Elijah’s Mermaid (39 page)

As Freddie’s business was publishing books was he now considered responsible for creating a spate of insanity in half the women of England? Really, I almost laughed out loud, but Freddie appeared to have been struck dumb, his mouth opened wide, no sound coming out – though when recovered sufficiently he brought his lips very close to my ear, where his breath was hot and smelled of cigars and the whisky he must have been drinking last night, all the rank odours of his wrath when he murmured, ‘Just say it . . . just say the word and I’ll take you away from this ship of fools.’

‘No! Go.’ I pushed him off, fearing he may persuade me yet, for by then all bravado was falling away and I wondered what folly we might have begun. But start we had, and must go on – for the sake of Elijah, and also Pearl – and as far as Freddie was concerned, to safeguard his business and his name. But whatever he might have done in the past I had to trust my uncle now, just as I trusted Samuel, who, before leaving the house last night, had finally agreed to help, despite all reservations posed – though regarding Mrs Hibbert’s part, without whom the enterprise was doomed, well, of Mrs Hibbert I could not be sure.

It was clear that Freddie despised her. The best that I could do was hope, though hours after Freddie had gone away, when I
lay in that narrow asylum bed, my mind was still a flurry of doubt. I was chilled to the bone by the cries and moans that came from other rooms around – like the souls of the dead in a listless sea.

Which one of them, if any, was Pearl? Did Pearl lie as still and as mute as me?

My hair was now cut as hers had been, though still falling just below my ears. All bindings and pins had been removed, along with the laces that tied my boots, anything – so the nurses who did it explained – that might lead a patient to harm herself. ‘We had one . . . oh, what a thing it was, coming in that morning and finding her dead, having gone and hung herself from the bed.’

‘Who’d even think it possible!’ another went on with morbid glee. ‘But she used her hair as a noose, you see. And after that we had new rules. Doctor Cruikshank insisted. All hair cut short.’

‘How terrible!’ I said, trying to imagine what desperate plight might lead to such an act as that.

‘It was,’ said the first, ‘and to tell you the truth, we never thought her mad at all, more likely to be an inheritance job, stuffed in here while the rest of the relatives got their grubby hands on the family wealth. We get a fair number of them . . . and the alcoholics . . . and the syphilitics . . . and the ones who’ve gone mad after giving birth. But then you’ll see everyone for yourself. You’ll meet them tomorrow at breakfast. For tonight, Doctor Cruikshank wants
you
kept quiet. You’ll eat your dinner up here in your room.’

That dinner had long since come and gone. A greasy mutton stew it was that lay heavy in my belly for hours. It was eaten by the light of a flame that swayed and guttered constantly, its sooty plumes rising up to the ceiling, and every spoon that passed my lips was noted down in a little book by the nurse who’d brought the bowl in on a tray. Even my use of the pot was recorded. Even the water I drank, and when I said I’d had enough, when she took that tray away again, she made sure to
lock the door. No candle or fire was left to burn to counter the oppressive gloom, only the occasional blast of hot air that blew through some ventings in the wall.
Hush
, it seemed to say to me, as hot and damp as Freddie’s breath when he’d planted his goodbye kiss on my brow, when he’d held me so firmly in his arms as if to crush out every ounce of fear, stroking my cheeks with his trembling hands, saying, ‘Lily, my brave, my dear little Lily. I swear I’ll make it up to you. Your prospects . . . your future is safe in my hands.’

But, whatever Freddie’s assurances, my mind was anything but soothed. What future could he want with me?

Tossing and turning for hours on end, I started at the howl of a dog, then the tolling of a distant bell. And, I tell you this because it is true, I wept that night when I came to fear that my mind had truly been possessed by some feverish, dark aberration. For long before being claimed by sleep my thoughts turned to Samuel Beresford, and my fingers touched the secret place that I’d never known to exist before – before seeing those scandalous pictures that my brother had made of Pearl.

PEARL

O life as futile, then, as frail!

O for thy voice to soothe and bless!

What hope of answer, or redress?

Behind the veil, behind the veil
.

From
In Memoriam
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I think I am forgotten here. No one has come to force toast in my mouth, or to make me drink gruel through a rubber tube. The Cruikshanks are out in the passageway, and a right old ding dong going on. Something about a loss of funds, and what should be said when informing the ‘trust’, and whether in future the Evans man should continue with his work or not.

