Dark Asylum

by E. S. Thomson

  ‘Welcome amongst us, Neptune, Master of the Deep!’ cried the sailor-parson. There was more clapping and shouting. ‘And who giveth her away?’

  ‘I do,’ said Dr Rutherford. He stepped forward, and smiled at me. That smile – how I came to loathe the sight of his thin cadaverous features. For here was no drunken reveller, out of his wits with rum and boredom. Instead, here was a man who was sober, fully sentient of what was about to take place and, in the name of entertainment, quite prepared to condone it.

  ‘Then plight your troth, sir,’ cried the sailor-parson, handing Neptune a bottle.

  Neptune took a swig, then put the bottle to my lips too. I was so thirsty that I gulped it down – I could not help myself – the sounds of cheering and laughing echoing in my ears. I tried to speak, tried to ask what was happening, but I could not form the words. I wanted to sit down – I had to sit down or I would fall down. Hands took hold of me and propelled me behind another flap of canvas. A chair awaited me, and I was pushed into it. A ragged posy of weed and starfish and frayed rope was thrust into my hands. The sun burned my eyes, my throat screaming again for water, and even in my stupefied state I knew that Dr Rutherford had drugged me. But there was nothing I could do about it now for my limbs were unable to obey me, my hands felt as though they were made of wood, and my voice was dead in my throat. The stink offish filled my nostrils till I thought I might be sick. I tried to look up, but the deck rose and fell before me. I saw Dr Rutherford tall against the sun; I saw his camera box, its brass eye trained upon me. I felt something hard grip the back of my head and my hands and feet were bound to the chair, the posy lashed to my hand when my fingers proved unable to hold it.

  ‘Hurry up,’ shouted Neptune. I noticed then that a thick rope-end was swinging heavily from his groin. He seized it between his hands and danced lewdly forward.

  ‘Don ‘t move, my dear,’ said Dr Rutherford in my ear. His breath was sour, his long thin fingers cold as they brushed my cheek.

  I did not move, I could not. I tried to clear my mind, but my head felt heavy and thick, and I could make sense of nothing. An eternity seemed to pass while I sat there, my head clamped, my arms and legs bound to the chair, the reek of that decaying posy wafting into my face. All at once I heard voices, counting down. Before me, standing beside the camera, I could see Dr Rutherford holding up his hand; a gold pocket watch balanced upon his palm shone in the sunlight, as though he were holding a living flame. He snapped it closed and there was a cheer. Someone released the vice that gripped my head, and unbound my hands and feet. Sea and sky lurched and wheeled in an arc above me, until I could not tell one from the other.

  I fell, slipping from the chair to sprawl before the baying mob. The deck felt warm against my cheek; rough, but smooth with the passing of so many feet, and the smell of brine and tar was thick about me. A shadow fell across the sun, and I smelled again the stink of Neptune – rum and dead fish, dried weed and sweat. I felt my skirts being lifted, so that the sun was hot on my thighs. I heard cheering and clapping and lewd voices, and I felt a pain like a knife between my legs.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  We would find Mrs Lunge upstairs, the porter said. She was expecting us.

  ‘How does she know we want to speak to her?’ said Will.

  The porter shrugged. ‘Not much goes on round here without her knowing about it.’

  ‘I always knew it was the servants who had the key to all this,’ I said as we climbed the stairs. ‘I should have had more confidence, been more certain in my actions. But I could not be sure. And there is so much at stake. We could not make a false accusation—’

  ‘Sure of what?’ said Will. ‘Of whom?’

  ‘We will soon find out,’ I said. ‘Though I fear it’ll lead to more harm than good.’

  She was on the top floor, staring out of the window in Dr Rutherford’s room, standing exactly where she was when I had looked up and seen her. Around her there was evidence of industry. Dr Rutherford’s books and papers, his instruments, natural history collection, skulls and death-masks had been packed into boxes, for he had bequeathed everything to the Phrenological Society, and they were coming to collect it at the end of the week. The room looked bare, and yet still it was a small space for a doctor to spend so much of his time. He had owned a large house on St Saviour’s Street, though he had rarely gone there, favouring instead the small suite of rooms at the top of the asylum.

  ‘Why did Dr Rutherford choose to live in such a place?’ said Will. ‘There is not much room here, when all’s said and done.’

