European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman (The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club Book 2)

by Theodora Goss

  “It’s as noisy as London, in its own way,” he said, dispassionately. “I couldn’t sleep in this racket.”

  “That’s birds and crickets,” she said, smiling.

  “Yeah, well, give me pigeons and cabs rattling across the cobblestones. And cabbies swearing! This green stuff’s all right in its place, and that place is a park. Bloody blooming hell! Something just stung me.”

  In front of them, Joe snorted.

  “What does he know? He wouldn’t last half a day in London,” said Charlie, but in a low voice. He knew better than to anger a man with arms the size of tree trunks.

  They had passed the development now: trees grew on both sides of the path. They walked in the shadows of leafy branches. “Carfax House is up ahead,” said Joe. “All this used to belong to the Carfax family—Carfax Woods, it’s called. But it was sold off for logging, and then the logging company went bankrupt. Don’t know who owns it now.”

  In a few minutes they had reached a high wall of gray stone covered with ivy and lichen. “The gate’s a little farther, I think. I ain’t been here for a while.” Walking along the wall, they soon reached it: an iron gate, rusted and with a lock that had been broken at some point. It made a grating sound when Joe pulled it open and led them through. The other side of the gate did not look much different: it was still wooded, although as they walked along the path, the undergrowth began to disappear. There were the remains of formal plantings, and here and there a moss-covered statue. Catherine realized this had once been a gentleman’s park. “There’s the house,” said Joe. Through the trees she could see a building of the same gray stone as the wall, looming and crumbling at the same time. One wing looked as though it dated back to the middle ages. The other was in the fanciful gothic of the seventeenth century, as though designed by Horace Walpole himself. They were connected by a section in a considerably more modern style. The house looked entirely deserted—its windows, whether medieval, pseudo-medieval, or modern, were dark and empty. Beside it stood a chapel, probably older than the house itself, with a stone cross on its roof.

  “After the last of the Carfaxes died out, it was sold to a foreign nobleman. He took possession, and we all hoped he would fix it up and provide jobs for the townsfolk. But after appearing in town several times, he disappeared suddenly, back to his own land they say, where he had a grand castle. I guess an English manor wasn’t fine enough for him!”

  Now they had passed the house and the forest was darker, the trees closer together, the undergrowth more dense. Light filtered through the branches, and it was cool under the shade of the trees.

  “There,” said Joe. “That’s the back wall to the asylum, and you can see the place where stones have fallen. The stone part of the wall belongs to Carfax, the brick part to the asylum. I don’t know why Dr. Seward doesn’t just get it fixed. It’s not as though the foreign nobleman is going to object!”

  The place where the stones had fallen was low enough to climb over—no wonder it had been so easy for Renfield to escape.

  “Why don’t they all escape this way?” asked Charlie, looking at the wall appraisingly.

  “Most of them don’t know about it. And if they did, most of them would stay in the asylum anyhow. This world’s no place for a madman. The wall is to keep them safe, not just keep them in,” said Joe.

  “All right, turn around.” Catherine drew the blue dress out of her satchel. Joe and Charlie both looked puzzled. “I need to change? Out of my clothes.”

  “Oh!” said Joe, growing red about the ears. Charlie just grinned. They both turned their backs to her. She wouldn’t have cared if they had seen her in her underclothes, but it would have embarrassed Joe, at least. Quickly, she slipped off her masculine attire and pulled the blue dress over her head. It would conceal the fact that she was wearing men’s, not women’s, undergarments. It was certainly not the sort of dress for which one needed a corset! She suspected that she looked rather like a blue sack of potatoes. But Beatrice would no doubt have appreciated it as an instance of rational dress.

  BEATRICE: That’s not fair, Catherine! One does not have to dress in a way that is unflattering, or even unfashionable, to be rational—and comfortable. How can you expect women to exercise their faculties, nay, their rights, in clothes that confine them? We shall never be men’s equals while we lace ourselves into ill health and drape ourselves in fabric until we can scarcely move. Dress reform is almost as important to our cause as the vote.