Their voices eventually fade away. Soon after, the younger nurse appears. The door is unlocked and there she stands, in her arms a great bundle of grey and black. She says I am to take the air while the basement floor is being cleaned. She gives me some heavy boots to wear, a grey overcoat, a grey knitted hat, some black knitted gloves and a muffler. She says I must behave myself. I am not to go running off again, or she can’t say what Mrs Cruikshank will do, ‘particularly with the mood she’s in’.

She crosses herself and bows her head when we pass by the door where a short while before I saw Mrs Cruikshank and heard her pray. After that, more corridors. More doors. Stone steps sprouting mushroomy fungus. The lawns are spangled white with frost upon which some other women are walking. I shuffle behind them. My legs are aching, as heavy as lead. My shift keeps twisting between my knees, and my feet in these
boots, already sore, are rubbed into more stinging blisters. I couldn’t run away if I tried, though I wish I could escape the mad. Some have fingers as sharp as Tip Thomas’s were. They point. They thump. They snatch. They pinch. But others, they keep away from me. They have no curiosity – no apparent interest in anything. They look lost. They look dazed. They look how I feel.

If I close my eyes against the wind I see the dead woman’s face again, the flesh tight, sheened white, like a carnival mask with her black sunken eyes and the dead blue lips around the gaping hole of a mouth – an orifice almost too intimate. I try not to think of the wounds below, feeling sick again and tasting bile, and when I open up my eyes the vision is stubborn; it lingers on. I can still smell the sour chemical stench that mingled with waste seeping out of the corpse. I can still see those bloody rags on white tiles, and the shelf with the bottles containing pale fluids; and in some of those fluids there floated strange objects, like fleshy pears or pickled plums, and one – a tiny human form. A baby, drowned and floating. On a metal tray, metal instruments – knives, scissors, scalpels, spools of gut – the same black thread that bound her wound. Oh, her terrible wound!

Tip Thomas once told me a story about the women stitched back up, sold on as virgins again and again until they wished that they were dead. Yesterday I wanted to die, but I do not want to die like that.
I do not want to die like that
. Those words might be a magic spell. If I try to say them often enough then Dr Evans will be dismissed and I will be safe from his meddlings.

‘What are you saying? Why are you sad?’ Someone is tugging on my sleeve. She speaks with a lisp. Her face is round. Her forehead is bulbous and very high, sprouting tufts of orange hair. But this squinting child has a radiant smile. I think she is an angel.

‘Are you new, like my friend, Miss Lily?’ She looks away and lifts her arm and waves at another woman, one who stands in the shade of a cedar tree.

Lily?
Could I be dreaming, or is that really Lily Lamb – and dressed like me, like the others here? She walks nearer, so close that we almost touch, but instead of saying anything she gives a little shake of her head as if to implore my silence, and then she takes the child’s hand and leads her back across the lawns, stopping beside a statue there – a crouching stone sphinx upon a plinth. Does it guard us, that demon sent from Hell?

From there, she looks back at me and nods, and when I start to walk forward again she whispers in the young girl’s ear, and the girl gives a high-pitched screeching laugh, shouting, ‘Hide and seek, hide and seek.’ In no time at all there is quite a commotion with Lily calling to a nurse and pointing at the running girl, who lumbers her way through the rows of green hedges. Several more patients go scurrying after, squealing and hooting with all the excitement, while others are crying out in alarm at this unexpected turn of events. But such a diversion gives Lily the chance to grab my hands, to look in my eyes, to tell me that she has come to help. It is hard to understand each word. There are too many people running past. Lily is speaking much too fast, or is it that my thoughts are slow? But I do hear Mrs Hibbert’s name . . . and how Mrs Hibbert is coming for me. It might be tomorrow. It might be today. She must know what room I occupy . . . at the front, or the back, upon what floor?

My answer is croaked, barely audible. My throat is still closed and sore – and now, the nurse is here again, saying that I must go inside – back to my dark damp underworld.

In my dream I see maggoty corpses, bloated like whales as they float down the Thames, and I am floating in between, not sure whether I am alive or dead. And here is Tip Thomas, rowing a boat, hands dropping his oars when they grab for me, nails digging sharp into my flesh as he drags me up and out of the water. I am the fish on the end of his hook. I am the child cradled in his arms, wrapped tight in the folds of his velvet coat as he rocks me and sings his lullaby,
God bless your sweet little
orphaned soul. Did she think I was going to let you go? A gift from heaven you are to me. A pearl dropped into me waiting hands
.

