The Asylum

Georgina Ferrars’ Narrative

I WOKE, AS IT SEEMED, from a nightmare of being stretched on the rack, only to sink into another dream in which I was lying in a strange bed, afraid to open my eyes for fear of what I might see. The smell and the texture of the blanket against my cheek felt wrong, and I was clad, I became aware, in a coarse flannel nightgown that was certainly not my own. I knew that I must still be dreaming, for I had gone to sleep as usual in my bedroom at home. Every joint in my body ached as if I had been stricken with fever; yet I had felt perfectly well the night before.

I lay still for a little, waiting for the dream to dissolve, until my eyes opened of their own accord. The ceiling above me was a dull white; the bare walls, a dismal shade of green. Grey light filtered through a metal grille; the glass behind it was clouded and streaked with moisture.

I sat up, wincing at the pain, to find myself in what appeared to be a prison cell. The door to my left was solid oak, with a narrow aperture at eye level, closed by a wooden shutter. The air was damp and chill, and smelt of cold ashes and chloride of lime. A small fireplace was, like the window, entirely covered by a stout metal grille. There was no furniture beyond a bedside table, a single upright chair, a washstand, and a small closet; there were no ornaments, no looking glass; not so much as a candlestick.

It was impossible; I could not be here. But neither could I deny that I was wide awake. And I was not, I realised, at all feverish; my forehead was cool, my skin was dry, and my breath came freely. So why did my body protest at the slightest movement? Had I fallen somehow? or been attacked?—or worse? Trembling, I threw off the bedclothes and examined myself, but I could find no trace of injury, except for some bruises on my upper arms, as if someone had gripped them tightly.

Was it some sort of hallucination? If I lie down, I thought, and pull the covers over my head and try to go to sleep again, perhaps I will find myself back in my own bed. But my feet, seemingly of their own volition, were already on the floor. I moved unsteadily to the door and tried the handle, but it would not budge.

Should I call out? And who would come if I did? I turned toward the window, wondering if this was what sleepwalkers experienced. Half a dozen paces brought me to the grille. The world beyond was obscured by grey, swirling mist, with faint, unidentifiable forms—walls? houses? trees?—hovering at the edge of visibility.

I returned to the door and tried the handle again. This time the panel shot open, and two eyes appeared in the slot.

“Where am I?” I cried.

“The infirmary, miss,” replied a young woman’s voice. “Please, miss, I’m to say you’re to get back into bed, and the doctor will be here directly.”

The panel slid shut, and I heard the muffled sound of footsteps receding. Shivering, I did as she had asked, relieved at least to discover that I was in a hospital. But what had happened to me, and why had they locked me in? I waited apprehensively until another, heavier tread approached. A lock rasped, the door swung inward, and a man stepped into the room. From his dress—a tweed suit and waistcoat, somewhat rumpled, a white collar which had sprung loose at one side, a tie of dark blue silk, carelessly knotted—and a certain humorous glint in his eye, you might have taken him for an artist, but there was an air of authority about him, of a man accustomed to being obeyed. He looked somewhere between forty and fifty, not especially tall, but broad-shouldered and trim. His eyes were pale blue, accentuating the blackness of the pupils, deep-set and piercing beneath heavy brows, with dark pouches beneath; his nose strong and aquiline and straight as a blade, the nostrils flared above chiselled lips. A long, lean face, clean-shaven except for a fringe of side-whiskers, tapering down to a creased, prominent chin. He stood silent, surveying me appraisingly.

“Where am I?” I said again. “Who are you? Why am I here?”

A gleam of satisfaction showed in his eyes.

“Do you mean you don’t know?—I see you do not. This is most inter—that is to say, most distressing for you. Forgive me: my name is Maynard Straker, and I am the superintendent and chief medical officer here at Tregannon House—on Bodmin Moor, in Cornwall,” he added, seeing that my bewilderment had not lessened. “Have no fear, Miss Ashton, I am entirely at your ser—”

He stopped short at the expression on my face.

“Sir, my name is not Ashton! I am Miss Ferrars, Georgina Ferrars; I live in London, with my uncle; there has been a terrible mistake.”

“I see,” he said calmly. “Well, never fear. Let me order you some toast and tea, and we shall talk it all through in comfort.”

“But sir, I should not be here! Please, I wish to go home at once!”

“All in good time, Miss—Ferrars, if you prefer. The first thing you must understand is that you have been very ill. I know”—he held up his hand to silence me—“I know you do not remember: that is a consequence of your illness. Now please; first you must allow me to examine you, and then I shall explain what has happened to you.”

Such was the force of his personality that I waited in silence whilst he murmured instructions to someone outside the door. He took my pulse, listened to my heartbeat, tested my reflexes, and seemed quite satisfied with the result. Then he settled himself on the wooden chair so that he was facing me directly.

“You arrived here yesterday morning; without notice, which is most unusual. You gave your name as Lucy Ashton and said that you wished to consult me on an urgent and confidential matter. As I was away on business, the maid referred you to my assistant, Mr. Mordaunt. You were, he says, in an agitated state, though striving to conceal your distress. He explained that I would not be back until the evening, and that you would therefore have to stay here overnight, and register as a voluntary patient in order to see me, and to this you very reluctantly agreed. You would not admit to any disturbance of mind; only to extreme fatigue, and, after giving him a few cursory details, asked if you might complete the admission forms later.

“Mr. Mordaunt found you a room in the voluntary wing and left you there, assuming you would rest. But several times that afternoon he saw you walking about the grounds in what he described—my assistant is something of a poet—as a trance of desolation.

“I returned at about nine o’clock, and, upon hearing Mr. Mordaunt’s account of you, called briefly at your room to arrange an appointment for this morning; I had too many calls upon my time to speak to you last night. You were plainly in a state of extreme nervous exhaustion, but again you refused to concede anything beyond fatigue. I naturally ordered you a sedative, which you promised to take, though I fear you did not. Voluntary patients are, I should say, under no compulsion to accept any particular treatment here. So long as they pose no danger to themselves or others, they are free to do as they wish: it is part of our philosophy.

“Early this morning you were found unconscious on the path behind this building; you must have slipped out without anyone noticing. It was evident to me that you had suffered a seizure, which, though rare, is not unheard of in cases such as yours, where extreme mental agitation induces something like an epileptic fit, or, in those actually prone to epilepsy, a grand mal episode. It is nature’s way of discharging excessive mental energy. Upon waking, the patient commonly remembers nothing of the preceding days, or even weeks, and is at a loss to account for the extreme soreness of joints and muscles, which is due to the violence of the spasms. Such episodes are, of course, more common in women, whose faculties are more delicate, and more readily overstrained, than those of men—”

“Sir,” I broke in, as the full horror of realisation dawned, “am I in a madhouse?”

“It is not a term I favour; say rather you are in the care of a private establishment for the cure of diseases of the mind. An enlightened institution, Miss—Ferrars, run on the most humane principles, dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the comfort of our patients.

“Now, you assured me at our first interview that you had never suffered from epilepsy, or any form of mental disturbance—but I take it you cannot recall that interview?”

“No, sir.”

“And you have no idea of how, or why, you presented yourself to us as Lucy Ashton?”

“None whatever, sir.”

“What is the last thing—the very last thing—you can recall?”

I had clung, throughout his recital, to the belief that this was all a ghastly mistake, and that I should be escorted home to London as soon as I could persuade him that I was Georgina Ferrars and not Lucy Ashton. But his question provoked a sort of landslip in my mind. My memory, as it had seemed, of going to bed at home the night before, wavered and collapsed, leaving only a dreadful, buzzing confusion. I must, I thought desperately, must be able to remember. If not last night, then the day before? Memories—if they were memories—spilled from my grasp like playing cards, even as I tried to order them. I saw my life dissolving before my eyes. The room swayed like the deck of a ship; for a moment I felt sure I should faint.

Dr. Straker regarded me calmly.

“Do not be alarmed; the confusion will pass. But you see now why I hesitate to address you as Miss Ferrars. It is possible—I have seen such cases—that you are in fact Lucy Ashton; that Miss Ferrars—Georgina, did you say?—that Georgina Ferrars is your friend or relation, or even just a figment of your disordered imagination. The mind, after an insult such as this, can play the most extraordinary tricks upon us.”

“But sir, I am Georgina Ferrars! You must believe me! I live in Gresham’s Yard, in Bloomsbury, with my uncle, Josiah Radford, the bookseller. You must wire to tell him I am here—”

Dr. Straker held up his hand to stop the rush of words.

“Steady, steady, Miss . . . Ferrars, let us say. Of course we shall wire. But before we do so, you should at least consider the evidence of your own possessions . . . Ah, here is tea.”

A young maidservant in a neat grey uniform entered with a tray.

“You will be pleased to see, Bella, that our patient is recovering,” said Dr. Straker.

“Yes indeed, sir,” she said. “Very glad to see you looking better, Miss Ashton. Will there be anything else, sir?”

“Yes; run down to Miss Ashton’s room, and bring all of her things up here. Ask one of the porters if you need assistance. We can manage the tea.”

“Yes sir; right away, sir.”

“You see?” said Dr. Straker wryly as she hurried out. “Miss Ashton is, at least, not just a figment of my imagination. Milk? Sugar?”

If Dr. Straker had betrayed the slightest anxiety on my behalf, I think I should have given way to hysteria. But his nonchalance had a strangely calming, or rather numbing, effect upon me. I had come here calling myself Lucy Ashton: so much seemed undeniable, though utterly incomprehensible. I felt certain I knew no one of that name, and yet it seemed vaguely familiar. He has promised to wire, I told myself. I shall be going home soon, and must cling to that thought. I sipped my tea mechanically, grateful for the warmth of the cup in my cold hands.

My mother’s birthday! It had been a warm autumn day.

“Sir, I have remembered something,” I said. “The twenty-third of September, my mother’s birthday—she died ten years ago, but I vowed I would always do something that we should have enjoyed together. It was a Saturday, and I walked up to Regent’s Park, and ate an ice, and felt very ill afterward.”

“I see . . . and after that?”

I strove to pick up the thread, but beyond that one glimpse, I could not be sure. I could go backward with some confidence, over the events of the summer, and the spring, and indeed all the way back to my childhood—or so it seemed—but when I tried to advance, I could summon only blurred images of myself in my uncle’s house; the power of ordering them seemed to have deserted me.

“I—I cannot be sure,” I said at last.

“Most interesting. Let us say, then, that your last clear recollection is—or appears to be—of the twenty-third of September. Would you care to hazard a guess at today’s date?”

I knew then what had been troubling me about the chill, the damp, even the quality of the light.

“I cannot guess the time, sir, let alone the date.”

“It is two o’clock in the afternoon of Thursday, the second of November. In the year of our Lord 1882,” he added, raising one eyebrow.

“November!” I exclaimed. “Where have I . . . How could I have . . . Sir, you must wire my uncle at once; he will be desperately worried.”

“Not necessarily. If a Georgina Ferrars had been missing for the past week, let alone the past month, we should have been informed. Asylums, like the hospitals and the police, are kept up to date with news of missing persons; and there is no one of that name—indeed, no one resembling you—on any of our lists. You may have told your uncle that you were going away; though not, presumably, to a lunatic asylum under a false name. So before we trouble him, let us try to set the record straight.”

He drew a piece of paper from his coat pocket.

“This is all the information you gave my assistant when he admitted you yesterday morning. ‘Name: Lucy Ashton. Address: Royal Hotel, Plymouth. Date of birth: the fourteenth of February 1861. Place of birth: London. Parents: deceased. Next of kin: none living. No history of serious physical or mental illness. No person to be advised in case of illness or decease. “Patient says she is quite alone in the world,”’ Mr. Mordaunt has noted. Interesting, is it not?”

“Sir, I have never even been to Plymouth!”

“I think we can safely say that you have. Amnesia is the most difficult of all conditions for a patient to grasp, Miss Ashton, because there is literally nothing to hold on to. You do not recognise any of those details, then?”

“None, sir. I cannot imagine why—”

“I can think of at least two explanations,” he said, producing a notebook and pencil. “But before we come to that . . . Your full name?”

“Georgina May Ferrars, sir.”

“And your date and place of birth?”

“March third, 1861, at Nettleford, in Devon.”

“That is near Plymouth, is it not?”

“I believe so, sir; I have no memory of it. We—my mother and I—moved to a cottage on the cliffs near Niton, on the Isle of Wight, to live with my aunt Vida—my great-aunt, I mean—when I was only an infant.”

He listened to this halting explanation with an air of polite amusement, as if to say, And why should we believe you this time?

“I see . . . And your father?”

“His name was Godfrey Ferrars, sir; I never knew him. He died before I was two years old.”

“I am sorry to hear it. What was his profession, do you know?”

“He was a doctor, sir—” I almost said, “like yourself,” but checked myself. “A medical officer, in London.”

“What part of London?”

