The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls Page 22
The Doctor stared at me in utter despair, and this is when I kissed him. I kissed him, Diary, and I saw more horror fill his eyes than my knifepoint could ever inspire. Then, with my lips still pressed tightly to his, I reached beneath my shift, withdrew my spoon, and plunged the sharpened handle deeply into his back. The clicking of a thousand tiny claws filled my ears and I backed away from my greatest enemy, knowing that I was no longer needed.
All at once, every Plague Rat in the Asylum pounced upon Dr. Stockill. Screaming in absolute terror, he collapsed beneath their combined weight, and the vengeful rodents scratched at his eyes and tore him apart with their bloodstained teeth until there was nothing left.
Asylum Letter No. LXIV
It is the morning after the Tea Party Massacre, and dawn is breaking through our cracked windows. I have just now completed the relation of all that has happened to this point, for I knew there would be no sleep until the story passed out of me through my little silver pencil. I can hear birds, which have always seemed to stray from their route only to avoid this place, whistling in the trees outside. Does the world know that a mark upon its soul has been blotted out? Will the sky be any clearer today? The air any sweeter?
In the drawer of Dr. Stockill’s desk, I found the Asylum’s visitation ledger, that which had once been governed by the iron claw of Madam Mournington in the days before she felt morally incapable of booking the sort of appointments that were required of her—the days before The Cell. Opening the ledger to today’s date, I saw that we had but one remaining task.
The bell rang in the Entrance Hall, announcing a visitor. The Captain stood facing the door, her tri-corner hat of striped wallpaper and apothecary orders cocked to one side. The length of braid that the inmates and I had woven for her was slung across her chest like a military sash, and a wee black rat perched upon her shoulder like a pirate’s parrot. I delivered to her the long surgical knife that I had meticulously cleaned and polished for just this occasion. The Captain looked down at the rough hilt resting in her delicate hand. The bell rang a second time.
‘Are you quite sure you want to do this alone?’ I asked her.
‘Yes.’
She breathed deeply.
‘I’m ready. You keep watch.’
‘Aye, Captain,’ I said, then ascended the staircase to attend to the others.
Asylum Letter No. LXV
The remainder of the day was passed in the basement, gathering the bodies of the girls who had not yet been incinerated, and then preparing them for the first proper funeral that had ever taken place upon the grounds of the Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls.
A towering pyre was made in the field over the Pits that still concealed the corpses of all who had ridden unwittingly in the Death Cart. We laid our newly dead upon the pyre, and covered them with the branches and wild rosemary we had found growing nearby. Rosemary, for remembrance, says Ophelia . . . a symbol that our sisters will not be forgotten.
As the sun set behind the bordering trees, a very curious procession emerged from the Asylum: Walking one-by-one, each girl wore clean stockings and a wrap of table linens for warmth; our bandaged hands held lanterns and slender ivory tapers. We were flanked upon both sides by rows of our Plague Rats; they walked with us through the courtyard and round to the side of the institution where the field lay. When we reached the Death Pits, we formed a circle round the pyre and raised our flames.
My heart was full with memories of the friends I had lost—girls, women who had died unidentified, unclaimed, and unimportant, yet who were here with me still.
I lowered my taper to the mound of sticks and fragrant brush, and so followed the multitude round me. As the flames rose higher into the glittering heavens, we threw back our heads and sang until our throats were dry.
Good night, sweet ladies, good night, sweet friends
You lie but sleeping, someday we will meet again
Sweet ladies, good night, sweet friends
You lie but sleeping, someday we will meet again
With rosemary green and bright
You’re not forgotten, eternal night
Can’t fade your memory, dim your light
You’ve made a difference, you’ve won your fight
We lift our branches and though we weep
No death could conquer, you only sleep
Good night, sweet ladies, good night, sweet friends
You lie but sleeping, someday we will meet again
Asylum Letter No. LXVI
It was the night following the Tea Party Massacre that we decided to stay. Returning from our makeshift memorial, we gathered round the great hearth in the Entrance Hall, surrounded by cups of tea and everything from the kitchen pantry that was remotely edible, our bodies slowly remembering what it was like to be warm. There, we discussed our options.
One of our numbers claimed to have an uncle just outside of London; perhaps he could take one of us on as a maid in exchange for board, provided he was still living. Another knew of a public house that might hire one or two of us as barmaids under the same conditions, provided it were still standing. Further suggestions were proposed, each one more utterly impractical and entirely impossible than the last. The most qualified amongst us was no better off than the least; a girl who may once have been employed as a tutor of children or even a seller of hats would never again be allowed even these small opportunities. It would only be a danger to return to our families, most of which wouldn’t be where we had left them, and wouldn’t want us if they were, as they clearly hadn’t wanted us before.
