Bedlam (21 page)

My next two visitors arrived together the following Wednesday.

Being in a doze when they entered, I at first mistook them for figments. But unless the gang is
dream-working
you with grotesque phantoms of their own making, a dream, however fantastical at first, when examined close is only ever yourself, and no less familiar. This was two other people. “You’ve come,” I whispered, or thought I did, before I opened my eyes.

There was no reply, only a rustling of skirts and a scrape as of something set on the floor.

Our embrace was a dissolve of tears. When she sat up, she looked to the one with us. I looked too.

“Hello, Papa.”

These words issued from the fairest mouth beneath the shapeliest nose and clearest eyes I ever saw. When the lips floated in for a kiss, I saw his mother’s, but those eyes spoke of my own mother’s too. “Hello,
my son,”
I whispered, groping for his hands, tears brimming, babbling and squeezing, hardly knowing what I said.

Margaret’s fingers were in my hair-bristles, then softly smoothing the creases at my brow.

“Your health, Father?” he asked. “Do they treat you well?”

“They treat me just as they know how to, my darling Jim—”

He smiled at this uncomprehending, but Margaret looked at me dubiously, with her old face. She’s an old woman now, and she regarded me as sceptically as I did her poor greenish-black gown and threadbare jacket as she stood behind him, with a hand on his slender shoulder. He was a flax-haired angel. Small, like me—I must adjust my wall-notch—but I would say eleven or twelve years of age, which is what he would need to be. “Do you go to school, Jim?”

“I do, Papa,” and he prattled awhile about his school and the teachers and friends he had there, until the tears flooded my cheeks, alarming him. “Is everything all right, Papa?”

“It is, Jim,” Margaret gently assured him (causing him, with a manly impatience, to shrug off her hand). “Only very happy to see you. Now you must let your father and me talk.”

“Before a keeper appears—” I confirmed, squeezing his fingers.

Sighing, Margaret sat on the edge of my bed to recount how for a decade she retailed tea, but the East India Company showing scant mercy for the independent shop, two years ago, to pay her debts, she sold all stock and furnishings to our long-time suppliers Crump
&
Co., who have hired her as book-keeper at their Holborn offices. Now our shop is the premises of a bespoke tailor named Hodge. Hodge of Leadenhall.

Bespoke
put me in mind of Justina Latimer’s hat. My question of Margaret why our former maid was at my subcommittee hearing seemed to nonplus her. “I can’t imagine but don’t like it,” she replied, looking perturbed. “All I know is when we pass in the street she pretends not to see me. Someone said she was modelling hats in the Burlington Arcade.”

“The scarlet bonnet with the green-grapes—”

“You should see the sunflower one.”

“She was friendly enough.”

“The more our concern. Something’s up, but I don’t know what. Did you know her former husband, the one murdered in his bed, was a republican sympathizer—?”

“And who are her associates now?”

“Gentlemen.”

“That could be our answer.”

Margaret looked at me close a moment and then provided a synopsis of her efforts to win my release, saying I could read it in full in the copies of her letters she’d brought. Her efforts stretch back twelve years and are more extensive than Dunbar ever dreamed of. She even once solicited the help of David Williams, who has done nothing. Now I understand how despite two sources of income she has no money.

“I’m sorry I was overcome before the subcommittee,” I said. “After all your work to get me so far, it would seem they’ve won the game.”

“Not yet.”

“Mags, no. You can’t spend the rest of your life on me. We must concentrate on family visits.” I squeezed Jim’s hand. “From them I’ll draw the strength I need to work on The Schoolmaster direct. I think part of him—I mean the Haslam part, such as remains-regrets I’m still in here.”

“Haslam can afford a spate of remorse. But once he’s immured in his next book, the mood will pass, and soon as that one’s finished, it’ll be on to the next. All he must do is stay buried in words until Death collects all Conscience’ pricks. There’s no peace of mind like the grave.”

“So what’s to be done? A quid to Alavoine and over the wall?”

“No, you’re too famous not to be pursued till capture. There’s only one way left: a legal challenge of habeas corpus, before the Court of the King’s Bench. Why do they have you? But it’s dangerous. If we think Monro and the governors are unsympathetic now, wait until we come at them with this. And if we lose, you won’t be going anywhere you can escape their revenge. Robert tells me Haslam’s kept you supplied with candles, paper, and suchlike. All that will end.”

“No it won’t, Jack’s not petty. But we do need to have him full on our side, as the one who knows most about me. Then it’ll be up to the governors to say why I’m in, and they can’t do it because they have no idea, and those who have and are still alive can’t reveal it.”

