He nodded. He didn’t need to say it aloud. Both were thinking of the Hotel Dieu, in New Orleans. The Louisiana hospital where she’d finally managed to locate him, days after a near-fatal wounding almost a decade before.

She said, “This time I get the bed and the morphine.”

“And I get to do the worrying. Please agree that you won’t go back there.”

“New Orleans?”

“The Evelina.”

“Let’s not talk about it now, Sebastian,” she said, in a tone that suggested that if they should talk of it at all, it would only be to have his point of view discouraged.

He said, “How can I ever feel at ease after what happened today? We’ll find you something else.”

“And how will you support the four of us if nothing comes along? It’s not just about the money. They actually need me there, Sebastian. I know I wasn’t bred to be useful. But in that position, I am. What’s happened here isn’t a consequence of the job. This is misfortune. And misfortune strikes where it will.”

“Why did that argument never work for me?”

“Because in your case it wasn’t true. You went seeking misfortune out. Now go home. And change that shirt before Robert sees it. He’ll have nightmares.”

FRANCES TOOK the news badly. Though she set out an evening meal for Sebastian and Robert, she ate nothing herself. After a visit to the hospital, from where she came away with a list of Elisabeth’s housekeeping instructions, she did what she could to sponge the blood out of Sebastian’s suit and rescue his bloodstained shirt with soap and a bag of Dolly Blue bleach. In fact, for the rest of that evening she showed an unusual level of personal concern for Sebastian, as if near-tragedy had driven her usual shyness away.

Robert did not go to the hospital, by mutual unspoken agreement. He had the situation explained to him, but seemed unaffected. This, they knew, could be misleading. Emotion tended to hit Robert like winter squalls; suddenly, at unexpected moments, and hard.

For now, his main concern was for who would be taking him to his piano lesson while Mother was away.

THE BETHLEM HOSPITAL, THE THIRD OF ITS KIND TO CARRY the name and function, stood in St. George’s Fields with its main gates and gardens facing the Lambeth Road. Columns and a long Georgian frontage gave it the look of some enormous Quaker meeting hall. As “Bedlam” the old place had become synonymous with chaos and disorder; in art and in the public mind, it was nothing less than a living hell upon Earth.

The present-day truth was not quite so dramatic. Wards for the dangerously insane had been closed after the building of a state criminal lunatic asylum at Broadmoor, and most patients in the Bethlem were now private admissions from among the educated middle classes. Standards were high. Some even believed that they were living in a hotel. The hospital’s governors were fighting a slow battle to separate Bethlem and Bedlam in the public mind.

Sebastian’s avoidance of his basement office had little connection with the lunatics in residence. The “furious and mischievous, and those who have no regard to cleanliness” were now accommodated elsewhere. But the room made available to the Visitor’s man, as a favor to his employer, shook when trains passed under and stank when the heat came on. The blame lay with the Bakerloo Tube and the boxes containing unclaimed effects of long-dead patients, stacked floor-to-ceiling against the rear wall and filling almost half of the room. While the owners might be long gone, their odor survived them in their goods.

For this reason, Sebastian called by only when required to, or when his employer was on the premises. Several of the Bethlem patients were on Sir James’s list, their estates taken under the control of the Lord Chancellor’s department. It was entirely possible that Sir Owain might end up here, or somewhere like it, if investigation showed his reason to be compromised and his affairs incompetently handled.

They met between interviews in the doctors’ room, situated between the galleries for male and female patients. Sir James had co-opted the office as his own for the morning.

“Sebastian!” he said. “Don’t dawdle in the doorway. Time’s a-wasting. What can you tell me?”

Sir James Crichton-Browne had held the post of Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy for some thirty-six years, securing the job over fierce competition. Prior to that, he’d been the youngest-ever medical director of Wakefield’s West Riding Asylum. A broad-domed, silver-haired, bewhiskered Scot, he was something of a professional whirlwind. His intervention in any situation always guaranteed some form of action or change. But, like a whirlwind, he could leave considerable upset and disarray in his wake.

Sebastian said, “On the face of it, Sir Owain seems coherent and well cared for. His affairs are properly managed. No one that I spoke to gave anything but a good account of him.”

“What about this companion of his? Doctor Ernest Hubert Sibley. Is he sound?”

“He is a doctor,” Sebastian conceded. “After he qualified he spent a number of years in general practice in the provinces. His name disappears off the medical register for four years from 1888, but there’s no record of any disciplinary action.”

“Nor need there be. A man can drop off the register for any number of reasons. Changing address and not informing the General Medical Council, for one.”

“With that in mind, I checked to see if he might have spent those years in prison.”

“And?”

“You know I found nothing.”

“Doctor Sibley has written to me,” Sir James said, “forwarding these.” He moved the typed pages of Sebastian’s report aside, uncovering an assortment of handwritten notes. He slid these forward to place them within Sebastian’s reach.

“A letter from the parents of each dead child,” he said. “And one from the county’s chief constable. All thanking Sir Owain for his kindness and support in a difficult time.”

Testimonials. Of a kind. Out of politeness Sebastian picked up one or two and scanned them, but the words passed before his eyes and he took nothing in.

He said, “Are we to set these against our appeals from the families of his expedition’s members?”

“I promised them a full investigation, Sebastian. I didn’t promise the result that they wanted.”

“I should have made faster progress,” Sebastian said. “I fear I’ve been distracted.”

“How is Elisabeth?”

“Home, now,” Sebastian said, “and able to move around. She doesn’t complain but I can tell she’s still in discomfort.”

“When she starts to carp about it,” Sir James said, “you’ll know she’s on the mend.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We know that Sir Owain’s own wife and child accompanied him on his Amazonian jaunt and that neither returned. I’m in no doubt that what happened out there saw the beginning of his mental undoing.”

“I agree, sir.”

“Do you, now? Stick to the detective work and leave the diagnosis to me, Sebastian. I’m an old-school psychiatrist. I believe that life’s too short for psychoanalysis. But I can’t deny the value in a certain kind of therapy. If writing his book served some such purpose, then so be it. There may be comfort in blaming monsters for a grief one cannot bear. Though publication was clearly unwise.”

“I’ve one avenue still to pursue, sir.”

“Then pursue it until the end of the week. After that, we’ll have to move on.”