Doctor Who_ The Sleep of Reason - Martin Day [102]
anything.
From my vantage point I could see no patients, and had no idea how many may have survived the frenzied violence, the ensuing flames. Such things belong to the future of Mausolus – if it has one.
A human sound, a distance from the house, caught my attention. I gathered my wits and set off towards it, and in time came upon Miss Thorne, slumped on a carpet of grass and pine needles a yard or two in front of the mausoleum.
She was sobbing, and coughing against the worst effects of the fire, her, face blackened yet pale.
‘My dear,’ I said as I approached, then sought to help her to her feet, ‘what are you doing here?’ She was shivering uncontrollably. ‘You must get out of the cold,’ I added – though where any of us might spend the night I had not yet considered.
Miss Thorne did not reply at first, striving to control her coughing and to steady her breathing. ‘Is this not the right place to come to die?’ she asked, managing a half-smile.
I gave her a few moments to rest – it was clear that she had very nearly crawled to this position from Mausolus itself – and then let her speak some more. She told me that a stranger had freed her from her locked cell (Mr Sands, I should imagine) and, as she sought to flee from the flames, she feared that she might be the only patient to survive the great fire. However, by the 188
time she emerged from the building and into the air, her breathing felt uncomfortable and hard; her first instinct, to run to the village, was supplanted by a more basic desire, which brought her to the mausoleum.
It is a grim building, half hidden from Mausolus House by a ragged curtain of pines and elms; it looks down on the older building as if a reminder of the certainty of death. I can just see the mausoleum, or the trees that hide it, from my window; it is not a view I care for greatly.
Up close, the building is as dreary and cold as one might expect, with numerous faux Grecian columns and alcoves. Carvings of long-dead gods stretch along outer walls marbled by years of rain and slowly creeping ivy; the doorway is framed by twin statues of sightless angels, their torn and ragged wings arching upwards and touching at the apex of the frame. I would swear that the building has become darker, even since my arrival, as if it is leaching death out of the rich soil, out of the bone-filled caskets that fill its central chamber.
‘You know that my family are buried here?’ asked Miss Thorne suddenly.
I nodded.
‘You never spoke of it before.’
I tried to place my coat about her shoulders but she refused. ‘There always seemed to be other things to discuss,’ I said. ‘Matters of life, and vibrancy, and hope.’
‘I had always hoped that I would leave Mausolus one day,’ said Thorne.
‘That was my hope also,’ I sighed. ‘It still is.’
‘Well, now I have,’ she said with a triumphant smile. ‘And I have brought myself to the family tomb, to the place that gave my prison its name.’
Miss Thorne was right. ‘Your family bought the workhouse, turned it into an asylum, named it after dead King Mausolus as if in a joke. Then they built this mausoleum, to make the point once more.’
‘It is but a short walk from Mausolus to here, as I have just discovered,’ said Miss Thorne.
‘You are not the first, nor shall you be the last, to make the journey from the asylum, the hospital, to the family tomb here,’ I said. ‘I am grateful for your family’s generosity, but I need only to glance out of the window to be reminded that they do not do this out of altruism.’
‘My father always used to say that our family is prone to afflictions of the mind. He said that my past. . . misdemeanours only proved the point.’
I could hardly bear to hear this. ‘And yet, records show, that when you first came here, you were not in any way ill! You became ill because of your environment, because of your treatment.’
Miss Thorne nodded. ‘That might indeed be true. But I do not wish you to think poorly of my father. He was a good man. He was brought up a certain way, a victim of his station, you could say.