Beyond the Veil of Tears (27 page)

‘She could well end up so,’ Mirabelle finished for her. ‘Yes, I see that.’ As Myrtle went to speak again, Mirabelle said, but not unkindly, ‘Quiet, girl’ and
a silence fell on the room.

Mirabelle’s head was whirling as she assimilated all she had been told. She didn’t for a moment doubt that the girl in front of her was telling the truth, but nevertheless she was
shocked and sickened that a man she had been intimate with for a number of years could behave so. And yet she’d had her eyes opened in the worse possible way as to how vile and vicious Oswald
could be, hadn’t she? Every day since, even after the injuries that he’d inflicted had healed, it had been as though the assault had happened just days, hours, before. The humiliation
and shame had changed her forever, she knew that, and try as she might she couldn’t rise above the burning hatred and desire for revenge that had turned her days joyless and her nights into a
torment. Only Alice had any idea what was wrong with her, and the effort of pretending to everyone else – even Marmaduke – that she was the same gay, carefree woman she’d always
been was beginning to make her ill. But it seemed as though Angeline had been as badly treated as herself, more so because the tender life of an innocent had been brutally snuffed out.

She bowed her head for a moment as the familiar pain of her barrenness, and all the heartache she’d suffered as baby after baby had come too soon, pierced her through.

When she looked at Myrtle again the mask she presented to the world was firmly in place once more, and the emerald-green eyes were as clear and hard as glass. ‘I will speak to Mr Jefferson
on his return and see that appropriate action is taken to secure the release of Mrs Golding.’

‘Oh, ma’am, ma’am, thank you. God bless you, ma’am. Thank you, thank you.’ Almost incoherent in her gratitude, Myrtle let the tears flow at last.

She was still thanking Mirabelle when, at a sign from her mistress, Alice led Myrtle out of the room, shutting the door behind them.

Left alone, Mirabelle sat gazing at the closed door. The girl had asked God to bless her, but only God Himself knew why she would make sure Marmaduke got Angeline out of that
place, and with the maximum discredit to Oswald. She liked to think she would have done the same, if Oswald hadn’t sodomized her and brought her so low that she knew she would never really
rise again. But she would never know the answer to that for sure. And perhaps it didn’t matter. What did matter was that every day she carried murder in her heart, and a holy God
couldn’t bless one such as she. But, even knowing that, she couldn’t – no, she didn’t
want
to – let the hatred and bitter fury die. It was the only thing that
kept her going.

Alice knocked and re-entered the room, and Mirabelle raised her eyebrows as she said, ‘Well, what do you think of that?’

‘I think, ma’am,’ said her very proper and refined maid, ‘that Mr Golding might soon find himself like one of Cook’s roast breasts of lamb – well and truly
stuffed – and it couldn’t happen to a nicer gentleman.’

Mirabelle stared at her maid in amazement and then burst out laughing. Perhaps the anger and loathing weren’t the only things that kept her going . . . Thank God for Alice!

Angeline sat under the shade of one of the shelters in the airing court, ostensibly watching a game of croquet that two of the nurses were supervising between a few of the
patients. In reality, her thoughts had soared way above the ten-foot-high walls surrounding the courts and the inmates they enclosed. The knowledge that Myrtle had come to the asylum a few days ago
had been both heartening and weakening. Heartening because it had comforted her to know she wasn’t completely forgotten by the outside world; weakening because the matron’s refusal to
allow her to see Myrtle for even a few minutes had brought home yet again how completely she was at the mercy of the asylum staff and, worse, Oswald.

Her fingers closed round Myrtle’s letter, hidden deep in the pocket of her skirt. She didn’t need to look at it to know what it said, for she had memorized every word. She had
surmised – correctly – that Myrtle had written it with a view to getting it past the scrutiny of the matron, hence the fact that it was couched formally and didn’t really sound
like Myrtle:

It ended, rather quaintly: ‘I will forever be your obedient servant, your maid, Myrtle.’

