Beyond the Veil of Tears

by Rita Bradshaw

  Mirabelle waved her hand. ‘I’m not angry, girl. I’m trying to get to the bottom of this.’

  ‘It was something to do with Mr Jefferson and Mr Golding gambling – the reason Mr Golding was so angry, ma’am. He,’ Myrtle gulped, ‘he thought Mr Jefferson was seeing to it that he lost. He . . . he said he was being cheated.’

  Mirabelle turned and looked at Alice and the two women exchanged a long glance for a moment.

  ‘Please believe me, ma’am. I swear it’s the truth and—’

  Again Mirabelle held up her hand. ‘I have no reason to doubt you . . . what is your name?’

  ‘Myrtle, ma’am.’

  ‘I have no reason to doubt you, Myrtle. And let me say it would not surprise me at all that Mr Golding ill-treated his wife. But to assault her when she was carrying his child is unforgivable.’

  ‘It was a little girl, ma’am, the bairn. Perfect she was, but too small. Fitted in me two hands, she did. Oh, I’m sorry, ma’am.’

  Mirabelle had made an anguished sound deep in her throat, and Alice glared at Myrtle, sounding quite unlike herself as she hissed, ‘Shut up. Just shut up!’

  ‘It’s all right, Alice.’ Mirabelle’s first pregnancy had resulted in a miscarriage at six months, the longest she’d subsequently carried a baby, and the child had been a girl. She gave Myrtle no explanation, saying, ‘Go on with your story.’

  With a quick glance at the glowering Alice, Myrtle said hesitantly, ‘Miss Angeline nearly died afterwards with the bleeding, but Mr Golding had me thrown out the next morning. I went back later, but I couldn’t see her. And then the nurse who’d been looking after her came to Miss Angeline’s uncle’s house’ – Myrtle had decided to leave out the matter of the letter to her, thinking it carried more weight if they believed the nurse had come to speak to Angeline’s uncle – ‘where my husband worked then, and told Mr Hector that Mr Golding had had her committed to the asylum. She, the nurse, said that although Miss Angeline was still poorly, there was nothing wrong with her mind. That . . . that was five months ago, ma’am, and Mr Golding won’t let anyone visit or anything. I’ve tried, ma’am, but it’s no good. It . . . it needs someone with authority, like Mr Jefferson, to speak for her. She’s not mad, ma’am, I know she’s not, but being in that place . . . ’

  ‘She could well end up so,’ Mirabelle finished for her. ‘Yes, I see that.’ As Myrtle went to speak again, Mirabelle said, but not unkindly, ‘Quiet, girl’ and a silence fell on the room.

  Mirabelle’s head was whirling as she assimilated all she had been told. She didn’t for a moment doubt that the girl in front of her was telling the truth, but nevertheless she was shocked and sickened that a man she had been intimate with for a number of years could behave so. And yet she’d had her eyes opened in the worse possible way as to how vile and vicious Oswald could be, hadn’t she? Every day since, even after the injuries that he’d inflicted had healed, it had been as though the assault had happened just days, hours, before. The humiliation and shame had changed her forever, she knew that, and try as she might she couldn’t rise above the burning hatred and desire for revenge that had turned her days joyless and her nights into a torment. Only Alice had any idea what was wrong with her, and the effort of pretending to everyone else – even Marmaduke – that she was the same gay, carefree woman she’d always been was beginning to make her ill. But it seemed as though Angeline had been as badly treated as herself, more so because the tender life of an innocent had been brutally snuffed out.

  She bowed her head for a moment as the familiar pain of her barrenness, and all the heartache she’d suffered as baby after baby had come too soon, pierced her through.

  When she looked at Myrtle again the mask she presented to the world was firmly in place once more, and the emerald-green eyes were as clear and hard as glass. ‘I will speak to Mr Jefferson on his return and see that appropriate action is taken to secure the release of Mrs Golding.’

  ‘Oh, ma’am, ma’am, thank you. God bless you, ma’am. Thank you, thank you.’ Almost incoherent in her gratitude, Myrtle let the tears flow at last.

  She was still thanking Mirabelle when, at a sign from her mistress, Alice led Myrtle out of the room, shutting the door behind them.

