Bedlam Read online

  I was coming along the front hall, still blinking from the basement, when our clerk, Mr. Poynder, accosted me in a state of wordless excitement. After fumbling a letter into my hands, he fell back to view my reaction. Poynder is an odd fish and since the first day I met him has had an odd effect on me. Sometimes, talking to him I feel it would take very little for everything suddenly to shift and the two of us to start communicating in an altogether different capacity—though what it would be I can’t imagine. When my reaction to the letter was blushing incomprehension, he stepped to my side to help me decipher the French. After that I was excited as he was and set out to tell my wife, Sarah, but my route taking me through the incurable wing (which for the men is at the far east end of the building, suspended over our fresh-dug Black Hole of Calcutta) I first paid a visit to Matthews, who was crouched quietly on his bed, writing or drawing on a sheet of paper, his Omni Imperias Throne standing empty.

  “James,” I said, rustling the letter at his ear, “here’s something to interest you. The celebrated Philippe Pinel is coming to visit us.”

  No response. Matthews is a small, fair-haired man with the sharp, handsome features of an intelligent clerk, an impression compounded that day by his neat grey shirt and snug-fitting waistcoat. Hunched over his work, he seemed sharper and smaller than ever. A specimen of a lunatic patient so exemplary he didn’t look like a lunatic at all.

  “He’s writing a book on the management of lunatics,” I continued, “and eager to see first hand how we do things here. He wants to meet everybody, inmates included. He even mentions by name two of our more famous: Peg Nicholson and James Tilly Matthews. Peg I assume because she tried to kill the King, and you because he approves whatever you did to advance republicanism in France—”

  “Who told you that?”

  “—or whatever it was you did there.”

  “Why do you persist in calling me a republican, Jack? Are you so ardent a monarchist?”

  “Ain’t England a monarchy and I an Englishman?”

  “And if it was a republic?”

  “Then it would be perfectly unimaginable to me.”

  “No longer England, you think?”

  “I think I should not know where I was—”

  “Or who? And do you now?”

  “Not when I find myself once again in debate with you.”

  At this he only looked at me disgusted and turned away.

  “Forget politics, James, you’re to meet the great Pinel.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Most recently, director of the Salpêtrière Hospital for female lunatics, in Paris. A genuine revolutionary: you’ll have much to talk about. In ‘93, when he was put in charge of the insane at another Paris hospital, the Bicêtre, his first act was to strike the chains off the patients. Most were immediately afterward strapped into strait-waistcoats, but in a legend of Revolution what’s that but a detail? Pinel’s one of only two or three Frenchmen capable of appreciating the difficulties of management in a place like this, and he approves what he’s heard.”

  “About you.”

  “In part about me. He read my book—”

  “This is flattery to insinuate themselves. Next they’ll have their Air Loom set up in the stove room. If this Pinel’s not their instrument, he’ll be one of them, sent out as him. The only question is, Why a Frenchman? A perverse and vicious taunt, I suppose.”

  Thinking that if Matthews was in a state to talk to Pinel, he’d talk to him, and if he wasn’t, then Peg Nicholson could tell him about the avenging dolphins slicing through the Thames to offer her the throne, I was leaning over Matthews’ shoulder to see whose death he was ordering this morning. It seemed to be a printed page he was writing on.

  “Who tore that out, James?” When he made no answer, I leaned closer and was astonished to see him shaping the next letter himself, as he’d apparently done the entire page, freehand, and yet it was perfect, every character upright and level as if typeset, the latest still glistening wet. And all done with a chain on his wrist.

  “James, what kind of talent is this?”

  No reply.

  “What does it say?”

  “It recounts atrocities committed in this place.”

  When I leaned closer to read, he put his other hand over it and looked round at me. There was a puff-paste quality to his features, and I wondered if water had been discharged from his brain, and that’s why he was calmer. It frightens me sometimes how little we know.

  “A perfect lettering of everything,” he said, and returned to his work.

