Charles murmured a polite agreement. He had touched exactly that same sore spot with his uncle, a man of a very different political complexion. Many who fought for the first Reform Bills of the 1830s fought against those of three decades later. They felt an opportunism, a twofacedness had cancered the century, and given birth to a menacing spirit of envy and rebellion. Perhaps the doctor, born in 1801, was really a fragment of Augustan humanity; his sense of progress depended too closely on an ordered society—order being whatever allowed him to be exactly as he always had been, which made him really much closer to the crypto-Liberal Burke than the crypto-Fascist Bentham. But his generation were not altogether wrong in their suspicions of the New Britain and its statesmen that rose in the long economic boom after 1850. Many younger men, obscure ones like Charles, celebrated ones like Matthew Arnold, agreed with them. Was not the supposedly converted Disraeli later heard, on his deathbed, to mutter the prayers for the dead in Hebrew? And was not Gladstone, under the cloak of noble oratory, the greatest master of the ambiguous statement, the brave declaration qualified into cowardice, in modern political history? Where the highest are indecipherable, the worst… but clearly the time had come to change the subject. Charles asked the doctor if he was interested in paleontology.

“No, sir. I had better own up. I did not wish to spoil that delightful dinner. But I am emphatically a neo-ontologist.” He smiled at Charles from the depths of his boxwing chair. “When we know more of the living, that will be the time to pursue the dead.”

Charles accepted the rebuke; and seized his opportunity. “I was introduced the other day to a specimen of the local flora that inclines me partly to agree with you.” He paused cunningly. “A very strange case. No doubt you know more of it than I do.” Then sensing that his oblique approach might suggest something more than a casual interest, he added quickly, “I think her name is Woodruff. She is employed by Mrs. Poulteney.”

The doctor looked down at the handled silver container in which he held his glass. “Ah yes. Poor Tragedy.’”

“I am being indiscreet? She is perhaps a patient.”

“Well, I attend Mrs. Poulteney. And I would not allow a bad word to be said about her.”

Charles glanced cautiously at him; but there was no mistaking a certain ferocity of light in the doctor’s eyes, behind his square-rimmed spectacles. The younger man looked down with a small smile.

Dr. Grogan reached out and poked his fire. “We know more about the fossils out there on the beach than we do about what takes place in that girl’s mind. There is a clever German doctor who has recently divided melancholia into several types. One he calls natural. By which he means, one is born with a sad temperament. Another he calls occasional, by which he means, springing from an occasion. This, you understand, we all suffer from at times. The third class he calls obscure melancholia. By which he really means, poor man, that he doesn’t know what the devil it is that causes it.”

“But she had an occasion, did she not?”

“Oh now come, is she the first young woman who has been jilted? I could tell you of a dozen others here in Lyme.”

“In such brutal circumstance?”

“Worse, some of them. And today they’re as merry as crickets.”

“So you class Miss Woodruff in the obscure category?”

The doctor was silent a few moments. “I was called in—all this, you understand, in strictest confidence—I was called in to see her… a tenmonth ago. Now I could see what was wrong at once—weeping without reason, not talking, a look about the eyes. Melancholia as plain as measles. I knew her story, I know the Talbots, she was governess there when it happened. And I think, well the cause is plain—six weeks, six days at Marlborough House is enough to drive any normal being into Bedlam. Between ourselves, Smithson, I’m an old heathen. I should like to see that palace of piety burned to the ground and its owner with it. I’ll be damned if I wouldn’t dance a jig on the ashes.”

“I think I might well join you.”

“And begad we wouldn’t be the only ones.” The doctor took a fierce gulp of his toddy. “The whole town would be out. But that’s neither here nor the other place. I did what I could for the girl. But I saw there was only one cure.”

“Get her away.”

The doctor nodded vehemently. “A fortnight later, Grogan’s coming into his house one afternoon and this colleen’s walking towards the Cobb. I have her in, I talk to her, I’m as gentle to her as if she’s my favorite niece. And it’s like jumping a jarvey over a ten-foot wall. Not-on, my goodness, Smithson, didn’t she show me not-on! And it wasn’t just the talking I tried with her. I have a colleague in Exeter, a darling man and a happy wife and four little brats like angels, and he was just then looking out for a governess. I told her so.”

“And she wouldn’t leave!”

“Not an inch. It’s this, you see. Mrs. Talbot’s a dove, she would have had the girl back at the first. But no, she goes to a house she must know is a living misery, to a mistress who never knew the difference between servant and slave, to a post like a pillow of furze. And there she is, she won’t be moved. You won’t believe this, Smithson. But you could offer that girl the throne of England—and a thousand pounds to a penny she’d shake her head.”

“But… I find this incomprehensible. What you tell me she refused is precisely what we had considered. Ernestina’s mother—”

“Will be wasting her time, my dear fellow, with all respect to the lady.” He smiled grimly at Charles, then stopped to top up their glasses from the grog-kettle on the hob. “But the good Doctor Hartmann describes somewhat similar cases. He says of one, now, a very striking thing. A case of a widow, if I recall, a young widow, Weimar, husband a cavalry officer, died in some accident on field exercises. You see there are parallels. This woman went into deep mourning. Very well. To be expected. But it went on and on, Smithson, year after year. Nothing in the house was allowed to be changed. The dead man’s clothes still hung in his wardrobe, his pipe lay beside his favorite chair, even some letters that came addressed to him after his death… there…” the doctor pointed into the shadows behind Charles… “there on the same silver dish, unopened, yellowing, year after year.” He paused and smiled at Charles. “Your ammonites will never hold such mysteries as that. But this is what Hartmann says.”

He stood over Charles, and directed the words into him with pointed finger. “It was as if the woman had become addicted to melancholia as one becomes addicted to opium. Now do you see how it is? Her sadness becomes her happiness. She wants to be a sacrificial victim, Smithson. Where you and I flinch back, she leaps forward. She is possessed, you see.” He sat down again. “Dark indeed. Very dark.”

There was a silence between the two men. Charles threw the stub of his cheroot into the fire. For a moment it flamed. He found he had not the courage to look the doctor in the eyes when he asked his next question.

“And she has confided the real state of her mind to no one?”

“Her closest friend is certainly Mrs. Talbot. But she tells me the girl keeps mum even with her. I flatter myself… but I most certainly failed.”

“And if… let us say she could bring herself to reveal the feelings she is hiding to some sympathetic other person—”

“She would be cured. But she does not want to be cured. It is as simple as if she refused to take medicine.”

“But presumably in such a case you would…”

“How do you force the soul, young man? Can you tell me that?” Charles shrugged his impotence. “Of course not. And I will tell you something. It is better so. Understanding never grew from violation.”

“She is then a hopeless case?”