Bedlam Read online

  I took the clothes from my poor madman to help him dress.

  He refused to lift his arms.

  “Jamie, what is it?”

  “This is my old friend Robert Dunbar’s shirt. I know the stripe.”

  “Jamie, we’ve talked about this. You understand what happened. I’ve never betrayed you, you know that.”

  “It won’t fit,” he said, not listening. “The pants less.”

  “We’ll roll the cuffs.”

  “And roll with them too, right, Mags?”

  “But the boots won’t fit you.”

  “Nor mine ever Robert Dunbar.”

  RETURN

  Did you ever notice, dear Reader, the readiness with which people will fall in love with a variation upon the one thing (whether they know it or not) they’re unhappiest with in themselves? And so they match noses. Or he’s been feeling the slide of discipline from his life, when along comes a female sergeant-major. Or desperate to feel herself as virtuous as she might compared to the vilest scoundrel in the room, does she resist his advances? People say, How can she be with him, they’re night and day? But night and day make twenty-four hours. Day pines for shade and night for definition. Each completed by the other becomes more assuredly what it is. Human love is a symptom not that we are imperfect but how wretched we are to know it. Those who don’t know it or can’t face that misery will pour their love on a horse, lapdog, or parakeet, saying, Polly won’t leave me, when they themselves departed long ago.

  Does this then make me, who love my mad husband, one who needs to know she is sane? We were married six years before his brilliance first tipped to delusion. Now that it has, I would say the reason my love for him has not fled but grown is not that his illness was what I was looking for all along but because sane he’s always showed himself a man of surpassing sympathy and loved me constantly, and now that he sometimes raves I love him as a helpless child does a parent or a helpless parent a child: either way stunned by the emotion of that inadequacy.

  After Jamie’s return from his three years’ detention in France, we lived for ten months, if it was possible, happier than we did for the seven years before the project of saving his country first took him to Paris. Happy as people grateful to have again what they’d feared forever lost. The only thing we needed now was a family, and for ten months we did everything a man and woman can do to become parents. Meanwhile, we were happy as any loving couple who by dint of hard steady work have achieved a middle station in life and must work ever harder to keep it.

  In Jamie’s three years’ absence, though I could blend and package tea with the best of them, I didn’t, being a woman, get far at the East India Company auctions and so could do nothing to stop the eventual collapse of our wholesale business. In desperation, and with assistance from Jamie’s old friend Robert Dunbar, I took it retail, not knowing how little breathing space under the ice the East India Company monopoly would allow for the little shop in tea. So Jamie’s first task back was to carve us out something again on the wholesale side, to afford us the luxury of selling to customers off the street.

  Though Jamie’s schooling in Camberwell finished at age ten when his father—in summer a digger of graves and ditches and in winter a cutter of pond ice—died of the cholera and his mother moved to Spitalfields for labour in the silk-works, he’s a talker to everybody and a reader of everything, with a mind so nakedly attuned to every facet of life that the risk is overstimulation unto mania. One day his understanding’s so sensitive he could be reading your thoughts, the next he’s off chasing a will-o’-the-wisp. If I hoped to see my husband returned safe to Bethlem Hospital while he raved I must join him in the fantasy he was the one taking me there. But my feet in their winter shoes felt they had lead weights strapped to them as, wrapped tight in my quilt coat against the cold, I trailed behind, him striding in his unshod, butchered feet up St. Mary Axe and so along Wormwood Street in the hour before dawn, the moon a medallion time-worn imperfect and streaming high before us, the air præternatural in its clarity, the streets empty, the city stones dew-burnished and glowing paler in the quickening dawn.

  How I love London when the meanest street has such a blessing of first light upon it that it might be a broad pavement in newest, grandest, westernmost Mayfair; when the old woman collecting dog dung for the tanners is not a gin-blasted hag but a white-haired grandmother plucking mushrooms in a flagstone meadow; when the tattered heap in the doorway is not a desolated ruin of humanity but rags for the dustman, who’ll be along directly; when the fetid smoke of the grease lamp that lights the oyster barrow, in the first confused instant it reaches your nostrils, might be incense from the Orient, and the monger is not a half-naked urchin shivering with cold and disease but a flashing-eyed Gipsy youth with a life before him.

