12|
"Meret! Good to see you," Jackie called the moment Meret entered through the library door. She was busy sticking up posters at the board next to the entrance, advertising some upcoming readings. "Back for the biography, is it?"
"That's the plan for today," Meret said with a smirk to indicate her lack of enthusiasm for this particular reading matter. "By the way, Sebastian's asked me to say hello."
"Thanks. How is he? He hasn't got in touch since he texted me on your behalf."
"He's fine... but you know: nerds—shy and repressed." They both chuckled. "I think he'd really like to see you, though."
"Does he?" Jackie grinned, but Meret thought that she looked quite pleased. "Yeah, why not... give me a call when you lot are going out... pub, club, whatever!"
"Well, must rush," Meret excused herself with a look at her mobile. "Not much time left before the library's closing... I'll get in touch!"
Jackie cheerily waved her goodbye, then smacked her forehead. "Forgetting my own head next!" she exclaimed. "Remember the woman who's subscribed for the Marlborough Mills papers? She's been here, and when I told her that someone else was checking out the same stuff for information on Emily Thornton, she asked me to ask you to contact her." Playing back the last sentence in her head, Jackie rolled her eyes. "Seems she's a historian doing a piece on the Beardsley Wing for their upcoming 150th anniversary."
"Beardsley Wing?—What's that?"
"Mental health clinic. Used to be a psychiatric ward attached to the Milton Infirmary. Very progressive in its time... Here's the number—Fiona Goodwin, she's called." She handed over a business card with a handwritten mobile number on it. "You'll keep me updated, won't you?"
Meret called the historian the moment she was back at her flat. She would have called on her way back home, if it wasn't for want of some quiet and a writing pad at hand. After the exciting piece of information she had found in Thornton's biography, she was itching to find out how the pieces fit together.
"Hello, this is Meret Frederiksen. Ashley Library gave me your number," she said over the phone, after a brisk female voice had answered her call. "I'm calling because of the Marlborough Mills papers—" She let the sentence hang in the air.
"Thank you so much for calling back so quickly," Fiona Goodwin replied in a considerably more obliging tone. "I've been told that you are researching Emily Thornton... May I ask about your particular interest in her?"
"Oh. I'm in it purely for personal reasons... She's an ancestor of mine—although not in a direct line—and she's a bit of a mystery woman. I know some facts about her later life in Denmark, but there was virtually no information on her prior to her marriage. A mention of Marlborough Mills was about the only lead I had—so, when I was offered work in Milton, I took the chance and started to research at the library." Meret drew a deep breath after her explanation, before dropping the bombshell, "I've read today that the Beardsley Wing was one of the two beneficiaries of the trust that was set up after Marlborough Mills was sold in 1875—the other was Emily Thornton... Is this why you wanted me to call you?"
"Both yes and no," Ms Goodwin said. "I knew about the funding from our in-house archives at the clinic. But the reason I've become interested in Emily Thornton is that there is some correspondence from the 1880s between her and the then head of the psychiatric ward..."
"Correspondence? What kind of correspondence?—regarding funding matters?" Meret interrupted.
"No, professional... medical issues. Emily Thornton was writing from the psychiatric clinic in Rheinau, in Switzerland."
"Was she a patient there?" Meret asked, taken aback.
"No, she may in fact have been a member of staff... Which is—all things considered—even more baffling."
"You know, Miss Goodwin, family lore has it that she was practicing psychiatry in Copenhagen in the 1920s... I've even got a photo of her in front of the building we believe to have housed her practice—"
"Can we meet?—to pool whatever preliminary results we've got on Emily Thornton? I've got a hunch that this woman's bio needs some serious seeing into."
As the archives at the Beardsley Wing were within walking distance of Meret's workplace, they had agreed for Meret to drop by straight after work on the following day. Fiona Goodwin met her at the entrance of the clinic and—after asking to call her by her first name—she led the way via some back stairs to the archives in the basement.
"Home sweet home," she announced her utilitarian workstation in a windowless anteroom between two doors. By one of them they had just entered and the other one was a fire door leading to the actual archive, a large cellar room stuffed with filing racks. "No electrical equipment allowed in there for safety reasons," she explained, "That's why I had to set up my desk out here. Cosy, isn't it?"
