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1

The Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics sat along a carriage track most people travelled only once. Imagine late summer: sunlight splayed over the rutted road and the copper peaks of the buildings, its warmth nested in the crowns of the trees and sinking into the bright-green lawn of the viewing mound. Because the inclement weather of the past month had finally ceased, the Matron was organizing a picnic. The patients, lined up inside the galleries, pressed their faces to the windows and watched as she marched past the fountain in a trim black dress, two attendants with wicker baskets walking smartly behind her. The inmates Leeson and Herschel were in the gallery of the men’s ward nearest the door. The girl was inside the women’s gallery, at the front of the shuffling crowd, her attention on the attendant who was unfurling a cut of cloth over by the rose bushes, how the sheet lolled briefly on a pocket of air before being snapped into place on the asylum grounds.

It was the 2nd of August 1877. We know this because Jane has read accounts of the day and we have stood over her shoulder and read alongside her. One hundred and six souls were in residence that summer, most in the main wards, five or so in refractory care. We know that two of the attendants were off work with fever and that the Superintendent was in the city applying for a permit to extend the farmyard so as to better accommodate the new litter of pigs. A litter that Sir Thom, the hospital tabby, was attempting to avoid by slinking along the stone wall at the edge of the property.

Leeson and Herschel studied the cat from the mens’ ward window – a distant spot of ginger against the press of the woods. By the time the matron’s attendants had brought out the next round of hampers the animal’s progress had been stalled by a cleft in the stone wall, a V-shaped opening that Sir Thom surveyed briefly, and then leapt into. Leeson turned to Herschel just as a whiff of fresh air, of drying earth and dilly grass, gusted into the corridor. Surprised, the two men looked to its source: a gap between the ward door and its frame.

What happened next set everything in motion: Herschel opened the old matchboard door – opened it as if he were allowed, as if he were back home on his farm in P— on an ordinary morning, lifting his own door latch and unceremoniously starting out. The other inmates watched him turn onto the path that led to the gatehouse, the big man in full stride, his grey painting smock giving his form a ghostly shapelessness, his legs bare and hairy down to his boots.

The attendants on duty did not notice Herschel. Two of them had gone back inside to fetch hampers from the kitchen and the third, a lanky blond, was lingering near the door to the laundry flirting with the sisters who worked there. The Matron was alone on the grounds, kneeling by the fountain, smoothing out the large staff blanket and setting out the silver. When she finished she sat up, and Herschel, registering her broad back and the whorl of her red hair, veered away, moving steadily towards the wrought-iron gates. By the time he was pottering towards the woods and the collapsed section of the stone wall, she was folding the table napkins.

A flurry of cheers went up in the men’s gallery when he made it to the stone wall. The other patients watched as the farmer lifted one leg and then the other over the rubble at the base of the cleft. For a split second Herschel seemed to waver there and then whoosh, he was gone, his whole frame swallowed by the trees.

Leeson blinked, trying to make sense of what he’d seen, worried that a hole or pit had been dug at the edge of the woods and that Herschel had lumbered into it. He pressed his hand against the glass, unsure of what to do, though he felt he ought to do something. From behind him came the sound of scuffling feet; he could hear Wick begin to titter. Feigning indifference, he studied the slot between the door and its support, the bare patch of stone floor that, minutes ago, had held conference with his friend. He hesitated a second, then dropped his hand onto the door handle. This agitated the men in the ward corridor further. Greevy, his grey hair wild, came forward to waggle a finger in front of Leeson’s face, and with that gesture the newest inmate, Hopper, started on the window, his forehead bump, bump, bumping against the glass – a rhythm that inspired the musician to clap his hands, which in turn roused the poet.

‘A Brisk Composition in Honour of the Occasion!’ the poet shouted, and Hopper stopped. The commotion subsided. ‘Unchain me!’ the poet began, his voice filling the length of the gallery. ‘Unchain me, unchain me, lest the hour’s dark horses come.’

