Bedlam (27 page)

Even Western could understand the interview was over. Perhaps he wondered if it was something he’d said.

The party trouped out, leaving James Norris to read things over twice and so avoid the inconvenience of notes.

I don’t know all the sights taken in by Wakefield and his companions on that tour. I don’t think Alavoine has told me everything, and some of it about Norris I heard in person from Wakefield’s testimony at the Inquiry. But another visit Alavoine was concerned to describe to me in some detail was the one they paid to James Tilly Matthews, in his private room.

For several years by this time, Matthews was raving as wildly as he did when first admitted. After the departure of his wife and son for Jamaica, he’d fallen back on his old conviction he was Omni Imperias Grand Arch Emperor of the Universe and all terrestrial heads of state mere strutting impostors. The latter was a corollary as agreeable to an Emperor of the Universe as to a republican and in either case convenient for overruling the tyranny your madness has you daily convinced you’re a victim of.

More productively, during those same years, Matthews was putting his engraving talents to use designing the Omni Imperias Palace he planned one day to make his residence, while working on a set of architectural drawings to enter in a competition for the best design of the New Bethlem. Though his qualifications as a lunatic might be thought a handicap, in fact they conferred a unique advantage: four years without his own Bethlem room had afforded him a wealth of hints how best to accommodate lunatics if you cared about their well-being. In the end he did not win but for his efforts was awarded thirty pounds by the Building Committee for his “benefit and comfort.” His entry was four water-colour architectural plans (offering alternative details) in a fine
folio set, plus fifty pages of notes in his meticulous hand. These are fascinating documents for those curious to know what sort of place a madman thinks a lunatic hospital should be. Not once do the governors consult Monro and myself about the new hospital but are so scrupulous to solicit the opinions of a lunatic in our charge that they escort him to the site of construction to benefit from his architectural criticisms. (As a result of his architectural enthusiasm, the next year Matthews published the first issue of his own magazine,
Useful Architecture,
containing plans of private houses and municipal buildings for a general readership. A second volume ensued, but sales, never vast, precluded a third.)

Beyond this, though it might be thought a curious circumstance that a madman with delusions of grandeur should design a madhouse, one needs only consider the resemblance between Bethlem at Moorfields and the Tuileries Palace to be reminded that grandness and lunacy have always drifted through history in some essential consanguinity. I don’t know if this means only that power more than corrupts, it makes men mad; or that madness gravitates to grandeur because the common fate of insanity is squalor; or that the history of madness is one and the same with the history of politics (the two effortlessly swapping back and forth from each other’s ranks); or if there’s some other, deeper communion between those two that the follies of any age will tend to obscure but the human heart has always known and must assent to.

Maybe it’s simple. Maybe we’re all great, and mad too. And all know it, but appalled at the thought of so much absence of limitation in either direction, we choose the greater comfort of habit and received opinion, and so reduce ourselves to being ordinary and dull. In this we’re like madmen subdued by depletory treatment,
but also, at the other extreme that’s really no extreme at all, like the great, debilitated by the luxury that consoles them for the narrow burden of constantly needing to defend not only what they have but having so much of it.

As Wakefield’s party entered Matthews’ room, no one among them could fail to be aware he was coming into the presence of Bethlem’s most famous living lunatic, if you didn’t count James Hadfield and Peg Nicholson, who enjoyed the unfair advantage of having tried to kill the King. While no more than two in the party—I mean David Williams and Wakefield himself—were familiar with the particulars of Matthews’ story, its unmistakable republican gist would have predisposed to sympathy all members of that hand-picked company. And even had Wakefield and Williams been aware that the work their favourite mad republican sat hunched over was designs for his own personal palace once he assumed his rightful place as Emperor of the Universe, they would not have been fazed. First of all, any industry in Bethlem (though there’s plenty of it: enterprising manufacture of gewgaws to extract coins from our trickle of permitted tourists) would have struck them as the human spirit triumphing over shocking adversity. Second, wasn’t it tyranny that drove Matthews mad in the first place? Third, so what if he happened to be convinced he’s greater than all the world’s leaders rolled into one? Ain’t everybody?

Yet there was more to it than this. Even in the darkest night of his most pathetic megalomania, Matthews never stopped being a favourite with everyone in the place. By that time old Alavoine had been his faithful defender for nigh twenty years, and Alavoine would sell you his mother’s corpse for fertilizer, and at a good price too, for what could be the demand?

