The Asylum

by John Harwood

  “Yes,” said Frederic, “but he will not accept that, unless he is certain that your memory has returned.”

  I had considered that possibility during the night: to tell Dr. Straker that I had remembered I was Lucia Ardent, exactly as she had presented herself to me. But he would want to check; he had already dismissed Lucia’s story as an obvious fabrication (as it surely was), and if he caught me in a lie, I would lose Frederic’s regard, and find myself back in Women’s Ward B.

  Again I was tempted to present him with the wills and Rosina’s letters and say, here is the truth, you must decide. But would he—would any man—meekly hand over a lucrative private asylum to a certified lunatic, wholly within his power? Even if he was infatuated with her? The idea that I was the lawful owner of this vast estate was too much for me to hold in my mind; I could grasp it only in bewildering flashes. Regardless of what the law might say, did I really want to deprive Frederic of his inheritance? The question was unanswerable. I could not think beyond escaping, and recovering my own name and fortune from Lucia.

  “—Miss Ashton?”

  I realised that Frederic had been speaking.

  “I beg your pardon,” I said. “There is—so much to take in.”

  He gave me a searching glance, as if hoping to detect some personal meaning, and looked hastily away. In the fields by the wall, work continued as usual. A light breeze blew from the west, stirring the leaves overhead and carrying fragments of song from the workmen. Patches of sunlight drifted across the hills. I thought of all the anguished souls incarcerated a mere hundred yards away, and shivered.

  “I must go,” he said. “And perhaps you should not stay too long; you must be getting cold. I shall let you know as soon as there is any news.”

  I thanked him once more. He did not offer me his hand this time, but he stood for a moment gazing down at me. Then he squared his shoulders and walked away without looking back.

  The following morning after breakfast, Mrs. Pearce, the matron, stopped me on my way out with the words I least wanted to hear: Dr. Straker wished to see me in my room. There I waited, imagining worse and worse consequences as the minutes ticked past. By the time he appeared in the doorway, I had resigned myself to being dragged away in chains, to the deepest, darkest cell in the asylum. But all he did was take my pulse—he seemed not to notice my agitation—and ask his routine questions about whether I had remembered anything more, to which I thought it safest to reply that I had not. I thanked him for moving me to the voluntary wing, and said that I felt better already for being able to walk amongst trees and open fields; he heard me out with his ironic smile and a faint inclination of his head, said he would look in again soon, and departed.

  My relief, however, was tempered by—I could not tell exactly what—an atmosphere, an undercurrent, an uneasy feeling that his manner had been a little too casual, his habitual detachment too studied. Frederic, after all, had confronted him twice in the last few days. Did he really believe that I had not the faintest inkling of this? Or was he trying to lull me into a false sense of security?

  Or was it simply my overwrought imagination running away with me? How could I be certain, for that matter, that Frederic had confronted him? Perhaps the only person I had succeeded in deceiving was myself.

  Three days passed without my seeing Frederic; I told myself that it might be weeks before Lucia replied—if she ever did—but my spirits sank lower nonetheless. The voluntary patients—there seemed to be about a dozen of them, all much older than I—avoided me whenever possible; I wondered who had told them that I was still certified.

  On the fourth morning, I resolved to visit the old stable, to see if it would suit my purpose. A fine, misty rain was falling, which made it more natural that I should hug my cloak around me and draw the hood close around my face as I set off along the path I had taken every afternoon. When I had gone about halfway to the wood, I knelt and pretended to remove a stone from my shoe, glancing behind me as I did so. There was no one following, but every window seemed alive with watchful eyes; the pressure on my spine did not relent until the path had carried me out of sight of the asylum.

  Grey, drifting vapour hung low overhead, curling amongst the treetops. Sheep wandered in and out of patches of mist, their cries muffled by the damp. Beneath the wall, indistinct figures hunched over their spades.

  You will be closely watched. Beyond the fearful promptings of my imagination, I had seen no sign of it. Could Dr. Straker really have stationed watchers all around the estate? How could he know which direction I would take?

