By a Lady

by Amanda Elyot

  Words deserted her.

  Finally, Lady Dalrymple broke the silence. “Oh, Cassandra,” she wailed.

  “Oh, Cassandra,” echoed Newton. “Oh, Cassandra.”

  “What has happened? Have I done anything?” the young woman found herself asking her “aunt’s” parrot.

  The usually saturnine Saunders smiled.

  Finally, Squiffers stepped forward. “Miss Welles,” he began, forming his words slowly, as though she were incapable of rational comprehension. “Over the past few weeks, it has become increasingly clear to those in your proximity that you have exhibited abnormal, indeed aberrant, behavior.”

  “Aberrant?” C.J. questioned. She was indeed uncomprehending.

  The doctor removed a small, leather-bound notepad from an interior pocket of his black coat and began to read from a list written in a cramped scrawl. He looked over at Saunders, who nodded her head and rewarded the medical man with a gimlet-eyed gaze. “Perhaps, I should begin at the beginning. Constable?”

  Mawl rose to his feet and stepped forward as though he were called upon to testify before the bar. He assumed a pompous stance. “The alleged Miss Welles was apprehended by me, near Stall Street, just after Easter Sunday. She was caught thieving and appeared to be without fixed abode. The minx was thereupon taken to the jail, where she was placed in the care of one Jack Clapham, warden.”

  “Constable, did this alleged Miss Welles ever tell you at the time you apprehended her, or during her incarceration in the prison, that she was the niece of a noblewoman: to wit, Lady Dalrymple, whom you see seated before you?”

  “What is this all about?” C.J. demanded, feeling increasingly ill and fearing the reply. “Why do I feel like I am on trial here?”

  “Because you are, in a manner of speaking,” Squiffers replied. “Are you or are you not related to Lady Dalrymple? What manner of young woman roams the streets of Bath unchaperoned, with nowhere to rest her head at night? What manner of young woman must steal for her supper?”

  “Breakfast,” C.J. corrected sullenly. What manner of a nightmare was she caught in?

  “If Lady Wickham had been well enough to travel, she, too, would be sitting here to question the sanity of a young woman who spends weeks in her employ, yet neglects to mention that she is the niece of a countess who lives but a few minutes’ walk away.” Dr. Squiffers flipped through his little pad of notes.

  “The old bat is healthy enough; she’s just too cheap to hire a hack.”

  “Mary!” Lady Oliver gasped at the maid’s rudeness.

  “Mary!” Lady Dalrymple said, nearly simultaneously, rather proud of the girl’s audacity.

  “Miss Welles is the dearest, sweetest friend I’ve ever had,” Mary proclaimed, dropping the fan in Lady Dalrymple’s upholstered lap and rushing over to protect her champion. She threw her arms around Cassandra and held her tightly. “Miss Welles is not touched. And whoever says so is touched himself!” she insisted, choking back sobs.

  So that was what was going on. Dr. Squiffers, clearly bolstered by the support of nearly everyone in the room, with the obvious exceptions of Mary and Lady Dalrymple, thought she was mentally unstable. C.J. reflexively touched her stomach as if to protect her child from hearing its mother so maligned. What did Darlington think? Did the man she had fallen in love with now regard her as a madwoman?

  Squiffers began to read from his notes. “Miss Welles comes and goes from the house at all hours, often unchaperoned. Miss Welles has been observed wearing the same garments at all hours of the day, not changing her morning frock for a tea gown on several occasions. She seems overfond of a cheap, yellow muslin and a particular blue sarcenet, although her ladyship has ordered many frocks made to her liking and her measurements. Miss Welles undertook to treat her ladyship of a severe illness of the heart, whereupon she procured some medication that was unfamiliar to every apothecary to whom a sample was presented.” Mary looked shocked and was about to protest that she had never betrayed Miss Welles or her ladyship and that one of the little tablets must have been stolen from her when the doctor raised his hand to hush her. He continued his recitation of C.J.’s transgressions. “Miss Welles’s conduct in prohibiting her ladyship’s physician to attend her and to prescribe an acceptable course of treatment is evidence of an unstable mind.”

