Bedlam Read online

  “Their conclusion he’s sane seems to have annoyed you.”

  “Annoyed, Mrs. Matthews, and amazed. When you consider a person cannot correctly be said to be in his senses and out of them at the same time, or when you consider madness is opposite to reason and good sense the way light is to darkness and straight to crooked, don’t you think it’s truly wonderful when medical professionals fail to discriminate transactions of daylight from materials of a dream? When, after a few visits with a lunatic, they, in full public view, entertain opinions diametrically opposed to those of men who after twelve years of his company and careers spent observing madness can be expected to know him better than they do and can diagnose his condition better than they can? And don’t you also marvel that the convenience of being disburthened of the expense of a pauper lunatic should never once have entered the thoughts of officers of so poor a parish as Camberwell?”

  “Mr. Haslam, it appears this result has touched you in some personal way I don’t fully understand.”

  “Then understand this, Mrs. Matthews. Your husband is too intelligent to give himself away to an interviewer whom he has every reason to convince of his sanity. How harmless your husband is may be debatable, but whether or not he’s a lunatic is not. What offends me is that your comedy-clowns should hold this hospital and its officers in such contempt as to fail to recognize a fact so obvious as your husband’s insanity. The world didn’t need to be assured yet again that a lunatic can be rid of his condition as easy as being declared he’s not one.”

  “Even if that declaration procures him the care he needs? The care is real, Mr. Haslam, the rest is words, vanity, and politics. Why cling to impotent distinctions when a human life hangs in the balance?”

  “Mrs. Matthews, as a man of medicine I can’t declare a man sane when he’s not.”

  “You don’t need to. The puzzle is why others’ doing it should so incense you.”

  “Puzzle? What puzzle? My life in medicine has been devoted to fighting against public deception concerning lunatics. Declaring your husband sane is for the Butterclerks and the Cluckbecks, who have the hunger of their ambitions to feed. I’m as sorry as you are they couldn’t help him—”

  “No, Mr. Haslam. At the end of the day the hunger of ambition is your own. What has finally kept my husband in is the letter from Liverpool. In the wake of it, the medical arguments have counted for nothing. You can blame Birkbeck and Clutterbuck as much as you like. The rub for you is nobody—not the doctors, not the politicians, not the judges, not the governors—cares a fig what you think about madness. And I must say I don’t either, because it’s long been too evident that you care less about my husband than about your own self-advancement.” Margaret stood up. “Now let me speak to him.”

  Before he rose as if exhaustedly to escort her upstairs, The Schoolmaster only directed at her, she said, eyes like two empty jam jars.

  Now, that interview over, she was sitting on my bed, her emotion communicating in the fierce, rhythmic way she was pressing my hands.

  Presently she inquired after my back.

  Curled on my side, my head on my pillow, gazing at her skirt tenting dark over her knees, I admitted it felt now and then a little uneasy.

  She sighed. Then she told me two awful pieces of news.

  First, last night Justina Latimer, whom she hadn’t spoke to in a decade, had burst in on her in a state of clamorous alarm, saying certain parties in Government, alerted by our habeas corpus endeavour to my continuing existence, were prepared to do harm to her (Margaret) and Jim if I didn’t from this day keep my mouth shut.

  “What?” I cried. “They sent Justina to threaten us?”

  Not according to our former maid. By her account she’d chanced on the information through a gentleman friend, an intimate of the Duke of York.

  “Dear God. Not York-”

  “Why, Jamie? Do you know him?”

  “The King’s son. A dolt-”

  “So not involved—?” she asked hopefully.

  Oh yes, involved. Involved as can be. But I didn’t say it, only shook my head.

  Margaret looked at me doubtful a moment and then seemed to resolve to be satisfied, continuing with the rest of what she needed to tell me, namely, that from a quality of menace intermixed in Justina’s manner, she (Margaret) had a darker suspicion that our former maid, as a victim of blackmail concerning how her husband really died, was herself expected to play a part in the harm. This forewarning from Justina was the better, or perhaps only the more frightened part of a bid to preclude the occasion. When she begged Margaret to flee with Jim, she also begged her to take her with them, begged like a woman in fear for her life.

