Bedlam (10 page)

“Yes, like a favourite uncle who invisibly works machinery so cruel that any little favour he brings is seen as a godsend. The patients think,
Well, the keepers may be vicious bullies, but at least the man in charge is good and kind. So good and kind it’s no surprise he’s an easy dupe of monsters so evil.
And of course, like the King’s, your scarceness makes you even more beloved. ‘What a treat it is,’ the
patients say, ‘to have the doctor about again!’ But Jack, you know what goes on here as well as I do. As you grow more famous and spend more time writing, you see less, but still in general you do know what goes on.”

“I do. And work daily to alleviate all suffering that I can, considering I have next to no authority, labour under an absent superior, and have three hundred patients to see to. What time do I have to know about these wolves I’m to be thrown to?”

“You can’t know about ‘em as long as their identities remain in flux. With the Ministry undermined every other day, a patriot Monday is a ravening traitor come Friday. Who can predict who’ll be who in the wolf pack the day I’m out?”

Saying this, he fixed me with a cold stare. “And if I’m still in when the wolves come for you, I’ll scatter my pages in the forecourt to ensure they squeeze through the gates.”

“Wolves have no interest in print, James.”

“These will be fascinated.”

“Tell me this. If you could change one thing about the place, what would it be?”

“My presence. My awful susceptibility to its every abuse originates in the one.”

“What single abuse otherwise?”

“The fact there’s more humanity in the victim than in the persecutor.”

“Isn’t this just your natural sympathy for your fellow patients?”

“No. What in here is called treatment, outside is called what it is: punishment.”

“James, I understand it must look at times—”

“You need to be mad, Jack, for it to look any other way.”

What was I thinking? Only a fool engages with a lunatic when
he’s raving. As Pinel himself has said, he’s too acute. To which I’d add, unconvincible of anything except his own fixed obsessions. The duty of medicine is not to puzzle what madness says. With language already mostly metaphor, the only question is, How committed is the patient to these wild pronouncements? Is there some way to lessen the grip of these proud views and even bring about remorse or abjuration? What other goal could justify provoking delusions into the light?

“I’ll have Alavoine give you more ink and paper,” I said.

“Sir Archy, you mean. Alavoine will give me clothes and ink and paper, but Sir Archy will pretend it’s all a favour I don’t deserve and make me pay for every piece of fabric, every drop of ink. I’d rather dip a brush in my own blood and write on the walls than go through that again.”

“What does he do? Pay how?”

“Why, Jack, must I keep explaining it? You’ve stopped listening, and what you once knew you’ve forgot. Your theme is gentle kindness. But all nature’s creatures listen, you don’t.”

“Tell me how Alavoine forces you to pay.”

“I told you: not Alavoine. Sir Archy. By making me his talisman. Did I mention Charlotte’s in chains as his tribade, for he’s secretly a woman? And so accomplished at brain-saying, most victims don’t even know it’s happening. But I do. Anything from Sir Archy is remarkable for its depravity, and easy to spy as ragweed in clover. What’s harder is rooting it out, for it grips the mind with a tenacity that belies its degenerate source.”

I must say I preferred Matthews close-mouthed and sullen. The raving only stirred in me an unavailing dismay. “I’ll give you ink and paper myself,” I said.

“Do you mean it? Be the instrument of your own arraignment?”

“Yes, out of kindness to its author.” Now that he was talking, there was information I needed if I would be more than his stationer. Cautiously, I sat down on the bed. After allowing him several minutes to grow accustomed to me so close as he worked, I said quietly, “James, tell me why exactly Lord Liverpool wants you in here.”

“Liverpool wants nothing exactly. Try sharpening a blade once it’s rotten.”

“But why has he picked you? Because you interrupted his speech in the House?”

“No, because I know what he is.”

“Which is what?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you offer a threat against his life?”

“Not in so many words, but here’s a better idea, Jack, and more how you like to think of yourself: Skip the threat and straight to the execution.”

“James, listen. To secure your release I need to be clear why you’re in.”

“Why don’t you ask Monro? He knows less than nothing.”

“And Liverpool?”