“Clerkenwell, sir. But he became very ill and had to move to the country; he was convalescing in Nettleford when I was born.”

“And did not recover, I take it?”

“He did recover, sir, but then he insisted on taking another situation, in Southwark—”

“Again as a medical officer?”

“Yes, sir. My mother took me to Niton—we were to follow as soon as he had settled in—but he came down with typhoid fever and was dead before news of his illness reached us.”

“Do you know the date?”

“No, sir; only that it was summer.”

“Well, let us say the summer of 1862.” He scribbled in his notebook. “And your mother’s maiden name?”

“Emily Radford.”

“She died, I think you said, ten years ago?”

“Yes, sir. She had some weakness of the heart—an aneurism, we were told. It was not discovered until after her death.”

“A melancholy history. Are you her only child?”

“Yes, sir.”

Dr. Straker regarded me curiously.

“Do you know, I wonder, whether the weakness was hereditary? Your own heart seems sound enough, on a brief examination, but have you ever suffered from palpitations, shortness of breath, dizziness, fainting fits . . . ?”

“No, sir, I was a very healthy child. She and my aunt were always anxious that I should take plenty of rest and exercise, and not become over-excited, but they never mentioned my heart.”

“That, at least, is reassuring,” he said, making another note. “And after that?”

“I remained with my great-aunt, Vida Radford, on my mother’s side, until we lost—until she died last year. After that I went to London to live with Uncle Josiah—Aunt Vida’s brother, so he is my great-uncle, too—”

Again I heard myself faltering.

“And has your uncle any children of his own?”

“No, sir. Like my aunt, he never married.”

“I see. And—if you will forgive me—what are your financial circumstances? Have you money of your own, or expectations of your uncle?”

Something in his tone made me even more fearful.

“I have a small income, sir, about a hundred pounds a year, from my aunt. And my uncle is certainly not rich; he says his estate is worth only a few hundred pounds.”

“I see. And now we come to your mental health. As Miss Ashton”—he glanced again at the paper on his knee—“you told my assistant that you had no history of mental disturbance. But given that you came here under an alias, and have since suffered a seizure, almost certainly brought on by prolonged and violent mental agitation, perhaps there is something you would like to add to Miss Ashton’s account?”

Again the room seemed to revolve around me. There were, I thought, with my heart beginning to pound, several things I ought to add; but if I confessed to them, I might never be allowed to leave. The seconds ticked by under his ironic gaze.

“I—I do not think there is anything out of the ordinary.”

“Very well,” he said, after an uncomfortable pause. “And now I must look in on some of my other patients. In the meantime, you must stay in bed and keep warm; Bella will see to the fire when she returns with your luggage.”

“But sir, you will send that wire to my uncle?”

“By all means. The nearest telegraph office is at Liskeard, a good forty minutes’ ride from here, so we cannot expect a reply until this evening at the earliest. Mr. Josiah Radford, of Gresham’s Yard, Bloomsbury, is it not?” he added, glancing at his notebook.

You must be able to remember, I told myself as the echo of his footsteps died away. It is like a door that sticks; you have forgotten the trick of it; that is all. Or a name that will not come to you, and then you find it upon your lips a few minutes later. But no matter how hard I strained, I could not even discern a gap where memory should have been. Was it possible that the real Lucy Ashton—where had I heard that name before?—looked just like me? Could we have been confused with each other? But that did nothing to explain what I was doing in a private asylum in Cornwall, a part of the world I had never visited . . . and so my thoughts went spiralling on, until Bella reappeared, struggling under the weight of a stout leather valise, a hatbox, and a dark blue travelling-cloak, none of which I recognised.

“I am afraid those are not my things.”

The girl regarded me with, I thought, a certain compassion.

“Beg pardon, miss, but you was wearing that cloak when you come here yesterday. And look,” she added, setting down the case and opening it. “Here’s your wrap, miss, the one you asked me to look out when you was cold later on.”

She held up a blue woollen shawl—the pattern was certainly one I might have chosen myself—and draped it around my shoulders. I watched numbly as she opened the closet and began to unpack the case—which had “L.A.” stamped in faded gold lettering below the handle. Everything she took out of it looked like clothes I might have chosen myself, but none of them were mine. It struck me that my own wardrobe, in its entirety, would fit into a case not much larger than this.

“Wait!” I cried. “I am not staying here; I must return to London as soon as—” My voice trailed away; the fog of confusion seemed suddenly to lift. Why on earth was I waiting for the answer to Dr. Straker’s wire? He had said I was a voluntary patient, and regardless of how and why they had mistaken me for Lucy Ashton—regardless, indeed, of what had happened to my memory—the sooner I was back in London, the better.

“In fact,” I said firmly, “I wish to leave immediately. Would you please help me to dress, and—”

“I’m sorry, miss, but I can’t, not without the doctor’s say-so.” She had a soft country accent which would, in other circumstances, have been pleasing to my ear.

“Then I shall dress myself. Please go at once and find Dr. Straker, and ask him to order me”—I was about to say, “a cab”—“a conveyance, to take me to the nearest railway station. You do understand,” I added, hearing my voice beginning to tremble, “that I am a voluntary patient here.”

“I’ll go and see, miss. But please, miss, doctor’s orders was for you to stay in bed.”

She hurried out, closing the door behind her. I slipped out of bed, suddenly afraid that she might have locked me in. But the door opened readily, onto a dark-panelled corridor, in which Bella’s receding figure was the only sign of life.

I closed the door again and turned to the closet. Lucy Ashton’s taste in clothing was almost identical to my own; like me, she favoured the aesthetic style; her blue woollen travelling-dress was the twin of one that I possessed in grey, and when I held it up against myself, it was plain, even without a mirror, that it would fit me perfectly. Even the laundry marks were exactly the same as mine: small cotton tags stitched into the lining, with “L.A.” sewn into them in neat blue lettering. If I had been asked to outfit myself for a journey, I could not have chosen better.

Again I found myself clutching at the idea that Lucy Ashton must be my double, only to remember that this did nothing to explain why I was here. Once more I strove to penetrate the void shrouding my mind, until something brought me back to the immediate present, and the awareness that Lucy Ashton’s case contained no purse or pocketbook; no jewellery, no rings, and no money.

And two other things were missing—though of course they were missing, since these were not my things: the dragonfly brooch my mother had bequeathed to me, which I would never have left behind; and my writing case, a present from Aunt Vida, containing the journal I had kept since my sixteenth birthday. It was a quarto-sized case made of soft blue leather, with two gold clasps, and a key, which I always kept on a fine silver chain around my neck, but which was certainly not there now.

The loss of that key somehow brought home the extremity of my plight. My strength deserted me, and I sank down upon the edge of the bed, just as Dr. Straker reappeared in the doorway, followed by Bella with a pail of coals.

“Miss—Ferrars,” he said sternly, “you must get back into bed and stay there. As your physician, I command it. There can be no question of your leaving; you are far too ill.”

“But sir—”

“No more, I pray you. The wire has been dispatched as you requested; as soon as we have an answer, I shall let you know,” he said, and strode from the room.

“Bella,” I said as she arranged the blankets over me, “I can’t find my purse, or my brooch—in a small red plush box; it is quite valuable; or my writing case—a blue leather one. Have you see them anywhere?”

“No, miss, I ’aven’t. This is all there was, miss, when I packed up your room just now.”

“But I must have had money,” I said desperately. “How else could I have got here?”

“You gave me a sixpence, miss, when you was still wearing your cloak. P’raps it’s there.”

She tried the pockets but found only a pair of gloves.

“You don’t think I took it, miss?” she said, with a look of alarm.

“No, Bella. But someone must have, and my brooch and writing case; I would never travel without them.”

“I don’t know, miss, I’m sure. We’re all honest girls here. Might you have put them away somewhere yourself, miss, and—and forgotten? Now please, miss, I must get on.”

To this there was plainly no answer. I gave up all hope of escaping that day, and lay with my mind spinning, and a sick feeling of dread gnawing at the pit of my stomach, while daylight slowly faded from the room, until I woke with the glare of a lantern in my eyes, to find Dr. Straker standing beside my bed.

“I am afraid, Miss Ashton, that you must prepare yourself for a shock. As well as conveying your message to Josiah Radford, I took the liberty of asking him whether he had ever heard of a Lucy Ashton. This is his reply.”

NO KNOWLEDGE LUCY ASHTON STOP GEORGINA FERRARS HERE STOP YOUR PATIENT MUST BE IMPOSTER STOP JOSIAH RADFORD.

I was sedated, that night, with chloral, and emerged from a pit of oblivion with my body still aching and a foul taste in my mouth. Whether it was the after-effect of the drug, or the accumulated shocks of the previous day, all I could think was that Dr. Straker must have wired the wrong Josiah Radford; further than that, my mind refused to go. Bella brought me breakfast, which I was unable to eat, along with a mirror in which I saw a drawn, sunken face, white as a ghost’s except for dark pouches like bruises beneath eyes that were scarcely recognisable as my own. Dr. Straker, she told me, as she brushed the worst of the knots out of my hair, would be here directly; his orders were for me to stay in bed; and no, I was not to dress on any account. And so I was condemned to wait in my nightgown and wrap until he appeared at my bedside, looking, if anything, even more cheerful than he had the day before.

“Well, Miss Ashton, as I think we must call you until we discover who you really are, I must say that your case is unique in my experience.”

“Sir, I beg of you . . . I cannot explain what has happened, but I swear to you, on my dear mother’s grave, I am Georgina Ferrars!”

“I know. I know that is what you believe, with every fibre of your being. But consider the facts. There is a Georgina Ferrars presently at the address you gave me—no, hear me out. You came here under the name Lucy Ashton, and I think we may say with certainty that Lucy Ashton is not your real name, either. You are, I take it, familiar with Scott’s Waverley novels?”

I knew, suddenly, where I had heard the name before.

“Lucy Ashton is the heroine of The Bride of Lammermoor. She is forced by her mother to break her engagement to the man she loves, Edgar Ravenswood, and marry another whom she loathes. She stabs her husband on their wedding night, and dies, insane, of a seizure. So it occurs to me to ask whether this has any personal significance for you.”

I stared at him, appalled.

“I have never been engaged, sir, let alone . . . !”

“Nevertheless, you will agree that it is a disturbing choice of alias for a troubled young woman presenting herself for treatment at a private asylum. It suggests that there is something in her past—perhaps her immediate past—from which she is fleeing.”

“There is nothing, sir, nothing!”

“Nothing that you can remember, I agree.”

“But sir, I have told you my history; you wrote it down yesterday. The person who sent that telegram is lying; I do not know why. If you do not believe me—”

“I have already been in touch with the medical boards of Clerkenwell and Southwark: a Dr. Godfrey Ferrars held positions there in 1859 and 1862 respectively. He died at Southwark of typhoid fever on the thirtieth of August 1862, survived by his wife, Emily, and their infant daughter, Georgina.”

“Then how can you not believe me?” I cried.

“Because—though I am sure you could give me the most fluent recital of the facts of Georgina Ferrars’ life—it does not follow that you are Georgina Ferrars. You may, for example, have met the real Georgina Ferrars, or someone who knows her very well, and—for reasons we cannot yet fathom—become obsessed with her. I have seen such cases before; it is called hysterical possession, where the patient assumes the identity of another and comes to believe in all sincerity that she is that person. As well as the evidence of the telegram, we have the fact that you presented yourself here as Miss Ashton, suffered a seizure, lost all memory of the past six weeks, and only then declared yourself to be Georgina Ferrars—”

“Sir,” I broke in, gathering my courage, “you must hear me! That cable is a fraud. I do not know who sent it, or why, but if you send someone to Gresham’s Yard, you will find only my uncle; he will come straight away and fetch me. I have a little money saved,” I added, praying that it was still true, “and I will pay any expenses—”

“That will not be necessary. As it happens, I have to go up to London by this afternoon’s train. I shall call at Gresham’s Yard tomorrow, and speak to Josiah Radford—and, I fear, to Georgina Ferrars, and try to persuade her to come down and identify you—since you clearly know a good deal about her.

“And if,” he added, before I could speak, “if it should turn out that you have a mortal enemy, who has been lurking around Gresham’s Yard, waiting to intercept a telegram he could not possibly have known would come, I promise to bring Mr. Josiah Radford back with me on the very next train, and eat my hat—a thing I have never promised to do before—as penance. In the meantime, we shall keep you comfortable, at our expense, of course.”

“But sir, I wish to leave at once!”

“I am afraid I cannot allow it. You are not well enough to travel, and, if my instinct is right, and you were to appear at Gresham’s Yard in your present frame of mind, you would probably be arrested and confined at Bethlem Hospital, which, though much improved, is not a place I should recommend to anyone in my care. And now I must see to my other patients; I shall leave you in the care of my colleague Dr. Mayhew until I return—which may not be until Monday.”

“Monday! But sir . . .”

