by John Harwood
“You leave me no choice,” he said, breathing hard. “I meant every word: I would have spared your life, but you have made that impossible.”
He drew a key from his waistcoat pocket, turned toward his desk, and froze.
“I should have known better. Throw down those papers while you still have the chance.”
I made no reply. He moved out of sight beneath the gallery, and I heard the scrape of a key. When he reappeared, he had a pistol raised in his right hand.
“You cannot escape me, Miss Ashton. I promise I will not shoot you if you come quietly.”
I flung the wreckage at him and recoiled from the opening. The crash reverberated around the tower; but the echoes did not cease. Someone was pounding on the vestry door.
“Damnation,” he muttered. There was a brief silence, followed by the sound of rapid footsteps as the hammering resumed. I peeped over the balustrade, just as he turned to look up at me. His face was very pale, and there was a smear of blood across his forehead.
“Be silent, and you may yet live,” he said, slipping the pistol into his coat pocket. A moment later he had reached the door, but he did not open it.
“Frederic!” he shouted. “What is the meaning of this?”
I heard a muffled reply but could not make out the words.
“Go back to the house! I will join you shortly!”
The reply evidently did not please him.
“Frederic! I insist that you return to the house!”
Another flurry of hammering.
He turned the key in the lock and braced himself. The door, I remembered, opened outward: he evidently meant to force Frederic back and confront him on the other side. But the door was wrenched from his grip, and Frederic, lantern in hand, burst into the room.
“Dr. Straker, you must come now! We have searched every . . .”
He set down his lantern, took a few tentative steps toward the invalid chair, and froze, transfixed by the sight of Lucia’s body.
“In God’s name, sir, what have you done?”
Dr. Straker’s hand went to his coat pocket. I tried to scream but could not utter a sound.
“She would have ruined us—everything we have worked for.”
Frederic turned to face him and caught sight of the pistol in his hand, the barrel downward to the floor.
“You—you murdered her?”
“If you had only obeyed me, you need never have known.”
Frederic took a step toward him. Dr. Straker half raised the pistol. Then his shoulders sagged, and his hand fell to his side.
“Enough,” he said wearily. “Miss Ferrars has defeated me.”
He contemplated the weapon for a moment, and with a faint, ironic smile, laid it carefully on the bench beside the lantern.
“Frederic,” I said, finding my voice at last. He stared as if mesmerised while I descended, weak from the reaction. Dr. Straker, too, stood motionless until I had come up beside Frederic. Then he bowed to me, extended his hand to Frederic (who shook it mechanically), and crossed to the cabinet on the wall, taking up the leather coronet as he passed.
“You should leave now,” he said, settling the coronet over his head and turning to the cabinet. With wires trailing from his head and hands, he looked like the high priest of some bizarre sect, dedicated to the worship of electricity. The vibration crept back into my bones, gathering power as I watched. Frederic stood mute. I opened my mouth to protest, but the words died on my lips. Dr. Straker raised his right hand and was flung into the air, where he seemed to hang for an instant, his arms outstretched and smoke curling from his temples, before he crashed to the floor.
The vibration did not cease. It rose in pitch and volume until it sounded like a swarm of angry hornets. Flames burst from the cabinet, followed by a vicious blue flash; then silence.
All the lights went out, except for the lantern and the yellow flames licking at the wall. Acrid fumes caught at my throat; I smelt burnt hair and flesh.
“We must run,” said Frederic, waking from his trance and urging me toward the door. I stopped beside the chair, looking down at Lucia. Her cloak had fallen open again, revealing my brooch; I had not given it a thought until that moment.
“We cannot leave her,” I said.
“We must. She is beyond our help; we will never get her through the tunnel.”
I went to unpin my brooch, and found that I could not bear to.
“Please let us try.”
“Then we must leave by the other door.”
He darted across the room, returning with the lantern and a bunch of keys.
