The Asylum

by John Harwood

  He was about the same height as Dr. Straker, but slender, almost emaciated, with thick brown hair, parted in the middle and worn quite long. Light from the window fell across his face, revealing sensitive features and dark, liquid eyes. He wore a suit of dark brown corduroy, with a loose white collar and a striped cravat.

  “Miss Ferrars? My name is Frederic Mordaunt; I am Dr. Straker’s assistant; he asked me to call on you.”

  The name “Mordaunt” struck a faint resonance, like the toll of a distant bell, immediately lost in the relief of being addressed as “Miss Ferrars.” His voice was low and hesitant; we might have been meeting in a drawing room. I invited him to sit down, but he remained hovering awkwardly in the doorway.

  “Really I should not,” he stammered. “I am not a doctor, and it would not be seemly for me to . . . There is a sitting room just along the hall; the fire is lit, and I thought perhaps, if you felt strong enough, we could . . .”

  Twenty minutes later, I was walking down the dim corridor, a little shakily but without Bella’s assistance. She had done her best to make me presentable, and though I still felt very bedraggled, Lucy Ashton’s blue woollen travelling-dress fitted me perfectly. Mr. Mordaunt was waiting by the window in a room not much larger than my own, but furnished with a settee, and cracked leather armchairs on either side of the hearth. The walls were papered in dark green vertical stripes, suggesting the bars of a cage, on a background much stained by smoke, with a faded hunting print above the mantel.

  “We have already met, Miss Ferrars,” he said, once we were seated by the fire. “It was I who admitted you here—as Miss Ashton,” he added, colouring a little. “But you do not remember me, do you?”

  “No, sir, I am afraid not. May I ask what Dr. Straker has told you about me?”

  “I know that you have suffered a seizure and lost your memory of the past few weeks. And that you prefer to be addressed as Miss Ferrars—”

  “I am Miss Ferrars,” I broke in. “I presume Dr. Straker has shown you the telegram?”

  “I am afraid so,” he replied. “But Miss Ferrars, I am not here to question your—that is to say, I have no right; I am not a medical man. Dr. Straker simply thought that a little conversation might help you recall . . .”

  He made an expansive gesture, then clasped his hands self-consciously.

  “You must understand, Mr. Mordaunt,” I said firmly, “that although I cannot explain what has happened to me, that telegram is a mistake or a fraud, and I shall certainly be going home on Monday.”

  He murmured something which was obviously meant to sound reassuring, but made no further reply.

  “May I ask,” I continued, “how I appeared to you when I arrived here?”

  “Well,” he said, colouring again, “you seemed agitated, and fearful—as many patients are when they first arrive here—but quite resolved that you must see Dr. Straker and no one else, on what you described as ‘an urgent and confidential matter.’”

  “And did I say anything at all, beyond what you wrote on that paper, about why I had come here?”

  “Well, no, Miss Ash—Ferrars, I mean—you did not. You struck me as preoccupied, almost as if—how shall I put it?—as if you were repeating a lesson you had learnt, whilst your mind was elsewhere.”

  “And after? You told Dr. Straker that you saw me walking about the grounds.”

  “Yes, I did. Even at a distance, you looked utterly desolate. I went out to you once, to ask if there was anything at all I could do to help.”

  He looked at me appealingly, as if willing me to remember him.

  I was about to ask him what I had said in reply, when Bella came in with a laden tray.

  “It is almost midday,” said Mr. Mordaunt, “and I thought you might like—I took the liberty of ordering a light luncheon.”

  I realised that, for the first time since my awakening, I was hungry. It seemed very strange to be sitting by a fireside, drinking tea and eating bread and butter and potted shrimp with this personable young man, and my hopes suddenly lifted. Why should I not simply say, I am quite recovered now, and need not wait for Dr. Straker to return? I remembered that I had no money; but perhaps I could persuade him to lend me enough for the fare to London.

  “Tell me, Mr. Mordaunt,” I said, “what is it that you do for Dr. Straker?”

