The Asylum Read Free Page B

over me, “I can’t find my purse, or my brooch—in a small red plush box; it is quite valuable; or my writing case—a blue leather one. Have you see them anywhere?”
    “No, miss, I ’aven’t. This is all there was, miss, when I packed up your room just now.”
    “But I must have had money,” I said desperately. “How else could I have got here?”
    “You gave me a sixpence, miss, when you was still wearing your cloak. P’raps it’s there.”
    She tried the pockets but found only a pair of gloves.
    “You don’t think I took it, miss?” she said, with a look of alarm.
    “No, Bella. But someone must have, and my brooch and writing case; I would never travel without them.”
    “I don’t know, miss, I’m sure. We’re all honest girls here. Might you have put them away somewhere yourself, miss, and—and forgotten? Now please, miss, I must get on.”
    To this there was plainly no answer. I gave up all hope of escaping that day, and lay with my mind spinning, and a sick feeling of dread gnawing at the pit of my stomach, while daylight slowly faded from the room, until I woke with the glare of a lantern in my eyes, to find Dr. Straker standing beside my bed.
    “I am afraid, Miss Ashton, that you must prepare yourself for a shock. As well as conveying your message to Josiah Radford, I took the liberty of asking him whether he had ever heard of a Lucy Ashton. This is his reply.”
     
NO KNOWLEDGE LUCY ASHTON STOP GEORGINA FERRARS HERE STOP YOUR PATIENT MUST BE IMPOSTER STOP JOSIAH RADFORD.
     
    I was sedated, that night, with chloral, and emerged from a pit of oblivion with my body still aching and a foul taste in my mouth. Whether it was the after-effect of the drug, or the accumulated shocks of the previous day, all I could think was that Dr. Straker must have wired the wrong Josiah Radford; further than that, my mind refused to go. Bella brought me breakfast, which I was unable to eat, along with a mirror in which I saw a drawn, sunken face, white as a ghost’s except for dark pouches like bruises beneath eyes that were scarcely recognisable as my own. Dr. Straker, she told me, as she brushed the worst of the knots out of my hair, would be here directly; his orders were for me to stay in bed; and no, I was not to dress on any account. And so I was condemned to wait in my nightgown and wrap until he appeared at my bedside, looking, if anything, even more cheerful than he had the day before.
    “Well, Miss Ashton, as I think we must call you until we discover who you really are, I must say that your case is unique in my experience.”
    “Sir, I beg of you . . . I cannot explain what has happened, but I swear to you, on my dear mother’s grave, I am Georgina Ferrars!”
    “I know. I know that is what you believe, with every fibre of your being. But consider the facts. There is a Georgina Ferrars presently at the address you gave me—no, hear me out. You came here under the name Lucy Ashton, and I think we may say with certainty that Lucy Ashton is not your real name, either. You are, I take it, familiar with Scott’s Waverley novels?”
    I knew, suddenly, where I had heard the name before.
    “Lucy Ashton is the heroine of The Bride of Lammermoor. She is forced by her mother to break her engagement to the man she loves, Edgar Ravenswood, and marry another whom she loathes. She stabs her husband on their wedding night, and dies, insane, of a seizure. So it occurs to me to ask whether this has any personal significance for you.”
    I stared at him, appalled.
    “I have never been engaged, sir, let alone . . . !”
    “Nevertheless, you will agree that it is a disturbing choice of alias for a troubled young woman presenting herself for treatment at a private asylum. It suggests that there is something in her past—perhaps her immediate past—from which she is fleeing.”
    “There is nothing, sir, nothing!”
    “Nothing that you can remember, I agree.”
    “But sir, I have told you my history; you