Eliot Hardy kept a small but tasteful set of rooms above a pub on Roupell Street, in Lambeth. To any casual observer, they were simply the rooms of a bachelor of modest but sufficient means—comfortable furniture, its wood and upholstery on the dark side and just worn enough to be noticeable; a set of bookcases as well stocked as the liquor chest; a cozy fire in a well-tended fireplace; dark velvet draperies framing a bank of mullioned windows that overlooked the street below. Hardy’s work was often of a sensitive nature, and he took pains to preserve all discretion for his clients.
William had been a visitor to these rooms often enough now to see the evidence of the work done here, lurking just beneath the discreet surface: the stacks of files sharing space with books, the boxes of collected evidence tucked behind the staid walnut desk; the array of tools set neatly at the edges of the desktop.
He was, in fact, far too familiar with Hardy’s base of operations, and far too familiar with the man himself. More than six weeks, he’d been on the case, and still no sign of Nora. Scotland Yard had pulled back its investigation of foul play in her disappearance; Hardy had it from a source inside the Yard that they, too, had decided Nora had run away. Her father remained adamant that she had been taken. In deference to the earl, the Yard had left the case open, but expended no new resources on it.
With Hardy’s help, William and Chris had combed all of England for her, pursuing every slimmest lead. But Kate Smith, her maid’s name, was ridiculously common. They assumed that Nora had taken an alias, but all of the aliases they’d been able to imagine had come up as empty as her own name. Both women had simply vanished.
Just past the Christmas holidays, Hardy had suggested that Nora didn’t want to be found, and they might consider respecting her wish. William and Chris had reacted in unison to that suggestion and shot it down at once. Chris was motivated by guilt, and William supposed he was as well. He loved her, and he wanted her with him, but more than anything, he simply needed to know she was safe and well. When they found her—and they would find her—if she wanted no contact, he would respect that. But he had to know.
Hardy had gotten the butler, Gaines, to crack, but he hadn’t known nearly as much as they’d hoped—only that yes, Nora and Kate had left together, and that Nora had been simply dressed, in the town clothes of someone of a maid’s station. Most likely Kate’s clothes. That information had handily answered the question of whether she’d been taken against her will, but had gotten them no farther toward finding her. Gaines had no clue where they’d gone, or what they’d planned. He hadn’t heard more from them, though Kate had wages outstanding. All he’d known was when, and in what condition, they’d left.
Now William and Chris sat in Hardy’s comfortable sitting room and waited while the detective served them tea. Every damned thing the Brits did had to be done with tea. He thought the whole British Empire would crumble instantly into ruin if somehow the tea trade dried up. They’d accomplish absolutely nothing.
When they had their cups, Hardy sat across a low table from them and sipped at his own.
William’s patience hit its wall. “You called us here because you have news. Let’s get to it.”
“Not news, precisely. A thought that arose from the news. It’s a long shot, but we’ve exhausted everything but long shots at this point.”
“Get on with it, Hardy,” Chris mumbled into his cup.
Their friendship had strengthened over the course of these weeks of partnership in the search for Nora. They’d finally had it out just before Christmas, when too much brandy and scotch at the Carlton had sparked an argument that had finally exploded into a bona fide brawl—in addition to the damage they’d done to each other, they’d done some damage to the club lounge, and Chris’s membership had been suspended for thirty days. Still on the outs with his father, he was currently staying at the Dohring, in a suite just down the hall from William’s.
A drunken scuffle had been just what they’d needed to find the true root of their friendship again. They’d dug out all the suspicions and resentments that had been seeded that night in Dover and left to grow wild in the year after.
Hardy sipped his tea and set the cup and saucer down. “We’ve exhausted every lead so far, and come up with nothing. At great cost to you both, I’ve searched all the corners of England for her, and Ireland and Scotland as well. Miss Smith’s family has no information. Your father’s offer of a reward goes unclaimed. We know that she wasn’t abducted from Tarrindale Hall, but that doesn’t preclude misadventure thereafter.”