  “Everything?”

  “Everything. You’ll be thrown to the wolves.”

  “Why? Don’t Anne Gibbons and Jane Taylor, who murdered their husbands, though whether their own or each other’s has never been—”

  “Each other’s.”

  “Good. That’s settled. Don’t the darlings both separately and together write me billets doux? Am I not well-loved here?”

  “Yes, like a favourite uncle who invisibly works machinery so cruel that any little favour he brings is seen as a godsend. The patients think, Well, the keepers may be vicious bullies, but at least the man in charge is good and kind. So good and kind it’s no surprise he’s an easy dupe of monsters so evil. And of course, like the King’s, your scarceness makes you even more beloved. ‘What a treat it is,’ the patients say, ‘to have the doctor about again!’ But Jack, you know what goes on here as well as I do. As you grow more famous and spend more time writing, you see less, but still in general you do know what goes on.”

  “I do. And work daily to alleviate all suffering that I can, considering I have next to no authority, labour under an absent superior, and have three hundred patients to see to. What time do I have to know about these wolves I’m to be thrown to?”

  “You can’t know about ‘em as long as their identities remain in flux. With the Ministry undermined every other day, a patriot Monday is a ravening traitor come Friday. Who can predict who’ll be who in the wolf pack the day I’m out?”

  Saying this, he fixed me with a cold stare. “And if I’m still in when the wolves come for you, I’ll scatter my pages in the forecourt to ensure they squeeze through the gates.”

  “Wolves have no interest in print, James.”

  “These will be fascinated.”

  “Tell me this. If you could change one thing about the place, what would it be?”

  “My presence. My awful susceptibility to its every abuse originates in the one.”

  “What single abuse otherwise?”

  “The fact there’s more humanity in the victim than in the persecutor.”

  “Isn’t this just your natural sympathy for your fellow patients?”

  “No. What in here is called treatment, outside is called what it is: punishment.”

  “James, I understand it must look at times—”

  “You need to be mad, Jack, for it to look any other way.”

  What was I thinking? Only a fool engages with a lunatic when he’s raving. As Pinel himself has said, he’s too acute. To which I’d add, unconvincible of anything except his own fixed obsessions. The duty of medicine is not to puzzle what madness says. With language already mostly metaphor, the only question is, How committed is the patient to these wild pronouncements? Is there some way to lessen the grip of these proud views and even bring about remorse or abjuration? What other goal could justify provoking delusions into the light?

  “I’ll have Alavoine give you more ink and paper,” I said.

  “Sir Archy, you mean. Alavoine will give me clothes and ink and paper, but Sir Archy will pretend it’s all a favour I don’t deserve and make me pay for every piece of fabric, every drop of ink. I’d rather dip a brush in my own blood and write on the walls than go through that again.”

  “What does he do? Pay how?”

  “Why, Jack, must I keep explaining it? You’ve stopped listening, and what you once knew you’ve forgot. Your theme is gentle kindness. But all natur
e’s creatures listen, you don’t.”

  “Tell me how Alavoine forces you to pay.”

  “I told you: not Alavoine. Sir Archy. By making me his talisman. Did I mention Charlotte’s in chains as his tribade, for he’s secretly a woman? And so accomplished at brain-saying, most victims don’t even know it’s happening. But I do. Anything from Sir Archy is remarkable for its depravity, and easy to spy as ragweed in clover. What’s harder is rooting it out, for it grips the mind with a tenacity that belies its degenerate source.”

  I must say I preferred Matthews close-mouthed and sullen. The raving only stirred in me an unavailing dismay. “I’ll give you ink and paper myself,” I said.

  “Do you mean it? Be the instrument of your own arraignment?”

  “Yes, out of kindness to its author.” Now that he was talking, there was information I needed if I would be more than his stationer. Cautiously, I sat down on the bed. After allowing him several minutes to grow accustomed to me so close as he worked, I said quietly, “James, tell me why exactly Lord Liverpool wants you in here.”

