Bedlam (29 page)

In the lengthening days of that winter, a number of long-time employees of old Bethlem, as if reluctant to undergo so jarring a change in levels of light, warmth, and general salubriousness as New Bethlem threatened, chose to retire to what they knew: dank, dark, and decay, with Death’s added benefits of eternal privacy and silence. First to lumber off was Alf Bulteel, without whom, all considered, the world is none the worse. Next was Bryan Crowther. Him I do regret, as I do my treatment of him. It was the tragic waste of a good intelligence. The next time I saw him after his seizure was only six weeks later, to surreptitiously examine his brain before sewing him up for burial. Dropsical insanity, the usual conformations, nothing otherwise remarkable. These brain descriptors can make too-fitting epitaphs.

After Crowther it was Peter Alavoine. On February 17, 1815, he celebrated his eighty-first birthday and three days later was stricken with a paralysis of the right side. Matthews, though hardly well himself, begging access to see to him, I granted it, and he and I were separately with him a good deal. One morning the codger, his skull a wizened birdling’s against his pillow, beckoned me close to whisper there was something he wanted me to have.
Conscious of the beady ancient gaze, I extracted a greasy manilla envelope from the East India Company fruit crate, with a hank of robin’s-egg chenille tacked round it, that served as his night-table.

T-hoh t-hinghs…Ch-hahn,
he said. As a consequence of immobility and lack of appetite, he’d contracted pneumonia, by which he’d grown daily more breathless and exhausted.
Whuhn, yho mhuhst nhaht hohp-hehn hit t-hihl hayhm g-hahn. T-hoh, yho mhuhst nehfhayhr show th-hem, t-hoh—

“Never show who what, Sir Archy?” Matthews said behind me.

With a frantic look at me, Alavoine gasped,
Theh gohvehrnhers!

“Evidence, is it?” Matthews asked, peering round my shoulder at the envelope. “Mum’s the word with Jack on evidence! He’s the new kind of recorder!”

Back in my office, it was to be only a peek, but once I saw what I had I dove in.

At noon I spelled Matthews. When he left for lunch I leaned in close to Alavoine. “You old bastard. To serve your friend this way—”

In his affected dialect he whined, “To ignore a dying man’s last request—”

“Peter, you love James and have always assured me his letters went out. Why such cruelty? Read them, since the rules say you must, but why for God’s sake not send them on?”

These questions inspired a speech of raving self-justification, in which the self being justified figured in the third person. The speaker was not Alavoine but his inhabitant, the one Matthews called Sir Archy. The letters, Sir Archy told me, had been held as “scraps for the dog Alavoine.” The plan was, with none of Matthews’ letters leaving Bethlem, there’d be no answer from Jamaica. When, out of despair, Matthews stopped writing, Sir
Archy would not tell himself this, which is to say would not tell
Alavoine,
but instead that Matthews’ more recent productions were being sold direct to Poynder. “A pretty way to twist his feed-tube, don’t you think?” he asked me.

“Whose
feed-tube?”

“Alavoine’s! But—” the old head gave a rueful shake—“Matthews never stopped writing—”

“Sell them to Poynder—?” I said, confused.

“Damn Poynder!
He’s keeping hers and wants the set!”

“Margaret Matthews has been writing letters? How many does Poynder have?”

“A good hundred. All the Jamaica ones.”

“She’s alive!?”

“As of three months ago, which is the time it takes a Jamaica letter to arrive, she was, but must be mad as he is, to write a hundred letters with no reply.”

“Does Matthews know she’s alive?”

“Only in his heart.”

I left him begging me not to tell Matthews he’d so callously betrayed him.

Poynder was at his desk doing his accounts. I told him Alavoine had given me 223 letters from Matthews to his wife. I also told him of Alavoine’s charge against himself.

He seemed perturbed by the first piece of information, consternated by the second. “Why would I do that?” he wondered.

“A guilty delusion,” I assured him. “He said he kept Matthews’ as scraps for the dog Alavoine.”

“This is delirium.”

“I’m writing her today.”

He regarded me with alarm. “You have her address—?”

