Bedlam Page 19

  And so I left Richard Pocock to restore one universe even as Alfred Sconser was preparing to disgorge another.

  Two doors this side of Hadfield’s cell I next stopped a moment to offer an encouraging word to James Norris, a homicidal American sailor who’s been locked up near a decade now in an iron apparatus special-designed for him by our medical officers after he plunged a knife into the keeper Hawkins, attacked with fatal intent a patient named Thompson rash enough to come to Hawkins’ rescue, and had just bit off Thompson’s finger when he was stopped from doing worse by having his arm smashed by our friend Davies with a shovel. Owing to an oddness of physiology, Norris’s wrists are thicker than his hands, so to him a pair of handcuffs is the gift of a deadly weapon.

  The merciful and humane apparatus in which our medical officers have Norris confined is a series of riveted iron rings that encircle his neck, trunk, and upper arms. The neck ring is attached by a short chain to an iron hoop that slides up and down a six-foot iron bar. The trunk and arm rings, which are fused, pinion his arms tight to his sides. All three varieties of ring are connected by two-inch iron bars that pass over his shoulders. A chain around his ankles prevents kicking. For nine years, our American has been able only to lie on his back or else, on account of the shortness of his neck chain (twelve inches), to stand on his bed against the wall. Now that he’s grown emaciated from lack of movement, he can draw his arms from the circular projections from his trunk ring and hold reading material. If he doesn’t, he has no choice but to rest them on the edges of those projections, a position he finds more painful than keeping them inside. These same projections are what prevent him from sleeping on his side.

  Norris has the care of a badger-dog-and-terrier cross named Philadelphia, of whom he’s exceeding fond. He’s also a voracious devourer of newspapers and books, which the keepers out of pity (as a cat pities a mouse) supply him with daily. He speaks rationally enough, at times expressing gratitude for his restraint, since he says he don’t feel entirely able to answer for his conduct and otherwise might commit more mayhem in the world than he already has.

  Still, it seems a drastic confinement for one so sensible of his condition.

  “Heigh-ho, James,” I said as Philadelphia trotted over to sniff at my ankle.

  “Heigh-ho, Jimmy,” he replied, setting down his paper. “I see my countrymen are overjoyed this nation’s promised to renew trade with them next spring. The question is, Do they imagine President Madison has conceded, or are they aware you British finally acknowledged Holland’s a free country that can trade with whoever it wants?”

  “Whatever your countrymen know, Jim, it’ll be only what they’ve been told.”

  “And in that no different from yours, I’ll warrant.”

  “No, no difference here.”

  “So where are you off to, then, Jim?”

  “To see Jim Hadfield.”

  “The three Jimmies, we are.”

  “That’s us.”

  Hadfield I found shackled as usual in his cell, weaving a place-mat of straw. Though too insolent, daring, and violent to be unchained, Hadfield since his murder of Benjamin Swain has run the largest manufactory on the premises. Swain at the height of his activities oversaw a sizable industry in baskets and tablemats but was never a fair employer, choosing as assistants only those well chained. So when he refused to pay them, saying their work was no good, or told them he’d paid them when he hadn’t, or paid them in bad coin, they were not well positioned to come after him. Hadfield, while more dangerous, is fairer, working mainly with his nemesis Bannister Truelock, himself a cobbler by trade, the two of them together by better taste and greater skill far surpassing the former productions of Swain and his iron-indentured crew. (By the way, Hadfield maintains he’s unfairly accused, that he never struck Swain a blow that sent him over a bench head-first into the floor, but rather Swain, jealous of competition, was gathering his force to deliver a fatal blow to Hadfield as he sat innocently at work on a rag doily, when suddenly he dropped to the floor and expired, his head having exploded from the intensity of his rage.)

  “Hello, James,” I said. “How goes the trade in placemats?”

  “Poor.”

  “No gawkers through?”

  At first he made no response. He’s one the gang prefer to keep in a twilight state. Six feet from his cell as I’d approached I could feel the insinuation of their magnetic assailment. Like many, Hadfield is so little aware of the primary source of his intellectual darkness that he’d sooner strike you down than acknowledge he suffers any at all. But on occasion he’s been heard to complain that someone’s trying to annihilate his “thinking substance,” and that’s a pretty accurate statement of his case. But he can work, and who will believe himself terminally afflicted who can still work?

