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stream, with only one person left distinct and clear, standing down by the wall of the Dock, staring at Abigail with those dark Pacific eyes.
    The woman from her dreams is standing on Old Gravel Lane.
    Abigail does not quite scream, but the noise she makes in her vice-tight throat is loud enough to draw the attention of several bystanders. She turns, and the chase begins.
    The two Abigails behind her eyes squabble over this new development. The woman has never appeared to her while awake before. But what if, asks that calm doctoring voice, what if she isn’t awake at all? What if this is all just another dream? Abigail has enough of herself left to vanquish this thought, to push it back into the mists for future consideration. But it doesn’t quite disappear.
    The woman is not real,
says her mind.
    The woman is chasing me through London,
her mind replies.
    Her body takes no view on the question. It just propels her, half-running, half-walking, across the Highway and north towards her destination. She has no money for a carriage, and it is perhaps four miles from Wapping to Hackney. The only currency she possesses is a letter, and that can only be used for admission when she reaches the end of her journey. It cannot help her fly from whatever it is that pursues her.
    There is nothing pursuing me,
says her mind.
    She will destroy me if she catches me,
her mind replies.
    She looks back every few minutes, and every time she does the woman is there, standing out clear and prominent in the blurry street scenes, always still and staring, never apparently moving. But always there.
    North of the Commercial Road, open fields and wasteland present themselves as options for flight, but she avoids them, not wishing to be caught out on open ground by her pursuer. So she follows a more zigzag route than she would otherwise have chosen, keeping to the streets, to the blurry crowds, which slow her down and shout angrily at her as she barges her way north, her heavy bag knocking into stomachs and shoulders, her own body tiring with every hurried step.
    But as she nears Bethnal Green, the roads begin to open out on both sides, as the metropolis starts to loosen its grip on the landscape. Rope walks and tenter grounds give way to open fields and farms. The Hackney turnpike stands at a crossroads, facing three or four clusters of houses which developers have built in anticipation of the inevitable encroachment of London.
    She looks back as she passes the turnpike. The woman is closer now, and she is running, her arms rising up in front of her. Twigs and branches and leaves poke out from her clothes and her hair and even her skin, as if she were part-woman and part-tree, an echo of the most awful flavour of her nightly dreams.
    Despite her exhaustion, Abigail runs now, her husband forgotten. Luckily for her, the building she seeks is obvious, the largest building in the neighbourhood, its crowded lines rising up above the fields to her left, its elegant front facing eastwards across the road. She bangs on the porter’s gate and screams for entry, desperately waving the letter she has carried from Wapping, the one which guarantees her security.
    A huge man with a simple face opens the gate and with a final desperate lunge Abigail Horton enters Brooke House, a private madhouse for the deranged.
     

 
A Treatise on
Moral Projection
and its Manifestation among Certain Women at Brooke House Asylum, Hackney, in the Year of Our Lord 1814
By Thomas Bryson, Dr, of St Luke’s Hospital,
Old Street, London 1845
PREAMBLE: TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
It is an unavoidable certainty, which must be obvious to any knowledgeable observer, that mankind knows more of his world, and the Prime Causes that guide it, with every year that passes. The past hundred years have seen a galloping chain of discoveries and revelations by which the world – nay, even the Cosmos – has become an open book to the eyes of men.
It is Britain, of all the Great Powers, that has led