“Liverpool you’ll find treacherous in the approach. Like Jefferson and Washington, he has the smell on him of the blood of slaves. Did you know the reason I refuse sugar in my tea is slavery in the sugar trade? In Grosvenor Square, in the days Liverpool was still Baron Hawkesbury, I once caught a glimpse of his first wife, Lady Hawkesbury, in the company of her mother, a Hindoo. Her father was a Clive man who cheated his way to a Bengal fortune. Lady Hawkesbury’s name was Amelia, a dusky beauty, only seventeen when I saw her. At nineteen she was sent down to the house
at Hawkesbury, which had sat empty for a century owing to a curse after the first baronet’s sister, prevented by her father from marrying a Papist, fell from an upper window. The beautiful Amelia was sent down for convalescence of a fever after the birth of a son but arrived dead. When the coachman unlatched the door of the cab, out she tumbled. They buried her across the road and gave over all thought of reclaiming the house, now doubly cursed. They say on windless days there hangs about the ruins a smell of the blood of slaves.”

“Does any of this have to do with why you’re in?”

“Only the part about the smell of the blood of slaves. Liverpool’s ultimate purpose is to disenfranchise the nation.”

“How will he do that?”

“He’s done and is doing it. Most lately by keeping up the conflict with France in hopes of causing the assassination of both nations and the destruction of my existence.”

“By what means? Because Liverpool’s anti-republican views since the fall of the Bastille are well known?”

“No, because he’s a liar, cheat, and destroyer, activated by the gang.”

“But aren’t we all activated by the gang, according to you?”

“Not all. The honest, decided, unwitting ones they ignore.”

“And the honest, decided, witting ones?”

“There’s only one of them in this place: me, who daily suffer bodily and mental torments. Separated from my beloved Margaret, the other half of who I am, and she from me, we’re both murdered daily. But I tell you this, Jack: I’m not afraid of all the gangs put together.”

“James, what evidence for these charges?”

“Fluidical.”

“Ah yes, of course. Fluidical.”

“You may patronize me, Jack. Don’t condescend.”

I stood up. “Speaking of fluidical, James, you’ll have your ink by tomorrow noon, and with it a dozen sheets of good-quality paper.”

With this promise I took my leave, which his gratitude, if he felt any, was insufficient to rouse him to acknowledge.

Now I was eager for Sarah to know of Pinel’s letter. With praise for my book now arriving from the Continent, I felt in need of perspective, lest like Matthews for anything good he gets from Alavoine (or Sir Archy, as he calls him) I must pay another way. As an Ancient once wrote,
The man whom praise greatly pleases, censure must greatly pain.
As I say,
Better a man’s wife whisper him the truth in private today than he reveal himself an idiot in public tomorrow.
In this too I was like Matthews: My wife worked hard to keep me sensible—a constant struggle. Like him I was fortunate to have married one whose judgment I could rely on and have sometimes thought,
If only he had listened to his more, he wouldn’t be in here and we wouldn’t be shutting her out.

As I hurried home, I was nagged by a fear Pinel would find little to admire in Bethlem as she was. Didn’t I write my book while I still wore rose-tinted spectacles, being half in love with the place I would one day make it? Thinking this, I thought again of Matthews, which reflection led me to marvel at his talent for black lettering, and then I had an idea. In my auxiliary capacity as overseer of the artsmasters at Bridewell Hospital I’d recently engaged a Mr. Logan to teach the delinquents there engraving.
Well, why not have Logan stop in at Bethlem once a week and teach it to Matthews? Surely Poynder could scrape up a little something for supplies. Engraving might serve to counterbalance Matthews’ raving, allay the tedium of his hours, and once I secured his release, provide him with a useful hobby, or even new trade. Meanwhile, the generosity of my initiative, even if it wasn’t enough to mend relations between us, would at least let him know I was kindly disposed.

Calm, Matthews was the most discerning of our inmates and of them all the one who seemed to speak direct to my understanding. How otherwise could he roil my blood so? There was far more to him than some unhuman fantasy, and I had no trouble grasping his popularity with our visitors or the fact his renown had spread in France. Alavoine’s devotion to him spoke volumes. People don’t want to know that true fame begins with those daily familiar with the person, who yet persist in their admiration. What are stories of public paragon, private monster, but sedatives for envy? And while they’re at it, cautionary tales. Why trouble to aspire, lest you become a monster too? But true fame’s not like that, it’s the splash of a small, rare drop that has rippled steadily outward.

