The Asylum

Georgina Ferrars’ Narrative

KNEELING IN THE DUST, with my writing case clasped to my breast, I reached instinctively for the chain around my neck—and found, of course, neither chain nor key. Both catches were locked. I grasped the cover and tugged reluctantly, thinking I would have to break the stitching, before it struck me that keeping the case intact might help to secure my release. And so I spent an age prying at the locks with a hairpin I had managed to bend into a hook. My hands shook so badly that I cut myself several times; by the time I had both catches open, the blue leather was stained with blood.

I took out my journal, along with two bundles of letters in a hand I did not recognise, a packet containing what appeared to be legal documents, and a solicitor’s card, with an address written on the back—“C. H. Lovell, Yealm View Road, Noss Mayo”—and began to read. I was still crouched on the floor, with the last of the daylight filtering over my shoulder, when I heard a distant gong, and had to cram everything back in its hiding place in a mad rush and set the room to rights before Bella came to find me. I must have eaten—if I ate at all—in a kind of trance, for the next thing I recall is being back in my room, with the door bolted again, and Rosina’s last letter in my hand.

Throughout my incarceration in Women’s Ward B, I had assumed that if only I could discover what I had done in those missing weeks, the fog would lift from my mind. Yet even after I had read through my journal for a third time, there was no answering chord. I could half convince myself that I remembered walking with Lucia in Regent’s Park, or confronting Uncle Josiah and demanding that she be allowed to stay with us. But it was like sifting through my earliest recollections, and trying to distinguish actual memories from things Mama had simply told me I had done. The fog remained as impenetrable as before.

I felt, indeed, as if I had lost a whole existence, rather than a few weeks of my life. Lucia had stolen my name, my money, my heart, and left me here to rot. Everything she had told me—even the name Lucia Ardent—had been a lie, carefully woven to draw me in. And I could not remember so much as a syllable she had uttered, or recover the smallest glimpse of her face, except for that hallucinatory moment on the doorstep in Gresham’s Yard, on the evening of my escape.

Had she deceived Dr. Straker, too? The shock of finding Rosina’s grave, and reading her last letters, and realising (even as I fought to deny it) that Felix Mordaunt had been my father as well as Lucia’s, and that Rosina had died within days of giving birth to me—the shock of all that had brought on the seizure, just as Dr. Straker had said.

Calling myself Lucy Ashton, and coming here on that deluded, foolhardy quest: I might as well have been acting on Lucia’s instructions.

As perhaps I had been. I looked again at my description of Mrs. Fairfax; of how she had been singing Dr. Straker’s praises; how much she seemed to know about Tregannon Asylum. I had, indeed, heard that voice somewhere before. She had reminded me of Lucia. And if I had left those wills with Henry Lovell, as any sensible person would have done, instead of bringing them with me, Lucia could have retrieved them, and, in the person of Georgina Ferrars, laid claim to the Mordaunt estate.

When I heard the clock strike ten, I hid everything away again and put out the light, so that Bella would not come tapping at the door. Stars glittered above the rooftop; I wrapped myself in the coverlet and went over to the window, gazing down into the moonlit courtyard.

I knew that I ought to be consumed with rage and mortification, but I seemed to have lost the power of feeling. I might as well have been reading about someone else; someone for whom I felt a degree of sympathy, but whose fate did not directly concern me. I wondered if I would ever feel anything again. My childhood with Mama and Aunt Vida seemed quite untouched, only now immensely distant, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The numbness seemed vaguely familiar.

But I still had to decide what I should do.

I could hand over the papers—except for the most intimate passages about Lucia (though was that not most of the journal?), which I would tear out—to Dr. Straker. That would surely persuade him that I had been telling the truth.

But unless Felix had made a later will, I would be presenting Dr. Straker with proof that I was the rightful owner of Tregannon House. Edmund Mordaunt would be disgraced; Frederic would lose his inheritance, and Dr. Straker his kingdom. I could say that I did not want the estate, only my freedom, my name, and my own modest income; but why should he believe me? It would be safer by far to burn the papers—“Miss Ferrars” in London could do nothing without them—and lock me away in the darkest corner of the asylum.

I could show the papers to Frederic, but again I would be gambling with my life.

Or I could try to escape again. But with no money, no name, and no one to help me—Lucia would surely have made a conquest of Henry Lovell by now—all roads led back to Women’s Ward B. Or worse.

Perhaps there was another way.

I stood at the window for a long time, watching the shadows climb slowly up the opposite wall, thinking how it might be done.

At ten o’clock the next morning, I was seated on a bench near the entrance to the voluntary wing. I had told Bella that if she should happen to see Mr. Mordaunt, I would be grateful if she could mention that I wished to speak to him. Now all I could do was wait.

The air was chill, but I could feel the sun’s warmth on my back. Through the woodland to my left, I could see a patch of red brickwork: the ruin of the old stable, perhaps, where Frederic had heard the mysterious tapping sounds. Away beneath the wall, men were tilling the fields, just as they had been the evening before. I felt strangely, almost unnervingly calm.

At least I know I am not mad. The thought had come to me upon waking: I might have Mordaunt blood in my veins, but I had endured five months in the family asylum without succumbing. It came to me again, like a current of warm air, as I sat gazing across the fields. I realised, too, that I did not greatly mind about being Rosina’s child and not Mama’s. No one could have loved me more dearly; if Rosina had lived, I should have had two loving mothers, as well as an aunt. I thought of the game I had played with the mirror, and the look on Mama’s face when she heard me shouting “Rosina” at my reflection, and I understood that in her place I should have done exactly the same. Her anxious, haunted expression when she thought no one was watching . . . I could well imagine her being possessed by a superstitious dread that if she made no provision, I would choose, of all the men in the kingdom, to marry a Mordaunt because she had not done so.

And indeed she had been right to fear it. Of all places in the kingdom, I had come to Tregannon Asylum, and might, in different circumstances, have fallen in love with Frederic Mordaunt, never imagining that he was my cousin. Only I had not come here by chance, but because of Lucia—Mordaunt blood calling to Mordaunt blood?—and if I had loved her so passionately, could I really have loved Frederic with the same—?

“Miss Ashton?”

I sprang to my feet. Frederic Mordaunt was standing two paces behind the bench.

“I am very sorry; I did not mean to alarm you.”

“Yes—I mean, no, I was just—shall we walk a little?” I said.

“By all means,” he said, falling into step as I set off, at random, toward the trees. He was bareheaded, and dressed much as I had seen him on that first morning, in brown corduroy and a white stock. The shadows beneath his eyes were darker than ever.

“You—er—mentioned that you wished to speak to me.”

“Yes, Mr. Mordaunt, I did. I feel—I have come to realise that I owe you an apology. I have been—unjustly harsh, and ungrateful—”

“Miss Ashton, Miss Ashton, it is I who should apologise—”

“But you have done so already, Mr. Mordaunt, and I ought to have accepted your apology with more grace. It is not your fault that I am here.”

His hands unclenched; he took a deep breath, almost a sob, and turned away to hide his emotion.

“Your generosity, Miss Ashton, means more than I can say; especially when—”

“Especially?” I prompted.

“Well—especially since you still believe you are Miss Ferrars.”

“I have been thinking about that,” I said. “Now that I am more at liberty, thanks to your kindness, it is easier for me to consider the possibility that—that I may have been ill, as Dr. Straker has always maintained. As I say, it is not your fault. I must not keep you from your work, Mr. Mordaunt; I only wanted to express my gratitude.”

“I see.” He sounded surprised, almost startled.

“But,” I continued, “I need time to reflect, before I speak to him, and so, if you are willing—”

“Upon my honour, Miss Ashton, I shall not breathe a word to him.”

His colour had risen; he was studying me as intently as politeness allowed, with every appearance of adoration. I kept my own gaze demurely fixed upon the prospect before us, wondering how he would respond if I told him we were cousins.

We were now approaching the edge of the wood. The trees were mostly oaks and alders, growing very close together; a narrow path wound its way in amongst them. Frederic began to bear away to his right.

“Shall we walk through the wood?” I asked innocently.

“Perhaps better not,” he said. “It is very overgrown, and you might . . . There is a very pleasant walk along the western side.”

He sounded natural enough, but it seemed to me that he averted his eyes from the ruin, and we walked for a little in silence, following a rough track that led us across a stretch of open field and around the end of the wood, until we were out of sight of the house.

“I remember you saying,” I ventured, “how lonely it was for you, growing up here.”

“You remember our conversation?” he exclaimed, with another heartfelt glance, which I pretended not to see. I had allowed the distance between us to diminish, so that our shoulders were almost touching. “After all you have suffered here—I am—” He seemed about to say “overwhelmed,” but checked himself.

“Yes, it was; I had no playmates, as I may have mentioned.”

“And no other relations—uncles or aunts, or cousins . . . ?”

“None living. Uncle Edmund had a younger brother, but, like my father, Horace, he took his own life.”

I stared at him in shock, caught my foot in a tussock, and grasped his arm to save myself from falling.

“I did not know,” I said. “About your father, I mean.”

“I did not like to mention it. He had been closely confined, for his own safety, but somehow . . .”

“I am truly sorry to hear it,” I said, thinking how dreadfully inadequate that sounded. Through the cloth of his jacket, I could feel his arm quivering—or was it my hand? I steeled myself to continue.

“And—the younger brother?”

“The same, I fear. He—my uncle Felix—was lost overboard, on a voyage to South America, but given the family tendency, there can be very little doubt. I came upon the report of it quite recently, when I was sorting through some papers. The ship—the Utopia, she was called—was just three days out from Liverpool. He had dined as usual that evening—the weather was calm, with only a light swell running—and that was the last anyone ever saw of him.”

“And—do you remember him at all?”

“No, he died before I was three years old; in the summer of 1860, I believe it was. I know almost nothing about him. The subject is distressing to Uncle Edmund; he prefers not to speak of it.”

I found that I was still gripping his arm, and hastily released it. Felix had not stayed with Clarissa; he had boarded the ship on which he had planned to sail with Rosina, and drowned himself, surely out of despair at losing her. He would never have made another will in Edmund’s favor; not when Edmund had been the agent of his ruin.

