Gaslight

by William Drummond

  Nancy tried again and Bella clapped her hands. “Much better. But don’t waggle. Once more. Try not to give the impression that your behind is struggling to get away.” Nancy laughed. On general deportment she bowed to Mrs. Manningham, but among the gentlemen with whom she hoped to better herself Nancy knew the provocative appeal of her waggle.

  Left alone, Bella bolted the door. There was so much to think about. The Lady Godiva indeed! How typical of Jack! He sees a slut with saucy eyes, an under kitchen maid probably, and invites her under his roof, maybe even, despite his condition, contemplating some furtive beastliness. He must have known when he wrote that “lovely letter” to York that his wife would soon discover the lie about Lady So-and-so in Bath. She smiled. It was a boobytrap he had laid for her. He would expect her to start a scene, demand the girl’s dismissal, to which he might be prepared to accede, if he had demonstrated to Elizabeth what a highly-strung woman his wife was. Well, she had reason to be pleased. The child genuinely wanted to “better herself.” Nancy was already half-won over. The expenditure of a little time, kindliness and perhaps guile would make of the girl a devoted ally, to say nothing of delivering her from Jack.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Bella slept very heavily that night. Indeed she did not wake up until she heard a heavy thumping on the door, which had been translated in her sleep to the nightmare knock of Doom. She did not immediately remember where she was and when she did, she called out “Come in,” having forgotten that she had bolted the door.

  The heavy curtains were drawn and she was as surprised to see the full light of day as she was disconcerted by the presence of her husband and a strange gentleman with a black gladstone bag in the doorway. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  “Dr. Frost, my dear,” Jack said. “You just slip back to bed like a good girl while I pull back the curtains and let in the day.” He gave her an affectionate pat on the head and strode over to the nearest window. “By Jove, you were sleeping heavy. We had to knock loud enough to wake the dead, eh, Doctor?”

  Bella did not feel at her best to be caught in bed and in disarray, without even the chance to brush her hair, which hung in plaits tied up with ribbon.

  “Come in, Doctor,” Manningham called as he swooshed back the second pair of curtains. Then to Bella, who was trying hurriedly to compose the bedclothes and herself. “There’s no need to fuss yourself, my dear. Dr. Frost has seen a sickbed before now.” He stood at the foot of the bed, wearing a gray morning coat (now with no crêpe band for Baby) and looking the picture of health as he jauntily bounced on the balls of his toes.

  Dr. Frost was a man of about her husband’s age, but bowed as if someone had struck him a short time before in the solar plexus. He favored mutton chop whiskers, which gave the impression that the lower half of his face was slowly exploding. Added to this, he wore his cranial hair long to cover baldness. “He has nothing to hide,” Bella thought, remembering her initial impression, “but he is doing his best to hide it.”

  The doctor looked round for somewhere to deposit his bag, and chose the escritoire. “As I told you in my note, Doctor, it is at Mrs. Manningham’s own behest, that you have come here. But I heartily endorse the visit. Most well-advised, I think, most well.”

  By now Bella was sufficiently awake to realize that her husband intended to remain in the room during the examination. “If you don’t mind, Jack,” she said in a quiet but penetrating voice, “I should prefer to be . . .” she hesitated to say “examined,” because she did not want to mislead Dr. Frost about the purpose of this visit at the outset . . . “prefer to see Dr. Frost alone.”

  “Oh!” Jack said, with an appearance of humorous surprise. “So that is how we would like it this time!” He turned to Dr. Frost. “If you have no objection then, Doctor, I will wait on your conclusion in the drawing room immediately below.” He bowed to the doctor and Bella and left the room.

  Whether he went downstairs or merely waited outside the bedroom door with his ear pressed against the panel to overhear their conversation, there was no means for Bella to discover. He was not ashamed of eavesdropping.

  “Could you,” Bella said in a low voice, “draw up a chair beside the bed?” But it was so low a voice that it was not till the doctor turned again from his bag that she could show him by gesture what she wanted. As it was, he looked at her curiously, having heard her speak earlier with such clarity.

