Holmes and I followed her down the stairs and along the corridor to its end. We came to a halt at the last door on the southern side—the room where we had seen the mad doctor. Light shone from beneath it. The door was fitted with a sturdy hasp and padlock. I frowned, trying to remember if I’d seen other padlocks as we came along.
Holmes, however, was in no doubt. He made a Ha! noise, indicating sudden revelation—always irritating, if one hasn’t yet made a connexion—and raised an eyebrow at the nurse. “Your cousin?”
She, too, kept her voice very low. “My mother’s brother had a daughter and two sons; this is the younger. He was a doctor, who came back from the War badly damaged. Some men get over it; others do not. He, I believe, never will. Do you need to see him? Strangers make him…troubled.”
Holmes shook his head, and although I was not sure I agreed, I was willing to go along for now. As we made our way back towards the stairs, I thought of the island where the Hon Terry had stopped our motor, the outline of the bell-tower in the night.
“Was your cousin held on San Servolo?” I asked.
“No, it was a dark and terrifying asylum on the mainland. They kept him chained, though he’s never been violent.”
“Yet you leave him in a room with slits in the shutters, where trespassers are sure to peer in and see…”
“We give him the toys he loves, and what work he is capable of. Some of which is surprisingly helpful.”
Holmes stopped dead on the landing. “Cadaverine!”
I stared at him, caught up by one of my more vivid laboratory memories—then started to grin. “No! Is that what we smelt? The rotting corpse I thought we were about to step into?”
“On the path, yes.”
“The fellow on the vaporetto even told me that people found the island’s odours unnerving.”
“I imagine they did, particularly as it tends to linger in the pores.”
“Lysine and sodium bicarbonate. Good Lord.”
Nurse Trevisan nodded. “We only put it out when we’re having problems, since we then have to live with it for weeks.” I could well imagine: Holmes’ demonstration of the stuff, some years back, had been the impetus for one of Mrs Hudson’s longer trips away.
“And in the meantime, your cousin provides the island with a mask of madness. Helping to promote your neighbours’ belief that the place is haunted. Ingenious.”
Back in the sitting room, Nurse Trevisan took the chair beside Vivian, while Holmes and I sat across the low table from them.
“So, what?” I asked. “You live here on an island you pretend is haunted?”
“Oh, none of us doubt it is haunted. Yes, we encourage the belief with the odd wail and the occasional walk along the front wearing an old bed-sheet—and we’ve found offensive smells particularly effective in discouraging both children and courting couples. But how could this place not be haunted? Centuries of plague victims died here. The north side of Poveglia—across the foot-bridge—appears on older maps as ‘the burning grounds,’ since that is where generations of the dead were incinerated. The soil there is lovely and rich. And the wild place on the other side of the church? That is given as ‘the plague field.’ They tried to start a garden there but had to give it up—apparently the number of skulls and scapulas was a bit disheartening.”
“Who is ‘they’?” I asked.
“Women, of course.”
“Women like us,” Vivian added.
“Meaning…Sapphic?”
“Some. Not all.”
The nurse explained. “Some of the women here have spent time in insane asylums. Others were merely fed up with the world of men. You, Miss Russell, would be quite welcome,” she added solemnly, “were you to become tired of your current situation.”
Holmes and I laughed—his, it must be said, was a touch hollow. “But you can’t be planning on hiding behind a ghostly veil for long?”
“There’s a bit more to it than bed-sheets and ghostly wails,” Rose replied. “Poveglia is in fact a registered mental asylum—‘asylum’ being a word that to the outside world means a place to lock up lunatics. But to those inside, it can indeed mean shelter. A place to lock the world out. My cousin downstairs is listed as the asylum’s doctor, though he arrived with a diagnosis of dementia praecox—what is now called schizophrenia. Since he came, two years ago, I’m told the number of illicit visitors has fallen dramatically. Poveglia’s neighbours seem quite content to leave its madwomen to the care of a mad doctor.”
“A new kind of plague island,” Holmes commented, “offering quarantine against the insanity of the world. While the inmates are free to come and go to the city.”
“And to the Lido’s cabarets,” I added.
The woman had a most unexpected dimple in her right cheek. “We have a storage room filled with appropriate dress.”
“But who is in charge?” Holmes asked. “Who started it all?”
Nurse Trevisan turned on him a rather pitying look. “Sir, those are two very different questions—although they take the same answer. No one person started it, and no one person is in charge. All work, all vote, all perform different functions. Some voices receive more attention, either because that woman brought more money with her or because she suffered more to get here, but in the end, each vote is equal.”
“How long have you been here?” I wondered.
“Me, personally? Ten days. I was born and raised in London, and would come to Venice on family visits. But one of my cousins—her brother is the man downstairs—moved here in 1920, the year after it started. You know what happened to women everywhere as soon as the War was over, when the men returned? Three Venetian war widows were among those faced with the realities of what is called ‘normality’: one was told by her father that she must marry a wealthy but crippled returning officer; another’s brother-in-law assumed he’d take over her husband’s business that she had been running; and the third was threatened with committal to San Clemente if she did not make room for her uncle and his large family in the house she and her husband had built. The three women were friends, and together they found another way.
“The woman with the business happened to be a partial owner of Poveglia, which at the time was deserted but for the nets of fishermen drying on the path-ways. The other two women scraped together enough money to buy out her brother’s interest in the island, and the three of them set up a sort of camp here. Others heard of them, and came to join. The only rule is that there can be no long-term residency of children. It is not fair to them—and besides, families may be willing to rid themselves of spare women, but they do not feel the same over their young.”
“How many women do you have here?”
“Thirty-two or -three—one is trying to decide.”
“And only one man?”
“My cousin, yes. Shall I tell you how that came about?”
“Please.” Holmes sat back, fingers on lips, while Vivian curled up on the chair in the attitude of a child settling in to hear a favourite story.
“As I said, this community began a few months after the War ended, when all was in confusion and people were only slowly returning to the city. My cousin Emelia came eighteen months later, when Poveglia had a population of fourteen.
“They knew even then that it could not last. Women, trying to live by themselves on an island? They were armed, yes, but all it would take was one boatload of drunken men and it would end. In fact, when I came back to Venice to celebrate my great-grandmother’s ninetieth birthday one December—this would have been 1922—they’d just had an incident where a fisherman tried to force his way into the building. Two of the women threw on men’s clothing and chased him off with sticks, but they were worried, rightfully so.
“I was working at Bethlem hospital, and I happened to tell my cousin Emilia how surprisingly little trouble the hospital had with the neighbourhood ruffians. That the reputation of Bedlam appeared to keep them out.”
I stirred. “When I met you—when Ronnie and I brought little Simon to Bed…Bethlem—you told me something of the sort. That an evil reputation could be a protective wall.”