“If the one on Matthews’ letters isn’t a fantasy, I do—”

I’m drawn to that other place Poynder watches people from, its lone remove. Conversations with him so throw me that once I found myself describing to him the Methodist minister in his rumpled coat who presided at Sarah’s funeral, how he fell on her eulogy in a slavering caress, the object of which bore no relation to the woman I knew and loved. I can only think telling Poynder this was my attempt to convey to him how alien and cruel the world has seemed to me since Sarah’s death, and that was a way to let him know how profoundly I miss her. A probe, in other words, an oblique one, for that other capacity in which he himself always seemed to operate. But no, even disguised, my anecdote was too intimate and frightened him. The abyss yawned. He temporized, fumbled out a brow-smoothing sentiment the equivalent
of You’ll be fine,
then rapidly discoursed on the shocking rise in the price of coal and whether we might ask the governors’ permission to fire the stoves five days in the week instead of seven. I was never in my life at the same time humiliated and abandoned by a man so familiar to me and yet so alien. The same treatment, come to think of it, I was trying to tell him I was suffering from the world.

“So no letters have ever come from her that you’re aware of?” I now inquired.

“John, you’ve asked me this before. My answer’s the same: none.”

“But you did know she’s in Jamaica?”

“Isn’t that what was said when she disappeared?”

“My letter will by-pass Alavoine.”

“Yes, drop it direct to me.”

Now, why would he say that?

A few minutes later I ran into Matthews in the upper hall,
making his way back from lunch to sit with Alavoine. When I told him what the old Satan had been up to, he nodded as at old news.

“You’ve known this?” I said in amazement.

“Yes, by the fact I’ve never received a Jamaica answer from her.”

“Alavoine tells me Poynder’s kept her letters.”

‘That would further explain it.”

“But why?”

“Because she’s alive and writing me.”

“No, why would Poynder keep them?”

He looked at me startled. “Jack, have you never considered what Poynder’s days must be like? A bachelor whose entire adult life has been lived on these and Bridewell’s premises? Don’t you think a little private transgression would go a long way in an existence like that? Or a woman’s genuine loving voice, though only on paper, not be rare music in it?”

“A transgression not private enough, James, and not little. Far from only between a man and his conscience, it would be criminal interference in others’ lives.”

“But don’t forget what this place is dedicated to, or how unsignificant those other lives are. Now imagine a constant aching absence in your heart—”

“I have no need to imagine.”

“At least you and I had someone once. Think of it like this, Jack. Margaret and I, by writing the truth of what we feel, have all along been doing double good. Even as we’ve taken up our pens to nourish the other, our words, in being robbed of their proper recipient, first fed their author and second, by a serendipity of that theft, have kept alive what’s human in Sir Archy and Poynder. That those two have held fast our loving sentiments should be viewed as testimony to the tenaciousness of their humanity. Or put it this
way: Though Sir Archy’s insensible to guilt, like a good thief he knows quality and has instinctively stored away my letters as a squirrel does nuts against winter’s poverty.”

“I’m writing her today.”

“Better post it yourself.”

“I’ll write two and give one to Poynder.”

“Make it a dozen. Gang agents have been scanning mail at the London and Kingston depots for years. The Government’s only been following suit, in their study of the gangs’ specialty: communication and its blocks. I’d be begging you to make a bundle of your inheritance and post it to her today, if I could believe for one moment they’d not vanish immediately down the nearest magnetic sink.”

In his last days Alavoine underwent a stunning transformation. The affected dialect—for as far as I could tell it was only ever a perverse, facetious affectation; nobody speaks English that way-cracked like a shell, leaving a regular Cheshire man’s manner of speaking, nothing otherwise odd about it at all. Also, up until the hour he died, his old nature continued evolving to ever more loving and plain. They say in old age a person will revert to how he spoke before the way he needed to, to get along in the world. And strokes, of course, can alter character and not always for the worse. But whatever caused the change, Alavoine now sincerely addressed everyone who visited—whether gallery maid (a hard-mouthed French one, Marie-Louise, called by Matthews Charlotte, was his favourite), lunatic, or medical officer—as a dear friend, and nobody heard his manner as mawkish or facetious, as indeed it wasn’t.

