The Quickening Maze Read Online Free PDF Page A

no one else was around, they mirrored each other.
    ‘Now is he married or engaged?’
    Hannah shrieked. ‘Annabella!’
    ‘Do not, please, feign a scandalised tone. We are seventeen. We have to be thinking of these things. What we need to do is plan how to draw his attention to you.’
    ‘It can be a little difficult to command attention when surrounded by lunatics.’
    ‘Oh, no, but that’s perfect.There he is with all those people around him and who is that still, pale figure so dignified amidst it all? Why, it’s the doctor’s lovely daughter.’
    ‘Don’t,’ Hannah blushed.‘I do need to do something, though. I think he’s short-sighted. He doesn’t seem to notice much and looks very closely at certain things.’
    ‘Maybe that’s being a poet: the distracted air.’
    ‘Maybe. I don’t think so, though. Sometimes he wears a monocle.’
    ‘What we need to do,’ Annabella said brightly, ‘is arrange it so that I can see him, or meet him. I think that will help my assessment.’
    Hannah looked at her smiling, excited friend and thought over the alarming idea. But before she could respond, Mademoiselle Leclair bustled in.The drawing - which Annabella briefly held up and which looked disappointingly accurate - was put aside.
    ‘Bonjour, les filles,’ Mademoiselle Leclair greeted them.
    ‘Bonjour,Mademoiselle,’they both replied and opened their grammars.
     
    William Stockdale the attendant was a taller man than the doctor, but he had to walk quickly to keep up with his master as they headed towards Leopard’s Hill Lodge and the severe cases. Fulton Allen, the doctor’s son, occasionally had to run to keep up.This was a general condition for Fulton, only just sixteen. His triumph, unknown to him, was not many months away. Before long he would be running the whole establishment alone. Presently he felt himself struggling, as always, in the turbulent wake of his father’s surging energy. He strove to keep pace, to gain his father’s mastery, to know what he knew, which, unfortunately for Fulton, was always expanding. This determination to match his father’s stride and certainty felt particularly urgent when visiting the Lodge because it terrified him. Fairmead House was full of gentle disorder, idiocy and convalescence, even some, like Charles Seymour, who were not ill at all. Leopard’s Hill Lodge was full of real madness, of agony, people lost to themselves. They were fierce and unpredictable. They smelled rank. They were obscene. They made sudden noises. Their suffering was bottomless. It was an abyss of contorted humanity, a circle of hell. All of Fulton’s nightmares were set there as were his sexual dreams, which he also classified as nightmares no matter what the evidence of his sheets. Even the building looked mad: plain, square and tight, with regular small barred windows that emitted shrieks.
    They marched towards it now, the forest a corridor of flickering light and shade.
    Stockdale explained the case. ‘He hasn’t evacuated for three weeks now, I believe.’
    ‘Suppression of evacuation will only render his mania worse. It’s a cause. And the delusion hasn’t left him?’
    ‘What is his delusion?’ Fulton asked.
    Stockdale laughed. ‘That if he does evacuate, he will poison the water, destroy the forest, and that it will permeate down and everyone in London will be killed.’
    ‘Let’s hope he’s mistaken,’ Fulton joked.
    ‘Fulton,’ Allen reproved. ‘You cannot be facetious, certainly not with the patient. Madness has no sense of humour. How many people are there now? We’ll need four at least to restrain him while I administer the clyster.’
    ‘I can help,’ Fulton offered meekly, angry at his father’s humourless reproof.
    ‘You can hold his head, maybe an arm. If you try to take a leg he’ll kick you across the room. Unfortunately, he’s a powerful and large man.’
    That smell was there when they went through the door, just as Fulton had remembered, but