He rose, silencing me with a gesture, and strode to the door, where he paused.

“Oh, and I shall ask my assistant, Mr. Mordaunt, to look in on you. I think you will find him—sympathetic.”

For the rest of that day I saw no one but Bella and Dr. Mayhew, a stout, grey-bearded physician who took my pulse, peered at my tongue, felt my forehead, grunted a few times and went away without speaking. Bella helped me to bathe, and brought me meals, most of which I was unable to eat. You must keep up your strength for the journey home, I kept telling myself, but the clenched knot in the pit of my stomach left little room for food. Once, after she had taken away my tray, I slipped out of bed and made my way unsteadily to the window. The mist had cleared, and through the grille I looked down upon an enclosed garden, perhaps thirty yards across, surrounded by high brick walls. Gravel paths ran between beds of dark green foliage; there was no one in sight, and no sign of any way in or out. Above the walls I could see only the tops of trees, silhouetted against a leaden sky.

There was no clock within my hearing; nothing to mark the passing of the hours except the slow fading of the light and the occasional spatter of rain against the glass; nothing to do but struggle in vain to comprehend what had befallen me, until I fell at last into a doze and woke in lamplight to find Bella arranging my supper tray. She had brought me another draught of chloral, which I swallowed reluctantly for the oblivion it promised. But instead of sleeping through the night, I woke in a kind of delirium in which I was aware of myself lying in bed, unable to move, spinning through fearful dreams until daylight and the horror of coming fully awake and finding myself still at Tregannon Asylum.

Before this, the idea that I might not even be—myself, was the only way I could conceive of it—would have seemed merely absurd. But here, anything seemed possible; not only possible, but nightmarishly plausible. How could I be sure that I was not insane? I did not feel mad, but how was I to know what madness felt like? Dr. Straker evidently believed it; and I had only to think of that telegram to feel terror rising to engulf me. Why had I called myself Lucy Ashton—as I must have done, unless everyone here was lying to me? Was there a strain of madness in our family, which had come out in me?

You must not think of it, I told myself, and a great sob burst from my throat. When the fit of weeping had passed, I lay down and closed my eyes and strove to imagine myself back in my own small bed in our house on the cliffs at Niton, with Mama and Aunt Vida murmuring nearby, their voices blending with the ebb and wash of the sea far below.

My great-aunt Vida had found the cottage many years before I was born, and had fallen in love with it at first sight. It stood about fifty yards up from the cliff, with the ground rising steeply behind. Away to the east ran the great sweep of the cliffs, the edge so sharp in places that it might have been cut with a knife, plunging down to two horizontal lines of fluted rock like great jagged teeth, the lower jaw projecting beyond the upper, and then down again to the falls of rock heaped along the shore far below. Whole farms lay buried in some of these mounds, but my aunt insisted that we were too far from the edge to be in any danger.

Our sitting room was upstairs at the front, with windows on two sides looking to the east and south, over the vast expanse of the sea. My mother had a chaise longue by the side windows, and here she would spend hours each day reading, knitting or embroidering, or simply gazing out to sea. Every morning after breakfast, the sitting room would become my schoolroom, and much of my education came from reading aloud—I could not remember a time when I could not read—or being read to, and asking questions whenever I did not understand. We read a great deal of poetry, and Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, and Macaulay’s History; anything from our small library that my mother considered suitable, and I do not remember her ever condescending to me, or saying that anything was too hard for a child to understand.

My aunt slept in the other front room; my bedroom was across the passage from hers, and my mother had the room next to mine. From my window I could see the long westward sweep of the coast. The dining room, which we seldom used, was downstairs, along with a breakfast room where we took most of our meals, and the kitchen and servants’ quarters where Mrs. Briggs, the housekeeper, and Amy, the maid, lived.

Aunt Vida seemed, when I was small, to tower above my mother, though I came to realise that there was only an inch or two between them. But my mother was pale and slender, whereas Aunt Vida was as stout and solid as a tree-trunk, her face weathered by long exposure to wind and sun. She was a great walker, and I would often see her striding out in the morning, swinging her blackthorn stick. In summer, especially, she might not return until after my bedtime; I would hear her voice raised in greeting as I was drifting on the edge of sleep, or wake to the murmur of conversation from the sitting room. She spoke, as a rule, in a gruff, staccato fashion, as though dictating her thoughts at the telegraph office. “I should have been born a man,” she once said to me, years after my mother had died, and indeed she behaved, for the most part, as if she had been. Once, having seen her snipping at her hair—a thick, white, wiry mane, very like that of Mr. Allardyce the vicar—with the kitchen scissors, I decided to try it myself, with predictable consequences. “I am old enough, and ugly enough, to do as I please,” she had said sternly, “but you, child, are not.” She despised bustles and crinolines; her wardrobe consisted of two summer and two winter walking-dresses, all in the same shade of brown (“doesn’t show the mud”), and two pairs of stout boots; in wet weather she would array herself in oilskins and a sou’wester. Years later, when I was fully grown, she insisted upon giving me a set of my own, which I thought deeply unbecoming and would wear only as a last resort. They smelt faintly but persistently of tobacco, and I suspected her of buying them from a sailor.

My own taste in dress was formed by my mother, who, like my aunt, refused to wear a bustle, or endure any form of tight lacing. She, however, had embraced the artistic fashion when I was still very small: plain, loose-fitting gowns in muted shades and soft fabrics, which she cut out and sewed herself. With me, she was abundantly affectionate; even during my lessons, we would nestle together on the sofa, whereas Aunt Vida, though I never doubted her love for me, could manage no more than a clumsy pat on my shoulder, as you might pat a horse you were not entirely sure of. But sometimes, if I caught my mother unawares, I would find her staring absently into space with a haunted, fearful expression—was it dread, or physical pain? I could not tell, because the instant she caught sight of me, she would shake herself, beckon me into her arms, and assure me that it was nothing, nothing at all. If she was in pain, or visited by some premonition of approaching death, she concealed it resolutely; if I suggested a walk, and she did not feel up to it, she would simply smile and say that she thought she had better rest. And so, with my aunt out roaming the countryside, I was left a good deal to myself in the afternoons.

The only remarkable thing about my bedroom, from a child’s point of view, was a full-length mirror in a tarnished gilt frame, fixed to the wall beside my bed. When I was about six years old, I invented a game—at least it began as a game—in which my reflection was my sister, Rosina. The name simply floated into my head one day, and I liked the music of it. I would stare at my reflection in the glass until I drifted into a strange, half-mesmerised state in which Rosina’s gestures and expressions seemed independent of my own. Rosina, of course, looked exactly like me, except that she was left-handed. But in personality she was quite different: bold, headstrong, defiant of authority, and entirely fearless. And oddly, though it did not seem so at the time, she was not my mother’s daughter, despite being my sister; she had sprung fully formed from the mirror, a law unto herself.

I had a separate voice for Rosina, higher and fiercer than mine, and sometimes our exchanges would become quite heated, if she was taunting me for refusing to do something forbidden, such as creeping downstairs before dawn to play in the moonlight. As I grew more adventurous, it was always fear of Rosina’s scorn, which I could summon as vividly as any feeling of my own, that kept me from turning back. When my mother was resting, I liked to play by myself in the garden, which was enclosed by a rough stone wall—I suppose it was no more than six feet high, but to me it seemed immense—partly hidden from the house by a coppice of ancient fruit trees. I was forbidden to climb it, but at Rosina’s urging I went a little higher each time, until I was perched on the very top. Looking along the coast, I could see the edge of the cliff, cut as cleanly as a pat of butter, and hear the wash of the sea far below.

That was as far as I dared go for a week or more, and it was even longer before I made my first tentative descent to the rough, tussocky grass outside. The hillside around was overgrown with gorse, which made it easy to keep out of sight of the house, though I learnt to be very careful of the thorns. Despite my apprehension, I knew at once what the next dare would be: to go right down to the edge of the cliff and look over.

I do not know how far I believed in Rosina as a separate being. Part of me, at least, was aware that I was playing a game with myself; yet the Rosina-voice also seemed to come from outside. I did not want to be bad, or cause my mother distress, but Rosina simply did not care; I was afraid of the cliff and had promised never to go near it; but Rosina was not afraid of anything. And so, day by day, I ventured closer to the edge.

Though the slope down to the cliff was quite steep, there was a place where the ground curled up like a lip: a small patch of grass, growing right to the edge, flanked by two gorse bushes. The afternoon I chose for my attempt was mild and still, but I was scarcely conscious of the sun’s warmth on my back, or the droning of the bees amongst the gorse, as I crawled up the lip on my hands and knees, too intent even to notice the stains accumulating on my pinafore. But the grass was higher than it had seemed from above, and I could no longer tell where the edge was; the gorse bushes on either side obscured everything beyond the small circle of crushed grass. All I could see before me was a tangle of green and brown stalks against the shimmering blue of the sky.

It did not occur to me that I could turn back. With my heart thudding violently, I lay flat on my stomach, stretched my hands as far ahead of me as I could reach, and inched forward, expecting every moment to feel empty space beneath my fingers. The coarse, springy grass confused me. Was the ground sloping up, or down? Was I pushing myself along, or beginning to slide toward the brink? Panic seized me. I dug in my toes into the earth, and pressed myself even flatter. I felt my fingers slipping through the grass, until they encountered a large stone, at which I clutched frantically, pushing myself back with all my strength.

The stone stirred like a live thing. It seemed to lift itself slightly, and shiver, before the grass beneath me vanished in a great slithering rush. Something caught me across the chest, and I was left suspended in midair while a mass of earth and rock hurtled down the cliff-face. It struck the undercliff in a silent explosion of debris, followed by a sound like a muffled peal of thunder. A plume of reddish-brown dust hung in its wake.

I found that my hands were gripping a gnarled tangle of roots, projecting from what was now the cliff-face. Small rivulets of dirt were spilling around me. I was lying side-on to the precipice, too terrified to move or breathe. Far below, jagged spurs of rock protruded from a mound of rubble, like teeth waiting to devour me. My perch was trembling in my grasp.

Whimpering with fear, I turned my head very slowly away from the abyss. The gorse bush whose roots had saved me, was now poised on the very edge of the cliff, the base of its trunk half-exposed. With every slight movement I made, more dirt trickled from around the roots.

I was perhaps two feet below the brink. To survive, I would have to pull myself closer to the trunk, wedge my feet amongst the roots, and actually stand up, balanced against the crumbling bank, before I could scrabble over. It was impossible: my feet and hands would not move. I tried to scream for help, but no sound came out.

Climb, you fool! Rosina’s voice seemed to explode inside my head, scornful, imperious. The roots shook; a rush of earth and pebbles spurted from the bank. I remember one glimpse, as if looking down from above, of myself pressed against the cliff with my fingers clawed over the brink. The next instant, as it seemed, I was sprawled on the ground, scraped and bloodied and weeping with shock and relief.

I do not know how long I lay there before realisation struck me. I had broken my solemn promise never, ever, to go anywhere near the edge; I had set off a landslip; and what if more of the cliff should fall? I was covered in dirt from head to foot, and my pinafore was torn and filthy. I sprang to my feet, raced up the hillside, heedless of the need to keep out of sight of the house, and scrambled back over the wall with a horrid rending of cloth. I dared not tell the truth; I would have to say that I had fallen in the garden; or perhaps I should say that I had tried to climb the wall to look over and had fallen off. Then at least I should be confessing to a small part of my sin. Yes; I could say that I had heard a strange noise from the cliff, climbed up to see what it was, and slipped. And I knew that I must go indoors straightaway, and not wait to be called and have to explain why I had stayed in the garden in such a dreadful state.

As it happened, my mother was still asleep, and the first person I met was Amy, who scolded me roundly, scrubbed me down, and gave me a clean pinafore. Mama was alarmed rather than angry when she saw my scrapes and bruises, said she hoped I had learnt my lesson, and made me promise, which I did with heartfelt sincerity, never to climb the wall again. I was still afraid that more of the cliff might collapse—what if our house was swallowed up in the night?—but as no one had heard the noise, they assumed I had imagined it.

I tried not to show how shaken I was, but every time I closed my eyes I would find myself back on the cliff-face, and I was so pale the next morning that Mama thought I might be sickening for something. Though I would much have preferred to do my lessons with her, I was made to rest in bed, with nothing to do but brood upon what I had done. If Rosina had not shouted at me—as it had truly seemed—I should certainly have died; but then if she had not taunted me with my fear of the cliff, I should never have gone near it. After a while I slipped out of bed, confronted my reflection in the mirror, and berated her for putting me in such danger. “I might have died!,” I was shouting, when my mother appeared behind Rosina—as it momentarily seemed—in the glass, staring down at me with a look of consternation.

“Georgina! What are you doing?”

“I was only playing at charades, Mama,” I said lamely. I was not sure what charades were, but I knew that they involved pretending to be other people.