  “Just as well no bloody gawkers,” he said.

  “Why is that?”

  “Look at me, damn thee,” he growled.

  With his gouged cranium, the bone smashed entirely away on one side, the membrane of skin there palpitant with each throb of his thinking substance, and with his head on a curious permanent angle owing to the position it lay in when surgery became imperative after the muscles of the neck were severed by the same or a different swordblade that penetrated his skull, he is undeniably a grotesque sight.

  “You look as you did ever since I first knew you,” I said, to reassure him.

  Now he lifted murderous red eyes at me and passed a hand across his shattered skull. “You don’t perceive, I suppose, I am losing my hair?”

  “Perhaps a little,” I conceded. We have this conversation often. His hair has grown thin on the diet here, he believes, and no longer has body enough to soften the horror with which the sight of him is apt to strike the unaccustomed eye. I know he has a request in for a wig—because I lettered it, at his dictation. His contention is, he no longer enjoys the same degree of mental binding as the rest of us. Besides this, a good wig would improve his appearance. And yet, while no one ranks higher on the list of Hadfield’s admirers than himself, I suspect his lack of comeliness is of no tangible loss to him except as it might dissuade any but whores from having congress with him. But I can’t imagine what other sort of woman would come near him. It’s not as if he needs to pay whores more because he’s grotesque. They’re used to that. In any case, as long as he has his pension and can work and sell his manufactures, he’ll keep himself sufficiently in pocket to purchase from Sir Archy private time in the visitors’ room and doxies aplenty to visit him there for the satisfaction of every convolution of his lewdness. Of all in here for an incurable term, Hadfield is perhaps the one with least to complain about. But a feature of his condition is that he does complain, constantly. In this he’s like a hypochondriac, who will complain, and live, forever.

  “I am losing time,” he told me. “Wasting my best days. I believe, here—” again passing a hand over his skull—“is sufficient proof of the consequence of my confinement.”

  Sometimes he groans that for the same reason the teeth are crumbling in his mouth.

  “James,” I said. “Let me remind you we’re both victims, to a degree, of a force far greater and of more intrusive malevolence than was ever a product of British justice.”

  This only annoyed him. “Bugger off with your French agents, Matthews. I have no patience for your raving at a time when the hair lies so thick on my gown and the floor round about me, I feel I’m at the barber’s.”

  Even as Hadfield rejected my reminder, I could sense by a shift in the quality of the force in the room that one of the women (of whom there are three in the gang, to four men) had just taken charge of the Air Loom. My guess was The Glove Woman, who never speaks but is remarkable for her skill in managing that terrible device. Certainly it’s well within her powers to use it to cause loss of hair and have us blame it on the diet. Her own locks have lately been fleeing her upper head for the damper climes of her nostril-aerated lip and night-drool chin, and for this reason she now
wears at all times a chip hat draped with black silk. Embalding others is just the kind of game she’d warm to. I can see her now, expertly working the machine while the rest of them banter and pluck at her like rooks at a strange jackdaw.

  “There’s talk Lord Sidmouth wants the governors to open two criminal wings that would hold sixty,” I told Hadfield, changing the subject.

  “Wings? Good. I’ll fly away, ha ha!”

  “These would be part of an entire new building.”

  “Where?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  He grunted.

  “I’m before the governors’ subcommittee Saturday,” I next informed him.

  This having nothing to do with him, he made no reply. In here you grow accustomed to a relaxed approach to conversation. A person will walk away in mid-sentence and neither of you thinks anything of it. The only reason Hadfield hadn’t already walked away was he was chained to the floor. In fact I would say the explanation for why, aside from the similarities of our cases, I’ve fallen into the custom of visiting him despite no discernible pleasure in his company is the same as why you will fall into the habit of visiting someone you can count on to be always at home and dependable in their reception, however dull.

  “At least you’re in by law,” I said.

  “I don’t like the way this is going,” he muttered.

  “How is that?” I asked, thinking this might be a conversation.

