1900
Thursday, 8th November
The weather was kinder today. The sun was nowhere to be found, but at least the rain never came and the bitterness of yesterday did not return.
Bertie was already at our spot by the time I got there, and I could hear him whistling before I saw him. He had a small basket with him, and under three towels he’d packed two meat pies, still hot, and a jug of milk which had gone warm what with being next to the pies.
‘How many children do you want, Bertie?’ I said as we ate. The question almost made him choke. ‘I’m being serious. How many children? I think I would be happy with two.’
Two seemed a good number to me, one boy and one girl. I don’t have the hankering for any more pain than I really have to endure. You hear about women who push it too far, and on their fifth or sixth, something goes horribly wrong, and then they’re dead. I don’t want to die in childbirth. Can there be a worse to way to go? All the pain and blood, and then the thought that you’ll never get to see your baby, never get to watch him or her grow up, never get to hold them and kiss them goodnight.
Those thoughts were making me sad, so I elbowed Bertie for an answer.
‘Two would be fine, I suppose.’
‘You only suppose?’ He was such a man. I shook my head and laughed at him.
‘You’ve never talked about babies before.’
‘I was just thinking.’ I didn’t tell him about my conversation with Mrs Leverton.
‘You should think a bit less.’
I was going to laugh again, but when I looked at him, he wasn’t smiling. ‘What’s wrong with you today?’
‘Nothing.’ He wiped his hands on his trousers and sighed. He was looking about himself, never managing to keep his gaze still.
‘Don’t you want to be here?’
‘It’s not that.’
But he didn’t meet my eye.
‘You can go if you like, Bertie. I wouldn’t want to keep you.’ My voice was high and haughty, just a notch away from cracking. I bit into my pie again and chewed and chewed and tried to swallow the lump in my throat.
‘I’m just cold,’ he said.
‘You sure that’s all?’ I turned to him, but he was blurred, what with the stupid tears that had come to my eyes.
‘Eh, none of that. Don’t you go crying over me, Katy. Don’t ever cry over me.’
He wiped the tears off my cheeks, and he smiled and went back to his usual self. I could eat my pie again.
I leaned against his arm and we watched the stream, which was thicker and faster now, and as grey as steel. He rested his cheek on the top of my head, and I slipped my arm around his waist, and we sat like that for a good few minutes.
‘I love you, Katy,’ he said, and I squeezed him tighter.
He got hold of my chin and lifted my head up to his. His dark eyes were sharp as he stared at me, but his kiss was as soft as snow.
I tried to make a note of it in my head so that I could tell Marion exactly what it felt like. I closed my eyes, and it was just me and him, only ever me and him. We could have been anywhere. The cold left me. His hands came to the sides of my face, holding me close, his thumbs resting against my ear lobes as his lips pushed against mine. My hands fell down his neck and onto his chest, slipping inside his coat until I felt the heat of his skin.
He tilted my head to the side, his grip tightening as his mouth opened and in turn, opened mine. And then somehow, we’d fallen off the tree stump and were on the ground, the wet grass cold against my back but Bertie hot on top of me. I unfastened his trousers as he hitched up my skirts.
And then I stopped trying to keep track of everything, for there was no way I could tell Marion anymore.
We were both breathless at the end. The mixture of hot and cold had left me with a damp sweat under my slip, a chill developing around my breasts. Bertie helped me to my feet and rubbed one of the towels over my back to take away as much wet and mulch as possible.
‘You best be getting back,’ he said.
The dark was approaching fast, the clouds making an early nighttime. I didn’t want to go, not even with the chill that was spreading over me, but he was already packing away the basket and brushing himself free of twigs and leaves and creases. He walked me out of the woods a little bit then stopped.
‘I need to get home,’ he said, meaning that he was not going to walk me to the track like usual.
We stood together for a moment, and it felt as if something had changed between us – a shift that I couldn’t understand and didn’t want to voice in case Bertie confirmed my fears.
He turned to leave, and I began to trudge away too, but then he strode back to me and kissed me again, as intense as before. I held him tight, breathing in his scent of butcher blood and sweat, bringing him closer and closer, tasting his tongue and swallowing so that he would be inside me again.
Then his face disappeared, my hands gripped air, and I saw his dark shadow running into the trees.
Monday, 12th November
Yesterday marked Mrs Leverton’s anniversary in here. Thirty years ago, she first stepped over this threshold.
‘They had to drag me in,’ she said as we walked outside. ‘It was a terrible day. The wind was howling, the rain was pouring. I can remember their hands on my arms, how my dress clung to my skin, the splat of my wet skirts in the hallway.’
Frost silvered the trees, and the grass looked as if diamonds had been thrown across it. We had already stopped on the mound, and I was about to head inside when Mrs Leverton asked if we might continue walking towards the lake.
It is a fair distance to the lake. At first, it looked like a little river, but when I got closer, I could see it was just the way the land fell that made it look so big, and that actually it was quite a small lake, with a tiny island in the centre, where ducks were nesting. There was a grotto beside it, and we sat on the bench there whilst Annie moseyed around at the edge of the water.
‘This is nice,’ I said.
