Bedlam: The Further Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë (17 page)

“Were you sent by Lord Eastbourne?” I asked.

They didn't even acknowledge that I'd spoken. But who except Lord Eastbourne could have sent them to get me out of prison? Neither of the men showed any interest in me, but I was too grateful to care about their behavior. Outside the prison, gaslights burned dimly up and down Newgate Street. It must have been two or three o'clock in the morning. Smoke drifted across the sky, which glowed orange over a foundry, like a false dawn. I didn't see a soul. How was I to get home? I doubted I could find a carriage for hire, and I was afraid to walk. London teemed with cutthroats.

To my relief, a carriage drawn by two horses emerged from the darkness between the lampposts. My escort who looked like a Greek athlete climbed onto the box with the driver. The other man opened the door for me.

“Please take me to Number Seventy-Six Gloucester Terrace,” I said.

Riding in the carriage, I looked forward to a good meal, a hot bath, and the company of friends. I peered out the window to see how close to home I was, and saw an unfamiliar street. I called to my escorts, “Excuse me—is this the way to Gloucester Terrace?” They didn't answer. I had a distinct, uneasy feeling that they were taking me in the wrong direction on purpose. “I'll get out here, if you don't mind.”

The carriage didn't stop. I tried the door. It was locked from the outside. Fear washed through me in a cold wave. “Let me out!” Beating on the door, I called out the window, “Help!”

There was no one to come to my aid. The window was too small for me to jump out. The carriage moved faster, racketing through the deserted streets, veering around corners. When it finally slowed, the sight of our destination filled me with horror. Bedlam loomed black against the fire-glow in the sky, like a haunt of demons. Gaslights burned at the portals. A guard opened the back gate.

“No!” I cried as the carriage rolled in. It stopped; the door opened. My escorts reached in and seized me. I resisted, but they dragged me out.

Two attendants brought a litter whose metal frame had leather straps attached to it and wheels on the bottom. My escorts flung me onto the litter. As I kicked and screamed, they held me down. The attendants buckled the straps across my body and wheeled me into the asylum. My escorts followed us through the dim wards.

“Help me!” I called to the nurses we passed. “I've been kidnapped! Please get me out!”

No one paid me any notice. Madwomen resisting incarceration must be a common sight in Bedlam. The attendants carried me up the stairs. I knew where we were going before I saw the heavy iron door.

“No!” I pleaded.

We entered the criminal lunatics' ward. As we moved down the corridor, I saw Julia Garrs peering at me from a window in a cell door. My captors wheeled me into the room that contained the table with the straps and the machine with the wires—the room where Slade had been tortured and the two nurses murdered.

I strained against my bonds; I shrieked; I tossed my head. A man leaned over me. He was the doctor with the white coat, the spectacles, and the gray tonsure of hair. I struggled harder, shrieked louder. He regarded me with detachment, his eyes as cool as gray pebbles. I might have been an insect under a magnifying glass.

“Lift her head,” the doctor ordered the attendants.

They obeyed. He put a glass beaker to my mouth. I tried to turn my head away, but the attendants held it tightly. I clamped my lips shut, but the doctor pinched my nose. Unable to breathe, I had to open my mouth. He poured in bitter-tasting liquid, and although I spat and coughed, much of it ran down my throat. My captors gathered around me. They watched me closely as I continued to struggle, scream, and beg them to let me go. The drug burned inside my stomach, then seemed to spread outward in warm waves. I lost the strength to scream anymore. My limbs felt too heavy to move; my struggles ceased. The men's faces wavered in my vision, and the gas lamps behind them grew large, blurred halos. An unnatural calm spread through my body even as my mind reeled with terror.

“Don't be afraid.” The doctor spoke in a soft monotone. “Just relax.”

My will bent to his command. A sense of detachment came over me. My thoughts were clear, and my powers of observation intact, but I felt as if I were inside an invisible glass bell, sealed off from my emotions. My terror didn't abate, but it existed apart from me. The thundering of my heart quieted.

