John Harwood - The Asylum

He paused, studying my face.

“Do you remember anything more, of those weeks before you arrived here?”

I shook my head faintly.

“And before that? Are your memories—as they appear to you—any different? Any less distinct? No? I feared as much. But at least you have seen with your own eyes, Miss Ashton, that you are not, and cannot be, Georgina Ferrars. Our task now is to persuade your mind to accept that. Sooner or later, the past you think you recall will begin to fade, and then to disintegrate, and your actual memories will return. By then I hope to have retraced the steps that led you to Gresham’s Yard in the first place. Once we know where you came from, we will be able to reunite you with the past—and the people—you have lost. So do not despair, Miss Ashton; we shall not fail you.”

He motioned me to be silent, and left without a backward glance.

The fever returned that night, and for days, perhaps weeks—I lost all track of time—I burned, or shivered, or lay in a drugged stupor, through which an endless procession of faces came and went. Some no doubt were real; others, like Aunt Vida’s—or Hodges’—could only be hallucinations, but all seemed equally phantasmal. I would wake from dreams so terrible that it was a relief to find myself back in the infirmary, until I remembered why I was there, and then the waking nightmare would begin again. And yet a small part of my mind—my last and only refuge—went on insisting that it was all a dream: that if I could only endure for long enough, I was bound to wake in my bed at Gresham’s Yard, and find that no such place as Tregannon Asylum had ever existed.

I clung to this thread until the day that Dr. Straker pronounced me well enough to be moved to the women’s ward. Two sturdy female attendants half led, half carried me along a series of gloomy, windowless passages, panelled with worm-eaten oak and smelling of damp fabric, ancient timber, and stale tobacco smoke. All was quiet, except for the steady tramp of the attendant’s feet.

We stopped at last in front of a massive wooden door, which they proceeded to unlock, and passed through onto a bare wooden landing, with another female attendant seated at the entrance to a long, empty corridor. On my right was a staircase, with a narrow window running the full height of the wall; the sky beyond was already darkening. A tall, emaciated woman, dressed in mourning, was slowly ascending the stairs. I thought at first glimpse that she must be very old, but as she dragged herself a step higher, I saw that she was still quite youthful. As the lock snapped home behind me, I realised that she was one of the inmates.

We continued on past a series of closed doors, each with the inmate’s name, made up of gold-painted letters on dark wooden squares, arranged in a slot above the observation panel: MISS PARTRIDGE, MRS. WARE, MISS LEWES, MRS. HAWKSLEY, MISS TRAHERNE, and last of all, MISS ASHTON. When I saw those words, the last of my courage failed me, and if the attendants had not taken me by the arms, I should have fallen to my knees. They propelled me, not unkindly, through the door and into a room very like the one I had occupied in the infirmary. I sank down upon the bed, dimly aware that my belongings—or rather Lucy Ashton’s belongings—had arrived before me.

An indefinite time later, I felt a hand upon my shoulder. A large, grey-haired woman in a dark blue dress loomed over me. Her face, the colour and texture of risen dough, was jowled like a man’s. Eyes of the same steely shade as her hair regarded me sternly.

“Now then, Miss Ashton, you must pull yourself together. Dinner is at six thirty, and you will want to make yourself presentable.”

She spoke like a grand lady admonishing a recalcitrant child. I sat up, dabbing at my swollen eyes, and stared at her in disbelief.

“I am Mrs. Pearce, matron of Women’s Ward B. We must begin as we mean to go on.”

“Then . . . I am not to be confined to this room?”

“Certainly not, Miss Ashton. As I am sure Dr. Straker has explained to you, Tregannon House is run on the system of moral therapy: you will find no manacles on my ward. Here, Miss Ashton, you will be given every encouragement to participate in your own cure. In your case, you are suffering from a delusion regarding your identity. But you will learn, with our assistance, to overcome it. So long as you obey the doctors, keep yourself occupied, and join in the society of your fellow patients, your cure can only be a matter of time.”

“And if I do not?” The words slipped out before I could stop them.

“Then your cure will take longer; that is all. There are some unfortunate souls in our care, who must be closely confined for their own safety, but I am sure you do not wish to be one of them. Especially not when Dr. Straker has taken a personal interest in your case; so much so that you are here, he informs me, as our guest.

“And now I must leave you. When you hear the gong for dinner, make your way along the corridor and down the staircase: the attendant will direct you. In the meantime, I shall send someone to help you dress.”

I wanted to shout, I have been robbed of everything, even my name, but I saw in that calm, implacable face the utter futility of protest.

On Women’s Ward B, there was no shrieking, no rattling of chains, no caged lunatics gnashing their teeth and rolling in their own filth, and no brutality: none, at least, that I saw. The attendants were mostly kind, and at worst indifferent; Hodges, or so I came to believe, must have been summoned from some darker realm. Yet it was, in every sense, a place of torment. I could not pass along our corridor without hearing the sound of muffled weeping from behind at least one door, and sometimes a dull, regular thud, thud, thud, as of a woman banging her head endlessly against a wall.

My window, again secured by vertical metal bars, overlooked a flagged courtyard, flanked on two sides by outbuildings. I could watch carts and carriages come and go, until the spectacle became too painful. Besides a metal bedstead, it was furnished with a soft chair, a small desk, an upright chair, a washstand, chest and closet. Heating was by way of a device I had never seen before, made of coiled metal tubing and fed with hot water from a boiler somewhere in the depths of the building. It took away the worst of the chill, but I was always cold. At night the gurgling of the water accompanied my anguished thoughts. We were not allowed matches, or any sort of naked flame: the light, as in the infirmary, came from oil lamps enclosed in stout metal grilles. You could extinguish your light by turning a little brass wheel, but only an attendant could light it again. All lights were extinguished at ten, and were not lit again until seven thirty the next morning.

Dr. Straker came to see me once or twice a week, always to ask if I had remembered anything more, and to assure me that it could only be a matter of time before he discovered my true identity. Whether I wept or raged or pleaded, or remained sullenly mute, his manner was always calm, courteous, unruffled; even the seemingly careless fashion in which he knotted his tie scarcely varied. I knew dimly that my only hope of escape would lie in accepting whatever character he chose to confer upon me—but what would I be escaping to?

The idea that I had seen Georgina Ferrars at Gresham’s Yard was at once inescapable—Dr. Straker had met and talked to her—and utterly beyond my comprehension. No matter how I racked my brains, there seemed to be only two possibilities. Either I was mad, as Dr. Straker believed, or the woman in London, whoever she might be, had stolen my name, my uncle, my brooch—and presumably, by now, the two hundred pounds my mother had left me. Perhaps she intended to push Uncle Josiah down the stairs, and flee with the proceeds as soon as his will was proven. It seemed an extraordinary risk to run for the sake of a few hundred pounds, but as an act of vengeance, for some crime I had never heard of, it might have been diabolically appropriate.