  Left alone, Mirabelle sat gazing at the closed door. The girl had asked God to bless her, but only God Himself knew why she would make sure Marmaduke got Angeline out of that place, and with the maximum discredit to Oswald. She liked to think she would have done the same, if Oswald hadn’t sodomized her and brought her so low that she knew she would never really rise again. But she would never know the answer to that for sure. And perhaps it didn’t matter. What did matter was that every day she carried murder in her heart, and a holy God couldn’t bless one such as she. But, even knowing that, she couldn’t – no, she didn’t want to – let the hatred and bitter fury die. It was the only thing that kept her going.

  Alice knocked and re-entered the room, and Mirabelle raised her eyebrows as she said, ‘Well, what do you think of that?’

  ‘I think, ma’am,’ said her very proper and refined maid, ‘that Mr Golding might soon find himself like one of Cook’s roast breasts of lamb – well and truly stuffed – and it couldn’t happen to a nicer gentleman.’

  Mirabelle stared at her maid in amazement and then burst out laughing. Perhaps the anger and loathing weren’t the only things that kept her going . . . Thank God for Alice!

  PART FOUR

  Breaking Free

  1893

  Chapter Eighteen

  Angeline sat under the shade of one of the shelters in the airing court, ostensibly watching a game of croquet that two of the nurses were supervising between a few of the patients. In reality, her thoughts had soared way above the ten-foot-high walls surrounding the courts and the inmates they enclosed. The knowledge that Myrtle had come to the asylum a few days ago had been both heartening and weakening. Heartening because it had comforted her to know she wasn’t completely forgotten by the outside world; weakening because the matron’s refusal to allow her to see Myrtle for even a few minutes had brought home yet again how completely she was at the mercy of the asylum staff and, worse, Oswald.

  Her fingers closed round Myrtle’s letter, hidden deep in the pocket of her skirt. She didn’t need to look at it to know what it said, for she had memorized every word. She had surmised – correctly – that Myrtle had written it with a view to getting it past the scrutiny of the matron, hence the fact that it was couched formally and didn’t really sound like Myrtle:

  Dear Ma’am,

  Please excuse the impertinence of my writing to you like this, but if they won’t let me see you, I hope they will pass this letter on. I am very well and I hope you are, too. Albert and I got married in the spring and, due to a windfall I received, we were able to buy a nice little farm near Castletown, so we will be forever thankful to my benefactor. My family are living with us too, and we have all settled in very nicely. I pray and think of you every day, and hope one day to see you again.

  It ended, rather quaintly: ‘I will forever be your obedient servant, your maid, Myrtle.’

  A forlorn smile touched Angeline’s lips. Dear Myrtle. And she was so glad the money had helped to secure the farm for Myrtle and Albert, and Myrtle’s family. At least they were free of the shadow of the workhouse now. She wished she could share the news with Verity, for she would have loved to know that Myrtle and Albert had bought the farm and were prospering. One of her friend’s absolute convictions was that there was no difference between the working class and the upper class except the capriciousness of fate, and that the working man was every bit as intelligent as the nobility in their mansions.

  ‘I tell you, Angeline, the fatality of birth and the forced repression of minds that could soar to great things, given a chance, is a terrible indictment of our society,’ Verity had said more than once. ‘And women are denied this basic right in every class, not just among the poor. I find it incomprehensible that, with a woman on
the throne of England, we are not given our rightful place in society. But Queen Victoria positively promotes women’s inferior status and the gross exploitation of the poor.’

  Oh, Verity. The smile died. So many weeks had passed, and still Verity was locked away in seclusion. May had managed to have a word with her once or twice, when she had been on the rota to clean the seclusion rooms, and had been upset at Verity’s deteriorating health. In protest at her treatment, Verity had refused to eat and was now being force-fed. May hadn’t gone into details, but Angeline knew it was a brutal procedure.

  But Verity’s resolve to stand firm was still strong, May assured Angeline, with something like awe in her voice when she spoke of the other girl. Verity’s heroines, who pioneered the right of women to higher education – Frances Buss, Dorothea Beale, Emily Davies, who all remained unmarried – were her inspiration.

