, they grow stronger and have achieved a kind of perfection. He is in good health physically, and in person he is a coherent interlocutor, though somewhat prickly as to criticism.
It may be this, indeed, that prevents his recovery. He is unwilling to countenance that the main elements of his story are fantasies. He still believes that events at Brooke House took place in the manner in which he describes, and that he has spent the intervening thirty years researching this strange theory of his while working alongside London’s new police as an expert on mental illness.
It need not be added here that there continues to be no evidence for the material found within. There are no records of a patient at Brooke House named Maria Cranfield. The only mention is within Dr Bryson’s own notes, clearly fabricated at some point or other. So perfect is Dr Bryson’s fantasy that he claims he himself destroyed the official Brooke House records, under the so-called ‘influence’ of Mrs Broad.
He is convinced that his theories are pertinent and reasonable, and is genuinely outraged that Dr Braid has outlined a similar idea, though with none of Dr Bryson’s crazed histories. His rooms at St Luke’s are tidy and, in many ways, could be the consulting rooms of a physician at any of England’s new asylums. While the costs of his treatment continue to be met by whatever benefactor is supporting him, I recommend his continued confinement.
DR JEREMIAH MARCHAND, St Luke’s Hospital, May 1846
WAPPING
The smart carriage, horses and driver outside the River Police Office clearly indicate who is inside. Horton sees them blocking the street, and decides to go straight home instead of visiting the office. He has no wish to see Aaron Graham.
So he turns into Lower Gun Alley, and sees a rather more welcome sight – an open window on the first floor with steam or smoke drifting out of it in an unhurried way. Inside Abigail must be cooking something. His supper may be waiting for him.
He has been careful to be home for supper, on time and every day, this past month. Since her return from Brooke House, Abigail has been her old self – curious, amused, occasionally severe. The woman who had pursued her through her dreams has gone, though Abigail cannot describe why. The treatment at Brooke House, which had ended so bizarrely in that little chapel, had apparently worked.
He has wanted to spend every moment he can with her, and for the first week this is how he behaved, until she shoved him out of the door of their rooms one morning and insisted he not return until the end of the working day. ‘Arrest felons!’ she’d shouted. ‘And leave me alone!’
So he’d returned to work – at much the same time as his magistrate, John Harriott. The old bulldog is somewhat quieter than had been his wont before his illness, but his mind was just as quick and his bark just as loud. He’d grabbed hold of the tail-end of the Sybarites investigation and shaken it until Sidmouth himself had told him to stop.
Graham has been an irregular visitor to Wapping, and while Harriott is much his old self, Graham is not. His clothes are just as fine and bright as they ever were, but his exposure to the fierce winds of journalism have buffeted him severely. He has been made the scapegoat for what the newspapers are calling a Conspiracy of Silence regarding the deaths of the Sybarites. Sidmouth has made him a scapegoat, but one of a very particular kind. The deaths have been pinned on Maggie Broad, but when the obvious question is asked as to how a single woman had managed to eviscerate a half-dozen gentlemen under the very noses of the constabulary, the Bow Street Runners and the magistracy, answer comes there none. It is to Graham that the question has been put, repeatedly and with growing volume.
Horton feels some sympathy for the man – not least because of his glimpse into Graham’s tortured domestic arrangements. But this sympathy is gossamer-thin, is veined with distrust, and is dissolved completely when Horton steps into his rooms and realises that Graham is in fact not visiting John Harriott at the River Police Office, but is visiting him.
The Bow Street magistrate rises with a tired smile and Abigail appears behind him, also smiling, as if the presence of this man is some kind of shared joke. Horton supposes that, in a different light, it could be taken as such. Graham had sat here three years before, had he not, making threats about revelations of Horton’s personal history, and issuing demands that Horton clean up a mess of establishment making over in Sheerness?
‘Constable! You will forgive my impertinence.’
‘I will?’
Horton turns his back on his guest, and removes his coat and hat. Abigail takes them from him, and places a warning arm on his. She then steps away into the parlour, leaving them alone in the little sitting room. Not a word or a kiss, wife? He scowls at her back. He is surprised to find himself angry at Abigail. She had, after all, let the magistrate in.
‘Does Mr Harriott know you are here?’ He asks Graham this without looking at him. Indeed, he sits himself down in front of the fire without once looking at the magistrate’s face. There is a fire going; October has turned chilly.
Graham says nothing. His waiting silence is, in its own way, an as
sertion of authority. Eventually, Horton relents and looks at him. Graham’s eyebrow is raised, and he indicates the chair he rose from. Horton nods, and the magistrate sits down.
‘Of course Harriott knows I am here,’ Graham says. ‘I never visit his cherished Investigator without permission. And in any case, it is not you I am here to see.’
Graham smiles at his own impertinence.
‘Your wife, Horton. I wanted to speak to your wife. To enquire after her recovery. I am, after all, an interested party.’
He is deliberately baiting Horton, this is obvious. But his charm is also much on display. See, we mean each other no ill-will, it says. We are intelligent men.
‘And what did you learn of my wife?’
Graham sits back, and brushes some unseen piece of time-saving lint off his turquoise silk breeches.
‘That she is much recovered. Completely so.’
‘Perhaps, then, I may enquire after your own wife. How does Mrs Graham?’
Graham’s face is cold.
‘She does well.’
‘And Ellen? Is she fully recovered?’
‘All is well at Thorpe Lee House.’
‘Well, I shall not ask after Sir Henry, for the obvious reasons. And with that, our business is done, and you are able to be on your way.’
‘Oh come now, Horton. Do not be so dull.’
Such a direct riposte is rare from Aaron Graham, and it has a good deal of irritation within it. And it goes on.
‘Your dislike for me is long-standing and well-grounded, that I know. But this surly display is childish and dispiriting. I bring news of the Sybarites case which I thought might interest you. Though if you persist in this thuggish insolence I shall take my leave of you and your charming wife, without thanks for my intervention in her own good health, and we shall continue to avoid each other for the sake of your own pride.’
This little speech is spoken with none of Graham’s typical delighted-with-the-world sang-froid. It is deliberate and serious, and Horton remembers that first meeting here so many weeks before, with Abigail incarcerated in Hackney and he loose from his moorings.
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