Where could we go but the streets? If the criteria for madness were still what we knew them to be, surely it would not be long before we were imprisoned all over again within one asylum or another. And, if we did succeed in avoiding recapture, what was our place in the world? With no money, no connections, and, worse, a bad name eternally attached to all things unsavoury, the best we could hope for would be occasional employment as seamstresses, a job that could never pay the most meager of expenses, or frequent employment as prostitutes, a job that we had all had quite enough of, thank you very much. No respectable household would ever take us on, not even as below-stairs kitchen maids, especially once they saw the brands upon our arms. No, once driven through the Asylum’s sharply spiked gates, we were dead to the world, and just as well, for I did not think we could have kept even these lowly positions if given the opportunity; we had been removed from civilization too long to ever fit back into it.
‘I do not think,’ I said, after a time had passed in silence, ‘that I shall go anywhere at all.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked my ladies. ‘You intend to stay here? In the Asylum?’
A new life was slowly unfurling inside my mind. I was feeling the space round me and stretching my fingers to see if I could fill it. I was breathing the corrupted air and wondering if I could cleanse it of its poison.
‘I think,’ said I, ‘that I mean to hold tightly to the freedom I have just won. If I step back through those gates, I become property of the world again, and I do not think that I can be anyone’s property—anyone’s anything—anymore . . . not ever. Can you?’
I saw that my fellow inmates were turning over this new idea to look at it upon all sides. They did not say ‘yes’, but they did not say ‘no’, and, little by little, I saw the gleam, gone for so long, return to Jolie Rouge’s azure eyes.
I looked round at my dear, cherished sisters . . . the only family I have ever known.
‘Yes, I shall stay,’ I resolved. ‘I shall devote what is left of my life to making my prison my palace. Just think of it, ladies: An asylum, by definition, ought to be a sanctuary for those who need one, and I fear I shall always need one.’
In the days that followed, the doors were open, the girls were free, and nobody left. The Asylum was ours now, and, finally, we belonged here.
Asylum Le
tter No. LXVII
It didn’t take long to clean up the Asylum. The furnace came in quite handy for the disposal of the staff. Madam Mournington I had burned separately, for I felt she was owed that much for her final deed. Before I left her, I took the cameo brooch from her throat, and, later, buried it beneath the rosemary, with a prayer for the child who had been Dr. Stockill’s first victim. Then, the basement was boarded up; no one ever need go there again.
It’s funny, Diary . . . we thought we had eradicated our collective enemies, but the truth is that we never will. Having been tortured for so long, we no longer know what life is without this treatment. We had not felt ourselves change, yet, gradually, we had become so accustomed to such monstrosities that, now that we are free, we feel strangely drawn to them.
Consider the leeches as an example: Many of us had made peace with our blood-sucking companions long ago, and we continue to apply the creatures to ourselves and to each other even though we no longer must. After all, they had been prisoners too—abducted from their natural habitats just as we were; they have names, and voices, and, well, they must be fed.
Though all of the cruelty has gone out of it, we sometimes bind each other in the manacles and straight waistcoats of our former nightmares. It has become a game to us—we hold contests to see who can escape their restraints the quickest. We have decorated the wheeled metal beds from the Bloodletting Wing and race them down the same corridors we used to dread. We have found a thousand uses for the instruments of our torture, claiming them as our own, and reclaiming ourselves in the process.
The Plague Rats remain of the utmost importance to every aspect of our lives here, with the ever-protective Sir Edward watching over us all, the father few of us had ever known. The rats sit with us at tea, drinking from our cups, nibbling the crumpets and scones and teacakes, for we have such things now.
In fact, we have every material thing that we could wish for, and far more. Under the Asylum’s previous regime, our tyrant-gaolers had absconded our belongings immediately upon arrival; they had sold some of our goods, and spent much of our money, but there remained hidden chambers filled with treasures amassed over decades—more than we needed to live as frivolously as we pleased for the rest of our days.
I had arrived entirely bereft of belongings, but many others had been deposited here by wealthy families who abandoned them, indeed, but not without full purses, having been given to think that their wards would be better cared for the more valuables they brought with them. Only too easy to fool, these guardians believed all this and had continued to send money, if only to ease their own consciences, never knowing that improved conditions could not be bought—not for any price.
The Asylum had been governed by masters of deception, yet it could not be denied that our directors preyed upon those more than willing to be deceived—who could be so easily led into doing evil. Worse, those who had a girl committed never knew what evil they had done. No one was informed when an inmate had died, and very few of those who brought us their mad ever returned, or even wrote to inquire after the progress of the ‘cure’, which was just as well, for the Asylum did not deal in cures.
We now govern ourselves, and we will never submit to anyone.
If the world never cared to know of the violence inflicted upon us, then the world ought not care to know of the violence that we had finally inflicted back. Besides ordering goods by post, we rarely have, nor have need of, direct communication with society beyond our gates. It is imperative to our survival that no one ever know of what has taken place here.
