Bedlam (20 page)

“No, sir,” I replied. “It’s universally acknowledged there always have been and always will be spies among us. That, alas, is not enough to prevent anybody from being a lunatic.”

“But if a fellow believes there are spies of a kind and in a place there ain’t,” another governor put in, “mayhap he just might be a lunatic?” This was uttered at a high pitch of nervous exasperation, but so struck was the speaker at the sound of his own whinging voice in the room he immediately lost heart and ended weaker than he started. But at least you knew he spoke direct for himself and was not one who’d been taken over.

“But if,” I said, addressing him in the tone of gentle reasonableness one assumes with a feeble-minded friend, “he believes there ain’t spies when there are, surely he’s the madder, when everybody knows there have been, are, and ever will be.”

Now another spoke up. “But what of these gangs? How do you mean they
work
heirlooms? What are they? Antiquaries? Smugglers? That’s a straightforward question, by God!”

“And here’s a straightforward answer, sir. Our politicians are lackeys and traitors and the royal family a set of treasonous usurpers, and the reason—”

Here again what I next meant to say crumbled and fell away out of view. As on occasion one will fade from a pressing scene of affairs into a succession of lethargies, I found myself in a slow tumble from one swoon to the next. Evidently, Augusta had chose to wreak her vengeance on me sooner rather than later. To this end she’d brazenly taken over The Schoolmaster’s saying of my brain by sucking it.
(Brain-sucking
is a process by which, after first using the Air Loom to apply a magnetic attachment from their brain to yours, they make a vacuum out of their own and so withdraw from yours the entirety of its thought-contents.)

“Sir? You were saying? The reason—?”

That Augusta should have hit on this moment to do what she was doing was shocking in the extreme but hardly surprising—unlike what happened next, though even it had many precedents in the shameful history of this gang.

“Mr. Matthews, will you please answer the question?”

“I cannot, sir. I have lost my—”

“Power of intellection, sir? Is that what you mean to say? And is that not the reason you’re here? Yes? No? Won’t answer? Then let me ask you this—”

Though at first sight, The Schoolmaster’s and Augusta’s impositions might seem as nonsensical as they were shameless, they did have a consequence in keeping with their ultimate goal, for the question Wood next asked was so preposterous there was nothing I could say or do but pour my every ounce of strength into a straight face.

What question was it, you ask? Reader, hold on to your hat.

“Do you count yourself grateful, Mr. Matthews, for the treatment you have received while at this hospital?”

The extreme effect of this question on me owed less to its pre-posterousness than to the immediate solution it provided to the mystery of twelve years of random kindnesses from The Schoolmaster: all to engineer at this moment a touch of the forelock (were it not shaved off) and a “That I do, sir.” It’s marvellous how an entire history will come pouring into a single instant.

A proper understanding of what happened next was granted me only days later, on a nauseous sick flood of horror. For that tickle at my anus had not been them pushing up the quicksilver, as I’d foolishly imagined, but rather someone at the machine—likely The Glove Woman—insinuating into my fundament an exotic form of the magnetic fluid, obtainable only by an unspeakable process called
gaz-plucking,
by which such fluid, having been rarified and sublimed by its continuance in the bowels of a lunatic, they make use of the Air Loom to extract in a gradual way, bubble by bubble. This, reaching my vitals at the precise moment Chairman Wood put to me his outrageous question, caused the muscles of my face to screw into a fixed grin. It’s a process the gang call
laugh-making,
and in my weakened mental condition, I was its helpless victim, falling off my chair with my face locked in such a horrible grimace of hilarity as to throw the entire proceedings into unadjournable uproar. By the time I was carted from the room, my face, tongue, and brain were froze fast, with nothing remaining in my mental realm save the dumbstruck faces of my supporters, like kites snapping stiff against vanquished skies.

B
ETHLEM
H
OSPITAL

(
NOW
—I
MUST FACE IT
—
MY LAST LONG
H
OME
)

13
TH OF
A
UGUST
, 1809

Dearest Mags,

I know by my Air-Loom-induced susceptibility to that Influencing Engine how sorely I have disappointed you all. No words can express my regret in having done so, and undoubtedly no words will, for the chances you ever read this are as good as nil. But even inside here, hope like a precious plate keeps springing from the shelf to smash again, and so I take up my pen to beg that you assure Jim I did everything in my power to withstand their brain-saying, thought-working, etc. If it had been only (only!?) The Middleman at the controls and the rest of them simply queering the game by owling me from the safety of the living empty shells of selected governors, I might have prevailed, but with the double-barrelled assault on my thinking substance by The Schoolmaster and Augusta, plus The Glove Woman laugh-making me by insinuating fingerlings of hilarity into my lower orifice, it was more than any human being could hope to withstand.