"And I thought things were bad at my institute!" Meret laughingly agreed. "Now, as for my meagre findings... I've got a couple of photographs I can share with you, some travel reports from 1894 with circumstantial evidence that she may have co-authored them—they're written in Danish, though—nothing whatsoever on her from the Marlborough Mills papers... and finally some random mentions of her in a 1950s biography about her father John Thornton, also to be found at Ashley Library. This was a non-starter, too. The biographer was a typical 1950s misogynist for whom women existed only in connection with men. Both Thornton's wife and daughter got barely a mention."
"Oh dear," Fiona sighed. "I was hoping for something a little more substantial, to be honest... I really got my hopes up that I might be on to something special when I found those letters—"
"Can I see them?"
"Of course! In fact, I can send you scans of the entire correspondence, if you want. Just give me your email address."
"Have you been in touch with... what was it?—Rheinau? Does the place she wrote from still exist?" Meret asked.
"I've sent them an email earlier this week," Fiona explained. "Turned out it is a branch of Zurich university hospital these days... and now I just have to wait—and hope. Firstly that they have an archive at all, and then that they find either staff lists or anything else with Emily Thornton's name on it to shed light on what she was doing there at the time."
"What could she reasonably have done there?"
"At present I can only guess... She would have been too rich to work as a lowly nurse; she may just have been a translator for the actual head of the clinic, Eugen Bleuler—which in itself would be quite fascinating—although the letters appear to be written in her own name... So, frankly, I don't know."
"Eugen Bleuler... Is he of any particular interest?"
"Perhaps not in himself, but most definitely as a predecessor of Freud and CG Jung. Bleuler was an early contributor to the understanding of mental illness and coined many psychiatric terms."
"It would be interesting to understand how Emily got to Switzerland in the first place," Meret mused.
"Finishing schools came into fashion in the second half of the 19th century, so she might have gone there—although this doesn't explain how she ended up in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Those schools were generally located at Lake Geneva... And she would have needed to be quite a polyglot; French, then German, and eventually Danish."
"Actually, I'm Danish, and I speak both English and German, besides a little French," Meret pointed out.
"Well, yes," Fiona laughed. "Sorry. I shouldn't extrapolate from my own inexpertness... I'd take sciences over languages every time, and my French is more of the 'travel and survive' variety."
"It's definitely one of the advantages of growing up in a small country; lots of exposure to foreign languages."
"By the way, do you happen to know how Emily and her husband initially met?"
"They met in London at a Royal Geographical Society matinee early in 1890; Ole Frederiksen mentioned it in one of his travel pieces. They got married later in the same year." Meret looked at the equipment on the desk. No sign of any actual documents. "Do you think I could actually see Emily's letters now?"
"My bad, Meret!" Fiona apologised. "Of course, you can... I should have shown them first thing rather than endlessly quiz you."
Later they sat in the cafeteria for a final cup of tea—"No beverages allowed at the workplace", Fiona explained—before it was time for Meret to leave in order to meet with her workmates.
"Why the interest in Emily Thornton, if I may ask?—with so little to go by," Meret said.
"Truth be told, the history of the Beardsley Wing is pretty straightforward—in other words, dead boring—and I'd love to come up with a different angle," Fiona said. "And wouldn't it fantastic if there was an early woman psychiatrist in the picture?—at a time when women were still excluded from studying medicine in England."
For the remainder of the present and large parts of the following day, Emily and her father hardly exchanged a word. It wasn't that John Thornton didn't try, but his daughter cut short every attempt at an explanation.
Eventually, in the afternoon, he cornered her in their shared hotel parlour.
"Talk to me, Emily," he quietly demanded.
"What for?" she cried. "You sneak away to meet that obnoxious Miss Hopkins... and you keep the fact from me that my mother didn't die but disappeared! How am I to trust anything you're going to tell me?"
"Your mother did die, darling," Thornton gently corrected her. "By all that is known, your mother is dead. It is only because of the circumstance that her body was never retrieved—" His voice slightly faltered. "—that rumours started in the first place."
