Bedlam Read online

  Now Matthews’ head came up and Alavoine’s with it as if they were hinged at the temple. “Wakefield’s no friend to the lunatic,” he muttered darkly.

  “Then he must be a friend of yours, Jimmy,” Crowther replied. “Ain’t you always telling us a lunatic’s the last thing you are?”

  Ignoring this, Matthews observed, “It’s no accident hack-rabble Grub Street’s direct around the corner.”

  “No accident, you say—?” Crowther muttered.

  “Grub Street printing presses are Air Looms refitted for typesetting. A newspaper’s an Influencing Engine from masthead to auction sales.”

  “Oh, now, Jimmy,” Crowther chided him. “You only say that because you consider your own lettering the work of the greatest Omni Imperias Engine that ever grasped a pen and made stroking motions.”

  “Believe me, Bryan,” Matthews answered calmly, “I never flattered myself they don’t have more fish in their fryer than this one.”

  “There’s room, is there?” Crowther said, yawning.

  “What?”

  “Flim-flam-flum,” Crowther said and pushed himself to his feet. “Let’s see, shall we, if we can’t get you out of this stinking sinkhole.”

  Now Matthews looked at him hard. Even Alavoine’s eyes opened, and he looked at him too.

  “I’m going to find you a healthier place to live, Jimmy,” Crowther announced. “Somewhere your wife can visit you, if she ever—” Though he could hardly stand, he did here break mercifully off (for who could know if she was alive or not?), adding only, “It’s my duty as your surgeon—” When still neither would release his pop-eyed stare, he added, with the haste of one tending to panic at the first sign of a moment turning poignant, “But first things first, I must attend to this devilish thirst—”

  Which is what, as Alavoine replaced his old head on Matthews’ shoulder, Crowther staggered off to do.

  And so ended another ingenious confabulation of our Three Wisemen of Bethlem.

  CORNWALL

  WESTMORELAND, JAMAICA

  JUNE 6TH, 1814

  Dearest Jamie,

  It’s two-thirty in the afternoon, forty-two degrees in the shade, I’m alone in the sweltering cook-room, where we just finished clearing up after what’s called here “second breakfast.” I have an hour before dinner’s to be set out, and I feel inspired to use it to tell you about the food we eat here, which as overseer of the kitchen-garden and cook-room I have a particular interest in.

  Owing to a Jamaica tradition of frequent fires, the cook-room is in a building separate from the main house. Here I and my staff of three slaves—Christabelle, Joan, and May-Beth: fine women all, we keep each other in stitches—prepare four meals a day for the overseer, agent, book-keeper, and their families, who have their own residences but usually take their meals together in this, the main house: First comes breakfast, for nine; second, the repast we just finished, second breakfast, for noon, the main meal; third, dinner for four o’clock, a small meal; and fourth, tea for eight o’clock.

  As to produce, the only northern vegetables that flourish here are cabbages, lettuce, and echallots, though given the heat, disease, insects, and animals, they need hourly watching. Of the local produce we rely on yams and plantains for poor potatoes, ochra for poor asparagus, abba (from the palm-tree) for poor artichokes, and calaloo (a prickly green) for poor spinach. In fruit we do better: oranges, shaddocks (a large citrus also called pompelmoose or forbidden fruit), grape-fruit (called cluster-fruit), passion-fruit (called granadilloes), achie (large and scarlet, that’s all I know, I never tasted one), pomegranates, mangoes, coco-nuts, jack-fruit (which can grow big as pumpkins, direct on the trunk of the tree), bread-fruit, and avocado pear (which here they spread on toast instead of butter). In fish too we do very well, despite universally unappetizing names, viz., boney-fish, groupas, grunts, hog-fish, jew-fish, mud-fish, old-fish, parrot-fish, snappers, and snook!

  Jim loves it here. Even the summer heat doesn’t faze him. He has friends both English and Negro and is a mighty favourite around the place. This morning he announced his ambition is to be an overseer, which reminded me our actions are not without effects, are they? You bring a child to Jamaica and before you know it he’s thinking in childish, hopeful Jamaica terms. I reminded him that to be an overseer he’d first need to apprentice as a book-keeper, which would mean direct supervision of Negroes.

