The Painted Bridge (4 page)

Until that time, I remain your loving and obedient …

Anna paused for so long that the ink dried on the nib. After nearly seven months, she still didn’t feel like Vincent’s wife. She signed herself his loving and obedient Anna, read the letter over and folded it into an envelope, resisting the impulse to throw it on the embers.

Picking up the pen again, she warmed the underside of the nib over the candle, loaded it with the remains of the ink and began an account to Louisa of everything that had happened since she read in a newspaper of the ship wrecked off the Welsh coast, the boy who had been pulled from the water still breathing. How she’d felt impelled to travel there, see if she could help.

She explained how Vincent had misunderstood her actions, and expressed her pressing need of rescue from this gloomy and godforsaken
madhouse.
As best she could reckon it, Lake House was some three miles north of the brickworks at the top of the Hollow Way, could be reached in a couple of hours by carriage from Louisa’s house at Wren Street.

She sat for a moment resting her head in her hands. A madhouse was what it was, however Mr. Abse tried to dress it up. Her husband had put her in a place meant for lunatics and hysterics. The thought prompted a stab of pain in Anna’s chest. She’d never set foot in any place like this, had only hurried past the walls of the large asylum near the Vicarage on occasion, hearing the awful cries that came from inside the place and feeling a mixture of relief that she wasn’t in there and horror that others were. Wondered what afflicted them. Back in Dover, where she grew up, such people tended to remain at large. There was a simpleton who wandered the cliffs, a woman who lived in a hut in the woods, feeding the birds better than she fed herself, and whom some of the local lads tormented as a witch.

Anna rubbed her eyes and grasped the pen. She’d run out of space. She needed to keep one sheet of paper for the other letter. She sent her
love to her sister, her nephews. Remembered her brother-in-law and added him too. “Please, Lou, come quickly, I beg you,” she wrote up the margin. The
you
was squeezed, almost illegible. She would have to trust in Louisa to grasp the seriousness of the situation. Sometimes, Louisa saw gravity only in things that related to herself. Still, she was the closest of Anna’s sisters. The others were so much older, all so far away. Anna couldn’t think how she would even begin to explain her predicament to them.

She got up and stretched, put her finger to the pane and slid it back and forth in squeaky lines. Drops of moisture were running down the inside of the window, joining and separating. It was pitch dark outside; she could see nothing, only feel the night pressing in on her, adding its weight to the walls, to the pervasive odor of damp. She had to get out.

Both candles were guttering, sending up curls of black smoke. Martha Lovely was a woollen mountain, her breathing steady. Anna stood and watched her, followed the rise and fall of the blanket, then crept to the end of the bed and eased the leg off the floor. The little knife fell out of the handkerchief into her hand, its pearl handle cool and smooth in her palm.

“Are you awake?”

The rhythm didn’t falter. Anna kneeled down by Lovely’s head and lifted the edge of the blanket. The woman’s cheek rested on the palm of one hand, her mouth open. Anna pulled the blanket down farther. The string that held the key was clearly visible above the neck of her nightdress. Anna sat back on her heels and pulled out the blade, silently. Her heart raced as she leaned forward and felt in the candlelight for the string.

She started and jumped back as Lovely sat bolt upright, one hand clamped around the key and the other holding the whistle to her lips.

“One blast o’ this and they’ll all come running. You lie down, miss. Go to sleep now.”

Lovely’s voice was calm, her tone determined. She didn’t sound like someone waking from sleep. Anna wondered if she’d been tricked for a second time that day as she scrambled to her feet and slid the knife up her sleeve.

“I’m still writing letters.”

She was shaking as she sat down again at the washstand. The blade had come within an inch of the woman’s neck; it could have hurt her. Anna hugged her arms around herself trying to get warm, to slow her thumping heart.

There was another letter she must write but she would not do it tonight.

*   *   *

Querios Abse climbed the back stairs and trudged along the corridor to his own parlor, flung himself into his chair. In her smaller, matching, armless chair on the other side of the hearth, Emmeline tinkled the bell in a long, uninterrupted note that he took to mean she was annoyed.

“I told Cook to delay supper,” she called out over the ringing. “Where have you been?”

“Working,” he mouthed back. “On the books.”

She stilled the bell in the palm of her hand and put it down on the hearth tiles.

“I do wish you’d come up earlier, Q. In the evenings.”

“I was occupied. New patient kicked up a rumpus.”

“I want to talk to you about our daughter.”

Querios felt his heart sink. He had real worries, important concerns and responsibilities, yet Emmeline persisted in burdening him with trivial domestic matters. The more he tried to explain the financial situation to her, the less she wanted to understand. He wasn’t certain that Lake House could stay in business. Government asylums were being built all around, taking in private patients as well as pauper lunatics. The old ways, the restraints, the rotatory chair, were out of fashion but it cost money to keep patients safe without shackling or frightening them. The wages bill kept rising and the amount patients’ relatives were willing to pay did not.

Private madhouses were closing down all over the country—thirty in ten years. Lake House might be one of them if things didn’t pick up. Emmeline didn’t see it. Nor did their eldest son, Benedict. The younger ones were children still, away at school. Querios had only himself to talk to about it. He slept badly. He had a ringing in his ears
that could drive him barmy, if he let it. Rushing like a waterfall, sometimes. Like swarms of insects, at others.

“Wasps,” he said aloud. “Or crickets. That awful sawing.”

“Pardon?”

“Nothing, Emmy. Nothing.”

It was a good decision, to allow St. Clair to test out his theory on the guests. Lake House had to move with the times. He’d kitted out the old fernery with blinds, ordered Fludd to build the dark cupboard St. Clair required. Patients liked to see themselves in photographs, drawn from the life, and relatives considered it progressive, although more than one inquired after the cost. He didn’t tell the families that there was no cost. That Dr. St. Clair was conducting a private experiment which in his own opinion was a sheer waste of time.

