John Harwood: The Asylum

“No!!” My voice rang through the tower. Dr. Straker spun round, scanning the gallery.

“Miss Ashton, is it not?”

“Yes,” I said hopelessly.

“Pray descend, and join us. You have nothing to fear, I assure you.”

I did not reply.

“Now please, Miss Ashton, be sensible. This apparatus is capable of every degree of effect, from a faint tingling sensation in the temples to instant death. I give you my word of honour that you will suffer only the mildest of seizures: you will wake tomorrow and recall nothing of these—unfortunate events. Frederic will have learnt a valuable lesson, and will, I am sure, remain just as devoted to you. Indeed, we may even anticipate your becoming mistress of Tregannon Asylum: a poetic irony I shall savour.

“As for Miss Ardent here, you cannot possibly care what becomes of her. I suggest you avert your eyes.”

Lucia appeared to have fainted with terror; she lay slumped in the chair, her head lolling sideways, her eyes closed. Now that all hope had gone, I felt strangely calm.

“If I escape you,” I said, “you will be hanged for murder.”

“So be it,” he said, and brought his hands together.

Lucia’s body convulsed so violently that I thought her spine had snapped. Whatever sound she made was lost in my own cry of horror and despair.

“Miss Ashton, Miss Ashton, calm yourself. Think of all the lives that may be saved—your own included—by this machine. We must all die, sooner or later, and some lives are not worth prolonging. So long as she lived, my life’s work was in jeopardy. You might even say that she died in the cause of science, that others might live longer and happier lives. The greatest good of the greatest number, Miss Ashton: it is the best we can hope for.”

He bent over Lucia and removed the coronet from her lifeless head. From the wreckage at my feet, I managed to free a piece of wood about three feet long. More lights came on; he tilted one of the shades so that the light caught my face.

“Now really, Miss Ashton, this is sheer foolishness. The last thing I wish is to cause you pain. You shall wake tomorrow, I promise you, feeling better than you did the first time; I shall reduce the current to ensure it.”

I moved closer to the opening in the floor, grasping the piece of wood with both hands, and placed myself so that I could bring it down on his head without striking the railing. My unnatural calm had deserted me; I was trembling more than ever.

“How did you know—the first time?” I said.

“Ah, well . . . I thought it best not to mention that you did come to see me, on the night of your arrival, with a most affecting tale about Felix Mordaunt, and the Wentworth sisters—you seemed excessively anxious about your late cousin’s parentage—and their testamentary arrangements. If you had known that Clarissa Wentworth had been blackmailing Edmund Mordaunt for the past twenty years, you might have been more circumspect. I myself knew nothing of this until last spring, when Edmund confessed to me that he had claimed the estate under the terms of a will he knew to be null and void. And, as he soon discovered, Clarissa Wentworth knew it too. She came to him with what appeared to be a copy of Felix Mordaunt’s last will and testament, threatening to produce the original if he did not make her a handsome allowance. To this he agreed, on condition that she lived abroad.

“He never dared called her bluff, but I had no such inhibition. I wrote to tell her that there would be no more money, only the certainty of imprisonment for blackmail if she ever dared contact us again. All would have been well if she and her daughter had not crossed your path, but as it was . . .

“Of course, I could not allow you to leave, and so I brought you here. It was a textbook demonstration of the apparatus; all it lacked was a professional audience. My one mistake was to assume that you had left your writing case in your room, but when that wire arrived, purportedly from your uncle, I saw how the game might be played. I have a gambler’s instinct, Miss Ashton, and am not averse to risk: I chose to play it long. I pretended to believe that Lucia Ardent was indeed Georgina Ferrars; I knew that sooner or later she would have to come here in search of those papers—where did you hide them, by the way?—and so it has transpired. Frederic’s falling in love with you did complicate matters rather, but I was able to turn even that to my advantage. He brought Lucia Ardent to me, thinking he was doing your bidding, when in fact he was doing mine: letting her believe that I would be away this afternoon was the surest way of luring her here unannounced.

“All that remains, Miss Ashton, is to relieve you of these unpleasant memories. You will come to no harm, my word upon it. So kindly lay down that chair leg, and descend.”

If you faint, you will die. I cast frantically around for something, anything that might delay him, and remembered Frederic saying, “Two have died in the past year.”

“Why should I trust you? You have murdered three people already.” My mouth was so dry that I could scarcely form the words.

“What do you mean?” he said sharply, pausing in midstride.

“Your two patients who died of seizures. Frederic told me.”

“Are you saying that he knows? ”

“He—he suspects.”

Dr. Straker stared up at me.

“No,” he said at last, “I don’t believe you. Frederic is incapable of concealing anything from me.”

“But I know,” I said. “You have just admitted it, and now you mean to murder me.”

“Upon my honour, Miss Ashton, you are mistaken! You may call this murder if you will,” he said, gesturing toward Lucia’s body, “though I prefer to think of it as self-defence; she would happily have murdered you. But the others, no; I meant to cure, not kill them. Both men were in the grip of incurable melancholia, and had been so for years. Both had tried repeatedly to end their own lives; one had spent more than half his adult life in a straitjacket. And we have—or had—no effective treatment for such patients. None whatsoever. For all my experience and training—in theirs and so many other cases—I might as well have been the proprietor of a country hotel.

“And then—why should I not tell you, since you will not remember?—I had been experimenting with galvanic stimulation of the brain, and thought I might as well try it upon the younger of the two. With the dynamo recently installed, I had all the power I needed at my disposal, and also the means of controlling it precisely. At the accepted levels, the treatment had no effect whatever, but as I increased the voltage, he began to report some relief. The benefit, however, was fleeting. I raised the level still further—and induced a seizure.

“When my patient regained consciousness, he had lost all memory of the treatment, and of the fortnight preceding it; so far as he could recall, he had never set foot in this room. And for the first time in years, he was free of his affliction; the black cloud had lifted from his mind. The remedy that had eluded so many had been delivered into my hands.

“But I have seen too many false dawns. I watched, and waited, and kept my counsel, and all too soon, the darkness began to encroach again. I decided to risk another treatment, and this time, the seizure proved fatal.

“Judge me if you will, Miss Ashton, but what else could I have done? On the one hand was the certainty that, without my intervention, the man was doomed to a life of torment and would sooner or later make away with himself. On the other was at least the possibility of a cure. I dared not confide in anyone; if the Commissioners had heard of it, we might have lost our licence. But I vowed that my patient’s death would not be in vain.”