“Isabella Powers. And I agree, Miss Routh: as I am led to understand these things, the nurses here are none too bad.”
I kicked myself at the near-slip of the name: one would think that a person who had actually experienced amnesia would be better at feigning it. “I’m not sure if Ruth is my surname, or a middle name. They tell me I had a head injury,” I explained by way of apology. “Things seem to be trickling back a bit at a time.”
“What a blessing, to forget one’s past,” Miss Powers said evenly, then: “Have you chosen your make-work, Miss Routh?”
“Pardon?”
She raised her chin at the room, where one of the attendants was coming through to distribute an armful of needle-work projects among the patients. “Idle hands are considered the workshop of devilish thoughts, and the idea appears to be that applying coloured thread to woven fabric offers sufficient engagement for wayward minds. Ah, thank you, Nurse Abbott,” she said, taking a half-worked square from the woman in the blue frock and white apron. “I shall get right to work on this.”
Nurse Abbott looked down at my empty lap. “And what about us?” she said with the kind of hearty good cheer that makes the hands twitch with the strangling urge. “Would we like knitting or needle-work?”
“We would like simply to sit and talk, thank you.”
It was as if I had not spoken. “Oh, we’re the memory girl, aren’t we? Well, until we’re certain we know how to knit, maybe we ought to stick to needle-work. The tangles are less.”
She handed me an eighteen-inch square of that stiff woven base cloth I had seen Mrs Hudson use, a large but very blunt needle with an eye a blind woman could have threaded, and three matted skeins of yarn in dull brown, dull green, and dull red.
I energetically shook out the length of the first skein, stuck one end through my needle, and set to working the entire length of it up and down the grid-cloth, wilfully overlooking the faint floral design with which the cloth had been printed. Miss Powers watched me for a minute, then resumed her own, rather more obedient, work.
“How long have you been here?” I asked her.
“Here in Bedlam? Or here in this ward?”
“There’s more than one ward?” I asked disingenuously.
“Oh, dear child, yes. And I have been in nearly all—all the female sections, that is—apart from the Noisy Wing. I started out among the convalescents, and then moved in with the criminals. When time went by and I failed to show any further signs of violence, I was moved in with the incurables, although eventually, the chaplain went before the presiding physicians and pointed out that life in that ward had a certain…coarsening effect. Also, that if even were I not violently insane before, living with the incurables might push me in that direction. So I was transferred to the basement with the curable-yet-temporarily-uncontrollables. Last year, I was granted a space in the light and freedom above ground, amongst the palms and pianos. Hence, my willingness to participate in needle-work and tedious conversation. At least here, one can see the sky.”
I considered asking what she had done, to land her in the criminal wing of Bedlam. Was that too blunt even for this place? Perhaps. “So how long have you been here altogether?”
“What year is it now? 1925, I think? Seventeen years.”
I dropped the needle in shock. The woman had been here since 1908? “You must’ve been remarkably young.”
When her damaged mouth smiled, there was just the slightest sag at the right-hand corner. “How seldom one exchanges compliments in here—I scarcely know what to do with it. I am thirty-seven.”
Twenty when she was shut away behind the barred windows, for some act of obvious insanity that left her scarred. Had she been sentenced more harshly, she would have gone to Broadmoor instead, the permanent home for the criminally insane—filled with men and women who would have met the noose were it not for a humane judge.
I took up my work again, hoping like hell that Holmes was not flattened by a bus. And that he hadn’t forgot to tell Mycroft where to find me.
Because if I tried to get out on my own, by admitting the truth? If I went before that pleasant white-coated doctor to say I was the wife of Sherlock Holmes and had come to Bedlam in the course of a case, so would he kindly let me go now, thanks very much—that truth would kick me directly over to the incurables wing, if not the padded room.
Chapter Thirteen
NO: BLUNTNESS WAS ONE THING, honesty was quite another. I came to an end of the drab brown yarn and threaded my needle with the drab red, doing the same monotonous running stitch: up, down; up, down. “Do you think they’ll let you out, then? Eventually?”
“Well, I’m not still in with the incurables.”
“And that’s all it takes? Convincing the doctor that you’re better?”
“Bedlam is an institution for those deemed curable, even if the progress is slow. In another year or two—less if I am very fortunate—I may be transferred to one of the upper galleries. And, if I pass that test of normalcy, sooner or later I shall be sent to Witley. The hospital has a farm there, where a patient may venture towards freedom.”
Half her life inside Bedlam’s walls: how would a person even begin to adjust to the modern world? “Do you have family?”
Isabella Powers’ body shifted, returning her damaged side to the wall. I did not think she was aware of doing it. “None that would want me.”
Friends? After seventeen years, that was unlikely. And if her family were denying her, there would be little support from them. So unless she had an inheritance…“Does the farm provide any sort of training, for jobs?”
Deliberately, she lifted her face, giving me a glimpse of that eerie pale eyeball. “Who would hire this?”
Neither makeup nor veil would be enough to let her move through the world—but wait. “A mask? There was an American woman in Paris, who made metal face-plates for wounded soldiers, beautifully painted to resemble their original faces. What about one of those?”
“This woman must be famous indeed,” she remarked. “I’d never heard of her before, and now she’s come up twice in the past few months.”
The needle slipped and jabbed into my finger—which, though too dull to draw blood, nonetheless hurt. “Really? Had the other person been to Paris recently?”
“She won’t have been recently, no. Though possibly some years ago.”
Catching the scent of Lady Vivian made my heart speed up. “Is this a patient or a nurse?”
“A patient.”
“What if you ask her to put you in touch with the American lady? See if she’s still making them.”
“That patient is no longer here.”
“Discharged? Or just down at the farm learning to be normal? Because if so, you could—”
“She is gone. No one seems to know where.”
“She escaped? From Bedlam? That can’t have been easy.”
“Not from Bedlam itself, no. She had a pass to travel home for a family event—a birthday, I think. She failed to return. Along with the nurse who accompanied her.”
“What, the nurse left, too?”
“It’s possible the hospital simply dismissed her. Losing a patient is presumably a firing offence.”
“I should imagine so. Well, that’s too bad—I’d have enjoyed talking with a patient who had travelled to Paris. I was there once.” Damn: another slip! “At least, I think I must have been. I have memories of the Eiffel Tower in colour, and the Seine, and the texture of baguettes in the mouth. My!” I exclaimed cheerily. “This conversation seems to be doing me a world of good: remembering one of my names, and that I went to Paris. The rest of it is sure to come soon, don’t you think?”