The Rising of Bella Casey

by Mary Morrissy

  ‘The asylum?’

  ‘Exactly so, Mrs Beaver,’ he said rising from behind the desk and leaning his hands on the green leather inset with the gold trim. It was a beautiful piece with scrolled legs and brass detail. ‘The Richmond is the only place for him.’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. Couldn’t you give him something to calm his nerves?’

  ‘It’s gone beyond that now,’ the doctor said. ‘He is a danger to himself and to others. Certify him, Mrs Beaver, there’s nothing else for it.’

  He opened the door for her and stood sentry by it as she passed out.

  Nick and Jack were waiting in the hall. Bella walked ahead with Nick, steering him towards the hall door. Blessedly, he’d forgotten about the medal he was expecting to receive; otherwise, there might have been an unholy row for he could not bear to be denied even in the smallest things. The only medal that was handed over was the silver for the doctor’s fee. She heard Jack and the doctor talking in low tones together, man to man, as she made her way out with Nick on her arm.

  ‘Is it a case of whores-de-combat?’ she heard Jack ask.

  She turned her head in time to see the doctor nod.

  Then, only then did she understand. Like Alfie Baxter coming slowly to his alphabet. It was the pox Nick had. The French disease, the syph. Whatever you called it, the shame of it was just the same. The plague caught from street girls who sold their wares to all-comers, who didn’t give a fig for keeping clean or changing their drawers. She’d known Nick was no saint when he was a young man. And being away from home for months on end, he might have given in to temptations but he’d been out of uniform nigh on fifteen years, so why was the affliction only showing itself now? Unless … unless. Previously unimagined scenes began playing in her head. Unless when she was sitting at home nursing his children, he had still been lording it about with floozies. Was that it? And then she thought of baby Nicholas. Was that why he had succumbed? Why else did Dr Leavitt enquire? Did his father bring home some germ, a maggot picked up from a judy, that made her little boy sicken and fail? Bella had never felt such fury. She wanted to tear Nick’s eyes out; to beat him bloody with her bare hands. She caught him bruisingly by the arm, just as he had often done with her. But when she raised her fist, she met not the proud swank of the Bugler Beaver, but the trusting eye and shambling mien of a madman, a helpless creature who couldn’t tell his daughter from a soldier, who thought the doctor an awarding general, who could no longer find his own way home unaided. She let her hand fall and turned to Jack.

  ‘Can you arrange it?’

  ‘The clutchers, is it?’

  She did not want the children – or the neighbours, indeed – to witness their father’s incarceration. Or to know the awful truth of what it was that ailed him. So some days later when she’d signed the necessaries she brought Nick around to Abercorn Road so that he could be taken from a place where no one knew him.

  ‘We’re going round to Mother’s,’ she said to Nick,’ for a nice little visit. We haven’t been in ages.’

  ‘I’ll have to wear my scarlets so,’ Nick replied, ‘for I’m sure she don’t approve of me.’

  He was lost somewhere in the folds of time, as if they were a courting couple and he was still waiting for Mother’s blessing, a blessing that would never come. Nothing would do him, though, but to don his uniform with the encrusted breastplate and the barley-twisted bugle cord. He wore his railway twills below so that he seemed a centaur, half-man half-beast, ill-fittingly put together. Bella had held the younger ones back from school so they could bid him goodbye. She’d told them their father was bound for the Blind Asylum. The subterfuge – no, she thought, the lies in which she had become so adept – was primarily for Susan’s sake, who still nursed fond feelings for Nick despite the evidence before her eyes. James and Valentine did not think to question Bella’s story either. Only Babsie remained sceptical.

  ‘Will it cure him of the drink where he’s going?’ she asked.

  When the time came Susan marshalled the boys into a row and Nick walked jaggedly before them as if inspecting a miniature parade.

  ‘Your father’s going away for a little while, to get his eyes fixed up,’ Bella announced.

  Nick shook their hands gravely, the man as trusting as the children, and all recognising the solemnity of the occasion without properly understanding it.

  ‘Come,’ she said to Nick tugging on his embossed cuff for she was afraid she might be overcome and the children must not see her upset.