  “For God’s sake, can’t you see I am losing my hair?”

  Inoculated yet or not, I soon took my leave of James Hadfield. A little of him does me for days. Though less confined than James Norris, he lacks the American’s generosity of mind.

  As I passed back along the gallery, I came upon Alfred Sconser completing the deflation of a Sphere. He seemed exhausted. All but one or two of his earlier audience had wandered off. Even lunatics grow tired of the same thing over and over. Suffering at that moment an overwhelming sense of the futility of all human endeavour, I tossed another ha’penny in the hat, which was empty, as before.

  As the last of the column of green phlegm retracted slowly into Alfred’s mouth, his eyes fixed hard on me. After swallowing down the entire gob, he bent to retrieve the coin, which he firmly replaced in my palm, saying in a voice of dignity, “I do clean out the hat.”

  84 LEADENHALL STREET

  AUGUST 11TH, 1809

  Dearest Jamie,

  Though I know unless the Bethlem door that opened a crack to let in Robert Dunbar is now also admitting my letters, this no more than the last will be the first from me you read. Yet I must write, for tomorrow you’re alone before the committee. Our every attempt to persuade them to suspend, even temporarily, the sanctions against me has failed. They want me to regret I was a nuisance in the early days of your imprisonment and seem to take pleasure in reminding me how much it’s diminished my capacity to help you. In this way they’d make me to blame for their failure of compassion. All I can do now is launch my counsel into the abyss like a desperate atheist a prayer, an atheist with every reason to fear hostile surveillance.

  Jamie, first, you must face your inquisitors in a calm, reasonable manner. Though we both know you’re not in for being mad, you must take particular care not to appear so. Committees, like water, seek their own level, i.e., the precedence of former rulings. Or think of it this way: Those made accountable for others’ behaviour tend to judge according to what they construe others’ good and not according to their own felt intelligence. Their duty, in other words, makes them rarely wise and frequently arbitrary.

  Second, you should not anticipate effective support from John Haslam, whose prime concern will be to defend his medical judgment of your case. Not understanding the reason you are in, and feeling in consequence (if he feels anything at all) susceptible to a charge of ignorance in the matter, he will cloak himself in the power of what he knows—medicine-even as he also knows it’s not the issue.

  Third, for your own good you must speak as little as possible of what you did in France. Though your sole intention in peacemaking was the good of your country, any such dealings are lately as much as ever considered traitorous, and you can no more afford to be seen to be concealing your supposed revolutionist connexions than can Bethlem those of an inmate. Jamie, this last advice is extremely important, for a single misstep could mean you not only don’t get your freedom but are hanged for treason. How painful it is to write these words, but the matter is so extremely serious that were the chances you read this a thousand times less than they really are, it would need to be done.

  Finally, Jamie, I hope what isn’t necessary to be said is the hearts and thoughts of all who love you will be with you tomorrow.

  Your ever faithful Margaret

  BEFORE THE COMMITTEE

  My first appearance before the Bethlem subcommittee after twelve years and six months at their pleasure took place on the morning of Saturday, August 12th, 1809. Sir Archy walked with me—or I should say I supported him—all the way down to the first-floor hall, which I never saw before. There we settled ourselves in silence on a bench rubbed smooth by the bums of a century of lunatics and their families. Otherwise there was little to admire. From where I sat, the light was too poor to make out what plaques and pictures hung on the walls and up the stairwell. Such glazing as there was was streaked with grime.

  Our silence was both vocal and mental. For the most part, Sir Archy communicates with me direct, by brain-saying. Yes, he’s just as quaint and indelicate in thought as in word and deed and no less obscene a blackguard on the inside than he looks and sounds. Following a particularly vicious assault on me, he likes to lurk at the Air Loom controls, stroking them with his bony fingers. After several minutes of this, he’ll turn with a hooded smile to The Middleman and in a filthy tone remark that I am the talisman.

  “You have plucked the very word from my mouth,” is The Middleman’s invariable facetious response.

  We’re all talismans of those two. Sometimes as they impose their will on me, Jack the Schoolmaster stands in the shadows. If asked what he’s doing, he shrugs and replies, “I’m here to see fair play,” which always brings down the house.