As to Matthews’ affliction, I would say it needed to be as dreadful as it was to overcome a man so quick, honourable, and intelligent, so his intellect was ever at the mercy of a hurry and confusion of thinking that swept him along on its tide. Many in Bethlem had an air of predisposing weakness, crime, or tendency to backslide. Not this one. This was a tragedy, the undoing of a fine, good man. If his condition ever eased, his mind would be good again, and morally sound. Better and sounder, in fact, than most men’s I ever knew. Seeing such a one in the manifest grip of the disease was truly terrible and, whatever else its effect on me,
left me too sensible of the uselessness of all we were doing and of my own impotence before so much suffering to do any lasting good at all.

My engraving initiative would mean that any work Matthews produced between now and June would be evidence Pinel could hold in his own hands and see with his own eyes that when it came to actual care, we were no less enlightened than my book had him imagining. For good measure I’d slip the chains off Matthews before he saw him, so our visitor could walk away knowing that when we unshackled ‘em at Bethlem we didn’t immediately cinch ‘em into a strait-waistcoat—or
camisole anglais,
as Pinel would call it when among his cronies. And with my mouth-key ready to show, not to mention our new shower-bath, he’d see how progressive we are. Who knew but the great man wouldn’t be so dazzled he’d out-do himself with praise for us in his next book.
They order this matter better in France,
indeed.

At home, our maid Jenny was nowhere in sight. Young John was braced in front of the parlour door wearing his Beefeater toy-hat of Canadian beaver pelt and pointing his toy musket at me.

“Ahoy, lad-”

Wrong militia. I tried again. “All quiet, yeoman?”

“All quiet, sir.” He lowered the musket.

“Where’s Jenny—?”

The yeoman headshake.

“Mum-? Sis-?”

He indicated the parlour door. I held it for him; he presented arms.

“Sarah—” I said, sweeping up Hetty from the rug, where she was stacking letter-blocks. “Sarah, news—”

From her cocoon of blankets by the fire, my lovely wife lowered
her book and turned to us smiling. With the heat and the reddish light from the coals, her cheeks framed by her dark hair seemed almost rosy. Hetty meanwhile, as if she knew what my news was, had slipped Pinel’s letter from my pocket and was testing its fabric. Needing two hands, I set her back down and extracted it from her grasp. The double bereavement stunned her. She looked uncertain whether to scream or flail. “Resume play with your letter blocks,” I instructed her, “as our sober philosopher
cum
pedagogue Mr. Locke would have you improve yourself by doing.” Ignoring my Swahili, she flung a look at her mother, who lifted an arm. She scrambled to her. I blurted my news.

When I had finished, Sarah, after a tactful pause, set about my instruction. “You don’t think, John, Pinel won’t be mainly coming to enhance himself at your expense—?”

“He doesn’t need to do that. He already has preeminence in the field-”

“Preeminence in the field is very often first won by luck or subterfuge, then by riding the shoulders of successive contenders. Besides, what Frenchman—” she coughed—“unless he had something to gain by it, ever acknowledged another did anything right?”

“Reflected glory’s a gain,” I tried. “By all appearance he approves very well how we do things at Bethlem and like an honest scout will take back word to the rest.”

“After five minutes’ conversation with Watercolours Monro he’ll have nothing to take back but ridicule.”

“Watercolours don’t often come to town for these things—” I was beginning to see the larger picture.

“He will if he finds out in time you forgot again to inform him of an important visitor.”

“I won’t forget—” I said, by now distinctly uneasy, not having decided if I would tell Monro or not. The problem was, he preferred not to know. That way he could avoid the nuisance of making an appearance. Yet if he found out he’d missed something, his pride was doubly hurt, first that he wasn’t invited and second that he’d lost a chance to strut about and act the third-generation Monro. But this kind of hurt he could always drown in rage at me, whereas the inconvenience of coming all the way to town to have his inadequacies scrutinized he couldn’t do anything about at all.

“When,” Sarah asked, “is this meeting of the greatest mad-doctors of England and France set to occur?”

“He visits England late June.”

“In any event?”

“Why should we be his only stop?”

“Why indeed?”

She smiled, and I smiled back, at this woman for whom my love had grown in proportion to my respect for her unblinking intellect, compounded by my terror of losing her to her illness. What joy I had known in casting my life at the feet of one so steely minded, in every aspect so contained, and yet, when she had strength, so passionate and so loving.

“Did I ever tell you, Sarah, how much I love you?”

“Daily. More often will look like you have something to hide.”