  ‘Why is that young lady crying?’ he asked noticing poor Susan’s trembling lower lip and brimming eyes. ‘Did I make her cry?’

  Bella’s temper tightened. Too late, she thought savagely, too late for contrition now.

  ‘Never mind that now, Nick,’ she said in her firmest schoolmistress tone. ‘We must be on our way.’

  *

  The black cab was standing outside by the time they reached Abercorn Road. It was not a long distance, but they had travelled slowly for Nick often made blindly for turns that weren’t there and he got places muddled in his mind. He mistook Great Britain Street for College Green and nothing would persuade him that the Custom House was not Trinity College. The pewter-coloured river gave off its porter whiff, the barges bearing barrels from the brewery cruised by, the business of the city carried on regardless as they strolled, to all intents and purposes, a respectable couple taking a constitutional. Albeit that the gentleman looked a trifle odd, attired in motley, and the lady a little down-at-heel. Bella had thrown a shawl over her shoulders and worn a hat borrowed from Susan, but otherwise she’d not paid much heed to her appearance. It is not what a woman thinks of when she’s about to have her husband locked away.

  Nick did not register the cab. Jack was standing at the open door and when he saw Bella approach he gave the nod to the two coated keepers who were leaning against the hansom, smoking. They stubbed their butts out in the gutter.

  ‘That’s him,’ Jack said.

  Bella handed them the papers.

  ‘Is he likely to go quiet, Ma’am?’ one of them asked. He was a pale-faced ginger fellow with a pocked face.

  ‘Where’s Mrs C?’ Nick asked.

  ‘Change of plan, squire,’ the other keeper said, a big bald brute.

  ‘These kind gentlemen are to take you on a trip first, Nick. To tour a new barracks where you may stay awhile. So, just as well you wore the garb.’

  She kissed him then on the lips, a Judas embrace. But there would be no pieces of silver for this particular transaction.

  ‘Has he got the old delusions?’ the ginger keeper asked as she let go of Nick’s arm.

  ‘Not another Napoleon,’ said the bald one loudly, ‘we have three of them already. Not to speak of several duchesses in the female block.’

  ‘No,’ Bella said, ‘he thinks only that he is himself.’

  She stood back as the two of them bundled him into the cab. She thought their unceremonious manner might arouse Nick’s suspicions, but he was meekness itself. There was part of her, a contrary part to be sure, that wanted him to fight them off, if only to prove that his old spirit was somewhere intact, but it was a perverse wish. For that old spirit was so distorted now, its only expression was in rages and blows. She and Jack did not exchange a word as Nick was settled in the back. It was a terrible contract they had drawn up between them. Was this, she wondered, the fate he’d wished on Nick all along?

  ‘Onward chaps!’ she heard Nick command.

  The cab lurched off with Nick shouting out from within: ‘Nil desperandum, Bella, nil desperandum!’

  THE ORIGINAL SIN

  The impressive pair of wrought-iron gates were firmly padlocked, the chains bound tightly around the lock. Her ungloved hands fell to her side like a sigh. She peered in through the bars but could see no factotum she could appeal to. She stepped back and looked up at the spears of iron pointing skywards and was about to turn away, thankful to be thwarted. Then she noticed the small wicke
t diminutively hammered out of the large gates. Was it only the florid mad who got to use the grand entrance, she wondered. She pushed it open and slipped through. In the distance she caught a glimpse of granite, turrets and buttresses. She was bare-headed and empty-handed. She toiled up the driveway. Crows cawed crankily. On the stubbled grass she could see inmates bent at work. Some were lugging hessian sacks; others, armed with garden forks, the docile ones surely, were spearing leaves. They took no notice of her; madness, as she knew, bred incurious solipsism. The sky showed the remnants of summer. Nature smiled even on the feeble-minded, she thought, though she had fully expected pewter-coloured weather inside the confines of the Richmond Asylum, in keeping with her own creeping dread. She climbed the steps leading to the imposing front hallway, a mosaic of black-and-white tile and empty of furniture bar a marble-topped reception desk close by the door. A wardress in a brown uniform and stiff bonnet stood behind it.

