“It removes turbulent spirits that are thought to disrupt the brain,” Dr. Forbes explained.
We saw patients sitting in bathtubs of cold water, metal lids locked over their bodies, only their heads showing. Dr. Forbes said it calmed them, and indeed they seemed calm to the point of insensibility. In one room a man wearing a gag lay trussed in a “blanket gown”-a garment wrapped and tied tightly around him so that he could not move.
“The blanket gown keeps him from hurting himself or anyone else,” Dr. Forbes said.
I thought of Branwell, who’d suffered from violent fits due to drink and drugs. A blanket gown would have come in handy for him. The memory of him saddened me. Indeed, I found the patients more saddening than inspiring, and they were hardly a suitable subject for a novel. Critics had called Jane Eyre coarse, shocking, and vulgar. God help me if I set my next book in Bedlam!
Leaving the treatment rooms, we met two physicians who asked Dr. Forbes for his advice about a patient. As he spoke with them, I looked around a corner and saw, at the far end of a passage, a door that was open just enough for me to see darkness on the other side. The darkness called to that which is dark in me. I approached the door, which was made of iron and had a large keyhole. I wondered why a door so obviously meant to be locked was not. What lay beyond?
Reaching the door, I peered around it. Into my face blew a cold draft that smelled of urine and lye soap. I saw a dim, dismal corridor with an arched ceiling, its only light from a barred window at the end; I heard wails and gibbering. A not entirely disagreeable fear shivered through me. I had a premonition that the corridor led to something I should not see but must. My heartbeat quickened with anticipation; I looked over my shoulder. No one was about. No one saw me step through the door.
The wails and gibbering echoed around me as I tiptoed down the passage; they sounded like utterances from Hell. On either side of the passage were doors, each with a window covered by metal grating set at eye level. I peeked through these. In one locked cell after another, through a maze of corridors, I saw a man or woman imprisoned. Some crouched in corners like animals in pens, but others were in wrist and ankle cuffs, chained to beds. How they struggled and moaned! These were scenes from a medieval torture chamber. I’d stumbled upon the dark heart of Bedlam.
I was headed back the way I’d come when I felt a touch on my shoulder. My heart vaulted up into my throat with a mighty thump. Gasping, I whirled. Before me stood a young woman, small and thin and pale. She wore a plain gray frock and a white shawl. A white bonnet framed brown, curling hair and delicate features. Violet-gray eyes too large for her face calmly met my gaze. Shock paralyzed me, and not just because she’d crept up on me so unexpectedly.
I am haunted by those I have loved and lost. Although they are dust in their graves, I encounter them time and again in persons I meet. This woman was my sister Anne in every lineament.
“Excuse me, madam,” she said, and her voice was Anne’s, sweet and gentle.
The terrible memory of Anne’s passing swept over me like a black wave. Anne had meekly accepted every remedy we pressed upon her; foul medicines and painful blisters added to her suffering, but she patiently endured. I took her to the seaside for a change of air, a last-resort treatment recommended by her doctor. Alas, it didn’t work. Anne died at the age of twenty-eight, in Scarborough. She was buried there, on a headland overlooking the sea she always loved. But here, with me, was her ghost.
“Who are you?” was all I could think to say.
“I’m Julia Garrs,” she said, and curtsied. “What’s your name?”
“Charlotte Bronte.” Now reason overpowered fancy. I saw that she was not my sister reincarnated. She was some ten years younger than Anne had lived to be, and prettier; she had a full bosom, Cupid’s bow lips, and thick, black eyelashes. She was a stranger.
Relief flooded me as I said, “What do you want?”
“I’m lost,” she said. “Will you help me get home? My baby is there. He needs me.”
I deduced that she was a visitor who’d wandered here by chance just as I had. “Certainly.”
She smiled, and as I escorted her along the passage, she took my hand. Her fingers were cold and frail, and I shivered: it seemed that Anne had reached from her grave to touch me. I lost my sense of direction and could not find the door. We turned corner after corner until we came upon a matron. She was a heavy woman with a coarse, red, common face. “Julia!” she said. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Julia shrank behind me. I wondered how the matron knew her name and why she was frightened. “We’re visiting the asylum. We got lost,” I explained.
The matron sneered. “You may be a visitor, mum, but she ain’t. She’s an inmate.”
I was shocked. “But-”
“But she looks so normal.” The matron laughed. “I know. All the visitors think so. You’re not the first one she’s tried to fool into helping her escape. She charms the attendants into letting her out of her cell.” The matron’s tone hinted at the sort of wiles Julia employed. “Then she goes looking for her next mark.”
“Is this true?” I asked Julia.
She clung to my hand but averted her eyes from mine.
“Oh, it’s true, all right,” the matron said. “She’s in Bedlam ’cause she killed her own baby. Born out of wedlock, it was. She drowned it in the bath. Afterwards, she went mad. Thinks it’s still alive.”
I stared at Julia in horror. The matron yanked her away from me and said, “Come on, then, girl. You’re going back to your cell.”
As she led the reluctant but meek Julia down the corridor, she said to me, “You hadn’t ought to be here, mum. This wing’s not on the public tour. It’s for the criminal lunatics.”
Stunned by fresh shock, I said, “How do I get out?”
The matron pointed. “The door’s that way.”
I gladly went in the direction she’d indicated. Then I heard a loud rattling of wheels. I saw, down the passage, four male nurses pushing a cart on which lay a patient wrapped in a blanket gown. He bucked and writhed; he grunted through the gag in his mouth. The sounds caused my own mouth to drop. My heart began a thunderous pounding.
The unintelligible noises that a human makes are as individual and distinctive as his voice speaking words. A sigh, cough, or groan can reveal identity. Every fiber of my being told me who that madman was, even though reason said he could not be.
The nurses pushed the cart into a room; the door slammed behind them. Torn between disbelief and fearful hope, I hurried to the door. I peered through the grated window and saw the nurses wrestling with the madman, removing the blanket gown. He was tall and thin, with sinewy muscles, clothed in a torn white shirt and black trousers. I strained to see his face, which was hidden by the gag and his disheveled black hair. A white-coated doctor with a tonsure of gray hair and a bland, bespectacled face tinkered with a strange apparatus-a clutch of squat black cylinders connected to a machine. Long wires protruded from metal posts at their ends. Nearby stood a wooden table fitted with leather straps with buckles and a set of clamps at the end. I watched the nurses heave the madman onto the table. They tried to buckle the straps over him. As he thrashed and struck out at them, his face turned toward me.
It was lean and swarthy, dripping with sweat, the nose like a falcon’s beak. His mouth was an agonized grimace around the gag. His eyes were a rare, brilliant, crystalline gray. I saw them in my dreams every night. He did not see me now. I clapped my hand over my mouth to stifle a cry of horror mixed with recognition.
My first, visceral impression had proved true: the madman was John Slade.
3
How had Slade, the man I loved, come to be here in Bedlam?