The Asylum Read Online Free PDF Page B

play this—this game anymore; it is bad for you, as I said. We need not trouble Aunt Vida, but I know that she would say the same. I shall ask Mr. Noakes to take away the mirror when he comes on Saturday, but meanwhile you must promise me not to do it again. If you are tempted, come and tell me; I promise I will not be cross. And if you are lonely, we must find you playmates; it will be much better for you to have real friends than—”
    She did not finish the sentence. I did not think I had been lonely, but I agreed that I should like some real friends, and said that I felt well enough to come and do my lessons. Despite my promise, I tried once more to summon Rosina before the mirror was removed, but all I saw was myself, pale and uneasy, with a bruise upon my forehead. And though she pressed me no further, I was aware, for some time afterward, of my mother’s anxious scrutiny.
     
    Though I kept well away from the edge after that, I soon forgot about Rosina, and even the terror on the cliff-face diminished in memory until it seemed no more than the shadow of a bad dream. But alone in the infirmary at Tregannon House—where I found myself sitting up again, with no recollection of having done so—it was my mother’s reaction that came back to haunt me. Why had she been so alarmed? Had she thought Rosina was some sort of ghost? Could I have had a sister who had died? No; she would surely have told me.
    Madness in the blood, however, was a very different matter. Of course she would have kept it from me, even if—perhaps especially if—she had feared that my fascination with the mirror was the first sign of its coming out in me.
    Apart from Aunt Vida, the only relation I had ever met was her elder brother, my great-uncle Josiah, who used to come to us every two or three years for a week in September. He was younger than my aunt but looked much, much older: completely bald, except for a thin fringe of white hair at the back of his skull, and so stooped over that I used to think he must be a hunchback. He had a white moustache, and a narrow, projecting jaw, which, with his stooped, wiry figure, gave him a distinctly simian air. He wore thick-lensed spectacles and used a magnifying glass for close work. His manner was always courteous, though very reserved; you could sit with him for a whole evening and realise at the end of it that he had scarcely uttered a word. There was—or so I felt as a child—a benign air about his silence; he would sometimes look up over his spectacles and smile faintly at me, but by the time I went to live with him, I cannot have been anything more than a familiar blur.
    My mother’s father, George Radford, who had worked all his life at the Treasury, was the youngest of the three. Mama had talked quite freely—or so it seemed when I was small—about growing up in Clapham, telling me all about her brothers, Edgar and Jack (Mama had been the youngest by six years), and how handsome they had looked in their dress uniforms when they came to visit, tramping about the house in a great clatter of spurs and sabers, until they decided to go out to New South Wales and make their fortunes, and how Grandmama (whose name was Louisa) had missed them so much that she had gone to live in New South Wales, too. Mama had stayed in Clapham with Grandpapa, who had died soon after she married my father.
    Mama herself had died before I came to realise that she only ever talked about her father or her brothers, repeating the same few comic stories about the scrapes they used to get into, whilst revealing almost nothing about herself. But from the caustic snippets Aunt Vida let fall in later years, I pieced together a very different version. Louisa Radford had been a vain, foolish woman who had led her husband a dog’s life (“poor George never had much backbone”) and doted slavishly on her sons, no matter how badly they behaved, to the exclusion of her daughter. Mama had been George’s favorite, and Louisa had