“Why? What is it?”

“Oh, Mags, don’t make me tell you what I know. You’re the poorest liar I ever knew.” She nodded, aware she was.

Her candour inspired me to explain. “The trouble with knowing things so far beyond top secret they sound like fantasy is that the constant exposure to the deluded inadequacy of others’ understandings makes you feel mad and alone. At first you ask yourself, What instead of this poppycock would he be telling me if he knew what I do? But the fact is he don’t and never will, and the repeated mental exercise is so hard on your brain you give it over, and that’s when it dawns on you he’s a puppet controlled by forces he’ll never understand and you will be too if you don’t watch out.”

Perhaps Margaret knew what I meant, perhaps she didn’t. Her attention was on another effect of knowing too much. “But, Jamie, if you know why you’re in, you must have some idea who wants you in, which means you can guess their reaction to a habeas corpus proceeding.”

“They’ll try to stop it.”

“But how? It’s a purely legal undertaking—”

“Mags, I’m not in by law. This is bigger than the courts.”

“So politicians influence judges?”

“Is the King shy of snipers?”

“Will they stop at habeas-corpus-fixing?”

“Won’t that be enough?”

“I’m asking, will we be putting you in danger from without, Bethlem reactions aside?”

“Not, I should think, as long as I’m in here. Out will be another matter.”

“Out I’ll guard you with my life. Out we can leave the country. First things first. We’ll try not to lose, Jamie, but we could, even if they don’t interfere. Even with Haslam on our side, for he knows too little. All we can do is bring in witnesses to your character and outside medical experts to examine you and trust that together they provide affidavits strong enough to convince a judge.”

“The question,” I said, “is whether The Schoolmaster cares more about his position than the truth.”

“Don’t forget there’s also the truth of his public portrait of Bethlem, which his honour will require him to defend.”

“Put that way, our case does seem hopeless—”

“Hopeless, are we? Not in here, surely?” This was wit from The Middleman, now looming over us like a vulture.

With a quick glance to see he wasn’t interfering with Jim, Margaret threw her arms around me, but the ulcer in my back causing me to flinch, she pulled back. “Jamie, what is it? What’s wrong?”

As she said this, The Middleman placed one bony claw on her shoulder and the other on Jim’s. I squeezed Jim’s hand tighter,
but mine was sweating and our grip slippery. “Hour’s up, Silly-Tilly,” muttered The Middleman, never one to allow a space of compassion.

“It’s not been an hour!” Margaret cried, looking frantic at me. “Jamie,
what—
?”

“I’m all right, Mags. It’s nothing—”

With a tug at her elbow, The Middleman pulled her away. At the same time, he used his knee to break my grip on Jim’s hand. Then, holding Margaret at bay, he reached down for something alongside my bed: a wicker hamper.

“That’s for my husband!” Margaret cried, knowing what was coming. “Leave it!”

With difficulty I struggled to stand, but in a feat of balance, as he gripped Margaret’s arm in one hand, the hamper in the other, The Middleman placed his boot sole flat against my chest. I flew across the bed and slammed the brick wall. When my senses returned, I saw Jim belabouring The Middleman with childish blows as Margaret fought the brute for the hamper until, growling, “Damned bitch,” he yanked it from her with such force its contents ascended in air: linen, fruit, cutlery, books, paper, ink, letters—a good dozen packets of letters, tied with string.

Some items hit the wall and fell, the ink smashing. Others scattered along the floor.

Margaret swung on me beseeching,
“Jamie, tell me!”

Roughly pushing Jim ahead of him, The Middleman was using his foot to sweep the hamper’s contents out into the larger room. Over his shoulder he said, “Come for these, Silly-Tilly, and you know what’s up for your arse.”

“I have an ulcer in my back,” I told Margaret quietly.

“Are they treating it?”

Looking to Jim, I shook my head No.

Margaret looked too, in time to see The Middleman disappear round the corner with him. She kissed me and flew after.

Which left me to rock on my bed, listening to my wife’s imprecations and son’s sobs fade together down the gallery.

84 L
EADENHALL
S
TREET

S
EPTEMBER
22
ND
, 1809

Dearest Jamie,

If only there were a better way than a letter you’ll never read to let you know Haslam had an ear cocked lest I was offered trouble and when I was, himself escorted Jim and me to the gate, with a vow to discipline Rodbird for his abuse of us and to see that Alavoine passes on my letters, once they’re approved—

Jamie, we have every reason to expect our habeas corpus will go ahead. We’re now in search of the most sympathetic and persuasive medical men to examine you and pronounce on your case. Our thinking is if the judge can be persuaded you’re not in on medical grounds, he’ll want to know what grounds you are in on.