William stood. “If you called us here to suggest that harm has befallen her …”
“Please, Mr. Frazier, sit. Not harm, per se, though of course we must consider the possibility of it, and I have searched for those cases as well. Happily, they’ve not produced the lady, either. Misadventure, I say. I’m speaking of prison.”
“What?!” Now Chris stood, so quickly his teacup rattled hard on its saucer, and tea splashed over the side. “You go too far, sir! Nora is no criminal!”
Hardy remained seated, and sipped again at his tea. “But you’ve said she is sympathetic to the cause for women’s suffrage.”
Chris calmed. “Sympathetic, yes. But she’s not one of those women.”
William ignored the contempt in his friend’s tone and thought of Nora’s interest in his arrest last year, and how she’d expressed concern for the Roses. She’d known them in some way. He sat back down. “Only because she didn’t have the opportunity,” he mused. “I think—no, I know—she’d have wanted to fight with them.” The full import of Hardy’s suggestion struck him like a blow to the gut. “My God. You think she’s been in Holloway all this time?”
He’d heard the horror stories of women who’d been imprisoned there. They were especially hard on suffragettes. Particularly since the movement had elected destructive and violent actions of protest. Hundreds had been arrested in November, just days after his arrival, when they’d stormed Parliament. And in December, several mailboxes had been set on fire by one of them. That woman had just been sentenced to six months in Holloway.
“I think,” Hardy answered, “that it’s a possibility we’ve not yet considered. Before I connect the daughter of an earl to such a circumstance, however, I would like your approval to investigate it.”
Chris sat again and shook his head. “No, it can’t be. Even if she’d been arrested in one of these incidents, they’d have released her at once when they knew who she was.”
“Unless she used an alias,” Hardy noted.
“She wouldn’t, not there. She’d have asked for help. She’s not so stubborn or stupid to stay in such a place when she’d need only give her name and be saved.”
William disagreed. A bilious brew swirled in his stomach—fear and excitement, both. Fear of what she might be enduring right this moment, and excitement that they might finally have a real lead. “Chris, think. Think of her state when she left. Would she trust your father to save her? Would she trust you, or me, or anyone? Or would she believe she were alone?”
Chris stared at him. His teacup began to shake sloppily on its saucer, and he set it down on the table before them. “Good lord. Could she—no, it can’t be. Not that. She’d never survive it.”
“Do I have your permission to investigate the possibility? If it becomes known, there might be even greater scandal for your family.”
Chris dismissed the notion with an angry flick of his hand. “I don’t care about the scandal.”
But William thought there was another cause to be concerned about bringing her name into this inquiry. “Is there a way we can investigate without bringing the Tate name into it?”
“Why do you care, of all people?” Chris’s face screwed up with confounded surprise.
“Nora ran, Chris. Maybe she’d rather it not be known she’s been found. It should be her choice after all this, shouldn’t it?” When Chris gave him a reluctant nod, William turned to Hardy. “Is there a way?”
The detective considered, and then nodded. “I should be able to get my eye on the prisoner manifests for the time since she’s been missing. I wouldn’t be able to keep the ledgers for long, but if you’re willing to peruse them with me, we might find something—one of the aliases we’ve listed, perhaps. Or at least rule out this line of inquiry. We can work from there.”
Two days later, they sat at Hardy’s dining table, perusing the ledgers from Holloway Prison—the intake lists as well as prisoner records. Chris and Nora’s Aunt Martha was with them; Chris had argued that they needed a woman’s eye, and he’d sworn her to secrecy.
William didn’t know Lady Collington well enough to know if she was trustworthy. He liked the woman, but she’d done nothing to help Nora, either. Nora hadn’t gone to her when she’d run, and that was, in his mind, proof positive that her aunt had failed her as much as the rest of them.
However, he trusted Chris to be judicious in his conduct in this matter, so if Chris trusted his aunt, William would as well.
They combed the intake ledgers, looking for Nora’s true name and every variation of it, and for the aliases they’d guessed at, from her favorite authors or characters in her favorite novels, to place names, to names so common as to be anonymous. When they came upon a name that seemed possible, they noted the prisoner number and went to the records ledgers to seek identifying information about her.
