The Asylum (34 page)

I scrambled over the rubble and fled, realising too late that I was running in the wrong direction, with the noise still ringing in my head.

Not the sound of a murderer burying his victim, but the tower clock striking the hour.

As the last echoes died away, I caught a glimpse of black stonework amongst the trees ahead of me: the side—no, the back—of the original house. I picked my way through mounds of sodden litter until the path ended by the uneven remnants of a flagged walk. The rain was falling more heavily now, pattering over the leaves and splashing onto the stones.

No one has lived there for years.
Many of the windows on the ground floor were choked with ivy; the panes above were black with grime. In places, where sections of the house had been built out from the rest, there was scarcely room to squeeze between the foliage and the crumbling masonry.

If I could find a way in, I thought, this might be just the place; no one, surely, would think of looking for me here. The first door I came to was massive, banded with rusty iron and quite immovable, but around the corner of a buttress, I found an alcove, about six feet square, with a door in the right-hand wall. Glancing up, I saw the tower looming overhead.

The door was narrow, arching to a point at the top, like the entrance to a vestry, with a massive keyhole below the latch, and a rusty iron ring hanging from a pivot in the centre. I lifted the latch and tugged, without much hope, but to my surprise it opened with only a rasp of hinges.

I stepped over the threshold, into a cylindrical stairwell, lit by a single window no more than a foot wide. Stone steps, deeply worn, spiralled upward into the gloom. There were no other doors.

Outside, the pattering of the rain increased to a roar. I have done nothing wrong yet, I told myself. If anyone catches me, I am simply looking for shelter.

After three complete circuits of the staircase, I came to an archway in the wall. The stairs continued upward, but I passed through the opening, into a bare stone chamber with an even narrower door set into the wall beside me.

Either the rain had stopped again, or the walls were so thick as to muffle the sound entirely. I grasped the handle, half hoping it would not turn. But this door, too, was unlocked; it opened halfway, and stopped against an obstruction.

All I could make out, at first, was a jumble of furniture, mostly chairs and tables and benches—no, church pews—stacked so close to the wall that only a narrow passage, leading away to my left, remained. Murky light filtered down from above; the pile was too high for me to see over.

I crept along the passage, wincing every time a board creaked, toward a strip of light—a window?—at the end. The floorboards were thick with dust, which clung to the damp hem of my cloak, leaving an all too visible trail. A few paces from where I had entered were two massive wooden doors, both immovable.

The oblong of light broadened as I approached; what I had taken for a sill was a railing, waist high, with solid oak panelling beneath. I emerged onto a gallery running the width of the building. The light was coming from lancet windows in the walls high above me. Through a circular hole in the floor, an open staircase spiralled downward.

I stole toward the balustrade and peered over, into what had once been a chapel, but was now a storeroom or a workshop of some sort. All of the windows below had been bricked up, as had the entrance; the only visible door opened into a vestry nearby. I remembered Frederic saying, “He calls it the temple of science,” and understood why there were no windows. I had blundered into the very heart of Dr. Straker’s domain.

Ranged around the walls were tables, benches, and cabinets bearing tools, bottles, racks of tubes, notebooks, coils of wire, and pieces of apparatus made up of brass wheels and polished rods and glass cylinders, with cables snaking away from them. A dozen or more oil lamps hung suspended from wires above the benches. Amidst all of this equipment were homelier touches: a teacup, a tantalus with a single glass beside it, a biscuit tin. A closet stood open; I could see clothes hanging from a rail, a tall hat on a peg, a pair of boots beneath. A long trolley, like a narrow bed on wheels, stood by the vestry door; it had two handles projecting from one end, and rails around the side: the sort of thing, it struck me, that might be used to transport an unconscious patient—or a corpse.

I became aware of a low, continuous humming, just above the threshold of perception. A swarm of bees, perhaps, trapped inside the wall? No, the sound was too constant; I could not tell where it was coming from, but there was a strange, underlying vibration to it that set my teeth on edge.

