Melting snow mixed with her tears as Thomas said his last words to Anne. "My dear, you are in the best possible hands. For as long as you live, my bank will send money for your maintenance. You will be well cared for. The Aston Asylum is one of the finest and most progressive in all of Britain. Dr. Aston is both a doctor of divinity and a physician, a noted alienist who assures me you will have the best treatments known to medical science. Good bye, now. Most probably we will never see each other again, but rest assured that I will always have a place for you in my heart." With that, the door closed, and Matron led Anne toward the womens wing.
Anne was the only child of The Reverend Evan Jones and his wife. As a non-conformist, not Church of England, and a displaced Welshman, pastor to a small flock in the north of England, Rev. Jones never had much money, but his family never lacked for the necessities nor felt a need for luxuries. Anne was an intelligent and attractive child, with lively eyes and auburn hair, but she had a speech impediment, a stammer, which exposed her to ridicule. Her parents schooled her at home and discouraged her playing with others. When she was eighteen, she began her monthly periods, as was common in those days, when girls matured more slowly. Her parents arranged a marriage to a lawyer, Thomas Marlow, Esq., an ambitious solicitor in Newcastle. They were married in her fathers church, and, as Thomas took Anne to Newcastle, the Rev. Jones and his wife departed England to bring the Gospel to the heathens of Africa.
The wedding night: Thomas, overcome by lust for her pale, delicate body, ravished the virgin Anne without those gentle preliminaries which might have prepared her for conjugal coupling. In the morning, she communicated to him how painful and distasteful the experience had been, on her part. Her husbands reaction was to declare that he would never again visit her bed, or even her bedroom. She was forbidden to leave the ho... Læs hele novellen
