Lord Sebastian Brotherton
Physical State: Refreshed and "stimulated"
Mental State: Ponderous
The townhouse on the corner of North Peabody and East Curwen was a welcome home away from home, a New England design in the very truest sense. The mock Tudor fascia, the arching shadows of the gable and the humble yet solid limestone of the floors - Sebastian could pull the curtains and halfway fancy he was still in Wakefield. With the heavy velvet curtains pulled aside, the weak mist-born sunlight filtered in; from his sitting chair he could make out the gazebo at the centre of Independence Square. Standing and crossing to the lean against the glass, he picked out the two young fellows sat talking in the shade. Each had books piled by them on the bench, and their suits looked respectable but faded; students at the local university, he reasoned, or perhaps fresh young academics.
"Your tea, sir." The staff had come with the house, or rather been hired by the agents Sebastian had contracted in preparation for his arrival. The service set was of course one of the first things sent ahead of him. Once the china cup was placed in front of him, Sebastian reached into his jacket pocket to produce a small medical bottle. As the remains of breakfast was cleaned away, Sebastian took his tea with laudanum and sugar, to coat the tincture's snuffy, bitter notes. By the time the cup was empty, Sebastian seemed to sit a little straighter in the chair, as if heavy bags were lifted from his shoulders. Then he retired briefly to his study, to apply a little colour to his face before he met the day. He was expecting a knock to come fairly soon.
True to Sebastian's expectations, a knock pounded on the front door: two short raps and then silence. When the door was opened, the man waiting outside placed the cabbie hat in his hands upon his balding head - apparently removed to perhaps scratch some itch, or to perhaps brush drops of melting snow from the shoulders of his brown wool coat. It didn't matter. It was already back in place as he stared up at Sebastian. His watery-looking eyes didn't blink at all as he said, "Sir Brotherton's ride is here."
With his initial message delivered, he turned and began walking down the pathway back to the road, apparently uncaring if the one who had answered the door followed him down. His shoes squished on the damp walkway but kept to the path, away from the slowly-melting piles of ice and snow that lined the walk. As long as the servants tended to them, the walkway was unlikely to freeze over. The driver could not have known that, but he likely knew the path was safe. Surely he had traveled it at least once. He walked to the sleek black car parked on the road. The back right tire, nearly worn smooth like the other tires, rested in a ice-lined pot hole. As the man opened the back door of the car for Sebastian to enter when he was ready, he did not seem concerned in the slightest. At worst, he simply kept flickering his gaze about the quiet road, focusing whenever a person or a car passed by and appearing to cringe whenever they came too close.
A soft rap on the door notified Sebastian that his driver was here, but of course this was not a prod to make him move. The aristocracy moved on their own time, and it was the place of the lower social orders to react to those actions. And besides, Sebastian still had to apply some toiletries (a delicately spiced cologne dabbed softly twice on each side of his neck), select the appropriate cufflinks for visiting a sanatorium (he had some stainless steel ones he felt were suitably 'sterile' for a medical environment) and a dozen more sundry little personal tasks before he seemed to feel entirely ready to face the world.
The man that emerged from the house - the door having been opened by the butler, of course - was apparently hale and hearty, wrapped up in a warm, thick winter coat against the winter chill. He walked with a silver-tipped cane and the wind caught his thin, light hair and tousled it gently. Of course, the colour in his cheeks was painted on and the pep in his step was chemical in origin. He trotted down the path to step into the waiting car, without saying a word to the driver, and slid in tight into the corner of the back seat, the furthest possible point from the open door. Waiting for the door to be shut and the driver to do his job, he reached into his inner pocket and produced a slim volume of verse he'd brought with him as a diversion on the drive up to the Sefton Ward. He ran his hand softly down the gilding on the spine before he cracked it open to peruse.