  Suddenly the quiet afternoon was shattered by Lady Lindsay, who had been playing croquet, having greatly improved over the last weeks, according to her particular nurses. At one time the voices in her head had ordered her to wrestle with an attendant or nurse, or to throw herself to the floor, and often the voices had given incomprehensible commands, injunctions, threats and insults, until she had stood and screamed and screamed at the contradictory orders. Lately, though, just one or two voices came and these were different and quite beautiful, according to Lady Lindsay. They gave her songs to sing and poetry to recite, and once they brought a hurdy-gurdy to encircle her bed and play a tune that made her weep with its loveliness.

  Now, however, she had flung down her croquet mallet and was tearing at her hair, shouting that ‘they’ were all telling her to hit the wooden ball in a different direction, and that there were hideous faces grimacing at her from the grass. Before the two nurses supervising the four women could restrain her, she had taken off like a greyhound across the airing court, her cries blood-curdling. Without pausing, and seemingly unaware that it was there at all, Lady Lindsay ran full tilt into the wall that enclosed the courts, knocking herself onto her back, whereupon she gave one terrible screech and then was still.

  Pandemonium reigned. Several of the patients began screaming or weeping; the ‘Duchess of Windsor’ began giving orders to the nurses in a high-pitched holler; and more attendants and nurses came running from the building. In the midst of it all, one of the more excitable inmates who had been quietly playing croquet before the incident also ran amok, brandishing her mallet like a club. Unfortunately Angeline, who had been attempting to hurry to the relative safety of the asylum, was directly in the woman’s path. Whether the woman intended to strike her or not was questionable – although Rowena Newton was highly strung and mercurial in her moods, she was not considered violent by the asylum staff – but, deliberate or not, the end result was the same. Angeline received a blow to the back of her head that felled her to the ground, and for a moment everything went black.

  When she came to she was being carried on a stretcher, and one of the nurses was walking alongside it, saying, ‘We’re taking you to the hospital wing, Mrs Golding. You’ve received a nasty blow on the head’, as though she didn’t know her head was throbbing fit to burst.

  Once in the hospital, she found herself in the small room off the main ward, where she had been ensconced for some time shortly after her arrival at the asylum. Within minutes Dr Craggs had examined the back of her head, tut-tutting as he did so and talking in an aside to his wife, ‘No lasting damage, but this sort of thing really should not be allowed to happen. It’s not good enough, Matron. Not good enough at all.’

  In spite of the buzzing and aching in her head, Angeline was struck by the incongruity of the superintendent addressing his wife so formally. Were they like that in the privacy of their own quarters? she mused dizzily. Doctor and matron? It fitted into the insanity that was all around her, if nothing else.

  Sounding extremely rattled, the matron said, ‘It was nothing to do with me, Doctor.’

  ‘Not good enough, as I said. You must keep a tight ship, Matron. Find out who was responsible for allowing Lady Lindsay such liberty and send them to me. Now, sedation and bed rest for Mrs Golding, and I’ll look in on her again tomorrow.’

  ‘Very good, Doctor.’

  The next hours were a blur. At some point quite soon after the superintendent’s visit, Angeline was aware of one of the nurses helping her into a nightdress and then settling her in bed after making her swallow a bitter liquid. Not that she objected to that. Anything that made her excruciating headache bearable was welcome. Within minutes the sleep-inducing drug relaxed her taut muscles and produced a soporific calm.

  Angeline didn’t know when she became aware that the opiate no longer held her in its soothing, inactive stupor. Sounds penetrated the lethargy – awful sounds.

  Fighting the desire to simply pull the blanket over her head and let sleep claim her again, she struggled to sit up in bed. Her head swam and her brain felt muzzy, and as the room had no window, the pitch-blackness added to the feeling of unreality. A bell was ringing somewhere and, now that she was more awake, she could hear shouts and screams, but they sounded different from the usual disturbances that occurred in the asylum.

  Unable to orientate herself in the darkness, she sat on the side of the narrow iron bed for a few minutes and then stood up, feeling around the walls until she came to the door. Banging on it, she called out, louder and louder when she got no response, but to no avail.

  Groping back to where she thought the bed was, she found it and sat on the edge again. Panic had given way to full-fledged fear. She could smell smoke.