In this state he showed no concern about Matthews’ letters, except to extol their loving sentiments. What he did speak of constantly, with a joy liable to cause a pang for anyone not so
confident it would ever happen, was the imminence of Matthews’ departure from Bethlem and how he’d always hoped—and feared—it would occur before his own another way, and how nothing could give him more satisfaction than to have Matthews close by him in his own last days and know he too would soon leave for superior accommodations, albeit (with a shy smile) more
mundane
than the place he himself was headed. Altogether he showed tremendous affection for his friend, and Matthews for him, to the degree that for the first time I heard Matthews call him Peter. To see them sitting together with clasped hands or Matthews gently easing him forward to plump his pillow, you’d never suspect that for at least five years one had been doing the other so heartless an injustice and the other had known all about it.

Without care of Alavoine to bring Matthews and me together, with him restricted once again to the galleries and my time more and more entailed by the thousand details of the transfer to the new place, I didn’t see him again until April, only a few weeks before the Inquiry began. Meanwhile, exacerbating my anxieties about eighteen years of keeping him as an incurable when we’d routinely sent ten times madder and more dangerous lunatics back out into the streets, the contents of his letters to his wife were constantly in my thoughts. Written in ordinary cursive script, they were nothing other than daily concerns and caring sentiments, with only here and there a stretch of lunatic delusion. In other words, the letters of any doting husband. But in communicating with such naked intimacy, such longing and love, as to seem already there, inside her mind, they lingered in mine, and there they served as a constant rebuke to my chronic failure of obligation to him.

I now resolved to try once more to convince him to tell me why he was in. Perhaps the Liverpool hints I’d picked up from Shaftesbury might loosen his tongue, by showing him I could corroborate what he told me, however incredible. If I didn’t succeed, I hoped at least, by entering again into conversation with him, to restore a modicum of communication between us, so if at the Inquiry I had no proper answer concerning his incarceration, I mean one that wouldn’t nastily rebound on Bethlem and her medical officers, at least when otherwise addressing his condition I’d pay him the respect, and do myself the service, of knowing of what I spoke when I spoke of him.

The day in April I first went to see Matthews was much like this one, an early-morning spring pause sort of day, all sunshine and blossoms. In memory it’s a Sunday, for how on a London factory day could air so calm have been so lucid? Yet I remember as we talked we could hear the demolishers joking and shouting as they levered shingles off the outbuildings west along London Wall. It couldn’t have been a Sunday.

I arrived to find his door wide open. Dawn to dusk, seven days a week, he liked to make himself available to visitors from both sides of the custodial divide. Sometimes he greeted them seated on his Omni Imperias Throne, sometimes more informally from the stool at his work table. Spread across its surface would be fresh documentation for our destruction, intermingled with plans for construction of his Omni Imperias Palace against the day of his ascension. It didn’t seem to matter to his callers what height of self-esteem he spoke from so long as he listened, which he always did, though answering more grandly or enigmatically on some days than others. People tend to grant an oracle figural leeway. They like to stumble away from a godhead with something to think about.

In sum, I would say that for all his determination to destroy us, as well as to exterminate all pretenders to the Throne of the Universe, belonging as that station did to himself and himself alone, Matthews’ primary impulse was conciliation. People did not come to him nervously asking themselves, Whose side will he be on? They knew he’d only ever be on the side of peace. It was not for the sake of power he sought Universal Dominion, it was ultimate deliverance from conflict. In this he was our own resident Un-Napoleon: an unacceptable identity, of course, in time of war, when the question
Whose side are you on?
admits of only one answer.

That morning Matthews was alone, at work on his journal. From the doorway I could see the letters neat and glistening. When he heard me he glanced up, and though I hadn’t laid eyes on him in two months and not been in his room for a year, he showed no surprise but only came fully round on his stool to study me as I lowered myself onto his bed and studied him back.

I don’t know what change he was finding in me. I’m aware since Sarah’s death and my children’s departure I’ve grown negligent of my appearance. Mornings I climb into the first thing that falls on me out of the closet. I don’t eat as I should, only Mrs. Clark’s tea and cakes, when I eat anything. My hair is exiting. I weep hair. When I catch a reflection of myself in a windowpane, I see a patient annoyed to glimpse another so startled at his appearance. But naked before Sarah’s looking-glass I see only a fat, weary widower in unspoused and unfamilied disarray, who happens to resemble a lunatic with a body gone amorphous from a brain too enfeebled by disease to contain it.