  “Mostly, Miss Ferrars, I act as his secretary. There is, as you can imagine, an immense amount of paperwork to be kept up. But he is the kindest, as well as the most brilliant, of men. He has been like a father to me for as long as I can remember.”

  “You knew him before you came here?”

  “No, Miss Ferrars, I was born here.”

  “Was your father a doctor, then?”

  “No, a lunatic.”

  I stared at him in astonishment.

  “Your father was confined here?”

  “In his last years, yes. But you see, Miss Ferrars, Tregannon House has only been an asylum for the past twenty years or so. Before that, it was my family home.”

  “Your home?”

  “Yes; there have been Mordaunts here since my great-great-grandfather married a Tregannon in 1720 or thereabouts. It was an alliance of two wealthy families, which increased the standing of both. It also brought together two bloodlines marked by a strong hereditary tendency toward melancholy, violent mania, and insanity. My grandfather, George—Mad Mordaunt, they called him; the maddest of the lot—squandered a large part of the family fortune, and of his children, only my uncle Edmund was spared the worst of the affliction. But I should not be speaking thus—”

  “No, I should like you to continue,” I said. “Is your mother still alive, may I ask?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “I can barely remember her. She ran away, you see, with another man, when I was four years old. And who could blame her?”

  He spoke without bitterness, and my heart went out to him.

  “I am very sorry to hear it,” I said. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “No; Uncle Edmund and I are the only surviving Mordaunts—in this unfortunate line, at least. And my uncle’s health is failing; I fear he has not long to live.”

  “Does your uncle live here, too?”

  “Yes. He has rooms on the ground floor, which he seldom leaves these days.”

  “And—how were you brought up?” I asked.

  “By Uncle Edmund; he paid for me to be privately tutored here. I owe everything to him, and Dr. Straker. They were friends, you see, at Oxford. Dr. Straker was already deep in the study of mental disease when they met, and Uncle Edmund had vowed to do whatever he could toward the lifting of the family curse, as he calls it. They dreamt of founding an asylum on humane and enlightened principles, like the Retreat at York—you have heard of it?—”

  I had not, but I nodded, not wanting to interrupt him.

  “When the estate came to Uncle Edmund, Tregannon Asylum was established, with Dr. Straker as its chief medical officer. My uncle had complete faith in him, even though he had scarcely begun to practise. There was just enough capital left to pay for the initial conversion. My uncle used to say—though he is not given to levity—that since it was already a madhouse, we might as well make a business of it. And it has done well, over the years; there has been a great deal of new building, which I suppose is a good thing—though I would far rather see the whole place pulled down for want of patients,” he added, with a sudden access of passion.

  “And you, Mr. Mordaunt? Why do you choose to work here?”

  “The family curse, Miss Ferrars: I suffer from bouts of acute melancholia. I could not complete my medical studies, and so Dr. Straker took me on as his assistant. Here, at least, my illness is of some use; our patients find me easy to talk to. I sometimes feel, Miss Ferrars, that I am a lay brother in a strange sort of latter-day order: we no longer believe in God, but hope nevertheless for miracles—though Dr. Straker would not agree.”

  “But surely, would you not be better living—” any
where but here, I almost said “in the world?”

  “It is natural to think so, Miss Ferrars, but my duty lies here. Dr. Straker has come to depend upon me, and besides—”

  He blushed, averting his gaze; I wondered what he had been about to say.

  “And you, Miss Ferrars?” he said after a pause. “Would you tell me something of yourself? You grew up on the Isle of Wight, I understand.”

  Hesitantly at first, I began to speak of the scenes I had recalled that morning, though not of my fascination with Rosina and the mirror. He listened attentively, smiling at my portrait of Aunt Vida. It struck me as I talked that, despite the loss of my mother, my childhood had been far happier than his.

  “Was your mother always an invalid?” he asked. “From childhood, I mean?”