The driver closed the door after Sebastian and walked back to the driver's side. He jumped as a car nearly clipped him, though his surprise seemed only vaguely related to the proximity of the moving car. Once he got into his seat and started up the car, it was clear he had barely been affected. His driving was just as smooth as though nothing had happened. The first few minutes of the drive went in complete peace, and it seemed like he had no plans to bother his client - employer, perhaps, may have been better for the service he was expected to deliver. Sebastian was able to read in peace before the car rolled to a stop at an intersection, letting another car pass ahead to avoid an accident on the still-icy roads.
"I've passed by that house of yours dozens of times. Never saw anyone in it, until today. New in town, right?" His words did not end as much as they ran into each other like a shallow brook - not smooth enough to slur together, nowhere near distinct enough to be enunciated. "You'll probably have more luck than most once the doctors see what you're made of - whatever you're looking for. Just be careful - seems like the crazy's following the cold this year. Arkham's never had this much before, or so I hear." With the road clear, he continued driving, and threw out one last casual remark. "Sure would be a shame if you caught the crazy just after showing up, after all." The Arkham Sanitarium now loomed at the far end of the road. With the driver's words, it was hard to say if the looming was of a guardian golem set to protect the secrets within, or of a leviathan beast determined to devour the city's inhabitants.
No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born / In a half savage country, out of date; / Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn; / Capaneus; trout for factitious bait. Sebastian read his Pound before snapping it closed in response to the driver. He had served with men of lower standing, sat among them in the sanitarium and had little to do but talk. "I have recently expatriated, yes." A childhood of enunciation lessons and social pressure gave Sebastian's voice a clear, crisp tone, automatically aloof. Apparently that was enough of a response for the young Lord, and he turned his head towards the window.
He stared out over the frost-bitten landscape, the sprinkled snow across the fields of grass - but was the snow perhaps a little greyed? Not a smoke-grey, or even ash-grey; no, the grey was more like that of a flat, uncaring sea. It was as if the colour was being leeched from the soil, to the texture of an old, cheap oil painting. Eventually the driver spoke again and the Lord gave his token response. "The French have a word for it; foile a deux, the madness of two." Before long, the sanitarium was visible, a neo-Gothic presence that sat on the the hillside like a cathedral grotesque. It wouldn't have looked far from home in among the spires of an English mill-town; in fact, he thought he recognised elements of St. James' Medical University in nearby Leeds, with its protruding clocktower. When the car drew to a halt, Sebastian calmly waited for the door to be opened for him.
The driver, as expected, came to a slow halt right in front of the asylum's gates. While closed so the nurses could escort the milder residents around the grounds, arm in arm like old friends instead of caretaker or warden and patient, it looked as if there was a guard house of some sort. Thankfully, there was a man inside who watched curiously as the driver exited the car, strode around to Sebastian's door, and opened it for him. With that simple task done, he strode - no, not quite right, the driver was much too sturdy and heavy in his steps to call it such - to the gatehouse. His stoic expression melted into a yellowed grin, pierced by gaps of black and tissue-red, at the man in the gatehouse.
"Sir Brotherton has arrived to speak with Dr. Abott. Should be a note somewhere." The driver waited a moment for the man to confirm and then went back to the car while the gates were being opened to speak one more time with Sebastian.
"The car will await your return. I only move for two people: my boss, and the police - and I doubt they have much business around here." His expression had resumed its stoicism. Once Sebastian had exited the car, his driver closed the door none too loudly behind him and then trudged into the driver's seat once more to begin the wait in the cold. By that point, the gates of the asylum were opened, utterly still on their heavy-looking hinges. The guard kept glancing back at the patients, but the nurses seemed to have them under control.
"Sorry, mister, but ye'll have to go on alone. Can't leave my post - we get drop-offs once in a while, ye know?" He seemed nervous as he eyed over Sebastian's attire and posture.
"Lord Brotherton, actually. I am a baron, not a knight. The appropriate title is 'lord' when addressing one of my station." Though his face was stony, like some Classical bust with upturned nose, inside he was smiling like a naughty schoolboy. Why not have a little fun with the Americans? It wasn't like they'd spent winter Saturdays being instructed in the intricacies of the peerage, the familial lineages that stretched back to the Norman Conquest, or had the weight of history pressed down on their shoulders. No, they lived in a place without history; the past was something packed up in crates and consigned to the other side of the Atlantic, what was left being carefully sterilised and bottled for public consumption. He could probably tell them he was a Crown Price or a Mongolian prince in exile and have a good chance they'd swallow it. Or he could use one of the French obscenities Henri would grunt into him at night, see if they caught the meaning.
