Authors: Lloyd Shepherd
‘Maria, it is time for us to leave,’ says the figure, and Abigail recognises the voice instantly. The voice in the wall, the one that had read to Maria during those hot August nights. The figure steps into the chapel, and turns its eyes onto Abigail.
Her fear buzzes around her head and thunders through Brooke House, with nothing to settle down on or adhere to, and it grows and grows and grows. The woman’s eyes are gleaming obsidian, and a pernicious scar wriggles up her face. Abigail feels naked before her gaze. More than naked: it is as if her skin were suddenly as transparent as glass, her bones and muscles and sinews exposed for this woman’s inspection.
‘Mother,’ says Maria. ‘Leave her.’
The dark-haired woman turns her gaze away, leaving Abigail to gasp as if her head had been held in water and then released, that word
mother
unavoidably mesmerising. She watches the woman walk up to Maria, with that painting of the priest behind them. The priest is not looking into the room, but at a point somewhere in the middle distance. Perhaps he is praying to the lightning.
The two women face each other in front of the painting. They look like two queens, discussing an offering from a poor subject.
‘What is this, Maria?’ says the woman from outside. ‘What is going on?’
‘God has spoken to me,’ says Maria. She looks away from her mother to the picture of the priest. ‘He speaks to me again.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘He said I am unclean. That there is a demon within me which can only be got rid of by my own destruction. He said I deserve what has happened to me.’
‘God is a man, Maria. And men speak lies.’
‘That is blasphemy, Mother. Even though you may say it, it is a wrong thing to say.’
‘Where did it come from, this truck with God? Not from me.’
‘From those who raised me.’
‘Ah, indeed? The good Suffolk farmer and his wife. They did what they promised.’
‘Until the illness took them.’
‘Indeed. The precious gift of disease from your so-called God. Beware men bearing gifts, Maria. And know this – to take thine own life is a sin, if such a God does exist. And this male God will punish you for that sin.’
‘I shall not take my own life.’
‘Ah. I begin to understand. You are to make a sacrifice of
another’s
soul.’
Maria sinks her head. A noise from the door, and a man comes into the room, and Abigail hears her name from her husband’s throat for the first time in more than a month.
‘Abigail!’
He rushes up to her, and she rises into his embrace, breathing his name and crying into his neck, but then his arms go limp and he sits on the bench beside her, looking up at Maria and her mother with the empty expression of an idiot.
‘Maria! No!’ she shouts, but Maria shakes her head.
‘’Tis not my doing, Abigail.’
‘Your husband?’ says Maria’s mother, and she looks at Abigail with those obsidian eyes, and Abigail silently prays that she never looks at her again. ‘Last time I saw this man he was lying senseless in a country field. He must be a bloodhound, to have followed me here.’
‘Leave him be, whoever you are,’ says Abigail, unable to look away from her. ‘He is a good man.’
‘There is no such creature as a
good man
,’ says the woman, and looks back at Maria. ‘Just ask my daughter.’
‘My papers,’ says a voice from the door, and all three women turn to see Dr Bryson standing on the threshold of the room, his little letter-knife held in front of him, his face pale and wet. ‘You made me destroy all my papers.’ He is, momentarily, framed by lightning.
‘Yes, doctor,’ says Maria’s mother. ‘All records relating to my daughter have been destroyed. She was never in this place. I should never have brought her here, but she seems calm now. You have had more success than I did. Than she permitted.’
Bryson steps forward.
‘Stay out of my head, bitch,’ he says. Another step into the room. ‘Evil, it is. The devil’s work. I must cut out the evil. It is an infection, and I am a doctor.’
He steps forward, one single shuddering step, and both women turn to face him head-on from the altar. He stops. But then he walks again – directly towards Maria.
‘Evil! Evil!’ he shouts. He walks like a man being pulled back and pulled forward at the same time, as if he has a piece of rope tied around him and someone outside the room is pulling him away from the women, but the other force is so much the stronger, the force pulling him towards them.
‘Maria, would you condemn his soul?’ says the older woman.
‘Evil!’ shouts Bryson again, stepping with stiff legs towards the altar. He has almost reached them.
‘I saw those men, Mother,’ says Maria. ‘I saw what happened to them. What you caused to happen to them. Even in these walls, I saw it. It was a great sin, and I am the cause of it.’
‘Is it a sin to rid the world of sinners, Maria?’
‘It is God’s work, Mother. It is not ours. We are abominations, you and I. It is not right that we should have such capacities.’
‘EVIL!’
Bryson is standing directly in front of the two women. Both of them stare at him as they talk, and Abigail feels the fine hairs on her arms and on her neck tingle and stand.
‘If it were a sin to dispose of these men, the sin is mine,’ says Maria’s mother, and Abigail sees a ripple of grey exhaustion pass over her disfigured face, which must have once been as beautiful as Maria’s. ‘I take the sin upon me, and only me. You are free, Maria. Free at last.’
Then the mother steps forward and grabs Bryson’s face between the fingers of her left hand and holds it before her, staring into his eyes.
‘Mother!’
As Maria says this, the woman from outside looks away from the doctor and around the room, and Abigail feels something terrible pushing at her head. She holds her hands to her ears, but it makes no difference. She feels like her head is being squeezed by gigantic fingers. She can feel worms burrowing away inside her skull, little creatures of intent, searching for something in her poor deranged brain.
The doctor’s body seems to momentarily loosen, as if the invisible rope around him had been dropped. Then his legs become less wooden and his arm comes round, and with a great cry . . .
‘
EVIL!’
. . . he plunges the letter-knife into the older woman’s throat. Once, twice, three times. And when he is done, he steps away, and drops the knife to the floor, where it rings a metallic trill on the old stone.
