Bedlam: The Further Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë (37 page)

His French was better than mine; I marveled at his facility with foreign languages as he quickly obtained a room in a modest inn. To fortify ourselves before we assailed Niall Kavanagh, we ate a good luncheon of chicken cooked in a sauce of cider and cream, fish stew with shrimp and mussels, cinnamon rice pudding, and a strong apple brandy. Then we set out for the château.

Following the directions given us by Sir William, we walked east out of town. The château was a sixteenth-century miniature castle, built of gray stone in hybrid Gothic and Renaissance style, whose two round towers with pointed roofs rose above woods surrounded by orchards. On this gloomy late afternoon it had a foreboding, sinister aspect; but I, in my high spirits, thought it romantic.

“What is our plan?” I asked Slade.

“To hell with plans,” he said. “Little good they've done us. We'll play it by ear this time.”

He rang the bell attached to the locked iron gate. No one answered our summons. A cold, thin rain began to fall. Slade said, “You could slide between the wall and the gate. I can climb over the top.”

We did. Inside, we walked up a short road, beneath dense foliage. The owner liked privacy, Sir William had mentioned. He was a wealthy amateur wild game hunter who collected animals for zoos and specimens for scientists. He was presently away on an expedition in India. An expanse of paving stones encircled the château and separated it from the forest. We marched up to the front door, an iron-banded affair recessed in an arch. Slade employed the brass knocker.

“Niall Kavanagh?” he called.

There was no sound except the rain pelting leaves. I backed out of the arch, looked up at the château, and saw a movement in an upstairs window—a curtain lifted and hastily dropped. “He's here.”

Repeated knocking and calling did no good. Slade tested the door; it was locked. We circled the house, unsuccessfully trying other entrances. At the back we came upon mews and storage buildings. By the wall Slade found a square structure with a stone base, built on a slant, perhaps two feet tall on its high side, covered by two iron doors.

“It must be the entrance to the cellar.” He cautiously lifted open one door, then the other. Inside, wooden stairs descended, vanishing into darkness.

I have an instinctive fear of dark places underground. “We aren't going down there, are we?”

“
We
aren't,” Slade said. “You stay here.”

Marriage hadn't changed his high-handed way of ordering me about. Vexed, I said, “I won't let you go. It can't be safe.”

“We didn't come all this way to be safe. And this appears to be the only way to get to Niall Kavanagh. Don't worry—I'll be careful.”

Marriage hadn't given me any power to control him, either. I could only watch nervously as Slade reached in his pocket and produced matches and a candle. Holding the lit candle in front of him, he cautiously descended the stairs, whose shaft had walls made of earth, stones, and timbers. The stairs were steep, their end too far underground to see. Suddenly he yelled, plunged downward, and vanished. I heard a series of bumps, then silence.

“John!” Terrified, I bent over the entrance and peered down. Did Slade lie unconscious at the bottom of the stairs? I tried not to think that he might be dead. I saw nothing. What should I do?

I had read enough novels to know that the heroine who ventures into dark cellars inevitably meets with disaster, but I could not abandon Slade. There was no one to rescue him except me. I crawled backward down the stairs, clinging to the risers above me as my feet groped for the ones below. The daylight framed by the doors overhead did not illuminate my way very far. I was soon engulfed in darkness, blind. Reaching the point where Slade had disappeared, I called his name; I received no answer. I tested the step with my foot. It seemed as intact and level as any of the others. Thinking that Slade must have slipped and fallen, I lowered my weight onto it.

It gave way as I let go of the upper step to which I'd been holding. I fell screaming through a distance that seemed like miles. My feet hit a hard surface; then I tumbled head over heels down a steep, slippery ramp. My screams echoed in the utter blackness that surrounded me. The ground leveled out, and I stopped in mid-tumble when my feet struck something. It grunted and said, “Bloody hell!”

“John?” Glad I was to hear his voice, but terrified that I'd hurt him. “Are you all right?”

“I was until you kicked me in the back. Are you?”

Sitting up, I moved my arms and legs. “Yes.” I ached all over, but nothing seemed broken.

“What are you doing down here? I told you to stay outside.”

“I followed you because I was worried about you.”

“Well, now we're both trapped,” Slade said glumly.

My hand found his; we held onto each other in silence for a moment. “At least we're together.”

“For better or worse.” Slade chuckled. He withdrew his hands from mine. “Now where did that candle go?” There were fumbling noises. “Ah.”

I heard a scrape, and a flame flared; Slade relit the candle. We stood, and he held the candle aloft. I saw ancient stone walls slick with moisture and became conscious of the dank, earthen, and animal smells in the chilly air. The flagstone floor was littered with dirt, straw, and rodent droppings. The light didn't penetrate the farthest reaches of the cavernous room. We could barely see the rafters some twenty feet above.

Slade shone the candlelight on the ramp down which we'd tumbled. “I'm ready to leave this pit, aren't you?”

We crawled up the ramp. At the top, we stood and looked up at the trapdoor through which we'd fallen. Slade raised his hands, but there was at least three feet of space between his fingertips and the door. “Climb on my back,” he said.

I obeyed, clutching at him while he swayed. Kneeling awkwardly on his shoulders, I pushed up on the door. “I can't move it.”

Slade lowered me. “There must be another way out of here.”

We slid down the ramp, then explored the cellar. The candle's flame elongated. “That draft must be coming from a door,” I said.

As we forged onward, a large square object came into view. It was a cage with thick iron bars that looked big enough to contain the Minotaur.

“The owner must use this for the wild animals he brings home,” Slade said.