  ‘It was what he preferred, sir,’ said Mrs Lunge. ‘He said he had no use for lots of rooms. Said he’d been close quartered for many years and he would not leave it now.’

  ‘Mrs Lunge,’ I said. ‘Why do you cry in the night?’

  She blinked. ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Mrs Speedicut heard you.’

  ‘This is a lunatic asylum, Mr Flockhart. The place is rarely silent.’ Her voice was quick and sharp, her words reasonable, but her face betrayed her, and I was watching. I saw her pupils dilate, saw the vein at her neck throb and her face become taut. I could not but admire her, for she mastered herself instantly, but in that single moment I knew I had glimpsed a different Mrs Lunge.

  ‘Mrs Lunge, two men have been killed. Edward Eden saw you in Dr Rutherford’s room with a skull – the same skull that went missing from the top shelf of Dr Rutherford’s phrenological collection on the night he was murdered.’

  I waited for her to speak, but still she said nothing. She stood without moving, her hands, for once, hanging limply at her sides. Her eyes were sorrowful, as if she were willing me to go away, to stop asking her what she knew. But I could not stop now, not when I was so close. And so I plunged on.

  ‘You weep in the night. You were known to be close to Dr Rutherford and yet you showed no emotion whatever when presented with his mutilated corpse. How might these things be explained? How might I, or anyone, interpret them?’

  Later, when I looked back on that last conversation I had with her, I realised that I had bullied her and I was sorry. I wondered whether this impatience, this angry aggressiveness – so against my usual calm and rational character – was the start of my own madness. Was I changing? Was I becoming someone other than who I wished to be, unable to control how I acted to others? All that I knew for certain was that I wanted it all to be over. I longed to walk away from Angel Meadow Asylum and not look back, for every moment I spent there had become a torture to me. And so I badgered her, dredging from my mind the most sordid of suppositions as to what she might be hiding: why might a woman cry in the night, a woman who had been known until very recently to have hung upon Dr Rutherford’s every word. Follows him around, Mrs Speedicut had said. Dr Rutherford said this an’ Dr Rutherford said that . . . I’ve heard her cryin’ in the night . . .

  ‘You and Dr Rutherford were lovers, weren’t you?’ I said.

  She did not move. Her gaze darted towards the door, as if she wanted to be free of the place as much as I. I remembered how stoical she had been as she stood within sight of his corpse. How could any woman remain unmoved at the sight of their dead lover? How she must long to show her true feelings.

  ‘Mrs Lunge,’ said Will. ‘You must tell us—’

  ‘He treated you shamefully, did he not?’

  She closed her eyes at that and sank onto a chair. Her shoulders shook, so that I found myself amazed that anyone could have stored up so much grief for a man like Dr Rutherford. Had he been a better man than I had thought? I sat beside her. ‘You have nothing to fear from him now,’ I said gently.

  Then she raised her eyes to look at me, and I saw that she was not crying at all, she was laughing. The sound rang out, mirthless and mocking. ‘I didn’t fear him,’ she said. She looked at me pityingly. ‘I hated him. I hated him, but I didn’t kill him.’

  ‘And yet you know who did,’ said Will.

  ‘Can you blame her?’ she snapped back at him.
‘I can’t.’ She jumped to her feet. ‘Oh, I’m glad he’s dead. Glad! I don’t know why I let it happen, why I gave in to him. I knew all along that he had nothing to offer me. I knew he wanted someone . . . someone better than a gaoler, for that’s all I was to him – he told me so often enough. I was lonely – of course I was. Is it only men who crave the companionship of their opposites, who ache for the physical touch of another? Am I supposed to lie in my bed, alone, night after night and be content? You will be disgusted, Mr Flockhart, and you Mr Quartermain, to hear me talk so, to think that someone like me might be flesh and blood beneath this shell of starch and silk.’ She reached up and tore at her collar, ripping at the buttons that fastened it so high. Beneath the fabric I caught sight of a flaking red rash. She clawed at it frantically with her fingers.

  ‘I understand more than you realise, Mrs Lunge,’ I said.

