The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (10 page)

Then, with considerable flair, Dr Freede produced her
coup de théatre
. She had found new evidence which established beyond doubt both the innocence and sanity of Eleanor Marchant. There was a murmur and then a greater stillness in the audience.

Dr Freede had managed to trace the descendants of Eleanor’s younger sister Margaret. They still had papers relating to Eleanor, among them a number of letters written by her from Broadmoor to her sister. They demanded that efforts be made to re-open the case, claiming that Bradley had been responsible for the deaths. Dr Freede read extracts from the letters which, as far as one could tell, were coherent and no more repetitive than anyone’s might have been under the circumstances. Perhaps the references to Dr Bradley as ‘that fiend Bradley’, or sometimes simply as ‘the fiend’ could be judged as intemperate, but even that was understandable.

The letters were impressive, as far as one could tell from the extracts, except for one thing. All the material had to do with self-exoneration: there were no expressions of regret for the suffering and deaths of her charges. When the patients were mentioned they did not merit a single epithet such as ‘poor’ or ‘unhappy’; their deaths were not called ‘terrible’, they were just deaths.

Among the family papers Dr Freede had also discovered a letter to Margaret Marchant from one of the doctors in Broadmoor from which she read the following extract.

I became acquainted with your sister in 1903 when I first came as a doctor to Broadmoor. I have made it my unvarying practice never to come to any patient with a preconceived notion of their state. Accordingly, when I went to see Miss Marchant, I put aside from my mind all thoughts of the unhappy circumstances under which she had entered the asylum. My unbiased impressions were of someone not unnaturally in acute mental distress, but otherwise in full possession of her rational faculties. As I slowly began to win her confidence, I found her a most interesting and delightful conversationalist and—dare I say it?—companion. There came a time when I found myself confiding some of my own difficulties to her, and her advice was always very much to the point as well as morally bracing. There were moments when I wondered which was the doctor and which the patient! After an initial reluctance she began to talk of The Case. Her recollections of the circumstances which led to her trial and conviction were clear and coherent, and I gradually became convinced that she was wholly innocent of the charges brought against her, and that her sole misdeed was to allow herself to be duped by the man Bradley. This she freely acknowledged and reproached herself most bitterly for it. She urged me to make representations to the Home Office on her behalf and this I was very willing to do, even though it was a most distressing thing for me to see her great agony every time my petitions failed. It will always be a regret to me that Miss Marchant died at the moment when I believe I had at last persuaded the authorities to re-open the case. She will ever remain in my mind as a beacon of inspiration, a true friend to me, I may venture to say, and a wise counsellor who bore injustice with fortitude and disappointment with a determination to overcome it.

Dr Freede then brought her lecture to the following conclusion: ‘Here at last, it seems to me, we have a true picture of Eleanor in the last days of her life. She remained at heart as she always was, wise, sympathetic, understanding, but also a great campaigner. She was fighting now not for the sufferings of others, but for justice itself, and she died when it was almost in her grasp. Her great heart gave out before she could restore her reputation. As a result she has remained for over half a century a byword for mad wickedness, a sort of female “Jack the Ripper”. But now the time has come to ask the question again: Eleanor Marchant, Victorian Villainess, or Victorian Victim? I know what my answer is; I leave it to you to answer in your own way.’

It was a splendid flourish and fully deserved the applause it received. I turned to the elderly woman on my right for her opinion, but she had gone. Suddenly I felt curiously alone. It seemed to me, quite irrationally, that everyone was now convinced of Miss Marchant’s innocence except me, for whom the Broadmoor doctor’s letter was simply evidence of her remarkably powerful and manipulative personality, no more.

The secretary invited questions from the floor, but none were of any great interest. I wished the elderly lady was still there. She might have known enough to question Dr Freede’s thesis. As for me, I simply did not have the courage to challenge her in front of such a sympathetic audience; besides, though I disagreed with it, I thought her lecture a splendid forensic achievement and did not want to cloud her moment of glory.