  Poor Lady Dalrymple, who had invested so much in her. And who had always trusted her own lady’s maid, never suspecting that the witch had her greedy hands in Lady Oliver’s purse. How could Saunders have betrayed her mistress? And how could Lady Oliver have so betrayed a bosom friend?

  “Mary, ring for Collins,” the countess said quietly. “Saunders, you are dismissed from my employ. Collins will see to it that you are packed and out of my house within the hour. You will receive no severance, nor will I provide you with a reference.”

  The dour-faced servant looked to Lady Oliver, clearly expecting to be rescued, if not offered a new situation outright, but her ladyship was far too canny to openly tip her hand.

  Dr. Squiffers steadied his own nerves by pressing his forefingers together as tightly as he could. “Lady Dalrymple, under the circumstances, I have no alternative but to admit Miss Welles to St. Joseph of Bethlehem.”

  Mary gasped. “Bedlam?!”

  The countess fainted.

  It was Darlington who came to Lady Dalrymple’s side, pouring several drops of cool water from a pitcher onto his monogrammed cambric handkerchief, which he fashioned into a compress for Lady Dalrymple’s throbbing temples. C.J. looked at him imploringly. “Your lordship?” she whispered. Her lips trembled. Should her words beseech or berate?

  “Nephew, we have nothing more to do here,” Lady Oliver remarked sternly. “I should like to call for my carriage.”

  The earl regarded his aunt. “For years now, I have been willing to see you through rose-colored lenses, owing to the dreadful hardships you endured as a young bride. You never permitted me to forget your own misery, and your bitterness grew like a chancre on a blossom, destroying all hope of its everlasting beauty. The scales have fallen from my eyes, Aunt Augusta. Or shall I say I have ground the rose-tinted glass beneath the heel of my boot. We have nothing to say to each other.”

  “You will regret it, Percy,” Lady Oliver warned. “You will live to regret this day.” She lowered her lorgnette and swept imperiously from the room.

  “Not half so much as I regret seeing the rest of the world through your jaundiced eyes,” her nephew retorted. He made a protective move toward Cassandra, but the physician held up his hand to stop him.

  “Miss Welles is going to Bethlehem, your lordship. The documents have been signed.” Squiffers produced a set of folded papers from the deep pocket of his coat and showed the earl the autograph that committed her to the asylum.

  “You bastard.” Darlington had been bested. All it took was a physician’s signature, and this one was legal. Would that he could strangle the doctor and take Cassandra with him to the countryside. Flout convention. Blast propriety. Dash the Digbys! He would marry his Cunegonde, Miss Welles, and they would survive if they had to work the land themselves.

  Darlington despised the triumphant look in the medic’s eyes. “Miss Welles will come with me,” the doctor said with finality.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Concerning the conditions in a nineteenth-century madhouse, and our heroine’s incarceration therein. The Marquess of Manwaring plays his part to perfection, spinning a fanciful tale that contains nothing but the truth itself.

  THE RED BRICK BUILDING with the cast-iron gate was forbidding from the outset. Ivy tendrils curled upward from the foundation as if to further shelter the Bethlehem inmates from the view of the outside world.

  St. Joseph’s of Bethlehem was the sister hospital, C.J. learned, to St. Mary of Bethlehem, the first English madhouse, which opened in Bishopsgate, London, in 1403. The London asylum quickly earned the nickname Bedlam, and the homeless people of the Tudor and Stuart eras were known as Tom O’Bedlam, as th
ey wandered the streets of the city in parti-colored attire begging for food and alms.

  Clearly, Dr. Squiffers, convinced by the testimony of Constable Mawl, was certain that this “Miss Welles” was a latter-day street person who in order to survive had spun a series of tall tales, none of which were true and most of which conspired to take advantage of specific members of the aristocracy, doubtless to win their hearts and the forfeiture of their purses. He lifted the handle of a small, black metal box that hung on the outside gate and rang the bell within it.

  Presently an extraordinarily tall, nearly bald gentleman of middling to advanced age came to the gate and unlocked it for the doctor and his charge.

  “Squiffers.”

  “Haslam.”

  The iron gate clanged shut behind them, the sound ringing in C.J.’s ears.