They’d worked through luncheon, and the pub below had just sent up tea when Lady Martha said, “Here, this one.” She turned the ledger so William could read it: Frazier, Eve.
William felt an odd quiver of hope in the thought that Nora might have used his name as an alias—a suggestion Lady Martha had made when she’d first sat down and opened a ledger. It hadn’t occurred to either Chris or him before. But there had been a few Fraziers in the lists, and none of them had been even possibly Nora.
“Why this one?”
“Eve was their mother’s name,” Lady Martha answered.
Chris’s head shot up. “What’s the date of intake?”
William read it off. “November twenty-first. Who has that records ledger?”
“I do,” answered Hardy. “What’s the prisoner number?” When William gave it, Hardy scanned through the book.
“Twenty-first November,” Chris mused. “That’s the date they stormed Parliament. She wouldn’t have got herself involved in all that, would she? Auntie?”
Lady Martha’s complexion had taken on an unsettled fluctuation of hues—pale, but blotchy bright spots on her cheeks, rising and fading with each breath. She faced her nephew. “She … she might have. Good lord, she might have. The night of Lady Francine’s party, when she—you remember that there was a protest?”
“They threw rotten lettuces at us. I recall.” He turned to William. “It’s the night I told you about, when Nora … had a breakdown of some sort.”
“It wasn’t a breakdown, Christopher. She said things she shouldn’t have, yes. But not because she’d lost her mind.” Lady Martha cleared her throat. “I mention that terrible night because, in the carriage, she and I spoke about the women protesting. She said that we—we women of means who support the cause—had a responsibility to stand with the women on the protest lines. She didn’t think it was fair that only poor women risked their bodies for justice. She was agitated about it.”
Chris laughed—it seemed to be an attempt at irony, but his tone undercut it, and the sound was merely bleak. “Auntie! I didn’t know you were a suffragette.”
Lady Martha answered quietly. “I believe women should have the right to a voice in their own destiny, yes. Your sister has been desperate for that voice. I think she’s been fighting as hard as she can to have it. So yes, I think she might have thrown a rock at Parliament, or at least stood with those who did.”
“I have it,” Hardy interjected. “The notes are quite extensive. Physical description … estimating eighteen to twenty-two years of age, five feet three inches tall, seven stone five pounds, blonde hair, blue eyes. An unusual note here as well: ‘graceful manner of speaking.’”
William sat up in his seat. That was Nora. The physical description was her exactly, but he supposed it wasn’t specific enough to be sure. Still, Eve Frazier, her mother’s name and his, with that description …
“It’s her,” Chris cried. “Have we found her at last? In Holloway Prison? Good God.”
But Hardy was still reading, and his frown deepened. “There’s more.” He looked up and pulled off his wire spectacles. “My lord, my lady, Mr. Frazier, this is … if it is Lady Nora, this …” He sighed and began again. “She began a hunger strike on her first day, along with most of the women imprisoned at the same time. She never ate willingly. The report describes this inmate as uncommunicative, combative, and violent. She was force-fed on four noted occasions. And then she attacked two guards, leaving one partially deaf and the other disfigured. Her last noted weight is six stone one pound.”
William quickly figured the conversion from yet another strange British term. A stone was fourteen pounds. Six stone was … eighty-four pounds. Six stone one meant … “She’s eighty-five pounds?!”
“And she beat two guards?” Lady Martha asked. “Are you sure?”
“I’m reading the record, my lady. There’s more. One more notation, the last, and the most troublesome: ‘transferred to Bethlehem Hospital, eighth December.’”
Both Chris and his aunt gasped. Lady Martha slapped her hands over her mouth. William quickly considered them both. “She’s ill. Because she’s so frail?”
“Bethlehem Royal Hospital—Will, it’s Bedlam.” Chris sounded more frantic with each word. “They committed her to Bedlam. Do you know what that is?”
He did. An insane asylum, and a notorious one at that.
December eighth—she’d been committed a full month ago.
William roared and swept the ledgers to the floor.