  Catherine took the pins out of her hair and untwisted the tight bun she had been hiding under Reverend Crashaw’s hat. She shook her hair over her eyes, rather like an unkempt dog, then said, “All right, how do I look?”

  Joe and Charlie both turned back to look at her. “Well done, miss,” said Joe. “I might have mistaken you for a patient myself.”

  “I’ll wait here for you,” said Charlie. Catherine stuffed Reverend Crashaw’s clothes inside her satchel and handed it to him, along with the hat she had been wearing. The men’s shoes would be hidden by the hem of her dress, which dragged on the ground a little. Did it . . . yes! It had pockets, into which she put three of the hairpins. They would come in handy later. The rest she would leave with Charlie.

  “And so will I,” said Joe, crossing his arms and frowning at Charlie, as though the London boy had taken his place. Which, in a way, he had—it was good of Joe to keep watch for them and send them updates, but when it came to scheming, Charlie was in a different class.

  “No, you won’t,” said Catherine, looking through the gap in the wall. On the asylum side, close to the stone wall, ornamental trees and shrubs had been planted, probably to conceal the wall itself. Beyond that small patch of wilderness, visible through the rhododendrons, viburnum, and Rose of Sharon, was a broad swath of lawn. She would follow the wall, staying among the shrubbery as far as she could. But eventually she would reach the brick portion of the wall that belonged to the asylum, where there was no cover. Then she would have to cross the manicured expanse of lawn to join the other inmates.

  “If anything goes wrong, if anyone notices that Seward’s office has been broken into, I want you to have a solid alibi. So what I want you to do, Joe, is go to The Black Dog and make sure everyone there notices you. And I want you to stay there at least until teatime. Can you do that?”

  “But what if you need help?”

  Men! Why did they always assume their presence would, in some intangible way, be helpful? “Right now, that’s the best help you can give me. We need to make sure you stay as far away from this affair as possible. That’s what Mary would want.”

  Aha! That had done the trick—she could tell by the expression on his face. “Well, if that’s what Miss Jekyll would have wanted. Just be careful, miss. When you get back, if you follow the path through the woods, opposite to the way we came, you’ll reach the front gate of Carfax. From there you turn left onto a road with no name, far as I know. We just call it the road to Carfax. You’ll know it’s the right way if you see a gravel pit—it was a cut to the gravel pit, originally. And that will take you back to the North Road.”

  “Thank you, Joe,” said Catherine. “I won’t get lost, I promise.” As though she could! Pumas had an excellent sense of direction.

  Reluctantly, Joe turned and walked back through the forest in the direction he had described, presumably toward the front gate of Carfax and the road with the gravel pit, which would take him to the North Road and into town.

  MRS. POOLE: You’re absolutely right about men, miss. They’re all very well in their place, but if I were in a tight spot, I would rather have women with me. They’re so much less sentimental.

  MARY: What about Mr. Holmes?

  MRS. POOLE: Ah well, I’m sure Mr. Holmes would come in handy. But look at how you girls work together, despite your bickering. Someday, I’m sure you’ll be as famous as Mr. Holmes.

  CATHERINE: If anyone buys our books . . .

  Catherine stepped through a gap in the wall where the stones sto
od no higher than her knees, holding her dress up as daintily as a lady of quality. With a brief wave to Charlie, she turned and crept close to the wall, hiding as much as she could behind the rhododendrons, which gave her good cover with their broad green leaves. There, across the lawn, was the Purfleet Asylum, a brick building, modern and undistinguished in style. She could see a back entrance and lines of laundry drying in the sun, but no one on this side of the building. All the servants must be inside. Hopefully no one would be looking out the windows—at least, no one that anyone would listen to. On the third story, the windows were barred. Behind one of those barred windows was Renfield, the madman, who had been suspected of the Whitechapel Murders. Seward’s office was on the second floor, on the right side of the building—it would be the left once she was inside. It would have been easier if she could have climbed up to it without entering the asylum, but there was nothing on the building to climb—no pipes, no ivy. Presumably all the plumbing had been built in, as it often was in modern construction. The ornamental shrubbery that hid the foundations did not extend even to the height of the first-floor windows. No, she would have to go in the front entrance and climb up the stairs, like an ordinary human being. In that office was a clue to what Prendick had been planning with Seward—at least, she hoped there was.

