Bedlam: The Further Secret Adventures of Charlotte Bronte

35

Captain Arnold let us off at the dock in Cherbourg. The afternoon was cloudy, with a damp, chill wind that rocked the ships in the harbor and chilled me to the bone. Cherbourg was a medieval town no more remarkable than any English port village. Slade and I walked through drab, malodorous streets so narrow that one could almost touch the gray buildings on either side. The people spoke French in a dialect I found hard to understand. This was not the France I’d always yearned to visit. If Cherbourg had any fine museums or monuments, I did not see them. We were a hundred and seventy miles from Paris, that great capital of fashion, art, and literature, but I didn’t care. I was living a miracle.

I had boarded the ship a spinster and disembarked a married woman. I looked at Slade and thought, “That is my husband.” No other man was as handsome, strong, or dashing as mine. Glowing with pride, I wanted the whole world to see us together. I felt more confident about the future than I ever had, as if our marriage rendered us invincible.

That was an illusion, as I would too soon discover.

Slade scrutinized the scene for threats. “France seems quiet. There shouldn’t be any revolutions to bother us.”

During the revolutions of 1848, the French populace had rebelled against government corruption and repression, high food prices, and unemployment. Radical societies staged public demonstrations in Paris. The government sent in the army, which fired on the mobs. Violent insurrection spread. King Louis-Philippe abdicated. The radicals formed a new government, but their haphazard reforms dissatisfied workers all over France. Three days of civil war against the army ensued. The streets of Paris ran with blood. Some fifteen hundred people were killed. The revolution was eventually suppressed by the military dictatorship that took power. From the turmoil rose Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, purported nephew of the first Napoleon. He symbolized revolution and authority, tradition and social reform; he promised everything to everybody. Elected President of France in December 1848, he spearheaded the formation of a new republic. I understood that it was a severe, oppressive regime, but it had indeed calmed down the country.

“We’d better find lodgings,” Slade said.

His French was better than mine; I marveled at his facility with foreign languages as he quickly obtained a room in a modest inn. To fortify ourselves before we assailed Niall Kavanagh, we ate a good luncheon of chicken cooked in a sauce of cider and cream, fish stew with shrimp and mussels, cinnamon rice pudding, and a strong apple brandy. Then we set out for the chateau.

Following the directions given us by Sir William, we walked east out of town. The chateau was a sixteenth-century miniature castle, built of gray stone in hybrid Gothic and Renaissance style, whose two round towers with pointed roofs rose above woods surrounded by orchards. On this gloomy late afternoon it had a foreboding, sinister aspect; but I, in my high spirits, thought it romantic.

“What is our plan?” I asked Slade.

“To hell with plans,” he said. “Little good they’ve done us. We’ll play it by ear this time.”

He rang the bell attached to the locked iron gate. No one answered our summons. A cold, thin rain began to fall. Slade said, “You could slide between the wall and the gate. I can climb over the top.”

We did. Inside, we walked up a short road, beneath dense foliage. The owner liked privacy, Sir William had mentioned. He was a wealthy amateur wild game hunter who collected animals for zoos and specimens for scientists. He was presently away on an expedition in India. An expanse of paving stones encircled the chateau and separated it from the forest. We marched up to the front door, an iron-banded affair recessed in an arch. Slade employed the brass knocker.

“Niall Kavanagh?” he called.

There was no sound except the rain pelting leaves. I backed out of the arch, looked up at the chateau, and saw a movement in an upstairs window-a curtain lifted and hastily dropped. “He’s here.”

Repeated knocking and calling did no good. Slade tested the door; it was locked. We circled the house, unsuccessfully trying other entrances. At the back we came upon mews and storage buildings. By the wall Slade found a square structure with a stone base, built on a slant, perhaps two feet tall on its high side, covered by two iron doors.

“It must be the entrance to the cellar.” He cautiously lifted open one door, then the other. Inside, wooden stairs descended, vanishing into darkness.

I have an instinctive fear of dark places underground. “We aren’t going down there, are we?”

