Bedlam (3 page)

By this time we were coming west along London Wall, approaching a stretch where you can look up and see the windows of the cells on Bethlem’s second and attic stories. Somebody’s blanket-gown hung from the bars of a window, and that enigmatic thing glowed blush-pink against the bricks in the predawn. God knows what some poor soul was sleeping in. A sad and sloven place, Bethlem, and no less that morning for being in a state of eerie quiet. Once the day starts up, the wails and cries of the inmates arise in answer to the mounting bedlam of the city: a chorus of lunacy that makes a fitting commentary on our modern age. But Bethlem in silence is even more terrible, like a house when the witch has stopped dancing.

Though our route should have taken us north up Broker Row along the eastern reach of the Bethlem buildings, Jamie led me past that junction to indicate three Bethlem doors opening directly into London Wall. The nearest, reached by stone steps, was, he told me, the main entrance to the house of the apothecary Haslam, the one he calls Jack the Schoolmaster, who so intrigues him. A short distance along was the door to Haslam’s office, and next to that was the gate to the Bethlem vaults. For some reason,
these three nondescript portals were of surpassing interest to my husband, and as I stood and waited, he devoted scrupulous attention to each. All were shut and featureless; the two at street level had a greasy band at hip level from a century of idlers.

Having fully examined the three doors, Jamie pointed to a row of houses immediately across the road: dreary, sealed-up affairs, martyrs to the government tax on windows. I wondered what he wanted me to see.

“A gang of seven has headquarters in a cellar over there,” he said. “I only wish I knew which house.”

The gang again. “What kind of gang? Pickpockets?”

My question was met with a remote, cautioning look, as you’d give a child who has no idea what she’s just said. “Nothing so humdrum, Mags. Nasty pluckskulls is more like it. The cellar connects to an ancient subterranean route out of the city under London Wall. In the last century, when this, the new Bethlem, was under construction, the workers being infiltrated by them—”

“By who?”

“The gang—connected Bethlem’s cellars to this one. That’s why today their Air Loom influence extends into every part of the building.” He paused, as for questions.

“Air Loom,” I said. It was a contraption he’d mentioned before. Though he once told me an account of it is to be found in Dr. Rees’ 1783 edition
of Chambers’ Dictionary
under “Loom,” and an engraved plate of it under “Pneumatics,” I didn’t see it there the one time I looked. From what he says, it resembles a great desk with drawers and is powered by magnetized vapours (that is, what men of science now call
gases)
from putrefaction constantly underway in hooped barrels. It has whirligig windmills, tubes, keys, levers, and other attachments above (some
very indistinct), and a hidden chamber below, which Jamie complains he can’t see into.

“A terrible device,” he affirmed. “In the
Annual Register
for October ‘91, Mags, there’s an interesting account of the Clyde River in Scotland overflowing its banks, water soon filling the cellars of adjacent houses. As soon as it reached the basement of the Town’s Hospital, in Glasgow, the raving fell quiet and so revealed the true secret of these places: the rising water forced the gang working that madhouse to abandon their subterranean Air Loom post. During their absence, the lunatics, being temporarily unas-sailed, grew calm and composed. Became, in other words, themselves again.”

“Jamie-”

“There’s one of the gang, Mags, I have a particular interest in. Her name is Charlotte.”

“What kind of interest?”

“Not that kind. She’s a filthy creature but with a knack of probing my vitals. She speaks French, but in a queer English idiom. Though prone to call a spade a bloody shovel, and kept naked and chained by Sir Archy, she’s an excellent recorder of everything they do. In all, a steady, persevering sort of one. How much a slave to Sir Archy she is is open to question. She knows what she’s doing and will only say she can’t help herself. Which pretty much sums up her case. As for Sir Archy, a thorough molly he may or may not be, but one thing’s clear: he don’t like women.”

“Would this be Sir Archy, the monster of depravity?”

“It would. Known to others as Alavoine, the steward. As with Jack the Schoolmaster, who inhabits Haslam, I don’t as yet have the whole story on him, Charlotte, and the rest, but I will.”

“Haslam the apothecary is part of the gang?”

“You could put it that way. But how much he knows is a good question. They’re a singular stripe of villain. In their nasty way, far more insinuating than Clyde water, I assure you.”

