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Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Anna Hope 2016

Anna Hope has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448170043
ISBNs 9780857521965 (hb)
9780857521972 (tpb)

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‘The hall is 104 feet long and 50 feet wide, and is fine alike in dimensions and general arrangement. There are dado and frieze in Burmantofts work, string courses, and above these arched windows, which form a further decorative feature. The windows are filled with cathedral glass, and long sprays of bramble with birds flitting about are painted upon it with charming effect. The ceiling is panelled and coved in light brown and gold, and picked out with various tints, all harmonising with the rich hues of dado and frieze, as well as with a magnificent arcaded gallery in walnut. At the opposite end is a large stage, fitted with all requisites in the shape of wings and flies, and accommodation for the band behind the foot-lights.’

‘The garden of humanity is very full of weeds … nurture will never transform them into flowers.’

Ella

‘ARE YOU GOING to behave?’ The man’s voice echoed. ‘Are you going to behave?’

She made a noise. Could have been yes. Could have been no, but the blanket was pulled off her head and she gasped for air.

An arched hall stretched before her, lit with lamps. The thin hiss of gas. Plants everywhere, and the smell of carbolic soap. On the floor were tiles, reaching out in all directions, polished till they shone, some in the shapes of flowers, but the flowers were black. She knew then that this was no police station, and started shouting in fear, until a young woman in uniform appeared from the darkness and slapped her on the cheek. ‘There’ll be none of that in here.’

Irish. Ella whipped her head back, tears in her eyes though she wasn’t crying. She knew those Irish girls. There were plenty at the mill. They were mean as hell.

Another woman came, and they put their hands beneath her armpits and began pulling her towards two doors. Ella dragged her feet, but they slapped her till she walked for herself. Both of them had sets of keys at the waist. There must have been twenty, thirty keys there, clanging away. They pushed her through the doors, locked them behind her, and then they were standing at the top of a corridor so long the end was impossible to see.

No reply. Only the wheeze of the gas and the corridor, stretching. They turned to the left with her, through another set of doors, marching her between them, uniforms crackling as they walked. Everywhere the same hard smell of soap, and something else, something wrong underneath.

Then, a last door, and a large room, with a stink like a pigpen, where they dragged her to a narrow, metal-framed bed and shoved her down. ‘We’ll deal with you later.’

Other beds showed themselves in the greyish light, hundreds of them lying end to end. On each a person, but man or woman she couldn’t tell. Heavy furniture lined the walls, which were painted dark. She could see the large double doors she had come in from. Locked.

She crouched at the top of the bed, breathing hard. Her cheek was throbbing. She lifted her fingers to it; it had split where the men had punched her earlier, and was pulpy and thick. She pulled the rough blanket up over her knees. Someone nearby was singing, the sort of song you’d sing to hush a baby to sleep. Someone else crying. Someone muttering to themselves.

A humming started up. It seemed to be coming from the next bed, but all Ella could see of the woman in there were her feet, soles like peeling yellow paper, until she sat up straight like a jack-in-the-box. She was old, but wore her hair in bunches like a little girl. Thin, tallacky flesh hung slack on her arms.

‘Germany.’ The woman’s eyes were wet and gleaming. ‘We’ll dance there, we’ll sing.’ And she started up a wordless tune in a cracked childhood voice. Then, ‘At night,’ the woman said, in a loud whisper, ‘when I’m sleeping, me soul comes out – creep creep creep like a little white creature.’ She pointed at Ella and smiled. ‘But you must let it be. It comes back in the morning, right enough.’

Ella brought her fists over her eyes, curling away from the woman into a small, tight ball. Someone was banging on the walls:

She stayed awake through the night, but couldn’t have slept if she’d wanted to. Her cheek flamed, and as soon as one of the women stopped bleating another one started up, bawling, singing, chelping to themselves:

As the sky started to lighten, the chorus got louder, and Old Germany in the bed beside her was the loudest of the lot, a terrible songbird greeting the dawn. A bell clanged at the top of the room. But there was movement at least, something happening, Ella could see a woman at the far end, dressed in uniform like those who had brought her here last night, and she slipped out of her bed, walking fast down the middle of the room. ‘I’ve to speak to someone.’

‘I’m in charge.’ The woman smoothed her uniform out over her belly. She lifted her watch, began to wind it up.

