by Viola Carr
She lingered. “You and my father were close. Who do you think A.R. is?”
Finch continued his crushing, a little too enthusiastically. “Haven’t the faintest idea. I correspond with him only by letter, and rarely at that. In my line of work, it’s best not to ask too many questions.”
“But—”
“No, there’s simply no use in your fishing for information I don’t have.” He bashed harder at the mixture, seeds scattering. “You know the fellow wasn’t named in Henry’s will. It simply said ‘my friend and benefactor,’ and Henry had many strange friends.”
“How vexing that no one thought to inquire.”
Finch glanced up, arching his pointed white brows. “Well, the lawyer knew, obviously. Mr. Utterson, later called to the bar at Gray’s Inn, like generations of scoundrels before him. Tiresome fellow. Always pestering Henry for this document, that codicil, the other signature in triplicate.” He waved his pestle in the air. “Gabriel, I’d say, Gabriel, you obtuse old bean, leave the man alone. Can’t you see he has higher concerns? Precious good he was when your mother passed, too,” he added. “God rest her soul. We had the devil’s own trouble convincing them all that Henry had nothing to do with it. Why does everyone assume it’s the husband? It was a robbery gone wrong, nothing more. These accidents happen.” Finch sniffed, indignant. “Pfft. God-rotted lawyers. Bottom of the Thames, say what—”
“Marcellus,” she interrupted gently.
“Eh?” His expression cleared. “Oh, yes. Henry’s will. As I was saying—you really shouldn’t interrupt me, dear girl—as I was saying, Gabriel’s dead these fifteen years. Buried in Highgate, you know, beneath the most spectacularly hideous black marble monstrosity. And no one else needed to know. Secrets were Henry’s habit, especially towards the end. I know only that he trusted this ‘friend’ implicitly.”
“As he did you.”
Finch’s gaze didn’t drop. “Naturally.”
She widened her eyes innocently. “What is that you’re working on, Marcellus? I believe you’ve spilled it.”
He looked down at the crushed berries and roots. A pungent leafy smell rose. “This? Another prophylactic. Not strictly conventional, my dear. Hush-hush.”
“Against cholera?”
“Against a curse.” He scraped the fragments into a pile using a folded paper, stuck one finger in, and popped it in his mouth. “Hmm. Needs more eel droppings. Oh, wait,” he added slyly, “one more thing.”
“Mmm?”
“Your Royal Society captain. Lafayette, was it? On the army list?”
She’d mentioned him in her wire. “Yes?”
“Arrogant gunslinger type, red uniform, smart mouth? Old money, East India Company, British army after the Mutiny, lately a bounty-hunter in darkest Bengal? Returned abruptly from the subcontinent under shady circumstances? Perhaps a tad too familiar with la belle France for comfort?”
“Yes?” She held her breath.
Finch winked. “Never heard of him. Good day, Eliza.”
SUCH PRETTY LUNACIES
BY THE TIME ELIZA REACHED BETHLEM ASYLUM FOR Pauper and Criminal Lunatics, it was nearly eleven o’clock, and clouds scudded along the horizon in a chilly breeze. The asylum’s three-story edifice loomed, topped by a narrow green dome in the center between two long wings. The forbidding brick wall surrounding the complex was topped with spikes and broken glass and a coil of electrically charged wire spitting blue sparks and rust. More like Newgate Prison than a hospital.
She trotted up the steps, Hippocrates following reluctantly at her heels. Between the tall columns, beneath the twin statues of Mania and Dementia, their naked marble bodies contorted in chains, and into the stone entrance hall.
Poor Hipp scuttled straight into a corner, grinding his cogs forlornly and flashing his red unhappy light. He couldn’t compute lunatics. They discombobulated his tiny brass brain.
“You can stay here, Hipp,” she soothed. “Don’t wander off this time.” Sometimes, the more cooperative lunatics were allowed to sun themselves in the hospital garden. She’d found Hipp hiding beneath a hedge, fighting off a squealing girl who was convinced she’d found Snookums, her long-lost kitty.
“Stay here,” Hipp muttered, and settled on folded legs with a sullen click-click! “Felis catus. Does not compute.”
Eliza hurried along a narrow passage towards the office of the surgeon in charge. The stale air smelled of disinfectant. In the distance, an inmate wailed. Faded, forgotten photographs in frames stared down from the picture rail.