As I began to back away, I heard, from somewhere below, a key turning in a lock. I dared not run, and could only crouch below the balustrade as footsteps, heavy and confident, approached. The footsteps halted at the foot of the stairs, as it seemed; through the opening in the floor I heard a drawer open and close, followed by the sound of riffling paper. Then silence, until at last the footsteps retreated, the door closed, and the echoes faded into silence.

The rain kept up for several days, but every afternoon I put on my damp cloak and tramped about the grounds, approaching the meeting place from a different direction each time. Frederic came to find me on the third day, a Monday, to tell me that he had received a note from Miss Ferrars, saying that he might call upon her at Gresham’s Yard if he wished. He would be going up to London on Wednesday. Despite the pricking of my conscience, I would have been glad of his company, but he seemed to feel himself honour bound not to linger. It occurred to me, as he walked away, that a young man as susceptible as Frederic might easily fall in love with Lucia.

Through the interminable days and nights of waiting, I pored over my journal until I knew it by heart, and could almost convince myself that these were genuine memories; except that the gaps between the entries remained as blank as ever. I imagined, in a sort of waking nightmare, returning from a walk to find Dr. Straker with my journal in his hand, saying, in his cool, ironic way, “It is a fiction, woven out of your disordered mind. Those wills exist only in your imagination.” I had loved Lucia, and she had betrayed me, and yet, no matter how often I reread those passages, I could not feel as I knew I ought to feel, or think beyond the prospect of escape.

By Thursday the rain had cleared; I arrived at the fallen tree an hour early, and paced restlessly about until Frederic appeared, looking so disconsolate that I assumed the worst. He could muster only a wan shadow of his usual smile.

“Good afternoon, Miss Ashton; I am sorry to have kept you waiting. You will be pleased, I hope, to hear that Miss Ferrars is to visit us, a week from today.”

He sounded so funereal that I thought I must have misheard him.

“Has she agreed to see me, then?”

“Yes, Miss Ashton, she has. She seems to have quite forgiven you, and she hopes that her visit will do you good—though of course she also hopes that it will lead to the recovery of her writing case. She would happily have made her visit sooner; only Dr. Straker reminded me, before I left, that he would be away in Bristol on Monday and Tuesday, and so we settled upon the Thursday.”

He spoke as if his mind were not really upon what he was saying, and he would not meet my eye.

“I am truly grateful to you, Mr. Mordaunt, for all the trouble you have taken on my behalf. But—you do not seem very happy about it.”

“Well yes—no—it is only—no, it is nothing, I assure you.”

It is just as I feared, I thought. He has fallen in love with Lucia.

“No doubt Miss Ferrars is very charming,” I said. “I only wish I could remember her.”

“Well yes, Miss Ashton, she—no—that is—” he stammered, looking even more uncomfortable.

“I trust that she was not distressed—or displeased—by your visit.”

“No, not at all, Miss Ashton. She was most hospitable—and charming, as you say—only—”

It struck me that he was using “Miss Ashton” far more frequently than before, with a peculiar emphasis upon the “Ashton.”

“I wish you would tell me, Mr. Mordaunt, what is troubling you.”

“Only that—” He took a deep breath, and seemed to make up his mind. “Until yesterday, Miss Ashton, I had hoped—against all the evidence—that Dr. Straker might have been mistaken; that perhaps the woman he had met in London really was the imposter, as you so vehemently believed. You had given me such a vivid picture of your childhood on the cliffs; your mother, your aunt, the loss of the house, that I simply could not—”

He paused, groping for words. I felt as if I had swallowed a lump of ice.

“But now I have met Miss Ferrars—the physical resemblance between you is indeed remarkable—and heard her describing those very scenes, sometimes in far greater detail, and spoken to her uncle, and the maid, and heard all about you—Miss Ardent, as you called yourself—and your extraordinary powers of recall, and mimicry, and—well, I can hope no longer. She even invited me to accompany her on an errand to the haberdasher in the square; they were reminiscing about the winter before last, when she first came to London.”

Clever Lucia, I thought. She has made absolutely sure of him.