‘You don’t know?’ The woman smiled at the round face of her watch as though the two of them were sharing a nice little joke. Another bell rang, louder, somewhere outside the room. The women began to swarm and press themselves into lines. Ella put her thumbs in her palms. For a moment she was back at work – seven in the morning and everyone rushing up the hill so as not to be late, not to have their pay docked – the metal-tasting panic in the mouth. Jim Christy, the pennyhoil man, standing at the gate, waiting to shut it in your face on the stroke of seven.

‘Never fight on an empty stomach.’ The girl had a quick, easy smile. ‘Come on.’ She touched her on the arm. ‘I can show you the way.’

She followed the crowd into a large, echoing room, where the women were taking seats on benches set before long wooden tables. One side of the room was all doors, and at each of the doors stood a woman with one of those sets of keys. The other side was all windows, but the panes were tiny, so even if you broke one you’d only get your wrist through.

‘Sit down.’ She was given a shove by a passing woman in uniform. A bowl clattered on to the table before her.

‘Porridge,’ said the pale girl, who was sitting on the other side of the table. ‘There’s milk. Here.’ She lifted a large pitcher and poured some for herself, then did the same for Ella. ‘The food’s not so bad.’

A young, dark-haired woman sitting beside Ella leant towards them. ‘It’s mice,’ she said, pointing towards the porridge. ‘They put them through t’feeder.’ Her face was grey and sunken. She seemed to have no teeth.

Ella pushed her bowl away. Her stomach was cramping with hunger, but if she ate here, then it was inside her. It was real. And wherever this was, it wasn’t real.

‘You should get it seen to.’ The girl tilted her head to one side. ‘I’m Clem,’ she said, and held out her hand.

There must have been five hundred women in there, and it was noisier than the mill with all the machines going. An old lady on the other side of the table was crooning to a rolled-up shawl, rocking it in her arms, shushing it, reaching out with a finger and touching it. A uniformed woman walking up and down the lines stood over her and rapped her on the shoulder. ‘Give over with that rubbish and eat your food.’

The old lady shook her head. ‘Not till babby’s eaten first.’ She began to unbutton her dress.

‘There’s no baby,’ the other woman said, raising her voice. She grabbed the shawl and shook it out, holding up the holey piece of cloth. ‘See? There’s nothing.’

‘Babby! You’ve hurt my babby!’ the old lady screamed, and fell to her knees, scrabbling on the floor. The uniformed woman hauled her up by her elbow. More women joined the commotion then, as though they’d all been given the signal to bawl. At the height of it, a bowl shattered on the floor.

‘What did you want to do that for?’ It was the same hard-faced woman from last night. The Irish one. Ella put her thumbs in her palms to grip them.

Baby-woman was shaking her head from side to side and crying as she was dragged to her feet and pulled from the room.

Across the table, Clem was eating calmly. When she had finished, she put her spoon to the side of her bowl and folded her hands in her lap.

‘Sharston Asylum.’ Clem’s eyes were a still and steady blue. ‘Why, where did you think?’

Ella looked down at her hands, clasped into fists; she stretched her fingers on the table: eight of them, two thumbs. But they did not look like her own. She turned them palms up and stared. She wished for a mirror. Even that old piece of cracked rubbish they had at the end of the spinning sheds. The one they’d all elbow each other out of the way for on a Friday. Even that. Just to see she was still real.

She looked up. Doors. Nurses standing at each like jailers, carrying one of those big rounds of keys.

She’d heard of it. Since she was small. If you ever did anything stupid: the asylum. For the lunatics. The paupers. They’ll send you to Sharston, and you’ll never come out.

She stood, grabbing one of the passing nurses by the hand. ‘Wait. There’s been a mistake!’

‘No! You don’t understand – there’s been a mistake. I’m not mad. I just broke a window. I’m not mad.’

A scraping of benches. The clatter as several hundred women stood, lining up by the door. More uniformed women appeared, a huddle in the doorway. One of them was older, wearing a smaller headdress and badge. She was looking over. Now she was crossing the room towards her. There had been a mistake. They knew it now. Relief made her shaky.

Ella didn’t look back. She followed the woman, walking out into the corridor, and when the doors were locked behind her, her knees went, as though they had been kicked from behind. She put her hand against the wall to steady herself.

The matron clicked her tongue in the back of her throat. ‘Are you ready then? Come with me.’