Slowly, so as not to set the group off again, Leeson inched the door open. A slat of sunlight fell onto the floor at his feet, brighter and more concentrated than what filtered through the quarrelled windows. He stared at it as if it were an accident, wondered if perhaps it had spilled out of a box, one that he had been entrusted with, one bearing a gift not intended for him. He waited to be called out and chastised, but nothing happened and no one came, and thinking only of Herschel, who might himself be in peril, Leeson stepped across the mat of honeyed light and scuttled out the door.

By the time he neared the fountain he was moving at a decent pace – just ahead of him were the Matron, the gatehouse and the belt of trees that Herschel had slipped into. Wisely, he gave the Matron a wide berth, treading as lightly as he could over the grass. Just as he moved past her, she straightened her back and turned towards the ward windows, a bowl of boiled eggs in her hand. Two dozen faces stared out at her, pale as dinner plates. Amused, she tsk-tsked under her breath and set the bowl back in the place she’d just moved it from.

Where Noble, the hall porter, had gone off to remains a matter of debate. He was still on poor terms with the Superintendent for falling asleep on watch and for glomming about near the windows while the female patients were jarring preserves in the kitchen. The asylum logbook for the 2nd of August states only that the event occurred around noon and that Noble saw nothing. The patients, once they were let out for lunch, did not raise the alarm, although a few of them, Hopper in particular, refused to settle down on a blanket, which prevented the head count from being taken for some time.

The girl, according to Leeson’s later statements to Dr Thorpe, caught up with him and Herschel in a clearing in the woods – the three of them tromping wordlessly along a muddy path and besting a modest hill before they came upon a narrow carriage track that led to town.

These are the woods of Jane’s dream and we are sometimes the figures who pass through them. We watch the dream unfold the way Jane watches a film, as if it were something we might try to press a finger against, try to pause, as if that would allow us to rest beside a nearby elm, to point down different pathways. The thing about Jane is that even though she often dreams about these woods, she gets only some of it right. This is the problem with imagination: it is prone to filling in gaps, takes what it knows from one set of experiences and sinks them into another to create some semblance of truth, bridge time.

In fact Jane has been to that part of the country only twice, once when she was fifteen and William Eliot drove her up from London, and again when she was twenty-five and writing her MA dissertation on archival practices in rural nineteenth-century asylums. This is useful but it is not enough. When Jane imagines the north she thinks of the country freshness of the air – of honeysuckle and meadow grass – and of driving down the paved lane that led to the Whitmore, which was by then a shell of its former selves – asylum, hospital, school – empty and boarded up for decades. She doesn’t think of legs not used to walking long distances or shoes that slip, bedbug bites, paths that dissipate into thistle or bodies scoured raw from the morning bath. She doesn’t think of what it means to walk out of a door and know that you have changed the course of your life.

The door is the part of the story some of us like best. It was dull on the outside from years of weather; it was the colour of weak tea. You could run your fingers along the brace and over the stiles and not meet a splinter. It had a cast-iron lock with a small mouth meant to swallow a skeleton key. Lean close and sometimes there was the sound of the wind chattering in its teeth. And it was usually reliable: kept people and things in their proper places, made a clop-clonk sound when the mechanism was released all those times Noble unlocked it.

You might wonder what a door knows of time. About as much as we do. We know doors are meant to be passive: people come and go, move through them, think nothing of the crossing, come out somewhere expected. It is different for us; for us time is knotted. A door can open in the flare of the imagination and a century can reel across the threshold. One minute we might be with Jane in her London flat, appliances humming in the kitchen, and the next we could be back in those woods, couch grass whisking our legs.

Yes, we know there are Wheres and Whens but we have lost much of the distinction. We do not always know ‘after’ from ‘before,’ or either of those from ‘now.’ We do not know our own names, or the cities or towns we came from, the cottages or houses we called home. For us there is waiting and there is sleeping and there is the dull sense that we are doing both – sleepwalking down a long hall, waking in unexpected rooms.

