Property of a Lady(51)
But it was.
SEVENTEEN
CHAPLAIN’S REPORT: BRANK HOUSE ASYLUM
November 1905
The condition of the patient, Elvira Lee, is increasingly difficult since the visit of two distant members of her family earlier this year – a Mr Frederick Anstey and his daughter, Harriet.
Miss Lee’s intelligence has not deteriorated, but the terrors which have driven her for so many years have increased tenfold. She spends much of her time crouching in a corner of her room, her hands stretched tremblingly before her, as if to push away an encroaching enemy. At those times it is very difficult to reach her – even to make oneself heard.
However, a week ago some rags of her sanity appeared to have returned for a brief time, and I was able to talk with her for almost twenty minutes.
The outcome is that she is to allow me to perform a religious ceremony of healing. I am hopeful it may be a way of persuading this poor haunted soul that God’s love and God’s strength have banished the demons she undoubtedly believes lie in wait for her.
This morning I received permission from the Bishop to hold the ceremony and the doctors have given their consent, although stress it cannot effect a cure. At their request, I am making an official record of the event. The notes are to be appended to the patient’s medical history.
Nell paused to refill her wine glass. So Elvira Lee had been thought of as haunted. How much of that had been due to her being incarcerated in an asylum since the age of eight? She remembered again how Beth, and also Ellie Harper, had insisted it was ‘Elvira’ the man in their nightmares was trying to find. Ellie in particular had been terrified for Elvira. ‘He mustn’t get her,’ she had said. ‘Promise you won’t let him get her. She’s so frightened of him.’
Nell pushed this troubling memory away and looked across at Beth, who was still absorbed in her homework. Then she returned to the chaplain’s account of the ceremony performed on Elvira Lee more than a hundred years ago.
The ceremony began at three o’clock today, Sunday 16th November. It was not that of exorcism, for that takes much preparation and is rarely performed in these enlightened times.
Dr Manville and Dr Chaddock were both in attendance – partly in case Miss Lee should require their intervention, but more, I believe, from curiosity.
The attendants brought Elvira Lee to the chapel. She was calm, and there was not the sense of ‘otherness’ that is so marked when the madness seizes her. I took her hands and assured her she was in God’s house, and that no harm could come to her in this place of refuge and sanctuary.
I began a simple prayer asking for peace and serenity to surround this troubled soul. At first Miss Lee murmured suitable responses – she has regularly attended all church services, as have most of the patients, and despite her affliction is well acquainted with both the New and Old Testament.
I had begun to entertain hopes that the peace I sought for her was beginning to soak into her mind, when she suddenly snatched her hands from mine and began to speak. Her voice was slurred and harsh. It is foolish to say this – and this is intended as a factual account – but the words rasped through the small, hallowed chapel like raw nails scratching across silk.
‘You waste your time,’ she said. ‘You can never drive out the creature that seeks me.’
I reached for her hands again – they were hot and dry and the very bones seemed to push through the flesh and clutch me. She pulled away and backed clumsily into a corner of the chapel, crouching against the pew in a huddle, her hands over her head – I know that to be the classic gesture of someone seeking to defend him or herself from attack.
‘He comes to me most nights now,’ she said. ‘I hear him making his blind fumbling way along the dark passages. He knocks at every door until he finds me. Just as he did the night my mother died.’ She paused and half-raised her head in a listening attitude. ‘Hear him now,’ she said, and so forceful were her words that I swear before God I heard three sharp raps on the chapel door. The two doctors heard it as well, for they both started and looked sharply round.
I said, in a low mutter, ‘There’s no one there, of course,’ and turned back to Miss Lee.
She had begun to sing the macabre verse she so often sang when the madness visited her, and even though I had heard it so many times, it still chilled me.
‘Open lock to the dead man’s knock . . .
Fly bolt, and bar, and band . . .
Nor move, nor swerve, joint, muscle or nerve,
At the spell of the dead man’s hand.’
As she began the second part of the song, a curious little echo picked up her voice, and the chant seemed to trickle in and out of the corners, a half-second behind her, almost as if a second voice was trying to join in. I saw Dr Manville, the younger of the two, shiver and glance nervously round the chapel.
I said, ‘Miss Lee – Elvira – who is it you think comes to find you?’
A great shudder shook her body, and she said, ‘The man who murdered my mother. I saw him do it, and that’s why he has to find me.’
This time it was Dr Chaddock who spoke. ‘Elvira,’ he said, ‘the man who killed your mother is dead.’
‘Is he?’ she said, in a dreadful, harsh whisper. ‘Can you be sure? Because I hear him singing to himself – I hear him chanting the rhyme I heard the night my mother died. If he is dead, how do you explain that? And,’ she said, ‘if he is dead, then who is it who creeps through the dark, searching for me?’