Free Thorn by Sarah Rayne Page B

people’s behaviour so accurately.
    She crossed back to the bed and tucked the errant hand beneath the covers. It was flaccid and still now, but for a few seconds there had been a threadlike pulse. Thalia smiled. Exactly and precisely as she had hoped. It seemed she had judged the dose accurately.
    The medical textbooks on chloral hydrate had been largely unclear to a lay mind, but what had been clear was that if it was administered with alcohol, a large enough dose could cause coma or death. Thalia had not wanted death for Eloise; she had wanted coma. And she had wanted the coma to last until Eloise was safely buried.
    If things went according to plan, Eloise would come out of the coma for long enough to understand what had happened. She would die knowing she had been buried alive. A bad death. But a just and fitting retribution.
    It was rather a pity that Royston had died naturally from that last coronary attack. Thalia would have enjoyed meting out a similar punishment to him.
    It was a pity as well that there was no means of knowing how much awareness Eloise would have at the end.
    Dan had always known, with a complete absence of vanity, that he had an aptitude for writing. He had been sufficiently successful as a journalist and more recently as a feature writer and biographer to know that he could produce reasonably written, reasonably readable prose. He had not made a fortune out of this aptitude, but he had made a living.
    What he had not known was that he would be able to write like this, working deep into the night, oblivious of his surroundings, plunging fathoms down into the strange, slightly surreal world of his own creating, sliding with almost frightening facility inside his characters’ minds and into their thoughts, scraping their inner emotions away from their skins, like scraping food from the sides of a pan.
    His heroine had been taken, heavily sedated and uncomprehending, to her asylum, and a bleak place it was. Her guardians had been deceived by the manicured gardens and the comfortable public rooms – and by the comfortable public manner of the sister in charge.
    Dan had enjoyed himself over the sister: Sairy Gamp in modern-day garb, minus the taste for gin but plus a nicely-judged taste in gentlemen. It amused Dan to provide her with an umbrella –about three-quarters of people reading that would miss the point, but it was worth putting in for the other quarter who would not.
    The problem was not so much avoiding the influence of modern-day writers as of steering clear of all those descriptions of nineteenth-century institutions. He had asked Oliver to bring anything he could find about Victorian workhouses or bedlams or even fever hospitals. If Oriel College could not supply the information, the Bodleian should be able to.
    â€˜I know you probably won’t be allowed to photocopy anything,’ Dan said on the phone, ‘but you could make notes for me, couldn’t you?’
    â€˜Oh yes. Yes, I could do that. It sounds rather interesting. You haven’t forgotten I’m coming to stay with you for half-term? It is still all right?’
    â€˜Yes, it is still all right, and no, I haven’t forgotten. I’ll meet the train, when you know which one you’re catching.’
    â€˜Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Oliver, rather diffidently, ‘I’ve bought a car. I thought I’d drive up.’
    â€˜Heaven preserve us all,’ said Dan and went back to his asylum.
    Places like Rosamund’s mental hospital did not exist any more, of course – at least, it was to be hoped they did not, although Rampton had almost passed into the language as a word in its own right, and there were occasionally cases of abuse in mental homes or orphanages, uncovered by crusading journalists. He had a vague idea that there had been something recently – the Rackham Commission, wasn’t it? Something to do with searching out malpractice inside NHS mental