The Head in the Ice Read online

  The Head in the Ice

  Richard James

  ©Richard James 2019

  Richard James has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2019

  This edition published in 2020 by Sharpe Books.

  For Charlotte.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  End Note.

  WINTER, 1891

  “The man who comes sane and safe out of the hands of mad-doctors and warders… is very sane indeed.”

  My Experiences in a Lunatic Asylum, Herman Charles Merival

  Prologue

  The dreams had come again. He woke in a tangle of sheets, breathless, in the small hours of the morning. He prayed he hadn’t screamed. After several minutes of waiting, he walked quietly to the table in the corner and splashed his face in a bowl of water. The flagstones were cold beneath his feet. Drying his face on the harsh, starched towel that hung upon a hook by the door, he sat for a moment on an old wooden chair. Rubbing his hands together for warmth, he waited for his heart to slow and his breathing to settle. Only then did he return to bed, pull the sheets over his head and attempt to sleep again.

  His next awakening came, as usual, at six o’clock. The rasp of the door on its hinges was enough to rouse him. For a while he lay still, his eyes resolutely closed. A warder entered his room carrying a candle ahead of him. Walking to the window, he threw open the heavy curtains. It was to no avail, of course, for at this time of year there was no morning light to admit.

  “Time to rise.”

  Bowman grunted in acknowledgement and buried his head deeper in his pillow.

  “Inspection on the hour, as usual.” The warder left the candle at his bedside and returned to the corridor, pausing only to turn up the gaslight directly outside the door.

  Bowman swung his legs from the bed and stood to stretch. With his fingers at their full extent, he could touch the ceiling.

  Still in his regulation nightwear, Bowman made his way along the corridor, a twist of used bedding bundled in his arms. As he joined the queue of dissolutes outside the bathing rooms, he let his eyes wander to each of their faces in turn. The cast-down eyes and grey, pasty skin spoke of nothing but despair. Some were soldiers from the African campaigns, he knew. Their twitches and groans gave them away. Each of the men deposited their sheets and nightshirts in a chute for washing as they reached the baths. The smell of sulphur pricked the air and, glancing up at the lamps, Bowman saw the walls and ceiling directly above the guttering flames were stained a ghastly, greasy black. Almost every other tile was missing or cracked. Despite the gas jets, he could plainly see his breath in the air around him. Several of his neighbours hopped from foot to foot or clapped their arms about them in a vain attempt to keep warm.

  Being next in line, Bowman stripped where he stood and let his nightshirt and sheets slide down the chute. Stepping behind the tiled partition that hid the communal baths from view, Bowman felt a tap on his shoulder. Turning, he was greeted by a naked, grinning man.

  “Fine day, ain’t it, your Majesty?”

  The manic gleam in the man’s eye gave Bowman pause. He knew a response was immaterial. The man’s face was framed with a haze of wild white hair but the eyes were alive with a childlike innocence. Bowman stepped into the bath and gasped. As ever, the temperature had been set just a few degrees below comfortable.

  He had been trusted to use his own razor and strop for several days now, but still it felt a novelty to shave himself. Having walked back to his room in a freshly starched gown, he had dressed in regulation clothes from a locker outside his door; a collarless shirt, trousers with braces and a heavy, tweed jacket. His razor and a shaving mirror had been set in his room. Wetting the blade in the bowl, Bowman’s eyes rose to see his reflection in the glass. He had certainly lost weight in the previous few months. Perhaps a stone or so. His skin was sallow, his moustache lifeless and wiry. His eyes were wide, the frown between them cutting deeper than he remembered. His hair lay limp on his head. The overall appearance was of a man some ten years older than his thirty-seven years. Bowman stood stock still in the silence, razor paused inches from his jaw, mourning for the man he would never be again. The breakfast bell jolted him back to the dreadful present and he rushed his shave, cursing as he nicked the skin on his neck.

