Vivian sighed. “Go ahead.”
So I did. I read it with care, looking back at portions and holding it up to the light. I returned it to the envelope. I laid the envelope on the table before her.
“When a person is the subject of a commitment order,” she said, “elements of her…legal status change. When I went into Bedlam, five years ago, my brother Edward was appointed my guardian. That gave him the right to handle my affairs, particularly any financial matters. The most recent order of commitment was revoked two years ago, but when I went to get my mother’s Fabergé egg from the safe in his office, I found that.”
“It wouldn’t take precedence over your official last will and testament.”
“No.” She raised her gaze at last, and gave me a sad smile. “Not if I was alive.”
The document amounted to a new will for The Lady Vivian Beaconsfield, giving the bulk of her possessions to the Marquess of Selwick, “in recompense for the considerable expenses incurred by the Selwick estate over the lengthy illness of The Lady Vivian.” That its beneficiary was also its signator, as her named guardian at the time, might be the basis for a legal challenge—if Ronnie and her mother wanted to take the Marquess to court over it.
“When you said you were safe in Bedlam, that day when Ronnie and I came to visit, was this what you meant?”
“No. I was not aware this existed until I saw it two weeks ago. My fears were…not about that.”
“But once the commitment order was cleared, why didn’t you simply leave Bedlam? I’ve been there—it’s not the most comfortable place in the world, and you have both family and money. Were you afraid he…afraid that something might happen to you, on the outside?”
Her eyes closed. When they opened again, her face wore the gaunt, aged look that I had seen there, three years before. “Yes. Except I knew it would happen. Eventually. He…Edward is my brother!” she cried. “I…I loved him, when I was small. I revered him. When he came home for the school holidays, I would treasure any time he deigned to give me—reading a story, building a fortress. He was my big brother, who lived in another world, but occasionally would visit.
“Not like Tommy. Tommy played with me as if he were close to my own age, never made me feel like a child. When he died, my world ended. And when Edward moved back home the following spring, my world…turned upside-down. He was unhappy, deeply so, and he…”
Her voice faltered, and stopped—but in fact, I had scarcely heard a word after her first cry.
Edward is my brother! Four words, but with them, the edifice that I had built, all my conclusions about money and greed and political machinations, everything shifted, to reveal the shape underneath.
That shape had been at the back of my mind for days—weeks, now. The sequence of Vivian’s life and madness, the dry notes of the asylum doctors, the cheeky maidservant at Selwick. The dairy-woman, Emma Bailey, had known, and told me across her kitchen table.
Dear God. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.
The shape had been pushing at me, I think, since the train back from Surrey, when I seized on the clean and straightforward answer of money. I had been loudly irritable with Holmes, so eager to condemn the male race, to condemn the Marquess of a lesser crime, because I could not bear facing the awful knowledge whispering in my ear.
“Your brother molested you.”
Her eyes snapped up. “You know?”
I was ashamed to tell her how long it had taken me.
Chapter Forty-five
I WAS OF COURSE FAMILIAR with Dr Freud’s theory, that a claim of incest reveals the sex fantasies of an hysteric. But “hysterical” is the modern’s cry of witchcraft, its punishment incarceration instead of burning. As a woman—and as a student of Sherlock Holmes—I should have used William of Ockham’s razor to cut to the truth: that some claims of incest were in fact just that.
Not that I was certain Vivian Beaconsfield had openly made such a claim. Emma Bailey’s suggestion had been far from overt. The notes of a dozen different mental doctors had employed cautious language and faint distress over these accusations made against a man of his rank.
Of course, if she had made those accusations in the open, would it have done her any good? Even I, trained in Holmesian cynicism, had managed to squirm out from the unpleasant hypothesis that Emma Bailey, medical records, and Vivian’s own personal history had pushed into my face: namely, that in 1916, Lady Vivian’s surviving brother, resentful at being forced out of his lively home in London by the War and financial straits, looked at this pretty and vulnerable twenty-five-year-old near-stranger and saw not a sister, but a woman. And like all women, she was there for his convenience—even if some young housemaids might believe that his interest was personal.
Looking across the table at her, sitting here on this island of the mad, I could not avoid the hardest truth of all: this poor creature had been betrayed, first by her blood, then by those whose job it was to heal her soul. Time and again, she’d been granted asylum; she’d been fed and rested and declared healed—and then, like a shell-shocked soldier, sent back to precisely the situation that had driven her to insanity.
How many women locked inside Victorian asylums, I had to ask myself, were there because they had offended their doctors with disgusting, ungrateful, and obscene “fantasies” about the male relatives who controlled their lives? The crime here was not the theft of a diamond necklace. It was the theft of a woman’s person, her security, her very mind and spirit.
I’m safe here, Vivian had said. And she was speaking nothing but the truth. I forced myself to continue.
“You showed no real sign of problem before your brother moved home. But within weeks, you had stripped your rooms to the walls and thrown your drawings of Selwick Hall out of the window. Your only acts of physical violence were against him. When you were away from him, you got better.
“And no one believed you. Not even the doctors.”
If she’d been startled before, now she was stunned. “How…?”
“I read your case file, at Bedlam. One doctor after another wrote, ‘She’s an hysteric, making wild accusations against the man who has done everything to help her.’ You would talk to them; they would make their notes; you’d realise it was leading nowhere and go silent; and they would happily declare you cured and send you home. To him.”
Tears glistened in her eyes.
“Dr Freud has many insightful conclusions about the human mind,” I continued bitterly, “but when it comes to women, he might do better investigating the male sex’s preoccupation with cigars.”
To my astonishment, she let loose with a snort of astonished laughter. A moment later, the rattle of cups signalled the arrival of the two who had been waiting at the door. Vivian dashed the moisture from her eyes and swept our masks and the envelope off the table.
Strong tea, fresh milk, hastily cut triangles of cheese sandwich, a plate of delicate almond biscuits. Truce, and silence, for a couple of minutes—during which Holmes eyed Nurse Trevisan with curiosity, Nurse Trevisan eyed Vivian with concern, and Vivian eyed something no one else could see. Then she looked up at the other woman.
“Rose, I think it’s time to introduce Miss Russell and Mr Holmes to your cousin.” Rose didn’t look altogether convinced. “They’ve been here, they’ve already seen him. And they want to help.”
The two women continued the wordless conversation for a time, until Rose put down her cup. “Come on, then. But keep quiet—people are asleep.”