  “Did Dr. Patrick write to you about me?” she asked.

  He nodded and opened a folder. “I have the full clinical details, madam, and I shall of course be prepared to treat you, as I am already treating Mr. Manningham. But Dr. Patrick must have informed you of that. So, I imagine, you had some other reason for consulting me.”

  “I have. I wonder, Doctor, if you would be kind enough to tell me what you think my reasons are.”

  “Surely, Mrs. Manningham, that is for you to tell me. A patient calls a doctor because something is wrong, describes the symptoms and on these, and his examination, the doctor makes a diagnosis and prescribes what he hopes will bring about a cure. This is complicated enough in all conscience. Please don’t make it any more complicated for me.”

  From the impatience apparent in the doctor’s voice, Bella perceived that she had already done what she most wanted to avoid, provoked him into thinking that she was an awkward, not to say odd or even abnormal, patient. “Has my husband told you why he thinks I requested this consultation?” Bella asked. “You can’t refuse to tell me that.”

  “Of course,” Dr. Frost said. “He certainly has. And why not?”

  “Because I have said nothing to him. Said not one word. So how should he know?”

  “But who says he does know?” Dr. Frost sat in his chair, the folder open upon his lap, pencil in hand. “It is surely natural in a husband to be concerned with the health of his wife. If for some reason she appears distressed, or in some way unwell, surely it is his duty to speculate as to what is wrong, and to give the doctor the benefit of those speculations, in order to assist him in summing up the case.”

  “May I tell you, Dr. Frost, what I suspect my husband has told you. He hasn’t said a word to me and I am purely going on my experience of seven years of marriage.”

  “It seems devious,” said Dr. Frost. “I’ve always thought that a straight line was the shortest distance between two points.”

  “But until we agree on what the two points are, Doctor, we can’t be sure which distance is shortest. You think that I want to discuss my health with you. I don’t. I want to discuss my husband’s.”

  “Really,” said Dr. Frost. “This was not something which your husband suggested.”

  “My husband suggested to you that the loss of my baby and the disease from which I discovered we were all suffering had upset the balance of my mind. Whereas either of us might have contracted the disease innocently. I have so lost my mental balance that I am determined to put the blame on to his amatory adventures. Perhaps, as man to man, he has admitted to what he probably called ‘an occasional flirtation.’ ” She looked up at Dr. Frost. “Are you with me, Doctor?” Though he had been careful to preserve his impassivity, she felt that she had kept close to the truth so far.

  “I am listening,” Dr. Frost said.

  “He will have explained to you that he is a man of normal passions, a husband with ‘conjugal rights,’ but that I am a frigid woman.”

  The doctor cleared his throat. “May we come to the point?” His voice was so dry that Bella realized that she had dissipated any good will she might have built up. If Dr. Frost was a married man, he might be drawing unfavorable comparisons about the way Bella was speaking of the man she was supposed to “love, honor and obey.”

  “Forgive me. That was unworthy. Where was I?”

  “I am as uncertain as you.”

  “He has told you . . . oh yes, he has told you that I had a mental breakdown when my father was drowned, which was not surprising because my mother went insane and died in a lunat
ic asylum . . . perhaps by her own hand . . . but I’m not certain, because I was only twelve at the time and I’ve never bothered . . . no, never dared . . . to find out for certain since. I notice that you aren’t writing anything down, Doctor. So I imagine that I haven’t told you anything you haven’t heard before.”

  Dr. Frost looked uneasy. “I thought you wanted to discuss your husband’s health.”

  “Oh, I do. I am,” she said. “But if this is what my husband has said, let me tell you it is true—a little more complicated, perhaps, but true.”

