Bedlam (18 page)

“How is she, Robert?” I asked.

“Margaret? Well. She’s well—” This with shifting eyes, in a tone almost querying, or imploring.

“She’s got along all right, has she? And the lad—?”

“Well enough, Jimmy. They miss you.”

“It’s been a long time to miss me. Him his whole life—”

“Aye—”

“Does she have help? Does she still employ Justina Latimer?”

This name seemed to consternate him. Thinking he’d forgot who she was, I added, “As her maid—”

“No,” he said. “Margaret gave Justina her notice years ago, for insolence, and other crimes—”

“What crimes, Robert? Not theft, I hope—?”

“Not theft—” he said quickly, seeming to curdle into himself.

“There’s a piss-pot under the bed, Robert, if you need—”

He shook his head. “You did write Margaret—?”

“I did. From the question I take it my letters have not got past Sir Archy.”

Talk of letters reminded Dunbar, and before I could stop him he extracted from his jacket an envelope and held it out, saying, “Here’s one that’s getting through—”

“Is it, now?” This was Davies, as he plucked it from Dunbar’s hand.

Dunbar jumped up. “Give that over!” he cried. “That’s Jimmy’s!”

“Whose?”
Davies wondered, horribly intrigued by Dunbar’s agitation. Although a thorough unwitting pawn of magnetic agents, and as such the purest case of ignorance-is-force I ever encountered, Davies has never lost the born bully’s delicate nose for infirmity. Now he folded his thigh-thick arms and directed at Dunbar a look that communicated consequences too brutal for such a one not to be instantly reduced to a quaking dish-clout.
How severely you judge my old Camberwell friend’s uncoura-geous behaviour will depend on how many William Davies you have met in your life in how many dark alleys and what your rate of success in countering those assaults on the integrity of your body and soul.

My hand on Dunbar’s arm easily drew him back down. “Never mind it, Robert,” I said, but the visit was over. Davies was on top of Dunbar to pull him to his feet and march him out, pausing only to direct a sharp kick at Joseph Panter, who was on his hands and knees, hard at work. Joseph took a moment to recover his balance after the toe of Davies’ boot lifted his ribcage high on one side, and then he returned to smearing ordure in loving circles on the floor and wall.

84 L
EADENHALL
S
TREET

J
ULY
13
TH
, 1809

My beloved Husband,

This is not the first letter I have written to you in your imprisonment, but it is too likely the first you will read. Though I know you yourself will have written faithfully, not a single letter from you has reached me. The day I come upon our correspondence hawked in the street, a ha’penny will buy me evidence of what we both already know: Everything that comes to Alavoine leaves only for money. But at least published we can read what we said, and if to increase their value our words have been doctored we’ll know the true parts as sure as we know each other’s heart.

Dearest Jamie, I write because the governors have granted permission for someone to visit you. Since I remain non grata, our choice has been Robert Dunbar, who will let you know that despite meagre resources and the creaking wheels-inside-wheels of power that run the country while they trap and crush anyone rash enough to attempt to discover how they work, we are doing all we can to win your freedom. But mainly by this letter know that you are father to a son who turns twelve on the 10th of September, your namesake, the most beautiful and intelligent boy that ever walked on this Earth, happy and kind, loving to his mother, thriving
at school, praying nightly for your health and long life and the day you come home—

But I break off—Robert’s at the door to say he’s just heard he visits you this morning or not at all—

Jamie, rest assured Jim and I love you with all our hearts, and with your friends and other honest champions of justice we will prevail.

Your devoted wife Margaret

B
ETHLEM
H
OSPITAL
(12
YEARS HEREIN CONFINED
)

J
ULY THE
13
TH
, 1809

Dearest Mags,

Though I caught only a glimpse of my name writ in your precious hand as your letter was plucked from Robert Dunbar’s grasp by one of our resident bullies, it was sufficient reminder there have been others before it, each less overtly than this one snatched as it enters the building, just as mine are when they leave it. What heartless predators, to confiscate the loving sentiments of lawful wedded pens!

Your great news must be of young Jim, whose existence Robert had opportunity to tell me of, alas, only the barest fact. Dear Mags, I am speechless—wordless—with joy. My dreams of our boy’s future achievements go shooting off in a thousand directions—

There—I have just scored a notch in the wall opposite my bed, marking his height. I don’t know what it actually is but shall have Robert (if he comes again) offer a correction. This way I’ll track young Jim’s growth while I envision every manner of virtue blooming in him as he matures to an upstanding honourable man, as I know he must, being blest by the love of a mother so worthy and true.