  Well? his look seemed to say. I can do that.

  “Jim, these people are slaves. Five days a week they spend every daylight hour in the fields. What do you think when you see the heads of suicides displayed on the bridges to town? How would you feel if a Negro grovelled before you and cried, ‘Massa Jim, me your slave!’?”

  “But I would be the best kind of master!” he objected. “I’d never use the cart-whip! Ever!”

  “Would you free them?”

  “If I was rich enough to own them—why yes I would, first thing!”

  “You’d give all your property away, just like that?”

  “I’d still have my land—”

  “Could you afford to keep it with no slaves to work it?”

  “Mummy, if I had money enough for land and slaves I’d have money enough to pay somebody to work it, wouldn’t I?”

  I would say his exasperation was less with me than with himself for too-little thinking of the too-hard lives of his friends and their parents.

  There is a joke here, Jamie, that sums up the place. A courtier in Hell is asked by the Devil how he likes it. “Not at all disagreeable, Mr. Satan, sir,” he replies. “Upon my honour, rather warm to be sure!”

  Your wife who misses you

  more than she can say,

  Margaret

  SHAFTESBURY

  James Norris seen through Wakefield’s eyes reminding Monro how cruel he made us look, he ordered him freed from the bulk of his restraints and the chain on his neck-ring extended from twelve inches to twenty-four. But this solicitude only made us look guiltier when, on June 7th, 1814, Wakefield and his party returned for a third visit and saw how quick we’d been to act after ten years of doing nothing.

  It was too late another way. On the basis of his drawing, Arnald soon had an engraving underway of Norris in full iron regalia. As a broadside published that autumn, this made a shocking picture of a lunatic all sickly and woebegone, drooping like a parched tomato plant in a cone of guide hoops, a perfect image to illustrate Wakefield’s allegations of our unspeakable cruelty. Over the next several months, picture and allegations together sold a great many editions, tongues were set in motion, and by the usual course of these things, questions came to be asked in the House.

  You can see where this is going.

  The next Saturday the Bethlem governors met to horrify each other by reading out attacks on us in The Times and The Morning Chronicle. Inside an hour they had whipped themselves to such a lather as to appoint an emergency subcommittee to look into Wakefield’s allegations, for example, our patients were chained naked in their beds not for purposes of medical cure but revenge. The subcommittee consisted mainly of our own governors but for substance included three M.P.s and three peers, most notably the 6th Earl of Shaftesbury. The following Saturday, myself, Monro, Alavoine, assorted attendants, and several governors who’d served on the weekly subcommittee were called on the carpet.

  From their questions, the committee wanted us assured how much we were appreciated. The response of the others was fawning gratitude, but both behaviours seeming to forget the enemy at the gates, when my turn came I reminded everybody it was the governors mainly to blame, for not putting pressure on the government to support us in a manner sufficient to make Bethlem work. A hard truth, for which I expected no thanks, but neither did I expect a cousin of Matthews named Staveley, who called himself a chemist, to stand up at the back and query me from a trembling piece of paper. “Mr. Haslam, on what grounds can you recommend still to persevere in the keeping of Mr. Matthews, after your assertion in The Sow and Sausag
e on the night of January 18th, 1809, that he was as well as you, and there was no more reason to confine him within these walls?”

  Here I could have lied. I had already been publicly embarrassed on this point six years before, and it later showed up in an affidavit in support of Matthews’ habeas corpus challenge. On the public occasion, not knowing what else to do and hating myself as I did it, I swore up and down I was never in The Sow and Sausage that night, it must have been somebody else. My accuser that time, and the one in the tavern, had been a friend of Matthews named Dunbar, since then sadly—so Staveley informed us—deceased. Who was left to gainsay me? But it seemed I was now too inflexibly either in the mode of truth or too proud another way to contradict myself, with the consequence I said nothing, only sat perfectly still and waited for the moment to pass.

