“Is there…a reason for that?” I asked carefully. “That you know of?”
Her eyes remained very still. After a moment, she supplied an answer that lay behind her words. “Perhaps.”
“Ah. That would explain some things.”
“Do you think so, Miss Russell?”
In fact, I did. In the Victorian era, upper-class families had been known to lock away their eccentric women, whether the sin was an illegitimate child, conversion to an extreme religious sect—or, being a lesbian. Granted, the disapproving wealthy were more likely to employ a private asylum over shameful Bedlam, but even a public institution knew how to hold secrets. Lady Dorothy’s puzzlement over Vivian’s lack of suitors suggested that she was an innocent, but it could explain some of the Marquess’ eagerness to close the door on an inconvenient half-sister.
Particularly since he was clearly feeling a financial pinch, and the mother who had bequeathed Vivian her diamonds also left an inheritance.
So, should I simply let matters go? Let the madwoman slip away?
Reluctantly, I decided that no, I couldn’t. Greedy uncles, dubious nurses, asylum superintendents lining their pockets at the expense of their inmates: there were too many questions whirling around one small pale-haired woman. I could help her—but I had to find her first.
The woman across the table had said something that the rapid firing of my brain had obscured. I looked up. “Sorry?”
“I said, I’m not bad at questions myself.”
“Oh. All right, although I’m not sure how many answers I have.”
“Have you met her uncle?”
“The Marquess? Yes, in fact I dined with him last night.” At any rate, I’d started to dine.
“What did you think of him?”
With another woman, I might have shaded my response to the diplomatic. With this one, I was honest. “Pompous. Politically extreme. Socially offensive.”
“Did you notice a blonde housemaid?”
“Yes, I believe I talked to most of the household staff.”
“What did you think of that one?”
“Why?”
“You’re doing the answers, remember?”
“I thought her a bit impertinent. Both rude and overly familiar in speaking about her employers. But that’s not unusual these days, when girls have so many alternatives to service.”
“Hmm. Do you know the sequence of Viv—of Lady Vivian’s madness?”
This woman had a most peculiar style of conversation, composed of profound non-sequiturs. “Sequence? You mean, when it came on her? Well, her father died in 1914, when she was twenty-three. Her brother Thomas died the following spring. Shortly after that, the Marquess came home and she, Ronnie, and Lady Dorothy moved into the east wing. That seems to have been the final straw, because The Lady Vivian started showing signs of increasing imbalance. She attacked the Marquess in the spring of 1916, and went into her first asylum. After that, it was a series of asylums, treatments, de-committals, and periods at home before things would go south for her again.”
“And?”
“And what?” It was starting to prove irritating. “If you have something to tell me, Miss Bailey, just say it.”
But instead, she grimaced and rose, setting her empty cup on the table. “I need to bathe and shave my father before I make him lunch. He’s been ill, which is why I’m here. Give my greetings to The Lady Dorothy, would you please? And to Ronnie, she was always such a nice child.”
And with that, she turned on her heel and walked out. I scrambled upright to protest. “I wasn’t—can you at least tell me, is there someplace you know where she might have gone?”
“Someplace safe,” she called down the stairs, and that was it.
I looked at the cat. Its pink tongue came out to pull the drops from its whiskers, before it settled to the serious business of bathing.
That word again: safe.
The word had stuck with me ever since Ronnie’s aunt used it to describe Bedlam, three years ago. So if that looming grey monstrosity made for her idea of safe, what were similar alternatives? Would she have found a secure prison to check in to? A remote castle? A niche in some choking Underground tunnel? Perhaps we should be making the rounds of the country’s other asylums.
Everything I had seen so far indicated that the greatest threat to Lady Vivian Beaconsfield lay in her own troubled mind. Even the obnoxious half-brother had never responded to her physical attacks in kind. Still, ultimately, any woman’s safety lay in her income.
“Pawn shops,” I told the cat. Its paw went still for a moment as it thought the matter over, then went on. Time for me to do the same.
Chapter Nine
THE PROBLEM OF TRUNK TELEPHONE calls from the depths of Surrey proving insurmountable, I ended up sending Holmes a cable from the village: COULD USE YOUR HELP AM RETURNING TO LONDON R.
If he was bored, this would give him an excuse to drop everything and perform one of his miraculous self-conjuring tricks, that he might be leaning with utter insouciance against a stanchion at Waterloo when I got down from the train. If he did have something going on, be it amongst the hives, in the laboratory, or buried in some dusty archive, my choice of words told him it could wait.
Unfortunately, without Mrs Hudson, a telegram might sit for days on the step before anyone took notice.
I used the post office’s pen to mark up one of the photographs, and on my way through the railway station, showed a pair of them to all and sundry. One had Vivian au naturel. On the other I had drawn a moustache, darkened her hair, and coarsened her eyebrows, then cropped the edges to make it feel like a different image entirely. The ticket agent knew her, but he’d lived in Selwick a long time. A conductor thought he possibly recognised the young man, but it had been raining on Friday, so…
I found an unoccupied First Class compartment, and settled in.
When Holmes had a spell of thinking to do, he would build a cushion nest before the fire and work his way through a heap of his most disgusting tobacco. I, however, had never found combustion inspiring, and preferred to meditate on objects with more substance than a dart of flames or a wisp of smoke: a lengthy walk, the lick of waves on a shore, a solitary train journey.
The countryside went by: cropped grassland, farms, hedgerows, the back gardens in towns. For all the attention I paid, I might as well have been travelling through Stockholm as Surrey.
It is War time. A sensitive young woman is hit by two hard losses and a seismic change in the structure of her small corner of the aristocracy. Yes, the nation is in turmoil, but so is her private world: father and brother dead, her family’s domestic arrangements turned upside-down. Her much older half-brother, frustrated by his reduced circumstances and its resultant life in the country, finds himself living cheek-by-jowl with a difficult young woman he barely knows. A flighty and fragile girl who turns out to be not only unbalanced, but—the family must suspect it—a lesbian, unwilling to be caught by a husband.
So, faced with this difficult yet financially solvent person, why not simply lock her away? As far as the Marquess is concerned, “the gel’s” inheritance is rightfully his—after all, didn’t her mother replace his as the Marchioness? Surely his stepmother’s money should be regarded as part of the larger estate? She’d had no right to assign her money to the girl of the family, not when the heir was in need of it. In any event, Vivian was too mad to take care of her own inheritance, wasn’t she? Perhaps everything would be simplified if she just…went away.
The rich June countryside gave way to London sprawl, my thoughts and mood growing as stained as the buildings that closed around me. It was a good thing that Holmes was not leaning against a stanchion when I climbed down from the train compartment. Had he been, I would surely have heaped my ninety minutes of dark thoughts upon his male head, as a convenient representative of his half of the race.