“ We aren’t,” Slade said. “You stay here.”

Marriage hadn’t changed his high-handed way of ordering me about. Vexed, I said, “I won’t let you go. It can’t be safe.”

“We didn’t come all this way to be safe. And this appears to be the only way to get to Niall Kavanagh. Don’t worry-I’ll be careful.”

Marriage hadn’t given me any power to control him, either. I could only watch nervously as Slade reached in his pocket and produced matches and a candle. Holding the lit candle in front of him, he cautiously descended the stairs, whose shaft had walls made of earth, stones, and timbers. The stairs were steep, their end too far underground to see. Suddenly he yelled, plunged downward, and vanished. I heard a series of bumps, then silence.

“John!” Terrified, I bent over the entrance and peered down. Did Slade lie unconscious at the bottom of the stairs? I tried not to think that he might be dead. I saw nothing. What should I do?

I had read enough novels to know that the heroine who ventures into dark cellars inevitably meets with disaster, but I could not abandon Slade. There was no one to rescue him except me. I crawled backward down the stairs, clinging to the risers above me as my feet groped for the ones below. The daylight framed by the doors overhead did not illuminate my way very far. I was soon engulfed in darkness, blind. Reaching the point where Slade had disappeared, I called his name; I received no answer. I tested the step with my foot. It seemed as intact and level as any of the others. Thinking that Slade must have slipped and fallen, I lowered my weight onto it.

It gave way as I let go of the upper step to which I’d been holding. I fell screaming through a distance that seemed like miles. My feet hit a hard surface; then I tumbled head over heels down a steep, slippery ramp. My screams echoed in the utter blackness that surrounded me. The ground leveled out, and I stopped in mid-tumble when my feet struck something. It grunted and said, “Bloody hell!”

“John?” Glad I was to hear his voice, but terrified that I’d hurt him. “Are you all right?”

“I was until you kicked me in the back. Are you?”

Sitting up, I moved my arms and legs. “Yes.” I ached all over, but nothing seemed broken.

“What are you doing down here? I told you to stay outside.”

“I followed you because I was worried about you.”

“Well, now we’re both trapped,” Slade said glumly.

My hand found his; we held onto each other in silence for a moment. “At least we’re together.”

“For better or worse.” Slade chuckled. He withdrew his hands from mine. “Now where did that candle go?” There were fumbling noises. “Ah.”

I heard a scrape, and a flame flared; Slade relit the candle. We stood, and he held the candle aloft. I saw ancient stone walls slick with moisture and became conscious of the dank, earthen, and animal smells in the chilly air. The flagstone floor was littered with dirt, straw, and rodent droppings. The light didn’t penetrate the farthest reaches of the cavernous room. We could barely see the rafters some twenty feet above.

Slade shone the candlelight on the ramp down which we’d tumbled. “I’m ready to leave this pit, aren’t you?”

We crawled up the ramp. At the top, we stood and looked up at the trapdoor through which we’d fallen. Slade raised his hands, but there was at least three feet of space between his fingertips and the door. “Climb on my back,” he said.

I obeyed, clutching at him while he swayed. Kneeling awkwardly on his shoulders, I pushed up on the door. “I can’t move it.”

Slade lowered me. “There must be another way out of here.”

We slid down the ramp, then explored the cellar. The candle’s flame elongated. “That draft must be coming from a door,” I said.

As we forged onward, a large square object came into view. It was a cage with thick iron bars that looked big enough to contain the Minotaur.

“The owner must use this for the wild animals he brings home,” Slade said.

A creaking sound came from overhead. We looked up as a rectangle of brightness opened in the ceiling. A shaft of daylight beamed upon us. An object came hurtling down. It crashed on the floor with the sound of glass breaking. It was a large bottle, now in fragments. The liquid it had contained spread over the floor. From the liquid rose fumes that smelled of chemicals, pungent and sickly sweet, disturbingly familiar.

“It’s ether!” I’d had an unfortunate and unforgettable experience with ether in 1848.