  I had only to imagine what I would have done in your place, Miss Ashton, to anticipate your every movement.

  There was the fallen tree, and the path leading into the wood. Except for the distant labourers, there was still no one in sight as I passed beneath the canopy.

  The trees grew even closer on this side. Some had been felled many years ago, and new ones had grown up around the stumps. I could not help leaving a distinct trail as I hurried along the path, flinching every time a twig snapped beneath my foot. Sooner than I expected, I emerged into a clearing in which stood a dark, ivy-covered mass, dripping with moisture. Frederic had described the stable as it had appeared on a sunlit afternoon; in that grey, murky light it was scarcely recognisable as a building. There was the broken lintel, with rubble heaped around a narrow opening.

  I held my breath, listening. Though the asylum was no more than fifty yards away, I could hear only the dripping of water and the muted calls of birds. I moved reluctantly closer.

  Frederic had said that the tapping sound came only when he was not listening for it. I knelt by the opening and tried to peer into the darkness within. A dank, chthonic smell wafted out at me—followed by a metallic clang.

  I scrambled over the rubble and fled, realising too late that I was running in the wrong direction, with the noise still ringing in my head.

  Not the sound of a murderer burying his victim, but the tower clock striking the hour.

  As the last echoes died away, I caught a glimpse of black stonework amongst the trees ahead of me: the side—no, the back—of the original house. I picked my way through mounds of sodden litter until the path ended by the uneven remnants of a flagged walk. The rain was falling more heavily now, pattering over the leaves and splashing onto the stones.

  No one has lived there for years. Many of the windows on the ground floor were choked with ivy; the panes above were black with grime. In places, where sections of the house had been built out from the rest, there was scarcely room to squeeze between the foliage and the crumbling masonry.

  If I could find a way in, I thought, this might be just the place; no one, surely, would think of looking for me here. The first door I came to was massive, banded with rusty iron and quite immovable, but around the corner of a buttress, I found an alcove, about six feet square, with a door in the right-hand wall. Glancing up, I saw the tower looming overhead.

  The door was narrow, arching to a point at the top, like the entrance to a vestry, with a massive keyhole below the latch, and a rusty iron ring hanging from a pivot in the centre. I lifted the latch and tugged, without much hope, but to my surprise it opened with only a rasp of hinges.

  I stepped over the threshold, into a cylindrical stairwell, lit by a single window no more than a foot wide. Stone steps, deeply worn, spiralled upward into the gloom. There were no other doors.

  Outside, the pattering of the rain increased to a roar. I have done nothing wrong yet, I told myself. If anyone catches me, I am simply looking for shelter.

  After three complete circuits of the staircase, I came to an archway in the wall. The stairs continued upward, but I passed through the opening, into a bare stone chamber with an even narrower door set into the wall beside me.

  Either the rain had stopped again, or the walls were so thick as to muffle the sound entirely. I grasped the handle, half hoping it would not turn. But this door, too, was unlocked; it opened halfway, and stopped against an
obstruction.

  All I could make out, at first, was a jumble of furniture, mostly chairs and tables and benches—no, church pews—stacked so close to the wall that only a narrow passage, leading away to my left, remained. Murky light filtered down from above; the pile was too high for me to see over.

  I crept along the passage, wincing every time a board creaked, toward a strip of light—a window?—at the end. The floorboards were thick with dust, which clung to the damp hem of my cloak, leaving an all too visible trail. A few paces from where I had entered were two massive wooden doors, both immovable.

  The oblong of light broadened as I approached; what I had taken for a sill was a railing, waist high, with solid oak panelling beneath. I emerged onto a gallery running the width of the building. The light was coming from lancet windows in the walls high above me. Through a circular hole in the floor, an open staircase spiralled downward.

  I stole toward the balustrade and peered over, into what had once been a chapel, but was now a storeroom or a workshop of some sort. All of the windows below had been bricked up, as had the entrance; the only visible door opened into a vestry nearby. I remembered Frederic saying, “He calls it the temple of science,” and understood why there were no windows. I had blundered into the very heart of Dr. Straker’s domain.