A forlorn smile touched Angeline’s lips. Dear Myrtle. And she was so glad the money had helped to secure the farm for Myrtle and Albert, and Myrtle’s family. At least they were free
of the shadow of the workhouse now. She wished she could share the news with Verity, for she would have loved to know that Myrtle and Albert had bought the farm and were prospering. One of her
friend’s absolute convictions was that there was no difference between the working class and the upper class except the capriciousness of fate, and that the working man was every bit as
intelligent as the nobility in their mansions.

‘I tell you, Angeline, the fatality of birth and the forced repression of minds that could soar to great things, given a chance, is a terrible indictment of our society,’ Verity had
said more than once. ‘And women are denied this basic right in every class, not just among the poor. I find it incomprehensible that, with a woman on the throne of England, we are not given
our rightful place in society. But Queen Victoria positively promotes women’s inferior status and the gross exploitation of the poor.’

Oh, Verity. The smile died. So many weeks had passed, and still Verity was locked away in seclusion. May had managed to have a word with her once or twice, when she had been on the rota to clean
the seclusion rooms, and had been upset at Verity’s deteriorating health. In protest at her treatment, Verity had refused to eat and was now being force-fed. May hadn’t gone into
details, but Angeline knew it was a brutal procedure.

But Verity’s resolve to stand firm was still strong, May assured Angeline, with something like awe in her voice when she spoke of the other girl. Verity’s heroines, who pioneered the
right of women to higher education – Frances Buss, Dorothea Beale, Emily Davies, who all remained unmarried – were her inspiration.

Suddenly the quiet afternoon was shattered by Lady Lindsay, who had been playing croquet, having greatly improved over the last weeks, according to her particular nurses. At one time the voices
in her head had ordered her to wrestle with an attendant or nurse, or to throw herself to the floor, and often the voices had given incomprehensible commands, injunctions, threats and insults,
until she had stood and screamed and screamed at the contradictory orders. Lately, though, just one or two voices came and these were different and quite beautiful, according to Lady Lindsay. They
gave her songs to sing and poetry to recite, and once they brought a hurdy-gurdy to encircle her bed and play a tune that made her weep with its loveliness.

Now, however, she had flung down her croquet mallet and was tearing at her hair, shouting that ‘they’ were all telling her to hit the wooden ball in a different direction, and that
there were hideous faces grimacing at her from the grass. Before the two nurses supervising the four women could restrain her, she had taken off like a greyhound across the airing court, her cries
blood-curdling. Without pausing, and seemingly unaware that it was there at all, Lady Lindsay ran full tilt into the wall that enclosed the courts, knocking herself onto her back, whereupon she
gave one terrible screech and then was still.

Pandemonium reigned. Several of the patients began screaming or weeping; the ‘Duchess of Windsor’ began giving orders to the nurses in a high-pitched holler; and more attendants and
nurses came running from the building. In the midst of it all, one of the more excitable inmates who had been quietly playing croquet before the incident also ran amok, brandishing her mallet like
a club. Unfortunately Angeline, who had been attempting to hurry to the relative safety of the asylum, was directly in the woman’s path. Whether the woman intended to strike her or not was
questionable – although Rowena Newton was highly strung and mercurial in her moods, she was not considered violent by the asylum staff – but, deliberate or not, the end result was the
same. Angeline received a blow to the back of her head that felled her to the ground, and for a moment everything went black.

When she came to she was being carried on a stretcher, and one of the nurses was walking alongside it, saying, ‘We’re taking you to the hospital wing, Mrs Golding. You’ve
received a nasty blow on the head’, as though she didn’t know her head was throbbing fit to burst.

Once in the hospital, she found herself in the small room off the main ward, where she had been ensconced for some time shortly after her arrival at the asylum. Within minutes Dr Craggs had
examined the back of her head, tut-tutting as he did so and talking in an aside to his wife, ‘No lasting damage, but this sort of thing really should not be allowed to happen. It’s not
good enough, Matron. Not good enough at all.’

