The Asylum

by John Harwood

  And now we were turning in to Tottenham Court Road, where the press of vehicles grew even heavier, and the gaslight fell upon crowds of pedestrians hurrying through the thin rain—to me an utterly incongruous spectacle, for it felt like three o’clock in the morning—and then in to Great Russell Street, past the looming bulk of the British Museum, and at last in to Duke Street, halting by the black mouth of Gresham’s Yard.

  I clambered down stiffly, paid the cabman, and waited for a moment in the shadows opposite. Lights were burning behind the curtains on the first and second floors of my uncle’s house; the time, I thought, must be approaching seven o’clock, his dinner hour. Today was Monday—no, Tuesday—so it would be curried mutton, the dish I liked least of Mrs. Eddowes’ seven, but my mouth watered at the thought of it. Two men in greatcoats went by, glancing curiously at me; I could not remain here long. A woman, muffled against the cold, came briskly up the other side of the street and turned into Gresham’s Yard, and I followed her upon instinct.

  The yard was lit by a single gas lamp on the wall opposite the entrance. The woman disappeared into a narrow passage beneath the lamp: a blind alley, leading to a house whose occupants I did not know. There were lighted windows all around, but I could see no one else in the yard. Ten feet away to my left, the area below the entrance to my uncle’s house was in deep shadow.

  I stumbled the last few paces, climbed the steps, and hammered on the door. As I waited, I thought something stirred in the darkness of the area below. But then came the welcome sound of hurrying footsteps and the familiar rattle of the bolt. The door swung back. Light dazzled my eyes; my mouth was already opening in greeting when I saw that the person standing there was not my uncle, or Cora, or any other maidservant.

  She was myself.

  For one stupefied moment, I thought that someone must have left a dressmaker’s mirror in the hall. But this was not the haggard and travel-stained reflection I ought to have seen. This was myself as I had been before those missing weeks, before the asylum, with my hair pinned up as I had pinned it a thousand times in my own mirror, wearing my favourite pale blue gown. Glittering upon her breast I saw, as a hand fell upon my shoulder and a sound like rushing water filled my ears, my dragonfly brooch, its ruby eyes glowing like tiny drops of blood.

  I woke in the infirmary at Tregannon Asylum, after an interminable nightmare in which I was either freezing cold or unbearably hot, only to realise that the nightmare was, in truth, beginning again, even to the appearance of Dr. Straker in the same rumpled tweeds and dark blue tie.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Ashton. I am glad to see you looking a little better; we have been quite worried about you.”

  I did not attempt to reply.

  “You do remember, do you not, your escape—very resourceful it was, too—and your visit to Miss Ferrars?”

  I nodded slightly; there seemed no point in denying it.

  “I am glad to hear it. I knew, as soon as I found Hodges locked in here, that you must have bribed her. I gave her the choice of confessing at once, or risking a long prison sentence: she gave up the brooch, and I dismissed her on the spot. Of course, you were well on your way by then, but we came up by the express—I had only to imagine what I would have done in your place to anticipate your every movement—which gave me just enough time to return Miss Ferrars’ brooch and persuade her to cooperate. She is still, I am afraid, very angry about the theft of her writing case, but she agreed to open the door to you when I told her it might be essential to your recovery.”

  He paused, studying my face.

  “Do you remember anything more, of those weeks before you arrived here?”

  I shook my head faintly.

  “And before that? Are your memories—as they appear to you—any different? Any less distinct? No? I feared as much. But at least you have seen with your own eyes, Miss Ashton, that you are not, and cannot be, Georgina Ferrars. Our task now is to persuade your mind to accept that. Sooner or later, the past you think you recall will begin to fade, and then to disintegrate, and your actual memories will return. By then I hope to have retraced the steps that led you to Gresham’s Yard in the first place. Once we know where you came from, we will be able to reunite you with the past—and the people—you have lost. So do not despair, Miss Ashton; we shall not fail you.”

  He motioned me to be silent, and left without a backward glance.