“Miss Ashton?—I fear I have distressed you.”

“No, no, it is only—” I took a step forward, and realised I was quite unsteady on my feet. “I should like to sit down for a little.”

I made my way over to a fallen tree, anxiously attended by Frederic, and sat down on the trunk. A few paces to my left, a path led back into the wood; I saw Frederic glance over his shoulder, and wondered if it went to the ruined stable.

“You must understand,” he said, “that, bleak as it must sound, these sad histories are part of the furniture of my mind. They have lost their power to hurt.”

A brief silence followed.

“Miss Ashton,” he said hesitantly, “what you said to me, before, has lifted a great weight from my mind. I hope you will not take it amiss if I remind you that, when you leave here, my purse will be at your disposal.”

In fact, sir, I imagined myself replying, it is my purse, and I have documents to prove it. But only if I could prove that I was Georgina Ferrars.

“You are very kind, Mr. Mordaunt,” I murmured, hoping I was not overplaying my part. “I should have been more gracious when you first made the offer.”

He gave me another of his heartfelt looks, in which a sort of incredulous hope was dawning. No one, I thought, could counterfeit such transparent emotion, those rapid changes of colour . . . I felt a wild impulse to confide in him, to trust in his sense of honour and his evident feeling for me; but then I thought of my journal, of how I had trusted just those signs in Lucia (if only I could remember trusting her). I reminded myself, too, of how much he idolised Dr. Straker, and resolved to stick to my plan.

“You spoke, Mr. Mordaunt, of when I am released. Are you confident, then, that Dr. Straker will let me go?”

“Yes, Miss Ashton, I am—though I cannot, as you know, force his hand.”

“But why is it, may I ask, that he will not release me now? I am not a danger to myself, or anyone else; I accept that I cannot be Georgina Ferrars, and I am prepared to wait patiently for my actual memory to return: what, then, is the obstacle?”

“I am afraid there are several. He fears that if he releases you prematurely—his word, not mine—your actual memory, as you call it, may never return. And he still hopes that by combing through records of missing persons—which he spends a good deal of his time doing—he will discover who you really are, and restore you to your friends and family, assuming, of course . . .” He trailed off awkwardly.

“But do you think it fair, Mr. Mordaunt, that he should keep me here, as a certified lunatic? If I am capable of living in the world, should I not be allowed to?”

“I—speaking for myself, I agree with you. I find it impossible to think of you as a lunatic, or to imagine . . .” He shook his head, as if to clear it. “The difficulty, according to Dr. Straker, is that yours is such a rare condition—he knows of only four comparable instances, all reported from France—that he simply can’t predict how, or how soon, it will resolve. My own belief, as I said to you only yesterday, is that if you could—I hesitate to say converse with, but speak to Miss Ferrars, in a setting acceptable to you both, the spell might be broken. But Dr. Straker, as I told you yesterday, is vehemently opposed to it: he fears the shock might kill you.”

“I cannot see why, Mr. Mordaunt. I agree with you; I am convinced that it would help me. In fact—of course I have no right to ask,” I said, meeting his eyes with all the appeal I could muster, “but would you be prepared to call upon Miss Ferrars at Gresham’s Yard, and try to persuade her to see me?”

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure, Miss Ashton; but Dr. Straker would never agree.”

“But supposing he is wrong? Should you not trust your own instinct? If it helps me recover my memory, and leads to my release, will he not forgive you? And have the largeness of heart to acknowledge that you were right and he was wrong? I should be eternally grateful,” I added, with another beseeching look.

“Miss Ashton, I only wish . . . The thing is, even if I were to defy him, Miss Ferrars has said that she won’t agree to it unless we can return her writing case.”

“But, as you said yourself, Mr. Mordaunt, if it helps me to remember what I did with it . . .”

He was plainly torn; his hands, clasped in his lap, were trembling.

“Something has just come to me,” I said, playing my last card. “About that writing case.”

“Yes, Miss Ashton?”

“‘Aunt Rosina’s will’: I don’t know what it means—the words just came into my head, but my heart insists that Miss Ferrars will understand them.”

My heart, in fact, was beating very fast, and my mouth was dry. I had gambled on his not recognising the name.

“I see. Do you think, Miss Ashton, that your memory is already returning? Dr. Straker will be most—”

“Please, Fre—Mr. Mordaunt; you promised you would not breathe a word of this conversation to him, until I have had time to reflect.”

“Of course not, if you wish it,” he said, regarding me with a sort of troubled adoration. “I shall do my utmost to persuade him—about Miss Ferrars—as if it were solely my own idea.”

My heart sank at “do my utmost.”

“But he will never agree; you said so yourself.” I had no need to exaggerate my disappointment.

“You are right,” he said, after a pause. “It is time I . . . I will not go behind his back, but I shall write to Miss Ferrars—I had better make sure she is at home—regardless of his response. And I shall certainly mention Aunt—Rosina, is it?—Aunt Rosina’s will.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I am very much in your debt. And now, I think, if you do not mind, I should like to return to my room, and rest for a while.”

He rose and held out his hand to help me up, and we stood for a moment facing each other, my hand still in his. He took a deep breath, as if about to make a declaration.

“You must know that I—this time I shall not fail you,” he said, restraining himself with palpable effort.

I smiled and thanked him again, and let my fingers brush across the palm of his hand as I released it, sternly repressing the thought that perhaps I was no better than Lucia.

I had intimated to Frederic that he might find me any day at about three o’clock, so long as the weather kept fine, reading by the fallen tree. He appeared that same afternoon, looking even paler than before.

“I cannot stay long,” he said, “but I wanted to tell you that my letter to Miss Ferrars will be in tomorrow morning’s post.”

“You have spoken to Dr. Straker, then?”

“Yes, and he was most displeased; even more so when he realised that I meant to write to Miss Ferrars, with or without his consent. He again accused me of—well, it does not matter. ‘I cannot prevent you from inviting Miss Ferrars to Tregannon House,’ he said, ‘but if any harm comes to Miss Ashton because of this, it will be upon your head. I have a good mind to move Miss Ashton back to the closed ward, for her own safety, but doubtless you will object to that, too. Very well; in the unlikely event that Miss Ferrars accepts, we will bring them together, under the most careful supervision. I repeat: upon your own head be it.’

“Neither of us alluded to it, but the implication was clear: he agreed only because Uncle Edmund could die at any time, and as the owner, I could make things very difficult for him—I hope I am not distressing you, Miss Ashton.”

“No, no, it is—only the thought of being confined again; I could not bear it.”

“I would not allow that, I assure you, unless you were to become—so violently agitated that there was no alternative. Indeed, I went further: I pressed him once more to lift the certificate. But there he is adamant. ‘If I did that,’ he said, ‘Miss Ashton would be off to London on the next train. She would go straight to Gresham’s Yard and make a scene. Miss Ferrars would summon a constable, and Miss Ashton would be hauled off to Bethlem. I hardly think she would consider that an improvement, do you?’”

“But I accept that I cannot be—” I stopped, realising that I had tied his hands by pledging him to secrecy.

“Yes,” said Frederic, “but he will not accept that, unless he is certain that your memory has returned.”

I had considered that possibility during the night: to tell Dr. Straker that I had remembered I was Lucia Ardent, exactly as she had presented herself to me. But he would want to check; he had already dismissed Lucia’s story as an obvious fabrication (as it surely was), and if he caught me in a lie, I would lose Frederic’s regard, and find myself back in Women’s Ward B.

Again I was tempted to present him with the wills and Rosina’s letters and say, here is the truth, you must decide. But would he—would any man—meekly hand over a lucrative private asylum to a certified lunatic, wholly within his power? Even if he was infatuated with her? The idea that I was the lawful owner of this vast estate was too much for me to hold in my mind; I could grasp it only in bewildering flashes. Regardless of what the law might say, did I really want to deprive Frederic of his inheritance? The question was unanswerable. I could not think beyond escaping, and recovering my own name and fortune from Lucia.

“—Miss Ashton?”

I realised that Frederic had been speaking.

“I beg your pardon,” I said. “There is—so much to take in.”

He gave me a searching glance, as if hoping to detect some personal meaning, and looked hastily away. In the fields by the wall, work continued as usual. A light breeze blew from the west, stirring the leaves overhead and carrying fragments of song from the workmen. Patches of sunlight drifted across the hills. I thought of all the anguished souls incarcerated a mere hundred yards away, and shivered.

“I must go,” he said. “And perhaps you should not stay too long; you must be getting cold. I shall let you know as soon as there is any news.”

I thanked him once more. He did not offer me his hand this time, but he stood for a moment gazing down at me. Then he squared his shoulders and walked away without looking back.

The following morning after breakfast, Mrs. Pearce, the matron, stopped me on my way out with the words I least wanted to hear: Dr. Straker wished to see me in my room. There I waited, imagining worse and worse consequences as the minutes ticked past. By the time he appeared in the doorway, I had resigned myself to being dragged away in chains, to the deepest, darkest cell in the asylum. But all he did was take my pulse—he seemed not to notice my agitation—and ask his routine questions about whether I had remembered anything more, to which I thought it safest to reply that I had not. I thanked him for moving me to the voluntary wing, and said that I felt better already for being able to walk amongst trees and open fields; he heard me out with his ironic smile and a faint inclination of his head, said he would look in again soon, and departed.

My relief, however, was tempered by—I could not tell exactly what—an atmosphere, an undercurrent, an uneasy feeling that his manner had been a little too casual, his habitual detachment too studied. Frederic, after all, had confronted him twice in the last few days. Did he really believe that I had not the faintest inkling of this? Or was he trying to lull me into a false sense of security?

Or was it simply my overwrought imagination running away with me? How could I be certain, for that matter, that Frederic had confronted him? Perhaps the only person I had succeeded in deceiving was myself.

Three days passed without my seeing Frederic; I told myself that it might be weeks before Lucia replied—if she ever did—but my spirits sank lower nonetheless. The voluntary patients—there seemed to be about a dozen of them, all much older than I—avoided me whenever possible; I wondered who had told them that I was still certified.