In spite of the buzzing and aching in her head, Angeline was struck by the incongruity of the superintendent addressing his wife so formally. Were they like that in the privacy of their own
quarters? she mused dizzily. Doctor and matron? It fitted into the insanity that was all around her, if nothing else.

Sounding extremely rattled, the matron said, ‘It was nothing to do with me, Doctor.’

‘Not good enough, as I said. You must keep a tight ship, Matron. Find out who was responsible for allowing Lady Lindsay such liberty and send them to me. Now, sedation and bed rest for Mrs
Golding, and I’ll look in on her again tomorrow.’

‘Very good, Doctor.’

The next hours were a blur. At some point quite soon after the superintendent’s visit, Angeline was aware of one of the nurses helping her into a nightdress and then settling her in bed
after making her swallow a bitter liquid. Not that she objected to that. Anything that made her excruciating headache bearable was welcome. Within minutes the sleep-inducing drug relaxed her taut
muscles and produced a soporific calm.

Angeline didn’t know when she became aware that the opiate no longer held her in its soothing, inactive stupor. Sounds penetrated the lethargy – awful sounds.

Fighting the desire to simply pull the blanket over her head and let sleep claim her again, she struggled to sit up in bed. Her head swam and her brain felt muzzy, and as the room had no window,
the pitch-blackness added to the feeling of unreality. A bell was ringing somewhere and, now that she was more awake, she could hear shouts and screams, but they sounded different from the usual
disturbances that occurred in the asylum.

Unable to orientate herself in the darkness, she sat on the side of the narrow iron bed for a few minutes and then stood up, feeling around the walls until she came to the door. Banging on it,
she called out, louder and louder when she got no response, but to no avail.

Groping back to where she thought the bed was, she found it and sat on the edge again. Panic had given way to full-fledged fear. She could smell smoke.

It was only a minute or two later that Angeline heard the key turn in the lock, but it wasn’t one of the nurses who spoke when the door opened, but May. ‘Angeline, get up,
there’s a fire.’

‘I am up.’ She stumbled to May in the doorway, who held a bunch of keys in one hand. ‘What are you doing, and what’s happening out there? Where are the nurses?’

‘They’re trying to get patients out, but some of ’em have gone clean barmy because of the fire. Come on, this whole wing’s burning and the smoke’s
terrible.’

‘My clothes. I can’t walk about in my nightdress.’

‘You can – don’t worry about that. The place is on fire, for goodness’ sake.’ May pulled her into the corridor, where thick black smoke was billowing from the
direction of the seclusion rooms along with the crackle of burning wood.

‘How did you get hold of the keys?’

‘One of the nurses collapsed, so I pinched ’em.’

Hair-raising screams were coming from the end of the ward that led on to the seclusion rooms, and Angeline clutched hold of May. ‘Is Verity still in there? We’ve got to help
her.’

‘I’ve tried, you can’t get down that end for the fire.’

‘But if Verity’s trapped, we can’t leave her.’ Angeline’s voice caught in horror. A figure came shrieking out of the smoke, her nightdress and hair on fire. The
woman fell to the ground before she reached them, still screaming, but as they ran forward the scream turned to a gurgling wail and then silence, although the body still twitched as the flames
consumed it. Through the smoke they saw a wall of fire, an inferno.

May grabbed Angeline’s hand. ‘Come on, there’s nothing we can do. It’s impossible to get down that end.’

Her head swimming from the smoke and the sedative in her system, Angeline let May haul her along. ‘How did you get out?’

‘Our attendants led us out into the grounds, but then we could see the ground floor and above were on fire, and I thought of you and Verity. It’s mayhem out there, it wasn’t
difficult to slip away.’

Once in the corridor beyond the hospital wing, they saw smoke seeping beneath the far door. ‘We’re trapped.’ Angeline looked at May in horror. They couldn’t go back and
they couldn’t go forward. She pointed to the window halfway along the corridor and set just below the ceiling. ‘How can we reach it? If we could break the glass we could climb
out.’