Slade and I dodged more bottles that shattered. We covered our noses and mouths with our sleeves and hurried toward the far end of the cellar, but the fumes overtook us. Slade said, “I have to put out the candle or they’ll ignite the fumes.” He blew on the candle. Above us, the trapdoor slammed shut. We were plunged into darkness. The fumes filled the cellar. I couldn’t help breathing them. Lightheaded and drowsy, I collapsed, then fell into deep, impenetrable unconsciousness.

A throbbing headache awakened me. I opened my eyes to dim, hazy, yellow-tinged light. My body was stiff from lying on the hard surface under me. Slowly the world gained definition. I saw a ceiling made of rusty metal a few feet above my face. When I turned my head to my left, fuzzy vertical stripes, crossed at wider intervals by horizontal ones, emerged from the haze. I blinked, and the stripes turned into iron bars. My wits came back in a cold rush of dread. I remembered the cellar, the cage, the breaking bottles, and the ether fumes, which I no longer smelled. But where was Slade?

I turned my head toward my right. He lay near me, flat on his back. His eyes were closed, but his chest rose and fell with even breaths. He was unconscious but alive. My sigh of relief caught in my throat as I realized that we were inside the cage… and that there was someone else in the cellar with us. I could hear breathing that had the ragged, wheezy sound of bad lungs. Paper rustled; a pen scratched. I smelled liquor and a fetid, sour human scent. A man sat on a stool some ten paces from the cage, a lamp on the floor beside him. He hunched over a notebook propped on his knees, writing furiously. His white shirt and dark trousers hung on his thin body. Tousled, shaggy red hair partially concealed his face; I could only see a beaked nose and the glint of gold-rimmed spectacles. He lifted a wine bottle, his hand trembling as he gulped a thirsty draught. His visage struck such a bolt of dreadful recognition into my heart that I sat up and stared.

During the earlier part of the adventures I describe herein, I had encountered the ghosts of persons beloved to me, and now it was happening again. Many times had I seen the man before me in just such an attitude, on nights when drink and drugs tormented his mind and he scribbled poems until he collapsed from exhaustion. Many times had I heard him laboring to breathe while the consumption ravaged his lungs. Three years ago I had stood by his deathbed. And here he was, resurrected.

“Branwell,” I said, my voice raspy from the ether, cracking in disbelief.

He started, dropped his pen, and turned to me. Now I realized that this apparition was not my brother. His nose was not as long or sharp as Branwell’s, his face not as gaunt. Branwell had died at age thirty-one; this man was at least a decade older. Yet the resemblance was still astounding. He had the same coloring, the same flush of liquor on his cheeks. He, too, had once been handsome. He had a similar loose, sensual mouth, and brown eyes that were sunken and bloodshot, fevered by madness. He rose and walked toward me with Branwell’s unsteady gait. Stopping short of the cage, he glared at me.

“Who are you?” Although his voice was deeper than Branwell’s, it had a familiar inflection-an Irish accent not quite erased by an English education.

Addled by the ether, shocked by the sight of him, I couldn’t speak.

“Who is he?” The man pointed at Slade.

Slade stirred, groaned, and propped himself up on his elbows. “Charlotte?” His voice was furred with sleep. He gazed in bleary confusion at the man before us. “Who-?”

Now I realized who the man was. “This is Niall Kavanagh.”

Slade rubbed his eyes. “Well,” he said, at once bewildered and gratified. “Dr. Kavanagh. At last.”

“How do you know who I am?” Fear joined suspicion in Kavanagh’s manner. “Who are you people?”

“My name is John Slade, and this is Charlotte Bronte.” Slade added, “My wife,” as though he’d momentarily forgotten we were married. He dragged himself over to Kavanagh. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.” He extended his hand through the cage’s bars.

Kavanagh recoiled. Slade noticed the cage and the fact that we were inside it. His gaze moved to the stout iron padlock that held the door shut. He frowned. “Did you put us in here?”