Your fond loving husband (all of an instant a doting parent),

James

This morning I awoke in that anxious state when the most familiar objects assume a hostile cast, and you wonder what on earth could inspire so hateful an array. It was either pace back and forth in an atmosphere of unremitting menace or pass along the gallery and visit our would-be regicide James Hadfield.

I chose Hadfield not for his charms (he has none) but for the magnetic fluid the gang circulate through his cell. The gang’s methods of working are as numerous as their victims, but the essential principle is the magnetic impregnation of unsuspecting men and women in order to suck their secrets, influence their actions, or else slowly destroy them. My hope was inoculation against what they plan for my Saturday appearance before the Bethlem subcommittee. The reason I can come and go (on the men’s side) was nine years ago The Schoolmaster removed my chains for good. Perhaps he remembered it’s discipline he stands for, not punishment. Or wearied of the game of rewarding me by giving me back my engraving tools and punishing me by taking them away again. Perhaps it dawned on him there’s something wrong when removal of a deprivation is counted as a privilege. So for nine years I’ve had the care of a small garden plot among the
ruins of the inner wall, and he’s let me come and go there as I please.

In my freedom from chains I’m luckier than Hadfield, who though he’s got his own room has been shackled the better part of seven years, ever since he knocked Benjamin Swain over a bench and so qualified Swain in the governors’ published statement to have died of natural causes. What more natural than a blow from a lunatic? A lie to the public? Four months later, in July, Hadfield enjoyed a brief hiatus from restraint when he escaped in the company of John Dunlop. They got as far as Dover, where a whore they jumped lived long enough to report them to the authorities. After that the governors required Sir Archy and The Schoolmaster to put in writing their thoughts concerning hospital security. This they did to everyone’s satisfaction, although Sir Archy’s failure at the time of escape to tell anyone two patients were missing the subcommittee found “highly reprehensible.” Of course nothing changed. The surveyor was called in to inspect the locks and that was the end of the episode. People are always escaping from here, whether or not they’ve slipped Sir Archy a quid for the privilege. The more of us on the streets or in private care at private expense or stuck like a pin-auger in the bosoms of our families the better—or so goes the latest thinking.

In this The Schoolmaster’s always been ahead of his time, except when it comes to some of us and the private-care-at-private-expense part, hating as he does anyone who’d make a fortune off mental suffering. An international reputation for himself is another matter.

After his Dover holiday, Hadfield was first returned to Newgate, but since then he’s been back and forth between here and there half a dozen times. No one wants him, but there’s no
question they’ve got him. When he’s here, he’s as agreeable as the next base malcontent, cleanly in his person, knacky and ingenious in his amusements. By trade a silversmith, he puts his time to good use weaving straw baskets and writing poems, including a very pretty one on the death of his squirrel Jack, which concludes,

So there is an end to my little dancing Jack
That will never more be frightened by a Cat.

Such nimble productions he sells to the few visitors allowed through, his popularity with them that know him by reputation alone running second only to Peg Nicholson’s and my own. By this means, combined with his government pension of sixpence per day, he dresses nattily and keeps his birds and cats plump on seed and fish scraps and himself mighty on tobacco.

Unfortunately for Hadfield, visitors of late have been scarce. So too admissions. Despite an influx in recent years of mental casualties of Bonaparte’s cannons, our number is now not much over two hundred and dropping fast, most tucked away in chains. Though outraged at the thought of genteel folk shirking the sight of lunatics, The Schoolmaster’s an advocate of the soothing power of darkness, particularly for wet or dirty patients, who end up on straw in the basement. The formula for their condition is
insensible to the calls of Nature.
Straw, being closer to Nature, must help them to hear her when she calls. They certainly can’t see her. Advice to visitors: Bring a lanthorn, and don’t forget a scented handkerchief—in case they let you in. If the place was a ruin when I first came, at least it was a teeming ruin and not a dank, stenchy desolation of whistling drafts and clanging iron. When much of the east wing went, I lost my longest home here and the women patients
their tub bath. Now the ones who won’t or can’t endure the shower-bath you daren’t approach for the stink.

