John Harwood - The Asylum

“As soon as you wish. In fact, if you are willing to accompany me, I can escort you there now.”

I rose, a little unsteadily. He offered me his arm, and blushed when I did not take it. Could he really make himself blush on cue? Was he Dr. Straker’s accomplice or his dupe? In either case, I could not afford to trust him.

“If you will lead the way, sir, I will follow,” I said.

He bowed with every appearance of mortification and set off toward the house. I could not help glancing up at the windows; there was a pale blur behind one of them which might have been a face.

He led me back to the entrance, and across the hall to a door through which I had seen Mrs. Pearce come and go. An attendant unlocked it as he approached, and we passed along a dim, echoing corridor, emerging beside a staircase I recognised: this was where, during my escape, I had seen the tall, grey-haired man who had reminded me of someone—of Frederic, in fact. Edmund Mordaunt had been watching me.

“Miss Ashton?”

He was indicating the stairs; I wondered, as I followed him upward, whether I had misunderstood him, and they were moving me back to the infirmary. But from the first-floor landing he led me along another passage, very like that in the women’s ward, except that there were no names on the doors, until we came to one with MISS ASHTON spelt out in the familiar gilt letters.

“I will leave you here,” he said reluctantly, with a look—or so, again, I would have sworn—of hopeless yearning. “If you simply retrace your steps at mealtimes, the attendant will let you through.”

He opened the door for me, bowed, and departed, and there was Bella, calmly putting away the last of my things.

“Very pleased to see you again, Miss Ashton, I’m sure. Will there be anything else?”

Her smooth, childish face now seemed a mask of deceit.

“No, thank you, Bella.”

She bobbed her head and withdrew, leaving me to my new surroundings.

The room, papered in a blue floral print, which, though faded, was distinctly more cheerful, was furnished in much the same fashion as the one in the infirmary, with a small oak chest beside the wardrobe and a writing table by the window. The paved courtyard below was enclosed by the other three sides of the building, with row after row of windows overlooking mine; I was glad to see that there were curtains. Four metal bars were set into the stonework, but outside the glass, making it seem less like a prison cell. The door had no observation slot; there was even a flimsy bolt for privacy, but no key in the lock.

I had not removed my cloak, and since there was still plenty of daylight left, I decided to test my newly acquired freedom at once to see if I really would be allowed out into the grounds. Two fashionably dressed women—visitors? voluntary patients? spies?—were conversing at the foot of the staircase; they glanced at me curiously but did not speak. My heart beat faster as I approached the door, but no one leapt from the shadows to seize me, and a moment later I was standing on the gravel path.

To my left was dense woodland, extending westward to the boundary wall, which looked at least a hundred yards off. A pale sun was sinking toward the treetops. Ahead and to my right, men were working in a patchwork of fields. Cattle grazed beneath the wall, which ran in a great curve round to the north and east, in the direction of the entrance. But for the great bulk of the asylum at my back, I might have been standing in the fields near Brighstone Forest, where my aunt and I had sometimes walked.

I turned right, as I had done before, and followed the path toward the gate. Freedom seemed tantalizingly close; my heart was thumping and my mouth was very dry as I passed beneath the branches of the copper beech, now coming into bud, and onto the forecourt.

The gates were closed. Further proof, if any was needed, that my escape had been contrived. I should have realised that no lunatic asylum would ever leave its main entrance open and unguarded.

You will be closely watched. Imagining Dr. Straker’s cool, sardonic gaze fixed upon me from above, I fought down a wave of panic and kept on walking around to the right, across the entrance to the stable yard, and round behind the stable buildings, out of sight of the house.

On this side of the estate, the ground sloped up toward the outer wall, which looked even farther away. To the east were open fields and meadows; to the south, more woodland. I came around the back of the stables into a large kitchen garden, bounded on my right by a very high brick wall. An hour earlier, I had been sitting on the other side of it. Two kitchenmaids were pulling up carrots from a bed nearby; they glanced at me curiously, but without any sign of alarm.

I went on through the opening at the far end. Red brick gave way to the grey stone of the middle wing; ahead of me loomed a squat, rectangular tower, built of much older stone, so dark and pitted it was almost black. The windows on the upper levels were no more than vertical slots; the ones on the ground level had been bricked up altogether, along with the doorway.

As I came closer, I saw that the tower was part of a long, rambling building made of the same blackened stone, plainly the original house. It stood about twenty paces from the main building; the two were connected by a flagged path, roofed in stone like a cloister. No smoke rose from any of the chimneys; the flagstones were strewn with rotting leaves, and weeds had grown up through the surrounding gravel.

The walls of the two buildings, the grey and the black, seemed to lean toward each other, forming a lopsided chasm. If I walked to the far end, and turned right, I should be back where I started. High above me, the uppermost windows caught the rays of the sinking sun, but the ground where I stood was already in shadow. You were found unconscious on the path . . . Was this where I had suffered the seizure? What had I been doing here, in the middle of the night? And what had caused it? Something I had seen? Or heard?

My feet began to move of their own accord, faster and faster until I was running over the gravel, around the last corner to the door from which I had set out, along the hall—which seemed to have grown much darker in my absence—and up the stairs, pursued by my frantically echoing footsteps all the way to my room, where I closed and bolted the door behind me and leant against it, shaking from head to foot.

Whether Frederic was simply in thrall to his master, or in league with him, Dr. Straker would never have agreed to move me unless it served his purpose. Was he tempting me to escape again? I could think of no other reason. If so, he would surely expect me to make for Gresham’s Yard.

Where something even more terrifying might be waiting for me. Or, at the very least, my arrest as an escaped lunatic claiming to be Miss Ferrars.

Without money, I could go no farther than Liskeard. So if he meant to lure me back to Gresham’s Yard, there ought to be another purse conveniently hidden somewhere in this room. And then, when the trap had been baited, I would find the gates open again.

So my one hope of escape was to find the money—if there was any to find—and flee, not to Gresham’s Yard, but . . . to Mr. Wetherell, the solicitor in Plymouth. I did not think—no, I felt sure—I had not mentioned him either to Frederic or Dr. Straker. I had never met him myself, but that might be just as well; my signature, at least, would match.

The last rays of the sun were fading from the roof opposite, but there was still enough daylight left. Might they be watching me at this very moment? I glanced around the walls and ceiling, looking for spy-holes. Impossible to tell; I remembered my aunt showing me that you could see a whole coastline through a hole no bigger than the point of a pencil. If they were watching, they would be expecting—indeed hoping—that I would search the room.