Usher’s Passing by Robert R McCammon

Author:Robert R McCammon
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2013-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

25

IN THE GATEHOUSE, RIX had made a disturbing discovery.

One of the books he’d brought up to his room from the library the night before was a ledger, dating from 1864, that listed the names, duties, and wages of every servant at Usherland. There were three hundred eighty-eight names, from apprentice blacksmith to master of the hounds, and everything in between.

But the volume that riveted Rix’s attention was the casebook of a Dr. Jackson Baird, director of a place called the Baird Retreat, in Pennsylvania. The Baird Retreat was a private insane asylum. The casebook, old and brittle, with many missing pages, monitored the month-to-month progress of Dr. Baird’s patient Jessamyn Usher, Ludlow’s first wife and the mother of Erik.

Rix sat at his desk, the casebook opened before him and light spilling over his right shoulder. For the past hour he’d been engrossed in a chilling account of madness, his reading interrupted only when an occasional ferocious blast of wind jarred his concentration. Jessamyn Usher, Dr. Baird wrote with a rigid hand, was brought to the Retreat in November 1886. Judging from a portrait Baird had seen when he’d visited the Lodge, Jessamyn Usher had once been an elegant young woman with curly ringlets of light brown hair and softly luminous gray eyes.

On November 23, 1886, a snarling madwoman in a strait-jacket was locked in a padded room at the Baird Retreat. She had pulled out most of her hair, her lips and tongue were mangled from being continually bitten, and her eyes were red-rimmed, burning craters in a moon-white face. Ludlow did not accompany his wife; she’d been brought by four servants, including Luther Bodane, Edwin’s grandfather. When Jessamyn was admitted to the Retreat, she was twenty-six years old, and hopelessly insane.

Rix had continued to read, fascinated by this new-found skeleton in the Usher closet. Though Jessamyn was the well-educated daughter of a millionaire New England textile manufacturer, in the seven years of her marriage to Ludlow Usher she had deteriorated into something very nearly animalistic. It was four months before Baird could even stay in the same room with her and not fear an attack. Her symptoms, Baird wrote in December 1887, included profligate violence, profanity, gnashing of teeth, garbled and meaningless prayers shouted at the top of her voice, and physical seizures “during which the unfortunate Mrs. Usher had to be bound to her bed with leather straps, her mouth stuffed with cotton, lest she bite off her tongue.”

Jessamyn’s condition, Baird wrote, seemed to have had its beginning with the birth of Erik, in April 1884. On several occasions, Jessamyn—whose favorite pastime had been working with her roses, dandelions, and camellias in the estate’s greenhouse—had tried to murder the infant.

It took Baird until the summer of 1888 to persuade the madwoman even to talk about her son. Up until that point, the name “Erik” would send her into a tirade of cursing and praying. But during that fateful summer, the storm that raged within Jessamyn’s mind began to abate—or perhaps, Rix thought, Baird had simply found the hurricane’s eye.

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