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