Beloved Husband, today as Jim was helping me prepare our dinner he asked if heroes often go unrecognized. His classmates knowing you better as a lunatic than as saviour of our country, he’s now old enough to suspect more in this than schoolyard malice. My answer was yes, heroes nearly always go unrecognized, when they’re not despised or resented as naifs, fools, prigs, or troublemakers. The greatest—and luckiest—achievement of a hero is to be hailed as one. For that he must be commonly agreed to
have risked or (better) sacrificed his life to save or signally benefit the lives of others. Failing this, courage and honesty seldom please, seeming self-righteous rebukes to everybody else’s sly small way of sidling along.

In answer to this he smiled and said, “I think sometimes the more I know of the world the less I want to be in it—”

“But you are in it,” I cried, “because of one thing: love. Love’s the complication and you must let it always be—!”

Jamie, how I wish you had been here from the beginning for the succession of miracles that has been our Jim’s youth, as he’s ascended from one level of mind to the next, now and then gazing around him exhilarated, like a mountaineer taking in a prospect. And when he’s been too long on one plateau before his next ascent, you know he’s in its shadow because how restless and moody he grows—Then all at once, before you realize it, he’s reached another summit, and O then to see the sunshine in his face! This has been the hardest part of all, my husband, harder I think sometimes than our own separation: to know how much you and he have missed in missing your lives together.

I pray you forgive this bitter reflection—

Your loving

Margaret

It’s been a month now, and I’ve not seen Margaret again, only two thin packets of her letters, the first retrieved from the gallery doorway by Reverend Jupp (a Methodist in for melancholy) before The Middleman returned for his spoils, the second by way of Alavoine thanks to The Schoolmaster—or should I say Haslam. With something more in his eyes than the usual desolation, Jupp slipped me the first packet two days after Margaret’s visit, as we passed in the gallery. The second was tossed onto my bed last week by the keeper Davies, our whistling postman from Hell.

Now that I’ve read Margaret’s letters, I know my own are a beggar-boy’s, whinging and cringing, and I wonder if this log of abuses is not my more manly love letter to a woman so dogged and strong. Judging from the few of hers Jupp’s kindness and Haslam’s justice have enabled me to see—thirty-four in all, the Jupp-saved written between March 4th and August 17th, 1804, the Haslam-provided between December 4th, 1808, and February 15th of this year, I mean 1809 (the narrow time span of the latter packet owing I should think to Haslam’s having no way to know how many Sir Archy’s held back)—Margaret’s letters in their own way are as lovingly rendered as this chronicle, and no more fit for
public eyes. Documents of loss, humiliation, resolve, longing, lust, fury, despair—all at a pitch certain to outrage those for whom sanguine views promise every advantage of hope, prevalence, and comfort. You build your world on sunny principles, and lo and behold ain’t life sunny, except for how much you hate the guts of anybody who’d prick your bubble.

I was lying on my bed thinking these ungenteel thoughts while wondering if habeas corpus will deliver me back into the world wiser than to be a blind drummer for human nature, when Mr. Ailey, a promising mathematician until he strangled his mother, stopped by to report that the Quaker William Tuke was in the building, with another gentleman.

I sprang from my deathbed.

Tuke is founder of The Retreat, the private asylum that’s been making such a racket at York. Even the London papers have been full of it for years. By Ailey’s account, the purpose of Tuke’s visit to The Schoolmaster was to learn how we do things here. Tuke’s been reported as saying he was even more impressed by the second edition of Jack’s book than by the first. But you don’t need to find the Tuke approach a good one to consider his errand, if not a fool’s, more mysterious than it appears. Who can predict what strangeness will issue from a Quaker silence? Yet Tuke’s visit whether strange or not promised to reveal something of the prospects of our habeas corpus.

Reaching the lower gallery, I ducked down quick behind the lunatic Phippard, an old sailor in the habit of gleefully swagging on the spot while he scans the heaving main. Adjusting his position, I got him between me and The Schoolmaster’s back, close enough so I could hear what Tuke was saying. Though tall, Phippard makes poor cover, for every twenty minutes or so he
stamps his foot and booms out something like, “God bless the King and all the admirals! I would fight up to my neck in blood for them!” before he returns to scanning. Such behaviour is apt to draw the attention of the unaccustomed. Fortunately, being moved by me a dozen feet failed to rouse Phippard from his anticipation of war at sea, and Tuke and The Schoolmaster remained locked in conversation.