  Ranged around the walls were tables, benches, and cabinets bearing tools, bottles, racks of tubes, notebooks, coils of wire, and pieces of apparatus made up of brass wheels and polished rods and glass cylinders, with cables snaking away from them. A dozen or more oil lamps hung suspended from wires above the benches. Amidst all of this equipment were homelier touches: a teacup, a tantalus with a single glass beside it, a biscuit tin. A closet stood open; I could see clothes hanging from a rail, a tall hat on a peg, a pair of boots beneath. A long trolley, like a narrow bed on wheels, stood by the vestry door; it had two handles projecting from one end, and rails around the side: the sort of thing, it struck me, that might be used to transport an unconscious patient—or a corpse.

  I became aware of a low, continuous humming, just above the threshold of perception. A swarm of bees, perhaps, trapped inside the wall? No, the sound was too constant; I could not tell where it was coming from, but there was a strange, underlying vibration to it that set my teeth on edge.

  As I began to back away, I heard, from somewhere below, a key turning in a lock. I dared not run, and could only crouch below the balustrade as footsteps, heavy and confident, approached. The footsteps halted at the foot of the stairs, as it seemed; through the opening in the floor I heard a drawer open and close, followed by the sound of riffling paper. Then silence, until at last the footsteps retreated, the door closed, and the echoes faded into silence.

  The rain kept up for several days, but every afternoon I put on my damp cloak and tramped about the grounds, approaching the meeting place from a different direction each time. Frederic came to find me on the third day, a Monday, to tell me that he had received a note from Miss Ferrars, saying that he might call upon her at Gresham’s Yard if he wished. He would be going up to London on Wednesday. Despite the pricking of my conscience, I would have been glad of his company, but he seemed to feel himself honour bound not to linger. It occurred to me, as he walked away, that a young man as susceptible as Frederic might easily fall in love with Lucia.

  Through the interminable days and nights of waiting, I pored over my journal until I knew it by heart, and could almost convince myself that these were genuine memories; except that the gaps between the entries remained as blank as ever. I imagined, in a sort of waking nightmare, returning from a walk to find Dr. Straker with my journal in his hand, saying, in his cool, ironic way, “It is a fiction, woven out of your disordered mind. Those wills exist only in your imagination.” I had loved Lucia, and she had betrayed me, and yet, no matter how often I reread those passages, I could not feel as I knew I ought to feel, or think beyond the prospect of escape.

  By Thursday the rain had cleared; I arrived at the fallen tree an hour early, and paced restlessly about until Frederic appeared, looking so disconsolate that I assumed the worst. He could muster only a wan shadow of his usual smile.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Ashton; I am sorry to have kept you waiting. You will be pleased, I hope, to hear that Miss Ferrars is to visit us, a week from today.”

  He sounded so funereal that I thought I must have misheard him.

  “Has she agreed to see me, then?”

  “Yes, Miss Ashton, she has. She seems to have quite forgiven you, and she hopes that her visit will do you good—though of course she also hopes that it will lead to the recovery of her writing case. She would happily have made her visit sooner; only Dr. Straker reminded me, before I left, that he would be away in Bristol on Monday and Tuesday, and so we settled upon the Thursday.”

  He spoke as if his mind were not really upon what he was saying, and he would not meet my eye.

  “I am truly grateful to you, Mr. Mordaunt, for all the trouble you have taken on my behalf. But—you do not seem very happy about it.”

  “Well yes—no—it is only—no, it is nothing, I assure you.”

  It is just as I feared, I thought. He has fallen in love with Lucia.

  “No doubt Miss Ferrars is very charming,” I said. “I only wish I could remember her.”

  “Well yes, Miss Ashton, she—no—that is—” he stammered, looking even more uncomfortable.

  “I trust that she was not distressed—or displeased—by your visit.”