  The lanky giant wordlessly led them along a worn flagstone path, up to a second gate. He removed a large iron key ring from his waistcoat and unfastened the enormous padlock, then opened the oaken door directly behind the portcullis.

  Haslam exposed a mouthful of yellowed teeth. “This way madness lies,” he grinned, gesturing down a grayish, grim corridor. “You say she’s another country pauper?” he asked Dr. Squiffers. “We’ve got so many of them in here, I’ve stopped keeping track. Shut yer!” he snapped at a moaning inmate who thrust a bony arm through the bars of a cell. The madman’s glazed eyes gave the impression that the human being behind them had long ago died, and that it was merely his starving carcass that had stubbornly refused to give up the ghost.

  C.J. stopped in her tracks at the sight of a man in leg irons shackled to the stone wall of his cell. They dared to call this a hospital? The conditions were worse than in the prison!

  Shrieks, groans, and unintelligible ravings echoed off the walls of the narrow corridor. C.J. would have tried to hold her ears, had not Squiffers a firm grasp of one of her arms.

  “I’m John Haslam, resident apothecary in charge here,” the gaunt giant told the stunned young woman. “And I run a tight ship. The usual treatment for this one?” he asked the doctor.

  Squiffers was about to nod his assent when C.J. stopped and whirled around, planting her feet. “What are you going to do to me?” she demanded, her voice rising.

  “Finest care in the kingdom, pretty one,” the madhouse keeper replied. “Regular bleeding, purging, and vomiting. We’ve got some two hundred inmates who receive a steady diet of water gruel every day for breakfast, porridge at lunch, and rice milk on Saturdays at dinner. Three meals a day! And of course at Bethlehem, we believe that the moral force of the ‘eye’—my eye—will lead these mad sinners to God,” Haslam gleefully told the physician.

  “I am not mad!” C.J. shrieked, and summoned all her force to shake loose from Squiffers’s grasp. She raced away from the mad-doctors, down the corridor, heart pounding, adrenaline pumping.

  But her freedom was short-lived, as she found herself lifted off the floor by two enormous guards who seemed to have materialized from the ether, men as tall as Haslam, but with perhaps thrice his bulk. They bore her back to the doctors, still attempting to elbow her way out of their firm grasp and kicking her legs as fiercely as she could, given the narrowness of her hem.

  When the duo reached Haslam and Squiffers with their prey, the keeper unlocked a cell, and pushed back the door. A huge metal contraption, like a giant black birdcage, hung from a chain of heavy links attached to the low ceiling. The bottom of the cage remained suspended about two feet from the floor of the cell. “This’ll keep her from doing injury to herself or the others,” Haslam explained. “It will stop her kicking, for sure.”

  No! They couldn’t! C.J. thought. In an instant, she became a living thing inside what nearly passed for a gibbet, the cage barely big enough to contain her slender body. Haslam slammed the door of the cage, rattling it to be sure that the lock held fast. He removed a gold pocket watch from his waistcoat and checked the time. “Ahh. How fortuitous of you to arrive at this time of day, Miss Welles. You are just in time for lunch.”

  The apothecary turned and escorted Squiffers from the cell and down the corridor, their retreat greeted by a chorus of cries and jeers from the unfortunate incarcerated souls.

  There she was, trapped in an iron cage, in a walled cell, in an airless stockade, which itself stood behind two impenetrable gates. All C.J. had left was her mind, which she was sure to lose for real, the more time she spent imprisoned within these walls. So this was where society locked away its undesirable element, its untouchables. Certainly, there were genuine madmen and madwomen in Bethlehem, but how many others had lost their minds in the asylum, who had been shut away simply for being homeless or helpless?

  And the more she thought about it, the more C.J. realized that the barbarism to which she was currently subject was not entirely unknown in her own century. Too often C.J. had come across headlines of abusive and appalling conditions in mental wards and nursing homes. Her heart had gone out to the victims she had read about and whose stories were played out in the nightly news, but they had always been more or less fictional characters to her. Now she was one of them.

  How could she retain her wits and devise a means of escape? How could she convey a message to those who still cared about her? C.J. tried to shift her weight; her legs had already fallen asleep. Even the mound of straw in the corner of the dark cell seemed inviting by comparison.

