Poor Lady Dalrymple, who had invested so much in her. And who had always trusted her own lady’s maid, never suspecting that the witch had her greedy hands in Lady Oliver’s purse. How could Saunders have betrayed her mistress? And how could Lady Oliver have so betrayed a bosom friend?
“Mary, ring for Collins,” the countess said quietly. “Saunders, you are dismissed from my employ. Collins will see to it that you are packed and out of my house within the hour. You will receive no severance, nor will I provide you with a reference.”
The dour-faced servant looked to Lady Oliver, clearly expecting to be rescued, if not offered a new situation outright, but her ladyship was far too canny to openly tip her hand.
Dr. Squiffers steadied his own nerves by pressing his forefingers together as tightly as he could. “Lady Dalrymple, under the circumstances, I have no alternative but to admit Miss Welles to St. Joseph of Bethlehem.”
Mary gasped. “Bedlam?!”
The countess fainted.
It was Darlington who came to Lady Dalrymple’s side, pouring several drops of cool water from a pitcher onto his monogrammed cambric handkerchief, which he fashioned into a compress for Lady Dalrymple’s throbbing temples. C.J. looked at him imploringly. “Your lordship?” she whispered. Her lips trembled. Should her words beseech or berate?
“Nephew, we have nothing more to do here,” Lady Oliver remarked sternly. “I should like to call for my carriage.”
The earl regarded his aunt. “For years now, I have been willing to see you through rose-colored lenses, owing to the dreadful hardships you endured as a young bride. You never permitted me to forget your own misery, and your bitterness grew like a chancre on a blossom, destroying all hope of its everlasting beauty. The scales have fallen from my eyes, Aunt Augusta. Or shall I say I have ground the rose-tinted glass beneath the heel of my boot. We have nothing to say to each other.”
“You will regret it, Percy,” Lady Oliver warned. “You will live to regret this day.” She lowered her lorgnette and swept imperiously from the room.
“Not half so much as I regret seeing the rest of the world through your jaundiced eyes,” her nephew retorted. He made a protective move toward Cassandra, but the physician held up his hand to stop him.
“Miss Welles is going to Bethlehem, your lordship. The documents have been signed.” Squiffers produced a set of folded papers from the deep pocket of his coat and showed the earl the autograph that committed her to the asylum.
“You bastard.” Darlington had been bested. All it took was a physician’s signature, and this one was legal. Would that he could strangle the doctor and take Cassandra with him to the countryside. Flout convention. Blast propriety. Dash the Digbys! He would marry his Cunegonde, Miss Welles, and they would survive if they had to work the land themselves.
Darlington despised the triumphant look in the medic’s eyes. “Miss Welles will come with me,” the doctor said with finality.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Concerning the conditions in a nineteenth-century madhouse, and our heroine’s incarceration therein. The Marquess of Manwaring plays his part to perfection, spinning a fanciful tale that contains nothing but the truth itself.
THE RED BRICK BUILDING with the cast-iron gate was forbidding from the outset. Ivy tendrils curled upward from the foundation as if to further shelter the Bethlehem inmates from the view of the outside world.
St. Joseph’s of Bethlehem was the sister hospital, C.J. learned, to St. Mary of Bethlehem, the first English madhouse, which opened in Bishopsgate, London, in 1403. The London asylum quickly earned the nickname Bedlam, and the homeless people of the Tudor and Stuart eras were known as Tom O’Bedlam, as they wandered the streets of the city in parti-colored attire begging for food and alms.
Clearly, Dr. Squiffers, convinced by the testimony of Constable Mawl, was certain that this “Miss Welles” was a latter-day street person who in order to survive had spun a series of tall tales, none of which were true and most of which conspired to take advantage of specific members of the aristocracy, doubtless to win their hearts and the forfeiture of their purses. He lifted the handle of a small, black metal box that hung on the outside gate and rang the bell within it.
Presently an extraordinarily tall, nearly bald gentleman of middling to advanced age came to the gate and unlocked it for the doctor and his charge.
“Squiffers.”
“Haslam.”
The iron gate clanged shut behind them, the sound ringing in C.J.’s ears.
The lanky giant wordlessly led them along a worn flagstone path, up to a second gate. He removed a large iron key ring from his waistcoat and unfastened the enormous padlock, then opened the oaken door directly behind the portcullis.
Haslam exposed a mouthful of yellowed teeth. “This way madness lies,” he grinned, gesturing down a grayish, grim corridor. “You say she’s another country pauper?” he asked Dr. Squiffers. “We’ve got so many of them in here, I’ve stopped keeping track. Shut yer!” he snapped at a moaning inmate who thrust a bony arm through the bars of a cell. The madman’s glazed eyes gave the impression that the human being behind them had long ago died, and that it was merely his starving carcass that had stubbornly refused to give up the ghost.
C.J. stopped in her tracks at the sight of a man in leg irons shackled to the stone wall of his cell. They dared to call this a hospital? The conditions were worse than in the prison!
Shrieks, groans, and unintelligible ravings echoed off the walls of the narrow corridor. C.J. would have tried to hold her ears, had not Squiffers a firm grasp of one of her arms.
“I’m John Haslam, resident apothecary in charge here,” the gaunt giant told the stunned young woman.