The woman’s jaw twitched, as though a fly had just landed there and she couldn’t brush it off. It didn’t matter. Soon she would be outside. There were two shillings sewn in the hem of her dress, and she would spend them this time. Do what she should have done yesterday. Take the train. Far away.

They marched through one set of doors – two, three, four. Every time they reached one, the silent nurse held Ella by the shoulders while the matron clanked around with her keys. They came to a lighter corridor and beyond it was the green of the entrance hall. She could see the plants, hundreds of them, and the thousand little tiles on the floor. She was marched past the front door into a stuffy room with a couple of chairs and a table and not much else.

The nurse shoved her into a seat, put down the papers she was carrying, and Ella was left alone. The windows had no bars in here. Through them was a wide gravel drive. The door opened, and a man entered. Humming. Fair hair. A long moustache, pointed at the ends, ears that stuck out and were pink at the tips. He eyed Ella briefly before coming to sit, and his eyes were blue and pale. He reached out and slid the papers towards him. He wrote something down and then read some more. He carried on humming as he read.

The man looked up. ‘My name is Dr Fuller.’ He spoke slowly, as though she might be deaf. ‘I am one of the assistant medical officers here. It is my job to admit you.’

‘Yes.’ He sat back in his chair, fingers touching the edges of his moustache. They were sharp, as though you might prick yourself on them. ‘Do you know why you are here?’

The words fell from her. ‘I broke a window. In the mill. Yesterday. I’m sorry. I’ll pay for it. But I’m not mad.’

The man’s eyes narrowed as he held her gaze. He gave a brief nod then looked back at his paper and wrote something down. ‘Name?’

His pen scratched out over the paper. ‘And before that? Did you work as a child?’

‘According to the papers I have here, you no longer live with your family, is that correct?’

The room was quiet. Outside, clouds raced each other across the sky as though they had somewhere better to be. She saw the house where she had grown up. A black house, a house that was never safe. ‘Fifty-three Victoria Street.’

The doctor nodded, wrote and then stood and crossed the room towards her. He took her wrist in his fingers and pressed lightly. With his other hand he took a pocket watch out and stared at it. ‘Tongue.’

He peered at it, then went back to the other side of the table and wrote some more. She watched the letters spooling from his pen, marching from left to right like a line of ants she saw once on a baking summer afternoon, crossing the path on Victoria Street. She had been small, sitting with her back on hot stone. Inside, she had heard the rasp of her father’s voice, then the thud of fist on flesh. Her mother crying, a low, animal sound. She had stared at the ants. They looked as if they knew just where they were going. She wondered what would happen if she followed them. Where she would end up.

‘It says here, Miss Fay, that yesterday morning you attempted to damage a machine in the factory in which you are employed.’ The doctor was looking at her again, a keenness to him now.

How to explain? How to speak of what she had seen – of the women and the machines and the windows that blocked everything out. It had been so clear then but would muddy before this man, she knew.

She shook her head, muttering. ‘There was no damage. Only the window, and I’ll pay for that. I’ve already said. I’ll find a way.’

‘I’m not mad,’ she said, louder now. ‘Not like those women in that room anyhow.’

‘What are you writing?’ She raised her voice. Still, he ignored her. The only sound the scratching of his pen. The furniture, heavy and silent, watching her too.

She hit the table in front of him. When he didn’t look up, she hit it again, stood and smacked her hand right down on his papers, his pen clattering on to the floor. The ink splattered over his hand. He snapped back in his chair. Took a bell and rang it, and two nurses appeared, as though they had been waiting in the hall just for this.

‘It appears Miss Fay is feeling violent. Please take her downstairs. We can finish the assessment when she’s calm.’

The nurses grabbed her, but she landed a bite on one of their arms and wrested herself free. And then – the door – not locked, running across the entrance hall, the black flowers. The big front door, unlocked too, and her outside on the steps, and the fresh air smacking her face, and her gasping for it, sucking it down, pelting across the gravel. Whistles blaring, shrill and hard. A nurse making towards her. Her turning to the left, to the far side of the building. Then only more buildings, and running from them too, out across the grass. A cricket pitch. Tall trees. Lungs burning. This way only fields, brown and muddy, stretching out, and sheep, and a lane ahead. The top of a small rise. Two men, standing in a hole. One of them waving his arms, shouting. Turning, seeing the nurses behind her, gaining on her. Swerving to miss them, but slipping in the mud, her ankle turning over and her falling, hard on to her front, pitching and rolling down the hill.