William and Chris wanted to go at once, but Hardy prevailed on them to give him a day to verify that the inmate in question was yet at the hospital and to determine who might be persuaded to assist them. In the meantime, he assigned them the task of arranging Nora’s recovery, should the inmate in question in fact be her.
None of them doubted that it was. They’d found her, and in far more dire straits than they had imagined. While Hardy did his part, William and Chris sat in Lady Martha’s parlor and made arrangements. They agreed that they should keep her rescue and recovery quiet until Nora herself decided if she wanted it known that she’d been found. So they had to take her from London, somewhere away from the places the Tates might be known.
It was Chris who decided it should be Bath, where visitors came from all over Great Britain to partake of the health benefits of its ancient Roman baths. They would be anonymous there, and Nora’s poor condition would be a common state among the guests of any hotel or inn in the area.
She would need a discreet physician as well; Lady Martha declared that she knew just the doctor, whom she could retain to join them in Bath.
By the time Hardy had done his part, and they theirs, nearly three more days had passed. William thought he’d lose his own mind.
But finally, at dusk on a cold Friday in January, Hardy, Chris, and William pulled a hired delivery truck up to a rear service entrance at the enormous hulk that was Bethlehem Royal Hospital.
“I’m told she’s in active treatment and in one of the better wards, but please. Steel yourselves,” Hardy admonished as they stepped from the truck and walked toward the door. “This place earns its reputation. Keep your focus on our goal here, no matter what you see or hear.”
A white-jacketed orderly let them in and led them to, and up, a set of dim, enclosed stairs. They saw nothing but the walls of the stairwell, but howls, shrieks, and moans filtered through the walls and echoed around them as they climbed.
“This is a bloody nightmare,” Chris muttered.
William ignored him, intent on only one thing. But the thought that Nora might be among the wailing souls lending their voices to this eerie chorus froze his heart.
The orderly finally stopped and put his hand on the knob of a door. He turned and met the eyes of each man with him. “This here’s the ward she’s in. There’s other ladies in here, too, and I’ll not have you disturbin’ them. They’ve just finished tea, and it’s rest time. Fanny’s at the desk. She’ll help us.”
“Thank you, Arthur.” Hardy held out a jangle of coins. “I know this puts you at some risk.”
The orderly pocketed the coins. “You make it worthwhile, Mr. Hardy. Just don’t forget to write that letter after.”
“I’ll do so first thing in the morning.” Hardy intended to write to the doctor in charge of Nora here and lay out the myriad benefits of his silence regarding her stay and her disappearance from their care.
“That’s good, then.“ Arthur opened the door. Immediately, the harmonic sound of wailing intensified. They all stepped through the door, and found themselves at the end of a long corridor. They followed Arthur to a door on the left side.
The room beyond that door was large and dreary, and quieter. High windows ran the length of the far wall, so maybe it was brighter in sunlight, but here at a winter dusk, with only dim lights on the walls, the room was colorless. Hopeless.
Two dozen beds were arrayed in rigid formation against the longest walls. Each one had a numeral painted on its whitewashed iron frame. Each bed held a sleeping, or at least resting, woman. Each woman was bound to the bed, either with ankle and wrist restraints, or, in a few instances, straitjacketed, with straps across the full bed. William’s gorge rose. One of these poor souls was Nora?
“God help me, but I don’t want it to be her.” Chris’s voice was nearly too low to carry.
At the far end, a nurse sat a desk. Fanny, William assumed. When Arthur led them deeper into the room, she rose and came to them, her posture stiff and her aspect guarded. “Arthur tells me you think one of my patients is your missing sister?”
“Mine, yes,” Chris took a step forward and offered his hand, but not his name.
Fanny shook his hand limply. “And why should I trust you? I can hardly let you come onto my ward and simply carry off one of my charges.”
Chris looked back at Hardy, surprised. “I thought you’d arranged—”
“I have.” Hardy fished in his jacket and pulled out an envelope. “This is what you require, I believe.”