He disembarked a little slower than he'd gotten into the car; once the initial hit of laudanum had kicked in it, his bones would settle in a general numbness but retain some tokens of their stiffness and occasionally twinge as if to remind him. He would be functional for a good few hours before he needed another top-up. He stepped a little up the path when the guard to the asylum spoke to him first. "I understand, officer." An accommodating smile. "It is a brisk morning; one rather fancies the stroll, actually."
With his cane in hand, Sebastian ambled up the path towards Arkham. There was a characteristic all these old buildings seemed to get, these places of long, slow sicknesses, as if malaise seeped into the bedrock, the foundations, the walls and widows. If ever a place could be haunted, it would be places such as this. He half expected to round a corner and see the walking wounded of the Somme, brought across impossible gulfs of time and the separation of death to this very moment, to reunite with him like corpse-cold friends. Instead he saw the civilian sick, mostly in soft pyjama clothes and dressing gowns or thin overcoats to help with the cold as they took exercise in the garden or across the yard. One wing, he could tell immediately, was more secure than the other; thick iron bars in the windows on the ground floor and those higher up with thinner, taller, built for purpose. He found a likely set of double doors to take him into a wide lobby or reception area and crossed purposefully to the front desk and the nurse thereat. "Lord Brotherton. I understand Dr. Abott is expecting me."
The nurse looked up at Sebastian and checked her desk, looking until she found a slip of paper, typewriter letters sticking out boldly on the white sheet. "Lord Sebastian Brotherton? Please, a minute. I will fetch Dr. Abott for you." She took a second to re-tidy her desk before exiting the room through a door behind her desk. Most of the papers were left covered by opaque folders; after all, there were many patients about the sanitarium who came of equally prestigious families, or poorer folks who simply wished to be undisturbed by the outside world. Secrecy was important in such an institution.
Yet, in her speed to help Sebastian, she had left the note she had written peeking out from underneath a folder.
At that point, the folder obscured the rest of the memo. Disturbing it could be noticed, and yet the note hung there tantalizingly.
Sebastian couldn't help but catch a glimpse of the note about cousin Sylvester, he barely suppressed a shiver and think back to the Majestic. The memo, delivered to his room personally, warning him to stay away had addressed him as cousin - yet it could not have possibly come from Sylvester, surely? What sort of sanatorium gave telegraph privileges to the patients, a mental degenerate at that? And - hmm. His hand paused a little above the paper, hesitating before he could take the note to read fully. If Sylvester was committed here, then two whom did the family estate belong? Perhaps there was something about an attorney, a point of contact, a next-of-kin that would handle Sylvester's affairs while he was being cared for. He slid the note further out of the envelope to get the end of the sentence, regarding Sylvester's fate. A word crossed his eyes that at first he seemed to be incapable of understanding, as if the ink would not sit still on the page. Eventually something seemed to click into place and 'Innsmouth' congealed into legibility. He thought it sounded familiar, a word he had overheard but never seen, referred to darkly by the townhouse's kitchen staff when Sebastian had requested fresh fish for dinner one night. A kitchen hand had quietly joked that they could get a good three days of fresh fish off of one resident of Innsmouth 'so long as you held him down before you cut him', and the grim quip had been promptly disciplined by the cook. This seemed to be where cousin Sylvester's branch of the family had slipped after arriving in America, and likely where Sebastian would find the people onto whom he could offload his ancestral burden.
Ah, but this left him stood in the foyer of a lunatic asylum peeping most improperly. He stepped back from the desk and ran a hand along his left temple, playing the whole thing off as getting close to the cabinet behind the reception desk to smooth down a stray hair on his head.