The fierce slap of mud. Everything red and black. A hot wetness spreading between her legs.

A face before her, a dark man – hand stretched out, palm open. ‘Are you all right there?’

People around her. Upon her. She on her hands and knees, spitting black earth to the ground. Her arms, yanked behind her back. Pain tearing as she was pulled up and made to stand by people she couldn’t see.

The dark man there still. Standing, watching her. A little way apart. Looking as if he pitied her.

John

Eight of them out here in the low tin light, waiting for their shovels, their breath meeting the air in vaporous clouds. The men coughed, blew on their hands, moving their weight from foot to foot, and went up one by one to Brandt, the attendant, to give their name and be told where to dig. It was always the same faces out here; not so many could be trusted with something hard and sharp.

‘Mantle Lane,’ said Brandt, when it was John’s turn, passing the heavy shovel over. John could just make out the thin lines of the man’s face.

He hefted the spade on to his shoulder and followed the grey outline of Dan’s bulk down the gravel path that led behind the main buildings, over the railway bridge and then out to the furthest reaches of the grounds. Their boots crunched on the frosted grass, and John hunkered into his jacket. It was a raw morning all right, with the wind coming down off the tops and finding the gaps in your clothes. When they reached the graveyard, they made their way to the hole they had been digging last week, covered over now with thick wooden boards. Dan crouched beside it, lifting one of the planks and peering inside. ‘Two of them in there.’

It was a little lighter now, and John could see the frown on Dan’s face as he brought two thin, sappy twigs from his pocket, twisted them into quick knots and laid them carefully in the hole, speaking a few low words as he did so.

There were always three to a grave. No headstones, just patches of earth raw with soil that had been dug and put back in.

John traced a rectangle on the ground with his shovel, marking the plot of a new grave. Dan soon joined him, and when the two men lifted their spades the metal struck the ground with a high, ringing sound.

They did not speak as they worked. It was always like this at first: silence until you got your rhythm up. Your boot finding its place on the lug. The shaft against your knee. Your breath finding its way. Only the sound of your shovel cutting into the ground and the odd grunt of effort. The cold no longer bearing on you, as all of you went into the digging, making the sides sharp and smooth.

They were good at it, and the hard jobs were the good ones – the ones that made you forget.

Occasionally there was a shout from one of the other men and the high shriek of the train as it arrived on the branch line from Leeds, casting a trail of smoke above the trees, but mostly there was silence. It took a day for the two of them to dig a grave. That was fair going. Even though the tools were useless. Not like the ones from home, the narrow loys, which were made to fit a man, to fit the job, whether it was cutting turf or digging potatoes or sod. These shovels were factory made. They were fast enough though, since John had cut earth since he was old enough to grasp the spade and Dan was the strongest man there.

They dug on, the heat rising in their bodies, while the sun smeared its late-winter dawn over the black buildings at their back and then hid itself behind thick grey cloud. While Brandt paced on the top of the rise, with the long stick that all of the attendants carried, keeping his beady eye on them and the other scattered working groups, ready with his whistle should anything occur.

‘Here,’ said Dan, when they were a good couple of feet down and standing in the hole. He palmed a bit of shag from his pocket, jerking his shoulder towards the fence that hugged the field. ‘Wouldn’t take much to climb that now, would it?’

John rubbed his forehead with his cuff, a sweat on him now. Beyond the fence the land rose a little – not the high rise of the moor that could be seen from their ward, but gentler. A few houses dotted the horizon. He glanced at Brandt and, seeing the man had his back turned, leant in, took a pinch of Dan’s tobacco and rolled a quick thin cigarette for himself. Dan was right. The fence was just the height and a half of them. A leg up and they would both be over and away.

‘Where would I go?’ said Dan, in answer to a question unasked. ‘If I did a scarper? Well now, mio Capitane, let’s see.’ He struck a match, the flare of it licking the hollows of his face.

John leant in to the small flame. He never knew how Dan managed to find and smuggle his lunts, but he had the knack of it. And a small piece of pride was always saved in not having to beg the attendants for a light.

‘Know what I wouldn’t do.’ Dan spat a stray piece of tobacco on the ground. ‘Nothing like them daft buggers who went wandering round the village.’ He gestured to the houses in the distance. ‘You wouldn’t want to do that. Not in this clobber.’