  The fever returned that night, and for days, perhaps weeks—I lost all track of time—I burned, or shivered, or lay in a drugged stupor, through which an endless procession of faces came and went. Some no doubt were real; others, like Aunt Vida’s—or Hodges’—could only be hallucinations, but all seemed equally phantasmal. I would wake from dreams so terrible that it was a relief to find myself back in the infirmary, until I remembered why I was there, and then the waking nightmare would begin again. And yet a small part of my mind—my last and only refuge—went on insisting that it was all a dream: that if I could only endure for long enough, I was bound to wake in my bed at Gresham’s Yard, and find that no such place as Tregannon Asylum had ever existed.

  I clung to this thread until the day that Dr. Straker pronounced me well enough to be moved to the women’s ward. Two sturdy female attendants half led, half carried me along a series of gloomy, windowless passages, panelled with worm-eaten oak and smelling of damp fabric, ancient timber, and stale tobacco smoke. All was quiet, except for the steady tramp of the attendant’s feet.

  We stopped at last in front of a massive wooden door, which they proceeded to unlock, and passed through onto a bare wooden landing, with another female attendant seated at the entrance to a long, empty corridor. On my right was a staircase, with a narrow window running the full height of the wall; the sky beyond was already darkening. A tall, emaciated woman, dressed in mourning, was slowly ascending the stairs. I thought at first glimpse that she must be very old, but as she dragged herself a step higher, I saw that she was still quite youthful. As the lock snapped home behind me, I realised that she was one of the inmates.

  We continued on past a series of closed doors, each with the inmate’s name, made up of gold-painted letters on dark wooden squares, arranged in a slot above the observation panel: MISS PARTRIDGE, MRS. WARE, MISS LEWES, MRS. HAWKSLEY, MISS TRAHERNE, and last of all, MISS ASHTON. When I saw those words, the last of my courage failed me, and if the attendants had not taken me by the arms, I should have fallen to my knees. They propelled me, not unkindly, through the door and into a room very like the one I had occupied in the infirmary. I sank down upon the bed, dimly aware that my belongings—or rather Lucy Ashton’s belongings—had arrived before me.

  An indefinite time later, I felt a hand upon my shoulder. A large, grey-haired woman in a dark blue dress loomed over me. Her face, the colour and texture of risen dough, was jowled like a man’s. Eyes of the same steely shade as her hair regarded me sternly.

  “Now then, Miss Ashton, you must pull yourself together. Dinner is at six thirty, and you will want to make yourself presentable.”

  She spoke like a grand lady admonishing a recalcitrant child. I sat up, dabbing at my swollen eyes, and stared at her in disbelief.

  “I am Mrs. Pearce, matron of Women’s Ward B. We must begin as we mean to go on.”

  “Then . . . I am not to be confined to this room?”

  “Certainly not, Miss Ashton. As I am sure Dr. Straker has explained to you, Tregannon House is run on the system of moral therapy: you will find no manacles on my ward. Here, Miss Ashton, you will be given every encouragement to participate in your own cure. In your case, you are suffering from a delusion regarding your identity. But you will learn, with our assistance, to overcome it. So long as you obey the doctors, keep yourself occupied, and join in the society of your fellow patients, your cure can only be a matter of time.”

  “And if I do not?” The words slipped out before I could stop them.

  “Then your cure will take longer; that is all. There are some unfortunate souls in our c
are, who must be closely confined for their own safety, but I am sure you do not wish to be one of them. Especially not when Dr. Straker has taken a personal interest in your case; so much so that you are here, he informs me, as our guest.

  “And now I must leave you. When you hear the gong for dinner, make your way along the corridor and down the staircase: the attendant will direct you. In the meantime, I shall send someone to help you dress.”

  I wanted to shout, I have been robbed of everything, even my name, but I saw in that calm, implacable face the utter futility of protest.

  On Women’s Ward B, there was no shrieking, no rattling of chains, no caged lunatics gnashing their teeth and rolling in their own filth, and no brutality: none, at least, that I saw. The attendants were mostly kind, and at worst indifferent; Hodges, or so I came to believe, must have been summoned from some darker realm. Yet it was, in every sense, a place of torment. I could not pass along our corridor without hearing the sound of muffled weeping from behind at least one door, and sometimes a dull, regular thud, thud, thud, as of a woman banging her head endlessly against a wall.

