He made me a miserable sketch of a bow, and walked away without looking back.
I remained on the bench, shaking with emotion and realising, as my anger subsided, how foolishly I had behaved. Extraordinary as it seemed, he evidently felt something for me, and I ought to have kept my temper and played upon that feeling, instead of driving him away. I rose, shivering, and was walking toward the building when I became aware of a face peering down at me from the end window on the first floor: a large, flat, porcine face that contorted in alarm as our eyes met, and turned quickly away.
If it had not been for her reaction, I would have assumed it was simply a woman who looked remarkably like Hodges. But the flash of recognition had been unmistakable.
I remained staring up at the window until it struck me that there might be an advantage in pretending that I had not recognised her. I lowered my gaze, shook my head as if in disbelief, and set off at a slow, mechanical pace, keeping my eyes fixed on the path, continuing on up the stairs in the same abstracted fashion, and along the corridor to my room, where I closed the observation slide and sank down upon the bed, struggling to comprehend what I had seen.
If she really had taken a bribe, and helped a patient to escape, Hodges could not possibly have been reinstated. I remembered the attendants I had passed on my way out, all turning to look at me, but none of them raising the alarm; the asylum gate standing conveniently open, with the gatekeeper nowhere to be seen; George Baker appearing so fortuitously on the road; and Dr. Straker waiting for me in Gresham’s Yard.
They had meant me to escape, or rather, to believe I was escaping. I had been led, every step of the way. Everyone—Hodges, the attendants, George Baker, perhaps even the motherly woman with the basket in Liskeard station, and, unwittingly, I myself—had played the parts assigned to them. In a play designed to convince me that I had met the real Georgina Ferrars in Gresham’s Yard. Just as Gadd, the monomaniac, had been brought face to face with the man he believed to be Gladstone.
I remembered Frederic saying that if they hadn’t found an attendant to impersonate Gladstone, Dr. Straker would have engaged an actor.
The woman in Gresham’s Yard had been an actress. She could have spent hours studying me through the observation slot in the infirmary.
A faint sound from the passage had me glancing fearfully at the slide. Had it moved a fraction? I dared not go close enough to check. Instead, I walked over to the window, where at least no one could see my face, and stood looking down into the darkening yard where the stable hands had greeted George Baker with such familiarity.
Had George Baker brought me here in the first place? I had woken from the seizure on a Thursday, so I must have arrived on a Wednesday . . .
But that was no more likely to be true than the story of Lucia Ardent.
I had been told so often, and by so many people, that I had arrived here as Lucy Ashton, voluntary patient from Plymouth, that I had come to picture it scene by scene: being admitted by Frederic; wandering restlessly about the grounds in the afternoon; being found, unconscious, early the following morning.
Dr. Straker had said that Lucy Ashton was “a disturbing choice of alias for a troubled young woman presenting herself for treatment at a private asylum.” Perhaps it was meant to be disturbing; perhaps he had chosen it himself.
Just as he had chosen to tell me that I had suffered a seizure. I might have been lying in a drugged stupor for weeks, not days, before I woke in the infirmary.
The more I thought about it, the more certain I felt that it was all Dr. Straker’s invention.
In which case Frederic had deceived me—about everything. That shy, earnest, sensitive demeanor; those heartfelt tears; perhaps it had all been an act. Perhaps he already had a wife, or a mistress, or both. He had even told me the story of Isaiah Gadd, confident that I was far too naïve to see the application to myself. Remembering how easily he had won my heart, I blushed with shame and mortification.
And if Bella, who had seemed so childlike and innocent—if she, too, had been deceiving me on Dr. Straker’s orders, then I could trust nothing beyond the evidence of my own eyes. And perhaps not even that.
I found that I was gripping the windowsill as tightly as I had clutched at the gorse on the cliff-face, staring into the abyss.
Everything they had done had been aimed at driving me out of my mind, in the most literal sense, by confronting me with irrefutable proof that I was not myself.
But why? Dr. Straker, at least, was risking disgrace and imprisonment. Supposing I had gone to Liskeard police station, instead of straight to Gresham’s Yard, and the police had believed me? Supposing my uncle had appeared at the wrong moment? Dr. Straker knew that I had very little money, and no expectations. Why choose a perfectly sane young woman when he had a whole asylum full of lunatics at his disposal? There was nothing at all unusual or interesting about me.
Only that, except for a half-blind uncle, no one would care, or even know, if I vanished from the world.
I remembered Frederic saying—again, supremely confident that I would miss the implication—that one of Dr. Straker’s interests was grafting fruit trees.
They had chosen me for an experiment.
Which was why I had received no treatment. Dr. Straker was waiting patiently for my mind to disintegrate, while he combed the records of missing persons for another young, friendless woman who had vanished from the world—a woman whose lost soul he intended to resurrect in my body.
And after that? He could not afford to release me—assuming he intended to let me go at all—until he was absolutely certain that every last trace of Georgina Ferrars had been expunged from my consciousness. For a man of his powers, it would be easy to arrange apparent proof that the real Georgina Ferrars was already dead: a mangled corpse fished out of the Thames, dressed in my clothes and wearing my brooch.
The experiment might end with my being hanged for murdering myself.
Each morning after breakfast, Mrs. Pearce would read out the names of patients whom the doctors wished to see, and tell them to return to their rooms and wait. I had not seen Dr. Straker for several days, but when my name was called the following morning, I felt as if the blood had drained from my body. It was all I could do to climb the stairs without fainting.
The wait, I knew, might be anything from five minutes to an hour or more. Telling myself that I must not show fear only made my trembling worse; I knew, too, that I would not be able to look at him without horror and loathing. Even if Hodges had not confessed, he would sense that something was wrong; and then he would press and press until he found out.
I could pretend to be ill, but when he found that I had no fever, he would know that I was pretending, and that would make me fear him even more. No; I would have to admit that I was afraid—as I had been, often enough, before—but somehow conceal that I was now mortally afraid of him. I sat down on the upright chair, with my back to the window, trying to decide what I should say.
When I heard his footsteps approaching, I buried my face in my hands and began to sob, which was easy enough to do in earnest, and when the door opened, I did not even look up.
“Good morning, Miss Ashton. I am sorry to see you distressed.”
I drew a long, sobbing breath and slowly raised my head. His tone, as ever, was calm and courteous, but the gleam in his eyes, which I had once taken for amusement, now seemed as cold as ice.
“It should not surprise you, sir,” I said. “I am a prisoner here; I will die here; there is no hope for me.”