  “Liverpool wants nothing exactly. Try sharpening a blade once it’s rotten.”

  “But why has he picked you? Because you interrupted his speech in the House?”

  “No, because I know what he is.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you offer a threat against his life?”

  “Not in so many words, but here’s a better idea, Jack, and more how you like to think of yourself: Skip the threat and straight to the execution.”

  “James, listen. To secure your release I need to be clear why you’re in.”

  “Why don’t you ask Monro? He knows less than nothing.”

  “And Liverpool?”

  “Liverpool you’ll find treacherous in the approach. Like Jefferson and Washington, he has the smell on him of the blood of slaves. Did you know the reason I refuse sugar in my tea is slavery in the sugar trade? In Grosvenor Square, in the days Liverpool was still Baron Hawkesbury, I once caught a glimpse of his first wife, Lady Hawkesbury, in the company of her mother, a Hindoo. Her father was a Clive man who cheated his way to a Bengal fortune. Lady Hawkesbury’s name was Amelia, a dusky beauty, only seventeen when I saw her. At nineteen she was sent down to the house at Hawkesbury, which had sat empty for a century owing to a curse after the first baronet’s sister, prevented by her father from marrying a Papist, fell from an upper window. The beautiful Amelia was sent down for convalescence of a fever after the birth of a son but arrived dead. When the coachman unlatched the door of the cab, out she tumbled. They buried her across the road and gave over all thought of reclaiming the house, now doubly cursed. They say on windless days there hangs about the ruins a smell of the blood of slaves.”

  “Does any of this have to do with why you’re in?”

  “Only the part about the smell of the blood of slaves. Liverpool’s ultimate purpose is to disenfranchise the nation.”

  “How will he do that?”

  “He’s done and is doing it. Most lately by keeping up the conflict with France in hopes of causing the assassination of both nations and the destruction of my existence.”

  “By what means? Because Liverpool’s anti-republican views since the fall of the Bastille are well known?”

  “No, because he’s a liar, cheat, and destroyer, activated by the gang.”

  “But aren’t we all activated by the gang, according to you?”

  “Not all. The honest, decided, unwitting ones they ignore.”

  “And the honest, decided, witting ones?”

  “There’s only one of them in this place: me, who daily suffer bodily and mental torments. Separated from my beloved Margaret, the other half of who I am, and she from me, we’re both murdered daily. But I tell you this, Jack: I’m not afraid of all the gangs put together.”

  “James, what evidence for these charges?”

  “Fluidical.”

  “Ah yes, of course. Fluidical.”

  “You may patronize me, Jack. Don’t condescend.”

  I stood up. “Speaking of fluidical, James, you’ll have your ink by tomorrow noon, and with it a dozen sheets of good-quality paper.”

  With this promise I took my leave, which his gratitude, if he felt any, was insufficient to rouse him to acknowledge.

  SARAH

  Now I was eager for Sarah to know of Pinel’s letter. With praise for my book now arriving from the Continent, I felt in need of perspective, lest like Matthews for anything good he gets from Alavoine (or Sir Archy, as he calls him) I must pay another way. As an Ancient once wrote, The man whom praise greatly pleases, censure must greatly pain. As I say, Better a man’s wife whisper him the truth in private today than he reveal himself an idiot in public tomorrow. In this too I was like Matthews: My wife worked hard to keep me sensible—a constant struggle. Like him I was fortunate to have married one whose judgment I could rely on and have sometimes thought, If only he had listened to his more, he wouldn’t be in here and we wouldn’t be shutting her out.