“Yes.” Kavanagh grinned.

“Did you throw the bottles of ether at us?”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“Because you were trespassing.” Kavanagh uttered a giggle tinged with hysteria. It raised a chill on my skin, for I had often heard it from Branwell. My dead brother truly seemed to live inside Niall Kavanagh, whose humor abruptly turned to angry belligerence. “Why did you come?”

“Let us out of the cage,” Slade said, “and we’ll explain.”

“No!” Kavanagh faltered backward. “If I let you out, it’s all over for me.” Again I heard the echo of Branwell in his voice. It’s all over for me, Branwell had often said during fits of black despair. “You want to destroy me and steal my work-just like everybody else!”

I remembered Branwell claiming that the world was against him, that everybody was in league to plagiarize his poems, wring all the artistic talent from him, and toss him aside like a dry husk. “We don’t want to hurt you,” I assured Niall Kavanagh in the soothing voice I’d employed with my brother. “We came to help you.”

“Why should you want to help me? I don’t know you. How do you know me? Who are you?”

I opened my mouth to speak. Slade said, “Charlotte.” His tone warned me that our captor might react badly to the truth about ourselves or our motives. I turned to Slade. “We owe him an explanation.” I then told Kavanagh, “I’m an authoress. My husband is a former espionage agent for the British crown. We’ve learned that Lord Eastbourne at the Foreign Office employed you to build a device based on your research on animalcules.”

Kavanagh pounced on this news with all the temper that Slade had anticipated. “Lord Eastbourne said my invention was worthless. He ordered me to cease working on it. He reneged on our contract, the bastard!” Kavanagh’s expression turned sly. “But he didn’t fool me. Lord Eastbourne wanted to steal my invention and take credit for it himself.” He didn’t seem to have considered the possibility that Lord Eastbourne had realized that the weapon worked far too well and was far too dangerous to be built and deployed. Now Kavanagh regarded us with heightened suspicion. “Are you working with Lord Eastbourne?”

“Far from it,” Slade said. “He did me a bad turn, too.”

“Any enemy of Lord Eastbourne’s is a friend of mine,” Kavanagh said, although he sounded less than amicable. “But I don’t need help. I’m quite all right on my own.”

“No, you aren’t,” Slade said. “You’re in a lot of trouble.”

“How would you know?”

“You were in such a hurry to quit the British Isles that you left your things behind,” Slade said. “Not to mention that you look like a wreck.”

Kavanagh’s distrust deepened. “How did you find me?”

“We spoke with your parents,” Slade said. “They told us you were here.”

Kavanagh huffed out angry breaths; he clawed his hair. “They promised to keep it secret! The traitors!”

“They’re concerned about you,” I hastened to say. “You told them that someone is after you. They said you were terrified.”

“Not anymore.” Kavanagh’s quaking body and the haunted look in his eyes belied his words. “I ran away from Lord Eastbourne. Surely he’s stopped looking for me by now.”

“He hasn’t,” Slade said. “A few days ago he went to your laboratory in Tonbridge. He burned the place down. What do you think he’ll do when he catches up with you?”

Kavanagh wobbled. Fear paled the flush in his cheeks. “He’ll never find me here.”

“Don’t count on it,” Slade said. “Lord Eastbourne will go through the same channels that my wife and I did. But he’s not your only problem.”

“What are you talking about?”

I took up the story. “Lord Eastbourne isn’t the only person who’s after you. There’s a man named Wilhelm Stieber. He’s the chief spy for Tsar Nicholas of Russia. He has two Prussian soldiers-”

I stopped because Kavanagh’s face had turned so ghastly white that I thought he would faint. He dropped onto his stool and whispered, “It’s true, then. I wasn’t just imagining them. They were snooping around my house in Whitechapel. I saw them when I went back to look for some things I thought I’d left there. I hoped it was just a hallucination.” Hunched in fear, he asked, “What do they want with me?”

“Stieber knows about your invention,” Slade said. “He wants it for the Tsar.”

