The Rising of Bella Casey (20 page)

‘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
!’

T
he 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 wicket 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 5
^th
.’

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 gaping 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.

‘Transfer,’ barked the ginger keeper at the wardress. ‘Leeper. Archie.’

The name, even in this slangy locution, reached Bella as if from a deep, watery recess.

‘Where to?’ the wardress asked.

No, it could not be! She felt for an instant an eerie sensation as if time were doubling up on itself. She was returned to the cowed young teacher standing on the threshold of St Mary’s Infant School to be interviewed for the position of Principal Infant Teacher. She brushed the memory away. It must be another man of the same name.

‘Incurables wing,’ one of the keepers said loudly.

Bella pulled her plain shawl around her, hoping that might grant her invisibility. But something in her furtive gesture must have caught
this
Leeper’s eye for suddenly the chaplain wheeled around and called out to her down the long passageway of time.

‘Miss Casey?’

She could not mistake that voice.

‘Yes, you, down there,’ he repeated. ‘Come out of the shadows so that I may see you.’

There were no shadows here, only the vast emptiness of the hallway and the darkness of her own heart. But meekly, Bella obeyed.

‘Miss Casey, isn’t it?’ It was so long since she’d been Miss Casey that she barely recognised herself in the old appellation.

The clergyman shuffled forward flanked still by the keepers and they faced one another like chess pieces on the chequered floor. Bishop and pawn. There could be no doubt now. There was
that inward face, the hair more unkempt than she remembered, that goitred eye. He seemed bowed down in some way, not as tall as she remembered. Her first impression of him that day of her interview in the schoolroom was that he was kindly. She recalled that when Miss Kidd asked her to play ‘Abide With Me’ on the harmonium and she stumbled over the second bar because she was so nervous and the instrument was new to her, it was he who had come to her aid. Laying a calming hand on her shoulder, he had motioned her to stop and turned to the Guardians.

‘May Miss Casey go back to the beginning and start again …?’

She felt lost in time, claimed by unruly recall. Was it this place? Could it unnerve you, render you as unstable as the people it housed?

‘It
is
you,’ he said.

And she had the self-same thought. This was no ghostly double, but the man himself, or a shadow of him. Leeper. His ministry among the mad now.

‘Isabella!’ He moved forward boldly.

She stepped back, her hands fluttering to her mouth like a nervous girl.

‘I …’ she began.

‘I knew you’d come. I told them.’ He jerked his head towards the two keepers. The ball of his jawbone chafed against his collar. ‘Isabella will not let me rot in this place, I said …’

‘Now Reverend,’ the second keeper said. He was a rotund, bespectacled man with several chins. ‘Why don’t you leave this
good lady in peace?’

Bella recognised the tone; she had often used it herself, a teacherly chiding of an obdurate child. Something on the
keeper’s
wrist glinted, catching a shaft of sun glitter. It dazzled her momentarily until she realised what it was. It was a silvery
bracelet
with which Leeper was tethered to the fat keeper. He was an inmate of this place, not a servant to it!