Everyone knew about the four who’d escaped. They were out for less than a day and did nothing worth the effort, wandering around Sharston in the daylight, going into a newsagent’s, visiting a barber for a shave. The man read the labels on the eejits’ fronts while they were sitting in his chair.

He and Dan were both wearing suits made of rough grey tweed, Sharston Asylum sewn on the outside of the jacket. Dan pinched the cloth of his label in his fingers. ‘I can’t hardly read, but even I’m not daft enough to think they wouldn’t brand us like sheep. No …’ He stepped back, eyes half closed now, smoke curling from his nostrils in the low winter light. ‘You wouldn’t head for the village. You’d head for the wood.’ He leant his weight back, gestured over to the west. ‘I’ve friends in the woods. They’d help me. They’d help you too, chavo. They always help an honest man.’

John took a draw on his cigarette. He never knew quite what sort of friends Dan meant.

He liked his stories, did Dan, looked like some strange sort of story himself, with his slab of a face and his strongman’s chest and his arms like great hams, inked all over with tattoos of birds and flowers and creatures that were half woman, half beast. He had been a sailor – twenty years of it – and called John his Captain, since he reminded him, so he said, of an Italian skipper he’d had: a right handsome omi, just like you. He’d sailed until he’d lost his registration ticket, then become a pugilist, knocking down lads for money in the fair. But he had many stories, and you never knew which ones were true.

Most of the men in there had faces marked with something John knew – poverty, or the fear of it. Dan Riley’s face was different – the only marks a nose that had been broken many times and creases made by laughter and sun. In two years, John had never come to know quite why the man was in there.

‘And then I’d head to sea,’ Dan carried on. ‘The sea, mio Capitane. South Shields. That’s where to go. You turn up with nothing, and they’ll take you on a merchant ship. No questions asked. I’d travel by night.’ Dan gestured a winding way with his cigarette. ‘Keep away from the roads.’ He slowed up a little, savouring. ‘And when I got there, I’d go round Norah Carney’s house.’

‘I’d knock on her door, and she’d appear.’ Dan stepped back as though to make room for her between them in the hole of the half-dug grave. ‘She’d take me in, like she always does. First thing we’d do, we’d burn this lot o’ clobber in the grate.’ He gestured at his suit. ‘Then we’d up and off to her lente, and I wouldn’t get up till—’

A high whistle sounded in the distance. Over Dan’s shoulder John could see Brandt waving his stick. Dan laughed, a ripe cackle that shook his body as he rubbed his butt out between his fingers and threw his cigarette on the ground. ‘What about you? Where’d you go, mio Capitane?’

He had a way of asking questions, looking at you straight, as though he wished for an answer. As though he were interested in the answer you might give.

They dug for the rest of the morning and were left to it. Dan hummed and sang while they worked. He sang to suit his mood: sometimes a murder ballad, verses of blood and revenge, or scraps of wandering songs from the road, but most often a song of the sea:

Then he changed the words, making them filthy, adding verses about slippery, lusty lasses called Norah, making himself laugh.

And though the work was bleak, when the smell of the earth rose fresh to your nose, and someone was singing beside you, and the digging was hard and the sweat came, blinding you from time to time and stinging your eyes, the world was simple enough.

Some time after the main clock had struck eleven, when they were a good few feet down, there came a commotion. Whistles, not one but many this time, being blown over and over again. They looked up and saw a figure coming towards them from the far side of the building, small, dark and hurtling.

John stared. Women were ghosts. They shared the buildings with them but were never seen. Other than on Fridays: the dancing. And he didn’t have anything to do with that.

Dan pushed his cap back on his head. ‘Go on, lass,’ he said, under his breath.

The girl was coming closer, arms pumping at her sides, face dark red with the effort of it. A wildness in her. A freedom. It pitched and turned in John’s gut.

‘Go on, lass!’ roared Dan, throwing his shovel to the ground and flinging out his arms. ‘Go on!!’

Behind the girl, on the rise of the hill, not twenty feet away, was Brandt, his thin black shape gaining on her, and behind him, nurses: three, four, five of them, skirts flapping, arms flapping, useless birds that could not fly. John scanned the distance to the trees, breathing fast, as though it were him running, not the girl. She might make it. She might.

‘Stop her. Stop her!’ Brandt was shouting, mouth open, face twisted as he ran.

But the girl looked up then and saw them. And though both men put their hands in the air to show they meant no harm, there was terror in her eyes and she swerved in her path, stumbling, falling badly, rolling towards where they stood.

