Bedlam: The Further Secret Adventures of Charlotte Bronte

28

After retrieving my possessions from my hotel and settling the bill, I boarded a train to Tonbridge, a market town twenty-five miles southeast of London, and I arrived just before five o’clock. A Norman castle overlooking the River Medway attested to the town’s ancient history, as did many buildings that dated from the Middle Ages. I engaged a room at the Rose and Crown, a sixteenth-century Tudor coaching inn. There were few coach travelers in these days of railways, but the inn was still very grand, a three-story brick structure that dominated the high street. I registered as “Mrs. Charlotte Bell” and wore my fake wedding ring. When I asked the proprietor for directions to the old workhouse, he said, “The old workhouse is closed, madam. You’ll be wanting the new one.”

He eyed me curiously: in my smart new clothes, I did not appear to need any workhouse. Workhouses were institutions that sheltered the poor, who labored inside them in exchange for bed and board. The population of poor had swelled of late due to declines in agriculture and mass unemployment. Hundreds of new workhouses, some as large as villages, had been built all across England. The older, smaller establishments had been demolished or put to other use.

“No,” I said, “I want the old one.” Lord Eastbourne’s note had been specific.

“Suit yourself, madam.” The proprietor gave me directions.

As soon as the porter had carried my trunk to my room and I had freshened myself, I set out. It was a warm, golden evening, but I carried my umbrella in case the clouds on the horizon brought rain. I didn’t know what I would do when I found Dr. Kavanagh-or how to proceed from finding him to finding Slade. My quest was like a novel that I made up as I went along.

The old workhouse was located on a street aptly named Poorhouse Lane. It was a Tudor-style mansion with half-timbered walls, two stories high, its slate roof studded with chimneys, gables, and dormers, set apart from other houses in the area by extensive grounds. These were enclosed within a vine-covered brick wall. Two huge, ancient chestnut trees flanked the ironwork gate and its crumbling stone pillars. More trees loomed over outbuildings around the mansion. Nothing about its appearance struck me as unusual, but the other senses often perceive what the eye cannot. The body reacts before the mind can articulate what it thinks. I felt such an immediate, instinctive revulsion that I stopped ten paces from the gate. The house was picturesque, with its many-paned windows that reflected the golden light from the setting sun. What caused me this strong urge to flee?

I believe that places can absorb the evil that humans have done or suffered within them. Workhouses are cauldrons of misery, where men, women, and children live in squalid conditions, labor hard at tasks such as stone breaking, and are abused by cruel masters. Maybe their ghosts haunted this workhouse. Or was it Niall Kavanagh’s madness I sensed?

Curiosity overrode instinct. I moved toward the gate. A breeze stirred the air; from the workhouse issued a faint stench of decay. My nose must have registered it and warned me off before my brain had. I halted at the gate, which hung open on rusty hinges. Beyond it a path of broken flagstones led between overgrown bushes. I shook my head in disappointment and vexation at myself. How rash had been my decision to come! What had I expected-that Slade would magically appear, like a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow? Alas, I had. Since he was nowhere in sight, what should I do?

I supposed I could ascertain whether Niall Kavanagh was inside, then go on from there. But I was afraid to meet the deranged scientist by myself. I looked around for support, guidance, or encouragement, but saw nothing except the empty, quiet street. The sun’s dying light turned the windows of the workhouse blood-red.

A sudden loud, splintery, jangling sound of glass breaking shattered the calm.

It would have sent me running like a coward, had I not remembered my adventures of 1848. Why should I, who’d once faced death and lived to tell, be daunted by anything now? I pushed open the gate and stepped through. Raising my umbrella against foes real or imaginary, I advanced up the path.

Stairs rose to an entrance within a porch. The noise had come from my left, and I went in that direction, along another path between shrubs higher than my head. As I rounded the corner of the house, I heard scrambling noises, branches thrashing, and leaves rustling. A man perched in a tree he’d climbed up to a window. He removed his jacket, wrapped it around his fist, and used his padded fist to enlarge a jagged hole in the window, which he must have broken by throwing a rock through it. Glass tinkled, fell, and scattered. Moving closer, I saw that the burglar I’d caught in the act was John Slade.

Amazement and vindication flooded me. The trail to Niall Kavanagh had led me straight to Slade. I forgot all about danger. I started toward Slade, spoiling for the confrontation I’d long anticipated.

“Hey!” called a loud, gruff, masculine voice. “What do you think you’re doing?”

I froze. A man emerged from a grove of trees. The twilight was fading, and I couldn’t see much about him except that he was stocky and wore a brimmed cap. He stood no more than twenty feet from me, but it wasn’t me that he’d seen: he aimed a rifle at Slade.

“Come down,” he said, “or I’ll shoot.”

I hadn’t come this far to have Slade killed before he could answer a few questions. I stepped off the path, angled through the shrubbery, and stole up behind the man with the rifle. I could see Slade clinging to the tree, staring at the weapon leveled on his heart. His face was set in hard lines that betrayed no emotion, but I read his mind: he was thinking that he’d escaped death at the hands of mighty villains all over the world, and now he was about to be brought down by a country caretaker in an English village. He couldn’t bear the stupidity of it, and neither could I.