Kavanagh stared, his mouth open, astonished. “He believes my invention works?”

“Yes. That’s why he traveled all the way from Russia to find you,” Slade said.

“At last!” Kavanagh’s mood altered yet again; a gleeful smile crept across his face. “Somebody important believes in me. He doesn’t think I’m deluded. At last, my genius is recognized!” Kavanagh dropped to his knees, clasped his hands. “Thank God!”

Slade and I exchanged troubled glances. Kavanagh didn’t seem to understand that being wanted by Russia wasn’t the boon he craved. Slade said, “Stieber believes so strongly in your invention that he has tortured people to obtain information on your whereabouts. He wants it so badly that he has killed twice in an attempt to get it.”

I watched trepidation erase Kavanagh’s smile.

“Stieber and the Tsar are even less trustworthy than Lord Eastbourne, and they’re far more dangerous,” Slade continued. “They mean to use your weapon in a war against England. Thousands of people will die.”

“So be it,” Kavanagh said, shaken yet defiant. “The way England has treated me, and my people, it deserves to be punished.”

“Should a plague start in England, it will spread to Ireland. Your own people will be killed,” Slade said.

Kavanagh sniffed.

Reader, I do not mean to give the impression that Branwell was as unreasonable, self-centered, or destructive as Niall Kavanagh. My brother started out a generous, considerate, loving person. Despite his weaknesses and passions to which he succumbed, he never had the dire, inborn flaw that afflicted Kavanagh. But Branwell and Kavanagh were points along the same spectrum of bad character. Even though my experience with Branwell had been miserable, it gave me insight into Niall Kavanagh. Perhaps I could gain command over the man.

“I understand how you feel,” I said. “You want to be valued for your genius. You want to be remembered. You want your name written into the history of great men of the world.”

Such had been Branwell’s fondest wishes. Now Niall Kavanagh nodded eagerly. “Yes! That’s right! It’s what I’ve been working toward all my life!”

“But that won’t happen if you fall in with Wilhelm Stieber,” I said.

“Oh?” Kavanagh thrust out his lip and folded his arms, like a boy who’s been denied a sweet. “Why not?”

Slade quickly caught on to my aims. “Stieber will steal your invention. He’ll kill you and dump your body in a ditch.”

“No one else will know what happened to you,” I said. “It will be as if you never existed.”

The conceit leaked out of Kavanagh like air from a balloon. At last he realized that he’d gotten in trouble over his head, and he dissolved into trembling fright, misery, and despair. He looked worse than Branwell had when most plagued by the aftereffects of liquor and opium. Crawling up to the cage, he implored, “What should I do? Help me! Please!”

I heard Slade expel a breath of satisfaction. I, too, was glad that we had Niall Kavanagh ready to cooperate with us; but I pitied him as I had pitied Branwell. Such another sorry waste of talent!

“Everything will be all right,” Slade assured Kavanagh. “We’ll take you back to England. We’ll protect you.”

“You’ ll be safe,” I said. “You can work in peace, and be rewarded handsomely.”

Slade and I avoided looking at each other while we spoke; we felt guilty for deceiving a sick, vulnerable man. Kavanagh didn’t know that we intended to turn him over to the British government, which would likely make sure he quit his dangerous research and never built any more destructive devices.

“Oh, yes!” He sobbed in relief; delight shone through his tears while he envisioned a rosy future. “Thank you!”

“All you have to do is let us out of this cage and come with us,” Slade said.

“Very well.” Kavanagh sprang up. “Now what did I do with the key?” We held our breath, fearing that he’d lost it. Kavanagh began hunting in his pockets. “Oh, no!”

“Maybe you dropped it.” I’d enacted such a scene many times with Branwell, when he’d misplaced his valuables. Now I endeavored to stay calm. “Look everywhere you’ve been since you used the key. Retrace your steps.”

Kavanagh crawled along the floor, peering through his spectacles, his hands scrabbling in the dirt. “Ah!” He triumphantly held up the key, scurried to us-then halted. “Why should I trust you to do what you say you will?” His suspicion flared anew.