As always, she spared a glance for one in particular. In a dusty laboratory amongst his firebrand scientific associates stood Henry Jekyll, young and confident, wearing the black suit and elaborate cravat of the period. His expression showed that absent impatience she associated with thinking people and research scientists. Not now, child, I’ve work to do. Run along and play.
People said Eliza had his eyes. From the photograph, she couldn’t tell.
The brass plaque on the open office door read SIR JEDEDIAH FAIRFAX FRCS. Eliza knocked, rat-a-tat! and entered.
Books and medical specimens in jars lined the walls on tidy shelves. A weak ray of sun dribbled in the narrow window. Above the desk hung a black-edged portrait of the late Lady Fairfax, a young and pretty woman wearing a white morning dress. On the desk itself—wooden, broad, not a speck of dust—sat papers and files, a single white rose in a tall vase, and a fat glass jar of preserving fluid, in which floated a pale, wrinkled human brain.
Mr. Fairfax—he preferred his surgeon’s address, and never mind the knighthood, which he despised as the relic of a corrupted age he considered bygone—didn’t look up from his journal.
“You’re late, Dr. Jekyll.” His neat steel-gray hair gleamed. Spotless black suit, an immaculate knot in his black cravat. Everything about him was tidy.
Eliza clutched her box of Finch’s prescriptions under one arm. “My apologies—”
“When I agreed to take you on, madam”—Fairfax closed his book and meticulously set the pen aside on his blotter—“I did so for your late father’s sake. Not for your amusing company. Certainly not for your superlative medical skills. Kindly be punctual in future.”
A paper scrap dropped from her bag, and she scrambled to pick it up. “Certainly, sir. I’ll do better.”
“I’m sure you will.” Carefully, as if he feared his face would shatter, Fairfax offered a smile. He had deceptively soft eyes, and the smile almost reached them. “I trust nothing alarming detained you?”
He was thin, she noticed. Pale. Faintly, she smiled back, and took the handwritten list he offered her. “Not at all. I’ll get to work.”
He rose. “After you, madam. I’ve rounds of my own to make.”
“Oh?” She hurried beside him towards the stairs. He had a firm, energetic stride that belied his years, which had to be at least sixty. He was still physically vital, a skilled surgeon, and unlike his absentee predecessors in the asylum director’s position, he preferred a radical, hands-on approach to mad-doctoring. Eliza remembered him from long ago as an arrogant but frustrated fellow—standing beside a childlike Marcellus Finch in that photograph in the corridor—contemptuous of authority and driven by ambitious ideas. He hadn’t changed, except perhaps by growing even more dismissive of idiots who got in his way.
“Indeed.” Fairfax rubbed his bony hands, a hint of indecorous relish that made her shiver. “I’m testing a new treatment regime for the intractable lunatics. The potential is limitless.”
“I see.” She had to trot up the stairs to keep up, gripping her box under one arm, her bag in the other, with the list clutched in one fist. They passed a big woman in a dirty white nurse’s uniform, carrying an armload of bloody sheets.
Fairfax made a careful frown. “Again, sister?”
“Yes, sir.” The nurse kept her eyes down.
“Put her in the whirling chair, then, and do it properly this time. As I was saying, Dr. Jekyll, I’m not a believer in br
ain surgery. Believe me, I’ve tried it extensively and it’s a lazy last resort at best. There’s no such thing as incurable insanity. Only stubbornness and lack of will.”
“If you say so, sir,” said Eliza.
A pale glance. “Do you disagree?”
“Well,” she ventured carefully, “I think that in certain cases, the lunatic longs for peace, but the cure is . . . more elusive than accepted medicine would have it.”
“Ah, well!” Another eager rub of palms. “Then we must advance our medicine, madam, until it measures up to the task. Precisely what I’m attempting here. Would you care to observe?”
They reached the landing. The smell of filth and piss and the curious goaty odor of mad people washed over Eliza like greasy water.
A locked gate of iron bars sat immovable. Beyond, keepers in protective leather tabards strolled, steel cages like boxes on their heads and electric truncheons hanging from their belts. These were the common wards, where the non-violent lunatics could socialize, play games, dance, even be let out to spend an hour in the courtyard’s chilly sunshine.