For a terrible second she was still. John moved – did it before he thought – hauling himself from the hole and starting over to where she lay. He knelt on the mud beside her. ‘Are you all right there?’

The girl was not moving. He reached out and touched her arm, and she rolled to her back. Her eyes were red and swollen, her cheek a painful sight. Her wet dress covered with mud and grass. He put his hand out to help her up, and she reached for it, but it was smacked away with such force that John was felled, sent spinning on to the ground himself. And when he stumbled to his feet he saw that Brandt was on her, his knee in her spine, her arms already pulled behind her back.

He watched, helpless, as the girl was pinioned and trussed, a rabble of nurses around her, squawking and squalling. Throughout it all, the girl’s red eyes were fastened on his, and he could not look away.

‘What?’ she snarled at him, as she was pulled to her feet. ‘What are you looking at?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, half to himself, and turned away.

Dan was thigh-deep in the grave, his cap pushed back on his head. He let out another low whistle. ‘Thought she was going to scarper it good and proper then.’

She had been running fast. She had been going to make it to the trees. She could have outrun Brandt. And then she had seen them and fallen, and now she was taken.

John lifted his shovel to the hard winter earth. And he thought of where he was. And how long he had been there. And what was simple broke apart and became a shattered, sharded thing.

Charles

IT WAS ALMOST a relief when the call came; late afternoon and he was on the far side of the men’s quarters, over in ward five, playing Mozart sonatas to the epileptics.

A young attendant tapped him on the shoulder and gave the news, ‘The superintendent wishes to see you now,’ and he was forced to break off in the middle of the Adagio of the C major, K545.

A queasy feeling assailed him as he hurried down the long main corridor, unlocking and locking doors as he went. He knew what this was about: it was about that girl. He should have gone after her. It had made him look weak. To have such a breach of security on his watch was not good.

As he approached the superintendent’s door, Charles took a couple of deep breaths before rapping on the wood with what he hoped was a confident tone.

‘Come!’ The superintendent’s voice was muffled by the heavy door. ‘Ah … Fuller.’ Soames was seated behind his desk. ‘Sit down.’

‘Good, good.’ Soames’s black-rimmed spectacles, perched as they were on the tip of his nose, gave the impression that he might be looking at him with multiple eyes. There was, in fact, something distinctly spidery about the man, tall and thin-limbed as he was; he rarely moved from this office, set at the centre of this web of corridors, but he missed nothing that occurred beneath his care. The superintendent gave a brief nod. ‘We have more music in the day rooms now, I hear?’

‘Ah. Well …’ Charles tried his best to make his voice light. ‘I believe the patients seem to like it. I’ve … experimented a little with the different composers. It’s almost becoming a … prescription, if you like.’

‘I see.’ A brief twitch of the lips that could almost have been a smile. ‘And whom do they like the best?’

‘Well, it rather depends.’ Charles leant forward. ‘I tend to favour Mozart for the epileptics. Or Bach. They seem to appreciate the order it brings and, then … Chopin, Schubert, the impromptus – for … well, for their … beauty, I suppose.’

Charles’s blood quickened. He decided to brazen it out. ‘Yes, sir. I find them the most beautiful of all the music for solo piano.’

Soames made a non-committal noise. ‘And the orchestra?’ he said. ‘Not too much for you? We can always find someone else to take up the strain.’

‘No, sir.’ Charles laughed. He had meant for it to sound easy, but it came out instead as a congested bark. ‘Not at all. Coming along well, sir. We have a viola now and a trumpet, so as of last week we are a full complement at last.’

‘Very good.’ Soames leant back in his chair, index fingers steepled beneath his chin. ‘How long have you been with us now, Fuller?’

‘Sir …’ Charles fretted his fingers together. ‘About the girl. I’m terribly sorry, I should have seen the signs, but she has been sent downstairs now and I believe—’

She had smelt of engine grease, urine and wool. His only thought while taking her pulse had been to wish the interview were over soon.

Well below par. He had expected one of the lower examples of the female, but she was quite a sight: eyes so swollen as to be almost deformed, skin pink and stretched above and below the eyeball, the conjunctiva inflamed and weeping, the edges crusted and yellow. Below them was an open wound, recently made, a punch to the upper cheek, which had split the skin.

