Bedlam Read online

  Now that I’ve read Margaret’s letters, I know my own are a beggar-boy’s, whinging and cringing, and I wonder if this log of abuses is not my more manly love letter to a woman so dogged and strong. Judging from the few of hers Jupp’s kindness and Haslam’s justice have enabled me to see—thirty-four in all, the Jupp-saved written between March 4th and August 17th, 1804, the Haslam-provided between December 4th, 1808, and February 15th of this year, I mean 1809 (the narrow time span of the latter packet owing I should think to Haslam’s having no way to know how many Sir Archy’s held back)—Margaret’s letters in their own way are as lovingly rendered as this chronicle, and no more fit for public eyes. Documents of loss, humiliation, resolve, longing, lust, fury, despair—all at a pitch certain to outrage those for whom sanguine views promise every advantage of hope, prevalence, and comfort. You build your world on sunny principles, and lo and behold ain’t life sunny, except for how much you hate the guts of anybody who’d prick your bubble.

  I was lying on my bed thinking these ungenteel thoughts while wondering if habeas corpus will deliver me back into the world wiser than to be a blind drummer for human nature, when Mr. Ailey, a promising mathematician until he strangled his mother, stopped by to report that the Quaker William Tuke was in the building, with another gentleman.

  I sprang from my deathbed.

  Tuke is founder of The Retreat, the private asylum that’s been making such a racket at York. Even the London papers have been full of it for years. By Ailey’s account, the purpose of Tuke’s visit to The Schoolmaster was to learn how we do things here. Tuke’s been reported as saying he was even more impressed by the second edition of Jack’s book than by the first. But you don’t need to find the Tuke approach a good one to consider his errand, if not a fool’s, more mysterious than it appears. Who can predict what strangeness will issue from a Quaker silence? Yet Tuke’s visit whether strange or not promised to reveal something of the prospects of our habeas corpus.

  Reaching the lower gallery, I ducked down quick behind the lunatic Phippard, an old sailor in the habit of gleefully swagging on the spot while he scans the heaving main. Adjusting his position, I got him between me and The Schoolmaster’s back, close enough so I could hear what Tuke was saying. Though tall, Phippard makes poor cover, for every twenty minutes or so he stamps his foot and booms out something like, “God bless the King and all the admirals! I would fight up to my neck in blood for them!” before he returns to scanning. Such behaviour is apt to draw the attention of the unaccustomed. Fortunately, being moved by me a dozen feet failed to rouse Phippard from his anticipation of war at sea, and Tuke and The Schoolmaster remained locked in conversation.

  By the pitch of The Schoolmaster’s shoulders, it was not one he was happy to be in. Beyond his right shoulder I could see Tuke’s ordinary, impatient face and the clipped movement of his pursed mouth with its chunks of yellow teeth. From the neck down, Tuke is a plain, drab-outfitted squab of the sort so intent on making his appearance unenviable that you can’t forget it. He’s exactly what you think of when you think of a Quaker merchant. Why does the nonconformist always have the best uniform? Yet I felt an immediate connexion to him and thought at first this must be because he’s made his fortune in tea, an ambition once my own, queer as it was just now to watch my hand letter the fact.

  But there was something more in Tuke’s face than tea, and something of disguise in that Quaker outfit.

  As to who the third gentleman was, owing to the position of The Schoolmaster, I couldn’t see. If it was Bryan Crowther (who’s an unabashed admirer of Tuke and his methods), Mr. Ailey would have known it, and if he didn’t, there’s the fact The Schoolmaster so loathes our surgeon it’s the rare occasion he’ll remain in the same room with him. For all Crowther’s eagerness to be a contributing part of things around here, he ain’t and never was and in his disappointment has too often retreated into drink, which has done nothing to enhance his prospects.

  But harkee, Tuke was talking.

  “There is much analogy, don’t you think, Mr. Haslam, between the judicious treatment of children and that of insane persons? As the most disruptive lunatic, one might say, has much in common with a two year old?”

  “An insane two year old—?” was The Schoolmaster’s murmured response.