  This admission secured a brief entry in Dr. Frost’s file. So Jack had told him all that; and last night he had deliberately behaved in that peculiar way in order to induce her to ask to see Dr. Frost. In fact she was doing precisely what Jack had plotted for her to do! Seeking safety from Dr. Frost, she was running straight into danger! She had seen Jack manipulating people and knew how plausible he was. Dr. Frost drew out his watch and glanced at it. She said, “Please, Doctor. If you have an urgent appointment, I mean anybody desperately ill, or going to have a baby or something, please leave. Otherwise, please hear me out because this is very important. I won’t say a matter of life and death, though I sometimes fear so. But it takes time, Doctor, and careful attention.”

  “I will give you my most careful attention, madam, if you will only proceed. But we seem to be taking a long time in coming to the point. There is nothing which you have told me so far which isn’t already in my notes.”

  “Which was why I asked you to read them to me in the first place. It would save time, if you read your notes about my delusions of persecution.” She smiled. “Wouldn’t it?”

  He looked at her straightly. “Delusions of persecution! Where did you get that idea, Mrs. Manningham?”

  “From living with Mr. Manningham. Being abroad so much, and him with no regular place of business, I have come to know him very well over more years than you have known him months, Dr. Frost. If you don’t read me those notes, he will come rapping on the door very soon. If that is, he is not listening outside the door at this moment.” Dr. Frost made as if to go to open it, but Bella shook her head. “If he could hear that, he would have heard what we said before, but I don’t think he could. It’s thick and well-fitting.”

  Dr. Frost was rattled. “I can tell you, Mrs. Manningham, I have never had a consultation like this.”

  “Nor have I, Dr. Frost.”

  “It is most unusual.”

  “I pray, unique,” said Bella. “Would you read to me now?”

  Dr. Frost adjusted his pince-nez and cleared his throat. “Mr. Manningham says that you . . .” He laid down the file and took off the pince-nez. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Manningham. I cannot tell you. I am afraid that you must tell me.”

  Bella had won at least some sort of recognition from the accuracy with which she had divined what Jack would have said against her. She held her hands over her eyes and spoke much more slowly. “What you are asking me to do now, Doctor, is something far more difficult. I haven’t seen my husband for three months until yesterday night. He is a man of the most fertile imagination. It is hard sometimes to follow his thought from moment to moment. A sort of dragonfly mind, he has.” She took her hands away and leaned forward, painfully aware that she might have made a better impression on the doctor if she had been given time to make herself physically more presentable. (Bella wondered if there had been something in her hot milk the night before, a soporific? If so, administered by whom? Elizabeth who served it, Jack of his own accord? Or by the doctor’s prescription?) “By the way, did you prescribe for me any soporific to be taken last night?”

  “How could I?”

  “But you have prescribed them for my husband?”

  “He complained of insomnia.”

  “This is what I mean,” she explained. “Without telling me, he must have given me a draught in my milk last night, a very heavy one to make me sleep so long; and then called you while I was under its influences so that you should find me befuddled.”

  “Thoughtless of him,” Dr. Frost conceded.

  “Or calculating,” Bella said, adding hurriedly. “I can see how shocked you are, Dr. Frost, and I too have been so shocked for the seven years of our marriage that, until recently, I never accepted that what appeared in the blackest terms was anything more than ineptitude. I have been very trusting.”

  The door opened. There was no knock. “Well,” said Jack, “how do you find the patient, Doctor?” He came in and looked blandly around.

  Dr. Frost did not rise from his chair. “I understood, sir, I should find you below when I had finished my consultation.”

  “Yes, yes,” Jack said, realizing that the maneuver had failed. “That’s why I butted in. Rather an important call. A gentleman from New Orleans wishes to see me in Brown’s Hotel with an interesting proposition. I shall wait on you later, Doctor, for your report on my good lady. You will excuse me, my dear.”

  “When will you be back?” asked Bella.

  He hunched his shoulders. “Can I say till I know how the business develops?”

  “At least tell Elizabeth of your lack of plans,” Bella suggested. “I shall as usual not expect you until I see you.”

  Jack laughed. “Hasn’t she the sharpest wit, Doctor? You must have found that. And the imagination!” He had come across to the bed and suddenly stroked her under the chin. “If only you would write all those stories down in books, our fortunes would be made!” He waved to them both and made his exit. He had failed to break up the consultation.