  The route to the refectory was interrupted by the queue for physical inspection. It was quick and perfunctory; a look inside the mouth and ears and a comb through the hair. The doctor peered down his prominent nose at Bowman, his head seeming to rest on the high wing collar of his shirt. The warders who assisted looked bored. Evidently free of ulcers or fleas, Bowman was let on his way and joined another ragged line to pass into the kitchens.

  Despite the heat from the ovens and hobs that were already stewing meat for dinner, the room felt barely any warmer than the corridors outside. Having reached the head of the queue at last, Bowman was rewarded with a thick slice of bread smeared with lard and a cup of thin, steaming broth. Grateful for the warmth it afforded if nothing else, Bowman took the cup and cradled it in his hands. It was served by a large lady, her face flushed pink as a ham from her toil in the kitchen. Her apron was tied too tight about her fat waist and she would lift it now and then to wipe the beads of sweat from her wide brow. Meeting Bowman’s eyes, the woman fixed him with a hard, deliberate stare. Bowman made his way to join his fellow diners at a trestle table, one of two that spanned the length of the hall. The noise by now was almost intolerable. The size of the room meant that every sound, no matter how small, was rendered substantial. Conversations and arguments were amplified. Shoes scuffed against the slate floor and echoed to the roof. The slamming of plates and scraping of benches joined the melee, so as to render the chance of any quiet conversation quite impossible.

  As he lifted his cup to drink, Bowman became aware of a man opposite him attempting to raise his voice above the hubbub. Stabbing the air with a bony finger and jutting his lantern jaw before him, he commenced hurling the most inventive obscenities that Bowman had heard in some time. Holding up a hand, he attempted to quieten the man. Looking about him, he saw two or three warders roused from their torpor. The wild man was on his feet by now, tearing at his hair and thrashing wildly about him. His neighbours stood too, either to get as far away from him as possible or to egg him on. Bowman saw that some of the more sensitive souls were crying or cradling their heads in their hands. Yet more laughed. Upending his cup and spilling broth to the floor, the man now picked up his plate and sent it skidding the length of the table to roars of approval from his audience. Two of his fellows joined him in his ghastly performance, one to hold his arms by his side in an attempt to subdue him, the other to rub the remnants of his bread into his hair. Bowman sank back into his seat, wary. By now the warders had approached and had a hold of the man. His screams only increased as they pulled him to the floor, the crowd pressing forward for a better view. Bowman noticed the doctor who had given the inspections at the door had run in too, his coat tails flapping behind him. With his beaked nose and high collared shirt, he looked for all the world like a large, agitated stork.

  One of the warders shouted into the maelstrom. “Take him out! Restrain him!”

  The hall was in uproar. The
man’s hysteria seemed to have spread like fire from table to table. Some had started fighting, others stood with their mouths agape or threw themselves beneath the tables for safety. Hair was pulled, punches thrown and cups spilled. Food was thrown about the room with abandon. Obscenities filled the air. Bowman kept to his chair and looked about him with caution. More warders had entered the hall and attempted to calm the crowd. Bowman saw them blowing on their whistles, but they were barely heard above the maelstrom.

  “Return to your dormitories!” they shouted. “Return to your dormitories!”

  Reasoning that removing the offender would help to quell the riot, they headed to help their fellows. Fighting their way through the ruckus, they lay their hands on the man wherever they could; his clothes, his limbs, his hair. A table was upended as they dragged him over the tiles to the door. One group of men had broken into song. Swiftly, Bowman took advantage of the moment and followed the warders in their wake, nimbly stepping into the path they left behind them. As he reached the door, he saw the old man who had spoken to him in the queue for the baths standing solemn and erect, chest puffed out and his hand raised in salute. Bowman acknowledged the gesture and slipped round the corner to the labyrinth beyond. Ahead of him, he saw the warders manhandling the deranged man towards the treatment rooms. Only months before it might well have been him. His mouth dried at the memory. His early weeks here had been marked by behaviour that swung alarmingly from hysteria to an opiate-induced fog of melancholy. Bowman knew the man would be administered a sedative and restrained for the rest of the day, either in his bed or in a bath with a sheet placed over him save for his shoulders and head. He would be assessed later that evening to see how he might then spend the night. With the noise of the riot receding behind him, Bowman turned off the main corridor to the dormitories.