‘God bless your sweet soul’. The Cruikshank man is at the door. The Cruikshank man is asking, ‘Pearl, are you asleep? Can you hear me?’

I lie very still, my head under the blankets, my face pressed down into the pillow. The heating vents are hushing and hissing, over which I hear sounds of cleaning near by, the swish of brooms, the water pipes gurgling, banging, ticking time like clocks – like the tap-tap-tap of Cruikshank’s stick when he walks into the room, and then the dull clang when it drops to the floor, when he says, ‘I have something for you, Pearl . . . to make up for this morning’s regrettable scene, the horror that you witnessed here. Dr Evans’s methods are too crude. He does not have the skill or artistic touch so necessary for this business of ours. That is why I am here to assure you now. That butcher will not lay his hands on you.’

I let out a sigh of relief when he reaches below the blanket’s hem. He strokes the stubble of my hair and traces the outline of one ear. But my blood runs thick and cold again, to hear, ‘No one will cut your flesh but me.’

And now, he is drawing the covers back, and now he is pulling my body around, and when I finally dare to look the picture I see is ludicrous, for balanced there in the palm of his hand is a china plate, with cakes with jam, with cakes with cream, all dusted with sugar – sparkles of sugar that look like ice.

He holds the plate closer in front of my face and my stomach gives a heaving flip as if begging for me to lick and taste. But my throat feels as if it is slashed by glass. How can I think to eat again?

‘My dear, you
have
to eat,’ he says, his weasel voice sneaking, wheedling. ‘You know what must happen if you don’t. We’ll have to use the tubes again, and I only want to make you well, to cherish you, my Pearl . . . my queen.’

I think of a nest of swarming ants, and the queen that lies at
its centre, her belly all swollen, her posture immobile, and always, always, always in darkness – the darkness he punctures yet again with the sugary barb of his poison tongue, when he coaxes, ‘Why not one little taste? You know it will make me happy. Don’t you want to please me, Pearl?’

I see my reflection in spectacle lenses where my eyes are as big as saucers now, almost as big as the plate in his hand, and my mouth moves slowly to form the words, ‘I want . . .’ I might say ‘my freedom’, but there is a sudden whisper of fabric, the fast click of footsteps outside in the passage, and Mrs Cruikshank appears in the door, one hand at her breast where she clutches her cross, her eyes very wide, as if in shock, flinching back when her husband shouts, ‘I told you . . . I am not to be disturbed!’

She seems cowed, but then rises to her full height. She takes a deep breath to remonstrate, ‘There are some guests. Mr Hall has come to see Lily Lamb. And there are two more . . . to visit
her
.’ Her finger points like a quivering arrow. Its tip is aiming for my heart.

‘Is it Osborne Black?’ her husband asks. ‘Really, this is most inconvenient. I don’t believe an appointment was made.’

‘No, it is not Mr Black.’

‘Well, who else could it be? Good God, woman . . . don’t tell me you’ve let them in? What if they see the coffin here? How are we to explain that death away?’

‘The coffin has been disposed of.’ She is obstinate. She tilts her chin. ‘I’m afraid these people refuse to leave. There is a lawyer. He has legal papers. And the woman come with him . . . a Mrs Hibbert . . . she is making all sorts of threats, talking of bringing in the police, of taking her story to the press.’ His wife’s voice is desperate, high and shrill. ‘I must insist you come upstairs. I cannot deal with this myself.’

He sets the plate of cakes on the table. He groans and bends forward to pick up his cane. His jaw is clenched, the sinews taut, too visible through red-bristled jowls when he says, ‘Take this woman and her lawyer to wait in the initiation room. Tell
them I will meet them there. Well, go on, woman, what are you waiting for?’

‘I will do as you say, because you are my husband, but,’ she looks at the picture above the bed where all of those sheep will soon fall to their deaths, and from there her eye lowers to gloat on me and I see the brown of rotting teeth when she draws back her lips in a smiling grimace, and mutters, ‘the Lord is my conscience here.
He
is my one true master. On your own head your own crimes shall be.’