“Rationed, am I? All right then, who are you reading?”

“John Wesley.”

That old humbug. “Sarah, did you ever notice how many great authors are named John?”

This drew another smile, before a cough. “Oh yes, and now a fresh one to their ranks. But you say John Wesley was nothing but an old actor.”

“I do not. I only mentioned the reason he was banned from sermonizing at Bethlem was his religious system is a wretched calamity rivetted to the mind by terror and despair—” I broke off before adding,
And so turns fools to madmen and madmen to foaming dogs,
because one thing Sarah never was was a fool. But her illness had given her of late a morbid taste for things Methodist. If her illness was a constant reminder that my paragon of wisdom and beauty was, after all, human, so was this.

“You don’t think, Author John, when life’s predicated on death,” she was saying, “there’s no place for terror and despair?”

“Yes, and also for frustrated love, disappointment, and grief. Which five conditions of mind account for ninety percent of our admissions here, one-third of whom are doomed republicans and one-third Methodically mad.”

“Now you contradict yourself. You always say madness is owing to brain disease.”

“It is. The affliction’s physical. Methodism, like frustration, like a reversal of fortune, exacerbates a root disorder. A cracked tooth feels fine, until you bite on it or sugar gets in. The problem with talk of mental cures, you open the sluice-gates and in pour the Wesleys with their religious opiates and ghostly therapeutics. But religion has too much madness in it to qualify as its cure.”

“And mad-doctoring too much ignorance.”

“Which is why treatment here is palliative when it’s anything.” Now was my chance to tell her my idea for having Matthews taught engraving, and so I did. I wanted her to say this was only for myself, so I could reply that in order to be for myself it first had to be for a patient I care about.

But she surprised me with a new tack. “You actually believe you can get your madman out, don’t you, John?”

“If,” I replied cautiously, “I take responsibility for his actions, then yes, I think I can. I’ve wrote to Lord Liverpool and expect an answer.”

“You assume they imagine him dangerous, but you know he’s not. Dangerous how?”

“Alavoine’s just told me he’s offered four million pounds for the death of the King and sundry others. That’s how. And how, somehow, not.”

“I should think whoever wants him in here knows the danger he presents to them better than you do.”

“What does that mean? You think he’ll act?”

“I don’t know if he’ll act. I don’t know him at all. I’m saying somebody thinks he’ll act, and you don’t know why or what they expect he’ll do. All I know is what you’ve told me: He’s been four times to Paris immediately before and after our declaration of war with France and has publicly charged the Ministry with treason.”

“Which in these times,” I said, “is all it would take to get him in here. Republicans are locked up on any excuse at all. But make a strong, simple case to the right party for freedom for a lunatic that your own, celebrated expertise can guarantee is harmless, his republicanism merely the going fantasy it is, and who’ll object?”

“I’m only saying, John, somebody does seem to object to this one’s being free. And it could just be that everybody—you, Bethlem, the government, and your madman—will be securer with him in than out. So don’t be surprised when his release turns out more difficult to achieve than you imagine. Don’t be surprised if the only way to get him out is something not for you but for his wife and friends to undertake, and their last resort—”

“What? A writ of habeas corpus? A legal challenge for us to say
why he’s in or else release him? But if we can’t say, we could be damaged—”

“Not Bethlem so much perhaps as Author John’s great good reputation. Of course, the writ could fail—”

“Or not. Which is why I must do everything I can before it ever comes to that—”

“For him, you hope, but mainly for you. Like your engraving initiative—”

“Ah, yes. Blinded by my self-interest to the creep of it, am I?”

“No more than the next lowly apothecary newly famous throughout Britain and Europe.” She coughed. “Perhaps more accurate to say, in your newfound confidence a little over-sanguine in your hopes.”

“What? Deficient in terror and despair, when I must daily stand by and watch you suffer?”

She smiled. “At least you have this place, where the inmates bear some of it for you, by bearing so much. I just hope all this fame, combined with your conviction a mad-doctor must impose his will on his patients while calling himself a model of civility, never causes you to lose sight of the miserable humanity he shares with them.”

“But I
am
different from what they are,” I said wearily. “They’re lunatics.”

Hetty had begun to squirm. Jenny would need to be sought out and discovered in a sweating clutch with the new assistant keeper. I swept up our daughter and left my beloved invalid to continue Methodizing her mind against all scheming and pride below.