John Harwood: The Asylum

The vibration did not cease. It rose in pitch and volume until it sounded like a swarm of angry hornets. Flames burst from the cabinet, followed by a vicious blue flash; then silence.

All the lights went out, except for the lantern and the yellow flames licking at the wall. Acrid fumes caught at my throat; I smelt burnt hair and flesh.

“We must run,” said Frederic, waking from his trance and urging me toward the door. I stopped beside the chair, looking down at Lucia. Her cloak had fallen open again, revealing my brooch; I had not given it a thought until that moment.

“We cannot leave her,” I said.

“We must. She is beyond our help; we will never get her through the tunnel.”

I went to unpin my brooch, and found that I could not bear to.

“Please let us try.”

“Then we must leave by the other door.”

He darted across the room, returning with the lantern and a bunch of keys.

“Let me,” I said, and wheeled her toward the far corner, where I held the lantern while Frederic tried one key after another. Burning fragments spilled from the cabinet, sending flames licking along the bench. As the lock turned over, I heard a muffled explosion, followed by a flare of white light. Liquid fire raced across the floor; I caught a glimpse of Dr. Straker’s body lying in a sea of flame.

“This way!” cried Frederic, slamming the door behind him. The chair lurched and swayed; I had a fleeting impression of rough stone walls, mottled with damp, as we stopped at the last door. Again I held the light while he wrestled with bolts and bars. Lucia’s head was hanging over the side of the chair; as I leant forward to straighten it, I saw the flicker of a pulse—faint, but unmistakable—in her throat.

We emerged into a confusion of lights, and voices shouting above the clangour of fire bells. Every window in the tower was pulsing with a fierce orange glow; men with lanterns converged upon us as we wheeled Lucia toward the dark bulk of the asylum. Someone recognised Frederic and called for orders.

“Dr. Straker is dead!” he shouted. I could barely hear him above the roar of the fire. “Too late to save . . . Bring water . . . Demolish the cloister and defend the house . . . Run to the wards . . . Get the patients ready . . . Evacuate in case it spreads.”

A window burst in a shower of glass, and smoke boiled upward; the noise of the fire redoubled.

“Round to the voluntary wing,” said Frederic. “They can take her up to the infirmary from there. If it’s safe.”

We hastened along the gravel walk between the two buildings and halted within sight of the entrance I had left only a few hours before. The old house had been dark as we passed, but now the upper window nearest the tower began to glow, and then the next, and the next. Frederic was shouting to someone nearby. Two attendants ran up and hurried Lucia away; a hand plucked at my sleeve, and I saw that it was Bella, with Frederic urging me to follow. I had forgotten that I was bloodstained, dishevelled, and filthy; I had forgotten even my exhaustion, but now the weight of it descended as if my bones had turned to lead. Leaning on Frederic’s arm, I heard him say something about a bed in the stables, and wondered if he meant me to sleep in the ruin, until we set off along the side of the building, toward the main gate.

Doors were opening all along the wall ahead of us, with people spilling out of them in every form of attire from dress clothes to nightshirts: doctors, lunatics, voluntary patients and attendants, mingled indiscriminately in the glow of the burning tower, swarming into the night.

I woke in a strange bed, with a coarse blanket prickling my neck, feeling as if I had fallen down a staircase. For a few terrible moments I was back in the infirmary, with the nightmare beginning again. Then a chair creaked and I opened my eyes, to find myself in a whitewashed attic room, with rain pattering against the window, my brooch and writing case on a little table by the bed, and Bella sitting beside me. The asylum, she told me, had been saved, but Mr. Edmund had died from the shock of it all; Mr. Frederic was the master now, and very anxious to see me. “And yes, miss”—it was plain she did not know what to call me—“the other lady” was alive, though still unconscious; they had carried her across to the infirmary as soon as it was safe.

At first I could barely walk, but after a perilous descent to the tack room below, the worst of the stiffness had begun to wear off. I declined, with a shudder, Bella’s offer to fetch an invalid chair, and settled for an umbrella instead. Everything looked exactly the same, even to the distant figures labouring by the boundary wall, but the sour, acrid reek grew stronger, reminding me of the fogs around Gresham’s Yard. I made my way slowly down to the far corner of the asylum and stood gazing at the devastation. All that remained of the old house was a jagged, roofless shell. Wisps of smoke still curled from the wreck of the tower; the surrounding trees were blackened and scorched.

I shivered, recalling my last glimpse of Dr. Straker, and thinking how much ruin and anguish would have been spared if Felix Mordaunt had never made that will, or, indeed, if he and Rosina had never met . . . but then I would not be standing here, with my writing case in my hand, trying to decide what I should do about those wills. The rain had all but ceased; I lowered the umbrella and drifted into a reverie, from which I was woken by the sound of Frederic’s voice.

“Miss Ferrars, I am delighted to see you up and about so soon.”

His suit was stained and crumpled, his face grey with exhaustion, but he smiled nonetheless. There was an air of quiet resolution—or was it resignation?—about him that I had not seen before.

“Mr. Mordaunt; I was sorry to hear of your uncle’s death.”

“You need not be; he was in constant pain and would not have lived much longer. And . . . he was not an affectionate man. Or, as I discovered this morning, a prudent one. He had been withdrawing large sums for many years, with no explanation and nothing to show for the money. The estate is mortgaged to the hilt; the sale of the asylum will barely cover its debts.

“So much for my promise to provide for you,” he said wryly, “let alone . . . But enough of this. There is so much I don’t understand, about you, and Miss Ardent, and why Dr. Straker acted as he did . . .”

“It was for these,” I said, handing him the wills and the marriage certificate. “And all for nothing.”

We talked most of the day by the fire in his private sitting room. I gave him Rosina’s letters to read, but said nothing of what I had felt for Lucia, who was lying, still unconscious, in the infirmary, only a few doors away. We were now, as cousins, on intimate terms. I had wondered if the discovery would change his feeling for me, but it plainly had not, and the memory of his impassioned declaration hovered between us.

I offered to burn the wills, thinking he might salvage something from the wreck of his fortune, but he would not have it.

“No, Georgina, the estate is yours by right, moral as well as legal, and if anything can be salvaged, you shall have it. Uncle Edmund was a thief and a hypocrite—when I think of all those lectures on morality!—and I will not profit from his wickedness. Not, I fear, that there is likely to be any profit. An asylum is a business like any other, and when the world hears of Dr. Straker’s crimes, its reputation will be lost. And to think I worshipped that man . . . the ruler of a madhouse, and he was mad himself.”

“Frederic,” I said hesitantly, “have you told anyone else about—what you saw last night?”

He shook his head.

“Then I think the secret should be ours alone. Not because of the asylum’s reputation; but if word of that machine gets out, someone else will try to build one.”