FEEBLENESS OF INTELLECT
FEMALE DISEASE
HEREDITARY PREDISPOSITION
INTEMPERANCE AND BUSINESS TROUBLE
JEALOUSY AND RELIGION
GATHERING IN THE HEAD
GRIEF
GUNSHOT WOUND
HARD STUDY
ILL-TREATMENT BY HUSBAND
NOVEL READING
NYMPHOMANIA
OPIUM HABIT
OVERSTUDY OF RELIGION
PARENTS WERE COUSINS
PERIODICAL FITS
POLITICAL EXCITEMENT
SCARLATINA
SEDUCTION AND DISAPPOINTMENT
UTERINE DERANGEMENT
VICIOUS VICES
WHAT SHE DID NOT WRITE [MOLLY]
What Lady Elodie did not write of were the fits. It took me time to understand, but she marked in her diary a large angry asterisk—*—and usually wrote no more on that day. It was only in the catalogue of doctors’ notes, prescriptions, diagnoses and fits, talking of the Falling Sickness and St Vitus’ Dance, that I could now discern patterns, as they attempted to give her something to stop the fits without harming the unborn child.
She sometimes wrote in the lines before the—*—of an overwhelming feeling of wellbeing, a shining certainty that all would be fine and exalted at the end.
But I have often heard, from those who have fits, that an exaltation seizes them in the minutes before the fit begins.
BLESSED [ELODIE]
My heart hurts, [she wrote, one day recovering from a sedation]. My heart hurts to think of him. The doctor says—but the doctor is an idiot—that there may be something wrong. The heart beats irregularly; sometimes it scarcely beats at all. This bodes ill, he says.
How can something so blessed bode so ill? I chide him. Check me again and give me something. But he will not, for fear of setting me off again.
Edward insists I must not worry. “We are blessed,” he repeats, as if to convince himself. But I hear his muttered conversations at the door, and I am afraid. I have been so lucky, to be loved, and wooed, and wed, and spoiled, and blessed with our children, and wealth, and health— till now. But now the doctor—hard to write—the doctor casts all into jeopardy. I will not write thus.
I shall write instead to you, my dear child, my child unimaginable, so long hoped for, my child in danger. I shall not give up, however they affright me, however I must fight them, I shall not give you up. I will cherish you—ah, but why must I write of your end, before you are even begun?
* * *
And then the diary went silent, for days, up to the due date for the birth, and beyond, with only —*—s to mark the passing of time, and doctor’s receipts.
GAPS IN THE RECORD [MOLLY]
Roxbury later filled me in on the gap in the diary. How could she write of it in those terrible days, terrible weeks?
“I knew birth could be hard, could be painful,” he said. “I did not know it could be a bloodbath. The yellow bedroom looked like the Colosseum by the time they’d got him out, and I was fearful first for her. The doctors wielded their knives, the midwives their forceps; we had them all lined up, forewarned of trouble. They would not let me in to be with her, fearful how I would react to the carnage. She screamed and begged for them to let me in, because she did not trust them to look after the boy. She thought their diagnoses had prejudiced me against him, and was afraid they would decide she could not have him. How much blood she lost. Pints. I cannot speak of it: the instruments they used, her fearful pallor when finally they let me see her.
“The wind was howling against the turret, just as it is now. The candles sputtered, and she would not sleep; she kept asking and asking to see him. And I did not know how to say nay: we brought him, but he was deadly ill. They said he might not last the night, as they had warned, and would not reach a week. They prescribed ten contradictory ways to cure him or save him or give him a tenth of the life we wished him to have, and all these required her to leave him in their care and try and recover. It was awful. She suffered the same fits as before, yet it was also a kind of fit that took her, a withdrawing fit that stole her away inside herself.”
* * *
The next diagnostic passages confirmed this mystification, as doctors from far and wide were called to tend her. Melancholia numinosa, one called it. Another, post-partum depression. Still a third, aphasia electa, with concomitant peregrinationes nocturnae. But none of these was sufficient to explain her symptomology.
