• • •
Some time later, two village policemen found Sir Norman Percy kneeling at the bedside of his dead wife. They had been summoned by a chambermaid who’d come upon the headless corpse of Dr Cadwallader floating in its own gore over in the east wing. Sir Norman offered no resistance, and the following day was arraigned at the county assizes at Newbury on a charge of capital murder. In a celebrated trial at the Old Bailey in the autumn of 1936 he was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and committed to Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum, as it was then called. After that first tragic blaze of psychosis had burned itself out, he resumed the role he had played so well all his life, that of the bucolic squire, and spent the rest of his mortal span, in Broadmoor, in a state of happy and imperious insanity. He died in 1957, and was buried beside his wife in the churchyard at Phlange. Upon his tombstone, curiously, is carved a verse of Melville, which runs:
What Cosmic jest or Anarch blunder
The human integral clove asunder
And shied the fractions through life’s gate?
PATRICK MCGRATH is the author of two story collections and eight novels, including Spider, Asylum, and Trauma. His most recent novel is Constance. He lives in New York. For more information, please visit www.PatrickMcGrathNovels.com.
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ALSO BY PATRICK MCGRATH
The Grotesque
Dr. Haggard’s Disease
Asylum
Martha Peake: A Novel of the Revolution
Port Mungo
Trauma
Constance
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1988 by Patrick McGrath
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
ISBN 978-1-5011-2538-6
ISBN 978-1-5011-2539-3 (ebook)