I helped gather up my neighbours’ plates, setting off with a precariously balanced armload towards the scullery window. As I came even with my chosen victim, I stopped dead, emitting a faint sound of distress. I swayed; the tin plates rattled; and I fell—directly into the young nurse.
She collapsed beneath me with a shriek, hands pushing against my inert torso. By the time she rolled me off, I had what I needed—and as I made a dramatic recovery from my swoon, scrambling upright with the help of her skirts, I returned the chatelaine with the remaining keys back onto her belt.
Fortunately, it was late enough in the day that no one was eager to drag me off to have my skull x-rayed, least of all me. Doubly fortunately, I appeared hale enough that they returned me to my room and not to the sick wing.
My private room with the lock mechanism on both sides.
A mechanism that gave way to my stolen key—the one that had been bright with wear.
It was well after midnight when I put my head out into the dimly-lit hallway. Seeing no motion, hearing nothing but the hive-like chorus of many snores, I stepped out. Shutting the door noiselessly, I padded down the gallery towards the asylum’s central rooms. But when I tried my key on the door to the physician’s office, it did not work.
I’d expected it might not: master keys sometimes had their limits. However, a nearby room that I’d seen the nurses going in and out of did open to it. Inside, I found some comfortable old chairs, three small tables, a schedule on the wall showing the dates for upcoming concerts, poetry readings, and lantern-slide lectures, an ice-box, and a gas ring for making cocoa or tea.
Too much to hope for some meat skewers or old-fashioned hat-pins, but in a basket near the door I found a jumble of broken and confiscated items, including a choice of impromptu pick-locks. I helped myself to a sturdy hair-pin and a splayed paper-clip, and returned to the doctor’s door, where I was soon inside. And as I’d hoped, I found the key to the file cabinets inside a desk drawer: male doctors did not wear chatelaines on their belts, nor did they spoil the cut of their clothing by loading their pockets with keys.
Lady Vivian’s file was surprisingly thick for a patient who had been here barely five years, but it proved to include records going back to 1916: the admissions papers from her very first asylum. I read through them, then skimmed through the six other periods of hospitalisation that followed, from four different institutions. All the pages had words and phrases in common: brought by family, voluntary admission, mania, violent outburst, certified insane, melancholia, delusions, and self-harm. Again and again, Vivian would arrive in a state of desperation; she would slowly calm; she would return to normal; and she would be discharged as cured.
Except for Bedlam. Oh, the same words were there, but whereas the longest she had spent in any of her previous asylums was nine months, she had remained here since her involuntary arrival in 1920—becoming a voluntary boarder in 1921.
Towards the end of the file, there was a notation by the same young doctor who had interviewed me that morning. Dr Rawlins’ handwriting read:
Patient asked if her certification had been rescinded and was told that yes, she was on the records as voluntary. Patient asked if that meant she was permitted to leave, and was told yes, given a 72-hour notice.
I looked at the date: a little over four weeks ago.
So, why had the dratted woman not simply given her notice and moved out? Or if her departure was a sudden whim, why not write a note to her niece and sister-in-law, to tell them that she had decided to fly away? Vivian was a woman of thirty-four, with an inheritance. Once Bedlam had pronounced her sane, she could go where she wished. So why not follow the brief formalities?
Possibly, because she had made no such decision. Possibly, because someone had decided that she should not return to the place she considered home.
I returned the file to its drawer and locked the cabinet. Where had they put me? I wondered. Under “A” for Anonymous?
I gazed across the office at “P,” tempted to read about Miss Powers’ acid attack, but I really had no right, nor even an excuse. Hers was no longer a criminal case, it was a psychological one, and no mere investigator could help her find a way through the labyrinth. In any event, it was getting late—according to the clock on the wall, in less than two hours the sky would begin to grow bright.
I replaced the file-cabinet key in its drawer, then put my ear to the door. I’d heard people moving about while I was pillaging the records, but they’d never come too close. I imagined that the wards for the more troubled patients would have been active around the clock, but this one seemed fairly quiet. I heard no one, and eased the door open to look: yes, the long gallery was empty.
Now came the tricky bit.
This central section of offices and meeting rooms made for the asylum’s common grounds: the wings and wards all joined here—male and female, regular and violent—to make use of the visitors’ entrance, the kitchen and laundry facilities, and the rooms that contained things all nurses would need close to hand. No doubt there were longer-term storage rooms at a distance, but with luck, the possessions of new patients would find a temporary resting-place somewhere here, on their way to being parcelled up and tidied away until discharge.
I avoided the hall beneath the dome—the palm-bedecked room used for chapel and holiday events—since I remembered that off that lay the porters’ rooms. If there were night guards, they would be there. Instead, I opened various doors until I found one lined with shelves holding everything from fresh bedding and hospital clothing to bed-pans, hair-combs, packages of tea-biscuits, and one solitary strait-jacket. And a set of shelves holding various things that were clearly intended for more permanent storage, including a brown-paper-wrapped parcel with the label:
Female, mid-twenties, blonde—blue. NB: dress and men’s trousers.
I did not need the confirmation of yesterday’s date to know that here was my clothing.
I plucked off the twine and hunted through the garments until I found my spectacles—to which, I was pleased to see, some thoughtful nurse had restored the lens that she’d found in my pocket. I put them on, then exchanged my hospital wear for my own undergarments, trousers, and cardigan. As I threaded my belt through the trouser’s loops, I paused. That was why all the inmates looked frumpy: in Bedlam, only the nurses were permitted belts.
Which explained why Vivian had such a collection of them in her wardrobe at Selwick.
I put the dress and hat back in the paper, along with the hospital’s night clothes, tying the twine around it again before replacing it on the shelf—thinner now, but it might take them a while to notice.
By which time, I would be gone.
(I hoped.)
A glance at the window warned me that the brief summer’s night was fast ebbing. I put on a motoring cap someone had left on a hook, dropped a packet of tea-biscuits into my pocket, then performed the ritual of the stealthy sticking out of head into the dim hallway again…only this time, the gallery was occupied. Very fortunately, she was walking in the opposite direction, and hadn’t heard the faint click of the mechanism under my hand. I kept very still, and cursed to myself when she reached the far end and turned.
My head was back inside the storage room before her reverse-face was complete. With exquisite care, I inched the door all the way closed, turning the knob to permit the tongue to slide into the plate. I could not risk the noise of the lock itself, but fortunately, the night-watchwoman did not perform the constabulary act of rattling door-knobs to check the locks. Her heels thumped along the worn carpet, approaching, then fading up the side-corridor. I held my breath: would she continue through the baths and into the wing for the “noisy” (i.e., uncontrollable) patients, or would she return?