Querios’s efforts hadn’t increased business enough. Patients arrived infrequently, despite the newspaper advertisements, the brochures. Some were withdrawn by their relatives almost immediately, others abandoned by husbands or brothers who would neither pay their costs nor remove them. A good cure rate impressed the families but depressed the revenue. The ones with puerperal mania, out of their right minds after childbirth, often improved within weeks and had to be discharged back to their infants. A few lived on at Lake House, neither fully well nor fully deranged; they passed as normal inside the asylum but as lunatics outside it. One or two, like poor, wronged Fanny Makepeace, ended up as staff.

The good thing was, he reminded himself as they proceeded into the dining room, sat down at their respective ends of the table, that the new patient was likely to remain for at least a couple of years. Hysterics often did and the woman’s husband hadn’t balked when he’d indicated as much. Querios had made a rough calculation earlier of what Mrs. Palmer would mean for the business if she proved an average case. Totted up what sum might be added to that if she had the full range of treatments. It had improved his mood.

Stewed rabbit with puréed parsnip cheered it further. He lifted a loaded forkful of meat and commenced chewing. The dull gleam of the brass candelabra, the soft lines of the old willow pattern china that he’d eaten off since he was a boy, seemed to speak to him, offer their
reassurance that life would continue, unchanged. Extracting pieces of shot from the mouthful of flesh, lining them up like plum stones on the rim of the plate, he experienced a rare feeling of confidence. Lake House would be up to the mark by the next time the magistrates called. All spick-and-span. Good enough, at least.

At the far end of the table, Emmeline was speaking. Her face was set in the frown that was becoming habitual and the wide white streaks at her temple shone in the halo of candlelight. She was as dear to him, as reassuring, as the old carver chair on which he sat, the gate-legged table on which he rested his elbows.

“What was that, Em?”

“I said that Catherine is poorly.” She spoke up, enunciating as if he was deaf. He was not. He heard too much, not too little. “She isn’t coming down tonight.”

“Again?” he said, matching her volume, outstripping it. “She seems to be making a habit of it.”

He embarked on a dish of tapioca, added a dense layer of sugar from the silver sifter, flooded the edges with yellow cream and watched as an island appeared. He held the empty cream jug aloft, waggled it and the maid came forward with a startled air. Emmeline was looking at him again. They always wanted something from you, women. A chap could have no clue as to what it might be.

“Benedict is out with his guttersnipes this evening, no doubt. Where on earth is our daughter?” He scraped the last traces of pudding from the inside of the bowl, relishing the smooth, bland sweetness. He licked clean the front and the back of the spoon, laid it down and looked at his wife. “Hmmm?”

From the expression on her face, he gathered that the answer had already been given.

A dozen or more women were gathered around a long table, roughly laid for breakfast. Lovely gave Anna a little push, pointed at a chair at the far end, a spoon and tin mug positioned on the oilcloth. As she sat down, the woman in the next seat looked up from a piece of wood wrapped in a scrap of white shawl, on her lap. She wore a print dress and her hair was cropped like a boy’s, with tufts sticking out over her ears. Her brown eyes were intense, searching, as she looked at Anna.

“Forgive me,” she said. “I tried my best.”

“I’m sorry but you’re mistaken. We have never met.”

The woman’s expression changed; Anna thought for a moment she was going to strike her.

“You were always a heartless creature, Ma Button. I saw it in your eyes, the first time I ever met you. I knew then what you were.”

Anna took a sip of water from the mug, rolled its iron taste around her mouth. An old woman opposite was collecting bread crumbs in the corner of a handkerchief; farther down the table, another one called for her mother. The air was thick with the taint of unwashed clothes and untreated hair.

On the far wall was a large fireplace in a marble surround. Next to it, a collection of portraits hung in two lines, some singly, others in pairs, all on long, fine strings attached to picture hooks on the rail above. Their arrangement on the wall was purposeful, had a pattern and order at odds with the rest of the room.

“The tea will be here soon,” her neighbor said in a different, lighter
voice. “I expect you’ll be glad of it on such a cold morning. How d’you do anyway, I’m Mrs. Lizzie Button.”

She shifted the bundle on her lap and held out a hand. Anna felt an impulse to grasp it, beg the woman to tell her what this place was, who these others were. Why they’d taken her cloak and boots, by the time she awoke. How she could escape. Checking the urge, she fixed her eyes on the wall in front of her and made her face expressionless. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—utter a word to any of them. She must keep herself separate, prove that she wasn’t one of them, that she didn’t belong here and never would.

Lizzie Button was undeterred. She carried on talking, between mouthfuls of herring. The tea was strong but never hot enough. She longed for a cup of coffee, they all did, and there was plenty wanted something stronger. All you got was a glass of beer once in a blue moon. Not that she took a drop herself. The fare was unappetizing right enough but the young lady ought to eat something if only to keep up her strength. She would need all of her strength in this place, especially if they decided to try to cure her. Mrs. Button yelped with laughter then started to cry again, dragging a handkerchief from her cuff, sniffing.

The woman turned to Anna and grabbed her hands, squeezing her fingers with unnatural strength.

“Let me see them,” she said, her voice charged. “My angels. Just once, Ma. I’m begging you.”

Anna shook herself free as a maid arrived with cakes, tipped upside-down from the tin and heaped on a platter. A hum rose over the table, hands reaching in from all sides. The plate emptied and a scuffle broke out at the other end of the room. As Makepeace’s clipping, approaching heels made themselves heard above the din, coming from along the corridor, the women fell silent. They rose one by one and formed a line by the wall, holding the cakes like robins’ eggs in cupped hands, then began to file out of the door.