  My window, again secured by vertical metal bars, overlooked a flagged courtyard, flanked on two sides by outbuildings. I could watch carts and carriages come and go, until the spectacle became too painful. Besides a metal bedstead, it was furnished with a soft chair, a small desk, an upright chair, a washstand, chest and closet. Heating was by way of a device I had never seen before, made of coiled metal tubing and fed with hot water from a boiler somewhere in the depths of the building. It took away the worst of the chill, but I was always cold. At night the gurgling of the water accompanied my anguished thoughts. We were not allowed matches, or any sort of naked flame: the light, as in the infirmary, came from oil lamps enclosed in stout metal grilles. You could extinguish your light by turning a little brass wheel, but only an attendant could light it again. All lights were extinguished at ten, and were not lit again until seven thirty the next morning.

  Dr. Straker came to see me once or twice a week, always to ask if I had remembered anything more, and to assure me that it could only be a matter of time before he discovered my true identity. Whether I wept or raged or pleaded, or remained sullenly mute, his manner was always calm, courteous, unruffled; even the seemingly careless fashion in which he knotted his tie scarcely varied. I knew dimly that my only hope of escape would lie in accepting whatever character he chose to confer upon me—but what would I be escaping to?

  The idea that I had seen Georgina Ferrars at Gresham’s Yard was at once inescapable—Dr. Straker had met and talked to her—and utterly beyond my comprehension. No matter how I racked my brains, there seemed to be only two possibilities. Either I was mad, as Dr. Straker believed, or the woman in London, whoever she might be, had stolen my name, my uncle, my brooch—and presumably, by now, the two hundred pounds my mother had left me. Perhaps she intended to push Uncle Josiah down the stairs, and flee with the proceeds as soon as his will was proven. It seemed an extraordinary risk to run for the sake of a few hundred pounds, but as an act of vengeance, for some crime I had never heard of, it might have been diabolically appropriate.

  And according to Dr. Straker, she had been at Gresham’s Yard for three of those missing weeks. Was that why I could not remember anything? Again and again I tried to pick up the thread, to move forward, step by step, from those last monotonous days in my uncle’s shop, but it was like stepping into a fog-bank, expecting every time to meet my double, only for the fog to lift an instant later in the infirmary at Tregannon Asylum.

  If Dr. Straker was right, it could only be a matter of time before my mind—or what I believed to be my mind—began to disintegrate. Imagining that, I would be seized by a trembling that I could not control, sometimes for hours on end. I had read, often enough, of the tortures of the damned, and had tried to imagine them continuing forever, just as I had tried and failed to imagine the joys of heaven. In the darkness of those interminable nights, it was all too easy to believe that I had died without knowing it; died, and been condemned to a hell in which even my present torment would seem like a paradise compared to what awaited me. Yet much of the day was occupied by the routine of the asylum, which I absorbed, little by little, through a fog of misery and dread.

  Between seven thirty and six, the door to the landing stood open, and we could descend to the ground floor, on which were a library, a women’s sitting room, a men’s sitting room, a dining room and a chapel. The men’s ward must have been a mirror image of ours; the men descended by a corresponding staircase at the other end of the wing. Patients were not allowed in one another’s rooms; if you wished to converse with anyone, you had to do so downstairs. Just beyond the foot of the women’s staircase was an outer door leading to an enclosed garden, the one I had seen from the infirmary window, where we were exhorted to walk whenever the weather allowed.

  As the days grew even shorter and colder, many of the inmates preferred to remain indoors, and had to be chivvied by the attendants into taking a turn in the garden—if so desolate a place deserved the name—whereas I found some relief in movement, and would put on my cloak and tramp round and round for an hour or more unless it was pouring with rain. Sometimes I would look up at the row of barred windows on the second floor; mine, I thought, had been the third from the right, and four windows farther along—though I tried not to think of it—was the sitting room where I had foolishly put my trust in Frederic Mordaunt. The ground-floor windows were barred as well, but those on the first floor were not, and I would often see faces looking down from them; I wondered if this was where the doctors, or the attendants, had their quarters.