On the fourth morning, I resolved to visit the old stable, to see if it would suit my purpose. A fine, misty rain was falling, which made it more natural that I should hug my cloak around me and draw the hood close around my face as I set off along the path I had taken every afternoon. When I had gone about halfway to the wood, I knelt and pretended to remove a stone from my shoe, glancing behind me as I did so. There was no one following, but every window seemed alive with watchful eyes; the pressure on my spine did not relent until the path had carried me out of sight of the asylum.

Grey, drifting vapour hung low overhead, curling amongst the treetops. Sheep wandered in and out of patches of mist, their cries muffled by the damp. Beneath the wall, indistinct figures hunched over their spades.

You will be closely watched. Beyond the fearful promptings of my imagination, I had seen no sign of it. Could Dr. Straker really have stationed watchers all around the estate? How could he know which direction I would take?

I had only to imagine what I would have done in your place, Miss Ashton, to anticipate your every movement.

There was the fallen tree, and the path leading into the wood. Except for the distant labourers, there was still no one in sight as I passed beneath the canopy.

The trees grew even closer on this side. Some had been felled many years ago, and new ones had grown up around the stumps. I could not help leaving a distinct trail as I hurried along the path, flinching every time a twig snapped beneath my foot. Sooner than I expected, I emerged into a clearing in which stood a dark, ivy-covered mass, dripping with moisture. Frederic had described the stable as it had appeared on a sunlit afternoon; in that grey, murky light it was scarcely recognisable as a building. There was the broken lintel, with rubble heaped around a narrow opening.

I held my breath, listening. Though the asylum was no more than fifty yards away, I could hear only the dripping of water and the muted calls of birds. I moved reluctantly closer.

Frederic had said that the tapping sound came only when he was not listening for it. I knelt by the opening and tried to peer into the darkness within. A dank, chthonic smell wafted out at me—followed by a metallic clang.

I scrambled over the rubble and fled, realising too late that I was running in the wrong direction, with the noise still ringing in my head.

Not the sound of a murderer burying his victim, but the tower clock striking the hour.

As the last echoes died away, I caught a glimpse of black stonework amongst the trees ahead of me: the side—no, the back—of the original house. I picked my way through mounds of sodden litter until the path ended by the uneven remnants of a flagged walk. The rain was falling more heavily now, pattering over the leaves and splashing onto the stones.

No one has lived there for years. Many of the windows on the ground floor were choked with ivy; the panes above were black with grime. In places, where sections of the house had been built out from the rest, there was scarcely room to squeeze between the foliage and the crumbling masonry.

If I could find a way in, I thought, this might be just the place; no one, surely, would think of looking for me here. The first door I came to was massive, banded with rusty iron and quite immovable, but around the corner of a buttress, I found an alcove, about six feet square, with a door in the right-hand wall. Glancing up, I saw the tower looming overhead.

The door was narrow, arching to a point at the top, like the entrance to a vestry, with a massive keyhole below the latch, and a rusty iron ring hanging from a pivot in the centre. I lifted the latch and tugged, without much hope, but to my surprise it opened with only a rasp of hinges.

I stepped over the threshold, into a cylindrical stairwell, lit by a single window no more than a foot wide. Stone steps, deeply worn, spiralled upward into the gloom. There were no other doors.

Outside, the pattering of the rain increased to a roar. I have done nothing wrong yet, I told myself. If anyone catches me, I am simply looking for shelter.

After three complete circuits of the staircase, I came to an archway in the wall. The stairs continued upward, but I passed through the opening, into a bare stone chamber with an even narrower door set into the wall beside me.

Either the rain had stopped again, or the walls were so thick as to muffle the sound entirely. I grasped the handle, half hoping it would not turn. But this door, too, was unlocked; it opened halfway, and stopped against an obstruction.

All I could make out, at first, was a jumble of furniture, mostly chairs and tables and benches—no, church pews—stacked so close to the wall that only a narrow passage, leading away to my left, remained. Murky light filtered down from above; the pile was too high for me to see over.

I crept along the passage, wincing every time a board creaked, toward a strip of light—a window?—at the end. The floorboards were thick with dust, which clung to the damp hem of my cloak, leaving an all too visible trail. A few paces from where I had entered were two massive wooden doors, both immovable.

The oblong of light broadened as I approached; what I had taken for a sill was a railing, waist high, with solid oak panelling beneath. I emerged onto a gallery running the width of the building. The light was coming from lancet windows in the walls high above me. Through a circular hole in the floor, an open staircase spiralled downward.

I stole toward the balustrade and peered over, into what had once been a chapel, but was now a storeroom or a workshop of some sort. All of the windows below had been bricked up, as had the entrance; the only visible door opened into a vestry nearby. I remembered Frederic saying, “He calls it the temple of science,” and understood why there were no windows. I had blundered into the very heart of Dr. Straker’s domain.

Ranged around the walls were tables, benches, and cabinets bearing tools, bottles, racks of tubes, notebooks, coils of wire, and pieces of apparatus made up of brass wheels and polished rods and glass cylinders, with cables snaking away from them. A dozen or more oil lamps hung suspended from wires above the benches. Amidst all of this equipment were homelier touches: a teacup, a tantalus with a single glass beside it, a biscuit tin. A closet stood open; I could see clothes hanging from a rail, a tall hat on a peg, a pair of boots beneath. A long trolley, like a narrow bed on wheels, stood by the vestry door; it had two handles projecting from one end, and rails around the side: the sort of thing, it struck me, that might be used to transport an unconscious patient—or a corpse.

I became aware of a low, continuous humming, just above the threshold of perception. A swarm of bees, perhaps, trapped inside the wall? No, the sound was too constant; I could not tell where it was coming from, but there was a strange, underlying vibration to it that set my teeth on edge.

As I began to back away, I heard, from somewhere below, a key turning in a lock. I dared not run, and could only crouch below the balustrade as footsteps, heavy and confident, approached. The footsteps halted at the foot of the stairs, as it seemed; through the opening in the floor I heard a drawer open and close, followed by the sound of riffling paper. Then silence, until at last the footsteps retreated, the door closed, and the echoes faded into silence.

The rain kept up for several days, but every afternoon I put on my damp cloak and tramped about the grounds, approaching the meeting place from a different direction each time. Frederic came to find me on the third day, a Monday, to tell me that he had received a note from Miss Ferrars, saying that he might call upon her at Gresham’s Yard if he wished. He would be going up to London on Wednesday. Despite the pricking of my conscience, I would have been glad of his company, but he seemed to feel himself honour bound not to linger. It occurred to me, as he walked away, that a young man as susceptible as Frederic might easily fall in love with Lucia.

Through the interminable days and nights of waiting, I pored over my journal until I knew it by heart, and could almost convince myself that these were genuine memories; except that the gaps between the entries remained as blank as ever. I imagined, in a sort of waking nightmare, returning from a walk to find Dr. Straker with my journal in his hand, saying, in his cool, ironic way, “It is a fiction, woven out of your disordered mind. Those wills exist only in your imagination.” I had loved Lucia, and she had betrayed me, and yet, no matter how often I reread those passages, I could not feel as I knew I ought to feel, or think beyond the prospect of escape.

By Thursday the rain had cleared; I arrived at the fallen tree an hour early, and paced restlessly about until Frederic appeared, looking so disconsolate that I assumed the worst. He could muster only a wan shadow of his usual smile.

“Good afternoon, Miss Ashton; I am sorry to have kept you waiting. You will be pleased, I hope, to hear that Miss Ferrars is to visit us, a week from today.”

He sounded so funereal that I thought I must have misheard him.

“Has she agreed to see me, then?”

“Yes, Miss Ashton, she has. She seems to have quite forgiven you, and she hopes that her visit will do you good—though of course she also hopes that it will lead to the recovery of her writing case. She would happily have made her visit sooner; only Dr. Straker reminded me, before I left, that he would be away in Bristol on Monday and Tuesday, and so we settled upon the Thursday.”

He spoke as if his mind were not really upon what he was saying, and he would not meet my eye.

“I am truly grateful to you, Mr. Mordaunt, for all the trouble you have taken on my behalf. But—you do not seem very happy about it.”

“Well yes—no—it is only—no, it is nothing, I assure you.”

It is just as I feared, I thought. He has fallen in love with Lucia.

“No doubt Miss Ferrars is very charming,” I said. “I only wish I could remember her.”

“Well yes, Miss Ashton, she—no—that is—” he stammered, looking even more uncomfortable.

“I trust that she was not distressed—or displeased—by your visit.”

“No, not at all, Miss Ashton. She was most hospitable—and charming, as you say—only—”

It struck me that he was using “Miss Ashton” far more frequently than before, with a peculiar emphasis upon the “Ashton.”

“I wish you would tell me, Mr. Mordaunt, what is troubling you.”

“Only that—” He took a deep breath, and seemed to make up his mind. “Until yesterday, Miss Ashton, I had hoped—against all the evidence—that Dr. Straker might have been mistaken; that perhaps the woman he had met in London really was the imposter, as you so vehemently believed. You had given me such a vivid picture of your childhood on the cliffs; your mother, your aunt, the loss of the house, that I simply could not—”

He paused, groping for words. I felt as if I had swallowed a lump of ice.

“But now I have met Miss Ferrars—the physical resemblance between you is indeed remarkable—and heard her describing those very scenes, sometimes in far greater detail, and spoken to her uncle, and the maid, and heard all about you—Miss Ardent, as you called yourself—and your extraordinary powers of recall, and mimicry, and—well, I can hope no longer. She even invited me to accompany her on an errand to the haberdasher in the square; they were reminiscing about the winter before last, when she first came to London.”

Clever Lucia, I thought. She has made absolutely sure of him.

“I am sorry, Miss Ashton, but we must face facts. Dr. Straker has been saying all along that when your memory does return, your personality, your facial expressions, even your voice, may change beyond recognition. It will be quite painless, he assures me; you may not even realise it has happened. You will wake up one morning as a different person in the same body, with your true history returned to you. But you will not remember me, or anyone here; you will not even know who I am . . .”

He had been gazing directly at me as he spoke, but his voice broke on the last phrase, and he averted his eyes. After a long, paralysed interval, I heard myself speaking, as I had that winter’s morning in the library, with cold contempt.