The nurse opened the envelope and peered into it. William couldn’t see what it was. He assumed it was some number of pounds. “Yes, that’s evidence enough. Bed four.” She waved toward a bed behind her.
William pushed past Hardy and the nurse and hurried to bed four. A straitjacketed woman lay, tiny and frail. She slept, her breaths huffing in rough rasps, but steadily. She was blonde, but her hair was short and choppy. Her face was badly bruised, her mouth swollen, her lips split. Dark circles pressed into the hollows around her eyes, and shadows carved caverns beneath her cheekbones.
God, was this Nora? He couldn’t be sure; he almost hoped it wasn’t. Though he wanted more than anything to find her, not like this. Please God, not like this.
He looked back at Chris. His friend’s eyes flashed horror and confusion—he didn’t recognize her, either.
William thought of one way to be sure. An image that had tormented him with longing for more than a year. He unfastened the straps across the bed and turned the slight form to her side.
A constellation of three tiny moles just at the base of her neck. “Oh, dear God.”
Chris saw them, too. He howled like a rabid beast and spun around. He grabbed Arthur and hurled him at the wall. “WHAT DID YOU DO? WHAT DID YOU DO?”
The patients began to stir and fret at the disturbance. Hardy and Fanny tried to calm the situation.
William understood everything that happened around him, could hear Chris’s distress, but he paid it no mind at all. “Nora,” he whispered, as he found the fastenings of the straitjacket and released them. “Oh, my darling, oh love, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
As he freed her and scooped her into his arms—dear lord, there was nothing left of her—her eyes fluttered and he caught just a glimpse of lovely turquoise.
She moaned and struggled, nothing more than a weak flail of her arms. Her wrists were bruised, too, braceleted with dark, raw skin.
“Shhh, my darling. It’s over now. I’m here, and I won’t let you go.”
“One of us should tell your father.”
“Absolutely not, Auntie. Will’s right. Nora should decide. We lost her for so long because Father couldn’t face the thought that she’d run from him—worse, he couldn’t face the idea of it being known that she’d run from him. If he hadn’t pushed that absurd abduction story, perhaps the Yard would have found her before any of this horror happened.”
William let Chris and his aunt bicker while he paced the room and stared at the closed door. Lady Martha had taken a cottage for them all in Bath, for maximum privacy. In other circumstances, he’d have found the place cozy and quaint. It was probably lovely in summer; the garden showed signs even in January of its lush life. But for now, his mood was too black and his thoughts too bleak to find anything charming.
Behind that door, Nora lay. Battered and bruised. Weak. Confused, when she was conscious at all. There were few signs in that wasted body of the lively young woman he’d fallen in love with.
Lady Martha’s physician friend was a woman. Dr. Stella St. John had been waiting for them when they arrived from London, and she’d shooed William and Chris from the room as soon as William had laid Nora in the bed. Since then, neither man had been allowed in, but both women, and the housemaid, had come and gone at will. Almost a full day had passed since they’d carried her away from Bedlam.
A courier had come from London that afternoon, bearing a package from Eliot Hardy: Nora’s record from the hospital. Hardy had managed to win the doctor’s silence as well as the record of her care and treatment.
Neither William nor Chris had had the stomach to read the file, but Dr. St. John had taken it into the room with her.
He raked his hands through his hair. “I just need to know something. How is she? How will she be?”
Lady Martha stood and stopped him from his pacing. The fire crackled beside them. “I told you all I know, and Stella will tell us more when she’s satisfied that she has more to tell us.” She tugged on his sleeve. “Come, William. You’ve hardly touched your tea.”
The last thing he wanted was a ham sandwich, and if he never drank another cup of blasted tea again in his life, it would be too damned soon. “I’m not hungry.”
“I know what you need.” Chris pushed away from the table and went to the liquor cart. “The same thing I do. Shall I make it a double?” He picked up a bottle of Irish whisky.
“Triple. Fill the damned glass.”
“One for me as well, Christopher,” Lady Martha sighed.
“Auntie!” Chris chuckled. “There’s a touch of the rebel in you, too.”
“You’ve no idea, nephew. No idea at all.”