‘Here’s the thing, Fuller.’ Soames’s eyes met Charles’s. ‘We don’t want any more escapees. Diminishes our reputation. Scares the villagers. You understand? We cannot be seen to be … out of control.’

‘I hope your recent promotion will not be found to have been too presumptuous. Can’t have you taking your eye off the ball.’

Charles nodded and shifted in his seat. ‘I do see, sir. And I sincerely hope not.’

‘Very good, Fuller.’ Soames lifted his hand in dismissal. ‘That will be all.’

Charles stood. Took a few jellied steps towards the door, then hesitated. It was rare enough to have an audience with the superintendent. Who could say when the next one might be? ‘Sir?’ He turned back.

Soames looked up as though surprised to find him still standing there. ‘Yes?’

‘I know you will be aware, sir, of the Feeble-Minded Control Bill the government hopes to introduce this coming year.’

Soames gave a small inclination of the head. ‘If I weren’t, Dr Fuller, I think I might come within its remit.’

Charles felt himself colour. ‘Of course, sir, I didn’t mean to suggest—’

‘Yes, sir. Thank you. Well, I’m sure you’re also aware of the existence of the Eugenics Education Society.’

A flicker of irritation crossed Soames’s face. ‘Where is this heading, Fuller?’

‘There is to be a Congress, sir, next summer, in London.’ Charles reached into his pocket, taking out the small piece of paper he had been carrying around for the last week, straightening it, laying it on the superintendent’s desk. ‘And, I … well … I had the idea that I might write a paper.’

The superintendent leant forward, peering down at the advertisement on the desk.

Call For Papers

First International Eugenics Congress

Subjects of Wide Importance and Permanent Interest.

‘I thought I might use my new programme of music in the wards – trace its beneficial effect on the patients, so to speak. I thought, sir, with your permission I might—’

‘You may have time for idle musings on the very best manner in which to improve the lot of our patients, but I for one am too busy to countenance such diversions. May I remind you that you are not a man of leisure? If there are any further slips such as this last, then I will be forced to reconsider your position. At the very least I should be forced to conclude that the extra musical duties you seem so keen to perform and write about are detrimental to your role. So, please, no more talk of papers or congresses.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Charles, when he had crossed the floor, but this time Soames did not look up.

Ella

ONLY HER LEGS were free. Those and her voice. At first she had kicked the door and shouted so hard she ripped her throat, before she slumped, head between her knees. Cold rose from the stone beneath her. A thin grey blanket was folded beside her, but with her arms tied like this there was no way of opening it out.

A sound came, as though someone was throwing themselves up against something soft, over and over again. Voices too, distant and thin like ghosts. On the way here there had been other doors, each with round holes in them, so other people must be here too, locked in their own damp cells. Was this where they had brought the old woman with the shawl? Was she down here now, rocking her woollen, holey baby to sleep?

Then, behind everything else came a deeper sound, a clanking, as though the building were a machine and she was near the heart of it: close to the workings, the grinding of its gears. She put her head back against the stone chill of the wall.

She had failed. For a brief green moment she had thought she was free, but she had failed.

Ten o’clock in the morning. Spinning room number four, five floors up above Lumb Lane. A morning like every other in the twelve years she had worked there. They had just had their break, and her mouth was sour with the taste of tea and mash. She must have fallen asleep, because she was woken with the smack of the alley strap across her back.

Panic flashed through her. Fifty machines clattered. It could only have been a second.

‘Next time,’ the man’s lips said. ‘Next bloody time.’ Then he moved off with his strap down the row.

She tried to concentrate, but the threads thinned and blurred before her eyes. She could feel her head going again, nodding, as if she was a puppet someone was forgetting to hold up. Dangerous. It was dangerous to fall asleep. There was the sickly, animal smell of the wool. The scorched metal of the machines. Her eyes swollen and stinging from the lint.

She wished for air, but the windows were closed, clouded and mottled, and there was no way to see the sky.

She had asked once, on her first day there, when she was small and frightened and eight.

And one of the older girls who was showing her what to do – how to scurry on the slippery floor beneath the looms and tie the threads together and tuck your plaits in so your scalp didn’t get pulled off – had laughed and clouted her on the back of the head. Why d’you think? You’re not here to admire the view.

So the windows were clouded in spinning room four, but there was nothing new in that. And the noise. She sometimes thought that was what the place made: noise and cloth, but mostly noise; so much it drowned your thoughts, so much you heard it ringing and buzzing in your ears all the way through your day off.