‘I thought they were going to hang me.’ Mrs Leverton ignored me. ‘For months, I thought they were going to hang me, that this was all a ruse. I was so sure death was coming for me.’
I shouldn’t have asked. I shouldn’t have encouraged her to think of such bad times, but I couldn’t help myself. ‘Why?’
‘A life for a life. In truth, I wanted it.’
‘You wanted to die?’
She laughed at me, then waved to a male patient and his attendant on the other side of the lake. I recognised the patient as Mr Merryton, an old man suffering from melancholia. His young attendant, whose name I didn’t know, held his arm as they walked, always keeping a few feet’s distance from the water.
‘I confessed everything. What was the point of denying what I had done? Then I realised that this was a different kind of prison.’ Her brown eyes cut across to me, daring me to challenge her.
She was right, of course. No matter how much Marion and I convinced ourselves that these ladies lived happy, peaceful lives, with comforts that the poor could only dream of, there was no getting away from the fact that their bedroom doors were locked, that their windows were barred, that their privileges could be given and taken away as if they were dogs, that needles could be forced into their flesh if needed.
‘He’s watching you,’ she said.
I looked up and followed her gaze. The male attendant and his patient were closer to us now, and I met the male attendant’s stare before I could gather my thoughts and drop my gaze to the floor once more.
‘You have many eyes upon you, Katy, do you know that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You are a pretty girl.’ She waved again, then called out, ‘Nice weather today, Mr Merryton.’
‘Beautiful, Mrs Leverton. How are you fairing?’
‘Very well, thank you.’
Mr Merryton passed with a nod, and I caught the smirk on the attendant’s face before he turned his back to us.
‘It i
s nice, to be desired. I was like you, once. At eighteen, I could have had any man in a room.’
I felt myself blush.
‘Be careful who you end up with, Katy.’
I thought of Bertie, of our odd farewell, but Bertie was the only one for me.
‘Do you believe in true love, Mrs Leverton?’
‘Not in the way you do.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I believe we each have a notion of true love, something we mistake for being something profound and right. A love that is so intense that it is painful. A love that is so fierce, that each touch could light a fire. A longing that makes us wake in the night and weep, and we must have them, at any cost. But that is not true love, Katy. That is an obsession.’
I didn’t agree with her. My heart ached for Bertie each and every day, but I was not obsessed. Our love was true and honest.
‘I was obsessed with him,’ she said, staring at the lake again.
‘With Edward?’
She flinched. In this place, no one ever said his name, never acknowledged he might have been something more than a figment of her imagination.
‘What was he like?’
It took her a few moments to answer, and I thought she was probably deciding whether she should talk to me or not, whether I had any other reason than simple curiosity in asking her to talk of him, this ghost to whom she wrote letters and for whom she prayed.
‘Grey eyes, the colour of that water. Skin the shade of strong tea. Dimples when he smiled. I had never seen hair like his before, past his shoulders, lank and shiny with grease.’ The tension in her shoulders slowly melted.
‘He said fairies lived under the hoods of bluebells and sang at sunset. He took me into the woods one night and made me listen, and do you know’ – she smiled at me, her eyes suddenly bright – ‘I could hear them. I really could.
‘Annie adored him – Annie the first, my best friend. She would bite Henry.’ Mrs Leverton threw her head back and laughed. ‘She was a good dog.
‘Edward came on a boat from Ireland, out of the fog, one early March morning. A silly little boat, smaller than this grotto, filled with everything he had ever owned. At night, I would open my chamber window and lean out so that I could see his bucket of coal smoking in the moonlight.’
She rested her head back against the stones and closed her eyes. She’s there at her window, I thought, and so I let her stay there a bit longer, watching the smoke from Edward’s boat, until clouds started to form in real life and threatened rain.
We walked back to the house in silence, and the rest of the day passed as every other day does, but at night, after her prayers and once she was tucked up under the covers, she reached for my hand and thanked me. I couldn’t do anything but nod back at her, but I went to bed with a smile on my face.
Saturday, 24th November
Dr Basildon called me to his study today. It was half past eleven when he opened the door, and he let me walk in front of him towards the desk before he pulled the chair out for me.
I was struck again by the darkness of the room, what with the window being north-facing, and the books all being dull and leather-bound. This time, I noticed the little stand to the right of his desk, on which sat a squat wooden box, open to show the glass jars filled with medicines. The room smelt of carbolic soap like the rest of the house, but in there, the stench was even stronger. Perhaps the unusually low ceiling made it worse, but it caught at the back of my throat and made my nose sting.
Dr Basildon didn’t seem at all disturbed. He sat in his big chair, and again, I couldn’t make out his facial features for a while, but eventually the bright circles of his eyes shone in the gloom.
‘You’ve been working here for two months.’ He said it as if I could not count the days myself. ‘I must say I am impressed with you. Mrs Thorpe says you are one of the cleanest attendants she has ever managed.’
‘I like things tidy, sir.’
‘You administer medicine well. Never leave a bruise.’ He smiled as he tapped my notebook which was lying on the desk. ‘You keep detailed notes. Very detailed. But you do not have an opinion on Mrs Leverton.’