“But you were shouting at your own reflection, and calling it Rosina; you said you might have died.”

“She is only someone I made up, Mama; it was just a story I was telling myself.”

“Georgina,” she said, kneeling down, taking me gently but firmly by the shoulders, and turning me to face her, “I am not angry, but you must tell me the truth. This—what you were doing with the mirror—is not good for you. And what is this about dying? Is it to do with your falling off the wall yesterday?”

“Yes, Mama,” I confessed, and to turn my guilty thoughts away from the cliff, I proceeded to tell her all about Rosina, and how the idea of a sister had come to me from the mirror, and that Rosina was the bold and reckless one who had dared me to climb the wall, aware as I spoke that my mother was regarding me with deepening anxiety, until my voice trailed off altogether.

“But why did you name her Rosina?” she asked. There was a note of fear in her voice that I had never heard before.

“I don’t know, Mama,” I said helplessly. “It just—came to me.”

“I see,” she said, and was silent for a little. “Now, Georgina, you must not play this—this game anymore; it is bad for you, as I said. We need not trouble Aunt Vida, but I know that she would say the same. I shall ask Mr. Noakes to take away the mirror when he comes on Saturday, but meanwhile you must promise me not to do it again. If you are tempted, come and tell me; I promise I will not be cross. And if you are lonely, we must find you playmates; it will be much better for you to have real friends than—”

She did not finish the sentence. I did not think I had been lonely, but I agreed that I should like some real friends, and said that I felt well enough to come and do my lessons. Despite my promise, I tried once more to summon Rosina before the mirror was removed, but all I saw was myself, pale and uneasy, with a bruise upon my forehead. And though she pressed me no further, I was aware, for some time afterward, of my mother’s anxious scrutiny.

Though I kept well away from the edge after that, I soon forgot about Rosina, and even the terror on the cliff-face diminished in memory until it seemed no more than the shadow of a bad dream. But alone in the infirmary at Tregannon House—where I found myself sitting up again, with no recollection of having done so—it was my mother’s reaction that came back to haunt me. Why had she been so alarmed? Had she thought Rosina was some sort of ghost? Could I have had a sister who had died? No; she would surely have told me.

Madness in the blood, however, was a very different matter. Of course she would have kept it from me, even if—perhaps especially if—she had feared that my fascination with the mirror was the first sign of its coming out in me.

Apart from Aunt Vida, the only relation I had ever met was her elder brother, my great-uncle Josiah, who used to come to us every two or three years for a week in September. He was younger than my aunt but looked much, much older: completely bald, except for a thin fringe of white hair at the back of his skull, and so stooped over that I used to think he must be a hunchback. He had a white moustache, and a narrow, projecting jaw, which, with his stooped, wiry figure, gave him a distinctly simian air. He wore thick-lensed spectacles and used a magnifying glass for close work. His manner was always courteous, though very reserved; you could sit with him for a whole evening and realise at the end of it that he had scarcely uttered a word. There was—or so I felt as a child—a benign air about his silence; he would sometimes look up over his spectacles and smile faintly at me, but by the time I went to live with him, I cannot have been anything more than a familiar blur.

My mother’s father, George Radford, who had worked all his life at the Treasury, was the youngest of the three. Mama had talked quite freely—or so it seemed when I was small—about growing up in Clapham, telling me all about her brothers, Edgar and Jack (Mama had been the youngest by six years), and how handsome they had looked in their dress uniforms when they came to visit, tramping about the house in a great clatter of spurs and sabers, until they decided to go out to New South Wales and make their fortunes, and how Grandmama (whose name was Louisa) had missed them so much that she had gone to live in New South Wales, too. Mama had stayed in Clapham with Grandpapa, who had died soon after she married my father.

Mama herself had died before I came to realise that she only ever talked about her father or her brothers, repeating the same few comic stories about the scrapes they used to get into, whilst revealing almost nothing about herself. But from the caustic snippets Aunt Vida let fall in later years, I pieced together a very different version. Louisa Radford had been a vain, foolish woman who had led her husband a dog’s life (“poor George never had much backbone”) and doted slavishly on her sons, no matter how badly they behaved, to the exclusion of her daughter. Mama had been George’s favorite, and Louisa had resented her for it; my mother once told Aunt Vida that if she could have had one magical wish, it would have been for the power of making herself invisible whenever she chose.

Why Edgar and Jack had gone to Australia, my aunt professed not to know, beyond hinting that they had left the army under some sort of cloud. Louisa insisted upon following them (“no more than they deserved”); but my mother refused to accompany her, and my grandfather George, taking courage from his daughter’s example, had refused to go either, and so the family split in two. According to Aunt Vida, Louisa had never written to my mother again.

The only likeness my mother had kept was a miniature of her own grandmother—her father’s mother, whom she had never known—it showed a fair, pretty young woman with her hair elaborately curled, but gave no sense of her personality. The miniature lived in Mama’s jewel box, along with a wonderful array of rings, pendants, beads, bracelets, necklaces, and earrings—nothing of any value, she said, but to me a treasure-trove. Her one truly precious possession was the brooch her father had given her when she came of age; she discovered after he died that he had paid a hundred pounds for it, far more than he could really afford. It was a dragonfly in silver and gold, less than two inches across, with rubies for eyes and a larger ruby, surrounded by clusters of tiny diamonds, set into each of its four wings. There were even smaller diamonds studded along its slender tail; its delicate legs and feelers were made of pure gold, and when Mama pinned it on her dress, the long gold pin was completely hidden; the dragonfly seemed to have settled upon her breast.

About my father I knew even less. I had never seen a picture of him, either, and I had only the vaguest idea of what he might have looked like: bearded—but so were most men—with brown hair—like most men; tall, but not especially tall; handsome, but not in any particular way. As a child, I had simply accepted whatever Mama had told me, which was mostly about their life in London when they were first married, and especially about his work amongst the poor of Clerkenwell, and what a good and kind and conscientious doctor he had been, but somehow these conversations had left me with very little impression of him. Papa’s parents had died, she said, before she had met him, and if he had had brothers or sisters, uncles or aunts, she had never mentioned them. For all I knew to the contrary, his entire family might have been locked up in Bedlam.

By the time I was eight or nine, I had come to believe that the subject of Papa—and especially their time at Nettleford, where he had taken so long to recover his health, even after I was born—was painful to her, though she tried very hard not to show it, and so I gradually ceased to question her. Perhaps if Mama and I had been living alone, I might have been more insistent. But our little household seemed to me quite complete, until all thought of my father was swept away by the shock of Mama’s sudden death.

I had become so absorbed in these recollections that I was startled to hear Bella’s voice in the doorway, telling me that “Mr. Mardent” would like to see me, if I felt well enough. I did not connect the name with Dr. Straker’s parting remark, and agreed uneasily, assuming that another doctor had come to examine me. But the young man who appeared in the doorway a few moments later looked, as Dr. Straker had intimated, more like a poet than a physician.

He was about the same height as Dr. Straker, but slender, almost emaciated, with thick brown hair, parted in the middle and worn quite long. Light from the window fell across his face, revealing sensitive features and dark, liquid eyes. He wore a suit of dark brown corduroy, with a loose white collar and a striped cravat.

“Miss Ferrars? My name is Frederic Mordaunt; I am Dr. Straker’s assistant; he asked me to call on you.”

The name “Mordaunt” struck a faint resonance, like the toll of a distant bell, immediately lost in the relief of being addressed as “Miss Ferrars.” His voice was low and hesitant; we might have been meeting in a drawing room. I invited him to sit down, but he remained hovering awkwardly in the doorway.

“Really I should not,” he stammered. “I am not a doctor, and it would not be seemly for me to . . . There is a sitting room just along the hall; the fire is lit, and I thought perhaps, if you felt strong enough, we could . . .”

Twenty minutes later, I was walking down the dim corridor, a little shakily but without Bella’s assistance. She had done her best to make me presentable, and though I still felt very bedraggled, Lucy Ashton’s blue woollen travelling-dress fitted me perfectly. Mr. Mordaunt was waiting by the window in a room not much larger than my own, but furnished with a settee, and cracked leather armchairs on either side of the hearth. The walls were papered in dark green vertical stripes, suggesting the bars of a cage, on a background much stained by smoke, with a faded hunting print above the mantel.

“We have already met, Miss Ferrars,” he said, once we were seated by the fire. “It was I who admitted you here—as Miss Ashton,” he added, colouring a little. “But you do not remember me, do you?”

“No, sir, I am afraid not. May I ask what Dr. Straker has told you about me?”

“I know that you have suffered a seizure and lost your memory of the past few weeks. And that you prefer to be addressed as Miss Ferrars—”

“I am Miss Ferrars,” I broke in. “I presume Dr. Straker has shown you the telegram?”

“I am afraid so,” he replied. “But Miss Ferrars, I am not here to question your—that is to say, I have no right; I am not a medical man. Dr. Straker simply thought that a little conversation might help you recall . . .”

He made an expansive gesture, then clasped his hands self-consciously.

“You must understand, Mr. Mordaunt,” I said firmly, “that although I cannot explain what has happened to me, that telegram is a mistake or a fraud, and I shall certainly be going home on Monday.”

He murmured something which was obviously meant to sound reassuring, but made no further reply.

“May I ask,” I continued, “how I appeared to you when I arrived here?”

“Well,” he said, colouring again, “you seemed agitated, and fearful—as many patients are when they first arrive here—but quite resolved that you must see Dr. Straker and no one else, on what you described as ‘an urgent and confidential matter.’”

“And did I say anything at all, beyond what you wrote on that paper, about why I had come here?”

“Well, no, Miss Ash—Ferrars, I mean—you did not. You struck me as preoccupied, almost as if—how shall I put it?—as if you were repeating a lesson you had learnt, whilst your mind was elsewhere.”

“And after? You told Dr. Straker that you saw me walking about the grounds.”

“Yes, I did. Even at a distance, you looked utterly desolate. I went out to you once, to ask if there was anything at all I could do to help.”

He looked at me appealingly, as if willing me to remember him.

I was about to ask him what I had said in reply, when Bella came in with a laden tray.

“It is almost midday,” said Mr. Mordaunt, “and I thought you might like—I took the liberty of ordering a light luncheon.”

I realised that, for the first time since my awakening, I was hungry. It seemed very strange to be sitting by a fireside, drinking tea and eating bread and butter and potted shrimp with this personable young man, and my hopes suddenly lifted. Why should I not simply say, I am quite recovered now, and need not wait for Dr. Straker to return? I remembered that I had no money; but perhaps I could persuade him to lend me enough for the fare to London.

“Tell me, Mr. Mordaunt,” I said, “what is it that you do for Dr. Straker?”

“Mostly, Miss Ferrars, I act as his secretary. There is, as you can imagine, an immense amount of paperwork to be kept up. But he is the kindest, as well as the most brilliant, of men. He has been like a father to me for as long as I can remember.”

“You knew him before you came here?”

“No, Miss Ferrars, I was born here.”

“Was your father a doctor, then?”

“No, a lunatic.”

I stared at him in astonishment.

“Your father was confined here?”

“In his last years, yes. But you see, Miss Ferrars, Tregannon House has only been an asylum for the past twenty years or so. Before that, it was my family home.”

“Your home?”

“Yes; there have been Mordaunts here since my great-great-grandfather married a Tregannon in 1720 or thereabouts. It was an alliance of two wealthy families, which increased the standing of both. It also brought together two bloodlines marked by a strong hereditary tendency toward melancholy, violent mania, and insanity. My grandfather, George—Mad Mordaunt, they called him; the maddest of the lot—squandered a large part of the family fortune, and of his children, only my uncle Edmund was spared the worst of the affliction. But I should not be speaking thus—”

“No, I should like you to continue,” I said. “Is your mother still alive, may I ask?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I can barely remember her. She ran away, you see, with another man, when I was four years old. And who could blame her?”

He spoke without bitterness, and my heart went out to him.

“I am very sorry to hear it,” I said. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“No; Uncle Edmund and I are the only surviving Mordaunts—in this unfortunate line, at least. And my uncle’s health is failing; I fear he has not long to live.”

“Does your uncle live here, too?”

“Yes. He has rooms on the ground floor, which he seldom leaves these days.”

“And—how were you brought up?” I asked.

“By Uncle Edmund; he paid for me to be privately tutored here. I owe everything to him, and Dr. Straker. They were friends, you see, at Oxford. Dr. Straker was already deep in the study of mental disease when they met, and Uncle Edmund had vowed to do whatever he could toward the lifting of the family curse, as he calls it. They dreamt of founding an asylum on humane and enlightened principles, like the Retreat at York—you have heard of it?—”

I had not, but I nodded, not wanting to interrupt him.

