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Ellen runs a trembling fingertip over the closed locked door of her world.
The great front door of the Bedlam is an imposing wooden gate that shuts everyone out who needs to stay out, and locks everyone in who can afford to be locked in. It’s thick and sturdy. But it’s not impenetrable. If she listens carefully, if she closes her eyes and concentrates, she can hear faint sounds from the other side: carts rattling by, their wheels clattering over the cobbles and squelching in the mud; dogs barking; chickens pecking; people talking. People laughing. People yelling and bargaining and disagreeing. People living.
Ellen drinks in news of the outside world like she’s dehydrating and it’s her only water source. She needs richer sustenance than can ever be physically provided for her in terms of food and drink here in the Bedlam, of which she receives plenty. Her fees are covered in perpetuity, and no-one dares mistreat her. She can’t leave her little prison world. And that’s fine, because she can’t leave. She doesn’t want to. But she can. Doesn’t she?
If she sees Matthew again she’ll smack him in the face. She was perfectly (really Ellen, perfectly?) content, yes, content with her lot in life until he showed up and started poking his long nose into things that didn’t concern him. She didn’t want the past dredged up. No-one closely or tangentially associated with her did. But he did. So that’s what happened. He bent his formidable will in her direction, and unearthed something rotten that was best left to decompose.
And he expected her to be grateful. Grateful! At the very least he expected her to be sympathetic to the horrors he’d survived to get to the truth of her story, and was clearly counting on polite understanding as the actual least. But gratitude?
She’ll wipe that self-righteous look off his pale face. She’ll watch his little eyes widen, and follow the arc of his smooth lawyer’s fingers up to his cheek in astonishment to cover the red outline of her palm. She’ll eat up his shock that she’s touched him like this, and turn away before she catches the flash of relief that she hasn’t touched him in a way fueled by desire. Because as well as being a busybody, he’s a coward. He strung her along for two years because he didn’t have the stomach to tell her his feelings towards her would never surpass platonic. If they were ever that to begin with. Did he ever actually like her? Respect her intelligence? Admire her care for others?
Or did he see just another wrong to be righted, an error to be corrected, an hourglass to be repaired and turned over? A poor wretch who deserved only pity, and the glorious cold sunshine of his benevolence. She was an interesting project to fill a few hours of his life. She was another example he could hold close to his chest and a trophy to display to the world that both whispered and screamed ‘Look at how good I am.’
Ellen’s stomach clenches, a familiar compression of anger and pain. Pain is her floor and anger is her ceiling. Despondence is her air. She breathes it in, her rotten invisible lifeline.
She knows she won’t actually hit Matthew if – when – she sees him again. For if – when? – she leaves the Bedlam, she won’t leave London. She needs the comforting bustle of people around her, of people who won’t care about her but who are there. She needs an unceasing background of noise; of talking, and laughing, and crying, and screaming, the more screaming the better, long screams, fake screams, soul-wrenching screams she needs it all, needs her corrupted drumbeat to accompany her out into the world.
But that’s just silly speculation. Speculation that, admittedly, makes her heart beat faster when she thinks about it now. It made her heart thump when she thought of it pre-Matthew as well, but that was in a different rhythm; it was heavy, saturated in a thick sauce of fear. These days the rhythm is lighter, brighter; it’s a long-dormant horse pawing politely but oh so insistently at the crack of light that’s appeared underneath its stable door.
Damn Matthew, maybe she’ll kick him. Or bite him. Scratch his eyes out. That’s what mad people do. But she knows she won’t. She also knows she isn’t mad. That horrible Dr. Guy, so full of genuine kindness, had threaded thoughts into her mind that she can’t tweeze out. Tiny tendrils of ‘You’re not mad for fearing the outside, just ill, and illnesses can be cured if we understand the root cause’ wrap around her brain and flood barren wastelands with light.
She knows the root cause of why she’s terrified of the outside. Of the wide blue sky. And now so does Guy. And Matthew, but he doesn’t count, he can drown himself in the Thames for all she cares, perhaps he can’t swim and will drown instantly, that will serve him right, especially if he’s scared of water.
Ellie closes her eyes at the stab of admonishment her newly active brain throws down at her. She doesn’t really want that to happen to Matthew. Her brain is shedding scabs. It’s slowly sloughing off a carapace it built itself to survive, and it doesn’t feel good.
And it doesn’t feel good because it’s not painful. Pain she can deal with. Pain is familiar, comforting even. It should feel more unpleasant. It should scrape, it should burn; her brain should pry onto its shield with a strength so desperate it consumes it. But her brain is working against her wishes. Like everyone in her life.
Ellen also knows this is unfair. And possibly untrue. Hopefully untrue. She was so fiercely independent when she was young. Before it all happened. Before she turned down West’s proposal of marriage and escaped the sentence of servile submission he sought to impose on her, for she could never be anything but a simpering wife to a courtier of the King. She rejected him and freed herself.
She rejected him and then trapped herself, for if she hadn’t chosen to walk along the path at the time she did, she would not have been set upon by West and his friend. Would not have been held down by this stranger while West forced himself into her. Would not have fought desperately and fiercely but in vain, for it’s always in vain to fight, while the great blue sky of an empty heaven swallowed her. It’s best to accept your place in life.
Except.