  But he’s not and it’s not, and my husband is not always sane, as I’d known by his increasing erratic conduct since ‘89, when the Paris mob stormed the Bastille, affecting the sensitive balance of his mind, for he began to think there was something he could do for England, though what kept changing as Revolution went from freedom for the French people to the guillotine and blood in the streets, to the execution of their King and war with us. And now in order to get him out of Bethlem soon, I needed to know the particulars of the circumstance that had got him in. While I had long understood there was nothing I could do to stop my husband’s mania when it grew full-blown, I also knew his welfare at such times was nobody’s first concern but my own.

  “Did you try to see Mr. Pitt, the Prime Minister?” I asked him. “This isn’t about France again, is it?”

  “No, that would be politics. This is truth, which Pitt, who is now politics through and through, can no longer hear. Four years ago he’d see me anytime, but last month his office denied me. So did his cousin Lord Grenville, the foreign secretary, though his man on the door treated me with such humanity I embraced the dry bundle of his bones in his shabby greatcoat, which amazed him. He stood and watched me go. But once I put the corner between us, it was anchors aweigh to Hertford Street.”

  “What’s there?” I asked. I was not humouring him. He was capable of anything.

  “Home of The Dark Lanthorn.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Lord Liverpool. They call him The Dark Lanthorn because he gives off no light.”

  “But who is he? I never heard of him.”

  “You will. He’s Baron Hawkesbury, lately honorificked by Pitt. As Hawkesbury he once listened, remember? Five years ago, when I was our government’s chief secret liaison with France? I imagined as Lord Liverpool he might listen again. Oh, he listened.”

  “Was it him called the authorities?”

  “I think not. But he tried to set the coal-man against me, for it was his cellar stairs I was obliged to enter by. Except, it turned out the coal-man was a secret republican and concluded I must be another after he heard me assure his Lordship I was at open war with him and his apostles in treason and swear I would see his head on a pike above Temple Bar.”

  “No! I thought Hawkesbury was somebody you admired!”

  “Not since the truth he’s a traitor has dawned, and I told him as much.”

  “Oh Jamie, you can’t say these things to their faces!”

  “The coal-man seemed to like what he heard. He carried a pistol in his black sack and wanted me to come to a meeting to plot attacks on the King. I didn’t go.”

  “That’s something.”

  “You forget, Mags, my true cause has always been the brotherhood of man. I never sought harm to the King. It was only in the early days, when I still had hopes of The Dark Lanthorn and my hero was the republican David Williams, that peaceable Revolution seemed to offer a way forward. It had a future look about it, and had perhaps only come a little premature in America and France.”

  David Williams I knew from six and seven years before, when he used to come to the house to tutor Jamie in radical politics. I remembered his shining blond hair, which he wore fastened b
ehind with a neat ribbon in black or grey, the sombreness a sop, I suppose, to suspicions of vanity. As he’d slip past me on his way to the parlour (where Jamie waited with his notebook and a thousand questions), I was put in mind of a cat in a gold hairpiece. The stealthy froideur I ascribed to the perils to which the high-minded must be constantly exposed. Though genteel and peaceable, as author of the anti-denominational Liturgy on the Universal Principles of Religion and Morality for the use of republicans, Williams had as many enemies among clerics as among the powerful in government. Given his enlightened principles, not to mention Jamie’s awe and love of him, he had to be more sympathetic than he seemed, or perhaps would have been were he not preoccupied by grave international concerns that precluded acknowledging the simpering wife of a tea-broker he tutored two hours a week because he needed the money.

  At that time, war with France was not yet declared. Then late in November 1792 French gunboats weighed anchor in the River Scheldt and headed for Antwerp to seize that city in the name of the French people. As Prime Minister, Pitt responded by descending hard here at home, declaring a state of emergency that allowed him to recall Parliament early, mobilize the militia, visit severities on aliens, prosecute republican works, find Tom Paine guilty in absentia of sedition, etc. In the midst of these hammer-blows by a government fearful of radicals, Jamie slipped away to Paris, where Williams had gone the week before to help his friend Brissot and the Girondin faction of the French government draft a new French constitution, on solid republican principles.