  “No, not at all, Miss Ashton. She was most hospitable—and charming, as you say—only—”

  It struck me that he was using “Miss Ashton” far more frequently than before, with a peculiar emphasis upon the “Ashton.”

  “I wish you would tell me, Mr. Mordaunt, what is troubling you.”

  “Only that—” He took a deep breath, and seemed to make up his mind. “Until yesterday, Miss Ashton, I had hoped—against all the evidence—that Dr. Straker might have been mistaken; that perhaps the woman he had met in London really was the imposter, as you so vehemently believed. You had given me such a vivid picture of your childhood on the cliffs; your mother, your aunt, the loss of the house, that I simply could not—”

  He paused, groping for words. I felt as if I had swallowed a lump of ice.

  “But now I have met Miss Ferrars—the physical resemblance between you is indeed remarkable—and heard her describing those very scenes, sometimes in far greater detail, and spoken to her uncle, and the maid, and heard all about you—Miss Ardent, as you called yourself—and your extraordinary powers of recall, and mimicry, and—well, I can hope no longer. She even invited me to accompany her on an errand to the haberdasher in the square; they were reminiscing about the winter before last, when she first came to London.”

  Clever Lucia, I thought. She has made absolutely sure of him.

  “I am sorry, Miss Ashton, but we must face facts. Dr. Straker has been saying all along that when your memory does return, your personality, your facial expressions, even your voice, may change beyond recognition. It will be quite painless, he assures me; you may not even realise it has happened. You will wake up one morning as a different person in the same body, with your true history returned to you. But you will not remember me, or anyone here; you will not even know who I am . . .”

  He had been gazing directly at me as he spoke, but his voice broke on the last phrase, and he averted his eyes. After a long, paralysed interval, I heard myself speaking, as I had that winter’s morning in the library, with cold contempt.

  “Never mind, Mr. Mordaunt. You will have Miss Ferrars to console you.”

  His head shot up again.

  “You surely cannot think—you do think. No, I cannot—I will not have it. Miss Ferrars is quite charming, yes, but I could never—it is you that I love, you that I have longed for since the day we met. I would infinitely rather you remained forever as you are. To me, you are the real woman, and Miss Ferrars a pale imitation. I will love you no matter
how you may change—of that I am sure—but you will never love me. You will look back on this time—if you remember it at all—with horror, and upon me as one of your gaolers. Detest me if you will, but never, never doubt my love for you.”

  He spoke with such passion, his face flushed, his hands gesturing eloquently, that I was moved in spite of myself; moved, but also exasperated beyond measure. Then why, why, why, I thought, can you not believe that Lucia is the imitation? I imagined him getting down on his knees, and my replying, I cannot marry you because we are cousins; because I have Mordaunt blood in my veins; because everything you are offering me is lawfully mine (though I do not think I want to claim it); and because I cannot return your passion. But he is not on his knees, I reminded myself, and you cannot afford to feel sorry for him.

  “I do not think of you as my gaoler, Mr. Mordaunt, and I am truly grateful for what you have done for me. But you must understand that until I am released, I can think of nothing else.”

  “Miss Ashton, you must not imagine that I cherish any false hopes,” he said earnestly, though his face suggested otherwise. “I should never have spoken, only—” An awkward silence followed.

  “At what time next Thursday,” I asked, “do you expect Miss Ferrars to arrive?”

  “She said she would take the early express, and she hopes to be here in time for luncheon. I have arranged for a fly to meet her at the station. She will stay with us that night and return the following day.”

  “And—will you tell Dr. Straker that you have spoken to me?”

  “Yes. In fact, he insisted that I should convey the news to you; he still believes that this was entirely my idea. Relations between us are—strained. But I find I do not greatly care. No doubt,” he added, staring bleakly at the distant hills, “we shall be back on our accustomed footing before long. I doubt I shall ever have cause to defy him again.”

  There seemed to be nothing more to say, and after another awkward silence he rose, and, with a last, desolate, searching look, made his farewells and departed.