  Yet he had succeeded in putting Bella off. How could she convince Dr. Frost that such a transparently ineffectual man was either a criminal or a madman; if not, both?

  They heard him run down the stairs two at a time on his way to Brown’s Hotel.

  Dr. Frost resumed his pince-nez. “I will read you,” he said, “what Mr. Manningham told me. Or rather my notes. He spoke of you most affectionately by the way, but rather in awe. You could be, I think, to someone like your husband a sort of Hans Andersen’s Ice Maiden. You are rather an exceptional lady, you know, to be able to read the ancient Greek and Latin, and even more to do so for pleasure. He is not an intellectual man.”

  Bella could not help laughing.

  Once having started, she could not stop until, by a gradation of which she was unaware, she found herself launched down a cataract of tears. To have mounted so high that she could see above the penitentiary walls her freedom. And then, at the last moment, by Jack’s clownish jerking backwards of the ladder, he faced her instead with this question mark of a doctor!

  She sat there propped on the feather bolster and the feather pillows, the tears streaming down her cheeks, shaking her fists with impotence because Jack had beaten her again.

  When through the curtain of tears she saw Dr. Frost deliberately rise and go over towards the bag upon the escritoire, this was too much. She turned and tried to muffle her screams and staunch her tears as she beat upon the pillows.

  Then she felt a lightness as the covers were pulled back, the hem of her nightdress sought and raised. She lifted up her head and yelled.

  There was a sharp prick as the hypodermic jabbed, a grunt of effort from the doctor, the cold of the alcohol swab and then oblivion.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  There followed days and nights, scarcely distinguishable, behind drawn curtains; time reduced by sedatives to a slack monotony. People came and went with trays and bedpans, flannels, bitter draughts, hot water bottles, performing the rituals of the sickroom. Faces loomed large, then faded; voices, even when raised, sounded as if from a great distance. Bella lay half buried in the feather overlay, too drowsy to be able to decide whether she felt so ill because of what they gave her or what they gave her was because she felt so ill. Nor could she concentrate enough to care.

  But gradually things lightened. She became less confused and could distinguish faces. Dr. Frost visited daily and she tried to speak about her collapse, but he was gently firm
. “It would be better not to refer to that, Mrs. Manningham. We don’t want you to distress yourself.”

  Bella did not argue. In fact, it was difficult to remember what the whole thing was about. She thought of it as a sort of mental abscess which had begun with the death of the baby and swelled until it burst that terrible morning. She had tried to blame Jack for what was merely the blind working of fate.

  Jack could not have been more thoughtful. He brought her flowers, heady hyacinths and narcissus, primroses and daffodils, reminders of the English spring which she had missed in the years abroad. There was no attempt to keep her bedridden or force her to get up before she was ready. “Just take your time, my girl. Elizabeth and Nancy will hold the fort until you’re ready to command.” He had not forgotten her strictures about the filthiness of the curtains. There had been an orgy of scrubbing, washing, dusting, cleaning and polishing, he said. When she came down, she would find the place as bright as a new pin.

  Elizabeth, at Bella’s request, came up and talked to her about her needs and problems. It was not easy for Bella to be helpful, considering astonishingly that she had never seen all over the house in which she had been living now for weeks. But it gave Bella a sense, even if illusory, that she was the mistress of place.

  She would have liked to pass more time with Elizabeth, listening to the not very exciting story of her life; domestic service, marriage to a carrier, widowhood and domestic service again. But Jack explained to Bella that Elizabeth had a great deal to do, getting the house to rights, and it was unfair to take up too much of her time.

  With Nancy it was difficult to re-establish the rapport, achieved during that first lesson in deportment. Nancy seemed scared of her, perhaps because of something that had happened during Bella’s illness. But the lessons continued in a rather desultory way. Nancy was eager enough to learn, but Elizabeth obviously did not want the undermaid to escape her share of work.