This is why we need Jane. Her world is fixed, measurable: she turns on her laptop and there’s a date in stern black type in the top right-hand corner of the screen; the pears she buys at the market, once composed in their bowl, convey the passage of time by the dwindling of their number and the mottling of their skin. We know that Herschel opened the Whitmore hospital door that afternoon in Yorkshire because Jane read that he did in Leeson’s asylum casebook. We know from her copy of Dr Thorpe’s report to the Commissioners that Herschel’s outdoor privileges had, a fortnight before, been revoked. We also know that there had been a month of rain – that the fountain was clogged with a thatch of green leaves shaken loose in a storm, that there were twenty small plots of earth waiting to be turned into gardens. And we know those woods. We know that on the 2nd of August, they carried the smell of wet must and the bright tang of decay. We know this because some of us were there.

According to Leeson’s statement it took an hour of steady walking along the carriage track to reach the first junction. While he and Herschel and the girl stood to consider directions, a brougham with horses travelling at a good clip came up the road. It slowed and passed directly in front of Herschel, and hints of the city – leather and polish, a waft of snuff – cut through the mineral scent of the woods. The lone gentleman passenger tilted his top hat with the nub of his walking stick and glanced out the window, surveying the trio briefly before he tapped for the driver to hurry on.

Herschel watched the carriage depart and scratched his thigh, which was prickly from wading through some kind of nettle. He’d abandoned his trousers earlier that day on the way out of painting class because he’d dropped his brush on them and found the dash of crimson above the knee troubling. No trousers, he’d decided, was better than stained trousers, because trousers once stained would always be so even when the mark was gone. All he’d have to do was steer clear of the attendants, and he’d be at liberty to dress as sparingly as he pleased.

When the brougham was out of sight, Herschel turned to Leeson in the hope that his companion would decide on a direction and lead the way. But Leeson just stood there and stared into the distance, his dark trousers as spotless as his white-collared shirt and loose jacket, though his toe-capped shoes were muddy, as were the girl’s flat-heeled boots and the hem of her brown dress. She’d come out, Herschel suddenly realized, without a shawl, and so was standing in a slip of sun, crossing her arms and rubbing them to keep warm.

Wordlessly they decided on a path that angled east, Herschel spotting the back end of a hare flashing through the woods and following it. Their pace was slow and all three were quiet, though Herschel cawed a few times at the sheep mulching along a ridge of heather, something he was prone to do, having once, in better times, conducted a study of local birdcall.

The girl, all of eighteen, was especially quiet, though she did say thank you in a soft voice when Leeson extended his hand to guide her over a fallen oak. He would maintain later on that he didn’t remember much of her, would only offer that she was given, throughout the afternoon, to biting her bottom lip and staring at her feet when there was cause to stop and assess a choice in direction. Leeson was caught up in his own concerns as he trod along: his knees past achy, his lungs on fire, though in the back of his mind, in the part filled with motherly advice and wifely admonishments to get outdoors, he was certain the pure air must be doing him some good. And he felt a kind of clarity, the near-joy of being unencumbered, of swinging one’s arms and breathing deeply. Words he’d once used in his life as a solicitor started to come back to him: consign, evince, bequeath. He raised his eyes to the stitch of sky between the trees and the word provision sprang to mind; he opened his palms, flexed his fingers and the word collation formed in his head; he tightened his fingers into fists, thought, Extremis.

Blinking into the leafy canopy Leeson tried to sort out what each word denoted. In a copse fragrant with meadowsweet he remembered what it meant to bequeath something: personal property, business stock, land. He conjured the countenances of old clients: the pug-face of a blacksmith willing his smithy to his nephew, signing the document Leeson had drawn up for him with such trepidation that his signature seemed to slip reluctantly out of the nib of his pen. There was also the widow from L— who had fifty acres, a woman so pale her veins gave her temples a blue hue. Words that had sometimes mired themselves in Leeson’s thinking, that had sat on his lunch plate like clumps of unrecognizable meat, suddenly attached themselves to lived circumstances. He thought, intestate, codicil, and saw an office in a dimly lit loft, a pocket watch that said it was early morning, then a drawer made of redwood that, when opened, revealed a thin stack of cream-coloured paper he’d cut into sheets himself. On the desktop there was a neat arrangement of stamps and wax, a taper on a brass holder. Just as he was about to inspect the post, his wife Emily appeared on the stairs to his office in her grey day dress, small pink flowers that seemed almost real stitched along her sleeve. Her smile was not as effortless as he would have liked, and there were dark circles under her eyes even though the baby had been born a month before and the doctor said Emily was fully recovered. Her pace was slow, one hand gripping the banister as she pulled herself closer. A fear rose in him, as he stood at his desk to greet her, that she was dragging a shackle behind her, that she would reach the top stair and the lead weight of the chain would snatch her backwards, send her plummeting to the landing. He sensed it even then – some yoke, some umbilicus pulling her away from him. Emily lifting her chin when she reached the top step, a tendril of blonde hair dampened against her forehead as she stepped towards him, opened her arms and said, ‘Good afternoon, Charles.’