After questions the meeting broke up; coffee was served from the back of the hall, and everyone milled around. Quite a crowd surrounded Dr Freede, but I felt it was my duty to make myself known to her. She spotted my approach and waved. Her admirers let me through into the presence.

‘You’re the playwright, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘I somehow knew you must be.’ She smiled with unexpected warmth. I congratulated her sincerely on her lecture. She nodded, almost impatiently, as if this was no more than her due.

‘You’re still not convinced of Eleanor’s innocence, though, are you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But you’ve given me a lot to think about.’ Dr Freede made a little grimace. Perhaps she thought I was being condescending. Perhaps I was.

‘I’ll ring you in a couple of days. I think I might be able to convince you.’

‘Why do you want to?’ I asked.

‘Don’t you want to know the truth?’

With that, it seemed my interview was at an end, and I went off to get a cup of coffee. To my surprise I found that the elderly lady who had spoken to me was serving drinks behind the refreshment table. Her sudden disappearance at the end of the lecture was explained. I asked her what she thought of Dr Freede.

‘I think Eleanor Marchant is a very persuasive woman.’

‘Don’t you mean Dr Freede?’

‘No, I mean Eleanor Marchant.’

I asked her what she had meant when she had asked me if I had fallen under her spell too. She said that she had once researched the Marchant case for a book she was writing. She said: ‘I found that if you get too close to her you can get burnt.’ I tried to ask her to explain further, but she deliberately ignored me and busied herself with serving coffee to others.

The next day there were one or two small articles in the papers about Dr Freede having found fresh evidence vindicating the notorious Miss Marchant, but they contained so many inaccuracies as to be worthless. The Head of Drama rang me up and I reassured her that I knew all about the so-called ‘fresh evidence’ and she seemed satisfied. I spent a day re-writing the final scene to include the Broadmoor doctor and then felt that it was time to type the final draft and deliver it to the BBC.

A week passed during which I typed the play. When it was done I was reluctant, as I sometimes am with a new work, to let it go. I re-read and revised it obsessively, then, one night at eleven thirty, just as I had finally decided to send it off to the BBC, the telephone rang. My mind was still so full of what I was writing about that I was not surprised to find myself talking about Eleanor Marchant with Dr Freede. Slowly, however, I became aware of the oddness of our conversation. Dr Freede had begun talking to me as if we had only just left off our discussion at the Fawcett Society over a week ago.

‘You’re still not convinced that Eleanor’s innocent, are you?’

I explained in the most emollient way possible that, persuasive as her arguments were, the evidence against Miss Marchant was too strong for me. On the other end of the telephone I could sense rather than hear a growing exasperation with my obstinacy. She asked if I had finished my play and I explained that I had and was about to deliver it to the BBC.

‘Then you have to come down and see me. I’ll show you you’re wrong about Eleanor. You needn’t worry about the expense. If you can get yourself down here I’ll put you up in a guest room on campus.’ I would not exactly say that I was afraid to refuse Dr Freede, but I was convinced that life would be a lot easier for me if I accepted.

We arranged a date and the following Friday I found myself driving down to Dorset. In the intervening days I had undergone a change of heart, not about Miss Marchant’s guilt, but about the whole nature of her story. It had seemed to me before that, though few narratives in real life had a beginning and an end, the story of a human life certainly did: birth began it; death ended it. But now I was not so sure: Miss Marchant was still alive in my mind and that of Dr Freede, and our respective versions of her career were in conflict. There had been no resolution and no dissolution. Just before I set out I looked for the piece of tile from Grove House, found it and put it in my pocket.

**

Dorset University campus is situated just outside Dorchester. It is a product of the 1970s, sculpted elegantly into landscaped parkland, its architectural beauties only slightly marred by the mildewed tinge which its concrete is acquiring. I arrived, as arranged, at six in the evening and met Dr Freede in a little office just off the Thomas Hardy Library. She seemed surprised to see me.

‘I was wondering whether you’d come,’ she said. ‘I thought you might bottle out.’ I detected an element of disappointment that I had not fulfilled her expectations. The phrase ‘bottle out’ did not quite belong to her: her nerves had borrowed it for the occasion from a younger colleague, perhaps even a student. She evidently realised that her reception of me was a little frosty, because she then became more animated and friendly, but I sensed that an effort was involved.