“Let me,” I said, and wheeled her toward the far corner, where I held the lantern while Frederic tried one key after another. Burning fragments spilled from the cabinet, sending flames licking along the bench. As the lock turned over, I heard a muffled explosion, followed by a flare of white light. Liquid fire raced across the floor; I caught a glimpse of Dr. Straker’s body lying in a sea of flame.
“This way!” cried Frederic, slamming the door behind him. The chair lurched and swayed; I had a fleeting impression of rough stone walls, mottled with damp, as we stopped at the last door. Again I held the light while he wrestled with bolts and bars. Lucia’s head was hanging over the side of the chair; as I leant forward to straighten it, I saw the flicker of a pulse—faint, but unmistakable—in her throat.
We emerged into a confusion of lights, and voices shouting above the clangour of fire bells. Every window in the tower was pulsing with a fierce orange glow; men with lanterns converged upon us as we wheeled Lucia toward the dark bulk of the asylum. Someone recognised Frederic and called for orders.
“Dr. Straker is dead!” he shouted. I could barely hear him above the roar of the fire. “Too late to save . . . Bring water . . . Demolish the cloister and defend the house . . . Run to the wards . . . Get the patients ready . . . Evacuate in case it spreads.”
A window burst in a shower of glass, and smoke boiled upward; the noise of the fire redoubled.
“Round to the voluntary wing,” said Frederic. “They can take her up to the infirmary from there. If it’s safe.”
We hastened along the gravel walk between the two buildings and halted within sight of the entrance I had left only a few hours before. The old house had been dark as we passed, but now the upper window nearest the tower began to glow, and then the next, and the next. Frederic was shouting to someone nearby. Two attendants ran up and hurried Lucia away; a hand plucked at my sleeve, and I saw that it was Bella, with Frederic urging me to follow. I had forgotten that I was bloodstained, dishevelled, and filthy; I had forgotten even my exhaustion, but now the weight of it descended as if my bones had turned to lead. Leaning on Frederic’s arm, I heard him say something about a bed in the stables, and wondered if he meant me to sleep in the ruin, until we set off along the side of the building, toward the main gate.
Doors were opening all along the wall ahead of us, with people spilling out of them in every form of attire from dress clothes to nightshirts: doctors, lunatics, voluntary patients and attendants, mingled indiscriminately in the glow of the burning tower, swarming into the night.
I woke in a strange bed, with a coarse blanket prickling my neck, feeling as if I had fallen down a staircase. For a few terrible moments I was back in the infirmary, with the nightmare beginning again. Then a chair creaked and I opened my eyes, to find myself in a whitewashed attic room, with rain pattering against the window, my brooch and writing case on a little table by the bed, and Bella sitting beside me. The asylum, she told me, had been saved, but Mr. Edmund had died from the shock of it all; Mr. Frederic was the master now, and very anxious to see me. “And yes, miss”—it was plain she did not know what to call me—“the other lady” was alive, though still unconscious; they had carried her across to the infirmary as soon as it was safe.
At first I could barely walk, but after a perilous descent to the tack room below, the worst of the stiffness had begun to wear off. I declined, with a
shudder, Bella’s offer to fetch an invalid chair, and settled for an umbrella instead. Everything looked exactly the same, even to the distant figures labouring by the boundary wall, but the sour, acrid reek grew stronger, reminding me of the fogs around Gresham’s Yard. I made my way slowly down to the far corner of the asylum and stood gazing at the devastation. All that remained of the old house was a jagged, roofless shell. Wisps of smoke still curled from the wreck of the tower; the surrounding trees were blackened and scorched.
I shivered, recalling my last glimpse of Dr. Straker, and thinking how much ruin and anguish would have been spared if Felix Mordaunt had never made that will, or, indeed, if he and Rosina had never met . . . but then I would not be standing here, with my writing case in my hand, trying to decide what I should do about those wills. The rain had all but ceased; I lowered the umbrella and drifted into a reverie, from which I was woken by the sound of Frederic’s voice.