By the pitch of The Schoolmaster’s shoulders, it was not one he was happy to be in. Beyond his right shoulder I could see Tuke’s ordinary, impatient face and the clipped movement of his pursed mouth with its chunks of yellow teeth. From the neck down, Tuke is a plain, drab-outfitted squab of the sort so intent on making his appearance unenviable that you can’t forget it. He’s exactly what you think of when you think of a Quaker merchant. Why does the nonconformist always have the best uniform? Yet I felt an immediate connexion to him and thought at first this must be because he’s made his fortune in tea, an ambition once my own, queer as it was just now to watch my hand letter the fact.

But there was something more in Tuke’s face than tea, and something of disguise in that Quaker outfit.

As to who the third gentleman was, owing to the position of The Schoolmaster, I couldn’t see. If it was Bryan Crowther (who’s an unabashed admirer of Tuke and his methods), Mr. Ailey would have known it, and if he didn’t, there’s the fact The Schoolmaster so loathes our surgeon it’s the rare occasion he’ll remain in the same room with him. For all Crowther’s eagerness to be a contributing part of things around here, he ain’t and never was and in his disappointment has too often retreated into drink, which has done nothing to enhance his prospects.

But harkee, Tuke was talking.

“There is much analogy, don’t you think, Mr. Haslam, between the judicious treatment of children and that of insane persons? As the most disruptive lunatic, one might say, has much in common with a two year old?”

“An insane two year old—?” was The Schoolmaster’s murmured response.

Having the dogged, no-nonsense air of a man with a sizable store of pronouncements to get through, Tuke didn’t seem to hear what The Schoolmaster said. Or perhaps Jack smiled as he spoke, and Tuke, thus cued, made the mental note
jest,
only himself omitting to smile, as one does who, having no sense of humour, assumes any sign of one betrays a tendency to instability best not encouraged.

As for the third gentleman, he shifted his weight like a man uncomfortable with a joke. But he didn’t speak, and he didn’t shift far enough to afford a view of who he was. Perhaps, I thought, it was only Tuke’s son—or even grandson. Old Tuke’s no spring foal.

“Which is not to say,” Tuke continued unflapped, “we should address them in a childish or domineering manner.”

“By no means ought we to
domineer,”
The Schoolmaster drawled, as if half asleep. “When it’s always been quite enough to
dominate.”

Now Tuke shot Jack the scrutinizing look of one to whom it’s just occurred the other could be vibrating at a frequency different from the one he thought. Just to be sure, and revealing the obtuse confidence of fifty years’ freedom from doubt, he waded in deeper. “Dominate, Mr. Haslam? I wonder if we ought to use even a word like dominate.”

“Well,” The Schoolmaster answered, practically in a yawn, “only for Truth’s sake—” Picking up speed, he continued, “Two things,
Mr. Tuke. One, these people are indeed in a condition of domination. Their confinement, however mild its acceptation, as at your celebrated house—” bowing—“amounts to an incarceration equal to that of the inhabitants of the King’s Bench, or Newgate Gaol. You do after all require they keep their madness to themselves. Ha-has, so to speak, are fences too. So why should not the manner and discourse of their dominators fit the circumstance?”

Before Tuke could make answer to this, Jack went on. “Two, thinking now of our own personal comportment as it must encourage in our patients that rational calm we agree is our common goal: Unless we’d be self-defeating hypocrites, surely we ought to display the authority invested in us and not, by pretending to be like them (as all too often happens), out of our own sheer lack of self-control in an insidious environment, sink to a level grotesque and dreadful as theirs and so lose their awe and respect altogether.” Here he meant Crowther, but Tuke had no way to know it. “Mind you,” again cutting him off, “if our concern here is only words—because your house employs strait-waistcoats as much as the next, but how in this day and age can anybody expect to attract paying customers with talk of shackles and severity—then I do sympathize, for such meal-mouthedness is only an understandable consequence of lunatic advisors turning hoteliers and so transforming human suffering to a business.”

This attack was vintage Schoolmaster, and I was curious how Tuke would take it—which was slow and deliberate, as he marshalled enough control of himself to make a generous-seeming, let’s-get-back-to-why-I’m-here response. “What I most value about your book, Mr. Haslam, is the impression you convey in it of your energy in doing what’s necessary to initiate a fraternal rapport with each patient. Like the great Pinel—” by a stiffening of
his neck you could see how little The Schoolmaster relished the comparison—“you inquire into the particulars of his case, how he acts, how he’s come to be in hospital, and so forth. It’s my belief, as I know it must be yours, that if we would seek to cure—”

“Cure?”
The speed with which this syllable shot back at Tuke streaming sarcastic incredulity was remarkable.

