Savage Magic by Lloyd Shepherd Page B

indignities and wretched crimes. And then, after perhaps two weeks, Abigail had heard another voice in the cell with her; a woman’s voice, its tones soft but its accent harsh. Sometimes it sang to Maria, sometimes it read to her, but when Abigail left her cell the next day, as she was permitted to do, the door to Maria’s was firmly shut. No one was getting out, it seemed, and Abigail could not imagine how anybody could have got in.
    She’d gone to Dr Bryson with the story of the singing, but had later wondered why she should have done so. He was unlikely to listen to her, she knew. Was she not mad? A female sufferer of terrible visions? What was an overheard voice from a madwoman’s cell when there was only a madwoman there to hear it?
    Such is how he’d heard her news, that condescending smile on his face, the one he used to calm people, the one which made her imagine his face being ripped into pieces by the hooks of Pacific fishermen. Specifically, Otaheite fishermen and Otaheite hooks.
    Ah, she was always there, the princess. Always there to preach violence in the face of men’s pig ignorance. Always whispering rhymes of revenge.
    She lies awake as night falls. She thinks of her husband, and where he might be, and whether he is sleeping or lying awake like her, their souls intertwined in restlessness. The madhouse seems to possess a different, almost watchful aspect. The house is never
silent
, by any means. It is, Abigail knows, an old, crumbling building which has housed the insane for more than half a century, and such a building is never going to be silent. Nonetheless there is a brooding quiet; even the inmates who contribute to the night-time noise do so with a kind of embarrassment, as if they imagine their quieter comrades turning upon them for their lack of manners. She is aware that she can hear
breathing
from the house around her, the hollow in-and-out of the desperate and the mad, normally inaudible beneath the groans and chuckles and repetitive incantations. Even in a place as respectable as Brooke House, the mad will moan.
    The air is cold, and this is also bizarre; summer is still caressing the trees of the gardens, and Abigail had felt perspiration on her face when out walking in the walled garden behind Brooke House that afternoon. Indeed, it is so cold that her breath rises up above her head as she lies on the bed, such that it creates its own little infernal fog.
    After supper she’d walked along the corridor that lined the rear upper floor, which looked over the garden. Even in her extremities of loneliness and anxiety this place can please her. She believes it must have once been a grand open gallery of the original house, for its ceiling is lined with ornate carvings which are abruptly cut off by the doors of cells along the corridor, making it clear that a once-open space has been subdivided. She’d looked at the women around her, most of whom were sat down against the walls, and none of them had looked back at her; they were either turned in on each other, or looking into the distance, or closely at the walls or the floor. The windows which ran the length of the corridor looked out onto a grey mist behind the house, as if the place were floating inside a gloomy cloud. Some of the windows had been replaced by boards, and cracks ran down the walls; the building itself seemed to be coming apart under the weight of its own anxiety. Nothing was visible in the gloom.
    She breathes on her bed. In, out, in, out. Her smoky breath embraces the air. She holds the book she’d taken from Brooke House’s surprisingly good library on her belly, her hands crossed above it, and she remembers the passage she’s just read.
     
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human