I turned my furled umbrella in my hands, grasping it near the pointed end. I crept up to the caretaker and brought the sturdy wooden handle down on the back of his head as hard as I could. He grunted, lurched, and dropped the rifle. I swung my umbrella and hit him behind his knees. He fell flat on his face. As he struggled to rise, something in me snapped. The passions and impulses I had controlled heretofore now overflowed like water over a crumbled dam. I lost all common sense, all self-restraint. I hit the caretaker again and again while he screamed. Slade jumped down from the tree and hurried toward us.

“Charlotte, stop! You’ll kill him!”

I didn’t care. Glorying in unholy wrath, I beat the caretaker until he lay still and moaning. Slade tore the umbrella out of my hands and flung it away. “Have you gone mad?”

Laughter burbled from me, even though I was shocked and horrified that I had attacked a man who’d never done me any wrong. “That’s the pot calling the kettle black! You’re the criminal lunatic from Bedlam!” Now I was furious. “You thought you could avoid me, but you were wrong!”

He shook his head, astounded and exasperated. “You never give up, do you? I suppose you came looking for Niall Kavanagh in an attempt to track me down, and you found his laboratory. I underestimated you.” Grudging respect crept into his tone; but then he said sternly, “You should go.”

“I’m not going anywhere!” I snatched up the rifle and aimed it at Slade. “Neither are you, until you’ve explained everything to my satisfaction!”

His hands went up. “Put the gun down. You’re not going to shoot me. You don’t even know how to fire a gun.”

“Is that what you think?” I had gone shooting on the moors in Haworth, although I’d never managed to hit anything. How furious I was that Slade would patronize me after I had just saved his miserable life! I pulled the trigger.

The gun fired with an ear-splitting roar. The barrel jerked upward. Slade dropped to the ground. I screamed in horror because I thought I’d shot him, which I hadn’t really meant to do. But the bullet hit the foliage high in the trees. Twigs and leaves rained down on him. He cautiously raised his head. We stared at each other, and the shock on his face was no greater than the shock I felt.

That we had come to this! That I had almost killed the man I loved!

I lowered the gun. When Slade jumped up and took it from me, I didn’t resist. He threw the gun into the bushes. I said, “I’m sorry.”

“So am I.” But his manner was more impatient than conciliatory. “I can’t tell you any more than I already have. Because it’s not your concern.”

My anger resurged. “After what I’ve gone through because of you, it certainly is my concern.” I played a card I thought he didn’t know I held. “Katerina has been killed.”

“What?” Even more stunned than when I’d almost shot him, Slade demanded, “How?”

I explained that I’d gone to Katerina’s house in search of him and found her tied to her bed, stabbed multiple times and bleeding to death.

“Good God!” Slade was visibly shaken.

I wondered if it was because he loved Katerina and her death grieved him. The thought fueled my rage. I told Slade I’d been caught by the police. “They think I murdered her. They sent me to Newgate Prison.” I related the indignities and terrors I’d suffered there. “So don’t tell me that your business is none of mine!”

Dismay appeared in his expression. “I never wanted you to be hurt.”

“You have an odd way of showing it.” Close to tears, I said, “That’s not the worst of what happened.” I described how Wilhelm Stieber had brought me to Bedlam and interrogated me. “He would have had me killed, if not for Lord Palmerston and the Queen.” I told Slade they’d rescued me and granted me a limited amount of time to prove my innocence and his. “Palmerston believed you were a traitor, but I defended you, and he’s giving you the benefit of doubt. Don’t you think I have a right to know what’s going on?”

Slade inhaled a deep breath, then slowly exhaled. “I suppose I do owe you an explanation.” He looked around to see whether anyone was coming to investigate the gunfire, then moved under the shadow of the tree I’d shot, where we wouldn’t be seen from the road; he beckoned me to follow him. “Whatever you want to know, just ask.”

Here was my chance to learn the truth. Perhaps it was my last because I would never see Slade again. Now was not the time to beat around the bush, to hesitate because of modesty, pride, or fear that the truth would hurt.

“Do you remember that we were once in love?” I said. “Do you remember asking me to marry you?”

The speed with which Slade turned away told me that he would prefer to discuss any other topic than this. “I do.” His voice was barely audible.

“Then why have you been acting as if you’d forgotten? Why have you pretended we were strangers?”

Slade shook his head, appearing helpless and ashamed, the way men often do when confronted with matters of the heart.

I whispered the question that I was most timid to ask, whose answer I was most afraid to hear. “Have your feelings toward me changed?”

He abruptly faced me and spoke with vehement passion: “My feelings for you remain exactly the same as when I proposed to you in that dreary, remote village where you live. I loved you then. I’ve loved you these three years. I love you now. If you think I’m so faithless that I would change my mind, then God damn you, Charlotte Bronte!”