Page 57 of Lady Beast's Bridegroom
“Is it true, sir? Are you really Lady Arial’s husband?”
Peter nodded, only half his mind on the conversation. If need be, he’d search every asylum within a day’s ride, and then widen the search. He had heard terrible things about what went on in some of those places. He was terrified for Arial.
The butler was still talking. “Is it Lady Arial you are looking for, my Lord? I heard the magistrates say that Lady Arial has been taken, and they think the Earl did it.”
The man looked worried. For Arial? Or for Stancroft? Peter’s answer was short and to the point. “He took her. We have reason to believe he has her imprisoned in an asylum for the insane.”
The butler’s next words captured Peter’s full attention. “Then I might know where she is, Lord Ransome.”
The butler had taken a cup of tea out to the earl’s coachman when the man had dropped Lord and Lady Stancroft off. The driver, the grooms who had traveled from London with the earl and countess, and their outriders had all been delighted to be rewarded with a one-week holiday.
“John Coachman was suspicious,” the butler said. “The earl is not a generous man. He thought it was probably because of what they might have seen. But he was not going to look a gifthorse in the mouth or interfere in the doings of the nobility. He went off to visit his daughter.”
“What did he see?” Peter asked, every nerve thrumming to squeeze the butler to make the story run faster.
Not much, but enough. The earl had brought a couple of extra servants with him from London, “Big men, and rough, John Coachman said. Criminal types.”
At the inn, Stancroft and his wife had met with another gentleman, who was also accompanied by several such types. “They arrived in a prison van and went off with his lordship around to the back of the inn.”
Stancroft’s usual servants were told to take the carriage back out onto the road, and to wait not far around the corner, just behind the inn. About half an hour later, the earl and countess came back alone, got into the carriage, and gave the order to continue on.
“You think they gave her to the men with the prison van—it would have been from an asylum.” Peter made that statement. He had no doubt of it.
The butler nodded. “Yes, my lord. John Coachman recognized the van’s driver.”
At last! “His name, man. We’ll need to question him and find out where she was taken.”
“Oh, I know that, my lord. That is what I have been trying to tell you.” And he gave Peter the name of the doctor who employed the driver, and the address where he lived and ran a hospital for private patients whose families had committed them for the treatment of mental illness.
Within ten minutes, Peter and John led a small force, including one of the magistrates, away from Stancroft’s house. Peter was muttering prayers under his breath that they were in time to save his wife from worse than unjust incarceration.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Arial lay onthe bed listening to the sounds of the asylum. The creak of the warders’ boots as they walked up and down the passage outside, occasionally banging the batons they carried on the bars of individual cells. Their ribald remarks, some of them addressed to Arial. The moans, shrieks, pleas, singing, shouting, and laughter of the other inmates. Apparently, the asylum never slept.
It was never dark, either. Lamps in the passage cast their light through the bars, so that, even if she had not heard them, Arial would have known the warders were passing because their shadows moved, dark and sinister, across her walls and ceiling.
The asylum had a smell, too. Carbolic soap and despair, with undertones of more noxious substances.
Her own wash had been made more pleasant by a kinder soap—something with floral tones. George and Arthur had objected to her “special treatment,” but Mrs. Parker had ignored them. She had been apologetic when she helped Arial into a clean shift and then a garment that covered her from neck to ankle, and had extra-long sleeves, the ends of which could be tied together around Arial’s waist, so that Arial was effectively bound inside her own shroud.
At least she was decently covered when the doctor came to examine his newest patient.
If it was an examination, then she didn’t pass. He dismissed every answer she gave to his questions. According to him, she had no husband. She was not a viscountess. Nor was she the daughter of an earl. Her cousin, or so said the doctor, was a kindly man doing his best to look after a deranged relative. When she would not agree with him, he insisted on taking that as proof of her insanity.
“But you are not to worry, Miss Bledisloe. I have had great success with delusions of your type. We shall start treatment in the morning, and in a month or so, you will not know yourself.”
That was precisely what Arial feared.
After he’d gone, she asked Mrs. Parker about the treatment, but Mrs. Parker just repeated that she was not to worry. Then she left the cell, bolting it and locking it behind her.
Arial just hoped she had taken the key.
Perhaps she hadn’t. At the sound of a key scraping in the lock, Arial sat upright, swinging her legs over the side of the bed to compensate for not being able to use her arms. Her heart pounding, she watched the door open. Bound as she was, she could not resist if one of the warders was intent on putting his disgusting suggestions into practice.
“It’s me,” Mrs. Parker whispered, and Arial slumped as she let out the breath she had been holding.
Mrs. Parker closed the door behind her and crossed the room in the patchy light. “You must be quiet,” she said. “I’m here to help you. When those louts talked about flour sacks, I remembered the lady in the caricatures, the oneThe Teatime Tattlerwrote about. You’re her, aren’t you? Lady R.?”