“Never mind, Mr. Mordaunt. You will have Miss Ferrars to console you.”

His head shot up again.

“You surely cannot think—you do think. No, I cannot—I will not have it. Miss Ferrars is quite charming, yes, but I could never—it is you that I love, you that I have longed for since the day we met. I would infinitely rather you remained forever as you are. To me, you are the real woman, and Miss Ferrars a pale imitation. I will love you no matter how you may change—of that I am sure—but you will never love me. You will look back on this time—if you remember it at all—with horror, and upon me as one of your gaolers. Detest me if you will, but never, never doubt my love for you.”

He spoke with such passion, his face flushed, his hands gesturing eloquently, that I was moved in spite of myself; moved, but also exasperated beyond measure. Then why, why, why, I thought, can you not believe that Lucia is the imitation? I imagined him getting down on his knees, and my replying, I cannot marry you because we are cousins; because I have Mordaunt blood in my veins; because everything you are offering me is lawfully mine (though I do not think I want to claim it); and because I cannot return your passion. But he is not on his knees, I reminded myself, and you cannot afford to feel sorry for him.

“I do not think of you as my gaoler, Mr. Mordaunt, and I am truly grateful for what you have done for me. But you must understand that until I am released, I can think of nothing else.”

“Miss Ashton, you must not imagine that I cherish any false hopes,” he said earnestly, though his face suggested otherwise. “I should never have spoken, only—” An awkward silence followed.

“At what time next Thursday,” I asked, “do you expect Miss Ferrars to arrive?”

“She said she would take the early express, and she hopes to be here in time for luncheon. I have arranged for a fly to meet her at the station. She will stay with us that night and return the following day.”

“And—will you tell Dr. Straker that you have spoken to me?”

“Yes. In fact, he insisted that I should convey the news to you; he still believes that this was entirely my idea. Relations between us are—strained. But I find I do not greatly care. No doubt,” he added, staring bleakly at the distant hills, “we shall be back on our accustomed footing before long. I doubt I shall ever have cause to defy him again.”

There seemed to be nothing more to say, and after another awkward silence he rose, and, with a last, desolate, searching look, made his farewells and departed.

The following morning brought another summons from Dr. Straker, and an even longer wait before he appeared in the doorway of my room. My mouth was very dry, and I could feel my arm shaking as he took my wrist.

“You are agitated, Miss Ashton. Mr. Mordaunt has told you, I believe, that Miss Ferrars is to visit us. Is that, do you think, the reason for your agitation?”

“I—I cannot tell, sir.”

“You do understand, Miss Ashton, that you are under no obligation to see her? My first duty is to you, as my patient, and I will not have you exposed to unnecessary nervous strain.”

“But sir,” I pleaded, “I want to see Miss Ferrars; I shall be quite calm, I am sure of it. If I seem anxious, it is because—because I hope this meeting will lead to my release.”

“Mr. Mordaunt is certainly of that opinion,” he said drily. “Well, I shall allow it. You may speak to Miss Ferrars—in my presence, of course—but if you seem in the smallest degree distressed, I shall close the proceedings forthwith. And if you should change your mind in the meantime, do not hesitate to send for me—remembering that I shall be leaving for Bristol on Monday afternoon and will not return until Tuesday evening.”

He rose, and seemed about to leave, then paused by the door.

“I take it, speaking of remembering, that you still have no recollection of where you hid Miss Ferrars’ writing case.”

I was suddenly, acutely conscious of the oak chest, a mere three feet from where I was sitting. I felt sure I could smell leather and parchment. My eyes were irresistibly drawn toward the chest, even as I tried to keep them fixed upon the floor at my feet, pretending to reflect. The air was heavy with suspicion.

“I am afraid not, sir.”

“A pity. Well, good day to you, Miss Ashton. I shall look in again on Wednesday, if not before.”

His cool, sardonic smile seemed to linger as he closed the door behind him; the rhythm of his departing footsteps was exactly as I had heard it from the gallery above his workroom.

At a little before five o’clock on Monday, I was standing at the back of the old house, scanning the woods around me for signs of pursuit. Birds were making a great clamour, and there were constant rustlings and cracklings in the undergrowth around me. I could not get enough air, no matter how rapidly I breathed, and at every movement amongst the trees, my heart would give a great jolt and seem to stop altogether.

All afternoon I had waited beneath the copper beech by the forecourt, pretending to be immersed in a book, alternately wondering if the tower clock had stopped and wishing the quarters would not strike so frequently. The shadows were lengthening, and the evening chill beginning to descend, before the gatekeeper emerged from his lodge and opened the gate. A few minutes later I saw Dr. Straker cantering up the drive on a glossy bay horse. He passed through in a flurry of gravel, spurring his horse in the direction of Liskeard. The gatekeeper did not lock up after him but remained by the entrance. As the hoofbeats faded into the distance, I heard a rumble of wheels from the opposite direction.

A small black carriage, enclosed like a London hansom, turned in through the gate and pulled up in the middle of the drive, about twenty yards from where I was sitting. No one got out; the driver remained on his box. I could not tell if there was anybody within.

Nor could I afford to delay any longer. I rose to my feet, made a play of stretching, and set off across the grass, fighting the temptation to hurry or look back until I had passed out of sight of the carriage.

My original plan had been to entice Lucia away from the house, by way of hints dropped during our supervised conversation. She wanted the wills; I wanted my freedom. If she believed I was prepared to strike a bargain with her, she might slip out and meet me somewhere private. I would force her to change clothes with me, and then somehow imprison her for long enough for me to reach Plymouth, show the papers to Henry Lovell, and trust in my powers of persuasion. Lucia, or so I had persuaded myself, would not have risked an interview with him; far safer just to forge my signature on a letter whenever she needed money.

It had seemed a desperate enough scheme when I first thought of it; as the day approached, it looked altogether hopeless, but without a disguise of some sort, I would certainly be apprehended. I had thought of stealing into the servants’ quarters and taking a maid’s uniform, but every foray had ended at a locked door, until I realised that the key was already in my hand. Dr. Straker was not especially tall; dressed in the clothes from his workroom, I would have a far better chance of escape. If necessary, I would fill my pockets with biscuits and walk all the way to Plymouth. I had found a place on the boundary wall, on the far side of the wood, where the trees grew close enough for me to scramble onto the top.

If I found enough money for the train, I would leave at once. I had brought my writing case with me, secured beneath my dress with strips torn from a petticoat; the outline was visible, but my cloak concealed it. Otherwise, I would hide everything I needed and leave immediately after breakfast the following morning. I had excused myself from luncheon often enough that my absence would not be noticed until the evening, by which time I ought to be in Plymouth. And even if the alarm was raised earlier, they would be looking for a woman, not a man.

I reached the alcove in the wall, took one more fearful look round, and eased the door open. Before, the sound had been muffled by the rain; now, every creak of the hinges echoed like a gunshot. As I stepped inside, I thought I heard a twig snap somewhere nearby. But I dared not look back. I hastened up the stairs, through the door at the top, and on to the gallery. The muddy trail I had left ten days ago seemed quite undisturbed.

On legs that shook as though I had been stricken with palsy, I let myself down through the hole in the floor, with the whole flimsy staircase quivering in sympathy. Clothes, money, food, I told myself. The fear will not kill you unless you give in to it.

The space beneath the gallery floor was much darker. Several large pieces of machinery, partially covered by dust sheets, were ranged along the wall: they looked like massive spinning wheels except that the wheels were made of glass. A desk, littered with papers, stood in the corner by the staircase. The wall itself was blank except for a doorway at the far end.

Clothes, money, food. The closet door was shut, but not, to my overwhelming relief, locked. I took down a shirt, a waistcoat, and a frayed tweed suit, such as a countryman might wear for rough walking, wondering why he kept a wardrobe here. The shoulders were too big, and the sleeves too long, as were the trousers, but not outlandishly so, and his heavy tweed overcoat—with a scarf to cover my throat—would help to conceal the disparities. I felt in all the pockets, hoping for coins, but found only lint and fragments of paper.

The hat would have covered my ears if my hair, which I had pinned as high and as tightly as I could manage, had not held it up. I saw at a glance that the boots were far too large, but the cuffs of the trousers would cover my own shoes.

Money and food. The biscuit tin was half full of ginger biscuits, stale but perfectly edible; I crammed them all into the pockets of the overcoat and returned to the desk, where I draped the clothes over Dr. Straker’s chair, and rifled through every drawer, but I found only papers, many of them filled with elaborate diagrams and mathematical symbols. Every nerve was screaming, Take the clothes and go; but without the train fare, I would have to stay another night, or sleep in the open; a woman dressed as a man could not ask anyone for shelter.

I looked frantically around the room, wondering if there was anything I could take to a pawnbroker in Liskeard. But I had never pawned anything in my life, and all I could see were tools and scientific instruments, which were sure to arouse suspicion.

There was, however, a cabinet on the other side of the floor, with a drawer at the top. An invalid chair, with an opening in the seat like a commode, stood nearby; I was sure it had not been there ten days ago. As I approached, I saw that leather straps had been attached to the arms and legs: once secured, the occupant would not be able to move. I imagined, all too vividly, a patient in a fit of mania, teeth bared, face distorted with fury, straining to break loose.

Hanging from one of the handles was a curious piece of headgear, like a coronet made of thick brown leather, with black-coated wires trailing away from it. Inside the circlet were two polished metal discs, about the size of a half-crown and six inches apart.

Take the clothes and run.

I opened the drawer.

Inside were dressings and bandages, several stout leather straps, neatly rolled, some crescent-shaped pieces of gutta-percha, about the size of my hand, an open case of surgical instruments . . . and a fine silver chain, glittering faintly as I drew it out.

The key to my writing case.

Again I became conscious of that low, resonant hum, not so much a sound as a faint vibration coursing through my bones and teeth. I put the chain over my neck and ran, scooping up the clothes and clutching the hat by the brim as I scrambled back up the stairs, squeezed past the furniture and through to the antechamber. Should I change my clothes here, or in the chamber below? I would rather freeze in a ditch than stay another night within these walls.