As for Matthews, he was ill. A cachexia in his features seemed to confirm Crowther’s diagnosis. Yet by the scrutiny he gave my anxious entrance, an observer might wonder which of us was
unempowered. Seventeen years had passed since I paid my slavish call on Liverpool and was won over and subsequently did nothing and so, to adapt Mr. Pope on duncely inertia,

…gently drawn, and struggling less and less,

Rolled in the vortex, and its power confessed.

Seventeen years is a long time to walk around feeling you should act and not acting.

“James,” I said without preamble, “it’s time I knew why the Government’s wanted you in here. It’s not because you’re mad, that’s long been evident. Nor is it some threat you once made on a now-deceased gentleman’s life. It’s what you know, isn’t it?”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because Liverpool would never be seen a coward, but he’d do what was necessary to ensure a confidence.”

“You knew The Dark Lanthorn, did you?”

“No, but I once paid him a visit.”

“So did I. More than one.”

“And yours, I take it, have done you even less good than mine. James, if you won’t, or can’t, tell me what the secret is, at least tell me who or what you’re a threat to.”

“This is unlike you, Jack, and a strange departure from your usual condescension to me as a demented child. It must be because the Inquiry will want to know and you fear they’ll think you never did.”

“You do know why you’re in, don’t you?”

“Yes, it’s because I was a hero once.”

“They incarcerate heroes, do they?”

“Only when the achievement explodes the categories it would
enhance their power to congratulate you inside of. That’s when they slip the Garter back in their pocket and call the police.”

“Tell me the story.”

“Is this to be my deathbed confession, a little early but not by much?”

“What? No. Of course not—”

“Jack, if you can’t tell your own patient the medical truth, how will you be able to hear what you’re wanting from me? I promise you it will do you far less good than admitting to me, who already know it, how sick I am.”

“Then it must do me very little good. You know I was never a devotee of the bliss of ignorance.”

“Not ignorance. Ambition. The insensibility of that.”

“You told Butterclerk and Cluckbeck, I assume, now tell me.”

“No, I never told them why I was in. Such innocents would have lost all heart for getting me out.”

“Getting you out is a separate concern.”

“The one before us being to assist you in outfoxing the hunt. I’m saying my secret can only hobble you.”

“I feel hobbled now, not knowing it.”

“Not knowing it and pretending you did.”

“I’ve pretended nothing, only defended—sometimes explicitly, sometimes by silence—a decision it has not been in my power to challenge.”

“Or understand. Your fear is not appearing in charge, when you never were. Why not act direct on what you already know is true, I mean your knowledge of what kind of man I am?”

I took a breath. “James, the other day I was told Liverpool once collaborated with the republican government in France—”

“Who said that?” he shot back, with a look of surprise.

“Lord Shaftesbury.”

He nodded, taking this in.

“So it’s true?” I said. “Liverpool, the great assailant of all things republican? And it’s through your sometime connexion with him you’re in here? You know the details, and now his son is Prime Minister?”

“It’s no accident his son’s Prime Minister,” came the dark reply.

“So it does go high.”

“To the very top.”

“That’s it, then?” I persisted. “Is that the story?”

“Not a fraction of it.”

“No? Is it that he’s Prime Minister to address an error of his father’s?”

“If Shaftesbury said that too, then he has only hints. You should ask, ‘The failure of what paternal plan has left him disappointed?’”

“All right, James. What plan?”

He smiled and shook his head.

Now I stepped toward the bed and looked down at him, and when I spoke, though my words came out quiet, it was with so palpable a commotion among the nerves of my lower face that I could only think my failure to defend him before the Grand Committee, coming as it has after a decade of doing nothing to get him out, has not left me unaffected. “James,” I said. “You told me I should act on what kind of man you are. I don’t know what kind of man you are. All I know is it’s past time, if you’re to remain in my care, I did you some good.”

“You have done some. You brought in Mr. Logan from Bridewell to teach me the engraving art. You’ve provided the necessary materials ever since, including a table to work on. As well as ink and paper, you supply me with pencils and pens, even though
you know perfectly well I’m using them to keep a daily record of the abuses I witness in here. Against house rules, you allow me extra candles to work at night. You haven’t put a chain on me in fifteen years. I can go anywhere on the men’s side I please. You even let me keep a garden plot. Aside from ensuring I receive my wife’s letters, the only good you haven’t done is freed me.”

