Page 77 of What Cannot Be Said

“Except?” prompted Sebastian when she paused.

Henrietta let out a long, pained breath. “The whispers started perhaps six months after she married Salinger. At first it was all servants’ talk—you know the dreadful way they can gossip from one house to the next.”

“What were they saying?”

“That Georgina had a vicious temper. That she hated to be crossed or made to feel embarrassed or slighted in any way. That she could be sweet and laughing one minute and then turn into a raging vixen. She was with child at the time, so at first her moodiness was attributed to that—and even for a while after Duncan was born because... well, you know how some women can become quite cast down after the birth of a child. But eventually Salinger took her off to the Priory and began spending more and more of his time there. When he did come up to London, he frequently came alone.”

“What was wrong with her?”

“Who knows? I’ve no doubt we’ve all known women—and men—like that at some point: quick to anger, impulsive. Her moods would swing unpredictably from excitement and joy to something dark and reckless. At one point she had a high perch phaeton she used to drive in the park so fast and with such wild abandon that it was a miracle she didn’t kill someone—or herself. There were whispers of excessive gambling, too, and crazy spending sprees. I suspect she ran through a significant chunk of her father’s money before he was even dead. And then there were the rumors that she used to cut herself.”

“Cut herself?”

“Yes, with a knife or pieces of broken glass. Not anywhere it showed, but on her...” Henrietta paused. “On her legs. Then one day her abigail found her cutting herself with one of Salinger’s razors. The woman tried to stop her, and Georgina flew into one of her rages and killed her. Slashed her throat.”

“Good God,” said Sebastian. “How did they ever keep that quiet?”

Henrietta’s lips flattened into a thin line. “Septimus Bain was an extraordinarily wealthy man, and as we all know, wealth brings power. He used it.”

“I thought Bain was dead by then.” Just one more thing, thought Sebastian, that Rhodes had obviously been lying about.

“Oh, no; he didn’t have his fatal apoplexy until a year or two later, after he lost a great deal of his fortune in some bad investments. The abigail’s death was declared a suicide—”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I wish I weren’t. In exchange for the verdict, Georgina was quietly committed to a private lunatic asylum out in Bethnal Green. At first everyone was told she had retired to the countryside to recover from the distress of finding her woman with her throat slit. But after a few years, when she became worse instead of better, Salinger let it out that she had died.”

Sebastian felt a heavy burden of sadness pressing down on his chest. He didn’t ask how the Dowager had come to know all this, but he didn’t doubt it for a moment. “Which one?” he asked hoarsely. “Which asylum?”

“Chester House. But you can’t mean to go there?”

Chapter 47

With a deep sense of foreboding, Sebastian left the Dowager’s house in Park Lane and turned his horses toward the depressed area on the northeastern fringes of London known as Bethnal Green.

He had never personally visited a madhouse; never had any desire to join the ranks of those who paid to be escorted through the halls of Bedlam and gawk at the public mental hospital’s hordes of naked, shrieking inmates. As a private hospital, Chester House was unlikely to turn their patients into an exhibition for the entertainment of the curious. But private asylums all too often hid their own horrors, for far too many of their patients were perfectly sane men and women who were seen as problematic or inconvenient by their families: daughters locked away by their parents for being headstrong and willful; sons judged by stern fathers as hopelessly wild and immoral—or too interested in those of their own sex; wives quietly disposed of by husbands who wanted them out of the way; wealthy heirs and heiresses at the mercy of relatives scheming to control their fortunes... It was one of the ugliest, most disturbing secrets of their society. And while the Duchess of Claiborne seemed confident that Lady Salinger’s commitment to Chester House had been warranted, Sebastian knew better than to take anything on faith—particularly when it came to murder.

At one time Bethnal Green had been the site of a number of large country homes for wealthy London merchants, back in the days when it was a simple hamlet, a place of market gardens and scattered weavers’ cottages. Now the area was a wretched hellhole of breweries and foundries, of crowded, filthy tenements filled with the desperately poor, and of more than one madhouse. Sebastian tended to avoid the district as much as possible.

When he reined in before Chester House, he found himself staring at a rambling, once-grand structure that probably dated to the seventeenth century. It stood back from the lane that ran along the western edge of the old green, with a shallow, half-dead front garden thrown into deep shadow by a pair of towering, ancient yew trees that loomed menacingly over the house itself.

“Walk the horses around the green,” he told Tom, handing the boy the chestnuts’ reins.

The tiger scrambled forward, obviously anxious to get away from this place. “Aye, gov’nor.”

Hopping down to the lane, Sebastian turned toward the house’s cracked, sunken front walkway, then found himself hesitating. It was as if he could feel a sickening miasma of fear, horror, and despair emanating from the place, so that he had to force himself to walk toward that grim, forbidding front door.

He was greeted by an aged, slightly stooped matron whose stern expression relaxed as he introduced himself as Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin. He explained his interest in seeing Lady Salinger as that of a relative—which wasn’t completely a lie, since like most old families the Priestlys were connected to the St. Cyrs somewhere in the past.

“Of course, of course, my lord,” exclaimed the matron, her hands coming up with their long, bony fingers entwined together as if in prayer. “Please do have a seat, my lord. I shan’t be but a moment. I’ll just call Dr.Palmer; I know he’ll want to see to you himself.”

She hurried away to reappear a few minutes later with a dark-haired, stocky gentleman somewhere in his forties who bowed and introduced himself as Dr.Samuel Palmer. “How extraordinarily kind of you, my lord, to come visit our dear Lady Salinger.” He gave a sad shake of his head, his elbows spreading wide as he hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his dark, conservative waistcoat. “It’s such an unfortunate case, you know. Most unfortunate. She’s been here nearly as long as I have.”

“So you were here when she first arrived?”

“I was, yes.” He paused, a look of concern drawing his brows together and twitching his prominent nose and chin. “You’re quite certain you wish to see her? She probably won’t recognize you, you know.”

“Yes, quite certain.”

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