Throwing the hat and the clothes down the stairwell, I followed unsteadily after. But at the lowest step, my foot caught in my skirts, and I went sprawling across the tangled clothing. My head struck the floor; dazzling pinpoints of light flashed before my eyes, and I lay for a few seconds unable to move, wondering if I had broken anything.

Escape. I dragged myself painfully to my feet and went over to the window to make sure there was no one outside. Only my blurred reflection, staring back at me through the grimy pane.

My reflection recoiled from me, its mouth opening in a soundless cry of surprise or alarm as darkness swallowed it.

I was woken by hands undoing—no, doing up—the buttons of my dress. A young woman was crouching over me. I had seen her last in the doorway at Gresham’s Yard, dressed in my favorite pale blue gown. Now she was wearing a grey travelling-dress and cloak exactly like my own. Her face blurred and re-formed; I wondered hazily if she might be a dream. As she rose to her feet, the cloak fell open, revealing my dragonfly brooch pinned to her bosom, its ruby eyes glowing like drops of blood.

Lucia.

And, clasped in her gloved hand, my writing case.

I tried to stand, but a wave of dizziness swept over me. She murmured something that might have been “I am sorry,” turned, and was gone.

Using the wall for support, I dragged myself to my feet and over to the doorway. She was already ten yards away, hastening toward the ruined stable; I would never catch her now. And even if I did, who would believe me? I was the lunatic; she was Miss Ferrars, and the writing case was hers, not mine. And soon, very soon, she would be the owner of Tregannon Asylum.

She had almost reached the far corner of the house when Dr. Straker, still in his riding clothes, appeared from behind a buttress and seized Lucia by the arm. I saw, as I drew back from the doorway, that he was steering her toward me.

I tried to gather up the clothes, but stooping made my head spin so badly that I feared I would faint again. I left them where they were, scrambled back up the stairs on my hands and knees, and into the stone chamber above. There I halted, crouched by the entrance, trying to control my breathing as voices echoed in the stairwell: Dr. Straker’s as cool and ironic as ever; Lucia’s shrill with fear.

“And what, pray, are my clothes doing here?”

“She had them.”

“I see. And where is she now?”

“I—she must have run away. Now please, you must let me go—”

“Perhaps she is within; I think we should make sure. You first, Miss Ferrars—or should I say, Miss Ardent?”

I heard a gasp from Lucia, and faint sounds of struggle.

“You may climb on your own, or be dragged, as you prefer. And do not try to escape me. All the other doors are locked.”

A sparrow could not have concealed itself in that featureless chamber. I had no choice but to retreat through the inner door, which I dared not close, along the dark passage, and onto the gallery. Daylight was fading fast.

Should I go on down to his workroom? I darted toward the stairs—but where would I hide? I fled along the gallery instead, boards squeaking beneath my feet. There was no passage at the far end: the furniture was heaped against the wall. Too late to go back. I squeezed into the only possible hiding place—beneath a small table, with chairs stacked on either side of it—and huddled there, quivering like a cornered animal. If Dr. Straker came even halfway along the gallery, he was bound to see me.

The floor trembled. I heard muffled voices, then the sound of a lock turning over. My last chance of escape had gone. The footsteps drew nearer.

“Down the stairs, if you please.” Though he was speaking quietly, Dr. Straker’s voice rang through the chapel. I could feel the staircase shaking as they descended. Lucia was making incoherent sounds—or sobs—of protest.

To hear without being able to see was more than I could bear. I crawled forward, keeping close against the side wall, and raised my head until my eyes were just above the balustrade.

Dr. Straker was standing with his back to me, one hand clamped around Lucia’s arm, my writing case in the other. He set the case down on a bench and steered Lucia toward the invalid chair.

“Pray take a seat, Miss Ardent. I am afraid the accommodations are rather limited.”

She struggled, but, with a single deft twist, he forced her down into the chair and stooped over her right arm as she flailed at him with her left. Within a few seconds he had her other wrist pinned and strapped; she kicked wildly and tried to bite him, but her legs were secured in turn, and then her upper arms, until she could only writhe helplessly as he stood back and straightened his coat.

“You will feel no pain, I assure you. It is not often that I have the luxury of working with an intelligent, fully sentient subject, let alone one to whom ethical considerations do not apply. I shall make the most of the opportunity.”

“Please, I beg of you, let me go! You have the papers; I promise, on my life, we will never speak of it to a living soul.”

“Your promise, I fear, is not a currency I can accept. Blackmailing Edmund Mordaunt was one thing; attempting to blackmail me was quite another. It amused me to let you believe that you had deceived me as you deceived your unfortunate—cousin, is she not? Miss Ashton, as she is destined to remain. Whereas you will continue in the role of Miss Ferrars—the late Miss Ferrars, if I may anticipate a little.

“And now I must go in search of Miss Ashton. We shall renew our acquaintance after dark; I regret I cannot make you more comfortable, or prescribe anything stronger than a mild sedative. A few drops of laudanum, perhaps? No? Then I must leave you. And please do not waste your breath in calling for help; these walls are immensely thick. You could scream all night, and not a soul would hear you.”

He picked up the writing case, and seemed to hesitate. I heard him murmur something that sounded like “Best not risk it.” Then he turned abruptly and strode toward the stairs. I shrank into the corner beneath the balustrade, not daring to retreat in case the floor creaked. But the staircase did not move. I heard a drawer open, followed by a muttered exclamation. The drawer closed again; a key turned in a lock.

I peeped over the edge again and saw him standing over Lucia. The writing case was no longer in his hand.

“Did you take the key?” he said sternly.

She shook her head wildly.

Caught between the terror of being seen, and the terror of not being able to see him, I dared not move my head. He moved to a panel on the wall and ran his hand across it. All around the room, yellow light sprang from what I had thought were oil lamps, shaded so as to direct their illumination downward, leaving the gallery in near darkness.

He stood in the middle of the floor, surveying his domain, and then began to move around the room, glancing under benches and opening cupboard doors—including that of the closet, which I had, after all, remembered to shut—until he passed directly beneath me. I heard the rasp of sheeting being pulled off the machines below.

My only chance, I thought, is to crawl back to my hiding place as soon as I feel his tread on the stairs, and pray that the sound of his ascent will cover any noise I make. But again the staircase did not move; he reappeared beneath the far end of the gallery and completed his circuit of the room.

Once more he paused beside Lucia, so that his shadow fell across her face. He drew a watch from his waistcoat and considered it, frowning. Then he raised his head, scanning the gallery. I held my breath.

“No,” he said at last, “I must not delay.”

He crossed to the panel. Lights around the room began to go out, one by one, until only a lamp above the vestry door remained. With a mocking sketch of a bow to Lucia, he drew out a bunch of keys, strode to the vestry door, unlocked it and departed, turning the key behind him. The echoes flitted around the chapel, fading into silence.

My first thought was to remain where I was, wait for his return, and try not to make a sound while he was doing—whatever he meant to do to Lucia. Then, perhaps, I could escape when everything was quiet. But he would surely go straight to my room, and then the hunt would be up. And how long could it be before he decided to make a thorough search of the gallery?

No; my only chance was to recover my writing case, find a way out, and hope that Dr. Straker’s clothes were still where I had left them. Dressed as a man, I might pass for one of my pursuers.

I rose stiffly to my feet and moved unsteadily along the gallery and down the stairs.

“Georgina! For pity’s sake, help me!”

I did not look at her but went straight across to the other door I had seen. It was heavy and close-fitting; when I tried the handle, it did not even move against the frame.

Keys. Or an implement; something heavy enough to break open the gallery door. Or to use as a weapon against Dr. Straker. The light was too dim to see into cupboards and drawers. I thought of trying the panel on the wall, but if he was watching from outside and saw the light . . . I moved from bench to bench, ignoring Lucia’s pleas.

“Be quiet,” I said as I passed behind the chair. “If you speak again, I will bind your mouth shut.”

She began to weep instead. I would not look at her.

After a hasty circuit of the room, I had found a hammer, a chisel, a heavy screwdriver, a candle and a packet of vestas. Fury at this woman I had never truly known, except through the pages of my journal, had kept the worst of my fear at bay. I turned to face her at the last.

“Georgina! I did love you, I swear! I would have come back for you!”

“You are incapable of love,” I said. “Or truth.” I stood looking down at her, trying to recover something of those lost weeks, but nothing would come. Terror had blurred the likeness that had deceived so many. Her eyes were glazed; the kohl had run in dark, glistening streaks.

“At least untie me,” she pleaded. “Give me a chance of life.”

“What chance did you give me? I would sooner release a serpent.”

Her head sagged forward; the chair shook to her trembling.

“What will he do to me?” The words were scarcely audible.

“He may tear your heart out and roast it before your eyes, for all I care.” But then I thought, If I leave her thus, I am no better than she is.

“If I escape him, I will save you if I can. For a prison cell.”

“Let me loose for a moment, or I shall soil myself.”

“You have soiled yourself already,” I said, and turned my back on her.

It was so dark in the corner by the desk that I had at last to light the candle. I worked the blade of the chisel into the gap between the drawer and the frame and pounded it with the mallet—the noise was so deafening that I expected Dr. Straker to appear at any moment—until the whole front of the drawer broke loose with a rending of timber. My hands were shaking uncontrollably; it took me an age before the writing case was safely buttoned inside my dress. And then I could not manage the lighted candle as well as the tools; I blew out the flame and dragged myself up the stairs, pursued by Lucia’s cries.

With the tools clutched to my bosom, I was forced to edge sideways into the darkness between the wall and the heaped furniture. I had gone only a few steps when the hammer slipped from my grasp. Stooping blindly to retrieve it, I lost my balance and fell against the stack, dropping the candle.

An ominous tremor ran through the floor. I was scrambling back toward the gallery when the whole pile collapsed with a roar like thunder. Something struck me between the shoulder blades, and I was flung violently forward, into oblivion.

I knew, as the throbbing in my head became too insistent to ignore, that I had been unconscious for a long time. I was lying on my back, in darkness, with one arm against a stack of chairs and the other jammed against a wall.