  It never did, only infinitely expanded, like a vapour.

  When a break was called, Shaftesbury, who’d sat frowning through my performance, leaned across the table and like a headmaster counselling a new boy in a slavish principle growled, “Don’t you know, Haslam, in any dispute those who understand nothing are naturally going to assume the innocence of one of the parties—”

  “Yes, my Lord. Simpler that way—”

  “So let’s not forget, shall we, which party this is.”

  “Would that be the innocent one, my Lord—?”

  “That would be the one,” he replied in a venomous tone, thinking—rightly—I mocked him.

  “But haven’t you noticed,” I blurted, a swath of fear through my bowels, for nothing about the old grandee invited debate, “when everybody puts only their best furniture forward, the know-nothings come to assume the function of appearance is concealment? So the charge-layers, having that prejudice to their advantage, as well as a press daily more eloquent on the theme of fine exteriors and hidden vice, are too apt to carry the day.”

  “Nonsense,” was his Lordship’s reply. He’d been making to stand. Now he sank back down. “The only reason the charge-layers have been carrying the day is the know-nothings are now corrupted by these republican elements. You’d think old Liverpool was still alive—”

  Confused, unless he meant only that republicanism was as rampant now as then—“The 1st Earl, my Lord? No republican he, surely—”

  “No, but he played with ‘em.”

  “Played with republicans, my Lord? Not Liverpool, surely—”

  “Surely, Haslam? You know about surely, do you? Surely Liverpool was ready to keep a lid on Europe by propping up the Revolution in France.”

  “I never heard that before,” I could only say, for it genuinely flabbergasted me. Liverpool? Playing with republicans?

  “No? And neither did you hear it just now. It’s history, Mr. Haslam. Unofficial, unwritten history, that’s all. Nobody that does know it cares. But if you ask me, it opened the door.”

  “To what, my Lord?”

  “Have you been listening, Haslam? Do you have any idea what this conversation has been about?”

  “I believe I do, my Lord, in broad outline—”

  Briefly then, before he spoke again, he regarded me. The malignance in his eyes had a quality to it immaculate, as if his hatred of me was so precisely calibrated to who and what I was it was clean of anything personal. “A word of advice to a medical man, Haslam. If you’d understand the contagion of madness plaguing this nation, you should think of politics as a tell-tale symptom. Book passage sometime to Calais, or Boston, and take a stroll around the town. You’ll find the disease there is florid. Has it not been said the Adam and Eve of America were born in Bethlem Hospital? Is anybody in this room surprised your Mr. Norris is a bloody Yank? Thank God, sir, this is England, where we do things another way and a son has the opportunity to remedy his father’s error.”

  My God, he meant the Prime Minister, Liverpool’s son. “Error, my Lord?” I said.

  This time he only shook his head and did get to his feet. “Stick to medicine, Mr. Haslam,” was all he muttered as he walked away, leaving me to puzzle what indeed our conversation had been about.

  The report on us his Lordship had a hand in that day did much to register and advance his principles. Considering, it declared, what a mischievous lunatic Norris is, there could be no conceivable foundation to a charge of repugnance to humanity in the manner he’d been kept. His mode of securement, while risking offence to sheltered sensibilities, was on the whole merciful and humane, and no insupportable imposition, especially when you considered that no better restraint could be devised for a criminal at once so dangerous and of so curious a physiology. As for restraint more generally at Bethlem, all custodial energy there was dedicated to the cleanliness, health, and comfort of the patients—consistent, that is, with their security and the safety of the keepers. Little wonder, therefore, that Bethlem was equal if not superior to any asylum in the country, and all in all a shining credit to its governors, medical officers, and anybody else who was ever concerned in its administration.