But rest assured, my Dearest Ones, I am recovering, though slowly,
and yes, even learning to grow a little reconciled to the now certain knowledge I shall never leave this dreadful place again. Please tell Jim how sorry I am to have let him down.

Your husband lately doomed by a shocking alliance of superhuman forces,

James

P.S. Why was Justina Latimer there?

As another has said, I am not mad but my thoughts sometimes are.

This unfortunately was not the opinion of the Bethlem subcommittee in the wake of my gang-infested hearing. They now declined to believe my friends would hold me, if they’d so adamantly argue I’m sane when I’m so manifestly not. My friends’ lack of judgment was considered by the committee a sign as bad as the one that in twelve years of punishment (in their word, treatment) for insanity, I have steadfastly refused to admit I suffer from that condition.

In the weeks after my hearing, Robert Dunbar was allowed two visits to my sickbed. On both occasions the letters for me from Margaret he carried were taken away before he reached my cell, with assurances I’d see them once they were scrutinized. I’m still waiting. During Dunbar’s second visit, he reported that Camberwell Parish, which had high hopes my hearing would win my freedom, in their disappointment now refuse to pay the continuing cost of me, and are full on our side in support of my release at their discretion. This is why Robert Dunbar, in the company of William Law (a Camberwell churchwarden) and the
baboon-faced man at my hearing (who it turns out is the new Camberwell overseer of the poor, one Joseph Sadler), waited on the committee to demand my release, suggesting I be removed from Bethlem and placed, until my harmlessness be established, in the Camberwell workhouse strong-room. (Justina, by the way, was not there with Sadler. Her presence remains as consternating a puzzle to Dunbar as to me.) When the committee’s response to Camberwell’s generous-minded offer was assorted demurrals and evasions (its composition being in the course of the usual rotation different from that of the one that first suggested I be handed over to Camberwell Parish for safe-keeping), the Camberwell officers declared, “In that case, Gentlemen, we have nothing more to do with him. Let us know the amount that is due, and we’ll tender it in bank notes. If you hold him, you hold him at your own expense.”

As Sadler afterward reported to Dunbar, the committee’s response was hastily to refer the entire business to the next meeting of the Grand Committee, which was at Bridewell on October 4th, when Sadler and Law were a good deal surprised to hear several of the Bethlem subcommittee who attended declare I’m not only as insane as ever but too intransigent a lunatic ever to be allowed at large. The last of these to speak was Wood—or should I say Augusta—who stated outright he considers me highly dangerous to the safety of his Majesty. Haslam and Monro were there to grimly concur. Topping off the proceedings, the chairman of the Grand Committee stood up and read out a letter, dated September 7th, from Lord Liverpool (not the 1st Earl, who died last year, but his son, the 2nd Earl, as home secretary—the grave is nothing to these people), who recommended I be detained as a fit and proper patient of this hospital. Further, he committed the
Government to relieving Camberwell Parish of all my expenses, including those of my funeral, should I die here.

Where else do they now expect me to do it?

Liverpool’s letter was the clincher and the matter settled. All my champions off the hook and not the shadow of a continued charge on anyone except the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who can afford it.

So here I remain in my dank corner with an ulcer in my back that promises to kill me yet. Luckily my brain was so abused during my subcommittee interview that death itself has come to seem a little agreeable. So many lice—why go on scratching? Like all weavers, my mother was Melancholy’s shuttlecock, and so these days am I. The Schoolmaster says Melancholy’s a mosquito: Brush it away in haste and it leaves a festering sting. Allow it to drink its fill and it lumbers off harmless. I’m allowing it to drink its fill. Five weeks it’s taken me to letter the above account of what Dunbar reported on his two visits, every penstroke an application of will. As for engraving, it’s out of the question, I’m at too low an ebb. I confess at my darkest moments I wish I never had a son or was told I do, when it means my life in here is so grimly shadowed by the absence not just of Margaret but of one I never knew. Night and day I lie curled in a condition of mental torpor. The simplest thoughts and routinest sounds from the gallery arrive hedged with mystery, while every item in every newspaper touches on me. I never knew so many special editions.