  “If Justina’s part of the plot, she must move in high circles,” I commented, “where it seems madness is now so much in vogue a lunatic’s word can strike fear in beau monde hearts. Flee where?”

  Margaret shut her eyes before she spoke—at least, I think she did. Eyes closed, eyes stayed open. My blood ran cold.

  That’s when she dropped the second bomb-shell. On her way here she’d stopped at a shipping agent’s to put down payment of passage for her and Jim on a schooner leaving at week’s end for Jamaica. Our house was already in the hands of a rent agent, who would oversee Hodge the tailor’s tenancy of our shop.

  This second piece of news took away what was left of my breath. “No—” was all I could whisper, looking down to see my hand clutching a piece of paper with a Jamaica address on it.

  “Forgive me, Jamie. I wouldn’t tell you any of this, but you must understand we need to leave. Either Justina’s telling the truth and Jim’s in danger from Government agents or she’s lying and he’s in danger from her. I can’t—I won’t—risk his life—”

  “Give me something to sign,” I said hoarsely. “Sell the house and shop. David Williams has been here—” My voice sounded faraway, hollow and pleading. “He’s going to get me out.” If this was true, it changed everything. “We’ll emigrate as a family. The gang never mentions Jamaica—” Not by name, no, but their affiliates operate throughout the West Indies, magnet-working in the sugar trade (which they dominate much as they do the corn and cotton in America), boasting obscenely of sucking the sugar stick, black jokes to be cracked, etc.

  Again she sighed, or someone did. “No, Jamie. Not even your mighty David can help you now. And I can’t sell the house—it’s yours and you’re in here, there’s no time—We must leave quickly—”

  To ease the brute finality of this, she leaned in to kiss my lips, her own warm and dry and myself docilely compliant, when, to my horror, from between those chaste lips (or so it seemed) came the outrageous probe at my teeth of a brash French muscle.

  Dear God, it was Charlotte. I’d know that tongue anywhere.

  “Margaret,” I said, and just to dredge up the name was me fighting for my life, “you don’t want to go—”

  “Jamie, you must understand I have no choice, only please don’t strain yourself to believe I’m not failing you—It will only aggravate your condition—”

  “Salope—!”

  “No, Jamie—” She was wiping at tears. “You must remain strong of mind. Please. For Jim and me and yourself and everything you ever believed in—”

  What was this but a nail’s wail for the hammer? And yet I could only close my eyes, remembering how twelve years ago Charlotte showed herself outside the gate when The Middleman and a French agent disguised as Bulteel came bearing down on us, except this time I could only sigh, “Begone, harlot—” to which, beyond a sob and a shoe-scuff and the insolent solace of a lingering phantom squeeze at my testicles, there was no response. When I could see again, I was alone, and could only wish the encounter start to finish had been some newfangled prank by the gang, but it wasn’t, and I had just broke my own heart in two.

  JOHN HASLAM

  1816

  PLUNGING

  Twenty years it’s been since I first took up my Bethlem post. Twenty years that on a retrospective spri
ngtime Sunday morning in neat suburban Islington, my library windows open on a June blue sky, seem as many weeks. A daily headlong press of business, with all the hurry and confusion of a madman’s thoughts, a rolling tide of sights and uproar and smells and fleeting ragged reflection under swift grey clouds. A man in full career, oh yes. Only a few minutes now and then does he have to stare through a telescope at the night heavens, or at the end of it all, as now, in the lucid calm before the breezes of a new day start up, gaze behind him at the dying turmoil and discover his own storm-tossed progress and ask himself, My God, what was I thinking?

