Bedlam: The Further Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë Read Online Free PDF Page A

“The door’s that way.”
    I gladly went in the direction she’d indicated. Then I heard a loud rattling of wheels. I saw, down the passage, four male nurses pushing a cart on which lay a patient wrapped in a blanket gown. He bucked and writhed; he grunted through the gag in his mouth. The sounds caused my own mouth to drop. My heart began a thunderous pounding.
    The unintelligible noises that a human makes are as individual and distinctive as his voice speaking words. A sigh, cough, or groan can reveal identity. Every fiber of my being told me who that madman was, even though reason said he could not be.
    The nurses pushed the cart into a room; the door slammed behind them. Torn between disbelief and fearful hope, I hurried to the door. I peered through the grated window and saw the nurses wrestling with the madman, removing the blanket gown. He was tall and thin, with sinewy muscles, clothed in a torn white shirt and black trousers. I strained to see his face, which was hidden by the gag and his disheveled black hair. A white-coated doctor with a tonsure of gray hair and a bland, bespectacled face tinkered with a strange apparatus—a clutch of squat black cylinders connected to a machine. Long wires protruded from metal posts at their ends. Nearby stood a wooden table fitted with leather straps with buckles and a set of clamps at the end. I watched the nurses heave the madman onto the table. They tried to buckle the straps over him. As he thrashed and struck out at them, his face turned toward me.
    It was lean and swarthy, dripping with sweat, the nose like a falcon’s beak. His mouth was an agonized grimace around the gag. His eyes were a rare, brilliant, crystalline gray. I saw them in my dreams every night. He did not see me now. I clapped my hand over my mouth to stifle a cry of horror mixed with recognition.
    My first, visceral impression had proved true: the madman was John Slade.

3

    H OW HAD SLADE, THE MAN I LOVED, COME TO BE HERE IN BEDLAM?
    Almost three years ago he had told me he was going to Russia. I had thought him still there. I’d had no reason to believe otherwise.
    What was happening to him, and why?
    I saw a door at the back of the room open. Through it stepped a man whose narrow figure wore a dark coat and trousers of a distinctly foreign cut. He had Germanic features—pale, hooded eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles, a long nose, a cruel mouth. His hair was close-cropped and silvery, his bearing imperious.
    Reader, you will recognize him as the Prussian who conspired with the Tsar against England. At that time I had no knowledge of the man.
    He strode toward Slade. An object glittered in his hand. It was a glass cylinder with a plunger, attached to a long, sharp needle. While the nurses struggled to hold Slade still, the man jabbed the needle into Slade’s arm. He worked the plunger. Slade jerked as the liquid contents of the cylinder ran into his body. His struggles weakened. His eyes closed. The nurses adjusted the clamps around his head. The doctor gathered up the wires connected to the strange apparatus. Each had a small metal disc at its end. He affixed these discs to Slade’s temples and forehead. He turned a crank on the machine.
    Lights on its surface blinked. I heard a crackling sound. Slade stiffened as if from a convulsion. The foreigner moved to his side, whispered in his ear. I did not know what these men were doing to Slade, but it could not be good. I tried to open the door; it was locked. I beat my fists against it and cried, “Stop!”
    The doctor, the nurses, and the foreigner looked in my direction. At the same instant I heard someone call my name. Dr. Forbes hurried toward me, saying, “There you are, thank heaven.” He seized my arm and propelled me away from the door, out of the dungeon. Soon we were in the ward where I’d left him, amid the staff, the visitors, and blessed normalcy.
    â€œThat was the criminal