Bedlam Read online

  “Would this be Sir Archy, the monster of depravity?”

  “It would. Known to others as Alavoine, the steward. As with Jack the Schoolmaster, who inhabits Haslam, I don’t as yet have the whole story on him, Charlotte, and the rest, but I will.”

  “Haslam the apothecary is part of the gang?”

  “You could put it that way. But how much he knows is a good question. They’re a singular stripe of villain. In their nasty way, far more insinuating than Clyde water, I assure you.”

  His smile as he said this resembled a fanatic’s. At the same time, it shook me to see how much in his friend Robert Dunbar’s too-big clothes he resembled a child playing at grown-up, and along with these likenesses came the horror of where we were and what we were about to do.

  What had I been thinking? How could I for one second consider returning my husband to such a place? “Jamie,” I whispered, and stopped, trembling, in my tracks. “We must not come here. We must go back home, now.”

  He stared at me. “Why would we do that, Mags? After trudging all this distance?”

  “It’s a terrible destination!”

  “No more than what’s on the way. The residents of Bethlem are the most human people on earth. It’s a college where the scholars arrive already broken. They make the best kind.” He was stretching out his hand. “We’ll still have our visits. If you do everything they say and slip Sir Archy something for his trouble, he’ll leave us alone now and then a half-hour in the visiting room, where we can be as lewd as we please. You’ll be let out as soon as you’re showing.”

  “Oh Jamie-!”

  Though I moved to embrace him, he stepped back out of reach, tilting his head to regard me. “You must be mad, Mags,” he said quietly, “to love a madman like me.”

  “You’re not so!” I cried. “Not at heart! Only sometimes! They do this to you!”

  “What do they do?”

  “Chase you down! Put you in this place!”

  “Not this time. This time it was me chased them down. For nonpayment of services rendered, among uglier crimes. And now I’ve chased you down. Please, Mags. The company of my like can’t be good for your health. Especially if you intend to be a mother—”

  Did he know, then? It would be just like him to know—

  “You see, Mags,” he continued gravely, “the time has come again for me to ensure the survival of two nations. But operations have now switched to the realm of the mental, and you, as a woman of too refined intelligence for such horrors, require the security of a madhouse.”

  “Jamie, my home’s with you!”

  He shook his head. “Only lately again, and didn’t these past ten months slip away on us pretty quick?”

  He brushed past me and started back toward Broker Row. Over his shoulder he said, “It’s better this way, but nothing’s certain. The rule is, you must be mad less than one year before you go in, and if they can’t cure you, it’s out again after a year. Unless, of course, you qualify for the incurable wing, in which case they keep you for good. It’s not just anybody’s admitted, and fewer still are allowed to stay. I’m saying we can’t count on anything. There are stories of people fighting twenty years to get a loved one in here.”

  When he stopped and turned, I was perhaps ten feet behind, following with the greatest reluctance. I didn’t know what to do for my poor husband and never did in the six or seven years he’d been suffering these episodes. All I’d learned was, if excessive energy of mind exacts a toll on the man himself, those who dwell in its borrowed light pay too.

  “Is this Saturday?” he asked, waiting for me to catch up.

  I had to think. “Yes—” and then remembered and said silently, Justina, pray open the shop. Please don’t let us lose the business of a Saturday. Reluctant to expose Jamie’s confusion to our maidservant, I had let her sleep through his return. But what if she didn’t open the shop?

  “Good.” He was walking again, me following, up Broker Row. “The committee of four or five governors meets Saturday mornings to view all applicants—”

  “Did they view you?”

  He stopped again and looked around at me, surprised. “No—”

  “Why not?”

  “The keepers did it all. I was roughly used.”

  “Where were the governors?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t a Saturday.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t a lawful incarceration.”

  Jamie nodded at this, though he seemed doubtful. He resumed walking. “As I was saying, those they consider a fit object they sign in on the spot. In your case, I’ll be there in person to give bond, to whit, if you’re released alive I’ll come and get you. If dead, I’ll take charge of your burial. That would be after Jack the Schoolmaster opens your head to examine the cause of your madness.”