A creaking sound came from overhead. We looked up as a rectangle of brightness opened in the ceiling. A shaft of daylight beamed upon us. An object came hurtling down. It crashed on the floor with the sound of glass breaking. It was a large bottle, now in fragments. The liquid it had contained spread over the floor. From the liquid rose fumes that smelled of chemicals, pungent and sickly sweet, disturbingly familiar.

“It's ether!” I'd had an unfortunate and unforgettable experience with ether in 1848.

Slade and I dodged more bottles that shattered. We covered our noses and mouths with our sleeves and hurried toward the far end of the cellar, but the fumes overtook us. Slade said, “I have to put out the candle or they'll ignite the fumes.” He blew on the candle. Above us, the trapdoor slammed shut. We were plunged into darkness. The fumes filled the cellar. I couldn't help breathing them. Lightheaded and drowsy, I collapsed, then fell into deep, impenetrable unconsciousness.

A throbbing headache awakened me. I opened my eyes to dim, hazy, yellow-tinged light. My body was stiff from lying on the hard surface under me. Slowly the world gained definition. I saw a ceiling made of rusty metal a few feet above my face. When I turned my head to my left, fuzzy vertical stripes, crossed at wider intervals by horizontal ones, emerged from the haze. I blinked, and the stripes turned into iron bars. My wits came back in a cold rush of dread. I remembered the cellar, the cage, the breaking bottles, and the ether fumes, which I no longer smelled. But where was Slade?

I turned my head toward my right. He lay near me, flat on his back. His eyes were closed, but his chest rose and fell with even breaths. He was unconscious but alive. My sigh of relief caught in my throat as I realized that we were inside the cage . . . and that there was someone else in the cellar with us. I could hear breathing that had the ragged, wheezy sound of bad lungs. Paper rustled; a pen scratched. I smelled liquor and a fetid, sour human scent. A man sat on a stool some ten paces from the cage, a lamp on the floor beside him. He hunched over a notebook propped on his knees, writing furiously. His white shirt and dark trousers hung on his thin body. Tousled, shaggy red hair partially concealed his face; I could only see a beaked nose and the glint of gold-rimmed spectacles. He lifted a wine bottle, his hand trembling as he gulped a thirsty draught. His visage struck such a bolt of dreadful recognition into my heart that I sat up and stared.

During the earlier part of the adventures I describe herein, I had encountered the ghosts of persons beloved to me, and now it was happening again. Many times had I seen the man before me in just such an attitude, on nights when drink and drugs tormented his mind and he scribbled poems until he collapsed from exhaustion. Many times had I heard him laboring to breathe while the consumption ravaged his lungs. Three years ago I had stood by his deathbed. And here he was, resurrected.

“Branwell,” I said, my voice raspy from the ether, cracking in disbelief.

He started, dropped his pen, and turned to me. Now I realized that this apparition was not my brother. His nose was not as long or sharp as Branwell's, his face not as gaunt. Branwell had died at age thirty-one; this man was at least a decade older. Yet the resemblance was still astounding. He had the same coloring, the same flush of liquor on his cheeks. He, too, had once been handsome. He had a similar loose, sensual mouth, and brown eyes that were sunken and bloodshot, fevered by madness. He rose and walked toward me with Branwell's unsteady gait. Stopping short of the cage, he glared at me.

“Who are you?” Although his voice was deeper than Branwell's, it had a familiar inflection—an Irish accent not quite erased by an English education.

Addled by the ether, shocked by the sight of him, I couldn't speak.

“Who is he?” The man pointed at Slade.

Slade stirred, groaned, and propped himself up on his elbows. “Charlotte?” His voice was furred with sleep. He gazed in bleary confusion at the man before us. “Who—?”

Now I realized who the man was. “This is Niall Kavanagh.”

Slade rubbed his eyes. “Well,” he said, at once bewildered and gratified. “Dr. Kavanagh. At last.”

“How do you know who I am?” Fear joined suspicion in Kavanagh's manner. “Who are you people?”

“My name is John Slade, and this is Charlotte Brontë.” Slade added, “My wife,” as though he'd momentarily forgotten we were married. He dragged himself over to Kavanagh. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.” He extended his hand through the cage's bars.

Kavanagh recoiled. Slade noticed the cage and the fact that we were inside it. His gaze moved to the stout iron padlock that held the door shut. He frowned. “Did you put us in here?”

“Yes.” Kavanagh grinned.

“Did you throw the bottles of ether at us?”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“Because you were trespassing.” Kavanagh uttered a giggle tinged with hysteria. It raised a chill on my skin, for I had often heard it from Branwell. My dead brother truly seemed to live inside Niall Kavanagh, whose humor abruptly turned to angry belligerence. “Why did you come?”

“Let us out of the cage,” Slade said, “and we'll explain.”

“No!” Kavanagh faltered backward. “If I let you out, it's all over for me.” Again I heard the echo of Branwell in his voice.
It's all over for me
, Branwell had often said during fits of black despair. “You want to destroy me and steal my work—just like everybody else!”

I remembered Branwell claiming that the world was against him, that everybody was in league to plagiarize his poems, wring all the artistic talent from him, and toss him aside like a dry husk. “We don't want to hurt you,” I assured Niall Kavanagh in the soothing voice I'd employed with my brother. “We came to help you.”

“Why should you want to help me? I don't know you. How do you know me? Who are you?”

I opened my mouth to speak. Slade said, “Charlotte.” His tone warned me that our captor might react badly to the truth about ourselves or our motives. I turned to Slade. “We owe him an explanation.” I then told Kavanagh, “I'm an authoress. My husband is a former espionage agent for the British crown. We've learned that Lord Eastbourne at the Foreign Office employed you to build a device based on your research on animalcules.”