His smile as he said this resembled a fanatic’s. At the same time, it shook me to see how much in his friend Robert Dunbar’s too-big clothes he resembled a child playing at grown-up, and along with these likenesses came the horror of where we were and what we were about to do.

What had I been thinking? How could I for one second consider returning my husband to such a place? “Jamie,” I whispered, and stopped, trembling, in my tracks. “We must not come here. We must go back home, now.”

He stared at me. “Why would we do that, Mags? After trudging all this distance?”

“It’s a terrible destination!”

“No more than what’s on the way. The residents of Bethlem are the most human people on earth. It’s a college where the scholars arrive already broken. They make the best kind.” He was stretching out his hand. “We’ll still have our visits. If you do everything they say and slip Sir Archy something for his trouble, he’ll leave us alone now and then a half-hour in the visiting room, where we can be as lewd as we please. You’ll be let out as soon as you’re showing.”

“Oh Jamie-!”

Though I moved to embrace him, he stepped back out of reach, tilting his head to regard me. “You must be mad, Mags,” he said quietly, “to love a madman like me.”

“You’re not so!” I cried. “Not at heart! Only sometimes! They do this to you!”

“What do they do?”

“Chase you down! Put you in this place!”

“Not this time. This time it was me chased them down. For nonpayment of services rendered, among uglier crimes. And now I’ve chased you down. Please, Mags. The company of my like can’t be good for your health. Especially if you intend to be a mother—”

Did he know, then? It would be just like him to know—

“You see, Mags,” he continued gravely, “the time has come again for me to ensure the survival of two nations. But operations have now switched to the realm of the mental, and you, as a woman of too refined intelligence for such horrors, require the security of a madhouse.”

“Jamie, my home’s with you!”

He shook his head. “Only lately again, and didn’t these past ten months slip away on us pretty quick?”

He brushed past me and started back toward Broker Row. Over his shoulder he said, “It’s better this way, but nothing’s certain. The rule is, you must be mad less than one year before you go in, and if they can’t cure you, it’s out again after a year. Unless, of course, you qualify for the incurable wing, in which case they keep you for good. It’s not just anybody’s admitted, and fewer still are allowed to stay. I’m saying we can’t count on anything. There are stories of people fighting twenty years to get a loved one in here.”

When he stopped and turned, I was perhaps ten feet behind, following with the greatest reluctance. I didn’t know what to do for my poor husband and never did in the six or seven years he’d been suffering these episodes. All I’d learned was, if excessive energy of mind exacts a toll on the man himself, those who dwell in its borrowed light pay too.

“Is this Saturday?” he asked, waiting for me to catch up.

I had to think. “Yes—” and then remembered and said silently,
Justina, pray open the shop. Please don’t let us lose the business of a Saturday.
Reluctant to expose Jamie’s confusion to our maidservant, I had let her sleep through his return. But what if she didn’t open the shop?

“Good.” He was walking again, me following, up Broker Row. “The committee of four or five governors meets Saturday mornings to view all applicants—”

“Did they view you?”

He stopped again and looked around at me, surprised. “No—”

“Why not?”

“The keepers did it all. I was roughly used.”

“Where were the governors?”

“Maybe it wasn’t a Saturday.”

“Maybe it wasn’t a lawful incarceration.”

Jamie nodded at this, though he seemed doubtful. He resumed walking. “As I was saying, those they consider a fit object they sign in on the spot. In your case, I’ll be there in person to give bond, to whit, if you’re released alive I’ll come and get you. If dead, I’ll take charge of your burial. That would be after Jack the Schoolmaster opens your head to examine the cause of your madness.”

“Jamie,” I said, “why are you in at the expense of Camberwell Parish? Why would so poor a parish enter into a hundred-pound bond to put you here?”

He looked over his shoulder at me, seeming surprised at this information. “You mean it wasn’t you paying?” Again he stopped to think. “Camberwell could mean the Ministry intended me for a longer stay.” He started walking again. “Why would they change their mind?”

“They didn’t! You escaped!”

He made no sign he heard.

I hastened to catch up. “Jamie, why did you refuse to see me?”

“Did it come to refuse?” He was still walking, not looking at me.

