“Help us?” Alexander said, as the topic turned to the care Soames had provided for his guests. “Nothing could be farther from the truth. Dr. Soames needed to keep us alive, because we were a source of enormous income for him, but he was keen to use His Grace and me for his little experiments.”

“Explain,” Sir Leviticus said.

Weatherby popped to his feet. “I must object. What went on years ago at some obscure facility is of no moment to the instant inquiry.”

Drossman peered over his spectacles. “You were happy to characterize this place as a madhouse not thirty minutes ago, Mr. Weatherby. Let’s hear what Mr. Fulton has to say.”

Alexander went through the whole litany. The ice baths, the purges, the bleedings, the electric shocks—Robert had mercifully forgotten about those—the strange diets, and sleep deprivation. The whippings—one of Soames’s early investigations—and the isolation.

“Soames needed us alive if he was to reap his filthy profits under the guise of medical care,” Alexander said, “but animals in a menagerie are treated with more dignity than we were. I suspect he was trying to drive us insane in truth.”

Interesting theory.

“And yet, you appear before the commission today,” Sir Leviticus said, “articulate, sound of limb, and in possession of your faculties. How did you resist the lure of insanity?”

Alexander braced both hands on the front of the witness box and nodded toward the counsel table.

“Him. Rothhaven. He figured out how to thwart Soames’s worst impulses and how to make us a family rather than a collection of rejected oddities. Things changed about the time Her Grace joined the staff. She and Rothhaven formed a team, and the rest of us joined on as best we could.”

“What sort of team?”

“If Soames decided somebody had to go a week without food, the rest of us would save a bit back and find a way to share it. If Soames had somebody locked in their room as a punishment—or simply because he pleased to inflict that misery on the unfortunate party—we found ways to slip his victim books, a deck of cards, a newspaper. The diversion itself didn’t matter half so much as the notion that we cared for each other.”

“Go on.”

“We developed a code, a tapping code. If somebody was confined to quarters, they could tap on the wall at certain hours, and we’d hear them and tap back. We had signals for food, water, and so forth, and to alert each other to one of Soames’s unannounced room inspections.”

“You describe a very difficult existence, Mr. Fulton.”

“One that should have driven us mad, but did not.”

“Thanks to His Grace?”

“In large part. And then his brother came and fetched him, but Rothhaven promised us—we only knew him as Robbie then—promised us he’d see us freed, and he did.”