In Bedlam, up was good. I knew before I came that the basement level was for the hard cases and the violent, while the top floor was for the gentle and obedient mad. A rise in altitude could only be a good thing.
We came out on the main level, at the far end of a long, bright gallery that ran the full length of the women’s wing. The nurse’s hand turned me towards the central hall, but I caught a glimpse of a room across the way with comfortable chairs and writing desks. Then we were marching down a long passage with deeply-set windows to the right and a series of identical doors to the left, all with sturdy locks. The floor had worn carpeting down the centre. The walls were regimented with paintings and plants on the window side, paintings and busts on high sconces between the doors. Shoved up against both sides, as if some energetic adolescents had decided to create a bowling-alley, were chairs both wooden and upholstered, side tables and etagères displaying vases and figurines, glass display cases containing stuffed birds or silk flowers, decorative (though empty) birdcages, potted palms that leaned towards the light, and—yes—aspidistras. The overall effect was slightly nightmarish, as if walking down an endlessly elongated sitting room belonging to an aged Victorian aunt—an aunt confined to an abnormally wide bath-chair. Disconcerting, but everything looked clean, and the predominant odour was one of polish.
We passed another set of stairs and a joining hallway briefer than the one we had come down, then entered the area I had seen with Ronnie—the public and office areas that were the literal centre of the hospital, dividing the women’s wing from that of the men. The room used as a chapel, beneath Bedlam’s oddly tall dome, stood just to our right, explaining the faint scent of beeswax candles.
Here was the room where we’d met Lady Vivian. Right after it was a door with a small plate saying PHYSICIAN’S ROOM.
The nurse knocked, waited for the “Come in,” and pulled it open, gently urging me through ahead of her.
Inside, there were many locked file cabinets, shelves with dozens of file-boxes, two desks, several chairs, and the promised physician, a slim young man in a white coat. Even without my glasses, I could see instantly that the doctor was very bright indeed. The nurse sat me in a chair across the desk from him and took a chair behind me. He introduced himself as Dr Rawlins, and began a review of my physical health, noting my excellent reactions, clear skin, lack of recent injuries, and rather unusual scarring. But when he went on to his diagnostic questions, so as to help determine my particular corner of Lunacy’s map, my variation in response seemed to puzzle him. Some of my reactions appeared to be in line with what was expected of insanity, but others clearly did not ring quite true. My only advantage was his assumption that anyone trying to sneak into Bedlam must surely be mad enough to qualify for admission in the first place.
I apologised for not being certain as to who I was, and told him I had a head-ache. He gently circled back to the question of my identity. The third time he did so, I decided my name was Mary. No, I couldn’t remember my surname, perhaps he could find it in my Gladstone bag? “It was taken from me. By someone. A man, I think? A large man with shiny buttons.”
“The police constable?”
“He had a big black beard.”
“Probably not, then. What was in this Gladstone?”
“My name.”
“On a label, you mean?”
“Maybe.”
“What else would it have been on, if not a label?”
“A case.”
“There was a case inside the Gladstone?”
“There must have been, if it had my name on it.”
“And what was in the case?”
Oh, the hell with it. “Oysters.”
He blinked. “Oysters?”
“Pearls. A jewellery case must have had pearls, mustn’t it?”
“Not oysters?”
“Why would it have had oysters? I don’t even like oysters. Slippery, horrid things. Even the name is disgusting.”
“Oyster?”
“Mollusc. Mollusc—one can’t even pronounce it without grimacing. They eat by pulling in tiny creatures through their gills. The gills have mucous—there’s another disgusting word. Mucous, mollusc.” I gave a delicate shudder. “The female expels her eggs by the million, did you know that? Million upon million of immature bivalve molluscs, coating the bottom of the sea. And they turn from male to female, did you know that? Shocking lack of continuity, eating the plankton and drinking the sea and lacking the energy to remain constant in their most basic of identities, and all so that they might be fetched from the bottom of the sea and set on plates for hands to seize—”
“Nurse,” he interrupted, “has this patient been given anything to eat?”
Good Lord. I stared at him in amazement. The last thing I’d expected of Bedlam was a doctor with basic common sense.
Chapter Twelve
BREAKFAST WAS IN PROGRESS, SERVED on tin plates in a room with long, bare wooden tables. I poked gingerly at the porridge, but it was in fact vaguely warm and neither burnt nor dotted with foreign objects—thus considerably better than some of my own culinary attempts. I did not count on it being of a quality that Mrs Hudson wouldn’t have instantly fed to the chickens, but together with the coffee (lamentably weak, but most English coffee was) it would keep body wedded to soul.
However, my interest in the meal was less nutritional than informational, for here I could make contact with my fellow inmates. I chose quickly as I crossed the room, and aimed for a seat amidst a group of women with marginally more tidy clothing, and marginally less of the posture of wild things snarling over their meals.
Of the four women, three looked up as I sat. The woman directly across the table—a girl, really—was an elfin creature with shiny brown hair and a dusting of freckles across her charming little nose. She gave me a shy smile and said, “Pretty day, isn’t it?”
This rather took me aback, since I had seen rain streaming down the windows of the long gallery as we passed through, but never mind, some people enjoy the wet. “I’m sure it will clear,” I told her, and watched her good cheer fade into confusion.
But before I could reassure her, the woman to my right laid a hand on my arm and demanded, “Do you like shoes?”
Perhaps the best policy here was stout agreement? “Absolutely.”
“I hate shoes. Shoes are terrible things. Footwear of all kinds that keep us from contact with Mother Earth, whether they’re boots or brogues or Cuban heels or sandals or Wellingtons or espadrilles or Dutch clogs or riding boots or plimsolls or ballet slippers—”
(“Pretty dancers, aren’t they?” murmured the girl.)
I did not know what was more impressive, the woman’s thesaurus of footwear or her lung capacity, but I thought it might be a kindness to cut her off before she ran short of either words or oxygen. “I once picked up a horrible splinter from Mother Earth. Limped for days.”
The rain-lover and the shoe-hater stared at me, along with a third person at the table, a woman with some Orient in her ancestry. But the fourth one, who’d bent down to finish her meal—had that been a snort of laughter?
“I’m Mary,” I told my companions, then hastened to add, “I think.”
The Asian woman glanced at me from under plucked eyebrows, the girl assured me that it was a pretty day, while the shoe lady was distracted from her fixation long enough to enquire, “Don’t you know?”
“Not really. I mean, Mary sounds right, although it might also be Judith, so I’m not entirely sure. But Mary will do for now.”
“I’m Lesley,” said the shoe lady. “That’s Pretty, and Helen.”
The shy smile came to life again. “Pretty name, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely. And you?” The other woman—the woman I thought might have laughed—just gazed at me.