  My husband’s goal, somewhat different from his teacher’s, was to prevent the chaos uncorked in France from foaming across the Channel and destroying English liberty. This he’d achieve by offering himself as negotiator representing Lord Liverpool—at that time still Baron Hawkesbury—and others in government to stop the outbreak of war by an honourable peace. But to his grief and amazement, though he took care to book himself at the same Paris hotel, Williams declined to introduce him to any French authorities, or for that matter even to meet with him—though the fact Jamie wasn’t invited along in the first place might have told him his mentor had doubts about his readiness for work in the field.

  “But how,” I said, “did you come against the authorities in such a way as to get you in Bethlem?”

  For some minutes a dray had been approaching behind us, and now came the squeak of its axles and the deafening cobblestone clatter of its iron tyres. Jamie held his answer until the racket diminished. Meanwhile he watched the horse, which turned its blinkered head as it passed to watch him.

  “From Hertford Street,” Jamie said, “I hastened direct to the public gallery of the House. There the gang (by a method I haven’t yet discovered) stifled Lord Erskine for the Opposition. After declaring we’d been seduced into war by the Monarchy, Erskine opened his mouth, evidently to utter the entire heinous truth of what the Ministry had been up to—”

  Was this gang who stifled Erskine the same one Jamie had talked about before, when he was raving? “Jamie, what heinous truth?”

  “No, Mags. The burden of it would be too great for you at this precarious juncture in your affairs.”

  “Jamie, tell me. You know I’m like you: I must know what’s what.”

  He only held up his hand and continued. “However the gang did it, Erskine fell back in his seat too thunderstruck to go on. This required Fox, as Leader of the Opposition, to take over, which he did, all impromptu scruff and bluster, lamenting the rashness and injustice of his Majesty’s ministers and calling our war with France a war of passion and prejudice, not policy and self-defence—but in this saying nothing everybody didn’t already know.

  “I slouched home dejected. Was this all the truth the nation could bear?

  “But the next time Liverpool spoke in the House, which was January, I made sure I was back to hear him drone on, saying (while scarcely taking his eyes off me) the French never desired peace and never showed any interest in negotiation, rhetorically asking why, if they were dissatisfied with our proposals, didn’t they bring forward some counter-proposal of their own? By such lies I was filled to bursting with the traitorous venality of him and monsters like him—”

  “Why? What did they do? Are there French counter-proposals you’ve learned of that they ignored?”

  “When I was centre-stage in the game there were—”

  “But that was four years ago and more! Four years of war! Why do you say Liverpool was lying?”

  “Because he lied then and is lying now—”

  “How do you know?”

  “Don’t doubt me, Mags. Last month, believe me, he was covering tracks so vile I was left no choice but to leap from my seat shouting over and over, Treason!”

  “Jamie, no! You’ll be hanged!”

  “Not yet. But they did want me out of there. When I resisted, a scuffle ensued. The next time I opened my eyes I was in a workhouse at Tothill Fields. After a week as a guest of that rigour, I was hauled before the Privy Council, which for the first fifteen minutes was three men and a clerk coughing and shuffling papers in an ill-lit room somewhere in that rabbit-warren disgrace to our nation, Parliament House. The Duke of Portland entering made four. Four against one. As the playwright Nat Lee once said of his own case, They called me mad and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. In their wisdom, the Privy Council predicted the figuration of my thinking better served by Bethlem than Tothill Fields. So it has been, but it’s turned out only a visit. Did I tell you my counsel’s Lord Erskine himself, as a noted former defender of madmen and republicans? He’ll see the Government pays me for my services.

  “Meanwhile, Mags, it’s you they want in, for your sympathies, and believe me, the opportunity won’t soon come again. Did you know they’ll give you straw to sleep on only if you grow so dirty or senseless as not to be fit to make use of a proper bed? And did you know it’s a strict rule with the keepers they’ll beat you only upon absolute necessity for your better government? I tell you, the William Batties and other mad-doctor critics of it can say what they like, there’s no place on earth like Bethlem Hospital.”

  AT THE GATES

  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.”