  The question stirred a troubling memory. I had never thought of her as an invalid; as a child, I had accepted her being delicate, and needing to rest a great deal, as simply part of the order of things. And when I was told, in the first extremity of grief, that her heart had been diseased, I assumed it had always been thus. It was only years after Mama’s death that it occurred to me to put exactly this question to my aunt.

  We were standing, that afternoon, on the path by St Catherine’s Lighthouse, gazing out across the sea. Neither of us had spoken for some time. It was a clear, windless day, early in the spring, and I was wondering whether a faint skein of cloud along the horizon was actually the coast of France, when my aunt said, more to herself than to me, “Emily always liked this spot.”

  Aunt Vida, when preoccupied, would speak of “Emily” rather than “your mother”; she always talked more freely when we were out of doors. Though we were only about a mile and a half from the cottage, the path was rough, and very steep in places, and I could not imagine Mama negotiating it.

  “Was she stronger—her heart, I mean—when she was a girl?” I asked.

  My aunt nodded, still in her reverie. “Could walk all day then. No sign of anything wrong.”

  “So when did she . . . ?”

  “At Nettleford, after—” Her expression changed abruptly, as if a blind had fallen across her features.

  “After what, Aunt?”

  “Don’t know. Woolgathering. No good asking me. Never saw the place.”

  My aunt had scarcely known my father. She had moved to the Isle of Wight when my mother was quite small, and though Mama had spent a good deal of her time there, my father had never visited the cottage. Aunt Vida had met him on a few occasions in London, but she in turn had never been to Nettleford.

  “Why did you never visit her at Nettleford?” She had always evaded the question, but now that I was as tall as my aunt, I felt entitled to an answer.

  “Told you before. Godfrey was too ill; didn’t want to be a nuisance. Before that, he was too busy. Asked them here several times, but he could never get away. Always worried about his patients. Would have lived longer if he’d chosen another profession, your mother said.”

  “Was he—were he and Mama happy together?”

  “Of course they were, child. Why do you ask?”

  I did not know what had prompted me to ask. I had been possessed, of late, by a strange restlessness, as if I were yearning for a place I had never seen but would recognise at once if only I could find it. I was in my sixteenth year, and on the verge of womanhood, for which my aunt, in her gruff, taciturn way, was doing her best to prepare me. Earlier on our walk, we had seen a cow giving birth to a calf, and not long after we had passed a field in which a bull-calf was attempting to mount a heifer—a common-enough sight, with so much farmland around us. I had once asked Mama about it, and she had told me that they were playing at leapfrog. I soon learnt to avert my eyes unless I was quite alone, but by the time I was thirteen, I had deduced what I supposed to be the essential facts of procreation.

  That day, however, as I was studiously ignoring the bull-calf, my aunt had abruptly said, “Mating. Same with humans. ’Spect you’ve guessed. Never cared for the idea myself.”

  I could not imagine anyone caring for the idea, but as I stood beside her, with the white bulk of the lighthouse towering above us, the groaning of the cow in its birth throes came back to me, and with it a dreadful suspicion that I knew why my mother had died so young.

  “That was why Mama always changed the subject,” I said, my previous question forgotten, “and why you will not speak of it—of Nettleford. It was giving birth to me that strained her heart.”

  My aunt turned on me, her face white with shock and fury. I recoiled, thinking she meant to strike me, until I saw that she was furious not with me, but with herself. She seized my shoulders and fixed me with blazing eyes.

  “Never think that, never! Not a jottle of truth in it—none at all. Always remember—only remember—she loved you best. You were her joy, her happiness: hold to that, and ask no more!”

  She drew me close and held me in a rare and crushing embrace while I wept.

  The memory faded at the sound of Frederic Mordaunt’s voice.

  “I do beg your pardon, Miss Ferrars; I did not mean to distress you.”

  “It is not that,” I said. “I grieved dreadfully for my mother, but—” I did not know what else to say. He rose and added more coals to the fire. We had long since finished our luncheon, but he seemed in no hurry to leave.

