Property of a Lady(41)

FOURTEEN




16th February, 9 p.m.

I thought I would remember everything about the Black Boar, but now I’m here I can only remember parts. But then it’s more than thirty years since I came here as a wide-eyed child, clinging to Father’s hand. One thing I do remember though is Mother saying to me beforehand: ‘You’ll be staying at an inn, Harriet. It’s a very grown-up thing to do, so you must be well-behaved and polite to everyone, and make Father proud of you.’

She knew I would be well-behaved and polite, and so did Father. I was a polite child. Children were in those days. And I was wide-eyed with awe at the huge adventure of going on a train with Father, just the two of us.

At the little station was a trap drawn by a fat pony, which took us into Marston Lacy and the Black Boar. Eating our supper in the dining room was another adventure. We had Brown Windsor Soup and roast mutton, and I was given half portions. Father had a joke with the waiter about whether he would only have to pay half of the cost for me.

But what I do remember in clear detail is the trap returning next morning after breakfast to take us to the place we were here to visit.

There are some memories that with time become buried, almost painlessly, beneath thick layers of scar tissue. They only hurt occasionally, those memories, and they’re natural and wholesome and part of the journey through life. The memories of Harry are like that.

But there are other memories, darker, deeper ones, that never quite heal, no matter how much they become overlaid with other experiences. They stay raw, those memories, and from time to time something will jab into them, making them bleed. My memory of that morning when I was seven years old, and Father, dear impractical Father, was in quest of his improbable inheritance, is one of those painful, unhealed memories.

I hadn’t intended to write an account of that time, but there’s more than an hour before I shall want to get into bed and I suddenly feel I would like to do so. Perhaps if I expose that deep, unhealed wound to the light, it will finally skin over and leave me.

That long-ago morning began happily enough with breakfast and then another ride in the trap. I was allowed to stroke the pony’s velvety nose, and the driver showed me how to offer a lump of sugar to him, with my hand flattened.

The trap jolted us through the centre of Marston Lacy, which was yet another adventure for me who had never been in a pony trap. I had never been outside our own Cheshire village either, although Marston Lacy had the same kind of village street with shops displaying their goods. But there were what Father called workshops here, as well: places where people made cabinets and chairs and clocks, and a blacksmith’s where a scent of hot iron gusted out into the street. I would have liked to see more of that, but the trap rattled its way on, all the way through the village and out the other side.

Father pointed out to me the smudgy mountains in the distance. ‘That’s Wales,’ he said.

But I had never heard of Wales, so I just said, ‘Oh, is it?’

As we went between hedges and fields, the sky seemed to grow darker. ‘Rain,’ said Father, glancing up. I believe that was the moment when I stopped being excited and inquisitive and when fear scratched at my mind, because the dark sky did not seem like the start of an ordinary rainstorm.

The trap turned into a narrow lane where the hedges gave way to high brick walls. I didn’t like them – they were too high and dark and if you were trapped behind them you would not be able to climb out because there were little hard bits of glass on the very top. Then, directly ahead of us, a massive building reared up. It seemed that one minute it was not there and the next it appeared between the trees. It had flat, dark-grey walls and tiny, mean windows with iron bars at some of them. I hated it.

‘Here we are,’ said the driver, pulling the pony up before black gates. Without the cheerful clatter of the wheels and the clip-clop of the pony’s hoofs it was suddenly and disturbingly quiet. There was lettering set into the gates, but although I leaned forward to try to read it, I could not.

‘This is where you wanted, isn’t it?’ said the driver.

‘I think so,’ said Father. ‘If this is—’

‘Brank Asylum,’ said the man.

I didn’t know, not at seven years of age, what an asylum was. But the sound of the name frightened me – Brank. It made me think of iron and blackness, and it made me wonder why there had to be bars at all those windows.

Father was handing the driver some coins. ‘You’ll come back to collect us in one hour?’ he said. ‘I shall pay you the other half of the money then.’

‘I will indeed,’ said the man, touching his cap and turning the pony’s head round.

‘We shan’t be as long as an hour, Harriet,’ said Father, taking my hand firmly and leading me forward. ‘But there’s someone in here who wants to meet you.’

That sent the fear spiking even deeper. ‘Someone who wants to meet you . . .’ Like any child of the early part of the century, I had read the extraordinarily macabre fairy-tales deemed suitable then. It meant I knew what sort of people lived inside lonely forbidding houses and wanted to meet little girls. Witches who put children in cages and fattened them up for the ovens. Wolves who dressed up in human clothes and pretended to be human.

Father rang the bell outside the huge main doors. He kept a firm hold of my hand – perhaps he thought I might suddenly bolt and run back down that long drive to the lanes beyond. I wish I had. I wish I had never gone inside Brank Asylum, and I wish, above everything in the world, that I had not followed Father and a grey-clad, slab-faced woman to the small, mean room at the end of one of the corridors. They smelt of food cooked too long, those corridors – unappetizing food, boiled cabbage and onions. Beneath that was another smell I had never encountered. I could not, then, put a name to it, but it made me think of people drowning in the dark. It made me want to cry.