  It was only a minute or two later that Angeline heard the key turn in the lock, but it wasn’t one of the nurses who spoke when the door opened, but May. ‘Angeline, get up, there’s a fire.’

  ‘I am up.’ She stumbled to May in the doorway, who held a bunch of keys in one hand. ‘What are you doing, and what’s happening out there? Where are the nurses?’

  ‘They’re trying to get patients out, but some of ’em have gone clean barmy because of the fire. Come on, this whole wing’s burning and the smoke’s terrible.’

  ‘My clothes. I can’t walk about in my nightdress.’

  ‘You can – don’t worry about that. The place is on fire, for goodness’ sake.’ May pulled her into the corridor, where thick black smoke was billowing from the direction of the seclusion rooms along with the crackle of burning wood.

  ‘How did you get hold of the keys?’

  ‘One of the nurses collapsed, so I pinched ’em.’

  Hair-raising screams were coming from the end of the ward that led on to the seclusion rooms, and Angeline clutched hold of May. ‘Is Verity still in there? We’ve got to help her.’

  ‘I’ve tried, you can’t get down that end for the fire.’

  ‘But if Verity’s trapped, we can’t leave her.’ Angeline’s voice caught in horror. A figure came shrieking out of the smoke, her nightdress and hair on fire. The woman fell to the ground before she reached them, still screaming, but as they ran forward the scream turned to a gurgling wail and then silence, although the body still twitched as the flames consumed it. Through the smoke they saw a wall of fire, an inferno.

  May grabbed Angeline’s hand. ‘Come on, there’s nothing we can do. It’s impossible to get down that end.’

  Her head swimming from the smoke and the sedative in her system, Angeline let May haul her along. ‘How did you get out?’

  ‘Our attendants led us out into the grounds, but then we could see the ground floor and above were on fire, and I thought of you and Verity. It’s mayhem out there, it wasn’t difficult to slip away.’

  Once in the corridor beyond the hospital wing, they saw smoke seeping beneath the far door. ‘We’re trapped.’ Angeline looked at May in horror. They couldn’t go back and they couldn’t go forward. She pointed to the window halfway along the corridor and set just below the ceiling. ‘How can we reach it? If we could break the glass we could climb out.’
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  ‘Wait here.’ May raced back the way they’d come and returned in a few moments, coughing and her eyes streaming, but carrying one of the straight-backed chairs from the nurses’ station in the ward, along with a still-smouldering blanket. Positioning the chair beneath the window, Angeline steadied it as May climbed onto the seat and then onto the back of it and hoisted herself onto the narrow window ledge. Passing May the blanket, Angeline watched as she wrapped it round her hand and arm, before punching the glass in the window as hard as she could. It shattered immediately, fragments of glass raining down on Angeline’s uncovered head and into her loose hair, although the worst of it fell outwards into the courtyard, which housed the small outbuilding holding the shower-bath for the hospital wing and seclusion rooms.

  Flames were now licking under the far door and the black smoke from the hospital wing was thicker. May had breathed in great gulps of the fresh night air, and as Angeline sank down onto the seat of the chair, coughing and choking, May positioned the folded blanket across the base of the window to protect them from any remaining shafts of glass and then leaned in, her arm outstretched. ‘Come on, reach up to me.’

  Still in the powerful grip of the sedative and with her chest aching from the inhalation of the foul smoke, Angeline shook her head. ‘I can’t.’ She just wanted to lie down and rest.

  ‘You must. Angeline, you must. For Verity, if not for you. Do you think she’d give up, in your place? Don’t let her die for nothing. We can escape this place tonight – I know we can. Who will be able to say exactly who died and who didn’t? This is our chance, and we have to take it.’

  ‘We can’t escape.’

  ‘We can. When I came back in for you and Verity, the superintendent had already ordered the gates to be opened to allow in help from the village down in the valley, and messengers have been dispatched to Newcastle asking for aid from the fire brigades. The staff have got their work cut out with the patients who have managed to get outside – the hubbub is deafening. If we don’t escape tonight, we never will. Your husband will make sure you rot in here, and they’ll keep me as an unpaid skivvy for the rest of me days. I’ve seen it with other patients, lass. I know what I’m on about.’