Leeson let out a whoop that rounded out into the woods so joyfully he almost didn’t believe it had come from him. He glanced up at Herschel’s broad back and stooped shoulders, then back at the rosy face of the girl. It didn’t matter that they ignored him; his mind was racing, so much so that he failed to notice they’d come to a worn path bordered by pollarded oaks. He looked at the oak closest to him and it wavered, became one of the trees that bracketed the park in his city, the park where he’d sometimes gone for midday walks, watched the brown backs of the ducks shining as they waddled out of the pond.

Up ahead Herschel trudged on, his boot heels clomping down with every step, mud from the last ravine they’d crossed spackled across the backs of his legs. Leeson wanted to call out to him but didn’t, wanted to ask if the farmer could see the same apparition that he was seeing: a bench in a clearing, a high gate with curled finials and a woman with a parasol walking through it.

An hour or more passed and the trees overhead became fuller, knitted themselves into rafters, growing as dark and sooty as a ceiling. Leeson’s stomach grumbled and instinctively he reached a hand towards his pocket watch to check the time, only to discover that he was wearing a plain shirt and no waistcoat. The sky had become so dusky it was difficult to keep to the path, to squint past the trunks of the trees for the dining room table, blue-medallion wallpaper and brass lamps he expected to appear in the thicket. His right foot struck a root, sending him onto his hands and knees. It was only then, as he found his feet and brushed himself off, that he recalled he was in the country, near the Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics, and remembered how he came to be there.

By the time Herschel stumbled out of the grove and happened upon the estate house, the sky had gone the blue-black of a rook – a bird that he preferred over jackdaws or magpies, not just for its shag feathers, but for the kaarg call it made when roosting at dusk, a throatier, more satisfying sound than the pruc-pruc of the raven. On the walk so far he had counted eleven different birdcalls, though in some cases he had not seen the bird, which he knew Dr Thorpe would say left open the possibility that, like certain human voices, those birdsongs might be constructed – be things one wants to hear. But the country house, Herschel decided, was not imagined. From the end of its great lawn he could make out the protrusion of an arcaded portico and two storeys of darkened windows that flanked off in either direction. The house sat mutely save for one slit-eye casting lamplight between its heavy curtains and tufts of smoke drifting out of the chimneys. Instinctively Herschel ran through a list of the kinds of nests one might find up there, bird names flitting through his head like a host of sparrows. He was fond of roofs, had been known to set his body down on ledges, window peaks or near chimney stacks – good spots to rest after hours of flapping along.

When Leeson and the girl caught up to him, they too took in the house hunkered in the distance. From the edge of the lawn it appeared as if some large and ornate stone had been dropped from the sky into an impossibly manicured setting. The scent of burning wood in the air lent itself to the idea of warmth, a place to sit down, something to drink – tea perhaps, or a cup of water.

Leeson turned to Herschel and swung out his arm as if clearing the way of obstructions, and the farmer’s round face filled with delight, though he didn’t move. In the end it was Leeson who rapped the lion’s-head door knocker against its plate, adjusting his cuffs while he listened over the chirr of crickets for the sound of footsteps. A minute later the door opened and a young footman with a centre part and a thin moustache appeared; he cleared his throat and moved his neck from side to side as if just settling into his collar.

‘May I help you, sir?’

Leeson recognized the man’s enunciation; it was the kind developed through practice. In better days he had heard the same forced diction from a variety of servants employed in the houses he visited for work. ‘Yes, you may,’ he replied. He brought his heels together in an effort to stand taller. ‘Is the Master of the estate at home?’