The door to Nora’s bedroom opened as Chris handed out their drinks.
“Is that scotch?” Dr. St. John asked, nodding at their glasses.
“Irish,” Chris answered.
“That’ll do. Two fingers, if you don’t mind.”
With another chuckle, Chris obliged.
William couldn’t waste time with niceties. “How is she, Doctor?”
Dr. St. John sat in a small chair near the window. She nodded gratefully when Chris brought her drink, and took a long sip before she answered. “She’s asleep, and I think comfortably so at last. She was given a steady regimen of strong drugs for several weeks, and it will take some time for their effects to leave her. She’s quite weak, but with nourishing food and the right rest, she’ll gain her strength, and her injuries will heal. There are few, I think, that will leave lasting scars. On her body. As for her mind, only time will tell.”
“As you saying she truly is mad?” Chris asked.
“Not at all. She’s deeply confused at the moment, and experiencing dissociation—she is having trouble recognizing this new reality. I suspect that she’s spent great portions of her conscious hours during these weeks escaping in her mind, somewhere she felt safe. Now she can’t hold on to the reality she has.”
Something in the doctor’s words, or maybe just her tone, caught William’s hope. “She’s spoken to you?”
“No. She hasn’t said a word. I’m interpreting what I’ve observed.”
Chris went back to the liquor cart and refilled his glass. “You’re describing a madwoman, Doctor.”
“No, my lord. I’m describing a sane woman in maddening circumstances.” She finished her own whisky and set the glass aside, then stood and walked to the fireplace. Staring at the fire, her back to the room, she said, “This is what men do, you see. When women behave in ways they don’t like, or don’t understand. They say we’re mad, we’re ‘hysterical,’ and they drug us and isolate us, they lock us away, and they torment us until we break. Then, either we are what they want us to be, or we are exactly what they said we were.”
She spoke from experience; it was clear in her voice. William turned to Lady Martha, who watched her friend sadly, and was sure it was true. The doctor had been treated for hysteria as well. “My aunt is a physician in America,” he offered, like an olive branch for the abuses of his sex on hers. “She says that the hysteria diagnosis is nothing but the ploy of men demanding control over women who will not be controlled.”
Dr. St. John turned and smiled gently at him. “Your aunt is right. You’re Lady Nora’s betrothed, as I understand it?”
“I hope so, yes. If she’ll still have me.”
“How much do you know about your aunt’s profession? How much has she told you, from a medical perspective, about the hysteria diagnosis?”
“A great deal, I think. Honestly, more than I would have asked to know.”
His admission earned him another gentle smile. “Do you know the treatments for hysteria?”
A cold stone settled on the floor of William’s stomach. “Yes.”
“When I tell you that her hospital record shows that all the conventional treatments were performed on Lady Nora, you understand what I mean?”
“Bloody hell,” Chris muttered.
“Yes,” William answered. He knew what she meant, and he knew that Nora had been tormented as well as brutalized, all in the name of medicine. The memory of their single night in Dover wavered into focus, the way he’d helped her learn her body, how delightful she’d been discovering her pleasure. Had she lost that?
“Many women take satisfaction from some of those treatments, and even seek them out. But when it’s not a choice, it’s an invasion. In a place like Bedlam, it’s …. Please understand what I mean when I say you must be gentle and patient. Let her lead as she finds her way back. The very core of her has been stripped, and she will be tender for some time—her psyche as well as her body.”
“I’ll never hurt her.” He wanted to kill the men who’d hurt her. And the women.
“You seem quite in earnest, Mr. Frazier, and I’m glad. I think, therefore, that you might be a great help to me, and to Lady Nora. Perhaps if she sees you, is able to touch you, you might serve as an anchor to this reality. It’s risky, because she might not be ready to feel strong feeling, and she was alone in her mind for weeks. I can’t say what her feelings might be now. We’ll give her the night for a full, comfortable rest. In the morning, if she seems strong enough, we’ll reintroduce you. Perhaps love will ground her.”
William held onto that hope like a drowning man clinging to the last piece of driftwood in the ocean.