The Asylum (3 page)

“Well, Miss Ashton, as I think we must call you until we discover who you really are, I must say that your case is unique in my experience.”

“Sir, I beg of you . . . I cannot explain what has happened, but I swear to you, on my dear mother’s grave, I
am
Georgina Ferrars!”

“I know. I know that is what you believe, with every fibre of your being. But consider the facts. There is a Georgina Ferrars presently at the address you gave me—no, hear me out. You came here under the name Lucy Ashton, and I think we may say with certainty that Lucy Ashton is not your real name, either. You are, I take it, familiar with Scott’s Waverley novels?”

I knew, suddenly, where I had heard the name before.

“Lucy Ashton is the heroine of
The Bride of Lammermoor.
She is forced by her mother to break her engagement to the man she loves, Edgar Ravenswood, and marry another whom she loathes. She stabs her husband on their wedding night, and dies, insane, of a seizure. So it occurs to me to ask whether this has any personal significance for you.”

I stared at him, appalled.

“I have never been engaged, sir, let alone . . . !”

“Nevertheless, you will agree that it is a disturbing choice of alias for a troubled young woman presenting herself for treatment at a private asylum. It suggests that there is something in her past—perhaps her immediate past—from which she is fleeing.”

“There is nothing, sir, nothing!”

“Nothing that you can remember, I agree.”

“But sir, I have told you my history; you wrote it down yesterday. The person who sent that telegram is lying; I do not know why. If you do not believe me—”

“I have already been in touch with the medical boards of Clerkenwell and Southwark: a Dr. Godfrey Ferrars held positions there in 1859 and 1862 respectively. He died at Southwark of typhoid fever on the thirtieth of August 1862, survived by his wife, Emily, and their infant daughter, Georgina.”

“Then how can you not believe me?” I cried.

“Because—though I am sure you could give me the most fluent recital of the facts of Georgina Ferrars’ life—it does not follow that you
are
Georgina Ferrars. You may, for example, have met the real Georgina Ferrars, or someone who knows her very well, and—for reasons we cannot yet fathom—become obsessed with her. I have seen such cases before; it is called hysterical possession, where the patient assumes the identity of another and comes to believe in all sincerity that she
is
that person. As well as the evidence of the telegram, we have the fact that you presented yourself here as Miss Ashton, suffered a seizure, lost all memory of the past six weeks, and only then declared yourself to be Georgina Ferrars—”

“Sir,” I broke in, gathering my courage, “you
must
hear me! That cable is a fraud. I do not know who sent it, or why, but if you send someone to Gresham’s Yard, you will find only my uncle; he will come straight away and fetch me. I have a little money saved,” I added, praying that it was still true, “and I will pay any expenses—”

“That will not be necessary. As it happens, I have to go up to London by this afternoon’s train. I shall call at Gresham’s Yard tomorrow, and speak to Josiah Radford—and, I fear, to Georgina Ferrars, and try to persuade her to come down and identify you—since you clearly know a good deal about her.

“And if,” he added, before I could speak, “if it
should
turn out that you have a mortal enemy, who has been lurking around Gresham’s Yard, waiting to intercept a telegram he could not possibly have known would come, I promise to bring Mr. Josiah Radford back with me on the very next train, and eat my hat—a thing I have never promised to do before—as penance. In the meantime, we shall keep you comfortable, at our expense, of course.”

“But sir, I wish to leave at once!”

“I am afraid I cannot allow it. You are not well enough to travel, and, if my instinct is right, and you were to appear at Gresham’s Yard in your present frame of mind, you would probably be arrested and confined at Bethlem Hospital, which, though much improved, is not a place I should recommend to anyone in my care. And now I must see to my other patients; I shall leave you in the care of my colleague Dr. Mayhew until I return—which may not be until Monday.”

“Monday! But sir . . .”

He rose, silencing me with a gesture, and strode to the door, where he paused.

“Oh, and I shall ask my assistant, Mr. Mordaunt, to look in on you. I think you will find him—sympathetic.”