“Is she unconscious?” a voice said, outside my field of view. It was inflected by a foreign accent that I'd heard before, in Belgium. There I'd met some Prussians who spoke German. The man had the same accent as theirs.

“No,” the doctor said, “she's quite alert.”

“Good,” the Prussian said. “Will you use the galvanometer?”

“That wouldn't be advisable,” the doctor said. “She's too small and delicate. The galvanometer could damage her brain before she can tell you what you want to know.”

I remembered seeing Slade hooked up to the machine that delivered jolts of electricity to his brain. I value my own brain above all else that I possess, and I should have felt relief at escaping from harm to it, but at that moment I did not care. I should have been worried about what these people were going to do to me, but the glass bell kept my anxiety at bay.

“We'll use a technique called mesmerism.” The doctor placed flat, heavy metal plates on my chest and stomach.

“What are those?” the Prussian asked.

“Magnets. According to the great Dr. Mesmer, they enhance the flow of the magnetic fluids within the body and render the mind susceptible to manipulation.”

Their cold weight crushed my breasts and my ribs. The drug didn't take away the pain, but rendered me as impervious to it as to fear. The doctor bent over me and said, “You will not move or speak unless I tell you to. You are under my power.”

A spark of rebellion flared in me, for I detest being told what to do, but it quickly faded, as if the glass bell that enclosed me lacked enough air to sustain fire.

“Can she speak?” the Prussian asked.

The doctor said to me, “State your name.”

“Charlotte Brontë.” The name issued from me against my will.

He unbuckled the straps that bound me to the litter. Here was my chance to flee, but my body lay inert, uncooperative.

“Raise your right arm, Miss Brontë,” the doctor ordered.

My arm rose, of its own, eerie volition.

“Drop it.”

My arm hit the litter with a thud.

“She's ready,” the doctor said.

The Prussian joined the doctor in my field of vision. I recognized him as the foreigner I'd seen on my previous visits to Bedlam. His face was pitted by old scars, healed over with tight, shiny skin. His eyes were the palest blue I'd ever seen. They reminded me of windows reflecting the sky at an angle, deflecting all the light. It was as if he could see out of them, but no one could see inside to his soul.

“My colleague is going to ask you some questions,” the doctor informed me. “You will answer truthfully.”

I deduced that the Prussian was Wilhelm Stieber, spy for the Tsar. He had indeed turned Bedlam to his own, criminal purposes. Everything Slade had told me was true. I should never have doubted him. I should have forgotten Slade as he had ordered me to do, should have ceased following his trail. I'd thought he was spurning me, but he'd been protecting me from Stieber. Now I was under Stieber's power.

“Why did you go to see Katerina Ivanova?” Stieber asked.

He meant Katerina the Great, I realized. He'd somehow learned that I'd been caught at the scene of her murder and arrested. “I was looking for John Slade,” I said, even though I knew I must keep silent to protect Slade, and myself. “I thought Katerina might know where he was.”

Stieber regarded me with the interest of a hunter examining an animal caught in a trap he'd set. Important human traits such as kindness and humor appeared to have been left out of his nature. He seemed a man composed entirely of intellect, discipline, and purpose. “Why were you looking for John Slade?”

“Because I'm in love with him.” The words I'd never spoken aloud to a soul slipped out of my mouth.

“How do you know Slade?”

I didn't mean to tell, but the drug and the magnetic forces had broken my inhibitions. The whole story spilled out of me. I told Stieber about my adventures in 1848 and described how Slade and I had foiled an attack on the British Empire. Not only did I violate my oath of secrecy, I gave up my own most personal secrets. I told Stieber how Slade and I had fallen in love, while shame and guilt assailed the glass bell like pounding fists.

When I had finished, Stieber wore an expression that I had often seen on the faces of people to whom I'd just been introduced. They could hardly believe that my small, plain self was the famous Currer Bell. Now Stieber couldn't believe that I had collaborated with a secret agent for the Crown and together we had saved the Royal Family.

“Can she be telling the truth?” he asked the doctor.