  At last, it was light. Bowman lay on the bed in his room. While he had been at breakfast, his sheets had been replaced. He knew that he had received preferential treatment in the past few weeks. The majority of his fellows languished in overcrowded dormitories with little or no privacy. They were noisy, unsettling places, as Bowman could testify. He had spent his first weeks in just such a place. Then, he had rarely slept due to the screams and shrieks that would punctuate the night. Often he would wake to find a stranger at his bedside, standing in eerie silence.

  The regime consisted of rest and routine. Those that could be put to work were placed in the laundry or the kitchens. Bowman himself had been placed on the allotments over the summer, which seemed to him a form of treatment in itself. The soil between his fingers and the certainty of growth made him feel part of the world and its processes. Any excess from the crops he gathered was sent to help feed the great gorging monster of a city, barely nine miles away. London’s appetite was insatiable. As he loaded sacks of potatoes and onions on to carts, Bowman had felt like a supplicant offering appeasement to a voracious god. Aside from the fresh vegetables, the food was nourishing enough but predictable. Stews and broth were the custom; in fact, anything that could be easily cooked in quantity was favoured by the kitchens.

  Bowman was fortunate. His room was comfortable if sparse. Just a little further up his corridor there were rooms similar to his own in every respect but that they were padded, kept locked day and night. They were seldom used and only as a last resort for those who proved a danger to themselves or others. Bowman wondered if his companion from breakfast had been taken there.

  As the light crept across the floor and up the walls to the ceiling, he could see clefts in the plaster above him. Cracked and rusted pipes leeched their ochre residue onto the walls. As Bowman sipped from his cup of malt liquor – another luxury he had recently been afforded – he let his mind drift. It was true he was feeling better every day, but he was scared of life on the outside. For the last six months, his life had been one of tedium. Excitement was mitigated and medicated against. Each day was much like the other, save for the gradual change in the seasons and the light at the window.

  He imagined himself back in his parlour; the picture of the Emperor Nero askew above the fireplace, the battered chaise longue by the door. In his mind’s eye, he lay there now, feet resting on a cushion, glass of Madeira in his hand. Looking to the chair by the fire where she would sit and sew, Bowman could see her slender hands at her needlework, her face inclined to him as she worked. The curve of her neck invited him, her skin alabaster. Anna. The very word seemed hollow now, devoid of meaning.

  He heard the hooves again. Anna turned to look, surprise in her eyes. He dropped his glass and tried to call her name but the words froze. His heart beat hard against his chest. He couldn’t move. And they were upon her. Bowman felt the blood fleck on his face. He opened his mouth to scream but heard a bell ring, long and loud. She lay in the road, shattered and twisted. And still the bell rang.

  Bowman opened his eyes with a start and sat upright in his bed. His breathing came fast and there was sweat on his brow. He found he had been clutching at his sheets, his knuckles white. Looking to the open door, he again hoped he had made no noise. The bell was ringing for the airing courts. He rose from the bed and pulled the towel from its hook. Wiping the sweat from his face, he took a breath. His heart had settled. And the bell had stopped.

  Bowman grabbed a regulation felt coat from a hook in the hall. Wrapping it about him, he joined the throng converging on the grounds. Most were herded to the airing courts; large, walled arenas laid to grass and shrubs where they could enjoy an hour’s supervised exercise. The warders cursed the cold almost as much as they cursed the inmates. Looking about him, Bowman saw the grass was resplendent in a frosty rime. Each blade a crystal. Drawing his collar closer about his neck, he trod carefully away from the crowd, heading for the allotments where he had been given dispensation to work unwatched. There was little to do at this time of year. The ground was iron hard. Bowman busied himself in gathering fallen wood from the nearby cedars and yew trees in a bid to build a fire. The blaze would keep him warm and the ash would serve to feed the soil for the next year’s crop. Looking about him he saw two or three others who, like himself, had earned the right to walk about the grounds alone. They kept their eyes down, Bowman noticed, as if in shame. After an hour, he was warm with his exertions. He stopped for breath and looked back at the building that had been his home, squinting into the low morning sun. Shielding his eyes with a hand, he tried to look at it afresh, as if for the first time.