At Fairfax’s nod, a warder unlocked the gate. This was the female section. Crowded, dim, noisome, the only light leaking in from barred slits too high to reach. A blunt-faced nurse with a bucket mopped at a dark wet smear on the floor.
A few of the women hooted and howled and plucked at their filthy smocks. Some just sat quietly, playing cards or reading, the kind who were neither violent nor truly mad. Just troublesome and inconvenient.
An old lady staggered in determined circuits around the room, shaking with palsy but holding her head high like a queen. Her frayed skirt was edged with ragged lace, and she twirled an imaginary parasol and nodded graciously to imaginary subjects. There were at least three queens in Bethlem, along with numerous duchesses and lords and even one genuine incarnation of God Himself.
Eliza dodged a ragged-haired woman who crawled on hands and knees, singing, her voice raw and ruined. “She wheeled her wheelbarr-oow . . . through streets broad and narroow . . . cockles and mussels . . . alive, alive-OOOH!”
In Eliza’s head, Lizzie sang along raucously. She was a fishmonger . . . and sure ’twas no wonder . . .
Impatiently, Eliza nudged her to silence, resisting the strange urge to sweep up her skirts and dance. For so were her father . . . and mother before . . .
A girl with rough pink skin and trotters for feet drooled in the corner, plucking lice the size of small butterflies from her hair and stuffing them into her snout.
Eliza bent to touch her cheek. “Don’t do that, Annie. They’re not food. Sister, can we give this girl a bath, please?”
Annie the pig girl stared at her, baffled. The nurse grunted. “She’s had one, Doctor. The lice just come on back for her. Like home for them, she is.”
“And Lucy here? Is this necessary?” On the wall, a square metal frame was bolted, and from it hung a woman, shackled at wrist and ankle. Thin, but once her figure must have been shapely. Her smock was splashed with blood, and knotted dark hair fell over her face. Her fingernails were torn to the quicks. She didn’t struggle or cry out. Just stared, blood dribbling down her chin.
“Necessary, as well as efficacious,” reminded Fairfax. “This is not a prison, madam, but a hospital. We’ll have none of Mrs. Fry’s so-called reforms here. We do what works. A simple system of cause and effect. Action provokes reward, for good or ill. Wouldn’t you agree, nurse?”
The nurse shrugged. “This one’s been biting again. It’s either this or solitary, and the cells is all occupied. Full moon in a few days. Drives ’em even more batty than they is already.”
Eliza cleared her throat, self-conscious. Lucy was one of the patients on whom she’d tested Mr. Finch’s remedy. Lux ex tenebris. She’d tried it only once. This bloodthirsty thing that burst out . . .
Fairfax lifted Lucy’s chin with one finger. “Peace, my dear. You don’t want the ice bath again, do you?”
“No.” Lucy’s voice was hoarse. Her gleaming eyes rolled, and she arched her body, lascivious. “Not the ice, sir. Please, I want to be warm and full inside. I don’t care if it hurts. I’m starving in here. I need to feed . . .” She chewed her lip, drawing blood, which she swallowed with a lustful groan. At some stage, she’d filed her teeth to sharp points, and they glistened red.
Fairfax leaned in, an inch from Lucy’s face. “No feeding, Miss Lucy. Not until you’re pleasant to the other ladies. Then you can have a nice hot cup of blood. Would you like that?”
“Oh, yes, I’ll be good, sir. I promise. So long as you let me drink from the nice one.” Lucy writhed, passionate. “I want the nice one. He smells goood. Like an animal.” She growled and snapped at Fairfax, missing his nose by a whisker.
Fairfax didn’t flinch. “Nurse, put something between this woman’s jaws before she hurts herself.” And he walked away.
Eliza scuttled alongside. “Whom does she mean: ‘the nice one’?”
Fairfax wiped reddish spittle from his face with a handkerchief. “Ah,” he said lightly. “The bloodthirsty Miss Lucy has designs on young Mr. Sinclair. One of our keepers, a student of mine. It’s quite harmless.”
“I’m sure.” Eliza stifled a smile. The nice one, indeed. She knew Mr. Sinclair. He was young, shy, good-looking. A kindly fellow who went out of his way to treat the inmates well. A lamb to Lucy’s lion.
“But do you see? An incorrigible such as Lucy lets her compulsions rule her. Lack of will, Dr. Jekyll. Why would any of them want to be cured? If they remain mad, they don’t have to face their sad little lives.”