  The brick walls that made up the other three sides looked even higher from below. Though they were kept clear of ivy, the mortar had crumbled a little, and it seemed to me that a strong and athletic person, not encumbered by skirts or petticoats, might be able to scramble up where the walls met at a right angle. But the alarm would be raised long before they could reach the top; and even if they got over, they would be instantly pursued. There was a massive wooden door at the far corner of the outer wall, but it was so overgrown that it had obviously not been opened for years. Apart from a scattering of white flowers, the only plants that seemed to be thriving were all of the darkest and most dismal shades of green.

  Idleness was strongly discouraged. Those who were agitated were exhorted to knit or embroider: there was basket-weaving or raffia work for those who could not be trusted with a needle. When I could not walk in the garden, I read, or pretended to read, so as to avoid being pressed to play cards or backgammon. In summer, or so I was told, patients who had made good progress were allowed, under strict supervision, to walk around other parts of the estate. All of this, according to Mrs. Pearce, was part of the system of moral therapy. To me it resembled a form of religious persuasion in which, though all the talk was of salvation, the prospect of hell was far more immediate, in realms far more confined, housing dozens or hundreds more inmates whom I never saw.

  We were required, too, to take all our meals in the dining room downstairs unless the doctors considered us too ill to attend. Male and female patients dined together. There were several tables of various sizes; Mrs. Pearce and at least one of the doctors (who all seemed to be bachelors, living on the premises) would preside at luncheon or dinner. At one of the tables, the faces changed from day to day; later I learnt that these were patients from the more restricted wards, brought in to show them the freedom to which they might aspire if they progressed. Conversation was encouraged, but meals were sombre affairs at best. If it had not been for the company, you might have imagined yourself in some genteel boarding-house.

  Dr. Straker assigned me to a place at the middle table, between a Mr. Wingrave, who talked continuously, and a Miss Traherne, who never spoke. Miss Traherne, a tall, emaciated woman with a corpse-white face and lank, mousey hair, would sit, radiating misery, staring at the uneaten contents of her plate until one of the attendants reminded her to t
ake a mouthful. Even the seating formed part of the system of moral therapy: Mr. Wingrave was an example of a man possessed by a delusion he refused to relinquish, and therefore condemned to live out his days at Tregannon Asylum; Miss Traherne was a terrible warning of the fate awaiting those who succumbed to despair.

  In Mr. Wingrave, I thought at first that I had found an ally, for he looked and sounded entirely sane, and seemed to know exactly what was wrong with our fellow diners. But then he confided to me that society was controlled by a race of invisible beings called the Overseers; he knew this because he alone could hear their voices. He appeared to be resigned to his fate; the Overseers, he said, had compelled Dr. Straker to certify him, so as to ensure that no one outside Tregannon Asylum would ever discover their existence. You could tell when an Overseer had taken command of someone’s mind because of the look in their eyes, a distinctive glassy stare that he had learnt to recognise. After everything that had befallen me, it sounded all too plausible, except that Dr. Straker was surely the god of our underworld; the attendants, his familiar spirits.

  Others at the middle table included a Miss Partridge, small, elderly, very gracious in manner, and possessed by the unshakable conviction that she was the Queen’s younger sister. She had been confined by her own children, to spare them embarrassment, I could only suppose, since she seemed entirely harmless. There was Mrs. Hawksley, wild-eyed, very tense and jerky in her movements, glaring at anyone who approached her. There was Miss Smythe, a small birdlike lady in middle age, who shook her head unceasingly, even when she was eating; sometimes slowly, sometimes in a seeming frenzy of denial. There was the Reverend Mr. Carfax, distinguished-looking, immaculately turned out, who would arrange his cutlery with mathematical precision and then sit brushing invisible specks of dust from the sleeve of his coat; and Mr. Stanton, gaunt, grey-headed, with haunted eyes and a permanent expression of dread. There was Miss Lewes, a stout woman in the grip of religious mania, listening to inaudible voices and arguing sotto voce with them; and others whose names I never learnt, like the immensely tall and thin man who moved like some strange wading bird, pausing before each step with his foot poised above the ground, his face set in a look of utter desolation.