Flowers From The Storm (9 page)

—crash—
X two
—crash—
Mah-she
!— crash—
Mah-she
!—
She
!—
She
!—
She
!—outraged, desperate; on and on until the echoing voice was hoarse and grinding; pleading, plaintive, corroding down to an inarticulate syllable between each smash of the barred iron door.

She had not thought him mad last night, but she thought him mad this morning. The truth of Cousin Edward’s warnings was patent—she should not have disturbed him, should never have gone to see him in that way. Everyone in the house was agitated, the other patients unnerved; Maddy had heard Cousin Edward instruct Larkin to explain to Master Christian that he would be restrained, taken to the seclusion room and left there if his conduct had not improved by noon.

Maddy already knew about the seclusion room. It was an essential part of the moral therapy practiced at Blythedale, the management of the patients’ behavior by an appeal to their dignity, the subtle balance between encouragement and intimidation as the situation demanded. Cousin Edward had given her a copy of Mr. Tuke’s
Description of the Retreat
, the famous Quaker asylum at York that had pioneered the humane and moral treatment of lunatics. She’d only had time to read parts of it, but everyone had heard of the Retreat. The brochure about Blythedale emphasized the extensive training and priceless experience Cousin Edward had gained in his eight years of work there under Dr. Jepson. Lunatics were to be spoken to at all times as much as if they were rational beings as possible, in order to cherish the spark of reason. They were to be treated gently and kindly, but made to understand that their circumstances and freedom depended largely on their own self-control. Like children, they were to be secluded if they would not behave after having been given ample chance to do so.

At half past eleven, when Cousin Edward retired to visit with his wife, the halls still rang with the steady
crash
and savage voice that had gone completely wordless now, just a guttural, broken, animal noise in time to the clang of the bars. Maddy felt she could listen no longer. It was her fault; if he was to be punished, she didn’t wish to sit in comfortable ignorance of what she’d caused. With no real purpose but to chasten herself for her foolish trespass, she asked a maid to point out the seclusion room. The girl led her to the cellar stairs.

“It’s the third door on the right, Miss. Just past the new bath.”

Maddy descended the stair. As she turned each corner, the violent sounds from above faded, until she stepped into a silent corridor. The air was cold, but the passage had been whitewashed and a lamp burned steadily at the far end, giving ample illumination. The third door on the right stood open to a small, windowless room with a wooden floor and a bench built into one wall.

It was not the horror chamber that she had expected. It was only a room; quite clean, dry, chill but not cold. A Bible lay on the bench, as if inviting someone to read and meditate in the silence. In the little chamber, Maddy suddenly saw the Quaker in Cousin Edward, the heritage from which he seemed to have drifted so far away in his daily life.

This room was like a meetinghouse. A place to be quiet and listen for the still, small voice, the Indwelling Light. As she stood in the middle of it, she thought that Jervaulx would be all right here.

And yet, the silence of it troubled her. She’d spent a large part of her life in the silence of Meetings and had never felt uncomfortable with it. She’d listened, and waited, and felt at times what she believed to be a true experience of the Inner Light—though she had never been moved by it to speak out or minister in Meeting. And in spite of the blasphemy of presuming to predict such things, she found it difficult to imagine that she ever would feel so moved. She wasn’t poised and self-confident, as the duke was.

As poised as Jervaulx had
been
.

She thought of him now. The manacles, the fury in his face. The broken sound of what was left of his voice.

Last night, she had not slept at all. She’d lain awake, as she’d lain awake the night her mother had died, trying to will acceptance out of something that it seemed would never be acceptable.

Silence. There were all kinds of silences: the open, waiting silence of Meeting; the warm silence of home and family where words were unnecessary; the bird-and flower-filled silence of an empty garden.

For months, he’d said nothing. Not one word. The written record so meticulously kept by Cousin Edward repeated it every day:
mute, sullen, uncooperative, violent
.

Cousin Edward called it dementia. Moral insanity; reduced to the animal nature.

She looked at the Bible but didn’t touch it. She’d been brought up to think of the Scriptures as a divine word, a useful and necessary word, but never greater than the leading of God in her heart. In the hush of this spare room she felt the slow prickle of truth growing in her, the dawning realization that a charge was being laid upon her, that the man above-stairs who crashed against his cage was calling out for
her
, that to him this room would not be a spiritual place, but a prison, a threat to be used against him. He didn’t understand silence; he didn’t know it as she knew it.

She lifted her head. He wasn’t a two-year-old. He had not lost his reason.

He isn’t mad; he is maddened.

The thought came so clearly that she had the sensation someone had spoken it aloud.

She felt that something left her, a presence that she had not even known had been there until it was gone.

The room seemed grimmer, less like the clean interior of a meetinghouse and more like a little empty seclusion chamber in the cold depths of a cellar.

Jervaulx had not lost his reason. His words had been taken away. He couldn’t speak, and he couldn’t understand what was said to him.

His banging shouts, his rage and despair, came to seem appallingly rational: not the work of a maniac reduced to lunacy by the sum of his vices, but of a sane man frantic with frustration. He had found no other way to reach out but by violence, this reckless duke who knew periodic functions and Fourier’s infinite series, who could create his own geometry, who had been free and eloquent and even generous in his autocratic way, and was now locked up and driven to distraction by it.

Maddy felt humbled. God had never spoken to her in quite so clear a way. She was no minister, not one of those men and women who had the gift of speaking out in Meeting and marketplace; she only went about her life as it seemed she ought to do from day to day.