  As I hurried home, I was nagged by a fear Pinel would find little to admire in Bethlem as she was. Didn’t I write my book while I still wore rose-tinted spectacles, being half in love with the place I would one day make it? Thinking this, I thought again of Matthews, which reflection led me to marvel at his talent for black lettering, and then I had an idea. In my auxiliary capacity as overseer of the artsmasters at Bridewell Hospital I’d recently engaged a Mr. Logan to teach the delinquents there engraving. Well, why not have Logan stop in at Bethlem once a week and teach it to Matthews? Surely Poynder could scrape up a little something for supplies. Engraving might serve to counterbalance Matthews’ raving, allay the tedium of his hours, and once I secured his release, provide him with a useful hobby, or even new trade. Meanwhile, the generosity of my initiative, even if it wasn’t enough to mend relations between us, would at least let him know I was kindly disposed.

  Calm, Matthews was the most discerning of our inmates and of them all the one who seemed to speak direct to my understanding. How otherwise could he roil my blood so? There was far more to him than some unhuman fantasy, and I had no trouble grasping his popularity with our visitors or the fact his renown had spread in France. Alavoine’s devotion to him spoke volumes. People don’t want to know that true fame begins with those daily familiar with the person, who yet persist in their admiration. What are stories of public paragon, private monster, but sedatives for envy? And while they’re at it, cautionary tales. Why trouble to aspire, lest you become a monster too? But true fame’s not like that, it’s the splash of a small, rare drop that has rippled steadily outward.

  As to Matthews’ affliction, I would say it needed to be as dreadful as it was to overcome a man so quick, honourable, and intelligent, so his intellect was ever at the mercy of a hurry and confusion of thinking that swept him along on its tide. Many in Bethlem had an air of predisposing weakness, crime, or tendency to backslide. Not this one. This was a tragedy, the undoing of a fine, good man. If his condition ever eased, his mind would be good again, and morally sound. Better and sounder, in fact, than most men’s I ever knew. Seeing such a one in the manifest grip of the disease was truly terrible and, whatever else its effect on me, left me too sensible of the uselessness of all we were doing and of my own impotence before so much suffering to do any lasting good at all.

  My engraving initiative would mean that any work Matthews produced between now and June would be evidence Pinel could hold in his own hands and see with his own eyes that when it came to actual care, we were no less enlightened than my book had him imagining. For good measure I’d slip the chains off Matthews before he saw him, so our visitor could walk away knowing that when we unshackled ‘em at Bethlem we didn’t immediately cinch ‘em into a strait-waistcoat—or camisole anglais, as Pinel would call it when among his cronies. And with my mouth-key ready to show, not to mention our new shower-bath, he’d see how progressive we are. Who knew but the gr
eat man wouldn’t be so dazzled he’d out-do himself with praise for us in his next book. They order this matter better in France, indeed.

  At home, our maid Jenny was nowhere in sight. Young John was braced in front of the parlour door wearing his Beefeater toy-hat of Canadian beaver pelt and pointing his toy musket at me.

  “Ahoy, lad-”

  Wrong militia. I tried again. “All quiet, yeoman?”

  “All quiet, sir.” He lowered the musket.

  “Where’s Jenny—?”

  The yeoman headshake.

  “Mum-? Sis-?”

  He indicated the parlour door. I held it for him; he presented arms.

  “Sarah—” I said, sweeping up Hetty from the rug, where she was stacking letter-blocks. “Sarah, news—”

  From her cocoon of blankets by the fire, my lovely wife lowered her book and turned to us smiling. With the heat and the reddish light from the coals, her cheeks framed by her dark hair seemed almost rosy. Hetty meanwhile, as if she knew what my news was, had slipped Pinel’s letter from my pocket and was testing its fabric. Needing two hands, I set her back down and extracted it from her grasp. The double bereavement stunned her. She looked uncertain whether to scream or flail. “Resume play with your letter blocks,” I instructed her, “as our sober philosopher cum pedagogue Mr. Locke would have you improve yourself by doing.” Ignoring my Swahili, she flung a look at her mother, who lifted an arm. She scrambled to her. I blurted my news.

  When I had finished, Sarah, after a tactful pause, set about my instruction. “You don’t think, John, Pinel won’t be mainly coming to enhance himself at your expense—?”