So our alma mater moans and begs in the same street she always did, a grizzled, blasted, rotten veteran of a century and a quarter of government neglect. This, by the way, is largely the result of a Bethlem treasurer named Kinleside absconding twenty years ago—long before either Jack or I arrived—with six thousand pounds. A Select Committee of Inquiry’s judgment of Bethlem’s record-keeping and accounting as “extremely obscure and defective” has resulted in a government policy as good as designed to deepen and justify the shadow, resulting in ideal conditions for the gang to sprawl together in promiscuous intercourse and establish their filthy community.

Meanwhile, most in here have no conception of the treatment they receive as anything other than malevolent and unnatural chastisement for misdoings they can’t begin to conceive. They wake up they-know-not-where, not in their right mind; unable to comprehend anything for certain; unwitting of decisions being made behind their back that yet directly affect their chances of survival; allowed no say, no privacy, no respect for their station—or what was once their station; at the mercy of a cabal of vicious drunks who treat them any way their savage whims dictate. For most it’s like drowning in a pitch-black well while their guardians stand around and lob rocks. It’s farther in here to justice than to sanity. The fist is always right in our face.

But there was a reason beyond outrage and magnetic inoculation I went to see Hadfield on the eve of my hearing, and that was I sometimes think his case might suggest a legal remedy for my own, if only I could figure out what it is.

Like Palmer Hurst, Kooney Nugent, William Wake, and Urbane
Metcalfe, to name four others I’ve counted as friends in here over the years, Hadfield is with us as a danger to his Majesty. Nine years ago, the King was making his bows upon entering Drury Lane Theatre, when Hadfield fired a pistol at him from the pit, the ball lodging in the ceiling of the royal box. In the traditional course of things, such overt aggression against the ruling monarch would mean instant hanging. But the defence—none other than my sometime supporter Lord Erskine, arguing before four judges, one of whom (Lord Kenyon) had recently put me away for good—drew attention to Hadfield’s head. Grossly visible there were the sabre wounds he’d received in ‘93 as a soldier in the Fifteenth Light Dragoons at the Battle of Lincelles. These Erskine succeeded in establishing as the manifest source of Hadfield’s intellectual disturbance. Suffering, as a result, extensive intimations of the dissolution of all human things, Hadfield only wanted to kill the King as a means to his own execution and so avoid the dishonour of suicide. A more frequent motive among the general population of assassins than you might suppose.

Even so, Hadfield would not likely have mustered the necessary resolve had he not, while out for a stroll of a Sabbath in White Conduit Fields, been accosted by the religious fanatic Bannister Truelock. It was Truelock who easily convinced him the Bible’s a vulgar and indecent history that fails to contain one solid or sensible argument, the New Testament in particular being a fabric of falsehood and deception of use only for the amusement of its absurdity, whereas for his part Truelock had been pregnant a quarter century with the Messiah, who now stood poised to erupt from his mouth, the only obstacle to this singular advantage to religion being the life of the King.

Such was the argument for the defence. But I should point out
Hadfield’s action was only in part the work of a sabre-damaged brain under the sway of little Bannister Truelock (no mean rouser of insurrection, as can be testified by the chaos that erupts in here every time he’s readmitted). Mainly Hadfield’s assault on the King was the doing of French magnetic fluid-working under the direction of Bill the King, who’s said to bear an uncanny resemblance to the late Dr. DeValangin. But unlike that beloved Forceps, Bill’s a mysterious villain of unrelenting treachery. A celebrated master of the Air Loom for as long as anybody can remember, he’s never been observed to smile, except at chess. Bill has his own good reasons for wanting his Majesty dead, but what they are I won’t know until I know who he is, by which I mean who he’s inhabiting. (A significant characteristic of the gang is, they have nothing to say or do in the world until they introject themselves into a human body. If there’s a moral in this I’m not sure what it is, unless it’s that one honest man or woman stands taller than all the evil that ever was.)

In the end Hadfield was found innocent by reason of a delusion, however temporary, but since nobody wanted him loose, a new law was rushed through to enable the incarceration of insane persons charged with treason, murder, or a felony, if they’re deemable a threat to the State—even when by reason of insanity they’ve been cleared of all charges. This is how what’s called the insanity plea came to be and James Hadfield our nation’s first criminal lunatic. Many’s the addle-pate’s been tossed in here after him.