“I am sorry, Miss Ashton, but we must face facts. Dr. Straker has been saying all along that when your memory does return, your personality, your facial expressions, even your voice, may change beyond recognition. It will be quite painless, he assures me; you may not even realise it has happened. You will wake up one morning as a different person in the same body, with your true history returned to you. But you will not remember me, or anyone here; you will not even know who I am . . .”

He had been gazing directly at me as he spoke, but his voice broke on the last phrase, and he averted his eyes. After a long, paralysed interval, I heard myself speaking, as I had that winter’s morning in the library, with cold contempt.

“Never mind, Mr. Mordaunt. You will have Miss Ferrars to console you.”

His head shot up again.

“You surely cannot think—you
do
think. No, I cannot—I will not have it. Miss Ferrars is quite charming, yes, but I could never—it is
you
that I love, you that I have longed for since the day we met. I would infinitely rather you remained forever as you are. To me,
you
are the real woman, and Miss Ferrars a pale imitation. I will love you no matter how you may change—of that I am sure—but you will never love me. You will look back on this time—if you remember it at all—with horror, and upon me as one of your gaolers. Detest me if you will, but never, never doubt my love for you.”

He spoke with such passion, his face flushed, his hands gesturing eloquently, that I was moved in spite of myself; moved, but also exasperated beyond measure. Then why, why,
why,
I thought, can you not believe that Lucia
is
the imitation? I imagined him getting down on his knees, and my replying, I cannot marry you because we are cousins; because I have Mordaunt blood in my veins; because everything you are offering me is lawfully mine (though I do not think I want to claim it); and because I cannot return your passion. But he is not on his knees, I reminded myself, and you cannot afford to feel sorry for him.

“I do not think of you as my gaoler, Mr. Mordaunt, and I am truly grateful for what you have done for me. But you must understand that until I am released, I can think of nothing else.”

“Miss Ashton, you must not imagine that I cherish any false hopes,” he said earnestly, though his face suggested otherwise. “I should never have spoken, only—” An awkward silence followed.

“At what time next Thursday,” I asked, “do you expect Miss Ferrars to arrive?”

“She said she would take the early express, and she hopes to be here in time for luncheon. I have arranged for a fly to meet her at the station. She will stay with us that night and return the following day.”

“And—will you tell Dr. Straker that you have spoken to me?”

“Yes. In fact, he insisted that I should convey the news to you; he still believes that this was entirely my idea. Relations between us are—strained. But I find I do not greatly care. No doubt,” he added, staring bleakly at the distant hills, “we shall be back on our accustomed footing before long. I doubt I shall ever have cause to defy him again.”

There seemed to be nothing more to say, and after another awkward silence he rose, and, with a last, desolate, searching look, made his farewells and departed.

The following morning brought another summons from Dr. Straker, and an even longer wait before he appeared in the doorway of my room. My mouth was very dry, and I could feel my arm shaking as he took my wrist.

“You are agitated, Miss Ashton. Mr. Mordaunt has told you, I believe, that Miss Ferrars is to visit us. Is that, do you think, the reason for your agitation?”

“I—I cannot tell, sir.”

“You do understand, Miss Ashton, that you are under no obligation to see her? My first duty is to you, as my patient, and I will not have you exposed to unnecessary nervous strain.”

“But sir,” I pleaded, “I
want
to see Miss Ferrars; I shall be quite calm, I am sure of it. If I seem anxious, it is because—because I hope this meeting will lead to my release.”

“Mr. Mordaunt is certainly of that opinion,” he said drily. “Well, I shall allow it. You may speak to Miss Ferrars—in my presence, of course—but if you seem in the smallest degree distressed, I shall close the proceedings forthwith. And if you should change your mind in the meantime, do not hesitate to send for me—remembering that I shall be leaving for Bristol on Monday afternoon and will not return until Tuesday evening.”

He rose, and seemed about to leave, then paused by the door.

“I take it, speaking of remembering, that you still have no recollection of where you hid Miss Ferrars’ writing case.”

I was suddenly, acutely conscious of the oak chest, a mere three feet from where I was sitting. I felt sure I could smell leather and parchment. My eyes were irresistibly drawn toward the chest, even as I tried to keep them fixed upon the floor at my feet, pretending to reflect. The air was heavy with suspicion.