He told me how they tried everything to revive her to normal spirits: pills, leeches, massage (Chinese, Swedish, Indian head), rubbing, prodding, stimulation of prescribed areas, warmth, cool, bedpans, ice, Turkish bath, hair brushing, sinus tapping, gland stimulation, coffee, opium, stroking, scratching, music, noise, silence, flashing lights, and electricity.
He waved his hand, with a sort of a half-nod, and I could trouble him no further. Seventy-three contradictory treatments. No wonder he was grown tired of it. Anyone would throw up their hands and give up.
But how did it end? He did not tell, and there were yet more entries in the diary, her diary, after the birth, and sorely broken.
AFTER THE BIRTH [ELODIE]
Into my pen, I cannot heave my heart. The trees blow against the window.
Soon enough the rain will drench them, then the snow.
It seems so desperately long since I wrote of those dark clouds obscuring the days of expectancy. The journal has sat moribund here, while up in the yellow room we tussled with life and death. I cannot begin.
Movement inside. The doctor’s warnings. Edward’s fears, and mine.
I cannot write today. Why such things happen is unfathomable. Poor Skirtle, she had to be strong, when I was weak. The little life that struggled to find breath in the room. He was here, and here, and then gone, still gone. Forever gone. Never to return. I cannot write of it. I wish to hide from the world and never to expose these woes.
His little hands. Holding so briefly the tiny fingers. The tiniest of fingernails, so miniature in form. Perfect spine. A few short breaths, and taken away, I cannot dwell on it. I cannot write. My chest aches, and I am dying here in my tower.
* * *
CLARITY, OPACITY [ELODIE]
Clearer than this the doctors cannot be. They told us something was wrong. I am ill. My fits, unexplained and unpredictable. My pains, not simply childbirth. The doctors tell me the baby has problems—as if he were in debt or misbehaving. And yet he comes out, bawling, though they said he would be dead. He bawled, dear little heart!
Problems with his breathing; problems with his heart.
Can they perform an operation? The wonders of modern medicine, and so forth. Edward has brought the finest surgeons in the land.
They could operate, they say, but it is a congenital defect; better to leave him in Skirtle’s arms for now. There he may die peacefully.
There he may die? And my arms: whom may I hold in my arms? I ask to hold him, I want to suckle him. The juddering fit comes upon me, and they press the zones to relieve it. When I come to myself, there is another doctor, another surgeon, who explains that he can open up little Jonathan’s chest, like a cage, or like an oyster, to see if he cannot repair the hole in his heart.
“Will he not bleed to death?”
The surgeon says that he may.
“Are you certain there is a hole in his heart?”
As certain as he can be.
“So you are not.”
I look to Edward, and we shake our heads. Skirtle and I take turns holding him, lulling him, but we cannot quiet him, that dreadful sound wheezing from his lungs.
* * *
I come round again from a fit. I wonder if I may have dreamt the latest surgeon. Edward is still trying. Everything. Anything. One surgeon believes iron lungs help congenital breathing difficulties. Within hours Edward has one made at the works, and brought for our use. But his wails are fading. Edward insists we let the doctors put him in the contraption. I am destitute;
Skirtle too, but she has to comfort me.
So we watch him die, unheld, uncomforted. I cannot hate them for it, cannot hate Edward. But I feel myself unhinged. My body is rebelling. My brain whirls into a gyre from which I never shall cease spinning.
My only relief from this lifeless deathlike existence are the fits. Seizures that freeze the heart. Sometimes I feel death near. They still me, restrain me, try to keep the fragile mechanism sound, ticking from one bald hour to the next, from day to benighted day.
How long until I yield? Despair sits beside my bed. I am spent, I’m shattered. Apothecary, cannot you relieve me?
HAIL AND FAREWELL [MOLLY]
I devoured her heartfelt jottings with my heart swelling, and I wished I could reach back and redeem their loss.
I went again down to the Walled Garden. This time, I stumbled to his grave with trembling awe. The sorry family tale ran through my sundered mind. I felt drained, and drawn to him, this tiny frame: all the king’s horses and all the earl’s quacks could not put him back together again. His little heart beating, beating, beating; and stopped.