  Now she had reached the end of the stone wall, where the band of trees and shrubs also ended. Here the wall turned a right angle, into the brick wall of the asylum proper. And there, across the lawn, were the female patients, just as Joe had described. Some of them were walking, alone or arm in arm. Some were sitting in lawn chairs in the shade of the building. They were dressed as she was, all alike. Where were the attendants? She strolled across the green lawn, trying to look as though she belonged and knew where she was going. Now she could see the front of the asylum. Yes, there were two men in white coats standing close to the front entrance, one of them smoking a cigarette. Even as far away as she was, she could smell the smoke. No one, as far as she could tell, was looking in her direction.

  The two women closest to her were standing together, one of them nodding and gesturing to the other in an exaggerated manner. As she approached, the one who had been gesturing turned to her and said, “Oh, hello, my dear, did you get lost?” Her voice was cultivated, and she looked rather like the grandmother in a fairy tale, with white hair in an untidy pile on top of her head. She was as small as Diana, with bony wrists and elegant hands. Her eyes matched the blue of the asylum dress. She might have been the only person on whom that dress was not entirely unflattering.

  “Yes, a little. I’ve only just come here,” said Catherine.

  “Oh, you’ll get used to the routine soon enough. You may call me Lavinia, although I make the attendants call me Lady Hollingston. An impudent lot! I’ll have no disrespect from them. And this is Florence. I don’t know her last name because she hasn’t said a word since I came here. It’s not physical, is it, Florence? Dr. Seward says it’s hysterical mutism, most common in young women of marriageable age. She suddenly stopped talking at the age of sixteen, although she writes a lovely Spencerian hand. And she’s been here ever since.”

  Florence nodded. She was a plump young woman with a round face, shy smile, and sad eyes.

  “I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance, Your Ladyship, Miss Florence,” said Catherine, with a slight curtsey.

  “Oh really, Lavinia, please. We have very few formalities here,” said Lady Hollingston. “May I ask why you were admitted?”

  “Well, you see, I can’t stop cutting myself,” said Catherine, pulling up her sleeve. On her brown skin shone the faint tracery of scars from Moreau’s surgery. “And if I may ask such a delicate question . . .”

  “Oh, I don’t mind.” Lady Hollingston smiled a kindly, gentle smile. Her blue eyes crinkled at the corners. “I murdered my husband, you see. But because of my age and station I was not committed to Broadmoor. Dr. Seward does not consider me dangerous, so he doesn’t keep me confined, as I might be elsewhere. He runs such a progressive establishment here, so forward-thinking. I feel quite fortunate to be here, although the fees are expensive. But my son does not object.”

  “Do the families of the patients pay for them?” asked Catherine, surprised.

  “Oh yes, this is a very exclusive madhouse, you see. . . . I don’t believe you told me your name? Otherwise they might be in charitable institutions. Most families of means would not want that for their relatives, however mad they might be.”

  “Yes, I see. My name is Catherine Crashaw, Your Lady—Lavinia.”

  Florence put her hand to her throat and mimed what was obviously an apology for not taking part in the conversation. She seemed a sweet girl, although Catherine wondered if she had murdered someone as well.

  MARY: Hysterical mutism is most often associated with trauma, such as an assault of some sort. I learned that in Vienna, when we were discussing symptoms of madness before Diana was—

  CATHERINE: Could you please not spoil the plot for our readers? You can talk about researching symptoms of madness all you want when I get to Vienna. I mean when you get to Vienna, later in the narrative.

  MARY: Well, at any rate, I doubt Florence murdered anyone. It’s much more likely that someone did—well, something not very nice—to her.

  “Are you by any chance related to the Devonshire Crashaws?” asked Lady Hollingston.