“Miss Ferrars, I am delighted to see you up and about so soon.”
His suit was stained and crumpled, his face grey with exhaustion, but he smiled nonetheless. There was an air of quiet resolution—or was it resignation?—about him that I had not seen before.
“Mr. Mordaunt; I was sorry to hear of your uncle’s death.”
“You need not be; he was in constant pain and would not have lived much longer. And . . . he was not an affectionate man. Or, as I discovered this morning, a prudent one. He had been withdrawing large sums for many years, with no explanation and nothing to show for the money. The estate is mortgaged to the hilt; the sale of the asylum will barely cover its debts.
“So much for my promise to provide for you,” he said wryly, “let alone . . . But enough of this. There is so much I don’t understand, about you, and Miss Ardent, and why Dr. Straker acted as he did . . .”
“It was for these,” I said, handing him the wills and the marriage certificate. “And all for nothing.”
We talked most of the day by the fire in his private sitting room. I gave him Rosina’s letters to read, but said nothing of what I had felt for Lucia, who was lying, still unconscious, in the infirmary, only a few doors away. We were now, as cousins, on intimate terms. I had wondered if the discovery would change his feeling for me, but it plainly had not, and the memory of his impassioned declaration hovered between us.
I offered to burn the wills, thinking he might salvage something from the wreck of his fortune, but he would not have it.
“No, Georgina, the estate is yours by right, moral as well as legal, and if anything can be salvaged, you shall have it. Uncle Edmund was a thief and a hypocrite—when I think of all those lectures on morality!—and I will not profit from his wickedness. Not, I fear, that there is likely to be any profit. An asylum is a business like any other, and when the world hears of Dr. Straker’s crimes, its reputation will be lost. And to think I worshipped that man . . . the ruler of a madhouse, and he was mad himself.”
“Frederic,” I said hesitantly, “have you told anyone else about—what you saw last night?”
He shook his head.
“Then I think the secret should be ours alone. Not because of the asylum’s reputation; but if word of that machine gets out, someone else will try to build one.”
“But then the world will believe he was a great man.”
“I think that is the lesser of two evils,” I said. “Perhaps he began with the best intentions. But with so much power in his hands . . .”
“And the patients he killed? What of them?”
“We cannot disclose that,” I said, “without revealing how they died. And then more lives will be sacrificed to someone else’s ambition.”
We both fell silent, staring into the flames.
“I see what you mean,” he said at last, “about keeping silent. Dr. Straker acted alone, so there is no question of defrauding the buyer.”
“Then I shall sign the property over to you. I insist upon it, Frederic; I have a small income of my own, and I will not see you left with nothing.”
“Then I shall insist upon sharing with you—if there is anything to share.”
Another silence followed.
“What will you do now?” he asked. His tone was studiously matter-of-fact.
“I shall go first to Plymouth, to see Mr. Lovell about the transfer—and find out how much of my money Lucia has stolen. And then I suppose I must call at Gresham’s Yard to collect whatever is left of my belongings. So far as Uncle Josiah is concerned, I have been away only a few days, and it would be pointless trying to tell him otherwise; he will be huffish enough about having to pay another boy to help him in the shop.”
“And then?”
“Then I shall return to Plymouth. Mr. Lovell kindly invited me to stay with his family at Noss Mayo, and if the invitation still stands . . . Don’t misunderstand me, Frederic; I know Mr. Lovell only through the pages of my journal, but he was kind to me, and I should like to rest for a while in a place where I can walk, and think, and be alone, and say as much or as little about myself as I choose. And you, Frederic? What will you do?”
“I shall look after things here until the asylum has been sold. And then, with luck, the new owners will keep me on.”
“But Frederic—”
“I know, I know; I should go out in the world. But this is all I know, and if I have a vocation, it lies here—or somewhere like this. I can at least try to ensure that, in future, no superintendent ever wields such power; if I achieve nothing else, I shall not have lived in vain.”