  Colney Hatch crouched low and solid against the horizon. It was a grey, squat building that sprawled east and west from a large central entrance flanked by a wide colonnade. To the right lay the female wing, to the left the male. A bell tower pierced the morning sky at its centre, crowned with a copper dome. Bowman knew that each of the thousand windows he could see from his vantage looked into surgeries and dormitories, dining rooms, visitors” rooms and treatment rooms. There were workshops, schoolrooms, a dairy and even a brewery. As well as being home to over a thousand patients, room was needed, too, for servants and staff, teachers, surgeons, warders and attendants, cooks and gardeners. A veritable town bustled within those high, forbidding walls. Craning his neck to the left, he saw a smudge of smoke rising from the dirty city on the horizon, a greasy smear in the sky. Much was made of the progress of industry these days, mused Bowman, but the greatest mysteries lay within these walls, those of the human heart and mind.

  As he let his eyes wander back across the sprawling length of the building, Bowman saw an attendant approaching. Even from this distance and accounting for the hat and muffler the man wore against the cold, Bowman recognised him as the attendant once assigned to sleep in his dormitory. Dawkins was his name. Beyond that Bowman knew nothing of him, save he had a habit of grinding his teeth and calling out in his sleep.

  “Bowman!” Bowman saw the man’s breath twist about him as he approached. “Bowman! You’re called to the board.”

  Bowman dropped his hand to his side and cleared his throat, nervously. “Thank you,” he ras
ped, the cold air catching at his throat. He was suddenly aware that these were the first words he’d spoken all day.

  The committee rooms stood at the very heart of the building, affording grand views of the grounds to the front and rear. Colney Hatch stood in seventy-five acres of farmland and formal gardens, now bereft of colour and foliage. As the superintendent stood looking out at the wide, sweeping drive to the front of the building, the trees stood bare and the gardens empty. He turned back into the room to face the poor unfortunate before him.

  Ernest Wright was a young, unkempt man. His jacket was at least a size too big and his scrawny neck poked through a collar far too wide. His black, wiry hair defied all attempts to tame it and would, now and then, fall across his eyes. A protruding bottom lip gave him the look of a simpleton and his half-shaved face told the story of a man for whom there was never enough time. He sat with his hands between his knees, rocking to and fro, cutting a pitiful figure. It was the superintendent’s duty to pass judgement upon Ernest Wright. Judgement, at least, on the state of his wits. With a sigh, he took his seat behind the long table that dominated the room. Looking up and down the line of chairs beside him, he saw the matron, the doctor, a clerk and the chaplain were all avoiding his gaze. Having delivered their evidence they sat, impassive or absently fingering the piles of notes before them.

  The superintendent cleared his throat to break the silence. “Ernest Wright,” he began, “I have considered the statements from those here present and listened to what you have to say. It is my duty to consider both what is best for you and for society at large with regard to your place in this hospital. The doctor has pronounced you physically fit which goes much in your favour, but it is to the matron that we must turn with regard to your mental health. It is she that has had the most contact with you over the past weeks of your stay, and so her words carry great weight. It concerns me to hear of your ongoing fits of violence.” He noticed Wright’s rocking increase in its regularity and adopted a conciliatory tone. “I am not apportioning blame, Ernest. I know that this is a symptom of your condition. I note that the frequency of your outbursts is decreasing, a fact that gives me hope that in but a few weeks more you might well take your place in the wider world.”