  Catherine wondered how Lady Hollingston had murdered her husband. She looked as fragile as a porcelain doll. “Yes, I believe so—distantly. You know, I think I’m beginning to feel faint.”

  “It’s this heat. You should go in and ask for a glass of water with a slice of lemon in it. They really are very accommodating, as long as we obey the rules of the institution. But make sure they put in a slice of lemon—the lemon is very important.” Lady Hollingston patted her on the arm.

  Florence nodded. How nice they were to be so concerned! And this was of course the excuse Catherine needed. She curtseyed again, then turned and made her way through the patients strolling about or sitting in lawn chairs, wondering what was so important about the lemon. Most of the patients nodded to her, except one young woman who was twisting her hair and muttering to herself.

  When she reached the steps to the front entrance, whose doors had been left open, probably to combat the unaccustomed heat, one of the attendants, the one who had not been smoking, said, “And where might you be going?”

  Catherine pulled at her hair, twisting it over her face like the madwoman she had just passed, hiding herself as much as she could. “I’m not feeling well, so Lady Hollingston told me to go in and ask for some water. With a slice of lemon, she said.” She made her voice as vague and plaintive as she could.

  “Oh, well!” He winked at her, while his companion chuckled and then coughed. “If Her Ladyship told you, then of course you must. Lord Holliston pays through the nose for having her whims indulged! I can’t think why, since she murdered his pa. But be quick about it.”

  She nodded, then walked quickly up the steps and into the asylum.

  It was just as Mary had described: a large vestibule, with benches along the walls and chairs scattered about, all made of hard wood. The walls were whitewashed, as in a hospital. A corridor ran back into the recesses of the building: from Joe’s descriptions, she knew it led to a communal dining room, the kitchens, and servants’ quarters. Somewhere in the distance she could smell cooking—mutton and dumplings, she thought, although over it all lingered what was probably a permanent smell of cabbages. On one side of the corridor was a set of stairs leading upward. On the second floor were offices and rooms for patients who were not considered dangerous. On the third floor were rooms for the patients considered dangerous to others or themselves.

  Luckily, the vestibule was empty, although she could hear what an ordinary person would not have: the click-click of heels coming down the corridor toward her. A faint medicinal smell identified the person with the clicking heels as a nurse. Medicine and cabbag
es—that’s what the asylum smelled like. Up on the third floor, a patient was groaning and crying. But otherwise, the building was silent.

  As lightly as she could, Catherine ran up the stairs. Perhaps she should take off her boots? But no, there was nowhere to hide them. She would simply have to be light on her feet.

  The second door on her left was conveniently labeled:

  JOHN SEWARD, M.D.

  DIRECTOR

  Now came the part she had been worried about. She pulled one of the hairpins out of her pocket. Would it be strong enough? She hoped so. She pulled apart the two legs of the long U until they were almost straight, then bent one into an angular S, as Diana had shown her. One bend of the S raised the lever, the other would retract the bolt. She put the hairpin into the keyhole. There—she could feel the lever lifting. She turned the hairpin firmly but carefully. And then, with a click, she heard the bolt draw back. She turned the knob, and then . . . she was in. Quietly, with a sigh of relief, she closed the office door behind her and locked it again with the hairpin.

  Seward’s office was neatly organized: books arranged on the shelves, file cabinet in the corner, a large desk with a blotter and inkstand. On the desk, beside the blotter, lay a single leather-bound book. On one corner of the desk was a phonograph, set to record on a wax cylinder. Good: that meant anything to be found would be appropriately filed. And bad: Catherine did not know where.

  The bookshelves would tell her nothing. All the books were thick, bound in leather, with gilding on their spines—medical books, no doubt. There were shelves of paperbound journals, but after one look at them, Catherine knew they would not be helpful either. They had titles like Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. No, the shelves told her nothing except that Seward was an important man, the director of a medical establishment, who tried to keep himself informed on the latest research in his field. She was glad the windows were open, or the afternoon sun would have made the room uncomfortably hot, even for her. She had no idea England could get this warm.