Buch lesen: «Secrets Behind Locked Doors»

Chapter One

Robert fought the urge to turn around and flee. He wasn’t a man who had ever run from anything. Six years he’d fought in the army and he’d never backed down from a fight, but right now his courage was deserting him.

‘Ready, sir?’ asked Yates, his agent, apparently oblivious to his discomfort.

Robert nodded, raised his hand and knocked on the imposing front door.

The stench hit him as soon as he walked inside. It was a mixture of sweat and cabbage and something else he didn’t even want to guess at. He wondered how the staff coped with it, the smell permeating their clothes and lingering as they returned home to their families. At least they could return home though, he supposed. Some of the inmates wouldn’t ever leave the confines of the Lewisham Asylum; they’d spend long years cooped up in the dreary rooms with only their screams for company.

‘Lord Fleetwood—’ a grubby little man hurried out to greet them ‘—it is such an honour to meet you. I’m Symes, the humble proprietor of this establishment.’

Robert nodded silently in greeting. He wanted to get his business here sorted as quickly as possible and escape. Already he was feeling despair, the same sensation the patients must have felt as they were dragged out of the sunlight one last time.

‘I said to your man there must be a mistake,’ Symes said as he led Robert into his office. ‘None of our patients are gently born, we haven’t got any ladies here.’

Robert very much hoped so, but in the ten years Yates had worked for him he hadn’t known the man to be wrong.

‘You have a patient listed as Louisa Turnhill?’ Robert asked.

Symes flicked through the ledger in front of him, his short, pudgy fingers crinkling the paper.

‘Louisa Turnhill, aged nineteen. Came to us just over a year ago.’

Over a year in this place. Robert couldn’t even begin to imagine it.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ Robert asked bluntly.

Symes squirmed a little in his seat, but dutifully read out the entry next to her name. ‘Melancholy and mania. Violent outbursts. Hallucinations.’

‘And what is her treatment?’

Symes looked at the two men in front of him blankly.

‘Treatment?’ he asked.

‘Yes, what are you doing to make her better?’ Robert had a sneaking suspicion he knew the answer to this question, but he persisted anyway. ‘How do you propose to cure her?’

‘Oh, there is no cure, Lord Fleetwood,’ he said, baring his yellow teeth in an uncomfortable smile. ‘We don’t deal in cures here, just room and board and a place for the wretched to stay out of the way of the rest of the world.’

Robert knew he’d never been in a more depressing place. Nearly one hundred poor souls locked in grim little cells with no hope of a cure and for many of them no hope of release.

‘Tell me,’ he said reluctantly, ‘how is Miss Turnhill presently?’

Symes shrugged. ‘I oversee the asylum, I don’t visit the inmates. You can see for yourself.’

He stood and stuck his head out into the corridor, motioning for a middle-aged woman to come into the room.

‘Show this gentleman to Room Sixty-Eight,’ he ordered.

Robert followed the dowdy woman up three flights of stairs. All around him screams and moans were muffled by thick wooden doors. He wondered how anyone got any rest. He wasn’t surprised they didn’t hope to cure anyone at Lewisham Asylum; he rather suspected it would turn a sane person mad within a month.

‘She’s in here, sir.’

The female warden slotted a key into the lock in front of her and opened the door.

Robert steeled himself, then stepped inside. He turned to see the door closing behind him as the warden locked him in.

He waited a minute for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. There was a tiny window, high up in the wall, covered almost entirely with bars. It let in a sliver of sunlight, but nowhere near enough to illuminate the room. In one corner was a metal bed and in another a small pot. The walls were whitewashed and the floor beneath his feet bare floorboards.

At first glance Robert thought they’d brought him to the wrong room, an empty room. For a few seconds he didn’t see the slender young woman crouching by the side of the bed, her wrist encircled by a manacle and a chain securing her to the wall. She was sitting completely still, regarding him with wide brown eyes.

‘Miss Turnhill?’ he asked.

She shied away from him as he took a step towards her.

‘Louisa?’ he tried again.

In his least threatening manner Robert ambled across the room and took a seat on the bed. It was hard, little more than a metal frame with an inch-thick straw mattress.

‘My name is Robert, I’m here to help you.’