  “Were you ever sent to school?” he asked, settling himself again. “After you lost your mother, I mean.”

  “No; my aunt used to say that if you could read and do sums, you could give yourself an education.”

  “And did you—do you have friends there still, at Niton?”

  “I fear not. Most of our neighbours were retired army men; the families all knew one another, and we didn’t fit in. We used to converse with the men, if we met them out walking, but we were too unfashionable, and too eccentric—my aunt, I mean—for the women. The farming people would remember me.”

  “Was it a lonely life?”

  “I suppose it was, though I did not feel it at the time; my life in London has been far more solitary. And you, Mr. Mordaunt? You must have been very much alone here.”

  “I was, yes. I had a series of governesses, because none of them would stay very long; they didn’t like living in a madhouse. Like you, I found solace in walking, once I was old enough to be let out on my own. I used to roam all over the moor; there are some wonderfully wild places, and huge clusters of standing stones, left by the Druids. The wind has a strange, thrumming note when it blows amongst them; you always feel that something uncanny is about to happen. I used to stand by Dozmary Pool—where Sir Bedivere is supposed to have thrown Excalibur—and hope that the Lady of the Lake would show herself.

  “And of course the house—the original part, where I grew up—was built nearly eight hundred years ago. Nobody lives there anymore. I would find it oppressive, even now; to a small boy it was profoundly so.”

  I shuddered, imagining lunatics shrieking and clashing their chains in the night.

  “Oh, it was not the patients,” he said, seeming to read my thought. “They were never kept in the old house. The voluntary patients have always lived in the middle wing, where we are now—it was added early in the seventeenth century—and those confined under a certificate are all in the new building, farthest away from the original house. No, it was—well, I suffered very badly from night terrors, and the housekeeper we had then—Mrs. Blazeby, her name was—used to play upon my fears, telling me bloodcurdling stories of ghosts until I did not know whether I was more afraid of falling asleep or staying awake. A house as old as that is never entirely still, even in the dead of night, with a myriad of tiny creatures gnawing away at the fabric, not to mention—”

  He stopped abruptly, colouring.

  “I do beg your pardon, Miss Ferrars—most inconsiderate of me.”

  “You needn’t apologise; I am not afraid of mice, or rats, if that is what you mean. But did you ever—have you ever seen a ghost?”

  His repl
y was forestalled by Bella coming to remove the luncheon tray. The sight of her evidently reminded him of something; he started and drew out his watch.

  “I am terribly sorry, Miss Ferrars, but I have a duty to attend to; I had quite forgotten. It will take me about half an hour; but if you are not too tired, would you care to remain here by the fire? Then we could continue our conversation; Bella will fetch you anything you need.”

  I agreed at once, delighted by the prospect. Frederic hastened away, glancing over his shoulder as if to reassure himself that I had not vanished the instant his back was turned. Bella, who seemed to be trying to repress a smile, followed him out.

  As I watched them leave, I was overtaken by a sense of absolute unreality. It was exactly like the moment in a dream where you realise that you are dreaming, an instant before you wake. So vivid was the sensation that I held my breath, waiting for the room to dissolve, expecting to wake in my bed at Gresham’s Yard, or—please God—in my room at the cottage, with my aunt and my mother talking quietly at the far end of the hall.

  The smoke-stained walls did not dissolve; the watery light at the window did not fade; the soft creak and trickle of the coals went on. And yet my perception had changed as profoundly as if I had indeed woken to the sound of retreating footsteps. My breath came freely; I no longer felt as if I had swallowed a mass of frozen lead. Warmed by Frederic’s evident belief in me, I felt sure that the telegram was, after all, a mistake. I had never been left alone with any young man, let alone one so agreeable. It would be hard, I thought, to imagine two more different upbringings, and yet our conversation had flowed so freely; I could not help feeling that there was an affinity between us and that he was drawn to me as I felt drawn to him. He had been so open, so candid—and it was surely not just professional concern that made his colour change so frequently . . .