How to Impress a Gentleman Read Online Free PDF

Send a handsome fortune seeker into the realm to interact with you and come out unscathed and others will soon follow.”
    “You may be deemed brittle, my dear, but you come with a very attractive dowry. You are not too hard to look at, either. My son will be all too happy to pay you court, at my behest or no.”
    “So, what do you say? Will you choose to take fate by the nose or will it lead you where it will?”
    “I accept your offer, Doctor Evers, and I thank you for your sound advice. I am no fool. I know to accept a helping hand when I am in over my head. Thank you,” she said, hiding the truth of her stung pride by bowing her head in acceptance.
    ~ ~ ~
    Just outside the city, the walls of Bethlem Hospital rose no higher than Lindsay’s chest. The sanitarium looked quite civilized, not at all the dilapidated house of horror she had oft times envisioned. Yet, the very orderly, contained presence of the monstrous edifice bespoke of a carefully constructed social corrosion.
    In the country, sick people were not sent away. All people were individuals with faces and names and problems to be dealt with. It might be messy, dealing with the cotter William’s tirades or Great Aunt Bess’s many invisible friends, but it was handled and grumbled over and joked about by those who knew them and loved them and cared about their fate.
    Here, if you did not fit in or act your part, you could be locked away so that all of polite society could look at this attractive building and not the unattractive truth of a hurting spirit, or a damaged soul.
    For years, those that dared to peer beyond Bedlam’s orderly surface, to laugh and point and chide at those suffering within, need only step up and pay a penny. Did it make them feel superior in some way? Lindsay wondered. Nothing in the wide world could entice her to set foot in the cursed place, nothing but this all-consuming yen to connect with her mother.
    Thus resolved, Lindsay strode forward. Whitney, clutching painfully to her elbow, had to be dragged along. “Please don’t do this, Miss Lindsay. I beg you not to torture yourself so. What’s done is done and seeing for yerself cannot make it better.”
    “You know I have to, Whitney,” Lindsay muttered through chattering teeth. Reaching into her reticule, Lindsay produced two pounds and walked forward to gain admittance as a “patron”. By offering a “donation” and explaining that she was a conscientious supporter of the mentally infirm and would like a tour to, “properly ascertain the opportunities for improvement that my women’s missionary group might explore,” she was ushered in and left to her own devices.
    The quiet, sparseness of the gardens without gave forth to a haphazard cacophony of stimulation within. A dingy, yellow light seemed to hang suspended in the air, clinging to the smells of blood, feces, and rotting flesh. Aproned nurses with mop caps bustled past, unconcerned with Lindsay and Whitney’s presence. Long hallways lined with doors ran to the left and to the right. Each door sported a tiny, barred window, into which meandering voyeurs might have peered. A human menagerie , Lindsay whispered to herself, her whole body taking up the tremors of her chattering teeth.
    Had her father even stepped foot in this place to which he’d sent her mother? Surely, he must have, for he’d taken Elizabeth to London in the carriage, seeing to the necessary paperwork and payments...Whitney surreptitiously approached a door and then scuttled back when a course voice screeched obscenities in her direction.
    Lindsay walked past them all, not bothering to look at what she knew to be an outward manifestation of some soul’s inner suffering. Instead, she strode to the end of the hall and up the stairs, towards the women’s ward.
    One door, the second to the last on the right of the stairs, stood open. Lindsay’s skin chilled and her lower lip trembled. Lindsay had received one letter from her mother, after she had