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

I’m sorry, doctor. I’ll put her in the corner till we’re done. Interrupting like that.’

Ally touches the nurse’s arm. ‘No. There is no need.’

She turns to the patient. To Margaret. ‘Good morning. I am Dr. Moberley Cavendish. You are right, of course.’

Margaret holds out her hand, as if they were meeting at a coffee morning. ‘Margaret Rudge.’

Not looking at the nurse, Ally shakes hands. ‘You know Mrs. Minhinnet well?’

Patients’ disorders feed on each other but they also adapt to each other, creating an ecology of madness all too easily upset by arrivals and departures.

‘We’ve been on the same ward six months. Can’t help but get to know people.’

And in your view, she wants to ask, is Mrs. Minhinnet mad or only damaged? Is she, in fact, telling truths that no one wants to hear? Because if, she sometimes thinks, if all the women in here who speak of indecent things, who recount endlessly obscene acts and unnatural couplings, are speaking from unhappy experience, then their madness may be perfectly reasonable. May be the inevitable response of a healthy mind to things that should not happen. And if that is the case, then the primary problem is not so much with the minds of some women as with the acts of some men. Older men, almost invariably. Men with power.

‘And you think someone has hurt her?’

Margaret Rudge shrugs. ‘I think someone’s hurt all of us, doctor. But not everyone ends up in here.’

Ally eyes Margaret Rudge. She doesn’t have time, not today. She’ll come back and hear some more.

She suggests keeping the two women as much apart as possible. There is no space to move one of them unless Dr. Crosswyn agrees to move someone else, a game of chess that invariably ends by causing at least as much trouble as it solves. As in other branches of medicine, despite one’s instincts and best intentions it is often best to do nothing. Perhaps some gentle occupation for Mary Vincent, she suggests, not the laundry and obviously not the kitchen but a little dusting, something to occupy her hands and allow her to feel useful. For Mrs. Minhinnet, she thinks, she will ask Dr. Crosswyn if there might be a women’s garden work group. The farm labour is another matter, but there is surely sufficient precedent for women’s cultivation of flowers? She examines a patient with a cough, declines to prescribe for the abdominal pains of a woman who has believed herself in an advanced state of pregnancy for some years, and makes her way up the stairs.

Mrs. Ashton is standing in the window, fingering the bars. She turns.

‘She is still with you,’ she says, her eyes fixed on a point behind Ally. ‘She has words for you and she’ll follow you until you hear her.’

She is always with me and always gone, Ally thinks. As are all the dead. One does not need to see ghosts, to know that people are haunted.

Mrs. Middleton stops rocking on her bed and looks straight at Mrs. Ashton. ‘You are an evil, wicked woman and the flames of Hell will take you and burn you for all eternity.’

‘Good morning,’ Ally says. ‘Mrs. Elsfield, look, I brought some blackberries for you all. I gathered them on Pendennis Head.’

There is silence. Even Mrs. Curnow looks up.

The nurse coughs. ‘You’ve brought a basket of blackberries onto the ward?’

She has made a mistake. She should have checked with Dr. Crosswyn, and she should have known it was a mistake because she didn’t want him to know.

Ally bites her lip. ‘I gathered more than I could eat myself. I thought you would all enjoy some fresh food.’

But it is not her job, not a doctor’s job, personally to remedy weaknesses in the asylum’s commissariat. Next she will be bringing in pillows and new dresses.

‘Very kind of you, Mrs. Cavendish, I’m sure.’ The nurse doesn’t look at her. ‘Thank Mrs. Cavendish, ladies. I suppose I’d better go find a dish. Only we’ll have to take them down to tea, Mrs. Cavendish, I can’t be serving out fruit up here, and then the other wards’ll be wondering why they haven’t got blackberries and before you know it—well. You mean well, I dare say.’

The road to Hell, Ally thinks.

‘It’s a good year, then, for blackberries?’ asks Mrs. Elsfield. ‘Time was, we’d be out after school picking and picking any fine day and the nettles and prickles on our hands. Ate a few, of course, but there were seven of us and never too much to go around, we’d get a proper slap if Mother thought we’d been greedy. Damsons, too, and rosehips to make a jelly for winter coughs. I didn’t like the work then but I’d be glad enough to be out in the fields now. Rain and all.’

Mrs. Ashton has turned back to window. ‘You’ll not see another autumn,’ she says. ‘You’ll not leave here but feet first in a wooden box, and that before another harvest’s in.’

Stop it, Ally wants to say. Shut up, you vile witch.

‘Mrs. Elsfield’s in fine health.’ She puts the basket down on the nurse’s table. ‘And maybe you will be back home next year, Mrs. Elsfield, who knows.’

The nurse, returning, shakes her head. ‘Best not, Mrs. Cavendish,’ she murmurs. ‘They sometimes remember things we say, you know.’

Mrs. Elsfield comes over to the table. The dress she has this week is cut so wide on the shoulders that the neckline sags open, showing breasts flat as empty socks lying on her ribs. She has to gather the skirt in her hands to walk. Hogarth, thinks Ally, the end of A Harlot’s Progress when the daring finery falls to rags, the manifest disjunction between a person’s appearance and her idea of herself. The clothes make Mrs. Elsfield look mad. Mrs. Elsfield removes Ally’s blue and white gingham cloth from the basket and then takes a handful of blackberries and pushes them all into her mouth. One rolls to the floor where Mrs. Middleton stamps on it. Purple