But this was an explicit obligation laid upon her. What witness it was that God wished to implement by visiting Jervaulx with this affliction, she did not presume to know— although it didn’t take much divine insight to hazard a guess. She was not asked to preach to him or judge him in his hardship.

What was required of her was only this: that she not abandon him while he suffered it.

Cousin Edward, Maddy knew full well, would not like it. He had expressly forbidden her the violent corridor. There were all sorts of sensible arguments against what she meant to do.

She thought of a multitude as she walked up the stairs, drawing near Jervaulx’s cell, the rhythmic crash growing louder. She was mistaken. She was inadequate. She was unfit for such a task. What did she know of madness or medicine? There was no human voice at all with the crash now. The rest of the asylum seemed strangely quiet, the mumbles and mutterings of yesterday absent as if everyone else hung on the savage clash of metal against metal, listening bewitched.

She turned the corner. Halfway down the hall, Larkin sat on a chair tilted back on two legs to the wall, his skull gleaming beneath the short stubble of hair. He had his pocketwatch out and propped on his knee, flipping the chain idly in time to the clanging.

“Three minutes to go,” he declared loudly, to no one in particular. The crashing cadence went on without a pause. He glanced toward Maddy, and the chair came down with a thump that was half-lost in the din.

“Friend Larkin.” She raised her voice to be heard. “I’ve come to talk to Jervaulx.”

The crash of the bars fell silent.

The startling lack of noise seemed to ring in her ears. Larkin looked to the door of Jervaulx’s room and back at Maddy. He scowled. “You’re not to be here, Miss.”

His voice sounded strange and hollow, surrounded by imaginary echoes of sound that had already died away.

“Nevertheless, I am here.”

“Now—you got me into wonderful trouble last night. I won’t be having any more.”

“Thou mayst go and speak to my cousin, if thou wilt. Certainly I don’t wish to make more trouble for thee.”

“I can’t do that, Miss. In a minute, I’m to take him down to seclusion. You’ll have to leave the corridor.”

“Thou wert only to take him down if he was not quieted by noon, wert thou not?” She made a little gesture toward the door. “He is quiet.”

As if to prove her, the clock in the hall below began to strike, sending slow chimes echoing up the stairs.

Larkin did not appear pleased with the turn of events. Maddy started forward, and he held up his hand.

“Don’t, Miss. Do us all a favor and don’t get him stirred all up again! Ah, Miss, if you please—”

Jervaulx was standing behind the barred door, his hands gripping the iron. The instant he saw her, the rigid clench of his fingers and jaw relaxed. His lips parted as if he would speak, and then clamped shut again. He stood back from the door in the dim room, making a formal bow, offering his hand through the bars as if she were a lady and there were no metal door between them.

“Don’t!” Larkin stepped forward. “He could kill you, Miss! He could strangle you in a minute, if he got hold of you through the bars that way.”

Maddy could see very well that this was so. And in the moment of hesitation, she saw Jervaulx recognize her fear. His open hand closed. He drew back and turned away from the door, moving like a ghost, a silent figure that drifted to the window and stood there, gazing out.

And Maddy realized that she had failed. Larkin’s voice had been the voice of the Reasoner, of evil, that would whisper arguments and proofs and make her resist her own Truth. The first test, and already she’d stumbled.

Maddy watched him for a moment, and then turned to Larkin. “Please go thou and ask my cousin to come here. Thou mayst say to him that I have had an Opening, and it is necessary that I speak with him.”

“An opening?” The attendant gave her an exasperated look. “I don’t know what you mean, Miss, but I’m not going to leave here and let you do something silly.”

“I will sit there,” she said, nodding toward his chair. “I promise thee, no more than that.”

“And what if he gets started again? He’s quiet now; you’ll agitate him.”

“Jervaulx.” Maddy went to the door and lifted her hand, offering it through the bars in spite of Larkin’s furious protest. “If I stay here, will I disturb thee?”

He looked over his shoulder at her.

“It’s on your head, Miss!” Larkin warned. “On your own head be it! After what he did yesterday…”

Jervaulx gave the man a look of utter scorn. He gazed for a moment at Maddy—and then he turned away, turned his back on her offered hand in a brusque and disdainful rejection.

A slap across the cheek could hardly have been more pointed. Maddy dropped her hand. “Please go thou and fetch my cousin,” she said stiffly to Larkin.

“You won’t try nothing while I’m gone?”

Maddy seated herself. “I will not.”

“I can’t believe you’ll last here long, Miss,” the attendant muttered, with a shake of his head as he turned away and strode down the hall, disappearing around the corner.

The silence settled.

Jervaulx remained staring out of his window.

“
Ape
,” he said, with that explosive inflection, a discharge of absolute loathing and contempt.

Then, without turning, he slanted a sideways look back at Maddy, speculative, one eyebrow lifted in subtle challenge.

“Yes,” she said, nodding emphatically. “A perfect ape.”

He crossed his arms, resting his shoulders back against the barred window in his insolent pose, a pale cavalier imprisoned in silence and dusk. A slow smile curved his mouth.

If he was mad, she could not trust him. Yesterday he had leaned back his head on the bars and watched her with just that relaxed and arrogant posture, then a moment later held a razor to her throat.

Be careful, the Reasoner murmured. He’s strong; he’s intimidating; he is not sane.

Maddy looked back at Jervaulx. She allowed a very faint answering tilt of her lips. “Ape,” she repeated decisively.

His one-sided grin seemed a light in the dimness of his little cell.

“
Ape
,” he said, with vicious relish.

Maddy folded her hands. “ ”Twould appear that we’re in agreement.“

He said nothing more, but watched her through the iron barrier with that mute and ironic smile.