John Harwood - The Asylum

“And your income? You said you have a hundred a year; do you know where from?”

“Until today, I assumed it came from the estate of Jules Ardent. I suppose I could write to the advocates—the lawyers in Paris. But they are French lawyers; if you forgot your own name, they would find reasons for not telling it to you.”

“English lawyers are no better,” I said. “Somehow I must discover what it is I must do to see the rest of the papers my mother left me. These letters—did I explain?—only came to me by mistake. I wonder—might she—my mother, I mean—have been protecting Rosina? By not letting me see the letters until her father was safely dead? Which would mean—”

“That he is still alive,” said Lucia, and shivered. “And that monster was—is—my grandfather! It is horrible to think of.”

“ Why didn’t Rosina go to Nettleford?” I exclaimed. “After Felix Mordaunt abandoned her, I mean. Mama could have kept her hidden until you were born. And after my father died, we could all have lived with Aunt Vida at Niton; you and I could have grown up together . . . Such a waste of happiness!”

“Yes,” said Lucia, looking through the letters again, “but do you really not see why?”

“She says, ‘I could not bring my father’s wrath upon you,’ or something like that, but I know Mama would have taken her in, without a second thought, and so would my aunt. You would have been far safer—and far happier—with us, than wandering the Continent alone, where nobody even knew who you were.”

“But the shame, Georgina, the shame! All of London must have known that she ran off with Felix Mordaunt. And then to bear a child out of wedlock . . . What a burden I must have been to her!”

“You must never think that, never!” I said, taking her in my arms. I tried to imagine what I would feel in Lucia’s place: anger at Felix Mordaunt, certainly; sorrow for my mother; but not shame, either on her behalf or mine. Was I somehow deficient in moral sense? Aunt Vida, certainly, had never cared about the world’s opinion. I heard, in what I had just said to Lucia, the echo of my aunt’s cry: “You were her joy, her happiness: hold to that, and ask no more!” I stroked Lucia’s hair and made soothing noises, half wishing I had never shown her the letters (but how could I have withheld them from her?), yet delighting, for all my unease, in the warmth of our embrace.

When she was calm again, I began to talk about that day by the lighthouse, when I had come to suspect that giving birth to me had strained my mother’s heart, and what a comfort my aunt’s words had been to me ever since.

“You and your mother loved each other dearly, did you not?” I said.

“Oh yes . . . I never doubted her love for me.”

“Then think how much lonelier she would have been without you. The doors of society closed against her the day she ran off with Felix Mordaunt. But her real friends—like my mother—would not have cared . . .”

“I wish I could believe that,” said Lucia.

“I am sure that when we see the rest of the letters, all your doubts will be set at rest. And Lucia—?”

“Yes?”

“This will be our secret; no one else need ever know. We shan’t even tell my uncle. Not that it would matter if we did; he cares for nothing but his shop and would forget it all five minutes later. To the world you will be simply my friend Miss Ardent.”

As I spoke those words, I was seized by a dizzying sense of unreality, as if I was looking down upon the two of us from somewhere near the ceiling. Surely this must be a dream? So powerful was the sensation that I dug my nails into the flesh of my wrist.

“You are so kind,” I heard Lucia saying. “And yes, I cannot quite believe it, either.”

I looked up and saw that she was smiling.

“I am sorry,” I said. “I did not mean . . . It is only that . . . I have been so lonely here and have longed and prayed for a friend. And for you this must be a hundred times stranger—your whole life changing before your eyes.”

“Yes, it is—and yet I think I always expected something like this. Mama is still my mother, after all; it does not mean she loved me any less than I believed. More, indeed; much more . . . when I think of what she faced each day.”

I knew already that I could not bear to lose her. Uncle Josiah would be utterly nonplussed, but if I paid for her keep . . .

“Lucia,” I said, “instead of staying in that hotel, why don’t you come and live here with me? You could have the bedroom below this: we shall have to air it and find you some furniture, but that is easily done.”

Her lips brushed my cheek; the warmth of her breath lingered against my skin.

“I should love to, but I could not impose myself, and besides, your uncle . . .”

“Uncle Josiah will need persuading, but I shall see to that. And if you don’t mind helping in the shop sometimes, it will be all the easier to persuade him. Why don’t you stay to supper—it is Tuesday, so curried mutton, I’m afraid—and meet him? And then we can come up here again and talk for as long as we like.”

She made a polite show of reluctance, but her delight, and her relief, were plain as I rang for Charlotte and told her to warn Mrs. Eddowes that there would be three for supper.

“One thing I am sure of,” I said when we were alone again, “is that our mothers kept on writing to each other. They loved each other; you can see from the letters that Rosina trusted Emily implicitly. We must persuade Mr. Lovell to let us see the rest of the papers. Suppose . . . would you be willing, Lucia, to trust him with your secret, if we tell him in the strictest confidence? He is my solicitor, after all; I am sure he would not betray you.”

“I suppose not,” she said doubtfully, “but in truth, Georgina, I would much rather tell no one else, for the time being at least. There is so much to comprehend—to take in. Could you not simply say that something has happened which makes it vital for you to see those papers? Or if he will not do that, insist that he reveal what you must do to satisfy this mysterious condition?”

“Yes, of course I will. I wonder . . . Mama would have known about you; perhaps that was her condition—that you and I should have met?”

“Perhaps,” said Lucia, her face still shadowed, “but I should still like to keep my secret for now.”

“Of course; we shall not tell a soul. Oh, if only we could have met sooner! I still don’t understand why you couldn’t have come to Niton. Once your mother had established herself as a widow—perhaps she really did marry a Jules Ardent; who else would have paid her an income?—she would have been perfectly safe with us. Even Thomas Wentworth wouldn’t have dared to hire murderers and send them to Niton. We knew all the farming people; they would have kept an eye out for us. And my aunt was quite fearless; she kept an old blunderbuss in the scullery, in case of burglars, and I am sure she would have used it. ‘Any ruffian shows his face around here, I’ll have him locked up before you can say Jack Robinson.’ That’s what Aunt Vida would have said. So how could Rosina have felt safer abroad, especially after what happened to poor Clarissa?”

Lucia shook her head in bewilderment. “I can only think that she was more afraid of meeting people from her past—like that awful Mrs. Traill and her daughter—than of her father.”

“But if everybody knew her as Mme Ardent—why should she have cared what the Traills thought? Compared to the risk of being murdered in some lawless place? You believed your father was Jules Ardent, until today. It makes no sense.”

I felt another horrid pang of doubt: how could I be certain that all this was not simply a bizarre coincidence?