“I should be careful what I wish for, were I you,” she warned grimly, and threaded some sky blue onto her needle.
I decided not to make further enquiries of this woman, who would surely begin to suspect my motives if I kept after the missing patient and her nurse. So I finished working my three skeins of yarn into the stiff grid, then set about picking them out again, since pointless work seemed to be the goal of the exercise. Rain ceased to stream down the tall windows; the room grew a fraction lighter. Half an hour or so after it ceased, a bell tinkled, prompting various patients to rise and leave for some task or another. Miss Powers was one of them. I re-threaded my needle with the drab red and started on another pattern, one that had nothing to do with the inked flower on the surface.
A short time later, as I’d expected, I had my first visitor, who arrived trailing snippets of multicoloured yarn.
She was one of the participants in the Raymond Navarro–Douglas Fairbanks debate (this one a vehement Fairbanks-ite) who had lost two of her four companions to the call of the outdoors. Since that had left her at the mercy of two vehement supporters of Navarro, she soon looked for an excuse to be elsewhere, and seized on me.
“Welcome, my dear, you’re new, aren’t you?”
One might have thought me a church visitor after a Sunday service rather than someone dragged in by uniformed police at midnight. However, I nodded and gave her as much of my name as I’d retrieved to that point, adding, “I don’t know if Ruth is my middle name or my surname. My memory seems to have a few holes in it.”
My new acquaintance emitted a manic giggle, delighted at the opportunity to tell her stories to someone who hadn’t heard them several times, and gave her name as Margaret Laine—“Mrs, that is, but you can call me Maggie, hehehe”—before leaping into revelations about the woman who had just left the chair. “Do you know Miss Powers? That is, you can’t have met her Outside, of course (hehehe) but it’s always possible you were here earlier and our paths didn’t happen to cross…”
“As far as I know, this is my first time here. And I just met Miss Powers this morning.”
“Oh, well, she’s one of our more (hehehe) what you might call infamous residents, had a child”—her voice dropped—“?‘out of wedlock,’ and when it came about that her young man was already married, she was thrown out on the streets. After the child died—starved, I hear—Miss Powers got some acid and went to his house, but there was a struggle because she was too weak to throw it, so he lost his hand but she lost her face. They put her here instead of in Broadmoor. Can’t imagine he’s comfortable, knowing she may get out in a few years.”
“Do people ever get tired of waiting, and simply escape?” I asked, helping myself to a length of rather pretty orange yarn from the tangle she’d arrived with.
“Ooh, that’s not easy. Even a man’d find it hard to go over the wall—I’ve not heard of it happening. And a woman? Never. People don’t escape from Bedlam—except (hehehe) if they’re not here.”
Hiding my smile, I urged her to explain, and heard the story concerning The Vanishing of Lady Vivian. It was mostly patent nonsense and wild speculation, with a climax of the lady holding a shotgun on her nurse and family and making away wickedly in the family’s Bentley. But I nodded, and made occasional sounds of appreciation, and waited until she had exhausted the imaginary exploits of this feminine Scarlet Pimpernel.
“What about the nurse?” I asked when she had run dry.
“Oh, she never came back, she was that frightened by the whole thing. Sent in her resignation by letter. Or perhaps she wired it—in any event, no one here has laid eyes on her since the two of them left for Waterloo station.” I drew breath to prompt her into a description of Nurse Trevisan, but a prompt proved unnecessary. “Just as well, that nurse was a most peculiar woman. Not bad, I’m not saying that, but she was all hoity-toity. Kept to herself, like. Though not with Miss Beaconsfield—oh, I know she’s Lady Vivian, but we don’t have much time for titles and such here, the nurses usually called her Miss like everyone else. Nurse Trevisan seemed to like her just fine. The two of them would talk on by the hour. It was funny to see them walking, the one all tall and dark, the other tiny and pale.”
“Do you think they might have gone off together?”
Such was the power of societal assumptions—a nurse would never side with her patient against an institution—that even the mad did not question it. And when they did, they leapt to a conclusion that I would not have considered the obvious one.
“You think Miss Beaconsfield paid her off, to help her escape? They do say she robbed her family blind. I’ll bet that’s what they did, plotted how to do it. That would explain all those long talks, wouldn’t it?”
“Still, merely getting outside the walls wouldn’t be enough, would it? If she paid the nurse to help her escape, where would the nurse take her? Did either of them ever talk about Cornwall, for example?”
“Why Cornwall?”
“From the surname—Trevisan. Isn’t that Cornish?”
“Far as I know, she’s a Londoner like me.”
“But her family. Did she ever mention…I don’t know, Falmouth? Newquay? St Ives, perhaps?” Weren’t there loads of artists in St Ives?
But Mrs Laine was shaking her head. “I’d go to Paris, I would. They have caffs there on the pavement, sit and drink your tea—coffee, more like—and watch the world go by, nobody to know you. Nobody to find you and make you come back here, wash the dishes, make the beds, cook dinners out of nothing…”
Mrs Laine was not talking about Bedlam. Mrs Laine was talking about her own home, a place from which at least twice, to judge by the scars I could see at the edge of her sleeve, she’d made an attempt at a final escape.
I let her prattle for a while, about nothing in particular, until my lack of replies drove her in search of a more responsive audience. In the relative silence—the woman tormenting the piano had been taken out for her airing, the birds were dozing, and the room had settled into the buzz of a dozen conversations—I let my fingers perform their clumsy work while my mind nibbled away at what I had learned, and what I had not. As always, the latter began to loom ever larger, until finally I thrust the needle to a resting point and looked around for my next informant.
Instead, I saw a thin young girl sitting right up by the window, face turned to the brightness. Her head was covered by a snug, old-fashioned cap, tied beneath her chin. Her hands were similarly covered, not by gloves but by mittens, the padding too thick to permit her to turn the pages of the small book in her lap. As I watched, her hand came up to her temple, encountered the various layers of resistance, and dropped down. A moment later it rose again, this time to swipe the mitten cloth across first one eye, then the other.
I gathered my ladylike handicraft together and crossed the room to stand in the window near the girl. Her head came up. She gave me a vague and unfocussed smile. I returned it, then stood for a time looking out. Next to the building was a drying yard, rapidly filling with bed-sheets that had waited for the rain to stop. Over its head-height wall I could make out gardens, with lawns and gravel paths, flower beds and mature trees rising above the high surrounding wall at the back. Off to my left were the gates and lodge-house, with the men’s side beyond the drive. Women with nurses were strolling the paths, while others—the securely non-violent patients, one assumed—were working their mallets through a soggy game of croquet.
Above the tree-line, even myopic eyes could see the hospital across the way, with the Roman Catholic cathedral behind it—dirty, blunt workaday buildings that made Bethlem look, somewhat ironically, like a green and friendly island loomed about by slums.