The young woman cocked her head to the side and scrutinised him. For an instant Robert wondered if she was dumb, or if she’d forgotten how to speak in her year of captivity.

‘No one’s here to help me,’ she said eventually, her voice a little croaky as if underused.

‘I would really like to learn a little more about you,’ he said softly.

She chuckled and Robert wondered if she was about to become hysterical.

‘No, you wouldn’t.’

‘How are you feeling today?’ He tried a different tack.

She paused, regarding him seriously. ‘Not too mad today, thank you very much.’

Robert felt as though he’d been transported to another world. He had no idea how to talk to this young woman. She didn’t seem mad, at least not at first glance, but he wasn’t exactly an expert.

‘Are you going to hurt me?’ she asked as if enquiring about the weather.

Robert looked at her carefully. Underneath her uninterested demeanour he realised she was scared. Petrified, even.

‘I promise I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said sincerely.

She relaxed a little. ‘Have you brought any food?’ she asked.

Robert wondered how she’d gone from violence to food so quickly. His confusion must have shown on his face.

‘When people come in it’s either to hurt me or bring me food,’ she said calmly.

Robert Fleetwood, hardened soldier and celebrated war hero, felt his heart go out to this scared young woman. In that instant he vowed silently to help her. Even if she wasn’t the Louisa Turnhill he was looking for, he would make sure she was properly looked after, somewhere a long way from Lewisham Asylum.

‘Will you tell me how you came to be here, Louisa?’ Robert asked.

She stood, the chain attached to her wrist jangling as she moved. He saw she was thin—a year of asylum food didn’t seem to provide much nourishment. Her hair was long and straggly, falling most of the way down her back. There were bruises on the pale skin of her arms and dark circles under her eyes. She was in a poor state, but despite all of this Robert saw the spirit burning in her eyes as she watched him look over her. In her time at the asylum they hadn’t broken her.

She came and sat on the bed next to him, making sure there was as much distance as possible between them.

‘There’s no point,’ she said, turning her face towards him, ‘you wouldn’t believe me anyway.’

It was said with such certainty that Robert knew he had to hear her story. He wondered if she was deluded, whether she would tell him a different tale if he came back tomorrow.

‘I might,’ he said simply.

‘If you stay here overnight, there’s lots of screaming,’ Louisa said. ‘And moaning and shouting. Do you know the most common thing people shout?’

He shook his head.

‘They shout “I’m not mad”—’ she paused ‘—or “I shouldn’t be here”, which is much the same thing.’

Robert couldn’t imagine spending a single night in this hellish place, let alone over four hundred as she must have done.

‘Everyone says it,’ she said with a small smile on her face. ‘But I actually mean it.’

‘You shouldn’t be here?’

‘I’m not mad,’ she said, ‘or at least I wasn’t when they put me in here.’

He didn’t know how to respond. He’d expected howling and writhing, he’d been prepared for that—this cool, detached statement of sanity he didn’t know how to react to.

‘I probably am a little bit mad now. Anyone would be after a few months in this place.’

She looked at him and Robert got the sensation she was assessing him, weighing up whether he was worth revealing more to.

‘I said you wouldn’t believe me.’

‘What happened?’ Robert asked simply, not trusting himself to say more. He got the feeling this strange young woman was very astute—she’d know if he lied to her.

‘You actually want to know?’

‘I want to know.’

‘I had an evil guardian,’ she said, then giggled. ‘Your face is a picture.’

Robert hadn’t realised he’d moved a muscle.

‘My evil guardian locked me up here after I refused to marry him. Lecherous old sod.’

Sometimes she sounded so normal, so sane, but Robert knew there were some lunatics like that. So caught up in their fantasy world they could make others believe it was true.

‘He wanted the money my parents had left to me. When I wouldn’t give it to him through marriage, he bribed a doctor to certify I was insane and dumped me here. I should imagine he’s worked his way through most of the money by now. Not that it’s any use to me in here.’

Robert knew he shouldn’t believe her. He knew he was probably being manipulated, conned into believing her fantasy, but the disbelief in his mind was giving away to horrified realisation.

He’d received a letter eight weeks ago, a confession of sorts. It had been sent the day before his great-uncle had died. In the letter his great-uncle confessed to committing a grave sin and asked Robert to put it right. The only other information the old man had supplied was Louisa’s name.