Eliza’s arm tightened around her bundle. Her own treatment was based on Mr. Finch’s theory of the shadow self, the darkness within—and her own desperate experience. Either you suppressed the shadow or you encouraged it. There was no middle ground. But who was to say which was “normal”?
Fairfax tugged her away. “I’ve no patience with shirkers. I intend to treat these unfortunate wretches, whether they like it or not. I shall defeat madness, whatever it takes.” A shadow flitted across his face, the ghost of long-suffered grief, but it quickly disappeared. “Come along, you really must see this.”
“And . . . er, what does your new regime involve?”
Through another barred gate, turning left towards the rear wing of the asylum, along a narrow brick corridor that stank sourly with vomit and fear. “It’s comprehensive,” explained Fairfax. “Electroshock, naturally. Hydrotherapy. Hypnosis. Extreme sensory control. Hot and cold, dark and light, noise and silence. All experimental.”
Sinister electric lights flickered in wire cages. A barred gate loomed from the dark, guarded by a pair of heavyset warders, and beyond it, creeping silence. Broken only by lonely moans, and the wind, whistling mournfully through slitted windows.
The solitary wing. Killers. Cannibals. Bloodthirsty maniacs.
Eliza shivered, chilled yet burning, and the dank walls closed in. She was a trained physician. Madmen held no terror for her. So why was she filled with dread?
From the dark corridor came the sounds of a scuffle. Heavy footsteps, panting, the crash of furniture, a rough curse and a choking groan, as if a man had been punched in the stomach.
The tattooed warder with the shaven head nodded gruffly. Fairfax unlocked the gate with a key from his own iron ring. “After you, madam.”
The scuffle grew closer. Eliza swallowed, and Fairfax waited, expectant. “The design is radical. Are you certain you wouldn’t care to observe? I promise you’ll find it educational.”
She managed a weak smile. “You’re very kind, but I’m already behind schedule. I really must—”
“Pity,” said Fairfax blandly. “I imagined you’d be most interested in my first test patient’s prognosis.”
And a tall figure hurtled through the gate and slammed face-first into the wall, six inches from her nose.
She jumped back, heart thudding.
Wild crimson hair, the exact shade of the blood dripping from his nos
e. Black waistcoat, arms in dirty white sleeves shackled behind him with rusted iron at wrist and elbow. The warder jammed a crackling electric hoop stick around the man’s neck, pinning him to the wall at a safe distance. The lunatic laughed and wriggled like a netted fish, earning himself a punch in the small of the back that knocked his breath away.
Every nerve screamed at Eliza to flee. But the narrow corridor left her nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.
Malachi Todd grinned at her, green eyes sparkling with mischief. “Hello, Eliza,” he panted. “Always we meet in such a crowd. Surely we no longer need a chaperone?”
A STUDY IN CRIMSON
GOOD MORNING, MR. TODD.” SOMEHOW, SHE KEPT her voice strong. “Um . . . I trust you’re well?”
“Oh, I’m capital. Most excellent.” Todd licked blood from his mouth and smacked his lips. “I say, this is a first-rate establishment you’ve locked me up in. Very educational. I’m quite the new man.”
“I’m pleased to hear it,” she said faintly. He was even thinner than she remembered, his cheekbones hollow. His chin was colored with a few days of crimson beard—so improperly red, Mr. Todd’s hair, ragged now in long knotted locks—and distantly she wondered who on earth dared to shave this man, and with what.
“You’re keeping fine company, as ever,” said Todd carelessly, his cheek still jammed against the wall. “Come to spark some life into me, Fairfax? Squirt me full of idiot juice? Or is it the ice bath today? I do so look forward to our little pain parties—”
“Shut it, dimwit,” growled the warder, his thumb hovering over the button, and blue static arced in tiny forks in Todd’s hair.
Todd’s eyes glinted. “By all means, give me an excuse. Your face would make a charming lampshade.”
“Now, Mr. Todd, keep it civil, please.” William Sinclair bustled from the dark cellblock. Mr. Todd’s keeper, he of Miss Lucy’s sanguinary affections. Young face, dirty blond hair, a spot of blood staining his beard. He wore a smeared linen apron over shirtsleeves, and under one arm he carried a contraption of stiff canvas, trimmed with leather buckles and straps.