John Harwood - The Asylum

My heart, in fact, was beating very fast, and my mouth was dry. I had gambled on his not recognising the name.

“I see. Do you think, Miss Ashton, that your memory is already returning? Dr. Straker will be most—”

“Please, Fre—Mr. Mordaunt; you promised you would not breathe a word of this conversation to him, until I have had time to reflect.”

“Of course not, if you wish it,” he said, regarding me with a sort of troubled adoration. “I shall do my utmost to persuade him—about Miss Ferrars—as if it were solely my own idea.”

My heart sank at “do my utmost.”

“But he will never agree; you said so yourself.” I had no need to exaggerate my disappointment.

“You are right,” he said, after a pause. “It is time I . . . I will not go behind his back, but I shall write to Miss Ferrars—I had better make sure she is at home—regardless of his response. And I shall certainly mention Aunt—Rosina, is it?—Aunt Rosina’s will.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I am very much in your debt. And now, I think, if you do not mind, I should like to return to my room, and rest for a while.”

He rose and held out his hand to help me up, and we stood for a moment facing each other, my hand still in his. He took a deep breath, as if about to make a declaration.

“You must know that I—this time I shall not fail you,” he said, restraining himself with palpable effort.

I smiled and thanked him again, and let my fingers brush across the palm of his hand as I released it, sternly repressing the thought that perhaps I was no better than Lucia.

I had intimated to Frederic that he might find me any day at about three o’clock, so long as the weather kept fine, reading by the fallen tree. He appeared that same afternoon, looking even paler than before.

“I cannot stay long,” he said, “but I wanted to tell you that my letter to Miss Ferrars will be in tomorrow morning’s post.”

“You have spoken to Dr. Straker, then?”

“Yes, and he was most displeased; even more so when he realised that I meant to write to Miss Ferrars, with or without his consent. He again accused me of—well, it does not matter. ‘I cannot prevent you from inviting Miss Ferrars to Tregannon House,’ he said, ‘but if any harm comes to Miss Ashton because of this, it will be upon your head. I have a good mind to move Miss Ashton back to the closed ward, for her own safety, but doubtless you will object to that, too. Very well; in the unlikely event that Miss Ferrars accepts, we will bring them together, under the most careful supervision. I repeat: upon your own head be it.’

“Neither of us alluded to it, but the implication was clear: he agreed only because Uncle Edmund could die at any time, and as the owner, I could make things very difficult for him—I hope I am not distressing you, Miss Ashton.”

“No, no, it is—only the thought of being confined again; I could not bear it.”

“I would not allow that, I assure you, unless you were to become—so violently agitated that there was no alternative. Indeed, I went further: I pressed him once more to lift the certificate. But there he is adamant. ‘If I did that,’ he said, ‘Miss Ashton would be off to London on the next train. She would go straight to Gresham’s Yard and make a scene. Miss Ferrars would summon a constable, and Miss Ashton would be hauled off to Bethlem. I hardly think she would consider that an improvement, do you?’”

“But I accept that I cannot be—” I stopped, realising that I had tied his hands by pledging him to secrecy.

“Yes,” said Frederic, “but he will not accept that, unless he is certain that your memory has returned.”

I had considered that possibility during the night: to tell Dr. Straker that I had remembered I was Lucia Ardent, exactly as she had presented herself to me. But he would want to check; he had already dismissed Lucia’s story as an obvious fabrication (as it surely was), and if he caught me in a lie, I would lose Frederic’s regard, and find myself back in Women’s Ward B.

Again I was tempted to present him with the wills and Rosina’s letters and say, here is the truth, you must decide. But would he—would any man—meekly hand over a lucrative private asylum to a certified lunatic, wholly within his power? Even if he was infatuated with her? The idea that I was the lawful owner of this vast estate was too much for me to hold in my mind; I could grasp it only in bewildering flashes. Regardless of what the law might say, did I really want to deprive Frederic of his inheritance? The question was unanswerable. I could not think beyond escaping, and recovering my own name and fortune from Lucia.

“—Miss Ashton?”

I realised that Frederic had been speaking.

“I beg your pardon,” I said. “There is—so much to take in.”

He gave me a searching glance, as if hoping to detect some personal meaning, and looked hastily away. In the fields by the wall, work continued as usual. A light breeze blew from the west, stirring the leaves overhead and carrying fragments of song from the workmen. Patches of sunlight drifted across the hills. I thought of all the anguished souls incarcerated a mere hundred yards away, and shivered.

“I must go,” he said. “And perhaps you should not stay too long; you must be getting cold. I shall let you know as soon as there is any news.”

I thanked him once more. He did not offer me his hand this time, but he stood for a moment gazing down at me. Then he squared his shoulders and walked away without looking back.

The following morning after breakfast, Mrs. Pearce, the matron, stopped me on my way out with the words I least wanted to hear: Dr. Straker wished to see me in my room. There I waited, imagining worse and worse consequences as the minutes ticked past. By the time he appeared in the doorway, I had resigned myself to being dragged away in chains, to the deepest, darkest cell in the asylum. But all he did was take my pulse—he seemed not to notice my agitation—and ask his routine questions about whether I had remembered anything more, to which I thought it safest to reply that I had not. I thanked him for moving me to the voluntary wing, and said that I felt better already for being able to walk amongst trees and open fields; he heard me out with his ironic smile and a faint inclination of his head, said he would look in again soon, and departed.

My relief, however, was tempered by—I could not tell exactly what—an atmosphere, an undercurrent, an uneasy feeling that his manner had been a little too casual, his habitual detachment too studied. Frederic, after all, had confronted him twice in the last few days. Did he really believe that I had not the faintest inkling of this? Or was he trying to lull me into a false sense of security?

Or was it simply my overwrought imagination running away with me? How could I be certain, for that matter, that Frederic had confronted him? Perhaps the only person I had succeeded in deceiving was myself.

Three days passed without my seeing Frederic; I told myself that it might be weeks before Lucia replied—if she ever did—but my spirits sank lower nonetheless. The voluntary patients—there seemed to be about a dozen of them, all much older than I—avoided me whenever possible; I wondered who had told them that I was still certified.

On the fourth morning, I resolved to visit the old stable, to see if it would suit my purpose. A fine, misty rain was falling, which made it more natural that I should hug my cloak around me and draw the hood close around my face as I set off along the path I had taken every afternoon. When I had gone about halfway to the wood, I knelt and pretended to remove a stone from my shoe, glancing behind me as I did so. There was no one following, but every window seemed alive with watchful eyes; the pressure on my spine did not relent until the path had carried me out of sight of the asylum.