“When the estate came to Uncle Edmund, Tregannon Asylum was established, with Dr. Straker as its chief medical officer. My uncle had complete faith in him, even though he had scarcely begun to practise. There was just enough capital left to pay for the initial conversion. My uncle used to say—though he is not given to levity—that since it was already a madhouse, we might as well make a business of it. And it has done well, over the years; there has been a great deal of new building, which I suppose is a good thing—though I would far rather see the whole place pulled down for want of patients,” he added, with a sudden access of passion.

“And you, Mr. Mordaunt? Why do you choose to work here?”

“The family curse, Miss Ferrars: I suffer from bouts of acute melancholia. I could not complete my medical studies, and so Dr. Straker took me on as his assistant. Here, at least, my illness is of some use; our patients find me easy to talk to. I sometimes feel, Miss Ferrars, that I am a lay brother in a strange sort of latter-day order: we no longer believe in God, but hope nevertheless for miracles—though Dr. Straker would not agree.”

“But surely, would you not be better living—” anywhere but here, I almost said “in the world?”

“It is natural to think so, Miss Ferrars, but my duty lies here. Dr. Straker has come to depend upon me, and besides—”

He blushed, averting his gaze; I wondered what he had been about to say.

“And you, Miss Ferrars?” he said after a pause. “Would you tell me something of yourself? You grew up on the Isle of Wight, I understand.”

Hesitantly at first, I began to speak of the scenes I had recalled that morning, though not of my fascination with Rosina and the mirror. He listened attentively, smiling at my portrait of Aunt Vida. It struck me as I talked that, despite the loss of my mother, my childhood had been far happier than his.

“Was your mother always an invalid?” he asked. “From childhood, I mean?”

The question stirred a troubling memory. I had never thought of her as an invalid; as a child, I had accepted her being delicate, and needing to rest a great deal, as simply part of the order of things. And when I was told, in the first extremity of grief, that her heart had been diseased, I assumed it had always been thus. It was only years after Mama’s death that it occurred to me to put exactly this question to my aunt.

We were standing, that afternoon, on the path by St Catherine’s Lighthouse, gazing out across the sea. Neither of us had spoken for some time. It was a clear, windless day, early in the spring, and I was wondering whether a faint skein of cloud along the horizon was actually the coast of France, when my aunt said, more to herself than to me, “Emily always liked this spot.”

Aunt Vida, when preoccupied, would speak of “Emily” rather than “your mother”; she always talked more freely when we were out of doors. Though we were only about a mile and a half from the cottage, the path was rough, and very steep in places, and I could not imagine Mama negotiating it.

“Was she stronger—her heart, I mean—when she was a girl?” I asked.

My aunt nodded, still in her reverie. “Could walk all day then. No sign of anything wrong.”

“So when did she . . . ?”

“At Nettleford, after—” Her expression changed abruptly, as if a blind had fallen across her features.

“After what, Aunt?”

“Don’t know. Woolgathering. No good asking me. Never saw the place.”

My aunt had scarcely known my father. She had moved to the Isle of Wight when my mother was quite small, and though Mama had spent a good deal of her time there, my father had never visited the cottage. Aunt Vida had met him on a few occasions in London, but she in turn had never been to Nettleford.

“Why did you never visit her at Nettleford?” She had always evaded the question, but now that I was as tall as my aunt, I felt entitled to an answer.

“Told you before. Godfrey was too ill; didn’t want to be a nuisance. Before that, he was too busy. Asked them here several times, but he could never get away. Always worried about his patients. Would have lived longer if he’d chosen another profession, your mother said.”

“Was he—were he and Mama happy together?”

“Of course they were, child. Why do you ask?”

I did not know what had prompted me to ask. I had been possessed, of late, by a strange restlessness, as if I were yearning for a place I had never seen but would recognise at once if only I could find it. I was in my sixteenth year, and on the verge of womanhood, for which my aunt, in her gruff, taciturn way, was doing her best to prepare me. Earlier on our walk, we had seen a cow giving birth to a calf, and not long after we had passed a field in which a bull-calf was attempting to mount a heifer—a common-enough sight, with so much farmland around us. I had once asked Mama about it, and she had told me that they were playing at leapfrog. I soon learnt to avert my eyes unless I was quite alone, but by the time I was thirteen, I had deduced what I supposed to be the essential facts of procreation.

That day, however, as I was studiously ignoring the bull-calf, my aunt had abruptly said, “Mating. Same with humans. ’Spect you’ve guessed. Never cared for the idea myself.”

I could not imagine anyone caring for the idea, but as I stood beside her, with the white bulk of the lighthouse towering above us, the groaning of the cow in its birth throes came back to me, and with it a dreadful suspicion that I knew why my mother had died so young.

“That was why Mama always changed the subject,” I said, my previous question forgotten, “and why you will not speak of it—of Nettleford. It was giving birth to me that strained her heart.”

My aunt turned on me, her face white with shock and fury. I recoiled, thinking she meant to strike me, until I saw that she was furious not with me, but with herself. She seized my shoulders and fixed me with blazing eyes.

“Never think that, never! Not a jottle of truth in it—none at all. Always remember—only remember—she loved you best. You were her joy, her happiness: hold to that, and ask no more!”

She drew me close and held me in a rare and crushing embrace while I wept.

The memory faded at the sound of Frederic Mordaunt’s voice.

“I do beg your pardon, Miss Ferrars; I did not mean to distress you.”

“It is not that,” I said. “I grieved dreadfully for my mother, but—” I did not know what else to say. He rose and added more coals to the fire. We had long since finished our luncheon, but he seemed in no hurry to leave.

“Were you ever sent to school?” he asked, settling himself again. “After you lost your mother, I mean.”

“No; my aunt used to say that if you could read and do sums, you could give yourself an education.”

“And did you—do you have friends there still, at Niton?”

“I fear not. Most of our neighbours were retired army men; the families all knew one another, and we didn’t fit in. We used to converse with the men, if we met them out walking, but we were too unfashionable, and too eccentric—my aunt, I mean—for the women. The farming people would remember me.”

“Was it a lonely life?”

“I suppose it was, though I did not feel it at the time; my life in London has been far more solitary. And you, Mr. Mordaunt? You must have been very much alone here.”

“I was, yes. I had a series of governesses, because none of them would stay very long; they didn’t like living in a madhouse. Like you, I found solace in walking, once I was old enough to be let out on my own. I used to roam all over the moor; there are some wonderfully wild places, and huge clusters of standing stones, left by the Druids. The wind has a strange, thrumming note when it blows amongst them; you always feel that something uncanny is about to happen. I used to stand by Dozmary Pool—where Sir Bedivere is supposed to have thrown Excalibur—and hope that the Lady of the Lake would show herself.

“And of course the house—the original part, where I grew up—was built nearly eight hundred years ago. Nobody lives there anymore. I would find it oppressive, even now; to a small boy it was profoundly so.”

I shuddered, imagining lunatics shrieking and clashing their chains in the night.

“Oh, it was not the patients,” he said, seeming to read my thought. “They were never kept in the old house. The voluntary patients have always lived in the middle wing, where we are now—it was added early in the seventeenth century—and those confined under a certificate are all in the new building, farthest away from the original house. No, it was—well, I suffered very badly from night terrors, and the housekeeper we had then—Mrs. Blazeby, her name was—used to play upon my fears, telling me bloodcurdling stories of ghosts until I did not know whether I was more afraid of falling asleep or staying awake. A house as old as that is never entirely still, even in the dead of night, with a myriad of tiny creatures gnawing away at the fabric, not to mention—”

He stopped abruptly, colouring.

“I do beg your pardon, Miss Ferrars—most inconsiderate of me.”

“You needn’t apologise; I am not afraid of mice, or rats, if that is what you mean. But did you ever—have you ever seen a ghost?”

His reply was forestalled by Bella coming to remove the luncheon tray. The sight of her evidently reminded him of something; he started and drew out his watch.

“I am terribly sorry, Miss Ferrars, but I have a duty to attend to; I had quite forgotten. It will take me about half an hour; but if you are not too tired, would you care to remain here by the fire? Then we could continue our conversation; Bella will fetch you anything you need.”

I agreed at once, delighted by the prospect. Frederic hastened away, glancing over his shoulder as if to reassure himself that I had not vanished the instant his back was turned. Bella, who seemed to be trying to repress a smile, followed him out.

As I watched them leave, I was overtaken by a sense of absolute unreality. It was exactly like the moment in a dream where you realise that you are dreaming, an instant before you wake. So vivid was the sensation that I held my breath, waiting for the room to dissolve, expecting to wake in my bed at Gresham’s Yard, or—please God—in my room at the cottage, with my aunt and my mother talking quietly at the far end of the hall.

The smoke-stained walls did not dissolve; the watery light at the window did not fade; the soft creak and trickle of the coals went on. And yet my perception had changed as profoundly as if I had indeed woken to the sound of retreating footsteps. My breath came freely; I no longer felt as if I had swallowed a mass of frozen lead. Warmed by Frederic’s evident belief in me, I felt sure that the telegram was, after all, a mistake. I had never been left alone with any young man, let alone one so agreeable. It would be hard, I thought, to imagine two more different upbringings, and yet our conversation had flowed so freely; I could not help feeling that there was an affinity between us and that he was drawn to me as I felt drawn to him. He had been so open, so candid—and it was surely not just professional concern that made his colour change so frequently . . .

I realised with a start that I had almost forgotten I was in a lunatic asylum, waiting not just for Frederic but for Dr. Straker to return from London. The thought of Dr. Straker struck me like a dash of cold water. Why had he been so willing to believe that I was not Georgina Ferrars, even before the telegram had come?

It was now Saturday afternoon; Dr. Straker was due back on Monday. There was really no reason to doubt that he would release me—Frederic, for one thing, evidently admired him above all men—but all the same, just supposing something had gone wrong at Gresham’s Yard . . .

Frederic was the heir; he must have some authority here. When he came back, I would tell him I wished to leave at once, and ask him to lend me the fare home—which would give me an excuse to write to him. Of course he might refuse me, but I would be no worse off if he did. He might even offer to escort me back to London.

Imagining that prospect, I leant forward and stirred the coals, enjoying the warmth on my face and thinking how absurd my suspicions about madness in my family would seem to Frederic. The nearest I had come to acute melancholia was, I supposed, my grief for my mother, but I could not recall the actual emotion, only a vision of myself weeping, and of my aunt’s dry, stricken face as she sat beside me on my bed, awkwardly patting my shoulder; and how could this be a true recollection when I seemed to be looking down upon the two of us from somewhere near the ceiling?

There was also the time I remembered as “the estrangement,” for want of any better description. It came on so gradually that I could not say when it had begun; only that I became aware of it in the autumn, a few months after my aunt’s passionate outburst on the subject of Nettleford. It was as if an invisible film had come between me and the world; or as if I were looking through the wrong end of a telescope, except that instead of the people around me appearing physically smaller, it was my feeling for them that had grown distant and remote. The lines, “Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted?” were often in my mind.

I was not unhappy, at least not consciously so, only detached from everything and everyone around me. If anybody had asked me, I would have insisted that I did not love my aunt any less, but my heart was unmoved by the sight of her; I seemed to have lost the power of feeling. I sensed that she was uneasy about me, but I was afraid of hurting her, and there seemed to be some inward prohibition against speaking of it. And so, all that winter, I insisted that nothing was amiss; I was not even aware that my heart was slowly reawakening until the day, early in the following spring, when I realised I was my old self again.

It was then, for my sixteenth birthday, that Aunt Vida had given me the writing case, along with a journal in a slipcover bound in the same blue leather. “Think you should keep a diary. Never got into the habit myself. Often wished I had. Try to write something every day.”

I wondered if she was inviting me to speak of the estrangement, but still the strange prohibition kept me silent, and as a sort of recompense I began my journal that very night. I had never corresponded with anyone, apart from dutiful letters to my uncle, and I found the act of setting down my most intimate thoughts both unsettling and compelling. Until then, I had seldom remembered my dreams, but the more assiduously I recorded them, the more frequent and vivid they became. There was one in particular that recurred several times, in which I was moving from room to room, searching for my mother. There was no one else in the house, and the echoes of my footsteps sounded unnaturally loud. The dream always began on the ground floor, but as it went on, I realised, with a growing sense of foreboding, that every surface was covered in a layer of fine white dust. Sometimes the thought, But Mama is dead! would flash across my mind, followed an instant later by the realisation that I was dreaming; but in at least one such dream I continued on up the stairs, with the dust growing thicker at every step, until it rose up in a great choking cloud and I woke with a cry of horror.

A coal burst with a sharp crack and a shower of sparks. My writing case and brooch! “We’re all honest girls here, miss.” I remembered, with another stab of apprehension, Dr. Straker saying that I—or Lucy Ashton—had given my address as the Royal Hotel in Plymouth. Could I have left them there? Perhaps, now that I was calmer, I would begin to recall something of those missing weeks. I summoned all of my concentration, but still nothing would come, only a jumble of grey, featureless autumn days in my uncle’s shop, and then, with no perceptible interval, my awakening here in the infirmary.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor outside, and Frederic, slightly breathless, reappeared in the doorway.