  That said, of late Alavoine (and I do mean Alavoine and not his inhabitor Sir Archy) has grown, when he can manage it, something like a friend. But not today. Today he was but a failing old man.

  “The wheel’s fallen off your cart, Sir Archy,” I’d said as I helped the old body down the stairs. “Is it not time you transferred to another vehicle not so decrepit?”

  He smiled at this and brain-said me only, Power and access, laddie, power and access. This came out, P-hohr hehn hahk-sehss, lehdhie. P-hohr hehn hahk-sehss. Even brain-saying, Sir Archy affects a provincial jargon. Affects because it’s not his true language. At one time I’d have understood him to mean the gang’s power of access is limited. But now I know it’s the rare one they can’t take over, once they apply their instruments to the task. Sir Archy inhabits old Alavoine for one reason: the steward’s power on the men’s side of the building and his universal access otherwise. Where better than in the steward of the place, however geriatric, to locate an agent? Add to him Jack the Schoolmaster, who took control of Haslam a long time ago, and The Glove Woman, who’s constantly in Matron White and whose villainy could fill the British Library, and you begin to understand how thoroughly they have us covered.

  For the hour Sir Archy and I waited on the bench, him slumped roupily against me, I fell to mentally reviewing certain crimes by keepers I’d lately been lettering, as when last summer The Glove Woman spent a fortnight at Worthing with one of her patients, a Miss Beddoes. This is worse than it sounds, for while The Glove Woman came back with two dozen brand-new pairs of fine-quality kidskin gloves, Miss Beddoes came back pregnant. This and other outrages I was turning over in my mind, when, to my horror, worse than the terrible breathing at my ear, the terrible breathing ceased.

  Frantic, I fumbled fingers to his neck: no pulse! For more than a decade
all but extinguished, and now the decrepit vehicle too! Alas, poor Alavoine! Over the years I had been beneficiary of enough signs of kindness from my old friend to now feel a burn of tears—when suddenly the ancient carcass give a great gasp, and after a carriage-wreck of wrenching heaves and phlegmy hacks, resumed its ragged rhythm. I blew my nose. Soon after, we were called into the committee room. I was almost on my feet when I had another surprise, as recipient of one of those startling small gestures that indicate old Alavoine is still among us. Waking with a jolt from his slumber, in a space of seconds before Sir Archy surged back in, he leant over and kissed my forehead whispering, Ghahd bhuh-lhass yho, lehdhie. Before I could whisper, Thank you, Peter, I was through the door.

  You can imagine how badly shook I was on entering the committee room, an unfortunate circumstance with so much riding on my appearing sane. Besides, after the drafty hall, and with blazing fires in both fireplaces, the room was too hot. Immediately inside the door I was sat down at the foot of a long, broad table, facing seven men ranged at the other end. Of these, four were governors, and of them it was immediately apparent two were inhabited. Put them and Sir Archy together with Jack the Schoolmaster; the clerk Poynder, an amiable fellow but indecently impressionable; and Monro, whose brain is so weak he can’t locate his cock without magnetic assistance; and you had as good as six agents in the room.

  Glancing hard right behind me, I saw, seated along the back wall, on the other side of the door from Sir Archy, Robert Dunbar, seeming queasy. By the look of him he’d just been before the committee. Next to him was my nephew Richard Staveley, now a Cheapside druggist, as Dunbar had told me. Staveley mouthed Halloo Jim and I mouthed back Halloo Dick. On Staveley’s left sat, of all people, Justina Latimer, no longer young but not old either, and no longer looking like anybody’s maid outside a Parisian bordello. Now, why would she be here? Under a scarlet bonnet spilling papier-mâché green-grapes, she was every inch your powdered, tousled whore but beamed at me for a reason I could only wonder at. A fluttery enticement of feminine frippery, but get on the wrong side of that one and you’ll soon know the meaning of rag and tag. Next to her was a man I never saw before but with a baboon face. Was she here with him? He looked at me mildly and nodded. The one I didn’t see was my other old friend mentioned by Dunbar: George Lambeth. I guess George had other plans. He was one of those people you continue fond of after quickly learning never to count on.