“I was there every day! The porter wouldn’t let me in!”

“Alf Bulteel? Did you give him a penny?”

“He took everything I gave him! Sometimes he said it was not visiting hours and sometimes he said you refused to see me!”

“Visiting hours is ten to twelve of the morning, Monday and Wednesday. Did he tell you that?”

“I found it out myself. It didn’t help.”

“He should have wrote you out a ticket. Never mind. He’ll write one for me when I visit you.”

Now we were coming into the Common Passage, which runs between the front wall of Bethlem and the open ground of Moorfields, or I should say what’s left of it, after the squalid creep of houses and shops. As we rounded the corner, Jamie gestured upward, and sure enough, at the top of a wall-post, a stone pineapple. Also of note about that front wall: set in it every fifth panel is a barred section, so passers-by might gaze upon the building it otherwise obscures. Gaze and tremble. I glanced through the bars of one section as we passed it but was too distraught to see what I looked at. Up ahead, Jamie pointed out what appeared to be a threadbare sheet with a great rend in it, snagged high on the wall. “That’s where I came over,” he said. “To land naked as from my mother’s loom.”

“Womb,” I corrected him.

He wasn’t listening.

Soon we arrived at the right-hand everyday entrance by the main gates. At this hour its iron door was locked shut. Here for the past three weeks I had been daily told by the porter
Bulteel—a scrofulous animal done up in a sky-coloured gown and gripping his great silver-tipped staff as a bully holds his truncheon—that Mr. Matthews wanted no visitors. This morning the beast was nowhere in evidence, but Jamie soon changed that by stepping up to the main gates and directing through the bars several stentorian
Hallos
and
Rouse up theres,
and suddenly everything was happening very fast. A door of the hospital to the right of the main ones, not more than forty feet from where we stood, flung open and the beast itself emerged stumbling unhatted, one arm caught in the sleeve of its coat, trousers undone, to weave and stagger cursing across the pavement toward us.

I tugged at Jamie’s arm. When he turned to me, his expression was not, as I expected, stubborn calm—the beast’s eruption only what he’d been after—but incredulous terror. “That’s not Alf Bulteel,” he whispered. “It’s a French agent, disguised as him.”

“Jamie, we don’t need to be here—” I was struggling to extract his fingers from the gate.

But the beast had sent up a roar, another ruffian in blue was cannonading out that same door, and Jamie was peering to see who that one was. Tremulously, not looking at me, gripping the bars with whitened knuckles, he whispered, “This other’s a French agent too. He only seems like the one they call Rodbird, though he’s really The Middleman, by a clever impersonation of the gendarme who did me violence in ‘95, who it happens Rodbird bears a resemblance to—”

Now came the true nightmare part, for such moments of crisis are apt to ignite Jamie’s wildest delusions. As I struggled to unhook his fingers, his head swivelled from the advancing brutes to me, except it wasn’t me he saw but more French agency.
Lâche-moi,
Charlotte! Salope française!
he gasped, starting back. In doing so, he let go of the bars, and I was able to yank him away across the gravel into the sheep-stubble of Moorfields, the snowdrops (I remember this so clearly) just beginning to pierce the cold earth, past the pond in the direction of Field Lane, thinking if I could get us safely lost in that shambles of tents and goods-stands. But with Jamie’s butchered feet on the uneven ground and his reluctance to go anywhere with a French whore, and him hobbled as well by Dunbar’s unrolling cuffs, our progress was stumbling. The men in pursuit of us, though hardly specimens of physical health, once they got through the gate were soon upon us. The one who’d come second out of the building threw himself at Jamie and brought him down hard, while I spun round to aim kicks at his kidneys as he pinned my husband making grabs at my legs until the old porter came panting up to dance lumbering between us, using his staff for a barrier. Not long after, the other muttered in a voice of sullen resignation, “Give us your stick, Alf.” As the porter reached it back to him, I tried to go round on the other side, but his arm hooked me and drew me close. It was with my face pressed against his stinking gown that I heard the sickening blow, and another, and another.

“Devil bastards!” I moaned, “Sweepings of Hell!” and coarser epithets—sailor coarse—while the porter continued to muffle me to him, as he heaved for breath.