“Miss Ferrars; I am sorry to have been so long. Bella is bringing us some more refreshment.”

To me, the time seemed to have flown, but I discovered to my surprise that I was hungry again.

“I would not have left you,” he explained as he sat down, “but there were papers I had to get off to Liskeard in time for the London train.”

“Do you mean there are no more trains today?”

“No—why do you ask, Miss Ferrars?”

“Because—how much is the fare to London, can you tell me?”

“Two guineas, for a first-class ticket.”

My heart beat faster, and my mouth felt dry, but I made up my mind to ask him.

“Mr. Mordaunt, you must have some authority here. You will understand that I am very anxious to see my uncle; I know that telegram is a mistake, and I do not wish to wait for Dr. Straker. I should like to leave by the first train tomorrow, and if you will only lend me the fare to London, I shall repay you as soon as I am home again.”

“Miss Ferrars, you are not a prisoner here, and if you choose to leave, no one will hinder you. But I urge you with all my heart to remain until Dr. Straker returns. Remember that you have suffered a seizure; and there is the question of—what happened during the interval, and why you chose to arrive here as Miss Ashton. If you leave us before these mysteries are solved, you may suffer a relapse. I wonder, myself, if some healing instinct drew you to us: Dr. Straker is a leading authority on disorders of the personality. I am not saying that you have any such disorder, but if you do, you could not be in better hands.”

“And can you assure me that if I do wait for Dr. Straker, he will let me go whenever I wish?”

“My word upon it, Miss Ferrars. You are a voluntary patient, and need only give twenty-four hours’ notice in writing. And, of course, since you are here as our guest, even that would not be necessary.”

“But—” I was about to say that Dr. Straker had twice refused me permission to leave, when it occurred to me that Frederic might not know this.

“It is only that—Dr. Straker seems far too disposed to believe that I am not Georgina Ferrars.”

“But you must understand, Miss Ferrars, that he sees many patients who are utterly convinced of things which are—well, quite mistaken. I am not saying that you are mistaken, only that he is bound to consider that possibility. I assure you, Miss Ferrars, you have nothing to fear; I would trust him with my life.”

He spread his arms wide in a gesture of reassurance. His hands were naturally expressive, the fingers long and flexible, unconsciously dramatizing the flow of his emotions as he talked. Every so often he would become aware of them, and blush, and clasp them tightly in his lap, until gradually he forgot, and his hands would unclasp, and begin to speak again. I wanted to tell him that he need not restrain them on my account, but it would have seemed far too intimate.

“And you have no idea,” he said after a pause, “as to why you presented yourself here as Miss Ashton?”

“None at all; I have tried and tried, but nothing will come . . . Have you any notion, Mr. Mordaunt, of what might have happened to me? How could I have lost all memory of the past six weeks, and yet recall everything before that perfectly—as I assure you I do?”

“Well,” he said hesitantly, “it can happen that, after a particularly terrifying experience, one loses all memory of the event—the mind protecting itself, like a scab growing over a wound before the wound itself has healed. But in your case, the seizure itself is the most likely cause, as I am sure Dr. Straker has indicated. Indeed, Miss Ferrars, you are fortunate to be alive; two of our patients have died of seizures in the past year—”

He stopped short with a look of consternation.

“I am very sorry, Miss Ferrars; I should not have mentioned that. Dr. Straker would be most displeased. You are recovering well; that is the important thing. The real question is what brought you here in the first place.

“Most likely, Dr. Straker has already seen your uncle and reassured him; he may even have solved the mystery. Why risk a long, cold, and tiring journey before you are fully recovered? You are safe here, on my word of honour, and I shall be delighted to keep you company whenever I can—if that is agreeable to you—until Dr. Straker returns.”

I could see the sense in this, and the thought of another day—perhaps two—in his company was tempting, indeed. But a small, persistent voice urged me not to weaken.

“Or,” he continued, “if you absolutely insist upon leaving tomorrow, is there someone else—a close friend, a relation?—in this part of the world, to whom you could go?”

“There is no one, apart from my uncle,” I said. “I am quite alone in the world.” The words echoed in my mind, as if I had heard them very recently.

It occurred to me that I need not leave by the very next train; I could wait until tomorrow afternoon, or even take the first train on Monday morning.

“I should like to think about it,” I said at last, “and decide in the morning, if I may.”

“Of course, Miss Ferrars; I am entirely at your disposal.”

He was interrupted by Bella appearing with a substantial tea of sandwiches, scones, and cake. Again I was struck by the incongruity of taking tea in a madhouse; so much so that I almost laughed aloud. I realised, too, that I had grown even hungrier, and we ate for a few moments in silence, glancing covertly at each other.

“Miss Ferrars,” he said suddenly, “since you asked me to lend you the train fare, I presume you have no money with you?”

“None at all; but the valise I arrived with is not mine, and neither are the clothes; though they are exactly what I should have bought if I had to outfit myself for a journey. But why would I have done that, when I had perfectly good clothes already?”

“That is very strange—very strange, indeed. It almost suggests . . . But you must have had money to get here.”

“My own thought exactly. Bella says I gave her a sixpence when I arrived, but that she found no purse when she unpacked my—the valise. And I am anxious about two other things I am sure I would never travel without: my writing case, and a dragonfly brooch my mother left me: it is the only keepsake I have of her.” I described them both in some detail, hoping that I might have produced the writing case when he admitted me.

“I’m afraid not. Bella, I’m sure, is honest, and we take great pains to ensure that all of our staff are trustworthy, but there is always the possibility . . . The room you occupied is on the floor below this, on the opposite side of the building; I shall start by—”

“Mr. Mordaunt, I am not accusing anyone here of theft; I am worried that I have left them somewhere else—the hotel in Plymouth, for example, which I gave as my address, because of—whatever has befallen me.”

“Yes, I do see that. Staying alone at an hotel—I know you don’t remember, but it suggests that you are accustomed to travelling, are you not?”

“I would not say accustomed, but yes; my aunt and I made several journeys together, after—” I almost said, after the estrangement, but changed it to “after I turned sixteen. She said it was time I saw something of the world; she used to make me buy the tickets at the station, and write ahead for our lodgings, and make the introductions when we arrived. My aunt was determined that I should grow up to be an independent woman, you see.”

“And where did you travel—abroad?”

“No, not abroad. We went to Scotland twice, and to Yorkshire, and Kent . . .”

“And Plymouth?”

“No, never—that I can recall, I mean.”

And never to Nettleford, I thought. I had tried to persuade Aunt Vida, saying that I should love, more than anything, to see the place where I was born, only to be met with a barrage of objections: she was sure we would never find the house; it had probably been knocked down by now; the countryside there was just like the Isle of Wight, but not nearly as interesting; and so on until I gave up, inhibited by the memory of her distress that day by the lighthouse, and her impassioned cry: “You were her joy, her happiness: hold to that, and ask no more!”

I looked up from the flames and saw that Frederic was studying me intently. He blushed as our eyes met, and we finished our tea in awkward silence. I felt suddenly, overwhelmingly fatigued; he remarked upon it a few moments later and took his leave, promising to return in the morning.

I slept, that night, without the aid of chloral; a long, dreamless sleep from which I woke in grey twilight to the sound of raindrops spattering against the window. I got out of bed, moving much more freely, and pressed my face against the grille. Steady, drenching rain was splashing along the paths below and bouncing off the tops of the walls. The trees beyond were no more than dim, skeletal shapes, wreathed in vapour.

It was raining like this, I thought, when we lost our house. The autumn was almost over, and the weather had been so wet that I had not ventured out of doors for days. The roof had sprung a leak; water was dripping loudly into a bucket on the floor of Mama’s old room, and our garden had become a swamp, with rivulets streaming around the house and gouging deep channels in the sodden earth. All week the mercury had hovered beside “Rain”; there had not been much wind, only the relentless downpour. But when we woke on Saturday morning, the glass had fallen toward “Stormy,” and a heavy swell was running. As darkness gathered, the roar of the waves grew louder still, and the wind was rising.

Amy and Mrs. Briggs were away, staying with relations as they did on the last Saturday of every month. My aunt and I had finished our supper and drawn our chairs close to the sitting-room fire; she was playing patience, as she often did to settle her mind, but I could tell that she was uneasy. I was sitting with my back to the flames, listening to the gusty roar of rain upon the roof, the creaking of the house, the wind shaking the windows and flinging torrents of water against the glass, and beneath it all, the deep, echoing boom of the waves.

Without warning, the house shuddered violently. Ornaments jangled and fell; a cupboard door flew open; the floor lurched and rebounded. A roar like thunder followed, shaking the walls until my teeth rattled; I thought for an instant we had been struck by lightning, but how could that be, when we had seen no flash?

“It is the cliff,” said my aunt. “Quick, fetch the lantern.”

I seized a candlestick and hurried downstairs, with my aunt close behind me despite her rheumatism. We kept a hurricane lamp on a hook by the kitchen door; I fumbled with the chimney and the box of vestas for an age before the wick caught and the harsh white light flared up.

We hastened along the passage, and threw open the front door to the rush of wind and the deafening roar of the sea, louder and closer than I had ever heard it. I could see our four stone steps, black and glistening, and a little of the gravel path below, but the light was drowned in the confusion of the deluge, like bundles of fine steel rods hurtling past an impenetrable curtain of blackness.

“Shall I go down and see, Aunt?” I shouted, reaching for my waterproof.

“No—too dangerous—must leave now,” replied my aunt, struggling into her oilskins as I closed the door against the noise. “We must find the path—make for the vicarage.”

“Mama’s brooch!” I cried, and was racing back upstairs before she could stop me. I dashed into my room and seized the jewel in its red velvet case. My writing case lay on the bedside table; I seized that too, thrust it into the bosom of my dress, and was back in the hall before my aunt had finished tying on her sou’wester. I threw on my own oilskins and galoshes; we returned to the kitchen door and faced the downpour again. Not long before my mother died, a gate had been let into the back wall: to reach the village, we would have to climb a steep, narrow path up through the gorse for a hundred yards or more, and then follow the road—a welter of mud, after such a deluge—for at least a quarter of a mile before the lights of Niton came into view.

“The rain is too heavy!” I shouted. “If the lamp goes out, we’ll be lost!”

“Must chance it—keep together!” She seized the lamp with one hand, clutched my arm with the other, and plunged into the storm.

I must have walked this path a thousand times; even on a moonless night, my feet would carry me from the kitchen door to the gate with scarcely a thought on my part. But the light showed only a teeming chaos of darkness and rain. We were sheltered, at first, from the full force of the wind, but the lamp still flared wildly, and the hot glass hissed and sputtered as we lurched in what I could only pray was the right direction. Branches clawed my face; black, clinging mud wrenched at my galoshes. I could not tell whether the quivering I felt was simply my own body shaking with fear, or the ground itself trembling; with every thunderous crash from the sea at my back, I expected the earth to vanish from beneath my feet.

After an age of splashing and stumbling, I blundered against stone, and felt my aunt tugging me to the right until we reached the gate and began to climb. Black, streaming gorse caught at our oilskins, leaving scarcely room for us to walk abreast, and the wind grew fiercer as we dragged our way upward, tugging at my sou’wester and sending jets of icy water down my neck.

I was trying to count my steps, and had got to something like fifty, when my aunt gasped and fell heavily, dragging me down with her. The lamp flew from her hand and went out in a flare and a clatter of breaking glass, and we were plunged into absolute darkness.

“What is it?” I shouted, drawing her close and trying to sit up.

“Ankle—can’t walk.”

“I’ll help you.”

I tried to stand upright, but immediately lost my balance and fell into gorse. Prickles stung my cheek. Fighting down panic, I slid one foot across the mud until it struck something soft; I heard another groan and dragged myself back to my aunt’s side.

Slowly and painfully, I managed to get us both sitting up, with our arms around each other and our backs against the gorse. Our gloves and oilskins shielded us from the prickles, but my galoshes were full of water, and I could feel my aunt shivering. I drew her closer still and tried to arrange our oilskins to protect us as best I could. With our heads side by side, we could at least hear each other without having to shout. The gorse gave us some shelter, but the wind still swirled about us, and the rain beat down relentlessly.

“You must go on,” said my aunt hoarsely. “Can’t be too far from the road. Crawl up the path—use the gorse to guide you.”

“I won’t leave you, Aunt. I’d only get lost.”

“Keep the sound of the sea behind you. When you reach the road, keep the wind on your left till you see the lights.”

“No; you’ll freeze if I leave you.”

“We’ll both die if you stay. Might be another collapse any minute. You get help—only chance.”

I tried to picture the rest of the climb. Though the gorse bushes grew close, there were gaps quite large enough to deceive me; once off the path, I would get hopelessly entangled, or crawl blindly until I slipped and rolled to my death.