  Having the dogged, no-nonsense air of a man with a sizable store of pronouncements to get through, Tuke didn’t seem to hear what The Schoolmaster said. Or perhaps Jack smiled as he spoke, and Tuke, thus cued, made the mental note jest, only himself omitting to smile, as one does who, having no sense of humour, assumes any sign of one betrays a tendency to instability best not encouraged.

  As for the third gentleman, he shifted his weight like a man uncomfortable with a joke. But he didn’t speak, and he didn’t shift far enough to afford a view of who he was. Perhaps, I thought, it was only Tuke’s son—or even grandson. Old Tuke’s no spring foal.

  “Which is not to say,” Tuke continued unflapped, “we should address them in a childish or domineering manner.”

  “By no means ought we to domineer,” The Schoolmaster drawled, as if half asleep. “When it’s always been quite enough to dominate.”

  Now Tuke shot Jack the scrutinizing look of one to whom it’s just occurred the other could be vibrating at a frequency different from the one he thought. Just to be sure, and revealing the obtuse confidence of fifty years’ freedom from doubt, he waded in deeper. “Dominate, Mr. Haslam? I wonder if we ought to use even a word like dominate.”

  “Well,” The Schoolmaster answered, practically in a yawn, “only for Truth’s sake—” Picking up speed, he continued, “Two things, Mr. Tuke. One, these people are indeed in a condition of domination. Their confinement, however mild its acceptation, as at your celebrated house—” bowing—“amounts to an incarceration equal to that of the inhabitants of the King’s Bench, or Newgate Gaol. You do after all require they keep their madness to themselves. Ha-has, so to speak, are fences too. So why should not the manner and discourse of their dominators fit the circumstance?”

  Before Tuke could make answer to this, Jack went on. “Two, thinking now of our own personal comportment as it must encourage in our patients that rational calm we agree is our common goal: Unless we’d be self-defeating hypocrites, surely we ought to display the authority invested in us and not, by pretending to be like them (as all too often happens), out of our own sheer lack of self-control in an insidious environment, sink to a level grotesque and dreadful as theirs and so lose their awe and respect altogether.” Here he meant Crowther, but Tuke had no way to know it. “Mind you,” again cutting him off, “if our concern here is only words—because your house employs strait-waistcoats as much as the next, but how in this day and age can anybody expect to attract paying customers with talk of shackles and severity—then I do sympathize, for such meal-mouthedness is only an understandable consequence of lunatic advisors turning hoteliers and so transforming human suffering to a business.”

  This attack was vintage Schoolmaster, and I was curious how Tuke would take it—which was slow and deliberate, as he marshalled enough control of himself to make a generous-seeming, let’s-get-back-to-why-I’m-here response. “What I most value about your book, Mr. Haslam, is the impression you convey in it of your energy in doing what’s necessary to initiate a fraternal rapport with each patient. Like the great Pinel—” by a stiffening of his neck you could see how little The Schoolmaster relished the comparison—“you inquire into the particulars of his case, how he acts, how he’s come to be in hospital, and so forth. It’s my belief, as I know it must be yours, that if we would seek to cure—”

  “Cure?” The speed with which this syllable shot back at Tuke streaming sarcastic incredulity was remarkable.

  “Yes, sir,” Tuke returned, practically as fast. “Cure. Cure of their insanity.”

  “Ah, cure,” The Schoolmaster replied, this time like one too innocent not to be a little slow to grasp a point of such diabolical cunning. “Tell me,
Mr. Tuke, would this be more politics? They do better if they imagine their time with you well spent? A profitable investment on their part, is that it?”

  “Why, what more profitable to a man, Mr. Haslam, than his sanity back?”

  “Funny, I thought you’d say soul.” And before Tuke could pick himself off the floor after that one, The Schoolmaster concluded, in a long-suffering voice, something like a fond nephew’s as it finally dawns on him his favourite uncle is a jabbering idiot, “So you do believe you can cure the insane.”

  “I do. Here’s why. At The Retreat we see monthly occurrences of it. Weekly occurrences.”

  “As do I, even in this poor place.”

  “Well then—?”

