Page 97 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

"Dr. Strode certifies, over his signature, that he examined Lady Linnet and found her of unsound mind." Harkness turned the certificate face up upon the table, unhurried. "With the commissioners' leave, I should like to put a few questions to Dr. Strode upon that examination."

Mr. Ellison inclined his head. "You may."

"Dr. Strode." Harkness did not approach him; he merely turned, as a man turns to remark upon the weather. "I shall begin with a fact not in dispute. Lady Linnet has been deaf from her infancy. She does not hear speech. She has never heard it—not a word, not a whisper, in the whole of her life. You were aware of this when you examined her?"

"I was aware of it. Yes."

"Then tell the commissioners, if you please, how did you communicate with her?"

"I observed her. As one does. Her manner, her comprehension, her responses to⁠—"

"Her responses to what, Doctor?"

"To my questions."

"And how did you put those questions to her?"

A pause, a fraction too long. "In the usual way."

"Aloud?"

"Naturally aloud."

"Aloud." Harkness let the word hang. "To a woman you had just told me you knew could not hear. Who, then, interpreted them for her? Who carried her answers back to you?"

Strode's eyes went, once, to Carmody, and found no help there, and came back. "There was no call for an interpreter. Her condition was evident upon observation."

"Observation." Harkness repeated the word as though tasting something gone off. "Let me be certain I have understood you, for the commissioners will wish to be certain too. You asked her questions she could not hear. You received answers she had no means to give you. You did not converse with her at all." He let it sit. "You looked at a young, deaf lady across a room, Dr. Strode, and you signed your name to the state of a mind you had no means on earth to address. Is that correct?”

Strode said nothing. There was nothing he could say that would not make it worse, and some animal instinct in him had at last worked that out.

"I have no further questions for the doctor upon his method," Harkness said. "I have a great many upon his motive."

One of the medical commissioners had begun, very slightly, to frown.

"That alone unmakes the certificate," Harkness went on. “But the commissioners should not be left to suppose it an honest error. There is the matter of why Dr. Strode wrote what was wanted." He laid down a second sheet—the register, the tidy years of it, Strode's signature against the house in Kent, fee upon fee upon fee. "Dr. Strode has drawn payment from Elmwood House—the very establishment to which he certified Lady Linnet Everly—for upward of fifteen years. The law requires the certifying physician to have no interest in the receiving house, precisely so that no man may be paid to find a woman mad and paid again to keep her. Dr. Strode has been paid both. His certificate is not merely mistaken. It is bought."

The silence in the room had changed its quality entirely.

Strode came half out of his chair, his face the color of tallow. "This is—the arrangement is perfectly usual—any physician of standing⁠—"

"That," said Mr. Ellison, without heat, "is rather what alarms us, Dr. Strode. Sit down."

He sat.

The chairman turned his grey, unimpressed gaze upon Linnet, and his manner gentled by some fraction I would not have credited a moment before.

He then addressed Lord Charles. “Lord Charles, I am given to understand you can make yourself understood to the young lady." Harkness had agreed that Lord Charles should interpret for Linnet. Because Miriam and I were interested parties in the challenge, and our close connection to Linnet, our efforts could have been called in question.

Lord Charles came to his feet. "I can, sir."

"Then ask her this, and render her answer faithfully, on your honor." Mr. Ellison studied her. "Does she know where she is, and why?"

My sister's gaze followed Lord Charles's hands. She nodded that she understood and—steady, unhurried—answered.

Lord Charles’s voice was not quite his own as he interpreted for her.

"She says: 'I am at Whitehall Place, before the Commissioners in Lunacy. My brother has had me certified insane so that I need never trouble his name again. I am not insane. I am merely deaf.”