‘We’ll have something to eat earlyish. Can you stand Indian? Then there’s someone I want you to meet. Is that okay? Have you been here before? Come along, I’ll show you the campus.’

We spent a pleasant hour during which Monica lost much of her inhibition. She was amusing in a caustic way about the university and at one point we found ourselves giggling together in front of the very bad portrait of a recent benefactor. Even then I did not feel quite at my ease because I remembered that on her desk I had seen a silver framed photograph of Eleanor Marchant. Others had relatives, or pets, or loved ones; she had Miss Marchant.

At the Indian restaurant we continued to enjoy each other’s company, though I noticed that whenever I tried to bring the conversation near to the reason for our meeting she veered away from it. This, however, gave me the opportunity to get to know something of Monica Freede’s mind. She had a keen analytical intelligence and her wit was the sharp, sardonic kind that goes with it. Her specialist area of knowledge was social history from the seventeenth century onwards and, within these confines its depth was considerable. Outside its limits she showed scant interest or understanding. For example, she knew the themes and plots of many Victorian novels (particularly those by women) but had no views at all on their literary merits. A work of fiction to her was merely ‘interesting’ for the light it shed on social attitudes and conditions. She knew all about the privations which men and women suffered in the Crimean War, but little of its causes or principal battles.

More significantly, her understanding of human character seemed to me rudimentary. People to her belonged in unalterable categories: victim or oppressor, pioneer or reactionary, reformer or reprobate. She found it hard to grasp that a person could be both or neither, or could change over time from one to the other.

But my feelings of superiority towards her were checked by the knowledge that Monica’s mind as a whole was finer and more disciplined than my own. I was also conscious of something in her which I could barely comprehend, let alone emulate. She had a kind of daring, a willingness to think the unthinkable, reach out for the unattainable. Perhaps it was her very narrowness of vision which gave her the speed and energy to touch distant heights. I only knew that such brilliance had its dangers.

After the meal, at which she had barely touched her vegetable byriani, Monica announced abruptly that we were going to see someone who lived a little way out of Dorchester, and that I was to drive her in my car while she gave directions. When I asked who we were to see she simply said: ‘Her name is Maeve Bush. I think you’ll find her interesting.’

Monica’s habit of always thinking she knew how I would feel irritated me. I asked her who Maeve Bush was and what she did, but she smiled and said: ‘You’ll see.’

Half an hour later we found ourselves in front of a cottage on the outskirts of the village of Wolfeton. ‘This is where my friend Maeve lives,’ said Monica in an oddly girlish tone of voice.

Before we had got to the front door it was opened by a heavy woman in her forties with a frizz of red hair. She wore a loose shift dress of dark green on which were superimposed several layers of richly coloured clothing and a fair amount of hand-made jewellery. She greeted Monica effusively.

The front door opened directly into the main living room. ‘Maeve,’ said Monica when we had got inside. ‘This is my playwright that I told you about.’

I extended my hand which Maeve took in both of hers. They were damp and almost unbearably hot. She stared at me, smiling quizzically. She had a longish but handsome nose, strong chin and large green eyes. She must once have been the toast of the Glastonbury Festival before she put on weight.

‘Hmm, yes,’ she said after a short pause. ‘You have quite a way to go, but I think you’ll get there.’

There is always a smart answer to this kind of gnomic remark; unfortunately, I never manage to think of it at the time. In fact I was lost for words. I stared at Maeve’s ample cleavage on which, among other ornaments, rested a pendant consisting of a silver bat clutching a brilliant purple gem.

‘That’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘Is it an amethyst?’

Maeve seemed pleased. ‘Yes, it is. I’m glad you like it. It’s a bit too witchy for some people.’

‘Not for me,’ I said fatuously.

‘Good! Good!’ said Maeve laughing and, to my great relief, letting go of my hand. ‘Now then, what about some blackcurrant leaf tea?’