  “Perhaps the difference between us, Mr. Tuke, is you’ve discovered how it’s done. Your innocence of medical rigmarole has afforded you insight unavailable to those of us still fettered by Hippocratic scruples.”

  Now, this was going pretty far, even for The Schoolmaster, whose world fame (ever since Pinel, in the book he wrote after he was here, as good as called him the greatest English mad-doctor that ever lived) has for some unaccountable reason done little to curb the effects of his insecurities. It’s as if he’s more impatient than ever with people slow to appreciate how right he is. Yet I wondered if that unease wasn’t blinding him to what he’s up against in the mighty Tuke. Sometimes you’ll half pity a man his crackpot beliefs, and yet what indomitable courage they may be all the while affording him. Enough easily to destroy you and everything you ever stood for.

  “I’ll tell you how it’s done, Mr. Haslam.”

  As he said these words, Tuke shot a glance at the third gentleman. It was a quick one, the kind by which a man will deflect attention from himself while he frames what he’s going to say next. But for me it told everything. Because even as Tuke glanced at his companion, he (Tuke!) continued to gaze hard at The Schoolmaster.

  At first I thought this must be my imagination, yet I knew what I’d seen and so knew it could mean only one thing: Tuke’s been taken over. That connexion I felt to him, what I was seeing in his face, was tea all right, but more essentially it was this: He’s in the power of the gang.

  But which agent? If you think I watched him close before—

  “The way it’s done, Mr. Haslam, is simple. We must love them.”

  A silence ensued from these words, the gentleman next to Tuke once more shifting his weight from one foot to the other, this time (I imagined) in nervous approval, as Tuke’s eyes continued to bore away into The Schoolmaster’s face while The Schoolmaster’s head remained bent. What expression was on The Schoolmaster’s face I had no way to see and couldn’t guess if he’d be bold enough to be meeting Tuke’s gaze.

  “Love them—” The Schoolmaster murmured at last, in a doubting tone.

  “Yes, sir. Love them. Only by love can this most devastating of human pestilences be cleansed from the face of the earth.”

  “Love,” The Schoolmaster repeated again, this time in such a way as to produce an animal sound you would not believe any human language had been vulgar enough to distinguish with meaning. If cure was a term The Schoolmaster found incredible, then love from his mouth was a loathing, unsignificant grunt.

  “Love them, sir,” Tuke insisted once more, and added, “for the troubled sinners they are.”

  And there it was, as The Schoolmaster had all along known it would be. Even from a Quaker, the sick-sweet incense of priestcraft.

  Now I looked at Tuke, who kept his eyes fixed hard on The Schoolmaster as if he would stare him down. At that moment I was struck by how much he resembled the late Sir William Pult-ney. A certain Roman aspect to the nose, and the sunk cheeks, though admittedly from a coarser mould. And then, by an association I at first assumed superficial, I found myself thinking of Dr. DeValangin, Old Benevolence, as we used to call him, who treated no man as a sinner, troubled or not. The resemblance was not with Tuke himself, but—Uh-oh.

  Stop right there. Now I knew. And a good thing it was I had Phippard to hold tight to, because the knowledge, when it hit me, buckled my knees.

  The truth of the matter is this: The agent currently in charge of the Quaker William Tuke is none other than the leader of the Air Loom gang himself, that archvillain of murderous deceit, the one who’s never been observed to smile except at chess: Bill the King.

  May God have mercy on us all.

  BILL & CO.

  But that wasn’t the half of it. Once I’d regained sufficient control of myself to extend my attention beyond the poor bare stinking weave of Phippard’s blanket-gown, the first thing I noticed was Urbane Metcalfe. Metcalfe is an obstreperous little complaining lunatic, a roaming pedlar who says he’s heir to the throne of Denmark, a delusion that could explain his chronic weakness for royal trespass, mentioned above. He was crossing toward the window, which stood wide open. Outside, a freezing rain cascaded down, and from Metcalfe’s ensuing pantomime I understood he could see a female patient standing drenched in the yard and was attempting to alert The Schoolmaster, so she might be brought in before she contracted pneumonia.