And before. Which is another way Hadfield’s case would seem to touch on my own, for my detention predates that law and is not even, like Peg Nicholson’s, a Green Cloth one. My detention occurred in the days when these things was handled more casually, as by a note to Monro from Lord Liverpool saying, Can you keep this one for us till further notice, Tom, like a good fellow?

Mind you, the crimes of Bethlem’s assorted enemies of the State vary greatly in enormity. Hurst, Wake, Nugent, Metcalfe, and the rest are merely individuals with a habit of wandering onto royal property without the sense to leave before they’re caught. All are sooner or later let go, but most are incorrigible. It’s something about the mighty tug that fame, power, wealth, and authority exert on uncompassed minds.

True lunatic would-be royal assassins such as Hadfield are a rarer breed.

So am I. And after twelve years of not being let go, here’s something I understand. I’m no more here for threatening Liverpool’s life (let alone the King’s) than I am for causing a stir in the public benches of the House. It’s not anything I did. It’s what I know.

Out in the upper gallery it was a quiet morning. Two of our makers and destroyers of universes were hard at work, and I paused on my way to Hadfield to partake of their genius.

The first I came to, standing in the centre of a small crowd, was Alfred Sconser. Alfred has the remarkable talent of eliciting a large amount of green fluid from out of his lungs. Tipping forward from the waist, he drools this ropy, viscous substance in a column a good inch and a half in diameter and perhaps five inches in length. Out of this pendant shaft, in gradual stages, with great care, he blows a grey-green bubble that on a good day reaches three feet in diameter, to general applause. The surface of Sconser’s Sphere, as it’s known, is smooth, with continents of thicker, duskier phlegm in relief upon it. Watching Alfred at work you find yourself witness to the generation of a globe not so very different from the one on which you are standing. When he has
got his creation as big as it will go, he maintains it a few minutes (I have never known anyone, however excited they become at the sight of it, to offer to burst it), then with equal painstakingness collapses it, at last drawing the entirety of the heavy fluid back into his mouth and swallowing it all down, with a gratified smile.

This is an accomplished performance, and Alfred has his hat on the floor beside him the while. But unless there are outside visitors present (ones, that is, who don’t recoil in disgust), he rarely receives more than the heartfelt admiration of his colleagues. Lately, it happens, I’ve earned a little from the sale of my engravings to our infrequent tourists, and so today when Alfred finished and the world had been swallowed back down, I placed a ha’penny in the hat before passing on.

Next I spent a few minutes in the company of that other serial destroyer and remaker of universes, Richard Pocock, whose conviction it is that as soon as he thinks of something, it’s destroyed or, as he says,
thrown up.
Pocock knows he can’t help all the destruction he’s guilty of, because what man alive can stop himself thinking something once he’s set his mind not to? But today he was working away, as he sometimes does, to undo the damage. To accomplish this, he stands with his eyes closed and his body bent double and his hands and arms extended in front of him, like one groping in the dark. He then decries all his previous thoughts, saying, for example, “I never thought of America, nor Jersey, nor Spain, nor Portugal, nor Plymouth Dock. I never thought of a pigsty, nor of Guildford. Oh, poor Guildford! and poor, good Mr. Hastings—” his former master—“and his family, my good and worthy friends who, thanks to me, alas, are no more! I never thought of a ploughshare, nor yet of a knapsack, nor yet of a summer house, nor of a sprocket and faucet, nor a monkey’s beard,
nor a hen’s foot, nor a finger-organ, nor a boar’s bristle. I have never thought of a parson, nor yet of a hedgehog, no, nor of a flying squirrel in America, nor of a monkey shaving himself, nor of the hinges of Mr. Hastings’ cellar door, nor of the Polinac River in France, where I sailed from—” etc.

And so I left Richard Pocock to restore one universe even as Alfred Sconser was preparing to disgorge another.

Two doors this side of Hadfield’s cell I next stopped a moment to offer an encouraging word to James Norris, a homicidal American sailor who’s been locked up near a decade now in an iron apparatus special-designed for him by our medical officers after he plunged a knife into the keeper Hawkins, attacked with fatal intent a patient named Thompson rash enough to come to Hawkins’ rescue, and had just bit off Thompson’s finger when he was stopped from doing worse by having his arm smashed by our friend Davies with a shovel. Owing to an oddness of physiology, Norris’s wrists are thicker than his hands, so to him a pair of handcuffs is the gift of a deadly weapon.