As Wakefield’s party shuffled in, Matthews remained hunched over his work table. But the instant Wakefield said quietly, “Mr. Matthews—?” his head shot up like a deer’s in the forest. Then slowly turned.

“An honour, sir—” Wakefield began, and stopped, for in Matthews’ face was manifest the look of one discovering something dreadful in another’s.

Though he was salesman and politician enough to know the best antidote to public distress, alarm, or inconsequential talk is blithe good humour, Wakefield was at this date as yet too green to manage it. His mouth moved but nothing came out.

Meanwhile Matthews’ eyes had moved on and stopped at a face he knew. “My God!” he cried. “David Williams! The c-company you keep!”

It must have been the tension in the room, but this caused a laugh to boom out and take a long time to die down. Before it did, Alavoine, who understood the cause of Matthews’ reaction to Wakefield had been the glimpse of an Air Loom agent in him, asked him in an aside,
Whoh hiss hay, Chimhayh?

A question intended as sympathetic but with a drastic consequence. In reply, Matthews clapped both hands over his left thigh (the side of him Alavoine approached him on) and muttered ferociously,
“Don’t start, Sir Archy! Don’t bloody
thigh-talk
me now!”
(In
my Illustrations of Madness
I explain that one way the gang used to torment Matthews was by directing their
voice-sayings
[as he called them] at his thigh, in which, to force their reception, they would temporarily embed his organ of hearing.)

Nhoh, Chimhayh,
Alavoine assured him.
Hhits hohnlhayh Mhist-hayhr Hedhoowharhd Whayhk-fheehld, c-huhm t-hoh s-hayh howh yho hahr heerh.

It was too late. A terrific grimace was stretching Matthews’ features. Repulsed by the bizarre energy of that distortion, the company fell back as, clutching at his head and uttering a series of rending shrieks, the madman came up off his stool and went staggering this way and that before collapsing senseless to the floor.

Over the years, Alavoine had come into a kind of implicit faith in Matthews’ delusions. What he alone now realized was the thigh-talking had been succeeded by a classic Air Loom assault of
apoplexy-working with the nutmeg-grater,
a process by which the gang use that machine to force magnetic fluids into the victim’s head with such violence that in the rare event he’s not instantly destroyed, constellations of tiny pimples erupt from his temples. These resemble the black pinholes left by a bolt of lightning as it exits a human body, except they’re closer to a rich dark-gold in colour than to sooty, and also raised and rough, and may accurately be compared to the appearance of a nutmeg-grater after use.

Alavoine further realized that Matthews had been too immediately overwhelmed to recognize the hand at the controls of the machine. But judging from the speed, accuracy, and strength of the assault, he understood it had to be a consummate expert such as The Middleman, or even—and here he did not forget the notorious villain whom Matthews had once glimpsed in William Tuke, whose reforming career was, after all, Wakefield’s principal inspiration—Bill the King himself.

But if it was Bill, who was he here in league with? What agent had Matthews just now spotted in Wakefield? The answer to this question, as Alavoine told me the next day, he discovered only later, after he had separated Bryan Crowther from a bottle long enough so he could tend to Matthews, escorted Wakefield’s party to the front gate, and returned to find Matthews slumped on the
edge of his bed with his head in his hands and Crowther slouched on Matthews’ work stool, arms folded, gazing at him.

Whoh whass hay, Chimhayh?
Alavoine asked again, sinking onto the bed next to Matthews and draping a filthy-red-jacketed arm around his neck.

The madman made no objection to the intimacy. Neither did he answer.

It was Crowther who said who it was: “Blue-Mantle.”

Hoh
Chays-huss
Khuhrayhst, Chimhayh!
was all Alavoine could exclaim at this information. Both he and Crowther were familiar enough with Matthews’ fantasies to know Blue-Mantle as a free agent not a member of any single gang, who many in the Bethlem one had always insisted was the agent who’d persuaded Hadfield he must kill his Majesty, that it was never Bill the King at all.

Still shaking his head at the implications of so odious a being at Wakefield’s helm, Alavoine cried again,
Hoh, Chimhayh!
as he tugged Matthews closer to him and tipped his old skull to touch the madman’s.

The two of them remaining in that attitude, Crowther took it on himself to sum up, for Alavoine’s information, the point he’d just been trying to impress on Matthews. “A closeted republican Wakefield may be, or inclined in that direction,” he declared, “but a king-slayer, Jimmy, I don’t think so.”