  About the proper treatment of lunatics, constantly, for to stop would have unleashed a flood of grief and fear I was too caught up with exhausting myself to endure and exhausted could endure less. My wife was dying, and what for me then? How much of a present shadowed by that could I bear? Better to slip away into work, away from her cough in the hallway, from presiding with paternal cheer over the family meal hardly able to meet the frightened eyes of my children, from sitting with her evenings pretending to delight in her unnatural animation, from allowing her heart-rendingly to believe (because it gave her such hope) that I was a hair’s breadth from taking Christ as my Saviour, from discussing together the shining futures of our beautiful Henrietta and brilliant John (soon off to Glasgow to study medicine) and thereafter the Glad Day we’d be reunited as a family, gazing out from our celestial home at azure sky and passing cherubim.

  One night six weeks before the end (John had been in Glasgow eight months), I invited Henrietta into the library to let her know how little time remained to her mother. She only looked at me. Returning the look, I wondered how I could have thought she didn’t already know this. How old was she? Seventeen? Eighteen? Her look seemed to ask, What more do you want from me? Tears at least, I wanted to say. Anything but that insolent little smile, that so-be-it shrug.

  Lamely I said, “That’s all. Just so I know you know—”

  “I do,” she replied. “Who spends every day and night with her while you hide away in here? Who sponges her four times a day and when she coughs performs sleight of hand with the handkerchief to conceal the red? Who reads to her from the Bible because she no longer has strength to hold it herself? Who has promised hand-on-heart to devote her life to a God who’d do this to so good a woman?”

  “I can’t hear you. You’re unhappy. We all are. There will be too few more of these days and nights—”

  “If that’s all, Father. I hear her bell-”

  As I watched Hetty leave me, I wondered how it happens a child’s grief for one parent will reverberate as rage at the other. Any small curb, it seems, is enough to rouse fury in a heart conscious of servitude. Ever since I’d prevented her visits to Matthews when we lived at Bethlem, she’d been kicking against me in small ways. More lately I’d incurred her unmistakable wrath by refusing her permission to walk out with her “friend” Mr. Felpice. Yet surely these were trivial losses compared to her mother’s dying, and only extremity of grief could turn a loving daughter’s values so topsy-turvy. Still, I was at a loss to know how my darling girl could become this bitter young woman, who’d accuse me of hiding away, in her presumption to know this was not me desperately doing what I must to keep a hopeless enterprise going.

  On the night of May 7th, 1810, Sarah passed mercifully to her rest. I almost wrote died in agony in a bed filled with blood. The bland formula is a drape over that, but the deceit shocks in its own way. Sarah did not pass mercifully to her rest. Long before she finished dying, there was no Sarah to pass anywhere. And rest is not the word for what a corpse is at. A corpse is at full speed back to the dust it came from.

  Sarah died and the world went black.

  But not black enough for the gods. A month after the funeral (Methodist; it was for my wife, not me), Jenny sobbingly handed me a note in my daughter’s hand:

  Father—

  I am now married to the man I love and have left London forever. While my sincerest wish is when you read this you will rejoice on our behalf, you must appreciate that only the certainty of your objection could have inspired us to so drastic a recourse.

  Your dutiful daughter before this, and loving

  daughter always, whether this union

  has your blessing or no,

  Henrietta Felpice

  Frantic, I made every inquiry: nothing. Who was this monster? What kind of name is Felpice? When calmer, I wrote John, just returned to Glasgow. By the scant surprise his answer evinced, I guessed she’d confided what she intended. Leaving me to derive what solace I could from his manly reticence.

  I was not much consoled. Neither was I by thoughts of remarrying. While it’s true the circles I moved in were mostly male (if you didn’t count the women’s wing, which you shouldn’t), the fact was I never met a woman to compare with my late wife. A too-convenient conviction, you might think, and even if true don’t expectations have a way of accommodating to circumstances, when the desire is there? But it wasn’t, and Sarah’s incom-parableness was the sort you don’t—because you can’t—replace. The result was that first year I spent not in fantasies of new-spouse pleasures but shuffling so drearily through the house I drove out even poor Jenny—more tears—to work for a luckier family. After Jenny there was old Mrs. Clark, who came in days to wield a duster and deliver tea and cakes to my desk, silently taking the stale, cold, untouched things away. All I needed of the female now were Sarah’s expressions, habits, and opinions, which filled my head and informed my actions. Not keepsakes but salvage from the deep, freely claimable, the vessel sunk. If they’d fit me, I’d have worn her clothes. After walking around with my head ready to burst, it took burying my face one desperate night in her dressing-gown to undam my tears.

