The Painted Bridge by Wendy Wallace Page B

women at his rooms at Regent’s Park, female callers at Popham Street were restricted to Lucas’s mother, on her annual visit to London from the Cotswolds, and his sister, who claimed to find the parlor more comfortable than any other in town and who if she called without her husband smoked a Turkish cigarette while Lucas puffed on his pipe.
    He leased the house from a silver merchant. It was adequate and the rent reasonable. On the top floor, where other men had bedrooms for children and servants, he had his darkroom. He’d had water piped up for the purpose and although he had not bothered to install a water closet, he was particular about the long basin, the drain that carried away the spent materials. The back bedroom was for dry work, varnishing and retouching, as well as storing the plates. Whatever time he didn’t spend at his post at St. Mark’s, Lucas spent on his research. He’d agreed to give a lecture in the spring to the Alienists’ Association on photography in the diagnosis of lunatics. The members of the Association were like-minded, progressives in tune with himself and hungry for new approaches to mental disease. He had been working on his research in every spare minute, trying to take further the science that Dr. Diamond had begun.
    Lucas put his glass down on the floor and rubbed his eyes with the tips of his long fingers. Most of the older generation were resistant. The superintendent of his own hospital, Sir Harry Grieve, was downright hostile. “The human eye does a better job of assessing a lunatic than a glass one ever will,” he liked to pronounce from behind his half-moons. He’d refused Lucas permission to take photographs at St. Mark’s, which forced him to seek out private asylums.
    As soon as he was able to establish his research more firmly, he planned to leave St. Mark’s. With luck, he would get a superintendent’spost himself and with it the chance to build a progressive retreat. In the four years he had spent working with the insane, Lucas had come to believe that mental pain was the worst kind of pain. It was worse than bullet wounds or gangrene. More agonizing than cancers or dropsy. And there was no consensus on how to alleviate it. Blistering was an agony. Purging weakened patients and left them depleted. Cold showers could kill. The intricate variations in medicines were more articles of faith than proven treatments.
    Lucas was convinced that photography could constitute a decisive break with the old ways. That it could lead to improved diagnosis, which in turn would inform better-judged treatments. But if he couldn’t even persuade Maddox of the utility of the method, what chance did he have with the medical establishment?
    Evidence. It was the only way. He had to come up with the evidence. He must get back up to Lake House at the first opportunity to discuss Mrs. Button’s picture with her; he owed his subjects that much, he believed. And he wanted to meet the new patient Abse mentioned and see if she would agree to being photographed.
    Maddox was dozing. His head lolled on the antimacassar and his jaw was slack. The tooth gleamed in the lamplight, whiter and larger than its intended twin. Lucas and Maddox both had posts at St. Mark’s; they had been at the same university and before that, boys at school together. The event that had bonded them more deeply than friendship, than shared history, was the one thing of which they spoke with difficulty and usually only when both were drunk. Maddox too had lost an older brother in the Crimea. George Maddox was mowed down alongside Archibald St. Clair in the slaughter at Balaclava. Lucas and James were older now than those men had been when they met their deaths. They had no right to squander even a minute of their lives.
    Maddox gave a thunderous snore and Lucas nudged his shin with the toe of his boot and stood up.
    “Bugger off home, Dox,” he said. “I’ve got things to do.”

SEVEN

    A fox emerged from the trees on