“It’s not Wakefield, it’s Blue-Mantle,” Matthews replied simply, not lifting his head. “Wakefield’s the vehicle only.” Listlessly he added, “First David Williams shows his nose here in the company of Bill the King-”

“What?” Crowther interrupted him. “The republican David Williams, who’s on the Board of Tuke’s Retreat? He’s been here before?”

“Five years ago,” Matthews said. “And today he pops upon us hand-in-hand with Blue-Mantle. You can’t tell me these are innocent pairings.”

As Matthews spoke, Crowther fixed a querying look at Alavoine, who saw it when he opened his eyes.
Chimhayh s-hawh Bhill theh Khingh hinh Whihl-yhahm T-huhkh,
he explained with a sigh.

“Tuke himself, now, has been here too?” Crowther cried. “Jesus Christ! Why didn’t anybody tell me?”

“The Schoolmaster talked to him,” Matthews said quietly, still addressing the floor. “Why would he tell you, Bryan, when he doesn’t tell you anything?”

“Haslam can go to bloody Hell!” Crowther shouted. “Do you know what that bastard did to me?”

Yahz wheeh dhooh, Bhrayhahn. Hiht hahp-hend fohr yheehrs hahgoh.

But having been drinking, Crowther launched into an extended revilement of me for attacking his
Pitiful—
excuse
me—Practical Remarks on Insanity
but soon losing his way, that ground being too criss-crossed by previous excursions, fell into a corollary track, also a long-time favourite with him: that the Bethlem damp was shortening Matthews’ life, and if our madman was to live another six months he must be found a new place to live.

When Alavoine (who I think preferred not to lose Matthews before Matthews would lose him) shot back irritably that this was no more than a truth universally acknowledged and everybody knew that, with the habeas corpus rejected, nothing further could be done about it, Crowther fixed a bleary red eye on him and intoned in a voice of doom, “It’s now more than an abscess he’s got, Peter, it’s a bleeding tumour.”

Hoh
Chays-huss,
Bhrayhahn, hahr yho sh-hoohr?

To confirm he was, Crowther gave a nod that, proving too strenuous for his unstable condition, required a foot shot out to the side. Balance recovered, he went viciously at his face with both hands, rubbing it hard all over, as he liked to do, the way you might manipulate and bat away at a rubber mask, flopping it this way and that until at last you desist, and it springs back to its original shape, only bright red, while for good measure you go on flicking at your ear, like a dog snapping the flap of it with its paw until it cracks like a whip. Then he spoke.

“I was fag at Eton of George Rose, who’s lately been saying publicly he don’t like the state of our madhouses. I say we conscript him and Friend Wakefield to our cause. Such allies will gain the attention of the press, which these days has grown capable of inciting sentiment for change.”

Now Matthews’ head came up and Alavoine’s with it as if they were hinged at the temple. “Wakefield’s no friend to the lunatic,” he muttered darkly.

“Then he must be a friend of yours, Jimmy,” Crowther replied. “Ain’t you always telling us a lunatic’s the last thing you are?”

Ignoring this, Matthews observed, “It’s no accident hack-rabble Grub Street’s direct around the corner.”

“No accident, you say—?” Crowther muttered.

“Grub Street printing presses are Air Looms refitted for typesetting. A newspaper’s an Influencing Engine from masthead to auction sales.”

“Oh, now, Jimmy,” Crowther chided him. “You only say that because you consider your own lettering the work of the greatest Omni Imperias Engine that ever grasped a pen and made stroking motions.”

“Believe me, Bryan,” Matthews answered calmly, “I never
flattered myself they don’t have more fish in their fryer than this one.”

“There’s room, is there?” Crowther said, yawning.

“What?”

“Flim-flam-flum,” Crowther said and pushed himself to his feet. “Let’s see, shall we, if we can’t get you out of this stinking sinkhole.”

Now Matthews looked at him hard. Even Alavoine’s eyes opened, and he looked at him too.

“I’m going to find you a healthier place to live, Jimmy,” Crowther announced. “Somewhere your wife can visit you, if she ever—” Though he could hardly stand, he did here break mercifully off (for who could know if she was alive or not?), adding only, “It’s my duty as your surgeon—” When still neither would release his pop-eyed stare, he added, with the haste of one tending to panic at the first sign of a moment turning poignant, “But first things first, I must attend to this devilish thirst—”