But yesterday morning Ella had looked around the room. Seen the children, with their pinched, frightened looks. Seen the older women, hunched over like half-empty sacks. The young ones steadying themselves against their frames as though offering themselves up in the din and the lint to the gods of spinning and metal and wool. She saw the life that was in them passing into the machines, as they gave themselves away in spinning room four. For what? For fifteen shillings at the end of the week and only all of the days to come while everything leached from you and falling asleep and getting beaten for it and the windows so clouded you could never see the sky.

So yesterday, the same as every other day, but not the same any more, Ella slid a skep of empty bobbins out from under her feet, picked one up and launched it at the window beside her. The clouded glass shattered, and she stood, gasping – giddy with the cold slap of air. She could see the horizon beyond. The dark, crouched promise of the moor.

She turned, walking down the centre of that long room, past the gawping faces, past the machinery still going, going, heart racing, through the lint snowing around her head, and when she got to the door she began to run, down five flights of stairs, out into the yard, away from the gate, through the scrubby grass, and out the back way on to Lumb Lane. The day was bright and clear and cold. The street empty. The sweat drying on her face.

Had she thought they would not come after her? They came though. Of course they came. Feet pounding on the metal stairs.

They called her mad when they dragged her off the street. Jim Christy, the pennyhoil man; Sam Bishop, the overlooker. Called her mad when they took her into a small room by the gate of the mill and she had screamed and kicked and spat. ‘What did you want to do that for, you mad bitch?’ And they might have been right, since she knew she had reached a point when she could stop, but then she was past it, way past it, and had become the screaming, become the kicking, become the spitting: a river that had burst its banks. She had hurt them, she knew that, could tell from the sounds they had made. Until a punch split her cheek and silenced her, and there was only the raw red beating of her blood. Until they chained her to a pipe and left her there.

The light from the window turned on the ceiling, and the small room grew darker. Sounds faded as the night took hold. Fear crouched beside her in the darkness, ready to crawl into her lap.

She jostled herself to sitting. Rubbed her arms on the wall behind her so the pain might keep her awake.

She was here. Arms tied behind her back. Only the clothes she sat in left. There was a room in a house on a street in Bradford, with four narrow beds and a window over a yard; there was a change of clothes there, in that room she had slept in for the last year but which meant nothing to her. She would never go back there now.

She felt a power in her then. The same feeling she had in the mill, but now it took root, lifting her spine. It was dark, she was alone, but her blood was beating; she was alive. She would study it, this place, this asylum. She would hide inside herself. She would seem to be good. And then she would escape. Properly, this time. A way they wouldn’t expect.

That was what her mother used to say to her – be good – pressing Ella’s face into her chest so she couldn’t breathe.

She knew about being good. Had known it since she was small. Being good was surviving. It was watching while your mother was beaten and staying quiet so you wouldn’t be next. Tucking in your plaits and shutting up and working hard.

Being good was outside only. It didn’t matter about the inside. That was something they could never know.

Charles

IT WAS PAST seven before he had finished his rounds, and as he made his way outside, night had fallen, blustery and cold. The family of rooks that made their home in the bell tower, disturbed by the weather, circled and called above his head. The wind had picked up and rain fell in small squally blasts. He was aware of a frayed, hangnail feeling as he set off across the damp grass. It had hung about him all day. He was glad to reach the low stone building that made up the male staff quarters. Inside, all was dark – it was a peculiarity of the asylum that there was no electricity, the junior attendants taking it in turns to light the gas. Often these buildings were the last to be lit. Charles groped his way down the murky corridor to his room, which was darker still. Closing the door behind him he fumbled for a match, striking and holding it to the gas sconce on the wall.

He breathed out as yellow light lapped on to familiar things: the mantelpiece with his charcoal sketches of the patients, a few small volumes of poetry, his desk, where his papers were stacked in a neat pile, the violin and music stand in the corner by the washbasin. He was in the process of transposing the aria from the Goldberg Variations from piano to solo violin, and the music, half finished, was laid out on the stand.

He shrugged off his rain-spattered jacket and hung it on the back of his chair. His fire, at least, had been lit for him and a good poke and a few lumps of coal roused it nicely. Easing his feet gratefully from his shoes, he unbuttoned his collar, laying it also over the back of his chair.

Also by Anna Hope

Ella

John

Charles

Ella

Charles