“Yes, sir.”
“Ring the bell there. You will need refreshment before you return to London.”
I stood up again and tugged the rope on the left of the fireplace.
“Tell me,” he added, without any change of tone, “is Mrs Reynolds dying?”
I felt tears prick my eyelids. I said, “She does not confide in me, but she grows weaker daily.”
“I am sorry to hear it. She has a small annuity, I collect? You must not mind me if I am blunt. It is as well for us to be frank about such matters.”
There is a thin line between frankness and brutality. I never knew on which side of the line Bransby stood. I heard a tap on the door.
“Enter!” cried Mr Bransby.
I turned, expecting a servant in answer to the bell. Instead a small, neat boy slipped into the room.
“Ah, Allan. Good morning.”
“Good morning, sir.”
He and Bransby shook hands.
“Make your bow to Mr Shield, Allan,” Bransby told him. “You will be seeing more of him in the weeks to come.”
Allan glanced at me and obeyed. He was a well-made child with large, bright eyes and a high forehead. In his hand was a letter.
“Are Mr and Mrs Allan quite well?” Bransby inquired.
“Yes, sir. My father asked me to present his compliments, and to give you this.”
Bransby took the letter, glanced at the superscription and dropped it on the desk. “I trust you will apply yourself with extra force after this long holiday. Idleness does not become you.”
“No, sir.”
“Adde quod ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes.” He prodded the boy in the chest. “Continue and construe.”
“I regret, sir, I cannot.”
Bransby boxed the lad’s ears with casual efficiency. He turned to me. “Eh, Mr Shield? I need not ask you to construe, but perhaps you would be so good as to complete the sentence?”
“Emollit mores nec sinit esse feros. Add that to have studied the liberal arts with assiduity refines one’s manners and does not allow them to be coarse.”
“You see, Allan? Mr Shield was wont to mind his book. Epistulae Ex Ponto, book the second. He knows his Ovid and so shall you.”
When we were alone, Bransby wiped fragments of snuff from his nostrils with a large, stained handkerchief. “One must always show them who is master, Shield,” he said. “Remember that. Kindness is all very well but it don’t answer in the long run. Take young Edgar Allan, for example. The boy has parts, there is no denying it. But his parents indulge him. I shudder to think where such as he would be without due chastisement. Spare the rod, sir, and spoil the child.”
So it was that, in the space of a few minutes, I found a respectable position, gained a new roof over my head, and encountered for the first time both Mrs Frant and the boy Allan. Though I marked a slight but unfamiliar twang in his accent, I did not then realise that Allan was American.
Nor did I realise that Mrs Frant and Edgar Allan would lead me, step by step, towards the dark heart of a labyrinth, to a place of terrible secrets and the worst of crimes.
Before I venture into the labyrinth, let me deal briefly with this matter of my lunacy.
I had not seen my aunt Reynolds since I was a boy at school, yet I asked them to send for her when they put me in gaol because I had no other person in the world who would acknowledge the ties of kinship.
She spoke up for me before the magistrates. One of them had been a soldier, and was inclined to mercy. Since I had indeed thrown the medal before a score of witnesses, and moreover shouted “You murdering bastard” as I did so, there was little doubt in any mind including my own that I was guilty. The Guards officer was a vengeful man, for although the medal had hardly hurt him, his horse had reared and thrown him before the ladies.
So it seemed there was only one road to mercy, and that was by declaring me insane. At the time I had little objection. The magistrates decided that I was the victim of periodic bouts of insanity, during one of which I had assaulted the officer on his black horse. It was a form of lunacy, they agreed, that should yield to treatment. This made it possible for me to be released into the care of my aunt.
She arranged for me to board with Dr Haines, whom she had consulted during my trial. Haines was a humane man who disliked chaining up his patients like dogs and who lived with his own family not far away from them. “I hold with Terence,” the doctor said to me. “Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto. To be sure, some of the poor fellows have unusual habits which are not always convenient in society, but they are made of the same clay as you or I.”
Most of his patients were madmen and half-wits, some violent, some foolish, all sad; demented, syphilitic, idiotic, prey to strange and fearful delusions, or sweeping from one extreme of their spirits to the other in the folie circulaire. But there were a few like myself, who lived apart from the others and were invited to take our meals with the doctor and his wife in the private part of the house.
“Give him time and quiet, moderate exercise and a good, wholesome diet,” Dr Haines told my aunt in my presence, “and your nephew will mend.”
At first I doubted him. My dreams were filled with the groans of the dying, with the fear of death, with my own unworthiness. Why should I live? What had I done to deserve it when so many better men were dead? At first, night after night, I woke drenched in sweat, with my pulses racing, and sensed the presence of my cries hanging in the air though their sound had gone. Others in that house cried in the night, so why should not I?
The doctor, however, said it would not do and gave me a dose of laudanum each evening, which calmed my disquiet or at least blunted its edge. Also he made me talk to him, of what I had done and seen. “Unwholesome memories,” he once told me, “should be treated like unwholesome food. It is better to purge them than to leave them within.” I was reluctant to believe him. I clung to my misery because it was all I had. I told him I could not remember; I feigned rage; I wept.
After a week or two, he cunningly worked on my feelings, suggesting that if I were to teach his son and daughters some Latin and a little Greek for half an hour each morning, he would be able to remit a modest proportion of the fees my aunt paid him for my upkeep. For the first week of this instruction, he sat in the parlour reading a book as I made the children con their grammars and chant their declensions. Then he took to leaving me alone with them, at first for a few minutes only, and then for longer.
“You have a gift for instructing the young,” the doctor said to me one evening.
“I show them no mercy. I make them work hard.”
“You make them wish to please you.”
It was not long after that he declared that he had done all he could for me. My aunt took me to her lodgings in a narrow little street running up to the Strand. Here I perched like an untidy cuckoo, mouth ever open, in her snug nest. I filled her parlour during the day, and slept there at night on a bed they made up on the sofa. During that summer, the reek from the river was well-nigh overwhelming.
I soon realised that my aunt was not well, that I had occasioned a severe increase in her expenditure since my foolish assault with the Waterloo Medal, and that my presence, though she strove to hide it, could not but be a burden to her. I also heard the groans she smothered in the dark hours of the morning, and I saw illness ravage her body like an invading army.
One day,