  ‘Do you?’ She threw back her head, her collar open at her throat now, the eczema on her skin beaded with blood where she had raked at it. ‘And so you will also understand how every time he came to me I said to myself that it would be the last. That every time he left me to return to his rooms I wanted to tell him to never come back, to leave me be. But I was weak. I said nothing. I despised myself for it. He never said he loved me. I knew he didn’t, but I hoped he would come to. I hoped he might one day see—’ Her hands flew to her throat, as if she felt his hands around it. ‘Oh, why did I want such a thing from him? Why did I?’

  ‘Because it seemed worse to be alone,’ I said. ‘Even though it was not.’

  ‘He said he would come to me that night, but he didn’t.’ She flung herself back down into the chair. Her face was wild, her hair awry. Gone was the silent, pinchfaced matron, and in her place was a woman filled with passion and feeling. She clenched her fists. ‘How often had he made me wait like that? He didn’t care. It was me that it mattered to, not him; me who waited and wanted. So that night I got up and I went along to his rooms to tell him—

  ‘But when I reached his door I knew he was not alone. I could hear voices. I recognised . . . it was Mrs Hawkins’s voice. What was she doing up there at that time in the morning, and with him too! And so I listened. She was pleading with him. I heard what she said, heard all he had done to her.’ Mrs Lunge covered her face with her hands. ‘I didn’t see her, I didn’t need to but it was her, there is no doubt. And I knew she was speaking the truth. And how did he answer her? What was his reply? He laughed! Oh, John Rutherford was a vile man, Mr Flockhart. I knew it then, as I had always known it in my heart, and whatever feelings I had had for him turned to ashes right there as I stood listening at his door.

  ‘I went back to my room, tried to think what to do. I waited for him to leave, hoping that he would go home that night. I could hear when he had gone for I know the sounds of the asylum as well as I know the ticking of the clock on my mantel – but he did not leave. I waited for the sound of his door closing but I did not hear that either. I slept a little. When I woke again it was two o’clock, and I did not imagine he would still be up. And so I went down the corridor to his rooms. His door was unlocked, the lamp still burning, just as I told you. And there he was, just as you saw him. She had killed him, Mr Flockhart. But I didn’t blame her for it, I didn’t blame her one bit and you shouldn’t either. Ask her! She’ll tell you what he did to her and you’ll see. I vowed I’d not tell anyone what I’d heard, what I knew. Besides,’ she threw back her head. ‘I was glad, for I hated him then, hated him for who he was, for all the times he had humiliated me.’ Her cheeks turned red. ‘Oh, you don’t know what he did to me. What I let him do in the hope that it would please him, that it might make him love me. I debased myself. Did he want to see how much I would take, to what depths of depravity I would sink? I hated myself, Mr Flockhart, but when I heard what he had done to Mrs Hawkins, well, I hated him one hundred times more.

  ‘I decided then that I would keep her secret – I was determined about that, at least. Were we not sisters in pain and sorrow, she and I? Might we not help one another against the cruelty and viciousness of men? If I helped her I might harm him, even though he was dead, and I was more than glad to do it. Besides, she didn’t deserve to hang for it. Had she not been through enough? But she wanted her baby so badly, no matter that it was only its little head that remained. He said it was his as much as it was hers and he would not hand it over. But I knew how to find it. I looked in his book – I had seen him poring over those ledgers often enough – and I took it. I gave it to her. I wrapped it up and I said I thought it was what she was looking for. I put my finger to my lips. She could hardly speak. She said she could never have another child, he had seen to that.’

  ‘She is not pregnant?’ said Will.

  ‘No, sir. She never can be. He took that from her too.’

  ‘But then Edward Eden came in just as you were retrieving the child’s skull from the high shelf,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You threatened him so that he would keep quiet.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I heard a movement at the door behind me. Pole! The fellow was always sneaking about the place, listening at doors and creeping along corridors.

  ‘Step out, sir!’ I cried. ‘How dare you listen to what’s meant for others—’

  It was not Pole, though when I saw who it was, I wished that it had been.

  The flower in his lapel that day was red, a loose and blowsy rose, large and heavy like furled velvet, as though he wore his own heart upon his coat. I had suspected for some time that Mrs Hawkins was not all she seemed – Mrs Lunge had merely confirmed it, and although I was not yet ready to accuse Mrs Hawkins of murder, I could not but think she was a very likely suspect. And her accomplice? I knew who he was, even if she did not.