I have known many little souls who have faded and failed in the hard London winters, with the cholera and consumption and all; but oh, to think of Lady Elodie’s wish granted, then snatched away. He lived, and she dandled him in her arms, as she had dreamed, as he struggled to cry.
And those fool doctors took him from her and did not let her see him and told her he was dead. And the fit took her again. No wonder it did. A relief. A release. She had written one last time in the book, when she knew that he was dead and was beginning to understand the bleak truth, and was becoming unhinged by it, and lost to the world of woes.
JONATHAN IS DEAD [ELODIE]
Jonathan is dead. Call for tea. Skirtle makes a lovely pot. But I shall take it with lemon. I don’t wish to see milk.
His little fingers.
Call for my boots. I shall go for a walk. Can I get up? I am still bleeding. Where is the value in living? I cannot read, I cannot listen to moralising sermons. He lived, at least. All that we could do, we did. Didn’t we? He lived. That cannot be said of every little soul who vanishes away. He lived, and I held him, and he shall not be forgot.
I shall walk to the Walled Garden. What is the racket down by the arboretum? What are they doing, there in the glasshouses, when I am trying to rest? No rest, now he is gone. Watchfulness: something was not right. His heart, his windpipe. They squeezed the breath into him at first. Is that so unusual? How were they sure something was amiss? Was there nothing wrong, really? They talk rot, these medics. Why did we believe them? Fiddle-faddling with facts and figures. Diagnoses. Agh, these diabolical diagnoses.
How does that square with your medical oaths, tell me, coming to tell me that he will not live, when he was palpably alive in my arms? And taking him… How can that accord with the tender ministrations of their duty? He was here; now is gone. Is he yet in the ground? I must see him. I should not like to see him put in the ground before I am. I would keep him here, with me, until such time as I can no longer.
Already I can no longer. I am indistinct. I am vague with doubt. And guilt. Someone is to blame. A child is not alive one hour and dead the next without reason. I do not accept it.
I will not. I feel the shuddering aura approach. Where is he? Bring him back to me.
SECONDARY DIAGNOSIS [FRENCH DOCTOR]
Notes: patient in a state of catalepsy. As if I had placed her under hypnosis— no different—but I have not. Patient alternates between lethargic and cataleptic states. Continues to have tonic & clonic seizures. Has communicated with nobody since attack.
The attack:
Pain, intense, right leg: the boule hystérique radiating from the right ovary, rising through digestive tract, suffocating her, like an apple at the base of the neck.
Ears ringing, eyes pressured, heart palpitating, temples hammering.
Tongue curled up in mouth, contracted. Vision foggy, hands clenched.
Head jerked to the right—and she was gone.
Thus the onset of the hysterical attack.
Diagnosis now sure: hysterico-epileptic.
Hysterico-epileptoid origin of the fits proven, as they are arrested by hysterogenic pressure. This is her type. It is a chronic state, a disease for life. The cataleptic state is a kind of brain fog. Her body has gone limp and numb, but her eyes are open and she appears sentient.
No evidence of intellection.
I touch the skin near her neck lightly, just above the sternocleidomastoid, and she twists her neck, afflicted with torticollis; I rub the other side, and she untwists. There is no sense of volition. She can be shaped, like a wax model. If the flexors of the forearm are rubbed, they become rigid; I cannot overcome this flexion by force, but only by rubbing the corresponding extensors. Any number of muscles may be contracted: biceps, pectorals, whatever, producing contractions as severe as seen in hemiplegia; but they may be resolved simply by exciting in turn the antagonistic muscles.
She cannot answer questions; neither distressed nor at rest. To prove her anaesthesia, I pierced her skin with a needle. Roxbury was disquieted, yet it caused her no apparent pain.
Too far, during these experiments. Whatever experiments we attempted, she relapsed into lethargic sleep. When tried to wake her, unable. Splashed her with water. Tried ovarian compression, faradisation—nothing worked.
Next morning, after twenty-two hours of sleep, her body was limp.