I grasped the rung of a chair. The whole pile shifted alarmingly as I levered myself onto my side, wincing at every movement, then rose painfully to my feet and tested my limbs. There was a cold, sticky patch on my temple, which stung like fire when I touched it, but nothing seemed to be broken. If I could find another way out, I might still escape.

As I emerged onto the gallery, I heard, far above me, the tower clock striking the half hour. But it was surely much too dark for half past six; it must be half past seven. They would have been hunting me for an hour at least.

On the western side, the windows still glowed with a dim, purplish light, which seemed to float in the upper part of the chamber. All was deathly quiet, except for the pounding of my heart, and a faint singing in my ears. Or was it the vibration I had felt before?

Below, the lamp still burned by the vestry door. Lucia’s white, terrified face peered upward; the marks left by the kohl looked like streaks of blood.

If I were to hide beneath a bench nearby, I might be able to slip out while Dr. Straker was occupied—I shuddered in spite of myself—with Lucia. But I could not descend without her seeing me; she would surely betray me if she thought it might save her life.

No; the safest thing would be to remain hidden up here until he had—finished with her. When daylight came, I might be able to move enough of the debris to reach the gallery door.

The invalid chair creaked. Lucia was fighting to free herself, straining until her eyes stood out in their sockets and the chair rocked back and forth on its wheels. She forced her head forward, struggling in vain to reach the straps with her teeth, and at last collapsed into harsh, choking sobs.

No, I thought, no; I cannot bear it. My feet had carried me to the stairs, without the slightest notion of what I meant to do, and my hand was upon the rail, when I heard a lock turn over. The vestry door flew open; Dr. Straker appeared, and strode across to the panel without so much as a glance at Lucia. Lights sprang up along the wall behind her. He moved on to a black cabinet nearby, opened the door, and reached inside; I heard a series of rapid clicks, like a ratchet, followed by a flash of blue light.

“Well, Miss Ardent,” he said, speaking over her shoulder, “you have caused me trouble enough for one night. Miss Ashton is still at large; we will recapture her soon enough, but I have no more time to spend on you.”

Lucia tried to speak, but it came out as a sob.

“You will feel nothing, I promise you; nothing at all,” he said, turning back to the cabinet. “It may comfort you to know that your death, at least, will serve some useful purpose. Your body—or, as the world will believe, Miss Ferrars’ body—will be found in the wood tomorrow morning. Heart failure—regrettable in one so young, but then her mother had a weak heart. Foolish young women will persist in wandering about strange woods at night, exposing themselves to shocks of all kinds—if you will forgive the expression . . .”

Lucia was making a low, keening sound, like a wounded animal in its death throes. He took the leather coronet in both hands, pressed it down on her head until the outer band was almost covering her eyebrows, and tightened it at the back, with the wires looping down from the chair. Then, from the bench, he picked up a small dark box, with more wires attached to it. He came around the chair and stood looking down at the terrified Lucia, with the wires trailing behind him. Then he raised his right hand in a gesture of finality.

“No!!” My voice rang through the tower. Dr. Straker spun round, scanning the gallery.

“Miss Ashton, is it not?”

“Yes,” I said hopelessly.

“Pray descend, and join us. You have nothing to fear, I assure you.”

I did not reply.

“Now please, Miss Ashton, be sensible. This apparatus is capable of every degree of effect, from a faint tingling sensation in the temples to instant death. I give you my word of honour that you will suffer only the mildest of seizures: you will wake tomorrow and recall nothing of these—unfortunate events. Frederic will have learnt a valuable lesson, and will, I am sure, remain just as devoted to you. Indeed, we may even anticipate your becoming mistress of Tregannon Asylum: a poetic irony I shall savour.

“As for Miss Ardent here, you cannot possibly care what becomes of her. I suggest you avert your eyes.”

Lucia appeared to have fainted with terror; she lay slumped in the chair, her head lolling sideways, her eyes closed. Now that all hope had gone, I felt strangely calm.

“If I escape you,” I said, “you will be hanged for murder.”

“So be it,” he said, and brought his hands together.

Lucia’s body convulsed so violently that I thought her spine had snapped. Whatever sound she made was lost in my own cry of horror and despair.

“Miss Ashton, Miss Ashton, calm yourself. Think of all the lives that may be saved—your own included—by this machine. We must all die, sooner or later, and some lives are not worth prolonging. So long as she lived, my life’s work was in jeopardy. You might even say that she died in the cause of science, that others might live longer and happier lives. The greatest good of the greatest number, Miss Ashton: it is the best we can hope for.”

He bent over Lucia and removed the coronet from her lifeless head. From the wreckage at my feet, I managed to free a piece of wood about three feet long. More lights came on; he tilted one of the shades so that the light caught my face.

“Now really, Miss Ashton, this is sheer foolishness. The last thing I wish is to cause you pain. You shall wake tomorrow, I promise you, feeling better than you did the first time; I shall reduce the current to ensure it.”

I moved closer to the opening in the floor, grasping the piece of wood with both hands, and placed myself so that I could bring it down on his head without striking the railing. My unnatural calm had deserted me; I was trembling more than ever.

“How did you know—the first time?” I said.

“Ah, well . . . I thought it best not to mention that you did come to see me, on the night of your arrival, with a most affecting tale about Felix Mordaunt, and the Wentworth sisters—you seemed excessively anxious about your late cousin’s parentage—and their testamentary arrangements. If you had known that Clarissa Wentworth had been blackmailing Edmund Mordaunt for the past twenty years, you might have been more circumspect. I myself knew nothing of this until last spring, when Edmund confessed to me that he had claimed the estate under the terms of a will he knew to be null and void. And, as he soon discovered, Clarissa Wentworth knew it too. She came to him with what appeared to be a copy of Felix Mordaunt’s last will and testament, threatening to produce the original if he did not make her a handsome allowance. To this he agreed, on condition that she lived abroad.

“He never dared called her bluff, but I had no such inhibition. I wrote to tell her that there would be no more money, only the certainty of imprisonment for blackmail if she ever dared contact us again. All would have been well if she and her daughter had not crossed your path, but as it was . . .

“Of course, I could not allow you to leave, and so I brought you here. It was a textbook demonstration of the apparatus; all it lacked was a professional audience. My one mistake was to assume that you had left your writing case in your room, but when that wire arrived, purportedly from your uncle, I saw how the game might be played. I have a gambler’s instinct, Miss Ashton, and am not averse to risk: I chose to play it long. I pretended to believe that Lucia Ardent was indeed Georgina Ferrars; I knew that sooner or later she would have to come here in search of those papers—where did you hide them, by the way?—and so it has transpired. Frederic’s falling in love with you did complicate matters rather, but I was able to turn even that to my advantage. He brought Lucia Ardent to me, thinking he was doing your bidding, when in fact he was doing mine: letting her believe that I would be away this afternoon was the surest way of luring her here unannounced.

“All that remains, Miss Ashton, is to relieve you of these unpleasant memories. You will come to no harm, my word upon it. So kindly lay down that chair leg, and descend.”

If you faint, you will die. I cast frantically around for something, anything that might delay him, and remembered Frederic saying, “Two have died in the past year.”

“Why should I trust you? You have murdered three people already.” My mouth was so dry that I could scarcely form the words.

“What do you mean?” he said sharply, pausing in midstride.

“Your two patients who died of seizures. Frederic told me.”

“Are you saying that he knows?”

“He—he suspects.”

Dr. Straker stared up at me.

“No,” he said at last, “I don’t believe you. Frederic is incapable of concealing anything from me.”

“But I know,” I said. “You have just admitted it, and now you mean to murder me.”

“Upon my honour, Miss Ashton, you are mistaken! You may call this murder if you will,” he said, gesturing toward Lucia’s body, “though I prefer to think of it as self-defence; she would happily have murdered you. But the others, no; I meant to cure, not kill them. Both men were in the grip of incurable melancholia, and had been so for years. Both had tried repeatedly to end their own lives; one had spent more than half his adult life in a straitjacket. And we have—or had—no effective treatment for such patients. None whatsoever. For all my experience and training—in theirs and so many other cases—I might as well have been the proprietor of a country hotel.

“And then—why should I not tell you, since you will not remember?—I had been experimenting with galvanic stimulation of the brain, and thought I might as well try it upon the younger of the two. With the dynamo recently installed, I had all the power I needed at my disposal, and also the means of controlling it precisely. At the accepted levels, the treatment had no effect whatever, but as I increased the voltage, he began to report some relief. The benefit, however, was fleeting. I raised the level still further—and induced a seizure.

“When my patient regained consciousness, he had lost all memory of the treatment, and of the fortnight preceding it; so far as he could recall, he had never set foot in this room. And for the first time in years, he was free of his affliction; the black cloud had lifted from his mind. The remedy that had eluded so many had been delivered into my hands.

“But I have seen too many false dawns. I watched, and waited, and kept my counsel, and all too soon, the darkness began to encroach again. I decided to risk another treatment, and this time, the seizure proved fatal.

“Judge me if you will, Miss Ashton, but what else could I have done? On the one hand was the certainty that, without my intervention, the man was doomed to a life of torment and would sooner or later make away with himself. On the other was at least the possibility of a cure. I dared not confide in anyone; if the Commissioners had heard of it, we might have lost our licence. But I vowed that my patient’s death would not be in vain.”

Dr. Straker’s gaze had not left my face. He was standing no more than five paces from the foot of the stairs, his head thrown back. He seemed to be summoning all of his eloquence; his voice had grown louder as he went on, until it echoed like a preacher’s in the darkness overhead. Surely, I thought, the attendants must be searching the grounds for me? Clutching my makeshift weapon, I kept as still as I could, praying that someone would overhear him.

“For the next few months, I devoted every moment I could spare to testing and refining the apparatus. I felt certain there must be a level at which the memory of past suffering would be purged altogether, the mind cleansed of its morbid tendencies, the patient freed to begin life anew—and so I ventured to try it upon the older man. You may recoil, Miss Ashton, but consider: you can establish how much power it takes to stun a rat, and how much more to kill it. But you cannot ask the rat if it recalls the shock, or whether its state of mind is in any way improved. For that, you must have a human subject: how else can the science of mind ever advance?