  ‘Yes?’ she demanded.

  ‘I’m here to visit my husband,’ she said. She would maintain the pretence of decorum, even if her interlocutor wouldn’t.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Nicholas Beaver.’ His name was her only identification in this place.

  ‘Date of admission?’

  ‘July 5th.’

  It had been three months, she realised, and this was the first time she could face the ordeal of a visit. She contemplated the word. Wouldn’t view be more accurate? As you would animals in a zoological exhibit. The wardress flicked the pages back and ran her fingers down the columns like a blind woman feeling her way through history. When she located Nick’s entry, she drew a bell from a hidden compartment in the counter and rang it loudly.

  ‘A beadle will come,’ she said shortly and turned away.

  Bella had to pace up and down for there was nowhere to sit in the echoing vestibule. At the far end stood two opposing arched doorways with the words MALES and FEMALES emblazoned in red overhead. This is the way life should be arranged, she thought grimly, to keep us free from the perdition that our coupling brings.

  Suddenly her name was called. A beadle had appeared at the door marked MEN.

  ‘Mrs Beaver, Mrs Isabella Beaver,’ he intoned as if she were being presented at a Castle ball.

  She wanted to flee. But what would the wardress make of such behaviour – as mad as any inmate within these walls? She quailed at the thought of facing Nick. Numbly, she followed the beadle. He was a portly man with an oily black handlebar moustache, all the world like a ringmaster in the circus. He wore a navy suit, and not the brown coats of the keepers, and clearly was of a higher rank. He took the chit the wardress had given her and pushed open the heavy door.

  They were engulfed at once in a wave of sound, an underground roar as if they had been released into the very heart of a volcano. Down the corridor they trod past doors flung open on grim wards. The iron bedsteads were set so close to one another that the inmates’ knees touched each other when they sat. Their suits were made of rough-hewn stuff, the trousers shapeless things, having accommodated themselves to a hundred nameless haunches. Their mealy jackets hung slack from their defeated shoulders. Pale forms slunk along the corridors close to the oat-coloured walls, skulking like dogs that expected to be kicked. They tugged at their neckerchiefs, scraping and scrabbling at themselves like animals with fleas. One man – though he hardly qualified for the term for he was a scraggy bag of bones with weasel eyes and matted hair – stretched out his hand imploringly to touch her arm, but the beadle, quick as mercury, yanked the creature’s cravat so it closed around his throat and produced a ghastly choking sound. But it was barely audible above the woeful lamentation that seemed to emanate from every mouth. From one a demented muttering, from another avid calculation – the nine times table – and yet another engaged in full-throated bellows. It was a veritable symphony of pain. The beadle halted at a door at the end of the corridor and ushered Bella in with a flourish of his hand.

  There were long sash windows in this room, but the sills were sloped making it impossible to gain purchase and were sited too high for any man to reach, even climbing on the shoulders of another. The grimy glass looked down on those within like the eyes of a mournful Master gazing down on those he’d decreed should suffer. As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods, she thought. The light that filtered into the ward bore no relation to the nosegay sky outside. It was wan and dolorous as if it had grown thin and sickly in such surrounds. In this room all the men were tethered to their beds. Some lay on the naked ticking resigned to their incarceration, but the majority made play of even the most limited territory awarded them. They paced as far as their tethers would allow though their footfalls made no sound. No boots were worn in this ward – a man could string himself up by his own laces – so they sported woollen pampootees, those who weren’t barefoot. Some sat on their beds rocking back and forth and moaning softly their private catalogues of grief and complaint. Others strained like dogs, spittle flying, trying to carry their beds with them – though they were like anvils since the frames were bolted to the floor.