“I can’t. I’ll never find the way.”

“S’pose not,” she said after a pause. “But if the sky clears, go at once.”

Even halfway up the path—as surely we must be?—the roar of the sea was terrifying. The time could not be much past nine o’clock; nearly ten hours until the dawn, unless the clouds parted. The moon had been full a week ago, before the rain began, but even starlight would be enough to guide us. We were both shivering now, and I could not feel my feet. I wrapped my arms still more tightly around my aunt and waited for the end, trying not to imagine the ground opening beneath us, the bone-crushing fall, being buried under tons of rock and yet still conscious—and recalled, with terrible clarity, a torrent of earth and rock plummeting down the cliff, and my being suspended in midair by a tangle of roots, with red dirt spilling over me.

“Rosina! Help me!” I heard myself cry.

My aunt gave a violent start and twisted in my arms.

“What? What did you say?”

“It was—only a sort of prayer.”

She muttered something I did not catch, and subsided. I remembered my mother finding me at the mirror, and the fear in her voice when she asked me about Rosina. If we lived, I thought, I would make Aunt Vida tell me—whatever there was to tell, about Rosina, and Nettleford, and my father . . .

But still the rain beat down, and the wind whipped about us in the darkness, carrying away what little warmth remained in my body. The shivering increased until I had to clench my teeth against it. It would be the worst of ironies, I thought, if we were found frozen to death with the house still standing. I had read somewhere that shivering was the body’s way of keeping itself warm, and I began hugging my aunt rhythmically, hoping to squeeze some warmth into her. Mud squelched beneath us; I kept feeling that we were toppling to one side or the other, with only the pressure of the gorse against my back to tell me it was an illusion. Pinpoints of coloured light drifted before my eyes; for a wild moment I thought they were stars, until I realised that my eyes were tightly shut; the pinpoints were still there when I opened them. I clung to my aunt, and shook, and prayed for rescue.

Her head lolled against my cheek, lurched away, and lolled again. The rain had lessened; even the roar of the waves had receded. I realised that I was no longer shivering. My arms and legs were numb, but that did not seem to matter, as I did not feel cold anymore, only pleasantly drowsy, as if I were sinking into a warm bath . . .

I was lying in soft grass, beside a hedgerow crowded with blossom, the colours richer and more dazzling than anything I had seen: reds and crimsons and violets and pinks and whites so breathtaking I could feel them softly vibrating. Sunlight warmed my cheek; the air quivered with the chirruping of birds and the deep, resonant hum of bees, growing louder and louder until my body shook to the sound. Then the sun vanished with a colossal roar, and I was plunged back into freezing darkness, with the long, booming echoes of another landslide reverberating in the darkness below.

“’S the end,” my aunt mumbled. “Mus’ leave me.”

“Aunt, you must wake up,” I said. “We’ll die if we go to sleep again.”

I began squeezing her once more, with arms I could not feel, assuring her that we had slept most of the night away—and wishing I believed it myself—but she only stirred, and muttered something unintelligible. The rain, at least, had stopped, but the wind still swirled around us, and the sea, now that I was fully awake, sounded even louder and closer than before.

How much more of the cliff had gone? Had it taken the house this time? As I strained my eyes toward the crashing of the waves, it seemed to me that the darkness was no longer impenetrable. Looking up, I caught a glimpse of stars, blurred by a flying skein of cloud. Faint outlines of bracken coalesced around me. To see if the house was still there, I would have to stand, but my legs refused to obey me; for all the feeling in them, they might have been amputated.

What should I do? If the starlight held, and I could make my legs move, and climb the path, I could reach Niton in twenty minutes, and my aunt would be rescued within the hour. If I stayed, she would survive the cold longer—but not until morning, which I felt certain was still many hours away, even if a third landslide did not claim us.

As gently as I could, I withdrew my arm from around her, took one of my lifeless legs in both numb hands, and began to work at it, pushing and pulling until a spasm of cramp seized my calf. I did the same to the other, clutched at the gorse for support, and dragged myself slowly upright.

A pale gleam, low in the sky, appeared from behind a cloud. It was the moon, only just risen—so the time could not be much past midnight—above a seething chaos of foam. Where the silhouette of our house should have been, no more than fifty yards down the slope, there was only an uneven line of darkness, stark against the white of the sea.

Numb with dread as much as cold, I turned to face the climb. Pain shot through an ankle; my foot, I realised, must be trapped in the mud. As I tried to free it, the moon was blotted out, and I was plunged once more into absolute darkness.

No, not absolute. A star—a bright yellow star—shone out above me. And no, not a star but a lantern, swaying as it descended, and voices calling our names.

Though I escaped with only a severe head cold and a lingering chill in my bones, my aunt was stricken with fever. She lay delirious for several days, hovering between life and death, and by the time the fever broke, her lungs had been gravely weakened. We had been taken to the vicarage, where we remained in adjoining rooms, tended by Amy and Mrs. Briggs, whom Mr. Allardyce had kindly allowed to join us.

If the cottage had been spared, I think my aunt might have regained her health. I had somehow assumed, from her muttered words on the path that night, that she knew it had gone. But the first thing she said to me after the fever had subsided was “When can we go home?” and all I could bear to reply was, “Not yet, Aunt; you must get stronger first.”

I walked round to the headland later that morning and stood for a while in pale sunlight, looking down from the top of the path. Our rescuers’ trampled footprints were still clearly visible around the place where my aunt and I had waited. Fifty yards farther down, the path ran straight over what was now the edge of the cliff. The rubble was completely hidden from view; of the house and garden, nothing remained but empty air, and the wash and slide of the sea below. Everything we possessed—our clothes, our books, our furniture, my mother’s jewel box, the trunk containing her own belongings—everything but my brooch and writing case lay buried under hundreds of tons of earth. I wondered how long I could put off telling my aunt, but someone must have let it slip, for when I returned from an errand a few hours later, she took my hand and said quietly, “It’s all right, my dear; I know.”

From that day onward, she ceased to struggle. The Aunt Vida of old would have been up and dressed the minute she could stand, waving away objections and declaring that all she needed was a good walk. But now she seemed content to lie propped up on a litter of pillows and watch the last of the autumn leaves drifting to earth. Our windows faced inland, but she showed no interest in what the sea was doing; nor did she ever ask me to describe the scene where the cottage had stood.

Her awkwardness about being touched had gone, too. She no longer withdrew her hand from mine, or held herself rigid when I put my arm around her, but simply accepted my embrace. Even Mr. Allardyce, himself now very old and frail, would hold her hand when he sat with her. We kept up the pretence that she was convalescing, but as the days passed, her breathing became more laboured, and when she slept, I could hear a faint, bubbling undertone. Fluid on the lungs, the doctor said; there was nothing to be done but keep her warm and comfortable and hope for the best.

On a wintry afternoon, she seemed to rally. She had slept most of the day, and, on waking, asked for an infusion and had me arrange her pillows so that she was sitting upright. Her hand felt very cold in mine, as it always did now, no matter how assiduously we kept up the fire.

“I think you should go to your uncle,” she said.

“But you would hate London, Aunt; you’ve always said so.”

“I meant, when I am gone.”

“You are going to get better,” I said firmly, “and then we shall find another cottage—not so close to the cliff this time—and live as we always have.”

“No, my dear, I’m not getting better. No tears now, child; I’ve had a good life, and I count myself lucky to have spent these last years with you.”

“Please, Aunt, you musn’t—”

“Pay attention, child,” she said, with a flash of her old self. “Things you need to know. I wrote it all down, but that’s at the bottom of the cliff now.”

I dabbed at my eyes and tried to compose myself.

“I’ve provided for the servants, of course. You’ll have about a hundred a year. Sorry it’s not more, but half our income dies with me because I never married. And there’s about two hundred capital, in trust from your mother. The cottage was to be yours, and everything in it—no use now. If you go to Josiah, you’ll be able to save a bit. Maybe find an occupation—we’ve talked of it often enough—more chance for you in London.

“Our solicitor’s name is Wetherell—Charles Wetherell, in George Street, Plymouth. When I’m gone, write to him. I’ve named Josiah as your guardian—has to be someone—told him to let you do as you please.

“Now—marriage. You know what I think, but you’re a handsome gel, not like I was. You’ll have offers. If you accept someone, write to Mr. Wetherell—tell him who you’re marrying. Papers to draw up—he’ll tell you what’s needed.”

She slid back amongst the pillows, breathing hard, and closed her eyes. I could not bring myself to disturb her, and three days later she was dead.

I arrived at Gresham’s Yard in the midst of a fog that would last another three weeks. I was used to the gentle mists that drifted about our house on the cliffs, and I had vaguely assumed that fog was the same, only denser. But this was altogether different: noxious, laden with soot, a dark, greasy yellow by day, pitch-black by night, clutching at the throat and choking the lungs. My uncle cheerfully informed me that this was nothing compared to the fog of two winters before, which had begun in November and lasted until the following March. And even when it lifted, the streets remained shrouded, either in smoke or driving rain: I woke each morning feeling as if I had inhaled a lungful of coal dust, and I was always catching cold.

My spirits, desolate enough when I arrived, sank lower as the weeks dragged on. My uncle was interested only in bookselling, and since his specialty was obscure theological works, there was little to converse about. To any question about our family, his invariable reply was, “You know, Georgina, it was such a long time ago; I really can’t recall,” until I gave up asking. What I had taken for benign approval was really benign indifference, an absolute lack of interest in anything beyond the confines of his shop.

As the days lengthened, and I began to venture out of doors, I discovered that everything sounded louder, and smelt worse, than I had ever imagined; my nostrils were constantly assailed by the stench of dung and drains, decaying meat and rotting fish, my ears deafened by the clatter of hooves and the cries of street vendors; yet the sheer extremity of sensation was a relief from the oppression of the house. In my wanderings through Bloomsbury, I was constantly amazed at how quickly the scene could change, from the grand houses in Bedford Square to wretched tenements a mere hundred paces away. The first time I saw a man sprawled dead drunk in the gutter, with passersby taking no more notice of him than of a sack of coals—far less, indeed, for the coals would have been carried off at once—I wondered if it was my duty to help him. But I soon learnt to avoid meeting the eyes of my fellow pedestrians, to walk briskly through the less-salubrious streets, and which streets to avoid altogether.

Gresham’s Yard was a small, cobbled square, opening onto Duke Street, close by the Museum. A little sign above the entrance said JOSIAH RADFORD: ANTIQUARIAN BOOKS BOUGHT AND SOLD. There were other shops in the square, including a stationer, a cabinetmaker, a tailor and a haberdasher. You passed through the entrance, which was like a short tunnel of blackened stone, roofed over by the upper floors of the houses, turned left, and there was the entrance to the bookshop, where my uncle sat in the front room at a battered roll-top desk when he was not pottering with the stock.

Despite his shortsightedness, he seemed to know where any book was in the shop, and if the price was not pencilled on the flyleaf, he would always give it without hesitation. The customers were mostly elderly men like my uncle, scholars who worked at the Museum. The whole of the ground floor, a warren of small rooms on several different levels, was crammed with books; shelves extended from floor to ceiling on every available wall. The rooms, some of them windowless, were lit by gaslights in chimneys, and heated by two stoves at the front and back. My uncle was mortally afraid of fire, and would not allow a naked flame anywhere in the house. He was also, I discovered, mortally afraid of spending money on anything other than books. I gave him fifteen shillings a week for my keep, which was certainly more than it cost him, and took over the duties of the boy who had helped him with the parcels in the mornings, but he still blanched at the smallest expense.

Beside the entrance to the bookshop was the area, protected by iron railings, with steps going down to the kitchen and scullery. Beyond that was the house door, opening onto a flight of stairs that ran straight up to the first floor, where my uncle had his quarters overlooking Duke Street. Here also was the dining room, served by a dumbwaiter and another narrower staircase leading down to the servants’ quarters. Mrs. Eddowes, the housekeeper, was a gaunt, elderly woman with steel-grey hair who kept very aloof, in the manner of one who was doing my uncle a great favour by remaining, though she had been with him a decade or more. She had seven dishes, one for each day of the week, with which my uncle seemed entirely content. There was a washerwoman who came in, and the maid, Cora, of whom I saw very little—the latest in a series of maids, I gathered, though Uncle Josiah did not seem to notice the difference. My uncle did not like servants waiting at table, and had everything sent up in the dumbwaiter. I preferred to clear away myself and to send the dishes down to be washed, which I am sure suited Cora very well.