“This time I proceeded with the utmost caution, raising the voltage so gradually that he recovered from the initial seizure within minutes, but still with no recollection of what had happened. And again, the relief from melancholia was short-lived. I induced two more, at slightly higher voltages, and was on the verge of proving my theory, when—it was a fault in the apparatus, a fault I have since eliminated, but sadly too late for my patient.

“But I had kept my vow; their deaths were not in vain, Miss Ashton, for I had learnt exactly how much power I could safely employ, and I had perfected my apparatus, albeit at grievous cost. And so, when it became necessary to—eliminate your memory of certain events—I was able to proceed with confidence. It was, as I said, a textbook demonstration; I only wish the Commissioners could have witnessed the proceedings.

“And now, Miss Ashton, now that I have been absolutely candid, you must be able to see that I mean you no harm. I understand your reluctance, but you must think of the greater good. If I were to release you now, my work would be lost, my reputation ruined, and Tregannon Asylum bankrupted. Frederic would lose his inheritance; and besides all that, I should very likely be hanged for murder. Whereas you need only undergo a brief, painless treatment for all these unpleasant consequences to be averted.

“Now—will you come down, or must I fetch you?”

The floor seemed to be dropping away beneath my feet. I dared not reply, for fear of betraying my weakness.

“No? Then I fear I must disarm you. You have the advantage of position, but I have always fancied myself at singlesticks. I shall try not to hurt you any more than—”

He was interrupted by the jangling of a bell on the wall behind him.

“That will be Frederic; I told him my engagement in Bristol had been cancelled. He knows not to ring unless the matter is urgent, but it will have to wait.”

Crossing to a stand by the vestry door, he drew out a heavy blackthorn stick and moved toward the stairs. All the blood seemed to drain from my body.

The bell rang again, more insistently. Muttering irritably, he strode over to it and stabbed with his finger at a bell-push.

“That should silence him.”

“But now he knows you are here,” I said desperately. I took a deep breath and cried, “Frederic!” thinking he must be close by, but Dr. Straker merely laughed.

“That is an electric bell, Miss Ashton. Frederic is in the asylum; if you had a steam whistle, he would not hear you.”

“But he knows I have escaped; he will wonder why you are not directing the search.”

“He may wonder all he likes. You will be found unconscious in the wood, close by Miss Ferrars’ body, as it will seem; he will blame himself for defying me.”

In a few strides he had reached the foot of the stairs. The railing shook; I leant forward, raising the length of wood, and flung it like a spear at his upturned face. He tried to fend it off, but it struck him lengthwise across the forehead; his stick clattered to the floor, and he slid back down the stairs, clutching at the railing. I was back at the head of the stairs with another piece in my hand, shaking like a leaf but determined now to survive, before he had recovered his balance.

“You leave me no choice,” he said, breathing hard. “I meant every word: I would have spared your life, but you have made that impossible.”

He drew a key from his waistcoat pocket, turned toward his desk, and froze.

“I should have known better. Throw down those papers while you still have the chance.”

I made no reply. He moved out of sight beneath the gallery, and I heard the scrape of a key. When he reappeared, he had a pistol raised in his right hand.

“You cannot escape me, Miss Ashton. I promise I will not shoot you if you come quietly.”

I flung the wreckage at him and recoiled from the opening. The crash reverberated around the tower; but the echoes did not cease. Someone was pounding on the vestry door.

“Damnation,” he muttered. There was a brief silence, followed by the sound of rapid footsteps as the hammering resumed. I peeped over the balustrade, just as he turned to look up at me. His face was very pale, and there was a smear of blood across his forehead.

“Be silent, and you may yet live,” he said, slipping the pistol into his coat pocket. A moment later he had reached the door, but he did not open it.

“Frederic!” he shouted. “What is the meaning of this?”

I heard a muffled reply but could not make out the words.

“Go back to the house! I will join you shortly!”

The reply evidently did not please him.

“Frederic! I insist that you return to the house!”

Another flurry of hammering.

He turned the key in the lock and braced himself. The door, I remembered, opened outward: he evidently meant to force Frederic back and confront him on the other side. But the door was wrenched from his grip, and Frederic, lantern in hand, burst into the room.

“Dr. Straker, you must come now! We have searched every . . .”

He set down his lantern, took a few tentative steps toward the invalid chair, and froze, transfixed by the sight of Lucia’s body.

“In God’s name, sir, what have you done?”

Dr. Straker’s hand went to his coat pocket. I tried to scream but could not utter a sound.

“She would have ruined us—everything we have worked for.”

Frederic turned to face him and caught sight of the pistol in his hand, the barrel downward to the floor.

“You—you murdered her?”

“If you had only obeyed me, you need never have known.”

Frederic took a step toward him. Dr. Straker half raised the pistol. Then his shoulders sagged, and his hand fell to his side.

“Enough,” he said wearily. “Miss Ferrars has defeated me.”

He contemplated the weapon for a moment, and with a faint, ironic smile, laid it carefully on the bench beside the lantern.

“Frederic,” I said, finding my voice at last. He stared as if mesmerised while I descended, weak from the reaction. Dr. Straker, too, stood motionless until I had come up beside Frederic. Then he bowed to me, extended his hand to Frederic (who shook it mechanically), and crossed to the cabinet on the wall, taking up the leather coronet as he passed.

“You should leave now,” he said, settling the coronet over his head and turning to the cabinet. With wires trailing from his head and hands, he looked like the high priest of some bizarre sect, dedicated to the worship of electricity. The vibration crept back into my bones, gathering power as I watched. Frederic stood mute. I opened my mouth to protest, but the words died on my lips. Dr. Straker raised his right hand and was flung into the air, where he seemed to hang for an instant, his arms outstretched and smoke curling from his temples, before he crashed to the floor.

The vibration did not cease. It rose in pitch and volume until it sounded like a swarm of angry hornets. Flames burst from the cabinet, followed by a vicious blue flash; then silence.

All the lights went out, except for the lantern and the yellow flames licking at the wall. Acrid fumes caught at my throat; I smelt burnt hair and flesh.

“We must run,” said Frederic, waking from his trance and urging me toward the door. I stopped beside the chair, looking down at Lucia. Her cloak had fallen open again, revealing my brooch; I had not given it a thought until that moment.

“We cannot leave her,” I said.

“We must. She is beyond our help; we will never get her through the tunnel.”

I went to unpin my brooch, and found that I could not bear to.

“Please let us try.”

“Then we must leave by the other door.”

He darted across the room, returning with the lantern and a bunch of keys.

“Let me,” I said, and wheeled her toward the far corner, where I held the lantern while Frederic tried one key after another. Burning fragments spilled from the cabinet, sending flames licking along the bench. As the lock turned over, I heard a muffled explosion, followed by a flare of white light. Liquid fire raced across the floor; I caught a glimpse of Dr. Straker’s body lying in a sea of flame.

“This way!” cried Frederic, slamming the door behind him. The chair lurched and swayed; I had a fleeting impression of rough stone walls, mottled with damp, as we stopped at the last door. Again I held the light while he wrestled with bolts and bars. Lucia’s head was hanging over the side of the chair; as I leant forward to straighten it, I saw the flicker of a pulse—faint, but unmistakable—in her throat.

We emerged into a confusion of lights, and voices shouting above the clangour of fire bells. Every window in the tower was pulsing with a fierce orange glow; men with lanterns converged upon us as we wheeled Lucia toward the dark bulk of the asylum. Someone recognised Frederic and called for orders.

“Dr. Straker is dead!” he shouted. I could barely hear him above the roar of the fire. “Too late to save . . . Bring water . . . Demolish the cloister and defend the house . . . Run to the wards . . . Get the patients ready . . . Evacuate in case it spreads.”

A window burst in a shower of glass, and smoke boiled upward; the noise of the fire redoubled.

“Round to the voluntary wing,” said Frederic. “They can take her up to the infirmary from there. If it’s safe.”

We hastened along the gravel walk between the two buildings and halted within sight of the entrance I had left only a few hours before. The old house had been dark as we passed, but now the upper window nearest the tower began to glow, and then the next, and the next. Frederic was shouting to someone nearby. Two attendants ran up and hurried Lucia away; a hand plucked at my sleeve, and I saw that it was Bella, with Frederic urging me to follow. I had forgotten that I was bloodstained, dishevelled, and filthy; I had forgotten even my exhaustion, but now the weight of it descended as if my bones had turned to lead. Leaning on Frederic’s arm, I heard him say something about a bed in the stables, and wondered if he meant me to sleep in the ruin, until we set off along the side of the building, toward the main gate.

Doors were opening all along the wall ahead of us, with people spilling out of them in every form of attire from dress clothes to nightshirts: doctors, lunatics, voluntary patients and attendants, mingled indiscriminately in the glow of the burning tower, swarming into the night.

I woke in a strange bed, with a coarse blanket prickling my neck, feeling as if I had fallen down a staircase. For a few terrible moments I was back in the infirmary, with the nightmare beginning again. Then a chair creaked and I opened my eyes, to find myself in a whitewashed attic room, with rain pattering against the window, my brooch and writing case on a little table by the bed, and Bella sitting beside me. The asylum, she told me, had been saved, but Mr. Edmund had died from the shock of it all; Mr. Frederic was the master now, and very anxious to see me. “And yes, miss”—it was plain she did not know what to call me—“the other lady” was alive, though still unconscious; they had carried her across to the infirmary as soon as it was safe.

At first I could barely walk, but after a perilous descent to the tack room below, the worst of the stiffness had begun to wear off. I declined, with a shudder, Bella’s offer to fetch an invalid chair, and settled for an umbrella instead. Everything looked exactly the same, even to the distant figures labouring by the boundary wall, but the sour, acrid reek grew stronger, reminding me of the fogs around Gresham’s Yard. I made my way slowly down to the far corner of the asylum and stood gazing at the devastation. All that remained of the old house was a jagged, roofless shell. Wisps of smoke still curled from the wreck of the tower; the surrounding trees were blackened and scorched.

I shivered, recalling my last glimpse of Dr. Straker, and thinking how much ruin and anguish would have been spared if Felix Mordaunt had never made that will, or, indeed, if he and Rosina had never met . . . but then I would not be standing here, with my writing case in my hand, trying to decide what I should do about those wills. The rain had all but ceased; I lowered the umbrella and drifted into a reverie, from which I was woken by the sound of Frederic’s voice.