The footman furrowed his brow and peered over Leeson’s shoulder at the others. ‘Might I ask who is calling?’

‘Indeed.’ Leeson smiled back at his companions, fighting the urge to explain Herschel’s lack of trousers or to flatten his own hair where the grey bits always stuck out from the brown. He turned again to the footman. Behind him he could make out a columned entry hall, a modest candle chandelier, a thick Turkish rug and a mahogany table set against the back wall holding five or six leather-bound volumes stacked on their sides. He caught a glimpse of a large mounted bear, its open maw and the spread of its brown claws, before he shifted his gaze back to the books. There was a time in his life when he’d spent whole days poring over tomes such as these, some of them half the size of his desk, all of them embossed and bound in similarly dyed leathers.

‘Sir?’

Leeson sighed. It wouldn’t serve any purpose to be a probate solicitor here, but the footman expected something. He glanced over the footman’s shoulder again, wishing a glass of claret might appear to relieve him of his thirst. ‘Please say that Mr Charles Leeson is calling.’

‘Mr Leeson, is it?’

‘Yes, and company –’ He gestured vaguely behind him.

‘And might I tell Mr Farrington your business?’

‘You may. I am here regarding a bequest.’

The footman furrowed his brow again, an expression that had annoyed Leeson the first time.

‘Yes, a bequest,’ Leeson repeated, savouring the shape of the word in his mouth, ‘of books. I regret I do not have my card.’ He patted down the front of his shirt as if it might sprout a pocket.

‘Books?’ the footman repeated somewhat dubiously.

‘Yes. I am here in my capacity as –’ and here he paused, considered a variety of overtures, and then said ‘– the Assistant Librarian of the British Museum,’ hastening to add, lest the footman turn them away, ‘London.’

In the end they stayed only briefly. George Farrington allowed his visitors to rest in the small parlour while he sent the maid for refreshments. Herschel plopped himself down on the horsehair sofa, which meant that Leeson had to take the wingback that was situated further away from the fire. The room was full of the sound of ticking clocks: a pillared carriage clock on the mantle, an ornate brass skeleton model with an ebony face on the tallest of the bookshelves and an old mahogany long-case on the opposite wall wedged between a stuffed grouse and a mounted fox. Two of the clocks were out of sync, so that every second had two beats, the confidently announced tick of the larger clock’s brass hand followed by a faint echo from the bookshelf. Farrington did not seem to notice. His hospitality extended to a series of questions: Which way had they come to Inglewood? Were they expected elsewhere? And, less pointedly, what particular flora or fauna might they have noted on the way? These questions were followed by a brief declamation on the state of the surrounding countryside, after which the maid intervened with tea. It arrived on a gleaming silver platter that she set down on a table with claw feet carved so realistically that Leeson believed they were gripping the rug. George Farrington’s mother, Prudence, joined them shortly thereafter, though she stopped upon entering the room, a strained expression on her long face as if she had suddenly come into contact with music she didn’t care for. It was only when George greeted her with a warm ‘Mother’ that her beauty became apparent: the thin petals of her mouth relaxing into a pleasing fullness, her chin lifting to reveal the elegant length of her neck. She extended her hands and moved towards her son and the pleated hemline of her mauve dinner dress shushed over the carpets behind her. Leeson bowed deeply as she approached, but Herschel remained seated, his head cocked to study the intricately fastened brown nest of her hair.

Once Mrs Farrington had settled in a high-backed chair near a corner of the room, Leeson returned to the task of explaining his charge – which he did rather unconvincingly between bites of oatcake. It was only upon reaching for his second oatcake – glancing around to mentally divide the number of cakes by the number of those in the room – that he noticed the girl who’d come with them was missing. He craned his neck towards the entryway, trying to recollect if she’d followed them in through the door.

‘Of course I am quite familiar with the museum library,’ George Farrington was asserting. ‘Two of my own books reside there – one botanical, the other verse. Though I am,’ he confessed, prodding the dwindling fire with a poker, ‘serious about one art and a dabbler in the other.’