  But The Schoolmaster being horn-locked in debate with Bill the King, Metcalfe’s exhortations were going unheeded. Nothing short of plucking The Schoolmaster by the sleeve (something even Urbane Metcalfe would hesitate to do) was likely to draw his attention, and I begun to fear Metcalfe, who has a stiff importunate beard and the penetrating black eyes of a water-rat, would come after me to do something, for those eyes had taken note of where I was. But just when Metcalfe seemed ready to make enough commotion to get himself thrown in chains for a month, the mysterious third man broke from Bill and The Schoolmaster and walked over to the window to see what Metcalfe wanted. And that was how, to my utter amazement, I saw who it was, and this was none other than the individual who first overturned everything I ever believed in, my former tutor, mentor, lodestone, and friend, that sometime-noteworthy man of light and leading, the celebrated republican and revolutionary, David Williams.

  First Bill the King in Tuke, now David Williams in the company of Bill the King. Has anybody during one brief crouch behind a lunatic experienced in such rapid succession two conjunctions so astounding?

  Not only that. As soon as David Williams saw what Metcalfe wanted, he called out to Bill and The Schoolmaster to come and see. This was a reflex of his goodness. Him of course they immediately heard and went over. After that there was nothing to be done but The Schoolmaster must send Metcalfe to find the keeper Davies to bring her in. Except, the bustle of these arrangements impinging on Phippard’s nautical reflections to a degree my use of him as a human screen had not, he give a sudden start and shouted out, “Glory be to his Majesty’s Navy! May the blood of a thousand Frogs turn the Channel to ketchup!”

  For Phippard this was a normal sort of thing to say, and The Schoolmaster and Bill the King never even bothered to look around, but David Williams did, and that’s how he come to see me. Only, then he looked away, and I was struck to the heart to think he’d pretend not to know me, until I considered I must be too altered by time and illness for immediate recognition, even by a former intimate. I appreciate my actions in both London and Paris had caused him no little embarrassment, but for all his faults he was a bigger man than to cut me. And I was right. If his first impulse was to look away, he soon enough looked back, and when The Schoolmaster and Bill the King, still arguing, begun to move down the gallery, he broke from them and crossed the floor to me.

  So it was in a wash of bliss I witnessed the approach of the dear, slight figure of my once beloved friend. But as he drew on, his wan features and grey, thinning hair and seedy coat caused me to ask if this could be the same firebrand I knew seventeen years ago, when we was shining-eyed young Turks together, knee-to-knee over tea in my parlour as he tutored me in the philosophy we so fervently believed would change the world. Was this the man who travelled to Paris in ’92 to help the Girondin faction frame a constitution worthy of the true republicans they were
puffed up like turkey-cocks with calling themselves? Was this the man I followed there to learn first hand what he’d been teaching me, for those were desperate days: If France went down in chaos again, who could say English liberty would not go with her? Was this the man I followed because he was the first I ever knew to embrace the good of all humanity, who first taught me love and freedom in universal fraternity?

  David Williams never trumpeted his egalitarian principles. Instead he was satisfied to argue with quiet lucidity that if humankind is ever to deliver itself from bloodshed, then every person must understand they have the same worth as the next and each a free and full say in the common good. Estimate another’s worth as greater than your own, and it follows that another’s is less. From inequality it’s a slippery slope to intolerance and from intolerance to resentment and resentment to oppression if you can and slaughter if you can’t, so why make that first mistake? Until this primary human principle has been understood, how can the future not be perfect mayhem?

  This was the innocent philosophy of youth that flooded back as I stepped from behind my sailor to reach out trembling hands and feel once more the press of my sometime boon companion’s. Like Margaret’s and Jim’s, their touch put me in mind just how much sanity and goodness there yet exists beyond these walls. Like theirs, it turned me a sponge, and when his fingers squeezed mine, the water gushed from my eyes.

  “Alas, mon compère,” he murmured, “that it should be in such a place we meet again.” As he spoke he meant to illustrate his regret with an eye-roll round the gallery, but it snagged on Phippard’s ecstatic swagging. From the grimace on Phippard’s face you knew it was a glorious day at sea, all blazing sun and salt spray.