How long had it been? A year, she supposed. She could ask them, write the question on the slate, but she feared to learn the truth.
Surely it was time for her medicine, time to deaden the world?
‘Mrs Bainbridge? Mrs Bainbridge, are you well?’
She kept her eyes shut. Enough, enough. Four words, and she had written too much.
‘Perhaps I have pushed her too hard for today,’ he said. But still he hovered, an unsettling presence by her bed.
This was all wrong. Her mind was thawing.
Finally, she heard him straighten up. Keys jangled, a door creaked open.
‘Who next?’
The door closed and muffled their voices. Their words and steps petered away down the corridor.
She was alone, but the isolation did not comfort her as it used to. Noises that usually went unnoticed came painfully loud: the rattle of a lock, laughter far away.
Frantic, she buried her face beneath her pillow and tried to forget.
The truth. She could not stop thinking about it during the cold grey hours of silence.
They didn’t get newspapers in the day room – at least, not when she had been allowed in there – but rumours had a way of seeping under doors and through cracks in the walls. Journalists’ lies made it into the asylum long before she did. Ever since she awoke in this place, she had been given a new name: murderess.
Other patients, attendants, even the nurses when they thought no one could hear: they twisted their mouths and bared their teeth as they said it, ravenous. Murderess. As if they wanted to frighten her. Her.
It wasn’t the injustice she loathed but the noise, its syllables hissing in her ears like – No.
She shifted in bed and hugged her goose-pimpled arms tight, trying to hold herself together. Until now she had been safe. Safe behind the walls, safe behind her silence, safe with the beautiful drugs that drowned out the past. But the new doctor . . . He was the clock signalling with a dread knell that her time was finished. Perhaps you do not belong in an asylum at all.
Panic spiralled in her chest.
Back again to the same three options. Say nothing and be presumed guilty. Destination: the gallows. Say nothing and, by some miracle, be acquitted. Destination: the cold, sharp world outside, no medicine to help her forget.
Only one choice remained – the truth. But what was that?
Gazing back to the past, the only faces she saw clearly were those of her parents. Around them, shadowy figures massed. Figures full of hate that had terrified her and twisted the course of her life.
But no one would believe that.
A full moon shone in silvery lines through the window at the top of the wall, touching her head. She lay there, watching it, when the thought came to her. In this place of misrule, everything was upside down. The truth was mad, beyond the realms of any healthy imagination. And that was why the truth was the only thing guaranteed to keep her under lock and key.
She slid from the bed onto the floor. It was cold and faintly sticky. No matter how many times they mopped it, the scent of piss hung in the air. She crouched down beside her bed, finally facing the bulky shadow across the room.
Dr Shepherd had ordered it put there: the first new item in an unchanging landscape. Just a desk. But it was another instrument to crack open the charnel house and exhume all she had buried.
With her pulse pounding in her neck, she crawled across the floor. Somehow she felt safer down low, crouched beneath it, looking up the notched legs. Wood. She shivered.
Surely there was no reason to be cautious, here. Surely they could not take any piece of wood and . . . It wasn’t possible. But then none of it was possible. None of it made the least bit of sense. Yet it had happened.
Slowly, she stood and surveyed the surface of the desk. Dr Shepherd had left all the implements out for her: paper and a thick, blunt-ended pencil.
She pulled a page towards her. In the gloom she saw a void of white, waiting for her words. She swallowed the pain in her throat. How could she relive it? How could she bring herself to do it to them, all over again?
She peered into the blank page, trying to see, somewhere in its vast expanse of nothing, that other woman from long ago.
THE BRIDGE, 1865
I am not dead.
Elsie recited the words as her carriage sluiced through country roads, churning up clods of mud. The wheels made a wet, sucking noise. I am not dead. But it was hard to believe, looking through the rain-spattered window at the ghost of her reflection: pale skin; cadaverous cheeks; curls eclipsed by black gauze.
Outside the sky was iron grey, the monotony broken only by crows. Mile after mile and the scenery did not change. Stubble fields, skeletal trees. They are burying me, she realised. They are burying me along with Rupert.
It wasn’t meant to be like this. They should have been back in London by now; the house thrown open, spilling over with wine and candles. This season vivid dyes were in fashion. The salons would be awash with azuline, mauve, magenta and Paris green. She should be there at the centre of it: invited to every diamond-spangled party; hanging on the arm of the host in his striped waistcoat; the first lady escorted into the dining room. The new bride always went first.
But not a widow. A widow shied from the light and entombed herself with grief. She became a mermaid drowning in black crêpe, like the Queen. Elsie sighed and stared into the hollow reflection of her eyes. She must be a terrible wife, for she did not long for seclusion. Sitting in silence musing on Rupert’s virtues would not help her grief. Only distraction could do that. She wanted to attend the theatre, to ride up and down on the rattling omnibuses. She would rather be anywhere than alone in these bleak fields.
Well, not quite alone. Sarah sat hunched on the squabs opposite, poring over a battered leather volume. Her wide mouth moved as she read, whispering the words. Elsie despised her already. Those mud-brown, bovine eyes that held no spark of intelligence, the pinched cheekbones and the lanky hair that always dribbled out of her bonnet. She’d seen shop girls with more refinement.
‘She’ll be company for you,’ Rupert had promised. ‘Just watch her while I’m down at The Bridge. Show her a few sights. The poor girl doesn’t get out much.’
He wasn’t exaggerating. His cousin Sarah ate, breathed and blinked – occasionally she read. That was it. There was no initiative, no yearning to better her position. She’d been content in her little rut as companion to a crippled old lady until the crone died.
As a good cousin, Rupert had taken her in. But it was Elsie who was stuck with her now.
Yellow, fan-shaped leaves came swooping down from the chestnut trees and landed on the roof of the carriage. Pat, pat. Earth upon the coffin.
Only another hour or two, and the sun would start to set.
‘How much longer?’
Sarah looked up from the page with glazed eyes. ‘Hmm?’
‘How long?’
‘Until . . .?’
Dear God. ‘Until we arrive.’