Leeson glanced at Herschel, who had become wholly distracted, first by the rash on his thigh and then by the half-dozen or so watercolour landscapes that hung in gold frames on the wall behind him. The farmer swivelled and rose on the sofa to get a better look, his smock lifting slightly as he did so.

‘Those were painted by my uncle Reginald,’ Farrington said, a hint of reprimand in his voice.

Herschel turned and sat back down, unsure of what exactly he’d done. He looked to Leeson, but Leeson was studying Farrington. The solicitor recognized his host now. It was the defect around his mouth that gave him away: an arced scar that tracked through one side of his dark-brown moustache and down onto his bare chin. A climbing accident, Leeson remembered the Superintendent saying, leaning sideways towards the Matron at the Whitmore. Burma, I believe. And Leeson, who had been standing nearby, had stepped forward to see whom they were discussing, and there was a gentleman – Farrington – in a top hat and bright blue waistcoat coming down the reception line at the Whitmore Ball, his boutonnière an exotic yellow bud with orange tips quite unlike any Leeson had ever seen.

It stood to reason, then, that if this was the celebrated botanist from the ball – and Leeson was fairly certain it was – he and Herschel were currently some ten or eleven miles from the Whitmore in the country house of the Farringtons, to whom much of the land they had traversed belonged.

Leeson stifled a yawn, realizing with a start that his host was speaking to him, saying something about the landscape the watercolours had been painted in. Obligingly he stood up to inspect the paintings, all the while wondering where the girl had gone off to, and whether or not some sort of sustenance beyond the oatcakes he’d already consumed might arrive. It did. His gaze had only just fallen into a rippled blue lake and the droopy willow that tickled it when the Farringtons’ maid re-entered the room. She curtseyed quickly, keeping her chin down while her eyes darted to further survey the guests. Wordlessly she handed a cloth sack to Mrs Farrington, who with one hand whisked the maid back through the door and into the hall. So it was that a mere quarter-hour after they had entered the house, they were sent on their way again, Mrs Farrington ensuring they had the sack of ham and butter sandwiches in hand.

It was near midnight when Herschel climbed back over the stone wall, and he and Leeson trudged across the lawn and into their beds. The main building was dark save for a row of candles placed along one of the gallery’s ledges.

The following morning a letter arrived at the Whitmore, delivered to the hospital clerk by a scrawny young man on a dun pony. It read:

Mr George Farrington presents his compliments to the Governor of Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics, and requests him to be so kind as to take precautions that his patients should not pay visits at Inglewood, as two did yesterday (one describing himself as an assistant librarian of the British Museum).

Mr Farrington is very glad if they in any way enjoy’d themselves here, and hopes they did not suffer from their long walk.

George Farrington did not mention the girl in his note. And we know from the asylum casebook that in Leeson’s interview with the Superintendent the next morning, he said he hadn’t seen her after the walk up to Farrington’s door, though he did comment on her absence and on the changing weather and on Herschel’s discovery of a roe deer bedded down in a whorl of grass. Numerous times in his description of events Leeson used words like intestate and disinherit; he also talked of returning to work in law. He said, ‘You cannot disinherit a ham, nor can you disinherit roast beef pie.’

Dr Thorpe wrote appears to be suffering from delusions twice in the transcript margins, and five times wrote tangent … before the description of ‘Activities Occurring on 2 August 1877’ was returned to and set down.

The hospital logbook that Jane first examined when she was writing her dissertation detailed almost nothing of the inmates’ escape. It noted that on the 2nd of August the laundry had been collected at eight, that the new hen had not lain. In hasty black ink underneath that someone had written Patients C. Leeson, H. Morley and girl N— missing, and then, in another hand, there was an added note: Patient Hopper restrained at 2 p.m. Finally, scribbled in handwriting so tight and angular Jane had to read it with a magnifying glass: Mstrs H. Morley and C. Leeson returned. On the 3rd of August the first entry states: Letter from G. Farrington received. This was followed by the domestics of the institution: a list of objects needing mending, a detailed order of supplies and foodstuff requisitioned from Morrington, a change in staff schedules.

No further mention of N— was to be found.

Aislinn Hunter

THE WORLD BEFORE US

HAMISH HAMILTON

Contents

THE BEGINNING

Part I

1