  “Jamie,” I said, “why are you in at the expense of Camberwell Parish? Why would so poor a parish enter into a hundred-pound bond to put you here?”

  He looked over his shoulder at me, seeming surprised at this information. “You mean it wasn’t you paying?” Again he stopped to think. “Camberwell could mean the Ministry intended me for a longer stay.” He started walking again. “Why would they change their mind?”

  “They didn’t! You escaped!”

  He made no sign he heard.

  I hastened to catch up. “Jamie, why did you refuse to see me?”

  “Did it come to refuse?” He was still walking, not looking at me.

  “I was there every day! The porter wouldn’t let me in!”

  “Alf Bulteel? Did you give him a penny?”

  “He took everything I gave him! Sometimes he said it was not visiting hours and sometimes he said you refused to see me!”

  “Visiting hours is ten to twelve of the morning, Monday and Wednesday. Did he tell you that?”

  “I found it out myself. It didn’t help.”

  “He should have wrote you out a ticket. Never mind. He’ll write one for me when I visit you.”

  Now we were coming into the Common Passage, which runs between the front wall of Bethlem and the open ground of Moorfields, or I should say what’s left of it, after the squalid creep of houses and shops. As we rounded the corner, Jamie gestured upward, and sure enough, at the top of a wall-post, a stone pineapple. Also of note about that front wall: set in it every fifth panel is a barred section, so passers-by might gaze upon the building it otherwise obscures. Gaze and tremble. I glanced through the bars of one section as we passed it but was too distraught to see what I looked at. Up ahead, Jamie pointed out what appeared to be a threadbare sheet with a great rend in it, snagged high on the wall. “That’s where I came over,” he said. “To land naked as from my mother’s loom.”

  “Womb,” I corrected him.

  He wasn’t listening.

  Soon we arrived at the right-hand everyday entrance by the main gates. At this hour its iron door was locked shut. Here for the past three weeks I had been daily told by the porter Bulteel—a scrofulous animal done up in a sky-coloured gown and gripping his great silver-tipped staff as a bully holds his truncheon—that Mr. Matthews wanted no visitors. This morning the beast was nowhere in evidence, but Jamie soon changed that by stepping up to the main gates and directing through the bars several stentorian Hallos and Rouse up theres, and suddenly everything was happening very fast. A door of the hospital to the right of the main ones, not more than forty feet from where we stood, flung open and the beast itself emerged stumbling unhatted, one arm caught in the sleeve of its coat, trousers undone, to weave and stagger cursing across the pavement toward us.

  I tugged at Jamie’s arm. When he turned to me, his expression was not, as I expected, stubborn calm—the beast’s eruption only what he’d been after—but incredulous terror. “That’s not Alf Bulteel,” he whispered. “It’s a French agent, disguised as him.”

  “Jamie, we don’t need to be here—” I was struggling to extract his fingers from the gate.

  But the beast had sent up a roar, anothe
r ruffian in blue was cannonading out that same door, and Jamie was peering to see who that one was. Tremulously, not looking at me, gripping the bars with whitened knuckles, he whispered, “This other’s a French agent too. He only seems like the one they call Rodbird, though he’s really The Middleman, by a clever impersonation of the gendarme who did me violence in ‘95, who it happens Rodbird bears a resemblance to—”

  Now came the true nightmare part, for such moments of crisis are apt to ignite Jamie’s wildest delusions. As I struggled to unhook his fingers, his head swivelled from the advancing brutes to me, except it wasn’t me he saw but more French agency. Lâche-moi, Charlotte! Salope française! he gasped, starting back. In doing so, he let go of the bars, and I was able to yank him away across the gravel into the sheep-stubble of Moorfields, the snowdrops (I remember this so clearly) just beginning to pierce the cold earth, past the pond in the direction of Field Lane, thinking if I could get us safely lost in that shambles of tents and goods-stands. But with Jamie’s butchered feet on the uneven ground and his reluctance to go anywhere with a French whore, and him hobbled as well by Dunbar’s unrolling cuffs, our progress was stumbling. The men in pursuit of us, though hardly specimens of physical health, once they got through the gate were soon upon us. The one who’d come second out of the building threw himself at Jamie and brought him down hard, while I spun round to aim kicks at his kidneys as he pinned my husband making grabs at my legs until the old porter came panting up to dance lumbering between us, using his staff for a barrier. Not long after, the other muttered in a voice of sullen resignation, “Give us your stick, Alf.” As the porter reached it back to him, I tried to go round on the other side, but his arm hooked me and drew me close. It was with my face pressed against his stinking gown that I heard the sickening blow, and another, and another.

