Property of a Lady

‘Brank Asylum,’ said the man.

I didn’t know, not at seven years of age, what an asylum was. But the sound of the name frightened me – Brank. It made me think of iron and blackness, and it made me wonder why there had to be bars at all those windows.

Father was handing the driver some coins. ‘You’ll come back to collect us in one hour?’ he said. ‘I shall pay you the other half of the money then.’

‘I will indeed,’ said the man, touching his cap and turning the pony’s head round.

‘We shan’t be as long as an hour, Harriet,’ said Father, taking my hand firmly and leading me forward. ‘But there’s someone in here who wants to meet you.’

That sent the fear spiking even deeper. ‘Someone who wants to meet you . . .’ Like any child of the early part of the century, I had read the extraordinarily macabre fairy-tales deemed suitable then. It meant I knew what sort of people lived inside lonely forbidding houses and wanted to meet little girls. Witches who put children in cages and fattened them up for the ovens. Wolves who dressed up in human clothes and pretended to be human.

Father rang the bell outside the huge main doors. He kept a firm hold of my hand – perhaps he thought I might suddenly bolt and run back down that long drive to the lanes beyond. I wish I had. I wish I had never gone inside Brank Asylum, and I wish, above everything in the world, that I had not followed Father and a grey-clad, slab-faced woman to the small, mean room at the end of one of the corridors. They smelt of food cooked too long, those corridors – unappetizing food, boiled cabbage and onions. Beneath that was another smell I had never encountered. I could not, then, put a name to it, but it made me think of people drowning in the dark. It made me want to cry.

‘In here,’ said the granite-coloured woman, opening a door and standing back to let us go inside. I hung back, but Father said, quite gently, ‘Come along, Harriet, it’s all right,’ and I had to go in.

The sad, drowning-in-the-dark smell was much stronger, and there was a horrid smeary darkness in the room. I had the feeling that things might be hiding inside that darkness – things that never went outside, things that had become covered with layers and layers of cobwebs until the cobwebs had formed thick ropes that tangled in hair and coiled around ankles and wrists . . .

But I stood obediently inside the door and waited to see what came next. At first I thought the room was empty, but then from the darkest corner came a voice – an ugly voice that made me think of a fingernail scraping across a slate surface.

‘You are Anstey?’

‘I am Frederick Anstey.’

There was a blur of movement, as if the cobwebs gathered themselves together. I flinched and glanced behind me, but the door was firmly shut.

‘You have brought the child?’

‘Harriet. Yes. She’s here with me.’

Father glanced down at me, and I managed to say, ‘How do you do,’ directing the words towards the dark corner.

‘They wrote to you?’ said the voice, as if I had not spoken. ‘They wrote asking you to come here?’

‘Yes. The solicitor—’

‘The details have no interest for me.’ The movement came again. ‘Tell the child to speak to me.’

Father bent down. ‘Harriet, tell this lady how old you are and how you are good at lessons.’ He gave me the smile that meant: everything is perfectly all right. It wasn’t all right, of course, but I saw he wanted me to pretend.

So I said, as politely as I could, ‘I’m seven. I like reading books.’

‘She is well-mannered.’

‘I hope so.’

‘Her mother?’