“Yes, sir,” Tuke returned, practically as fast. “Cure. Cure of their insanity.”

“Ah,
cure,”
The Schoolmaster replied, this time like one too innocent not to be a little slow to grasp a point of such diabolical cunning. “Tell me, Mr. Tuke, would this be more politics? They do better if they imagine their time with you well spent? A profitable investment on their part, is that it?”

“Why, what more profitable to a man, Mr. Haslam, than his sanity back?”

“Funny, I thought you’d say soul.” And before Tuke could pick himself off the floor after that one, The Schoolmaster concluded, in a long-suffering voice, something like a fond nephew’s as it finally dawns on him his favourite uncle is a jabbering idiot, “So you do believe you can cure the insane.”

“I do. Here’s why. At The Retreat we see monthly occurrences of it. Weekly occurrences.”

“As do I, even in this poor place.”

“Well then—?”

“Perhaps the difference between us, Mr. Tuke, is you’ve discovered how it’s done. Your innocence of medical rigmarole has afforded you insight unavailable to those of us still fettered by Hippocratic scruples.”

Now, this was going pretty far, even for The Schoolmaster, whose world fame (ever since Pinel, in the book he wrote after he was here,
as good as called him the greatest English mad-doctor that ever lived) has for some unaccountable reason done little to curb the effects of his insecurities. It’s as if he’s more impatient than ever with people slow to appreciate how right he is. Yet I wondered if that unease wasn’t blinding him to what he’s up against in the mighty Tuke. Sometimes you’ll half pity a man his crackpot beliefs, and yet what indomitable courage they may be all the while affording him. Enough easily to destroy you and everything you ever stood for.

“I’ll tell you how it’s done, Mr. Haslam.”

As he said these words, Tuke shot a glance at the third gentleman. It was a quick one, the kind by which a man will deflect attention from himself while he frames what he’s going to say next. But for me it told everything. Because
even as Tuke glanced at his companion, he (Tuke!) continued to gaze hard at The Schoolmaster.

At first I thought this must be my imagination, yet I knew what I’d seen and so knew it could mean only one thing: Tuke’s been taken over. That connexion I felt to him, what I was seeing in his face, was tea all right, but more essentially it was this: He’s in the power of the gang.

But which agent? If you think I watched him close before—

“The way it’s done, Mr. Haslam, is simple. We must love them.”

A silence ensued from these words, the gentleman next to Tuke once more shifting his weight from one foot to the other, this time (I imagined) in nervous approval, as Tuke’s eyes continued to bore away into The Schoolmaster’s face while The Schoolmaster’s head remained bent. What expression was on The Schoolmaster’s face I had no way to see and couldn’t guess if he’d be bold enough to be meeting Tuke’s gaze.

“Love them—” The Schoolmaster murmured at last, in a doubting tone.

“Yes, sir. Love them. Only by love can this most devastating of human pestilences be cleansed from the face of the earth.”

“Love,” The Schoolmaster repeated again, this time in such a way as to produce an animal sound you would not believe any human language had been vulgar enough to distinguish with meaning. If
cure
was a term The Schoolmaster found incredible, then
love
from his mouth was a loathing, unsignificant grunt.

“Love them, sir,” Tuke insisted once more, and added,
“for the troubled sinners they are.”

And there it was, as The Schoolmaster had all along known it would be. Even from a Quaker, the sick-sweet incense of priestcraft.

Now I looked at Tuke, who kept his eyes fixed hard on The Schoolmaster as if he would stare him down. At that moment I was struck by how much he resembled the late Sir William Pult-ney. A certain Roman aspect to the nose, and the sunk cheeks, though admittedly from a coarser mould. And then, by an association I at first assumed superficial, I found myself thinking of Dr. DeValangin, Old Benevolence, as we used to call him, who treated no man as a sinner, troubled or not. The resemblance was not with Tuke himself, but—
Uh-oh.

Stop right there. Now I knew. And a good thing it was I had Phippard to hold tight to, because the knowledge, when it hit me, buckled my knees.

The truth of the matter is this: The agent currently in charge of the Quaker William Tuke is none other than the leader of the Air Loom gang himself, that archvillain of murderous deceit, the one who’s never been observed to smile except at chess: Bill the King.

May God have mercy on us all.