“Because we have your best interests at heart,” I said.

“Because we’re the only people who can help you,” Slade added. “Unlock the cage, and we’ll show you that we’re on your side.”

Kavanagh frowned, torn between his wish to believe us and the fear engendered by drink, disease, natural inclination, and ill treatment from other folk. “How do I even know that you’re who you say you are? Have you any proof?”

“In my pocketbook.” It lay on the floor some fifteen feet away, where I’d fallen when I’d lost consciousness. “There,” I said, pointing.

Kavanagh set the key on the stool on his way to fetch my pocketbook. He rummaged inside the pocketbook and found the paper I always carried, the only identification I’d brought. He read, “‘I am Charlotte Bronte. In case of an emergency, please contact my father, the Reverend Patrick Bronte, at the parsonage in Haworth, Yorkshire.’” He looked askance at me, tossed the paper and pocketbook on the floor, and turned to Slade. “What about you?”

Slade reached inside his pocket and removed a card. As he handed it to Kavanagh, I saw that all it said was, “John Slade.” Kavanagh took the card, glanced at it, then snorted and threw it onto my pocketbook. “It doesn’t say you ever worked for the Foreign Office.”

“Agents don’t carry documents that identify them as such,” Slade said. “That would be dangerous, should we fall into the hands of our enemies.”

“That’s a convenient explanation,” Kavanagh said scornfully. “Who are you really?”

Although we tried to convince him that we were telling the truth, we couldn’t overcome his suspicion. Kavanagh jabbed his finger at us. “Ah! I know who you are. You’re agents for the Tsar. You’re trying to trick me into giving you my invention and telling you my secret techniques for building it!”

We could only deny it; alas, we had no proof to offer. Kavanagh grew more agitated. He ambled in circles, muttering to himself. “If they found me here, so will their accomplices, so will Lord Eastbourne. They’ll kill me. They’ll steal my invention and my secrets. I’ll never have the fame or glory I dreamed of. What shall I do?”

Slade and I tried to reason with him, but he wouldn’t listen. He gulped wine from his bottle. “I must leave this place. I must find somewhere else to hide.”

I despaired because the liquor would only make him less tractable. Now he flew into a rage, tearing at his hair and clothes. “How unjust it is that I should be a fugitive, when I am the greatest scientist who ever lived!” Kavanagh wept and blubbered. “How terrible that I should have to hide the most spectacular invention of all time or die!” He turned on us in fury. “Damn you! You’ve brought me to this!” Like Branwell, he blamed others for his woes. “If I must die, then so must you!”

But Branwell had never physically harmed anyone but himself. Kavanagh scrambled away, snatched up something that lay in the shadows beyond his lamp. He returned, brandishing an axe.

“No!” I fled to the far end of the cage and cringed.

“Pull yourself together, man,” Slade ordered, and I heard the desperation beneath the authority in his voice. “Think rationally. You know Lord Eastbourne has treated you ill. You’ve seen Stieber’s spies sniffing around, trying to nab your invention. But what harm have we ever done you? None! We shouldn’t be punished for everyone else’s sins.”

“If you kill us, you’ll just make things worse for yourself,” I said. “You’re already wanted in connection with the deaths of Mary Chandler, Catherine Meadows, and Jane Anderson. Two more murders, and you’ll surely hang.”

Kavanagh gaped, stricken. “You know about my experiments?” Then he giggled. “You won’t live long enough to tell.”

He swung the axe. Slade ducked. I screamed. The blade struck a bar of the cage with an ear-splitting, echoing clang. Kavanagh reeled, off balance. He hauled back for another swing.

“For your own good, don’t!” Slade shouted. “Cooperating with us is your only hope of surviving, let alone getting the recognition you want.”

Kavanagh’s mood shifted yet again, with lightning speed. Mischievous cunning gleamed in his bloodshot eyes. “Maybe you’re right: you can do me more good alive than dead.”