Surely this wasn’t the sin his great-uncle had talked of. Robbing a young woman of her fortune was one thing, but to rob her of her freedom and label her as insane was worse than murder.

He cursed the man again for not providing more details of his crime.

‘And who was your guardian?’ he asked, trying to make his tone casual even though he was holding his breath in anticipation of her answer.

‘Thomas Craven,’ she said. ‘The name I curse last thing every night and first thing every morning.’

Robert felt the foundations of his world rock. This young woman must have been the ward of his great-uncle, Thomas Craven, otherwise there was no way she could have given him the right name.

When Yates had tracked Louisa down to the asylum, Robert hadn’t known what to expect. He’d wondered if his great-uncle had somehow played a part in this young woman’s descent into madness, maybe by robbing her of her innocence, an event she hadn’t been able to recover from, and for which his great-uncle had rightly blamed himself. No part of him had been prepared for the possibility she’d been wrongly imprisoned for over a year.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, patting him on the hand in a sisterly gesture, ‘you don’t have to believe me.’

Robert stood and paced to the other side of the tiny room, trying to buy himself time to figure out what he believed.

‘I want to take you away from here, Louisa,’ he said eventually. ‘I want to take you somewhere safe whilst I figure out exactly what’s happened.’

Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. Robert surmised she hadn’t had much reason to trust people in the last few years. She wrapped her arms around her body protectively and started to hunch into herself.

‘I promise I won’t hurt you,’ Robert said, kneeling down in front of her and gently taking her hand. ‘I won’t let anyone hurt you ever again.’

She flinched as his skin touched hers, not pulling her hand away, but cowering a little as if she expected him to hit her.

‘Do they beat you here?’ he asked, suddenly catching sight of the bruises on her arms for a second time.

She laughed in disbelief. ‘Of course.’

Robert felt the rage building inside him, rage he thought he’d managed to control for so long. He didn’t know if this young woman was mad or the victim of a very heinous deception, but either way she didn’t deserve to be beaten. She shouldn’t be chained to the wall, frightened of every person who entered her dismal cell. She deserved more than that, every human did.

‘Trust me,’ he said quietly.

Louisa regarded him for almost a minute in silence, staring into his eyes, and Robert felt as though she’d studied his soul. Eventually she gave a small, almost imperceptible nod.

Robert rose to his feet, strode the couple of paces to the door and thumped hard on the wood with his fist.

He waited until he could hear footsteps approaching, then thumped again.

The female warden unlocked the door and stood aside for him to come out.

‘Get me Symes,’ he commanded. ‘And give me the keys to unlock this poor girl’s manacles.’

The warden just stared at him.

‘I said give me your keys,’ he growled in a voice that brooked no argument.

Wordlessly the warden handed over a key, unthreading it from the bunch.

‘Go get Symes,’ he repeated. ‘I’m taking Miss Turnhill away from here.’

‘Very Arthurian,’ Louisa murmured as he unlocked the manacle from around her wrist.

He looked at her, puzzled.

‘My knight in shining armour.’ He saw the smile on her face and humour in her eyes and wondered how anyone could keep from utter despair after spending such a long time in the asylum.

‘What’s going on?’ Symes asked as he blustered in. ‘Lock her back up immediately.’

‘I’m taking Miss Turnhill with me,’ Robert said, ‘and we’re never coming back.’ It was a bit of a dramatic statement, but the whole scene seemed a little farcical to him.

‘You can’t do that,’ Symes said.

‘I’m her legal guardian now, I can choose to do whatever I like. And I choose to take Miss Turnhill away from this dreadful place and into my care.’

With that Robert took Louisa’s hand and tucked it into the crook of his arm. She took a couple of steps forward and stumbled. Robert realised she wasn’t used to walking far and, adding to that the excitement of escape, he wasn’t surprised she was a little overcome. Wanting to make their exit as quickly as possible, he bent his head to Louisa’s ear and dropped his voice so only she could hear.

‘I’m going to carry you,’ he said.

‘You most certainly are not.’

Robert blinked twice in quick succession. Most young ladies wouldn’t give up the chance of being swept into a man’s arms whatever the circumstances.

‘I was dragged into this hellhole, but I will walk out on my own two feet.’