My next visitor was Jack the Schoolmaster, who hadn’t spoke to me since his annual drop-by last May to inaugurate the summer’s regimen of bleedings, blisters, vomits, and purges, which as usual he
inflicted on every patient they wouldn’t kill while cheerfully declaring them useless. He gave me a medicine I swear was copper shavings in a chloric paste. I was incontinent for two weeks. It’s a kind of depletory care they practise in here: drenching to diminish the evil their system excites. Since his move to Islington, The Schoolmaster is here four hours a day at most. The rules say he must be here every day, but they don’t say for how long. Rumour has it his wife is dying and requires constant attention. Otherwise, his time has gone into the second edition of his book and various other publications in a vain struggle,
a
, to grow rich enough to remove his wife southward and so rescue her lungs,
b,
to put more distance between his reputation and the appalling truth. Struggle
a
’s vain because there’s no more cure for consumption than for madness, and
b
because the better he sounds on paper, the wider the gap between reputation and reality. In any event, I rarely see him now. He’s not as absent as Monro, or when here as elusive as Crowther, but he’s three times more absent than he used to be. On his visit he let drop he gets more work done in his library at home; there are too many distractions here.

“Distracteds, did you say?”

“Oh, cut it, would you—” In our normal exchanges he addresses me aloud. There is none of the brain-saying of his ostensible satellite Sir Archy.

“How does Henrietta?” I asked next.

But this reminder of the damage he did his daughter’s love for him when he cut off her friendship with me only annoying him, he scowled and said, “As a good daughter to her ailing mother.”

“I’m sorry your wife isn’t well, Jack.”

He acknowledged this by a nod but with his face averted as if embarrassed lest I see how much her suffering affected him, or perhaps fearful lest affirming the disease hasten its course.

The pretense for his visit was to apologize for my unending incarceration. More accurately, to reaffirm it without explanation. This a week after he damned me before the Grand Committee. The real reason he was pacing my little corner in such agitation is he’s compromised down to his bootsoles, which as any honest soul will tell you is nine-tenths of the way to Hell.

When I pointed this out, his back was to me, his head tipped back like an actor’s whose lines are tacked to the ceiling, but he made no answer. When he faced me again, I suggested he examine the ulcer in my back, but he was thinking about something else.

“You are a medical man—?” I said.

“The matter’s now beyond the subcommittee’s purview,” he stated, meaning my release. “The letter from Liverpool has made that clear.”

The Schoolmaster’s heavier now, and looks older than his forty-five years. Success has proved a harrowing mistress. The poundage testifies less to constant intake, damped flame, than to insulation against conscience. More weight suggests Haslam continues to stir. Buried but alive, which means enough scraps of truth lobbed past The Schoolmaster could mean Haslam snatches enough to grow strong and so fights his way back to the helm of his own being. But I must say there was nothing in those eyes to indicate he was anywhere present. If you ask me, The Schoolmaster had come to see me out of neither guilt nor interest in my freedom but merely curiosity to see what use the gang could put me to in their scheme to murder England, Wales, and Scotland, and let Ireland go hang.

“The problem is, James,” he said, “the Government still wants you in.”

“Yet you happen to believe I’m sane as the next man.”

If this was a hit he only shot back the quicker, “The next man in here, yes.” Then, for all the world as if more kindly, “When, James, did I ever tell you you’re sane? And what do you expect me to stand up and declare after your performance before the subcommittee?”

“You could explain I’m a victim of systematic mental abuse.”

“Which would only make you sound not in control of your actions. No, James. This is what happens when you call people cunts to their faces and denominate politicians traitors and lackeys and the royal family treasonous usurpers.” This too seemed sympathetically enough said, but I also caught in it the tenor of gang sentiment and was reminded how much they’d love to see Napoleon Bonaparte crowned Emperor of England. They’ve told me too often they intend to work that monster up to as high a pitch of grandeur as they will degrade me below any common level of human nature.

When I made no answer, only shook my head, he said, “James, I don’t need to remind you, if you would only tell me why you’re in here, there might be something, even now, I could do.”

When I made no answer, it was as good as the end of Jack’s visit, and he soon took his leave.