Her pulse was 28–32; her breathing slowed to three to six breaths per minute; temperature was below 98 degrees; face cyanotic, suggesting extreme danger to life.
We pressed on her hysterogenic zones and brought her back to consciousness. This “attack of artificial sleep”, like that caused by narcotics, scared the earl so much that he wishes me to desist from these experiments.
She thus remains in this cataleptic state, malleable, feedable, but desperately absent.
BRUSH WITH DEATH [MOLLY]
After the narrow brush with death, Roxbury dismissed the Frenchman, I read in the diagnostic notes. He resigned himself to her state, though continually seeking other avenues.
At last, he met John Hughlings Jackson, who had already mapped out many of the disorders of the brain through posthumous dissections of patients he had known well.
As his knowledge of the brain increased, and which areas governed which faculties, he was becoming increasingly interested in the stimulation of the brain by electricity. He believed that, just as Galvani had made frogs’ legs jerk with the correct positioning and voltage, so we might shift the sluggish faculties, if only we could be precise both in our knowledge of the brain and our control of electricity. Jackson had nearly arrived at the neurological knowledge; it was by great good fortune that he met Roxbury, who had nearly achieved the necessary mastery of electricity.
When he closed her eyes, though, she relapsed into lethargy. This sleep, of indeterminate length, could last days. She could be awoken at any time by shining a bright light in her eyes, or banging a gong. This returned her to the cataleptic state, in which she was manageable, but not present.
THE TURRET OF THE EAST WING [MOLLY]
Down at the Walled Garden, I looked up at the house.
In the turret, a movement. My mind swirled with Lady Elodie’s words. In my mind, I conjured her up, at the window, pulling back the heavy floral curtain. A solemn heart-shaped face, blinking at the day’s brightness, seeing, but unseeing, the gaze directed inwards at her forlorn self, isolated in that high tower above the Burnfoot gorge, above the bustling activity of the house, of the glasshouses and menagerie, where scientists busied themselves with opaque researches.
I walked back to the house, the rain driving against my coat and scarf, my mind tumbling through the past weeks. The earl’s melancholy; Birtle and Skirtle’s complicity; I could no longer bear to be excluded.
I tore unannounced into Birtle’s quarters.
He looked at me, and I believe he understood
my crisis.
“Lady Elodie?” I beseeched him. “I must— Will you not let me—?”
“I’ll take you up to see her.” He stood. He put his hand kindly on my shoulder. “Now that you’re one of the family.”
GYRE [LAWLESS]
In the week before I met up with Lodestar on No Man’s Land Fort, things changed. Perhaps I had been naive, rather than foolish; we had certainly not been lazy. Things only now began to make sense, things I would never have connected.
I made discoveries about Lodestar’s style, in business and pleasure, that tallied with Ruth’s concerns.
Bracebridge Hemyng had clammed up that day. But I caught up with him again, tight as a boiled owl, at the old Coach and Horses. I provided him with more neck-oil, to ease his leg pain, and he never suspected he was being worked for information.
Hemyng spoke of the incessant gambling in the Hounds Club. Lodestar liked to hang around the flash set, never drinking, always listening. I took down the names surreptitiously. I’d brought a betting pencil specially, so Hemyng would think I was just planning my afternoon’s bets. Each man he named, peers and parliamentarians among them, had accounts at Overend and Gurney. They had profited in the wake of the outrages from buying up cheap property in Erith, Camden, et cetera.
Useless to name them here: I could garner no proof of their involvement, beyond their clairvoyant profiteering.
Lodestar himself never bet.
“Hadn’t the capital for it.” Hemyng took a hefty pinch of snuff. “Not that that prevented him accruing debts.”
I refused his proffered snuff tin. “How did Lodestar catch these fellows’ interest?”
“Information.” Hemyng winked. “He was the information man. A fascinating aura of otherness about him. He knows some rum coves with their ear to the ground.”
“Meaning?”
“As if he knew of the attacks before they happened. It was uncanny.”
Lawless and the House of Electricity Page 28