“Miss Ferrars, I am delighted to see you up and about so soon.”

His suit was stained and crumpled, his face grey with exhaustion, but he smiled nonetheless. There was an air of quiet resolution—or was it resignation?—about him that I had not seen before.

“Mr. Mordaunt; I was sorry to hear of your uncle’s death.”

“You need not be; he was in constant pain and would not have lived much longer. And . . . he was not an affectionate man. Or, as I discovered this morning, a prudent one. He had been withdrawing large sums for many years, with no explanation and nothing to show for the money. The estate is mortgaged to the hilt; the sale of the asylum will barely cover its debts.

“So much for my promise to provide for you,” he said wryly, “let alone . . . But enough of this. There is so much I don’t understand, about you, and Miss Ardent, and why Dr. Straker acted as he did . . .”

“It was for these,” I said, handing him the wills and the marriage certificate. “And all for nothing.”

We talked most of the day by the fire in his private sitting room. I gave him Rosina’s letters to read, but said nothing of what I had felt for Lucia, who was lying, still unconscious, in the infirmary, only a few doors away. We were now, as cousins, on intimate terms. I had wondered if the discovery would change his feeling for me, but it plainly had not, and the memory of his impassioned declaration hovered between us.

I offered to burn the wills, thinking he might salvage something from the wreck of his fortune, but he would not have it.

“No, Georgina, the estate is yours by right, moral as well as legal, and if anything can be salvaged, you shall have it. Uncle Edmund was a thief and a hypocrite—when I think of all those lectures on morality!—and I will not profit from his wickedness. Not, I fear, that there is likely to be any profit. An asylum is a business like any other, and when the world hears of Dr. Straker’s crimes, its reputation will be lost. And to think I worshipped that man . . . the ruler of a madhouse, and he was mad himself.”

“Frederic,” I said hesitantly, “have you told anyone else about—what you saw last night?”

He shook his head.

“Then I think the secret should be ours alone. Not because of the asylum’s reputation; but if word of that machine gets out, someone else will try to build one.”

“But then the world will believe he was a great man.”

“I think that is the lesser of two evils,” I said. “Perhaps he began with the best intentions. But with so much power in his hands . . .”

“And the patients he killed? What of them?”

“We cannot disclose that,” I said, “without revealing how they died. And then more lives will be sacrificed to someone else’s ambition.”

We both fell silent, staring into the flames.

“I see what you mean,” he said at last, “about keeping silent. Dr. Straker acted alone, so there is no question of defrauding the buyer.”

“Then I shall sign the property over to you. I insist upon it, Frederic; I have a small income of my own, and I will not see you left with nothing.”

“Then I shall insist upon sharing with you—if there is anything to share.”

Another silence followed.

“What will you do now?” he asked. His tone was studiously matter-of-fact.

“I shall go first to Plymouth, to see Mr. Lovell about the transfer—and find out how much of my money Lucia has stolen. And then I suppose I must call at Gresham’s Yard to collect whatever is left of my belongings. So far as Uncle Josiah is concerned, I have been away only a few days, and it would be pointless trying to tell him otherwise; he will be huffish enough about having to pay another boy to help him in the shop.”

“And then?”

“Then I shall return to Plymouth. Mr. Lovell kindly invited me to stay with his family at Noss Mayo, and if the invitation still stands . . . Don’t misunderstand me, Frederic; I know Mr. Lovell only through the pages of my journal, but he was kind to me, and I should like to rest for a while in a place where I can walk, and think, and be alone, and say as much or as little about myself as I choose. And you, Frederic? What will you do?”

“I shall look after things here until the asylum has been sold. And then, with luck, the new owners will keep me on.”

“But Frederic—”

“I know, I know; I should go out in the world. But this is all I know, and if I have a vocation, it lies here—or somewhere like this. I can at least try to ensure that, in future, no superintendent ever wields such power; if I achieve nothing else, I shall not have lived in vain.”

Though he strove to repress it, the note of desolation was unmistakable.

“Frederic,” I said gently, “you told me, five days ago, that you loved me, and I fear that your decision to remain here has—something to do with that.”

“Yes,” he said simply. “I did, and I do. But it is impossible, for every possible reason, and so—”

“No, Frederic; it is impossible only for one reason. I love you as if you were my brother—but not as a woman should love the man she is to marry. If I did, I should not care a straw about money, or Mordaunt blood, or anything else. But I do not want you to cherish false hopes of me, and lose the chance of happiness because of it. You have a loving spirit—I said so at the beginning, and I feel it all the more deeply now—and you ought to marry. You will always have me as your friend, your cousin, but I cannot be your wife.”

“If I had been—if I had stood up to Dr. Straker at the very beginning . . .”

“Frederic, Frederic, there is nothing you could have done, or not done; you must believe me. Perhaps you feel that you have given your heart to me, and can never love anyone else, but you will—it is why you must go out in the world, as you put it, even if your work is here . . .”

“You sound as though you speak from experience,” he said, with a touch of bitterness.

“No, only from intuition. I don’t know that I will ever marry, Frederic; after everything I have lived through here, I cannot imagine . . .”

Unsure of what it was I could not imagine, I trailed off, leaving him plainly unconvinced. Frederic, I wanted to say, I loved Lucia as a woman is supposed to love her husband, though I have only the evidence of my journal for it. And yes, she is my half sister, but I did not know that, any more than I knew that she meant to deceive and betray me. And though I may never remember what I felt for her, I believe she showed me something of myself; something that perhaps explains why I cannot return your love as you would wish.

But then I feared he would simply be shocked to no purpose, and so I did not speak, and another awkward silence followed, until a man I had not seen before, a Dr. Overton, came in to say that Miss Ardent was awake, and asking if she might speak to Miss Ferrars alone.

“Please tell her I shall be along in a few moments,” I said.

“Surely you do not want to see her?” said Frederic as soon as Dr. Overton had gone. “Should we not send for the police and have her arrested at once?”

“No,” I said, “I should like to speak to her before I decide—for my own part, I mean. But how can she possibly remember me, when I recall nothing of her?”

“I think,” said Frederic, “that Dr. Straker was deluded about that machine, as about so much else. It was sheer chance that he did not kill you. Now really, should you not spare yourself this encounter?”

“No, I want to speak to her.”

“Then, if you are quite sure, may I see her first? I have something to say to her myself.”

They had put her in the very same room where I had woken on that cold November day a lifetime ago. She was deathly pale, and her face had been scrubbed clean; the resemblance was still plain, but I was far more struck by the differences in the shape of her eyes, the set of her lips, the curve of her cheekbone; so much so that I wondered how anybody, excepting Uncle Josiah, could have mistaken one of us for the other. Standing there in the doorway, I thought of what I had said in my journal about the likeness increasing every day, and I understood just how closely she had studied me.

“Georgina,” she said, in a small, chastened voice, “will you sit by me for a little?”

I moved the upright chair—the one Dr. Straker had always occupied—closer to the bed, and sat down beside her.

“I can’t remember anything of—what happened,” she said, “but Mr. Mordaunt told me that you risked your own life to save mine, and saved me again when you might have left me to burn. Why did you do that?”

“Because I could not bear to watch you die, without at least trying to save you. Not out of any feeling for you—I have none. You deceived me and betrayed me, and left me here to rot.”

A long silence followed.

“I have not had a moment’s peace,” she said at last, “since I sent that telegram in your uncle’s name. It was done on the spur of the moment, and then—I was afraid to go back.”

“I would have shared with you,” I said, “if there had been anything to share. But Edmund Mordaunt is dead, and the estate is bankrupt; you and your mother had already bled him dry.”

She stared at me, horror stricken—or so I would have sworn.

“I knew, I knew, I knew you would have shared. But my mother said you would be bound to find me out. And now I shall be sent to prison for years and years—as I deserve.”

She burst into heartrending sobs and buried her face in her hands. I knew better than to trust in this show of contrition, and yet I longed to comfort her, and felt cold and heartless for restraining myself.

“Lucia,” I said when she was quiet again, “why did you not go on the stage, as you said you wanted to? You are a consummate actress; you could have made your fortune, and been admired for your talent, instead of lying and deceiving your way through life.”

“I wish I had,” she said, “but it is too late now.”

“How much of my money did you steal?” I asked.

“Only your allowance. My mother said I must not risk going to see Mr. Lovell until . . .”

She lowered her eyes and let the words trail away.

“That was your mother—Mrs. Fairfax—the woman who tried to befriend me in Plymouth.”

“Yes,” she said faintly.

“And where is your mother now?”

“In London. At the hotel where we—the one in Great Portland Street.”

“Where you went every day on those walks of yours. To plan how you might ensnare me.”

“And now I must pay for my wickedness. Oh, how you must hate me!”

“No more tears,” I said firmly. “I hated you last night, when I said he might tear your heart out for all I cared, but that is gone now, like the fortune you set out to steal. As for sending you to prison: your mother’s fate is not for me to decide, and if Mr. Mordaunt decides to have her charged with blackmail, she must take the consequences. But for myself, I should rather see you on the stage than in a cell.

“You will write me a full account of every wrong that you and your mother have done me. You will promise, in writing, never to commit another crime. Mr. Mordaunt will witness your signature. And you will keep Mr. Lovell informed of your whereabouts. Fail me in any particular, and your confession will go to the police.”

“I promise,” she said in a very low voice. “If I may have pen and paper, I will begin at once.” Her face was ashen; she looked utterly spent.

“You should rest now,” I said, “and begin in the morning.”

“I am truly sorry, Georgina. If only—I wish I had been worthy of your love. I shall try to deserve your trust.”

“I wish I could believe you,” I said. I rose stiffly to my feet, suddenly aware of my bruised and aching body, and stood looking down at her. She held my gaze with dark, pain-filled eyes, the very picture of remorse, and it seemed for a moment that I could truly remember, could see and feel her trembling in my arms, on our last night together in Gresham’s Yard. But then my mind was shrouded again, as if a curtain had fallen between us, and I left the infirmary without looking back.