On the next floor up were a bedroom and bathroom, and above that two more bedrooms on the third floor. I chose the westward-facing one of these for my sitting room, because of the view over the rooftops; when the air was clear enough, you could catch glimpses of the river. It was barely ten feet square, with a small grate; a Persian rug so faded you could scarcely see the pattern; a tattered old chaise longue, which I draped with velvet; a small round table; and two upright chairs. I repapered the walls myself, in a green leafy pattern, which sometimes caught the afternoon light, and placed the sofa beneath the window. There I spent much of that interminable winter, desultorily reading novels and yearning for a friend. But where was I to find one? As the weather improved, I took to visiting the Museum and various galleries, and I would sometimes smile tentatively at other women, but they were almost never unaccompanied; at best they might smile faintly in return, and then move on.

I dreamt of Niton as a lost paradise, and thought many times of returning, but I feared that I would be just as lonely there, mourning the life I had lost. Amy wrote to me in the spring to say that she had married her sweetheart and moved with him to Portsmouth; Mrs. Briggs had retired from service and gone to her sister in Felixstowe; and when I heard that Mr. Allardyce had died—even at Niton, the winter had been exceptionally severe—that put the seal upon it.

Depressing as I found my uncle’s shop, I decided that I might as well make myself useful instead of moping upstairs. Most of his business was done by post, but he disliked having to close when he went out to sales, or to visit other dealers, and so I offered to mind the shop whenever he did. By the time I realised what a mistake I had made, it was too late: Uncle Josiah was going out every afternoon from two o’clock until five, while I sat moping downstairs instead of up. If there had been no clients at all, I should have rebelled, but the few that called—mostly elderly clergymen—brought in just enough money for my uncle to insist that we could not possibly manage without it.

Standing at the infirmary window, with the rain still falling steadily, I sought to coax my memory beyond those drab autumn days in my uncle’s shop. I could recall, vividly enough, feeling that another winter in Gresham’s Yard would be more than I could bear, and thinking that as soon as Aunt Vida’s estate was settled—it seemed to be taking Mr. Wetherell an unconscionably long time—I could draw out the two hundred pounds Mama had left me and travel abroad: in Rome, or Naples, it would at least be warm . . .

Shivering, I returned to bed and tried to make up my mind about leaving, until Bella arrived with a knowing look and the news that, though it was only half past eight, “Mr. Mardent” would be pleased if I would join him for breakfast in the sitting room.

He was pacing about the room when I arrived, looking even paler than he had the day before, and there were dark shadows under his eyes. But his face lit up when he saw me, and I felt my breathing quicken in response.

“Miss Ferrars, I am delighted to see you looking so much better.”

“Thank you, Mr. Mordaunt. I slept extremely well. And you?”

“Not so well, I’m afraid; I am—not one of the world’s great sleepers. But no matter.”

There was a short silence while we settled ourselves by the fire.

“Tell me, Miss Ferrars, have you decided?—about returning to London, I mean.”

“I thought—perhaps by this afternoon’s train,” I replied, realising, as his face fell, that I was not at all sure it was what I wanted.

“I’m afraid there is no afternoon train on a Sunday. It would have to be this morning at eleven, which would leave you very little time; and in such vile weather . . . Why not wait for Dr. Straker?”

Rain spattered against the window; I thought of how bleak and cheerless Gresham’s Yard would seem on such a day—and all the fogbound, wintry days to follow. Of course, I could leave first thing tomorrow, but to depart only hours before Dr. Straker returned would seem even more pointed.

“I should be very happy to wait for Dr. Straker,” I said, “if you would be kind enough to send another wire to my uncle, just to make sure that—that he knows I am here.”

“I am sorry, Miss Ferrars, but that is impossible; the telegraph office is closed on Sundays. Of course, we could wire in the morning, but I doubt the reply would be here before Dr. Straker.”

“Then I think I should . . .” Instinct prompted me to say “take the first train home tomorrow,” but Frederic had given me his word, and I was here as their guest, with Bella, seemingly, as my personal maid; they would have every right to be offended. But still the idea of waiting for Dr. Straker prompted a cold, clutching sensation in the pit of my stomach.

“I shall stay until tomorrow,” I said at last. “As you say, the weather is too wet for travelling.”

Frederic’s hands, which had been tightly clasped on his knees, relaxed, and his face brightened again. “It rained like this for a week before we lost our house,” I added by way of distraction, forgetting I had not mentioned the landslide. He looked suitably startled and begged me to continue. No one—except my mother—had ever listened so attentively, or for so long. Frederic scarcely spoke, beyond murmurs of sympathy or encouragement, and yet his attention never wavered. When I described my ordeal on the path that night, he shivered unconsciously; I found myself speaking more and more openly as I went on, even disclosing what I had meant to conceal, my misery at Gresham’s Yard, and my dread of another winter there.

A small silence followed, in which we sat contemplating the remnants of a breakfast I scarcely remembered eating.

“I wonder,” said Frederic tentatively, “if that—your unhappiness in London, I mean—might explain your presence here. You say that, in the last days you can recall, you were thinking of wintering abroad. Let us suppose that you actually did set out on a journey of some length; we don’t know when, or where, but you told your uncle not to expect you back until the new year, let us say.

“And then—this is only my hypothesis, you understand—you suffered an accident, or a severe shock, lost your memory—all of it, I mean—and hence your luggage, though you must have retained some money. You outfitted yourself as best you could; perhaps in Plymouth, perhaps before you arrived there. Why you chose to call yourself Lucy Ashton we don’t know—a subliminal awareness, perhaps, that your mind had been badly shaken. It was at Plymouth, I suspect, that you consulted a physician, who in turn recommended you to us. The courage and determination you displayed so abundantly that night on the cliff brought you all the way here, but then the strain caught up with you, in the form of a seizure, which restored most, but not all, of your memory. As I think I mentioned yesterday, if the initial shock was—well, exceptionally frightening—that could explain why there is still a gap in your memory.

“And, if I’m right, we can even account for the telegram Dr. Straker received from your uncle, who, you say, is very much absorbed in his business and—er—not the most observant of men. What he meant to convey was ‘Your patient can’t be Georgina Ferrars because she is travelling abroad’—assuming he knows nothing of the accident, or its aftermath—but to economise on words, as one does with telegrams, he put ‘Georgina Ferrars here,’ with the most unfortunate results. Of course, it is only a theory, but it seems at least plausible, does it not?”

“It is more than plausible,” I said with a deep sigh of relief. “I am sure you are right. I have been thinking myself that the reason I went to Plymouth is because it is near Nettleford; if, as you say, I had lost all of my memory, instinct might still have drawn me to the place where I was born. Thank you, Fr—Mr. Mordaunt; that is such a relief to my mind.”

Our eyes met; I was suddenly, acutely, conscious of his hand resting on the arm of his chair, only a foot away from mine. I lowered my gaze, but my awareness of his hand remained. My breathing faltered; blood rushed to my face. His fingers spread across the fabric, seeming to reach toward mine of their own volition.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor. Frederic hastily withdrew his hand, even though it had not moved beyond the arm of his chair. I clasped my own hands in my lap and stared at them, willing my colour to subside and looking, I am sure, as guilty as if Bella had caught us in the most flagrant embrace, while she cleared away the dishes, pointedly averting her eyes. Frederic made some banal remark about the weather, to which I replied in kind, addressing myself to the fireplace. It seemed an age before Bella withdrew and I dared to glance in Frederic’s direction, only to catch him glancing at me, looking every bit as flushed and discomfited as I felt. He stirred uncomfortably in his chair, as if preparing to make his excuses and depart.

“Tell me,” I said, casting around for a topic, “I realise I know nothing of what an asylum is really like—how you cure your patients, I mean.” The words had scarcely left my mouth before I remembered that his father had been confined and died here; but then, he had chosen to work as Dr. Straker’s assistant.

“The truth is, Miss Ferrars, that for the most part we don’t cure our patients; all we can do is provide them with the conditions most favorable to recovery. Dr. Straker has come to believe that for the afflictions we commonly see in our voluntary patients—melancholia, nervous exhaustion, inanition, morbid anxiety, and the like—the conventional treatments are largely ineffective. He says that trying to relieve melancholia with mercury, or hydropathy, is like shooting blindfold at a target; if you fire often enough, you are bound to hit it sooner or later, but only by chance. Whereas clean air, kindness, nourishing food, exercise and occupation—and, above all, respite from the cares of everyday life—can only be conducive to healing.

“What we practise here is a form of moral therapy: we encourage every patient to take responsibility for his or her own cure. In my own case, for example, when I feel a bout of melancholia coming on, I know that there is nothing I can do—nothing anyone can do—to forestall it. I can take a glass of wine to ease the oppression, but then I am tempted to take another glass, and another; I can drug myself with opiates, but then I am fit for nothing. My only desire—in so far as I am capable of desiring anything—is to stay in bed and pull the blankets over my head, as I have done all too often, even though I know that it will only make things worse.”

We had recovered our composure while he was speaking, and I ventured to ask him whether melancholia was like grief, only worse, or quite different.

“It is different from grief because grief is a living emotion—to grieve, you must have loved—whereas melancholia is at once the worst pain imaginable—worse than any physical pain I have experienced—and the negation of feeling. It is like a leaden blanket of darkness—darkness and fear, because you are possessed by dread: a universal dread that clamps like a limpet onto every passing thought. In the depths of an attack, I wake each morning feeling as if I have committed a capital crime and been sentenced to hang. The overwhelming temptation is to seek oblivion, and at the worst, the thought of the ultimate oblivion is always with you.

“But I also know, even in those depths—and this is where I am fortunate—that the darkness will pass, and that if I can drag myself out of bed, and face whatever the day requires of me, the oppression will diminish somewhat. And that, if you like, is the essence of moral therapy. I have Dr. Straker to remind me that I will be better if I get up, but only I can do it. He could drag me out of bed—which is what happens in less enlightened asylums—but I would not benefit in the slightest.”

“How can you call yourself fortunate,” I asked, “when you endure such anguish?”

“Because, for much of the time, I am free of it, whereas for some of our patients, the darkness never lifts. And because my father and grandfather were so much more grievously afflicted; I have been spared, thus far, from mania.”

These last words had been accompanied by one of his expansive gestures, but then his expression changed; he looked suddenly stricken, and averted his eyes.

“I am sorry,” I said. “I did not mean to stir such painful memories.” It struck me as I spoke that he had very little but painful memories to draw upon.

“It is not that,” he replied, “only . . . But you were asking me about cures. There are some conditions that can be cured: phobias, for example. Dr. Straker has had remarkable success with a technique he calls dramatic therapy, in which the patient is gradually brought face to face with the thing he fears most. We had a patient who was morbidly afraid of serpents. Dr. Straker began by bringing him into a room in which there was a stuffed cobra in a glass case, well away from the door. The man was gently encouraged to approach a little closer each time until he was able to stand right next to the case; then to watch Dr. Straker reach in and grasp the snake, and finally to handle it himself.

“For the next stage of the cure, Dr. Straker replaced the stuffed cobra with a live one, whose fangs had been drawn, and repeated the sequence—which took a good deal longer—until the man was able to handle a living serpent without any sign of fear, and even to acknowledge that the creature had a certain beauty about it.

“He—Dr. Straker—has had equally good results with several other phobias, and so he naturally wondered if the technique might be extended to more serious cases. A couple of years ago we had a patient who was firmly convinced that he had heard the voice of God commanding him to assassinate Mr. Gladstone; I remember Dr. Straker saying that many perfectly sane men might be tempted to do likewise, without divine instruction. He was actually arrested on his way to the Houses of Parliament with a pistol in his pocket, but because his family were wealthy, he ended up here rather than in Bedlam. Dr. Straker wanted to see if he could cure a patient of monomania by allowing him to act out his obsession under controlled conditions—like drawing fluid off the brain, or lancing a boil—and this man, whose name, appropriately enough, was Isaiah Gadd, seemed an ideal subject for the experiment.

“Dr. Straker began by getting the attendants to say to one another, within the man’s hearing, that Mr. Gladstone would shortly be visiting Tregannon House. Gadd was in a locked ward, but he wasn’t closely confined; on any subject other than Gladstone he seemed quiet and sensible. He sat and read his Bible, did what he was told without argument, was polite to his fellow patients, and seemed to understand perfectly well why he was confined. And as you might expect, he was greatly agitated by the news of Gladstone’s visit.

“As it happened, we had an elderly attendant who looked remarkably like the great man; I am sure he cultivated the likeness. Dr. Straker said that if we hadn’t found anyone on the staff, he’d have engaged an actor. On the morning of the supposed visit, Gadd was told that we were moving him to another wing, where he would be locked up until Mr. Gladstone had left.

“He was taken to a cell on a badly lit corridor in the old wing, got up to look like a Hogarth engraving: a bare stone floor, with an iron door and vertical iron bars, far enough apart to get your arm through, right along the front. Dr. Straker and I were in the room opposite, with the door standing open and the light arranged so that we could see Gadd, but he couldn’t see us.

“He was left alone for an hour, growing more and more agitated, pacing up and down like a wild animal. Then a couple of attendants came running down the corridor, shouting that Mr. Gladstone would be coming this way, and to be sure to bring the guards up first.