  It was not long after Sarah died I published several things that bother me still. The first was a small volume devoted to Matthews’ delusional system. After Butterclerk and Cluckbeck, by testifying he was sane, had everybody thinking we were the ones medically incompetent and doing less than we could, I wrote another book, Illustrations of Madness, to establish once and for all the nature and extent of his insanity. But though that book has the merit of accuracy and originality and includes an engraving of the Air Loom by Matthews himself, with explanatory notes and frequent passages in his own words, it’s marred by the bitterness of the occasion, for I indulge in a sneering tone and conclude with an unadvised, categorical defence of the habeas corpus decision, a defence that would later do me no good at a juncture I would need every good done that could be done. More than this, even at the time I reflected, Is this what my decades’ study of Matthews has been for?

  The other pieces, though more minor, in having nothing to justify them bother me as much. At the time they seemed harmless pranks, holidays from care. Now I can only wonder what flailing state I was in. My friend Kitchiner having published his expansively titled Art of Invigorating and Prolonging Life by Food, Clothes, Air, Exercise, Wine, Sleep, Etc., I at first wrote two satiric articles on it, both anonymous, both published in the London Gazette by our mutual friend Jerdan, who didn’t know who their author was but like me considered the pieces good-humoured enough for print. In the articles I made sport of such Kitchiner enthusiasms as his “Peristaltic Persuaders”—laxative pills of rhubarb, oil of caraway, and syrup—and fired off squibs like, “If all the puny children in this country were brought up to the study of physic, it might conduce to beneficial results, both to themselves and the community, or it might not” and, “Contents of the several chapters do not correspond to titles, but this trifling informality introduces greater variety.”

  Good fun, what? Reading the pieces now, I find something nasty in them, a quality even of misdirected rage, that so sweet a man as Kitchiner was no deserving victim of. Yet at the next meeting of the Committee of Taste, seeing how exercised he was by what I had wrote and being the one he hit on to demand what he should do about these vicious attacks, I, still thinking they weren’t vicious at all and amused to
see him fired up, cruelly stoked the flames, exhorting him to face Jerdan (whom he’d banned forever from our dinners for publishing the attacks) in a duel. I can only thank Christ the two best friends I ever had were not the sort of men to take up weapons. It was bad enough I’d estranged them. Yet still I wasn’t satisfied, for at the beginning of June I published—also in Jerdan’s Gazette—a supposed autobiographical essay by Kitchiner, debating whether it was my lack of interest in women or my pearlike corpulence that had been the greater persuasion to a hermit bachelorhood whose solemn mission in the world was to “invent new dishes, and devour them.”

  Is this how you repay a man who’s generously fed and wined you in the best company every Sunday for a decade? No, it’s how you come to wonder if you know yourself at all. Why did I do it? The fury of grief? Rage at the universal assumption, in Matthews’ habeas corpus case, of the irrelevance of medical opinion, whether pro or con? Or did the idea for the prank—as well as the anger that fuelled it—come from Bryan Crowther’s conviction that I was the author of a dismissive Medical and Physical Journal review of his book Practical Remarks on Insanity, in which he denies any necessary connexion between lunacy and physical symptoms in the brain, declaring that what he calls my “experiments” have utterly failed to establish it? As soon as I caught wind of Crowther’s suspicions, I had made every effort, through letters brimming with the friendliest assurances, to convince him I was never guilty of the betrayal he was accusing me of. To no avail. As for my own behaviour, one thing about the Bethlem keepers, it’s the lovable patients, not just the unruly ones, who bring out the worst in them. The feeling at such moments is that nothing could be more natural than to teach innocence a lesson. But what is this but the serpent saying to the loving woman or man, “Here is something you should know about a world that contains a creature in a state of pain like mine.”