Page 119 of The Duke Undone

Suddenly, it broke. Air rushed in, but through a cloth, wet with a penetrating smell, like a sweet and strong spirit, and she was gone.

Floating. Over eons, across vast distances, she struggled to return to her body, to surface until she wore her own skin, looked out of her own eyes.

Sometimes she heard noises. Sometimes she saw shadows shift, and faces formed above her. Once she saw green and felt a longing so deep she couldn’t remember the source, and then she submerged again.

Chapter Nineteen

When Anthony was a small child, his mother sometimes crept into the nursery at night to rock him in her arms, singing lullabies. One of those melodies came back to him as he walked behind Mr. Wilkes across the grounds of the Putney Asylum, a haunting melody, in a minor key.

“We’re very proud of our facility,” Mr. Wilkes was saying. “It’s not a holding pen, Your Grace, but a hospital in every sense of the word. Our staff is dedicated to curing the patients, that is, those in whom there yet exists some normal function that can be influenced.”

Mr. Wilkes was young, bald, and harried, with a quick, roving eye. As they passed near a huddle of well-heeled visitors, he gestured sharply to a nurse standing in a doorway. She came forward at once, whistle between her lips, and scattered the little party as the object of their interest—a patchy-haired boy on his hands and knees—snapped and growled at the air.

“An Irish vagrant,” said Mr. Wilkes, walking quickly down the path. “He doesn’t think he’s a dog, by the way, but rather Cú Chulainn, the Irish hero. You’ve heard the myth? Ireland’s greatest warrior. He slayed a guard dog as a boy and took its place in recompense, so they called him the Hound of Ulster.”

Anthony glanced over his shoulder at the boy, now in a crouch, rubbing his ear against his bony shoulder.

“Men tend not to debase themselves in their delusions,” said Mr. Wilkes. “Kings or gods every one. This way, please. We do everything we can, of course, for the pauper patients, but the Poor Law officials have all but overwhelmed us with chronic cases, a hundred from the workhouses and the country asylum in the past year alone. The private patients are far fewer in number. Some of them have rooms in the central building and the rest are lodged in the cottages. Ah, there are a few of the women on the knoll. Healthy amusements form the better part of their treatment. Good afternoon, Mrs. Blizard, Miss Laurence, Mrs. Hinson, Lady Vigers.”

Three women raised their rackets in acknowledgment while the fourth stood frozen.

Anthony glanced at them, ordinary, orderly specimens, hats shielding their faces from the afternoon sun. In their walking dresses, they looked like any other Londoners of the leisure class, out to enjoy a bright day on the heath, no different from the visitors gasping at the antics of that poor deluded boy.

The discrepancy between appearance and reality chilled him.

These women couldn’t return home when the shadows lengthened. They’d been separated from their families, torn from their lives. Their rooms, however comfortable, were cells.

As he watched, they began a game of badminton.

“The majority of them will reintegrate into society after treatment,” said Mr. Wilkes, clapping his hands to separate a guard and a nurse who’d drifted under a stand of holly to exchange some confidence.

“Our therapies have proven most effective. The medical superintendent will be delighted to discuss our philosophy in greater depth. Your timing couldn’t have been better. He has just now returned from a week in London.”

They turned off the path onto a wider avenue that led up the hill.

There it was again, the silvered notes of his mother’s song, floating toward him on the breeze. He pivoted, but of course he couldn’t find the source of the melody. No woman crooned to her infant on the grounds. The faint tune played inside his head.

Yesterday, still thinking about his discussion with Mabeldon, he’d driven to Islington, to Normand Park, only to discover the mansion had burned to the ground. He’d never see the asylum where his mother spent her final days, the room where she’d been found, hanged, the music crushed forever from her throat.

He turned back to Mr. Wilkes.

“Your Grace?” The alienist had stopped a few feet higher on the hill, sun glistening on his bald pate. “Yes, we’ve broken ground for the cannery. Is that what caught your eye? Behind the kitchens there. Not much to see as yet, but we’ve every expectation the construction will move rapidly. I would have shown you, but I’m sure Dr. Jephson wants that pleasure.”

“Cannery?” Anthony looked blankly in the direction Wilkes pointed.

“It will give us the means to achieve total food self-sufficiency and to provide steady employment to several of our male incurables as well. We’re most indebted to your generosity.”

Mr. Wilkes started again up the hill.

“I funded this cannery?” Anthony strode beside him, confusion curdling into anger. “I think you mean my father.”

Wilkes frowned slightly. “Perhaps you were following your father’s wishes, Your Grace, but we secured the funds after the New Year, from you. Your dedication to improving care for the mentally and morally diseased does you credit.”

Anthony smiled, an effortful smile, his teeth like knives in his mouth. He had to hold his lips just so or he’d taste blood.

Mr. Wilkes seemed competent to his tasks, brisk and dispassionate. Maybe the Putney Asylum was a model institution, a place where the patients’ surroundings had been adjusted to provide the most healthful influences, so that dangerous behaviors resolved themselves and defective brains modified their disorder, becoming rational. Maybe the Putney Asylum was deserving of support.

Even so, his father’s noblesse oblige, extended by Yardley, might have found a different target. England had hundreds of asylums. If Weston the elder felt compelled to improve care for the insane, there were ways to do so without pumping money into the projects of the man who’d presided over his wife’s suicide. But, of course, he had always placed the blame squarely on her. His financial commitments confirmed it.