Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss (top ten ebook reader TXT) 📕

any threat to herself or anyone else. Lady Clarinda sings, mostly in Italian and mostly rather above Miss Carpenter’s vocal range. One summer day seven years ago, Lady Clarinda went around Miss Carpenter’s village knocking on doors and demanding that her tenants serve her tea and present their household accounts for her approval, and since then both have lived here. And there is Mrs. Middleton, who tends to be vocal about her own damnation and the similar fate of those around her, but today is in bed, silent and facing the wall. This turns out to be at least partly because the nurses have put her in a ‘closed dress,’ a stiff garment whose sleeves are sewn into the side-seams and sewn up across the cuff so that the wearer’s arms are fastened at her sides and she cannot use her hands. Closed dresses are made by patients in the asylum sewing room. The nurses have also fastened the sheets around her mattress so that she can’t sit up; it is against the rules to apply physical restraint on the wards but for some reason the closed dresses don’t count and this kind of violence by bed-making is tacitly allowed. With one nurse injured, it is better not to antagonise the others, for Dr. Crosswyn is right that the patients are in the end dependent on the tempers of their attendants, and also that the more intelligent and charitable nurses do not choose to work in madhouses.

‘Mrs. Middleton? How are you this morning?’

There is no response. Ally probably wouldn’t feel like making conversation either if she were sewn into a nightdress and fastened down by sheets.

‘Nurse? Do you think we might let Mrs. Middleton sit up? And have you—’ she pauses. Don’t provoke them, it is the patients who will suffer for it. ‘Has she taken her breakfast?’

The nurse, the fat brown-haired one who is either Smith or White, doesn’t turn around and takes her time to finish folding a pillowcase.

‘Nurse?’

She puts down the pillowcase, sighs, and turns around, dusting her hands on her apron. ‘Yes, Mrs. Cavendish?’

Ally swallows. To rise to the bait or accept the insult?

Nurse smiles with her teeth. ‘Oh, you like to be called Doctor, of course. Well, Doctor?’

‘Has Mrs. Middleton eaten anything since yesterday, and have you allowed her to use the commode?’

‘I couldn’t say, Madam. You see, Madam, we came on duty this morning, didn’t we? So it would be the night-nurses you’d be wanting to ask, Madam, only unfortunately one of them’s in Matron’s room now with a broken shoulder, see?’

Ally finds herself thinking that one would not need to be particularly deranged to push this woman down a flight of stairs. It is more surprising that most nurses are not assaulted by patients than that some are.

‘Thank you, Nurse. Please get Mrs. Middleton up, allow her to use the lavatory and wash her hands and face, dress her in her usual clothes and have her ready on my return in an hour or so. Mrs. Middleton, in a little while I shall take you to my office and we will have a talk.’

Mrs. Middleton’s brindled hair, sewn into a plait, nods on her pillow, and Ally goes to register the new patients.

She starts with the farmer’s wife, because the woman is returning to the asylum for the third time and readmissions are easier. Mrs. Minhinnet, having been home for two weeks, stood beside her kitchen dresser and, piece by piece, working from the bottom of the dresser towards the top, threw her dinner service across the kitchen. She was stopped, she observes ‘before I got to the gravy-boat, which is a shame because it would have smashed nicely.’ When Ally asks why she did this, Mrs. Minhinnet laughs and then sits with her mouth hanging open. She spat, accurately, at the vicar and doctor whom her husband summoned, and, according to the admission form, ‘availed herself of obscene and abusive language.’ In her fortnight’s liberty, she has also accused her dairy maid of ‘fornication’ with an elderly neighbour, providing unseemly and improbable detail about the imagined transgression, and waylaid the same neighbour with propositions which he found distressing and distasteful. Mrs. Minhinnet, noticing Ally’s wedding ring, makes some rather startling suggestions about her marital life. Ally returns her to Ward Two.

The girl from Mylor is more troubling. She sits on the edge of her chair, knees pressed together under a dress too big for her, head bowed, thin hands writhing in her lap. Her nails are bitten to the quick and weeping blood. Ally checks the admission form. Mary. Mary Vincent. Melancholy, delusions, and, last night, an attempt to harm herself with a knife, wrested from her hands by her employer before much harm was done. Ally draws up a chair and sits beside her.

‘Good morning, Mary. I need to ask you some questions.’

Mary glances up. There is a bruise on her jaw, probably four or five days old, as well as the line of red across her neck.

‘Did someone hurt you, Mary?’

Mary shakes her head.

‘Your jaw is bruised.’

She shakes her head again.

‘I understand that last night you tried to injure yourself?’

Her head drops again and the writhing hands speed up.

‘Mary, did you want to hurt yourself?’

Ally thinks she saw a slight shake of the head.

‘But you had a knife? Your mistress took a knife from you?’

Mary looks up. ‘The carving knife. Master uses it, Sundays. For the joint.’

Rain runs down the window.

‘What were you using it for, Mary?’

Mary shrugs and looks away.

‘You must have been very unhappy?’

There is no reply.

After a few minutes, Ally sends her to Ward Two. It is not as if there is anywhere else for her to go.

Back up to Four. She can hear Mrs. Middleton from the door, the usual rising and falling rhythms of the hell-fire preacher. Mrs. Middleton sits on her bed, wearing a shrunken asylum dress on which the ghost of a pink rose pattern is still visible around the seams and hem.