Though he strove to repress it, the note of desolation was unmistakable.
“Frederic,” I said gently, “you told me, five days ago, that you loved me, and I fear that your decision to remain here has—something to do with that.”
“Yes,” he said simply. “I did, and I do. But it is impossible, for every possible reason, and so—”
“No, Frederic; it is impossible only for one reason. I love you as if you were my brother—but not as a woman should love the man she is to marry. If I did, I should not care a straw about money, or Mordaunt blood, or anything else. But I do not want you to cherish false hopes of me, and lose the chance of happiness because of it. You have a loving spirit—I said so at the beginning, and I feel it all the more deeply now—and you ought to marry. You will always have me as your friend, your cousin, but I cannot be your wife.”
“If I had been—if I had stood up to Dr. Straker at the very beginning . . .”
“Frederic, Frederic, there is nothing you could have done, or not done; you must believe me. Perhaps you feel that you have given your heart to me, and can never love anyone else, but you will—it is why you must go out in the world, as you put it, even if your work is here . . .”
“You sound as though you speak from experience,” he said, with a touch of bitterness.
“No, only from intuition. I don’t know that I will ever marry, Frederic; after everything I have lived through here, I cannot imagine . . .”
Unsure of what it was I could not imagine, I trailed off, leaving him plainly unconvinced. Frederic, I wanted to say, I loved Lucia as a woman is supposed to love her husband, though I have only the evidence of my journal for it. And yes, she is my half sister, but I did not know that, any more than I knew that she meant to deceive and betray me. And though I may never remember what I felt for her, I believe she showed me something of myself; something that perhaps explains why I cannot return your love as you would wish.
But then I feared he would simply be shocked to no purpose, and so I did not speak, and another awkward silence followed, until a man I had not seen before, a Dr. Overton, came in to say that Miss Ardent was awake, and asking if she might speak to Miss Ferrars alone.
“Please tell her I shall be along in a few moments,” I said.
“Surely you do not want to see her?” said Frederic as soon as Dr. Overton had gone. “Should we not send for the police and have her arrested at once?”
“No,” I said, “I should like t
o speak to her before I decide—for my own part, I mean. But how can she possibly remember me, when I recall nothing of her?”
“I think,” said Frederic, “that Dr. Straker was deluded about that machine, as about so much else. It was sheer chance that he did not kill you. Now really, should you not spare yourself this encounter?”
“No, I want to speak to her.”
“Then, if you are quite sure, may I see her first? I have something to say to her myself.”
They had put her in the very same room where I had woken on that cold November day a lifetime ago. She was deathly pale, and her face had been scrubbed clean; the resemblance was still plain, but I was far more struck by the differences in the shape of her eyes, the set of her lips, the curve of her cheekbone; so much so that I wondered how anybody, excepting Uncle Josiah, could have mistaken one of us for the other. Standing there in the doorway, I thought of what I had said in my journal about the likeness increasing every day, and I understood just how closely she had studied me.
“Georgina,” she said, in a small, chastened voice, “will you sit by me for a little?”
I moved the upright chair—the one Dr. Straker had always occupied—closer to the bed, and sat down beside her.
“I can’t remember anything of—what happened,” she said, “but Mr. Mordaunt told me that you risked your own life to save mine, and saved me again when you might have left me to burn. Why did you do that?”
“Because I could not bear to watch you die, without at least trying to save you. Not out of any feeling for you—I have none. You deceived me and betrayed me, and left me here to rot.”
A long silence followed.
“I have not had a moment’s peace,” she said at last, “since I sent that telegram in your uncle’s name. It was done on the spur of the moment, and then—I was afraid to go back.”
“I would have shared with you,” I said, “if there had been anything to share. But Edmund Mordaunt is dead, and the estate is bankrupt; you and your mother had already bled him dry.”