Chapter 37
Chapter
Thirty-Seven
The Mask Removed
The poem went off like a charge laid in a coal seam—slow to catch, and then everywhere at once.
Quennell published “The Mask of Virtue” the morning Harkness laid our challenge before the commissioners, exactly as we had agreed: Lydia's verses set within a black border, her pen name beneath the title, and beneath that the date of her death.
By noon the first copies were passing hand to hand in the coffee houses along Fleet Street.
By evening I was told there was not a clean copy of The Quill and Crown to be had in the whole of the West End, and the printer was setting a second run by lamplight.
I had thought I understood what we were doing. I had not. I had imagined a stone dropped in a pond. This was a fire in a high wind.
It was the timing that did it—that, and the date beneath the title.
Half of literary London already knew that Lydia Gray had died under the wheels of a carriage in Bloomsbury, and now half of literary London held in its hands a poem she had written before her death, naming in unmistakable terms the precise machinery by which troublesome women were declared mad and buried alive in respectable houses in the country.
And while the ink of that was still wet, the same drawing rooms learned that the deaf sister of Lord Westmere had been carried off and shut away in exactly such a house.
The poem ceased to be a poem. It became a key, and every reader in London turned it in the same lock at once.
"You will want to sit down for the morning's intelligence," Miriam said, three days after the challenge had been made, laying the cards and notes she’d received from her extensive gossip network beside my chocolate. "Edgar was cut at his club."
I set down my cup. "Cut. Really?”
"By name, in the smoking room, by old Lord Brearley, who is too deaf himself to have managed it quietly and too grand to be corrected.
" Her mouth twitched. "He enquired of the room at large whether a man who would put his own sister behind bars might not be more comfortable taking his brandy elsewhere.
I am told Edgar left within the quarter hour and has not been back since. "
“He must be furious,” I sipped my chocolate. “Anything else?”
“The invitation to the Hartleys’ ball was rescinded as well as the Marchmains' supper and Lady Provost's musical evening.
" She folded her hands. "He is finding, Lark, that the pristine name he prized above his own sister is a good deal less pristine this week than last. And the beauty of it is that he cannot say a word in his own defense without naming the thing he most wishes unnamed.
To protest is to confess he has a deaf sister at all. "
I should not have smiled. But I did.
My joy was fleeting. Every coffee house in London might be ablaze with Linnet's name.
But Linnet sat behind a barred window in Kent, unaware of how hard we were fighting for her release.
We had not been allowed to write to her, and, even if we did, I very much doubted the letter would ever get to her. Yes, Edgar was that vindictive.
Then, on the fourth morning, Harkness's note came. The Commissioners in Lunacy would receive the matter of Miss Linnet Everly. Not in the ordinary course which would take weeks. At once.
"They cannot afford to be slow," Thorne said when I put the note into his hand.
He had come the moment I sent for him. "A body that exists to prevent wrongful confinement, sitting on its hands while the whole town reads a murdered woman's poem about wrongful confinement?
They would be the next thing in every column.
We did not give them a choice, Lark. We took it from them. "
"You took it from them,” I clarified.
"We," he affirmed, and did not let me argue.
The commissioners kept their offices at Whitehall Place, in a set of rooms a great deal plainer than the power they held within them.
I expected something grander, and found instead a long table, a quantity of foolscap, a coal fire that smoked, and seven men who between them could open the door of any madhouse in England or nail it shut for good.
I knew them only by Harkness's murmured catalogue as we entered—three medical men, three of the law, and the chairman, a spare grey gentleman named Mr. Ellison who had the dry, unhurried manner of a man who had heard every lie the human animal could devise and was no longer impressed by any of them.
They were the audience our whole strategy had been built to reach.
I found my hands were not as steady as I wished. I folded them so it would not show.
Edgar was already there.
A part of me had hoped he would not, so that I might never again be in a room with the man who had done this.
But, of course, he had come. A man does not let a thing be decided about his property without attending to it.
He sat very upright, very correct, in a coat brushed to perfection.
When his eyes found mine across the room, there was nothing in them at all.
That was the worst of him. There never had been.
Beside him sat the solicitor, Carmody, who had brokered the whole filthy arrangement. In a seat behind, looking as though he wished the floor would oblige him by opening, sat Dr. Aubrey Strode.
And then a side door opened, and they brought in Linnet.
I was on my feet before I knew it. Thorne's hand closed briefly over my wrist—not yet, not here. I made myself stand still and not run to her. She was pale, thinner, and there were shadows under her eyes that had not been there before. But she was still Linnet. They had not broken her.
The instant she saw me her whole face changed, and her hands moved. “I knew you would come.”
I had to look at the smoking fire very hard for a moment to keep my composure in front of the men who would weigh it.
At the far side of the room, Lord Charles had risen as well.
When Linnet saw him, a fierce emotion crossed her face. But it was not for me to read. So I looked away.
Mr. Ellison rapped the table once. "We are not a court," he said, to the room at large.
"I will thank everyone present to remember it.
We are here to satisfy ourselves upon a single question: whether this young woman is detained with sufficient cause, or without it.
Mr. Harkness. You act for the petitioner against the order. You may begin."
Harkness rose, unhurried. He did not raise his voice once in the whole of what followed, which made it carry all the further.
"The order committing Miss Everly rests upon two medical certificates," he said. "By law, they must. Remove either, and the order falls. I shall trouble the commissioners with only one." He turned a single sheet face up upon the table. "The certificate of Dr. Aubrey Strode."
He let it sit.