There is a great confusion then. Maria
screams
, and this scream is accompanied by an even greater sense of
pressure
on Abigail’s head. Maria kneels down beside her mother, and Bryson shouts once more, spins and falls to the floor, and lies still.
Maria weeps, kneeling by her mother, who splutters a single sentence.
‘Free, Maria, and none shall remember you.’
Then she falls silent. Maria speaks some soft female words which Abigail cannot hear. She finds she cannot move, and next to her she feels her husband pinned by the same invisible chains.
Finally Maria stands, and looks down at her mother. She shakes her head – once, twice, three times – as if to dislodge something within, and then raises her head to the ceiling of the chapel and lets out another scream, one which seems to shake the wicked old fabric of Brooke House just as the thunderclaps had done. Abigail feels that pressure again, even stronger than before, and the noise is everywhere inside her as well as everywhere outside, like a cannonball thundering down from her brain to her body.
Then it stops. Maria steps away from her mother’s body and walks towards the door. She stops beside the hunched figure of Charles Horton, and places one hand on his head. She looks at Abigail.
‘He will recover soon. But he will forget me. It was my mother’s scheme. I see it now. All this sin will collect upon her; all these terrible events and stories must be hers alone. She made the doctor kill her. She has cursed her own soul, in order to save mine. God will know whose hand drove the knife.’
She takes the hand from Horton’s head, and places it on Abigail’s cheek.
‘I suppose I will live a life, after all,’ she says.
Abigail senses a crackle of something like electricity beneath the fingers which stroke her face, and a pressure behind her eyes.
‘She is gone from your mind, Abigail. The princess who haunts you is no more.’
She takes back her hand, and smiles at Abigail. A beautiful smile, but a sad one.
‘And now, you will forget me.’
And she leaves.
PART FIVE
The Forgotten Woman
Persons who have children are more difficult to cure than those who are childless.
Benjamin Rush,
Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind
(1812)
Madness is a distemper of such a nature, that very little of real use can be said concerning it.
John Monro,
Remarks on Dr Battie’s Treatise on Madness
(1758)
A Treatise on Moral Projection
Within the finer classes, it may only be military officers who can be said to have seen unspeakable things. I have read of numerous cases where such men lose their sanity, temporarily or permanently, as a result of the awful scenes which play out inside their minds night after night.
Just such an awful scene awaited me on that long-ago morning in Brooke House. I awoke to witness the most terrible of mutilations. I lay on the floor of the madhouse chapel, with no recollection of how I came to be there. Beside me, laid out at the feet of the priest on the wall, was a strange woman, dead from a terrible wound in her throat.
It is impossible to describe the sense of panicked shock I felt at that moment. Try, if you will, to put yourself in my position. Try to imagine waking on a cold floor, with no conception as to how you arrived there, next to the body of a dead woman whom you do not recognise. It is the stuff of the very worst of nightmares.
But then, the nightmare darkened even further. Because by my side, lying on the floor next to me, was my letter-knife. The way it lay on the ground told an obvious tale: I had dropped it as I had fallen. The dark red stain on its blade told another tale, and I glanced from it to the poor woman’s open throat, and I struggled not to run from that place, screaming.
Squatting on his knees above the dead woman, inspecting her injuries with an awful calm was a man, dark and quiet and pale, who looked up from the body and looked at me intently. It was Constable Horton – a flash of memory, disconnected from anything I was then experiencing, came to me then, of him visiting me in my study while I burned papers in the fire. But which papers? And why did I burn them?
Sitting on one of the benches to the side of the room, quiet and eyes downcast and moving her lips in prayer, was Horton’s wife.
I stood, and saw another figure, a shadow in the back of the chapel, his head down. It was John Burroway.
I forced my mind to travel backwards in time. I tried to make sense of dozens of images and sensations, but none of them would adhere to an Idea. They were as useless as the gibberish of idiots. There were flashes of memory – such as that rendering Constable Horton and I in my study – but they did not serve to enlighten me. I knew where I was – the former chapel at Brooke House. I knew the people who were there with me, the ones who were living, at least. But I did not know this dead woman. And I did not know why she was there.
I stood, slowly, and at the same time Constable Horton rose from his position by the body. He walked over to me and put a hand under my arm, helping me to stand on two feet. I thanked him, but then he looked into my face and said:
‘Dr Bryson, I am arresting you for the murder of this woman. Please stay calm while I secure us a carriage to convey us to Wapping.’
Such was the madness of the scene that I did not at once debate this with him. It was a mistake, of course, but it was an understandable one. The woman was killed with my own knife. Anyone with eyes to see would know that.
But why would I have killed her? This was a question which much vexed Constable Horton over the following hours and days; one word he used, over and over, was
motive
, and as I insisted on telling him, I had no such motive.
As we walked from the chapel, John Burroway looked at me, and I spoke to him.
‘What happened here, John? Did you witness it?’
He said nothing, and his eyes were murky and feeble. It occurred to me that whatever had happened might have deepened his own idiocy; that he may have been shocked into a kind of silence. This turned out not to be the case, but I did not question it further at that time.
I was taken to the police office in Wapping and was interrogated there by Horton. He was joined, soon after my arrival, by Aaron Graham, the man who had paid for the treatment of Horton’s wife. They seemed as perplexed as I by the story, such as it was. In any case, it soon became clear that my involvement in the matter was a secondary consideration. Of more paramount concern was the identity of the dead woman in the chapel. Her body was also taken to Wapping by Horton, and there she was identified as Maggie Broad.
To write of this now is to tell a tale which the whole nation recognises: how Mrs Broad made her fortune in New South Wales, having been sent there as a lowly Suffolk thief, and how she had returned to this country with, so it seemed, the single purpose of exterminating a group of men who called themselves the Sybarites.