Except she could have another place in this life. Outside of this dank prison, for that’s what the Bedlam is, a prison, not a hospital despite what it’s poorly dressed up to be. Prison isn’t bad. It gives you routine and structure. Regular meals. A bed and a roof above your head. And she has a job, she has purpose. She is content.
She was content.
And then Matthew came along and thrust a crowbar into her locked door and pried it up as far as he could. He’s exhausted his strength and resources on the effort, and now her door is stuck halfway closed, halfway open. He’s left it in the worst possible position. It’s so warped that it can’t be closed fully. And it’s so heavy that it can’t be opened. There are no hinges on her door to remove or replace, for her door is embedded fully into the surrounding stone brickwork. She can block the gap up as best she can, with rags and cheap wooden furniture; with memories of past contentment and deliberate avoidance. Sometimes a chill wind blows through the gap. Sometimes it’s a warm breeze. But there is always something, always movement through her unwanted egress. If she wants to remain in the Bedlam, she’ll have to adapt to this ruined architecture.
And if she wants to leave, she’ll have to crawl through it.
She’ll have to crawl on her hands and knees over rough cobbles and sharp stones, through stagnant puddles and filthy straw. She’ll have to hurt and demean herself before she has space to stand up, to stand up tall, to uncoil and face the sun and be as close to the sky as she’s ever been since that day.
She closes her eyes at the thought. She waits to feel dizzy, to feel immolated with terror. A diluted form of these symptoms of her condition can be brought on if she thinks about being outside, cast out of the safe heart of the Bedlam. Her heart beats harder. Her fingers clench tightly into fists. But she doesn’t scream. She doesn’t throw herself onto her bed and curl up and wail.
She squeezes her eyes closed tighter. She wants to feel these debilitating reactions. They’re hers, she’s had them for decades, they’re familiar and have a known antidote, which means they’re safe. The sluggish part of her brain that’s still waking up, the accomplice to the part that’s always craved news of the outside, kindly tells her that time moves on, and to change doesn’t mean to regress. Both parts tell her that she’s always had more choices than she’s cared to admit.
Matthew may have channeled his blinkered obsessive force to throw a punch at her door with such strength that it smashed a hole through it, and Guy may have sanded the hole’s edges smooth to remove the splinters, but only she can use her door. She was given a key to her padlocked door the moment it was slammed behind her, a key she buried but didn’t discard. She’s always told herself she literally couldn’t destroy that key, couldn’t break it or melt it or bury it deeply enough for it to rot away into the earth. But maybe she didn’t truly want to. In a final act of courage before it was put in deep freeze for twenty years, a part of her burned the key’s teeth onto her skin. It made a perfect copy for her to carry around.
She doesn’t want to give Matthew the satisfaction of being right. For that’s what she’ll give him if she crawls through the door he’s so gallantly damaged.
But she’d be taking so much more for herself. And why should she care what Matthew would feel? He only cares about himself anyway, so let him get on with it. Although, Ellen thinks with a sigh, that’s not right; Matthew mostly cares about himself. Never always. He wraps it up in beautiful layers of compassion for others, but his selfish center is stark. She doesn’t blame him for having a degree of selfishness. But she does, and will, blame him for the pain he’s caused others in service of it.
She wishes he hadn’t investigated her past. She wishes he felt the same way she feels about him because she still loves him, god help her she still loves him. He’s intelligent and witty and would drain oceans to help someone in need. He doesn’t do this because he wants to preen about how he’s so goodly and elevated above others, but because compassion is the true core of him. It’s the pillar that everything else is scaffolded around. Sometimes that comparison hardens into obsession, and stone blinkers grow on each side of his face. But these stones are held in place with cheap cement, and they crumble if pressure is applied. He is like no other. There will be no other like him.
Maybe her feelings for him is the burden she’ll have to carry if she crawls outside. It’s the new weight she has to bear, an unwanted mutation that can only be dissolved, slowly, one fraying strand at a time, by exposure to light and heat. If she stays in the Bedlam, here in the damp dark, she’ll never truly get over him. He’ll be another thing she can’t truly destroy. He’s one of so very few people to have made a positive impact in her life that her heart, starving for company and simple human decency, won’t let him be forgotten. If she wants to be rid of him, she’ll have to burn him away.
She’ll have to leave.
She has many reasons to want to leave the Bedlam. She has many reasons she wants to stay. But some things, once started, can only be ended. They can’t be rewound or paused indefinitely. The system of the world doesn’t allow it. But it does give her a choice. It gives us all choices in how to navigate it and live within it. Sometimes we make good choices, sometimes we make bad ones. And like with all choices, it is our motivation behind them that truly counts. Action trumps thought. But action with intent triumphs over action without meaning.
Ellen runs two steady fingers over the closed unlocked door of her world.
She has no certificate of lunacy, which means she is free to leave any time she likes. She has her fees paid for her, which means she can stay until she dies.
Ellen’s two fingers slow, and then still. Hesitantly, as if she’s violating something scared, she pushes. Her heart thumps pleasurably. This action can’t of course open the door, her pressure is too weak. But she’s done something she thought she’d never want to do. Or was able to do. Maybe tomorrow she’ll push on it with three fingers. And then four. Then with one hand followed by two.
She’ll move forward steadily, increase her pressure steadily, and see if she can put a toe into the light without being burned.
And if she is burned, she’ll shed that dead layer in time as well.