"Dr. Strode certifies, over his signature, that he examined Lady Linnet and found her of unsound mind." Harkness turned the certificate face up upon the table, unhurried. "With the commissioners' leave, I should like to put a few questions to Dr. Strode upon that examination."
Mr. Ellison inclined his head. "You may."
"Dr. Strode." Harkness did not approach him; he merely turned, as a man turns to remark upon the weather.
"I shall begin with a fact not in dispute.
Lady Linnet has been deaf from her infancy.
She does not hear speech. She has never heard it—not a word, not a whisper, in the whole of her life.
You were aware of this when you examined her? "
"I was aware of it. Yes."
"Then tell the commissioners, if you please, how did you communicate with her?"
"I observed her. As one does. Her manner, her comprehension, her responses to—"
"Her responses to what, Doctor?"
"To my questions."
"And how did you put those questions to her?"
A pause, a fraction too long. "In the usual way."
"Aloud?"
"Naturally aloud."
"Aloud." Harkness let the word hang. "To a woman you had just told me you knew could not hear. Who, then, interpreted them for her? Who carried her answers back to you?"
Strode's eyes went, once, to Carmody, and found no help there, and came back. "There was no call for an interpreter. Her condition was evident upon observation."
"Observation." Harkness repeated the word as though tasting something gone off.
"Let me be certain I have understood you, for the commissioners will wish to be certain too.
You asked her questions she could not hear.
You received answers she had no means to give you.
You did not converse with her at all." He let it sit.
"You looked at a young, deaf lady across a room, Dr. Strode, and you signed your name to the state of a mind you had no means on earth to address. Is that correct?”
Strode said nothing. There was nothing he could say that would not make it worse, and some animal instinct in him had at last worked that out.
"I have no further questions for the doctor upon his method," Harkness said. "I have a great many upon his motive."
One of the medical commissioners had begun, very slightly, to frown.
"That alone unmakes the certificate," Harkness went on.
“But the commissioners should not be left to suppose it an honest error.
There is the matter of why Dr. Strode wrote what was wanted.
" He laid down a second sheet—the register, the tidy years of it, Strode's signature against the house in Kent, fee upon fee upon fee.
"Dr. Strode has drawn payment from Elmwood House—the very establishment to which he certified Lady Linnet Everly—for upward of fifteen years.
The law requires the certifying physician to have no interest in the receiving house, precisely so that no man may be paid to find a woman mad and paid again to keep her.
Dr. Strode has been paid both. His certificate is not merely mistaken. It is bought."
The silence in the room had changed its quality entirely.
Strode came half out of his chair, his face the color of tallow. "This is—the arrangement is perfectly usual—any physician of standing—"
"That," said Mr. Ellison, without heat, "is rather what alarms us, Dr. Strode. Sit down."
He sat.
The chairman turned his grey, unimpressed gaze upon Linnet, and his manner gentled by some fraction I would not have credited a moment before.
He then addressed Lord Charles. “Lord Charles, I am given to understand you can make yourself understood to the young lady.
" Harkness had agreed that Lord Charles should interpret for Linnet.
Because Miriam and I were interested parties in the challenge, and our close connection to Linnet, our efforts could have been called in question.
Lord Charles came to his feet. "I can, sir."
"Then ask her this, and render her answer faithfully, on your honor." Mr. Ellison studied her. "Does she know where she is, and why?"
My sister's gaze followed Lord Charles's hands. She nodded that she understood and—steady, unhurried—answered.
Lord Charles’s voice was not quite his own as he interpreted for her.
"She says: 'I am at Whitehall Place, before the Commissioners in Lunacy. My brother has had me certified insane so that I need never trouble his name again. I am not insane. I am merely deaf.”
For a moment, no one in the room moved at all.
And then Linnet offered, without being asked, more on her own.
"She says,” Charles went on, and here his voice did break, just once, before he mastered it, “’If the commissioners require more proof of my sanity, I would be more than glad to provide it. All you need to do is ask.’”
I did not look at Edgar. I did not have to. The small sound he made was the first human thing I had ever known to come out of him. Made of pure fury, it came far too late to be of the slightest use to anyone.
Mr. Ellison set down his pen.
He conferred with the men to either side of him—a matter of minutes only, heads bent, a low murmur I could not catch and did not need to. When he straightened, he spoke not to Harkness, nor to Edgar, but directly to my sister, slowly, while Charles's hands moved to carry his words.
“Lady Linnet. This commission finds no sufficient cause for your detention, and a great deal of cause for our displeasure with those who arranged it. The order is discharged. You are free to leave this place, and to go wherever, and with whomever, you please."
I did not clearly remember crossing the room.
What I did remember were Linnet's arms and the warm, shaking reality of her.
Her hands were against my back saying something over and over that I could not see to read and did not need to.
Lord Charles stood a careful, aching half step away, granting us the moment, his whole heart in his face, while Miriam wept openly into a handkerchief.
I turned at the last to Thorne—who had not said a word in the whole proceeding, who had stood at my shoulder the entire time like a wall I could lean on without seeming to—watching me with an expression I had never seen him wear, and would spend some time afterward trying to name.
"You fired it once," I said, when I could speak. "And it did not miss."
"No." He looked at my sister, at the young man hovering at her side, and finally at the wreckage of three ‘respectable’ men at the long table. And something eased in him that I had not known was being held. “No. It did not."
Edgar left before we did. He went without a word to anyone, upright still, correct still, his pristine name in cinders behind him and the whole of London waiting outside to watch him carry it home. No one rose. No one saw him to the door.
It was, I thought, exactly the silence he had meant for Linnet. I found I could not be sorry he had been made a present of it instead.