“Either she is or she thinks she is. In her condition, she cannot lie.”

Stieber shook his head, as nonplussed as the fashionable literary set meeting Currer Bell for the first time. “Did you find Slade?”

Even as I prayed for the strength to protect Slade from his enemy, I answered, “Yes.”

“Where?”

“At the zoo.”

“When?”

“On Sunday afternoon.”

Stieber's pale eyes gleamed with satisfaction. Helpless misery joined the league of emotions trying in vain to inhibit my speech. I had made Stieber aware that Slade had still been in London as recently as two days ago.

“What did Slade tell you?” Stieber asked.

Out came everything Slade had said at the zoo, plus that which I'd learned from Lord Eastbourne. I told Stieber that the Foreign Office had sent Slade to aid Russian revolutionaries in their uprising against the Tsar and find out what the Tsar was plotting against Britain. I did not neglect to mention the reason Slade had returned to England. “You're trying to find Niall Kavanagh and his invention,” I told Stieber. “Slade followed you in order to stop you.” I could no more stanch the flow of my words than I could have halted a flood from a broken dam.

Shock quenched the gleam of satisfaction in Stieber's eyes. Apparently Slade had managed to keep his intentions secret during his torture. Now, thanks to me, Stieber knew. But I didn't realize just how much I had compromised both Slade and myself until Stieber spoke.

“You said that
I
am trying to find Niall Kavanagh and his invention.” He leaned closer, his gaze boring into me. I could see smaller pits within the pits that marred his face. Breathing the air around him, I made an unsettling discovery: he had no odor. “So you know who I am?”

“Yes.” Common sense blared a distant warning that I was unable to heed.

“What is my name?”

“Wilhelm Stieber,” I said. “You're the Tsar's favorite spy.”

He drew back, the instinctive reaction of a man who travels in disguise and hears his true identity suddenly proclaimed. “What else do you know about me?”

I perceived a chasm yawning before me. The drug and the magnetic forces banished my instinct for self-preservation. I stepped right over the edge. “You killed Katerina.”

“How do you know this?” Stieber spoke in a level yet menacing tone.

“Katerina told me. Before she died.”

Stieber turned away. I could surmise what he was thinking: my story would sound preposterous to most everyone, were I just an ordinary woman, but I was not. My service to the Crown had gained me the confidence of people in high places, and if I told them about Stieber, they might believe me. Stieber didn't know I had already passed on much of the information to Lord Eastbourne and been rebuffed. He only understood that I knew far too much.

The doctor put a stethoscope to my chest and listened to my heart. “She can't withstand the magnetic forces any longer. Are you finished?”

“Oh, yes,” Stieber said.

“Your men can take her back to Newgate.” The doctor lifted the magnets from my chest. I was vaguely conscious of physical relief, but doom vibrated like thunder outside the bell jar.

“No,” Stieber said.

Confusion wrinkled the doctor's smooth brow. “What am I supposed to do with her?”

“Dispose of her,” Stieber said. This was my death sentence, uttered in the perfunctory tone of a man ordering a servant to clean up a mess his dog had made.

“Do you mean . . . ?” As the doctor turned to Stieber, dismay broke the monotone of his voice; its pitch rose high with fright. “No. I can't.”

“You will.” Stieber's voice was flat, authoritative.

“But I've never killed anyone before.” The doctor's protest was the bleat of a coward. If only his fear of taking my life were stronger than his fear of displeasing Stieber! “It's against my principles.”

“Your principles didn't prevent you from accepting money for torturing people,” Stieber said.

“That wasn't torture, it was medical research!”

Stieber made a moue of contempt, then said, “She can't be allowed to live.”

“But how will I dispose of her body?” The doctor had given in to Stieber; only the practicalities of killing me were in question. My hope of a reprieve faded. “What if I'm caught?” My last chance rested on his fear of the consequences. “Even if I can convince my superiors that her death was accidental, they'll put a stop to my research. I'll lose my position!”

“You'll lose more than that unless you do as I say.”