‘Should I, sir?’
‘Is she improving?’
It was hard to say whether she was improving or not. From what I had come to understand from Mrs Thorpe, she’d first been sent to The Retreat because of trouble after having her daughter, and her mind had got so jumbled that she’d come up with fanciful notions to punish her lack of motherliness.
‘She is very affectionate to Alice,’ I said.
‘What has that got to do with anything?’
My mouth went all dry, and I wished I’d kept it shut. ‘I just thought that... She is like a mother to her. A very good mother.’
‘But the delusions?’
‘Then I should say no, sir.’ I felt such a coward for saying it, and I thanked the Lord that Mrs Leverton could not hear me.
‘What do you make of her?’
I looked at him, trying to see something behind his meaning, wondering if he sought to trap me into talking negatively about my patient so that he might dismiss me.
‘Speak plainly, Katy. I am asking your opinion; you are allowed to have one.’
‘She is a very nice lady.’
‘I’ve known her nearly all of my life. She was only a little younger than my mother when she came here.’ He got to his feet and sauntered towards the wall where small, framed photographs and sketchings hung. He motioned for me to join him.
‘This is my mother.’
‘She is very beautiful,’ I said, although she was quite plain. I imagined Mrs Leverton would have been infinitely more dazzling.
‘This is the house in 1802, before my grandfather started taking in patients.’ He pointed at a sketch on beige paper of a small manor house. ‘My father had the male and female wings built in 1845, and the staff quarters. There you are.’
He pointed at another sketching. This one, I recognised as The Basildon Retreat now. His finger hovered over the building in which my room was set.
‘This was taken just a month before my father’s death.’ He showed me a tiny photograph of him and his father, poised in front of a grand landscape which must have been a curtain. Dr Basildon stood tall beside his father, who was curled into a chair, his white hair scraped over his egg-shaped head, their stares matching each other’s intensity.
‘And here he is again.’ His father was propped up in a soft chair this time, his eyes closed, his lips shrivelled into his face. It took me a while before I realised he was dead. Dr Basildon chuckled at my shock.
‘I have a soft spot for Mrs Leverton,’ he said. ‘She was one of my father’s favourites and I feel I inherited his tenderness for her. I am glad you are her attendant. She likes you.’
I drew away from the pictures on the wall. I didn’t want to look at death any longer.
‘Is she really delusional?’ I had said the words before I could stop them coming out. Dr Basildon did not reply, and with the silence stretching, I continued. ‘I mean; she talks so clearly of it all. Her description of Edward is very detailed.’
‘Edward?’
I should not have said his name. I could feel the heat rising in me all the way from my toes, as if a fire was licking at me.
‘Have you been discussing Edward with her?’
‘No. She just started talking about him.’
‘You did not encourage her?’
‘No, sir. I just listened.’ The fire crept higher as I lied.
‘Very well.’
I let out the breath I had been holding.
‘You must not indulge these fantasies, Katy. I am sure she is only testing you, a new person, seeing if she can bring you onto her side. It is what they do, I am afraid. But you must not be taken in, you must set an example of a sound mind, one in which they can trust and follow.’
‘Yes, sir.’
He took a step closer, and I was about to step back in return, bu
t I found a table against my backside.
‘Do not get tempted by the serpent, Katy.’
I felt my head nod, but it was a jerking, stiff movement.
‘You may go.’
10
1956
Her shift had run over. Dot was having another one of her outbreaks, and Iris had had to hold her down while Nurse Carmichael got the medicine ready. Shirley had been on the other side of Dot, gripping her shoulder as the woman writhed and raved.
Shirley had been grumpy all day. She hadn’t worn any makeup, and she was already looking deathly pale before Dot’s eruption, but as she held onto Dot, she grew whiter and whiter.
Shaking, once the injection had been administered, Shirley flopped into a chair and fanned her face with her apron. Iris brought her some water.
‘You can wipe that smirk off your face,’ Shirley said with her eyes closed.
Iris sat beside her. ‘What time did you get in?’
‘Two? Maybe three? It’s his day off today.’
‘At least you can have a rest tonight.’
‘He’s taking me out for dinner.’
Iris didn’t know what kind of dinner companion Shirley would make tonight. She was on the brink of sleep already.
‘He’s keen.’
Shirley opened one eye, grinned. ‘He’s bought me a dress to wear. It’s red silk.’
‘Where is he taking you, the Ritz?’
‘You jealous?’
Iris just smiled at her friend. She didn’t like John, and she didn’t buy into his romantic gestures.
‘He won’t tell me, says it’s a surprise. What if he... you know?’
Iris drew a blank.
‘What if he asks me to marry him?’
They had only been courting for a few weeks! ‘I don’t think he will.’
Shirley sniffed, closed her eyes again. ‘He might.’
Iris left her in the chair as she retrieved their things from the staff room.
‘You’d better get going, or else you’ll be late.’
Shirley squinted at the clock on the wall, gasped, grabbed her bag out of Iris’s hand, and dashed out of the ward.
Woman on Ward 13: A haunting gothic novel of obsession and insanity (Iris Lowe Mysteries) Page 7