  ‘Dr Hawkins,’ I stammered. ‘I . . . we didn’t hear you.’

  ‘Clearly.’ His voice was cold. ‘And yet here I am. Is there something you wish to tell me? Or is it only meant for others?’

  I felt myself blush crimson. I had known Dr Hawkins all my life, he had helped my uncle and my father; he had tried to help me too, and yet here I was, about to repay his trust and kindness by accusing his wife of the most terrible of crimes. I fell silent. I did not know how to answer.

  ‘It is but speculation, as yet, sir,’ said Will. ‘I’m sure everything can be explained quite easily.’

  ‘Dr Hawkins,’ I said, ‘you cannot allow Susan Chance to remain locked up for crimes she did not commit.’

  ‘And my wife did commit these crimes? She murdered Dr Rutherford? Dr Golspie? She bound and gagged you and put you into a coffin?’

  ‘But why, Jem?’ said Will. ‘Why would she do such things?’

  ‘Perhaps we should ask Mrs Hawkins.’ My words were reckless, and hurtful, but I had to press on. I had to know. If I had thought for one moment where my accusations might lead, that I was soon to be responsible for the most terrible pain and suffering, I would have chosen my words more carefully.

  ‘I see you will not be stopped, Jem,’ said Dr Hawkins. ‘In that case we will find my wife and we will ask her what she knows. But you must understand that our friendship is at an end from this moment on.’

  ‘But sir—’

  ‘From this moment!’ Dr Hawkins stalked out. ‘She is in the women’s ward, with the Ladies’ Committee, I believe. No doubt she is planning her next attack.’

  ‘Dr Hawkins.’ I plunged after him. ‘Ask her in private, sir. Please.’

  ‘She has nothing to fear. It is you who will be shamed by this.’

  ‘But what do you know of her, sir? How did you meet? Can you truly say that you know everything about her past?’

  How could I explain my doubts, based as they were on such slender but convincing evidence? For it was my firm belief that it was Mrs Hawkins whom Dr Golspie had seen in Dr Rutherford’s broken mirror. Why else would Dr Golspie have baulked at telling us who he had seen when Dr Hawkins was standing right before him? I was certain too that this
knowledge had led to Dr Golspie’s murder – had she not been seen in Dr Golspie’s stair? She had given the name ‘Susan’, but even so unobservant a boy as Billy Slater would have noticed that Susan Chance was a cripple – the girl was unable to move without her metal boot clunking on the stair. And yet he had said no such thing. There was also the fact that Mrs Hawkins was familiar with prison slang. ‘Watch yer crabshells, miss,’ Pole had said as he swept the floor beside us. Mrs Hawkins had stepped daintily aside straight away while the rest of us stood our ground mystified. There was also the tall concealing collar of jet beads she always wore at her neck, her pallor at the very mention of Dr Graves the anatomist, these things had crystallised into something meaningful only when I had discovered that the photograph was taken on a transport ship, when I had read in Miss Mothersole’s notebook what she had overheard from the conversation between Joshua Milner and Mrs Hawkins . . . Have no fear, we shall be more than a match for him . . . I have paid for my crimes thrice over, must I pay for them still? . . . Say nothing . . . Be as a stranger to me or all is lost. The words were Mrs Hawkins’s. Dr Stiven had pledged his silence, but at what price? Mrs Hawkins was a felon, there was no doubt in my mind. Where else might her acquaintance with Dr Rutherford come from but aboard a transport ship? It was Mrs Hawkins who was the woman in the picture. What might she not do to keep her identity a secret, to hide her past from her new husband?

  ‘Dr Hawkins,’ I said. ‘Please sir, listen to me—’

  He turned to me then, taking a breath to steady himself. I saw doubt in his expression, but his words remained faithful to her. ‘I know what she’s told me,’ he said. ‘And that is – that has to be enough.’ He seized my arm. ‘I’m aware that your mind at the moment may be . . . overburdened. The murder of Golspie – I know he was your friend – your own recent experiences—’ He cleared his throat as if he could hardly bring himself to remind me that I had been buried alive. ‘That alone is enough to make anyone deranged, even temporarily. I can forgive you, but you must withdraw these accusations directly—’