I HAD FIRST MET Ellen Fettiplace two years before. I had been visiting a client, a boy incarcerated in the Bedlam for religious mania. At first Ellen had seemed saner than anyone else there. She had been given duties caring for some of her easier fellow patients, towards whom she showed gentleness and concern, and her care had played a part in my client’s eventual recovery. I had been astonished when I learned the nature of her malady – she was utterly terrified of going outside the walls of the building. I had myself witnessed the wild, screaming panic that came over her if she were made even to step over the threshold. I pitied Ellen, all the more when I learned she had been incarcerated in the Bedlam after she was attacked and raped near her home in Sussex. She had been sixteen then; she was thirty-five now.
When my client was discharged Ellen asked if I would visit her and bring news of the outside world, for she had almost none. I knew no one else visited her, and agreed on condition she would let me try to help her venture outside. Since then I had tried any number of strategies, asking her to take just one step beyond the open doorway, suggesting I and Barak hold her on either side, asking if she could do it with closed eyes – but Ellen had procrastinated and delayed with a guile and persistence more than equal to mine.
And gradually she had worked that guile, her only weapon in a hostile world, in other ways. At first I had promised only to visit her ‘from time to time’, but as skilfully as any lawyer she had manipulated the phrase to her benefit. She asked me to come once a month, then every three weeks as she was so famished for news, then every two. If I missed a visit I would receive a message that she was taken ill, and would hasten round to find her sitting happily by the fire soothing some troubled patient, having made a sudden recovery. And these last few months it had dawned on me that there was another element in the problem, one I should have seen earlier. Ellen was in love with me.
PEOPLE THOUGHT of the Bedlam as a grim fortress where lunatics groaned and clanked their chains behind bars. There were indeed some who were chained and many who groaned, but the grey-stone exterior of the long, low building was quite pleasant looking. One approached across a wide yard, which today was vacant except for a tall, thin man dressed in a stained grey doublet. He was walking round and round, staring at the ground, his lips moving quickly. He must be a new patient, probably a man of means who had lost his wits and whose family could afford the fees to keep him here, out of the way.
I knocked at the door. It was opened by Hob Gebons, one of the warders, a big bunch of keys jangling at his belt. A stubby, thickset man in his fifties, Gebons was no more than a jailer; he had no interest in the patients, to whom he could be casually cruel, but he had some respect for me, for I stood up to the Bedlam’s keeper, Edwin Shawms, whose cruelty was not casual. And Gebons could be bribed. When he saw me he gave me a sardonic smile, showing grey teeth.
‘How is she?’ I asked.
‘Merry as a spring lamb, sir, since you sent word you were coming. Up till then she thought she had the plague. Shawms was furious watching her sweat – and she did sweat – thinking we’d be quarantined. Then your message came and within an hour she was better. I’d call it a miracle if the Church allowed miracles now.’
I stepped inside. Even on this hot summer’s day the Bedlam felt clammy. On the left was the half-open door of the parlour, where some patients sat playing dice round a scratched old table. On a stool in a corner a middle-aged woman was weeping quietly, a wooden doll clutched firmly in her hand. The other patients ignored her; here one quickly got used to such things. To the right was the long stone corridor housing the patients’ rooms. Someone was knocking on one of the doors from the inside. ‘Let me out!’ a man’s voice called.
‘Is Keeper Shawms in?’ I asked Hob quietly.
‘No. He’s gone to see Warden Metwys.’
‘I’d like a word after I’ve seen Ellen. I can’t stay more than half an hour. I have another appointment I must keep.’ I reached down to my belt and jingled my purse, nodding at him meaningfully. I slipped him small amounts when I came, to ensure Ellen at least had decent food and bedding.
‘All right, I’ll be in the office. She’s in her room.’
I did not need to ask if her door were unlocked. One thing about Ellen, she was never, ever, going to run away.
I walked down the corridor and knocked at her door. Strictly, it was improper for me to visit a single woman alone, but in the Bedlam the usual rules of conduct were relaxed. She called me in. She was sitting on her straw bed, wearing a clean, blue dress, low-cut, her graceful hands folded in her lap. Her narrow, aquiline face was calm, but her dark-blue eyes were wide, full of emotion. She had washed her long brown hair, but the ends were starting to frizz and split. It is not the sort of detail you notice if you are attracted to a woman. Therein lay the problem.
She smiled, showing her large, white teeth. ‘Matthew! You got my message. I have been so ill.’
‘You are better now?’ I asked. ‘Gebons said you had a bad fever.’
‘Yes. I feared the plague.’ She smiled nervously. ‘I was afraid.’
I sat on a stool on the other side of the room. ‘I long for news of the world,’ she said. ‘It has been more than two weeks since I saw you.’
‘Not quite two, Ellen,’ I answered gently.