“James, because I couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t you? Then why not do like most people in your position?”

“What? Say I only did what I was told?”

“Haven’t you always? Do they prosecute lackeys? Despise, yes, but prosecute?”

“What if this is a matter of conscience?”

“And how long did it take to become that? No, Jack, this smells more like fear of a House committee. And since eighteen years of not knowing why I’m in here never moved you to resign, you won’t after you know it. Nothing will change.”

Saying this, he turned back to his table.

And so I took my leave.

B
ETHLEM
H
OSPITAL

A
PRIL THE 17TH
, 1815

Dear Mags,

After not showing his face in my corner for two months, The Schoolmaster has just been by to beg me to tell him why I’m in. He’s quaking in his boots for fear of going before the House Committee with no idea why he’s had me for eighteen years. Though he’s stumbled onto something of what old Liverpool was up to, I refused to tell him more. Yet I admit his request has put me in mind of the pleasure I derived from telling my story to the good doctors Birkbeck and Clutterbuck (though for them I omitted that part), I mean the satisfaction of speaking out about matters otherwise relegated to a wretched morass of pain and confusion in my head. Jack’s request also reminded me how disappointed I was when they suddenly announced they had no need to hear more. In short, now I thought of it, I was positively itching to tell Jack exactly what the story is and why I’m in and would do it in a flash if only I could think of one good reason why I should.

The question was, What would he do with it? Nothing—there was nothing he could do with it. The trouble was neither would he be moved to try—not Jack. Well what of Haslam, then? Well, what of him?
Whatever else, wasn’t this Truth? And double-barrelled too, boom! boom! And wasn’t Truth what Haslam needed if he was to wax mighty enough to burst the shackles of Jack?

Why, there it was, like a beating heart, my reason.

Why didn’t I think of this before? Was it not the fear I’d not emerge un-powder-blackened? Was that not the real reason I didn’t tell Birkbeck and Clutterbuck? They were not too-innocent lambs, I was too corrupted.

But what of sheepish qualms now? It’s crucial times! I’m telling Jack the very next time I see him!

Yours in a sudden state of scarce-containable excitement

at the prospect of dealing The Schoolmaster a

double death-blast of Truth, with hope of

Redemption in Jim’s eyes for too many unmanly

showings before too many committees,

James

C
ORNWALL

W
ESTMORELAND
, J
AMAICA

S
EPTEMBER
10, 1815

Dearest Father,

I write you Father on this my eighteenth birthday first of all to assure you that Mother and I are doing very well, though we miss you dearly. Since I have met you only once, your absence is the air I grew up breathing, but Mother finds her distance from you very hard and constantly berates herself that she isn’t doing more. I know we’re in Jamaica principally for safety’s sake and I do like it here, but I promise you Father once I have secured a post and put aside a little money, I shall bring Mum back to London, so she can find out first hand how you are getting along. Otherwise we have no way to know, as your letters never reach us. I can always return here once we have the knowledge you are safe and well.

Lately Mr. Scrubbs the book-keeper has been putting me in charge of the sugar mill, and even sometimes the boiling house, so he can sneak off to town. I do like the Negroes, they have exuberant souls, but they need to be watched. Faced with a lifetime of overwork, a person will naturally seek every opportunity to shirk that obligation. And yet production must go on; Mr. Lewis expects it. How I hate it when Mr. Scrubbs cart-whips
a Negro. He scoffs when I tell him he shouldn’t. If it’s good enough for our soldiers and sailors, he assures me, it’s good enough for our niggers. When I observe that no creature, human or otherwise, deserves to be whipped, he looks at me as if I am mad.

The only other news I can think of is I have a new tutor. Mr. Pullen has decamped for Ireland, blaming the heat. As of this week I’m taught by a Mr. Noble, who is not. But at Christmas (by a long negotiation with Mother) my schooling comes to an end. I am a man now Father and hope one day to achieve as great things in the world as you have done, and this hope of mine and your achievements I celebrate by writing to you on this my majority day—

Your devoted son,

Jim