For the rest of that day I saw no one but Bella and Dr. Mayhew, a stout, grey-bearded physician who took my pulse, peered at my tongue, felt my forehead, grunted a few times and went away without speaking. Bella helped me to bathe, and brought me meals, most of which I was unable to eat.
You must keep up your strength for the journey home,
I kept telling myself, but the clenched knot in the pit of my stomach left little room for food. Once, after she had taken away my tray, I slipped out of bed and made my way unsteadily to the window. The mist had cleared, and through the grille I looked down upon an enclosed garden, perhaps thirty yards across, surrounded by high brick walls. Gravel paths ran between beds of dark green foliage; there was no one in sight, and no sign of any way in or out. Above the walls I could see only the tops of trees, silhouetted against a leaden sky.

There was no clock within my hearing; nothing to mark the passing of the hours except the slow fading of the light and the occasional spatter of rain against the glass; nothing to do but struggle in vain to comprehend what had befallen me, until I fell at last into a doze and woke in lamplight to find Bella arranging my supper tray. She had brought me another draught of chloral, which I swallowed reluctantly for the oblivion it promised. But instead of sleeping through the night, I woke in a kind of delirium in which I was aware of myself lying in bed, unable to move, spinning through fearful dreams until daylight and the horror of coming fully awake and finding myself still at Tregannon Asylum.

Before this, the idea that I might not even be—myself, was the only way I could conceive of it—would have seemed merely absurd. But here, anything seemed possible; not only possible, but nightmarishly plausible. How could I be sure that I was not insane? I did not
feel
mad, but how was I to know what madness felt like? Dr. Straker evidently believed it; and I had only to think of that telegram to feel terror rising to engulf me. Why had I called myself Lucy Ashton—as I must have done, unless everyone here was lying to me? Was there a strain of madness in our family, which had come out in me?

You must not think of it,
I told myself, and a great sob burst from my throat. When the fit of weeping had passed, I lay down and closed my eyes and strove to imagine myself back in my own small bed in our house on the cliffs at Niton, with Mama and Aunt Vida murmuring nearby, their voices blending with the ebb and wash of the sea far below.

My great-aunt Vida had found the cottage many years before I was born, and had fallen in love with it at first sight. It stood about fifty yards up from the cliff, with the ground rising steeply behind. Away to the east ran the great sweep of the cliffs, the edge so sharp in places that it might have been cut with a knife, plunging down to two horizontal lines of fluted rock like great jagged teeth, the lower jaw projecting beyond the upper, and then down again to the falls of rock heaped along the shore far below. Whole farms lay buried in some of these mounds, but my aunt insisted that we were too far from the edge to be in any danger.

Our sitting room was upstairs at the front, with windows on two sides looking to the east and south, over the vast expanse of the sea. My mother had a chaise longue by the side windows, and here she would spend hours each day reading, knitting or embroidering, or simply gazing out to sea. Every morning after breakfast, the sitting room would become my schoolroom, and much of my education came from reading aloud—I could not remember a time when I could not read—or being read to, and asking questions whenever I did not understand. We read a great deal of poetry, and Lamb’s
Tales from Shakespeare,
and Macaulay’s
History;
anything from our small library that my mother considered suitable, and I do not remember her ever condescending to me, or saying that anything was too hard for a child to understand.

My aunt slept in the other front room; my bedroom was across the passage from hers, and my mother had the room next to mine. From my window I could see the long westward sweep of the coast. The dining room, which we seldom used, was downstairs, along with a breakfast room where we took most of our meals, and the kitchen and servants’ quarters where Mrs. Briggs, the housekeeper, and Amy, the maid, lived.