  Something rustled in the dark. For a moment, C.J. thought she saw the straw move. Perhaps she was losing her mind sooner than she feared.

  A woman’s head, covered with long, matted gray hair, poked through the smelly reeds. The head was followed by a body resembling nothing so much as a sack of potatoes. The colors of whatever garments the lady had been wearing had faded into nondescription. Her breasts sagged to her waist. It was nearly impossible to tell her age. But she fixed upon C.J. with piercing blue eyes. For several moments, the two women simply regarded each other, with more curiosity than wariness. Finally, the other spoke, never releasing C.J. from her bright blue gaze. Her voice sounded like aged whisky. “I’ve been here twenty years,” she said.

  “How old are you then?” C.J. asked curiously.

  “Nineteen . . . and twenty-three and sixty-five if I’m a day.”

  This did not seem a satisfactory answer to the new inmate. “If you are but nineteen years old, how can you have been here for twenty years?” she queried.

  The haggard woman sat up and began to rock herself, singing a ballad with a lyric of her own devising, set to a familiar tune.

  “Alas, Lord Featherstone did me wrong, for to get me with child on a mild midday; my maidenhead died the same day as my father, and . . . look you!” The madwoman staggered to her feet.

  C.J. noticed that her cellmate was pregnant, immediately putting her in mind of her own dire plight. “Lady Rose?” she asked, horrified.

  “I was once a lovely pink rose, but my bush was pruned,” Rose continued in a singsong. She lifted her skirts. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” she chanted, displaying her privates. “Oooh, I’ve lifted my skirt for men much better than you, I warrant.”

  Rose rubbed her belly and began to cough; it was a dry, hacking sound. “Pray, sir, have you got anything to drink? I am parched with thirst.” She looked about the ratty straw until she found a tin cup. Rose stared into the bottom of the cup, wishing it full, then turned it over and demonstrated to C.J. that there was nothing in it. She stumbled over to C.J.’s cage, still clutching her cup and peered closely at her. “Ohh, you’re a lady,” Lady Rose marveled. “I was a lady once.”

  Rose’s arms were rail thin. Perhaps she had eaten nothing during her incarceration. With her swelling belly and skeletal frame, she resembled the photographs C.J. had seen of starving children in Biafra. “Lady Rose, what happened that you should end up in Bedlam?” Should she divulge her knowledge of Rose’s recent whereabouts, that the last time C.J. had seen her, Rose was the main attraction at a gang rape masquerading as a bawdy
costume ball?

  “Curse the day you were born a woman!” Rose hissed. She began to sway to and fro, picking up the thread of her tune.

  Lord Featherstone could not live alone, cut by the ton and his family.

  A babe on the way fair ruined his day, nor could he repair my virginity.

  Lady Rose, shivering, scratched at her bare, scrawny legs. They were dotted with ugly sores. “Mrs. Lindsey was kind to me, so kind . . . until . . .” She clawed at her own belly.

  “Until she could tell you were carrying a babe,” C.J. whispered.

  Rose nodded. “I’m cold, so cold. Can you keep me warm, mistress?”

  C.J. searched the confines of her cage for anything resembling a blanket, while Rose, dripping profusely with a cold sweat, tried to hum to herself to keep her teeth from chattering.

  “I’m afraid I have nothing here, your ladyship,” C.J. said. That it should come to this. At least the poor young woman deserved to be addressed properly. The rest of her dignity already had been stripped away by degrees. “Come to me, Lady Rose.” C.J. crouched at the bottom of the cage and stretched her arms through the bars as far as she could reach.

  Rose crawled over and nestled like an obedient child in the pungent straw matting while C.J. managed to cradle the head and shoulders of the unfortunate soul in her arms. Rose began to rock and sob, in between shivers, and for several minutes C.J. rocked with her, the cage swinging to and fro.

  Rose’s flesh then began to grow cold to the touch; her singing stopped. The only noise C.J. heard was the cacophony of shrieks and cries from other inmates. To her mortification, she realized that Lady Rose was most likely at death’s door. C.J. cried herself hoarse calling for the doctors.