There is but one thing that weighs heavily upon my mind, and this is only because it is something I cannot share, and so I bear the burden alone: Just before the dawn following the Tea Party Massacre, I had entered the Operating Theatre intending to select a suitable knife for the Captain, for she wished to greet the The Cell’s final customer herself and finish the task she had begun at Bainbridge. We had left Dr. Greavesly dead upon the operating table hours earlier, but, upon reentry, I found the table empty.
Frantic, I flew to the window just in time to see a figure, hunched and limping, stumbling through the early morning mist and into the black woods behind the Asylum, leaving a winding trail of red in the snow behind him. I prayed that he would die in the merciless cold, and that, should he chance to live, he would not be back.
Asylum Letter No. LXVIII
From the very start of our new life within the Asylum, we had come to agreement by unanimous vote on one very particular point: We would continue to accept new patients. In the event that a girl was as sane as were the most of us, she might prove a pleasant addition to our strange society, and, if a girl truly was mad, and in need of serious care and rehabilitation, then perhaps we could make the Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls what it always ought to have been: a place of safety and shelter . . . a sanctuary . . . an asylum.
And this, Diary, is how Sachiko came back into my life. She was delivered one morning in the hansom of a police constable who had found her walking backwards upon a railroad track just outside of London. Upon arrival, Sachiko refused to speak, and was so entirely catatonic that she did not recognize me, her oldest friend. As the months passed, my childhood companion was gradually revived to her former self, and better. We all have our battle scars, and Sachiko has not yet been able to tell me of precisely what happened to her during the small eternity for which we had been separated. Someday, perhaps, I will know her story, but, in truth, it little matters; we try our best to look to the future and leave our histories behind. We are learning to live again, and, for many of us, it is for the first time.
Yet, despite our best efforts, I do not suppose that we will ever know happiness as other people do—people who have never suffered as we have. I reckon that the reason we now indulge in our luxuries and teas and dances and music and all things beautiful and even frivolous is simply to countervail the reality that, no matter how many years are left to us, there will never be enough time to fill the void that had been borne inside of us each when we were made so brutally aware of how very little we mattered to the world. Revenge itself may indeed be the best revenge, but slaying one’s enemy does not give back what they stole. There is not enough revenge in the world for that.
Still, we do our best to live as blissfully as we can, and I daresay we have great fun trying. We have reformed the Asylum in every aspect, from the kitchen to the cells and even the flat rooftop over the Wards where we often gather to look down upon the city of London as the sun sets—upon those same twinkling lights I had once marveled at as I stood barefoot in the middle of a bridge with Anne at my side. I am now equally removed from the city as I was upon that day, but I am no longer running towards it.
We have between us girls of every conceivable talent, from bakers, who craft the most exquisite creations from pastry and cream (and who enable us to enjoy High Tea at both four o’clock in the afternoon and four o’clock in the morning), to writers and painters of great brilliance, to master musicians, of whom I am proud to count myself amongst, and who keep our extraordinary household supplied with music, for there is always music, and Sachiko and I play our Mozart duets for royalty as we always said we would, for we are the kings and the queens, and this is our territory.
Asylum Letter No. LXIX
It is the eve of the New Year at last.
We have enjoyed the most glorious Yuletide, and the scent of pine and sugarplums still fills the Asylum. Whilst many of our girls had passed the holiday in teaching themselves to skate upon the icy surface of the Bathing Court, I had assigned myself the monumental task of creating a perfect Asylum replica in gingerbread for the Plague Rats. But it is the turning of the year that I have looked most forward to since we attained our freedom.
Upon this eve, we mean to begin what I believe will become our most precious annual tradition. We have organized a Tea Ball—a grand tea and dance—upon the rooftops of the entire institution. It s
hall be the affair to transcend all other Asylum celebrations, and those in the city as well, I am quite sure.
In preparation for our first Ball, we each contributed our individual talents: I had devoted months to the composition of a new musical work to be presented at midnight, and the ladies in the kitchen planned a lavish, highest-of-the-high tea, with a three-meter croquembouche, a pirate ship made entirely of spun sugar, and enough champagne sent up from London for every girl, and every rat too.
We have agreed to dress in white from head to toe as a symbol of our resurrection, and I think this particularly meaningful, for I feel that we are finally growing into our new life. Though our phantoms will never leave us, our demons are almost gone.
The clock in the Entrance Hall rang out in joyful majesty—the Ball was soon to begin.
We ascended to the rooftops, followed by the Asylum ghosts, their wispy figures swirling about our skirts as we climbed the old staircase, emerging from the corners and within the striped walls to join us for our greatest celebration of freedom and unity.
I confess that, in my quieter moments, I often try to spot Veronica amongst the ghosts, but I never can, and I have learnt to be glad that she has been able to leave this place, even as I chose to stay. I content myself with the belief that, when I am at my end, she will be waiting.
At last, it was time.
A trail of teacups alight with flame marked the path leading to the rooftop dancing floor, and every girl was now in her place. As the musicians sounded the first note of the evening, a blinding shower of sparks—my surprise for my fellow inmates—exploded into the star-filled sky.