Aunt Vida seemed, when I was small, to tower above my mother, though I came to realise that there was only an inch or two between them. But my mother was pale and slender, whereas Aunt Vida was as stout and solid as a tree-trunk, her face weathered by long exposure to wind and sun. She was a great walker, and I would often see her striding out in the morning, swinging her blackthorn stick. In summer, especially, she might not return until after my bedtime; I would hear her voice raised in greeting as I was drifting on the edge of sleep, or wake to the murmur of conversation from the sitting room. She spoke, as a rule, in a gruff, staccato fashion, as though dictating her thoughts at the telegraph office. “I should have been born a man,” she once said to me, years after my mother had died, and indeed she behaved, for the most part, as if she had been. Once, having seen her snipping at her hair—a thick, white, wiry mane, very like that of Mr. Allardyce the vicar—with the kitchen scissors, I decided to try it myself, with predictable consequences. “I am old enough, and ugly enough, to do as I please,” she had said sternly, “but you, child, are not.” She despised bustles and crinolines; her wardrobe consisted of two summer and two winter walking-dresses, all in the same shade of brown (“doesn’t show the mud”), and two pairs of stout boots; in wet weather she would array herself in oilskins and a sou’wester. Years later, when I was fully grown, she insisted upon giving me a set of my own, which I thought deeply unbecoming and would wear only as a last resort. They smelt faintly but persistently of tobacco, and I suspected her of buying them from a sailor.

My own taste in dress was formed by my mother, who, like my aunt, refused to wear a bustle, or endure any form of tight lacing. She, however, had embraced the artistic fashion when I was still very small: plain, loose-fitting gowns in muted shades and soft fabrics, which she cut out and sewed herself. With me, she was abundantly affectionate; even during my lessons, we would nestle together on the sofa, whereas Aunt Vida, though I never doubted her love for me, could manage no more than a clumsy pat on my shoulder, as you might pat a horse you were not entirely sure of. But sometimes, if I caught my mother unawares, I would find her staring absently into space with a haunted, fearful expression—was it dread, or physical pain? I could not tell, because the instant she caught sight of me, she would shake herself, beckon me into her arms, and assure me that it was nothing, nothing at all. If she was in pain, or visited by some premonition of approaching death, she concealed it resolutely; if I suggested a walk, and she did not feel up to it, she would simply smile and say that she thought she had better rest. And so, with my aunt out roaming the countryside, I was left a good deal to myself in the afternoons.

The only remarkable thing about my bedroom, from a child’s point of view, was a full-length mirror in a tarnished gilt frame, fixed to the wall beside my bed. When I was about six years old, I invented a game—at least it began as a game—in which my reflection was my sister, Rosina. The name simply floated into my head one day, and I liked the music of it. I would stare at my reflection in the glass until I drifted into a strange, half-mesmerised state in which Rosina’s gestures and expressions seemed independent of my own. Rosina, of course, looked exactly like me, except that she was left-handed. But in personality she was quite different: bold, headstrong, defiant of authority, and entirely fearless. And oddly, though it did not seem so at the time, she was not my mother’s daughter, despite being my sister; she had sprung fully formed from the mirror, a law unto herself.

I had a separate voice for Rosina, higher and fiercer than mine, and sometimes our exchanges would become quite heated, if she was taunting me for refusing to do something forbidden, such as creeping downstairs before dawn to play in the moonlight. As I grew more adventurous, it was always fear of Rosina’s scorn, which I could summon as vividly as any feeling of my own, that kept me from turning back. When my mother was resting, I liked to play by myself in the garden, which was enclosed by a rough stone wall—I suppose it was no more than six feet high, but to me it seemed immense—partly hidden from the house by a coppice of ancient fruit trees. I was forbidden to climb it, but at Rosina’s urging I went a little higher each time, until I was perched on the very top. Looking along the coast, I could see the edge of the cliff, cut as cleanly as a pat of butter, and hear the wash of the sea far below.

That was as far as I dared go for a week or more, and it was even longer before I made my first tentative descent to the rough, tussocky grass outside. The hillside around was overgrown with gorse, which made it easy to keep out of sight of the house, though I learnt to be very careful of the thorns. Despite my apprehension, I knew at once what the next dare would be: to go right down to the edge of the cliff and look over.

I do not know how far I believed in Rosina as a separate being. Part of me, at least, was aware that I was playing a game with myself; yet the Rosina-voice also seemed to come from outside.
I
did not want to be bad, or cause my mother distress, but Rosina simply did not care;
I
was afraid of the cliff and had promised never to go near it; but Rosina was not afraid of anything. And so, day by day, I ventured closer to the edge.