  Nick was one of these, though it was difficult at first to distinguish him so alike did all these creatures seem, a twitching mass of humanity, ants in drab engaged in minute, meaningless toil. Though his manacles were bound in cloth, one of them had chafed his ankle, yet still he applied all his strength to shift the bed. He was like an aviator and the bed a craft he was attempting to get airborne. But instead of making for the tantalisingly open door, he was straining towards a dun-coloured press at the far end of the ward. Its door was resolutely shut though the key lodged in the escutcheon was clearly visible. Like a lone swimmer, or an oarsman rowing against the current, he stood arms bulging with the effort, the cords on his neck in rigour, as he yearned towards the door he thought would lead to freedom. Even though during her visit, an orderly turned the key of the press to reveal shelves of metal chamber pots, Nick kept on eyeing it, convinced that escape lay in that direction.

  ‘There he is Ma’am,’ the beadle said pointing his finger. ‘Number 0214.’

  They’d let his hair grow, his lovely glossy hair once oiled and slicked back from his face, now hung in drifts around his blue unshaven jowls. He seemed to have shrunk not in height but in breadth; his shoulders once so broad and straight had caved in. The jacket he’d been assigned was too tight across his chest and gaped, the trousers were for a smaller man so they hung at half-mast. When Bella looked down, his feet were bare. That was the worst part. Never part a soldier from his bluchers, Nick used to say, for he feels naked without them. An orderly patrolled the small passageway between the beds.

  ‘His eyesight is disordered, Ma’am, he may not recognise you,’ he said. ‘If you explain to him who you are, it will pacify him.’

  ‘Nick, Nick, Nick,’ she called out for in this room the noise was less underground swell and more roaring sea.

  ‘It’s your wife, Nicholas,’ the orderly said as Nick looked past her at the cupboard door.

  ‘Here,’ he said catching Nick’s chin and turning his face back towards Bella. Even in this, the simple act of looking her in the eye, he had to be directed. But finally, his face broke into a wreath of smiles.

  ‘Nora!’ he said.

  ‘No, it’s Bella,’ she said evenly.

  ‘Nora?’

  ‘No,’ she repeated, ‘Bella.’

  ‘It’s Jennie,’ he said emphatically this time.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Juno?’

  She did not even bother to demur .

  ‘Ethel?’

  Molly, Bessie, Mary, Rose – with each new name he would beam at her, sure that he had her now. And each time she shook her head, his gormless glee would give way to a crestfallen dejection until he dredged another jade from his pantheon. All her feeling for him evaporated. She rushed from the room, brushing against a fellow inmate, who stood in her path frozen in an attitude of paralytic stillness. She fled down the corridor with its sickly hue and gapin
g portals of protest. The beadle who had escorted her was in his habitual position on guard by the main door.

  ‘There you are, Mrs Beaver,’ he said heartily like a flunkey in a fun palace. ‘Leaving us so soon?’

  ‘Open the door, if you please,’ she said.

  He got the measure of her mood then. He fished one key from a jangling loop that dangled from his capacious waist and inserted it showily in the big black lock. He heaved the heavy door open. It shut behind her with a thud, quenching the agonising clamour within and she was back in the Italianate hall.

  The wardress had seen it a hundred times, a visitor emerging looking like the wreck of the Hesperus, as dishevelled and discombobulated as one of the inmates. What these innocents expected, she did not know. It was a madhouse, wasn’t it? And yet some of them arrived as if to an Alpine sanatorium. Some even brought gifts! Tessie Archbold often thought of warning them beforehand, but she didn’t. Better to keep your distance, keep it official. They would find out soon enough, anyway. And no warning could prepare them. They had to put their finger in the wound.

  Bella took two or three deep breaths before moving away from the men’s door. She longed to sit down but there was nowhere to sit in the hallway. It was a place for passing through, with dread on your way in and relief on your way out. Fresh air then, that’s what she needed. She stumbled towards the main doorway but, like the destination in a dream, it seemed to recede as she went towards it. She did not remember the hall being so long, or was she, too, going mad? Behind her she heard the iron hinges of the men’s door open again. She turned to look behind her, half-expecting to see Nick in pursuit, dragging his anchor bed behind him and still calling out names that didn’t belong to her. But it was only two keepers being let out, escorting a chaplain. She stepped back out of their path as they passed her. Even a man of God needed protection here, she thought. The chaplain had a haughty bearing and a stately walk even though his suit looked oddly shabby. The keepers kept close to him as they halted by the counter at the far end of the hallway.