"Are you telling me that her body vanished in thin air? And I am supposed to believe this?" Emily snidely asked. "I want to go to where it happened—Nice, wasn't it? I want to see for myself."
"There is nothing at all for you to find out there, Emily."
"I don't care!—You owe me as much!" she shouted.
"Very well," he said at last, sighing heavily. "I shall change our bookings... If only to make you understand that there is nothing to see—and nothing hidden."
The following morning Emily almost felt bad for her father when she saw him at their breakfast table. Gone was the light-hearted man of their first few days in Paris. The person who sat opposite her looked positively haggard, with purple smudges under his eyes speaking of a series of bad nights. They made very little conversation over breakfast—taken inside because even the weather conformed with their general mood—and then it was time to pack and leave for the Gare de Lyon.
The train journey seemed to go on and on, and yet Emily couldn't remember a single landmark they had passed during the long hours riding south to Nice. The air in their compartment was humid and oppressive, and her many layers of clothes clung uncomfortably to her body.
"It's the marin," John Thornton explained, noticing her heightened complexion. "A warm wind blowing in from the sea that brings a lot of rain further inland... It will be sultry at the coast. You may want to adjust your attire once we have arrived at our accommodation."
Emily merely nodded in reply, self-consciously waving her fan which she put to use for the first time in public. Her father didn't look comfortable either, she saw. His dark frock coat and woollen trousers—his habitual way of clothing himself—were as bad a choice as her dark blue travelling costume.
"Where shall we stay in Nice?" Emily eventually asked. A look at her pocket watch confirmed that they should be arriving within the hour.
"We won't stay in Nice," he replied and, only when he saw her uncomprehending look, he elaborated, "I've made arrangements for us to stay in Èze... This is where your mother and your great-aunt Shaw resided during their winter at the Riviera. I expect to get confirmation of our booking upon arrival at Nice terminus station, and a means of conveyance to take us there."
He fell silent again, pointedly looking out of the window, thus making her understand that he was on this expedition under duress—and against his better judgment. At times her father was not an easy man to be around, given to brooding and the odd bout of temper, although, until now, it had rarely been for Emily to suffer his displeasure. Well, she had also inherited her fair share of the Thornton temper, and their stubbornness. She stared at him until he, noticing her gaze upon him, turned back to face her.
"Am I to see more of Miss Hopkins in the near future?" she asked once she had his attention.
"As you shall be staying in Lausanne for the next year, this is unlikely, don't you think?" was his sardonic answer. When he saw her eyes widen in shock, he added, "Emily, will you please give me credit for being able to take the measure of the likes of Miss Hopkins? Do you think that I didn't realise her shallowness?—that she would choose appearances over substance any day... and that I wouldn't recognise a laudanum habit gone out of hand when I see one?" He scoffed.
"No, I have no designs on Miss Hopkins," he said more calmly. "I never had any interest in her beyond the civility and attentiveness that is her due as a colleague's daughter... And when I met her in Paris—and choosing a public place to keep me above suspicion—this was solely to make her understand my position."
"I am sorry, papa," Emily replied repentantly. "It wasn't for me to ask—"
"No, it was not," Thornton agreed, his voice stern. "But I chose to reply regardless, to make you understand that I am not deceiving you."
"Oh, papa!" Emily cried. "Am I wrong about wanting to know?... Not about Miss Hopkins; that was just... spite. I mean about my mother—" Tears stung in her eyes.
"It's been, perhaps, time for you to know... but I don't think this here—" He gestured at the compartment, representing their journey. "—is the right way of going about it."
He rubbed his forehead, considering. "And yet, there may not be any 'proper' way... What I am afraid of, Emily, is that you may find that there are no simple answers—that there may be no definite answers at all—and I wanted to protect you from this for as long as possible." He smiled bleakly. "You should not have learnt about it from your uncle."
"Will you tell me now?" Emily asked, tears finally welling from her eyes.
"Once we are there I shall try." He touched her forearm and gave it a quick reassuring squeeze.
This was not going to be easy—for either of them.