  Though this report was thought by some to err a little on the side of complacency, I don’t think anything less than so authoritative a conflation of clean bill of health and ringing endorsement could have silenced our critics in this reform-mad age, even for the hour it did. If only the truth struck so thrilling a chord. Wakefield was already, all on his own, insinuating himself with George Rose, the justice Crowther once fagged for, who was a keen advocate of reform for lunatics and by the way a good friend to the King. That spring Rose had attempted to secure passage of legislation for the tighter regulation of madhouses, and not just the private kind. When the legislation was struck down in the House, Lord Eldon as secretary of lunatics nastily observing, “There could not be a more false humanity than over-humanity with regard to persons afflicted with insanity,” Rose, with Wakefield, engineered the setting up of a House of Commons Select Committee on Madhouses, chaired by himself. A select committee it certainly was. Many on it had already been to see us in Wakefield’s tow, which should indicate which hospital they mainly had their guns trained on.

  A PLAN

  Meanwhile that winter, the Inquiry not until May, we set about preparations for removal to the new place. With responsibility for a smooth transition falling square on me, Matthews was not always the first lunatic on my mind, though I had every intention, as soon as I could make the time, to see what he’d say to Shaftesbury’s disturbing words about Liverpool. I was finding it hard to believe the great man who once invited me into his home could have been involved in underhand republican dealings. But what nonparticipant knows a tenth of what goes on in upper-echelon politics? Perhaps in those days it was the best, or only, way to keep the French conflagration under control. And if true, it was conceivably enough to explain why Matthews was with us, as one who knew that the father of our Prime Minister had been a collaborator with revolutionists.

  Before I could see Matthews again, another matter arose to do with him. One day early in January, who should show his grizzled boat at my door but Bryan Crowther. By the look of him it was a medical emergency, and mechanically I groped for my bag. Yet, despite Crowther’s sheet-white pallor and shaking hands, it wasn’t his own health he’d come about. After coughing up a good deal of phlegm, which occupied his mouth until he located his handkerchief, he informed me that as Matthews’ surgeon he thought I should be apprised of plans now in motion to transfer him to a private madhouse.

  I sat down at my desk, to learn that in Christmas week, Monro, happening to be seated at a state dinner next to a government under-secretary named Becket, had mentioned to him we had care of a lunatic who would benefit from a purer atmosphere.

  While it’s possible this remark, which might be thought to run counter to what for eighteen years had been our physician’s impregnable position on Matthews, was only one more disheartening bubble from the Monro brain during a meal poor Becket must have found the longest he ate in his life, it was as likely the upshot of systematic wheedling by Crowther. Still, it was interesting Mon
ro should be playing a role in a scheme to get Matthews out. I remember seven years ago when Matthews’ wife and friends were engaged in their final effort to free him—before she sailed for Jamaica—I commented to him that in some ways it would be a relief to see the last of our Omni Imperias Emperor.

  Monro’s response was instructive. After sketching awhile in theatrical absorption, he murmured as if musingly, “And how would we do that, John?”

  “Why, by letting him go.”

  “And carry his Bethlem journal with him, I suppose, so he can recover his fortune as he takes his revenge on us by selling it piece-by-piece to the papers?”

  This response astonished me, and I don’t know what implication of it the more: that Monro should know Matthews’ journal even existed or that he should imagine the charges of a committed lunatic could ever touch us. I don’t think it was only the bias of an author that had me also asking why any man, insane or not, should be held against his will for writing down what he considers the truth.

  And there was something else I remember thinking at the time: Monro may be more dangerous than I assume. Thank Christ we’re on the same team. What I didn’t think was, Why am I relieved to be teamed with a dangerous fool?

  Crowther was now informing me Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, was willing to send Matthews wherever in the countryside we wanted.

  “He needs to be with his family—” were my first words, no alternative having ever occurred to me.

  “Sidmouth’s been clear it must be a secure house.”

  “Has he been as clear about where the money’s to come from?”

  “Poynder tells me Bethlem’s authorized to pay half what it would cost to keep him here. Sidmouth’s office will match that amount. The rest must be found. On the basis of what Matthews’ friends offered before, our hope is they can—”

  “That was six years ago.”

  Crowther shrugged. “Six years to resent us the more and prosper enough the better to afford him.”