  “Devil bastards!” I moaned, “Sweepings of Hell!” and coarser epithets—sailor coarse—while the porter continued to muffle me to him, as he heaved for breath.

  “I beg your pardon, madam,” he managed, once he’d retrieved his stick and let me go, advising, “Stay clear now—”

  And so we were set marching, as the one called Rodbird, a grim-beaked facetious individual, in a nasal tang befitting his hawk countenance, addressed poor Jamie (who tottered before him, head streaming with blood, dazed and lost), calling him his Little Fly-Coop and his Wee Darling Home Pigeon, and other grimly jesting endearments, as he pulled him to his feet and pushed him in the direction of the gates. And when Jamie stumbled and would fall, Rodbird clutched the back of his shirt—Robert Dunbar’s shirt—and half-carried, half-marched him before him, and when I angrily demanded to know what right they had to seize and beat my husband, “By his right to be where he belongs,” Rodbird advised over his shoulder. “Straight back up his own arsehole.”

  Too soon we arrived at the gates, which stood open. The porter, who until now had not let go of my arms, rotated me away and give me a shove, and the gates clanked and were locked even as I threw myself against them. And so it was now my turn to shout through the barrier as they supported him one at each shoulder in the fashion of soldiers a dazed and stumbling prisoner as they escort him to his execution.

  HASLAM

  For some good time after Jamie was taken into the building and the doors slammed shut, I called out that I was his next of kin and had given no consent for his confinement and must speak to someone in charge. I shouted until I was hoarse, and still no one came back out and no life stirred in the hundred and more windows I could see as far east and west as the building stretched. Black pits, all, except for the ones on the ground floor nearest the gate, which had been boarded up, as if to prevent direct communication of visitors with those within. At last, my voice ravaged, I sank down in bitter abjection, my back against the bars. It was then I saw my commotion had attracted a coterie of the sort as might indicate not all Bethlem’s lunatics, once discharged, wander far.

  A snag-toothed young woman who leaned on a crutch informed me without preliminaries, “Saturdays Bulteel don’t take up his post till past nine-thirty.”

  “What time is it now?” I asked.

  “Not nine,” someone offered.

  “Not nine,” a child with the haggard look of a dying sweep put in, “on account of it ain’t eight.”

  I nodded and several nodded back.

  In the quiet you could hear the dawn hubbub of London Wall and from across the way in Field Lane the clamour of the shopkeepers as they opened for trade.

  “When does the committee arrive that sees to Saturday admissions?” I next inquired of my on-lookers.

  I might as well have asked them the best means to determine the longitude at sea, for they only continued to look at me. But not for long. Soon a head among them bound in greasy rags, of a sort more often seen washed up on the banks of Fleet Ditch, revolved toward a scarlet rim of light along the eastern rooftops. Now we were all looking, for the sun rises faster than you can ever believe, and so it did, a ball of molten scarlet adhering a moment to that rickety horizon before lifting clear. We were still looking when footsteps sounded at my back. Twisting where I sat, I saw a man in a snuff-coloured coat crossing the forecourt toward me.

  No more than Jamie had I ever set eyes on the famous Dr. Monro, or any picture of him. Yet, imagining this must be him, I scrambled up, watching him as best I could with a green sun bouncing before my eyes. Still coming on, he held up a key to mean he’d let himself out and we’d talk. When I nodded, he offered a guarded smile before his eyes returned to the pavement in front of him. I stood up and brushed myself off.

  In John Haslam—for that’s who this was, not Monro, physician of the place, but Haslam, the apothecary—there was something right away familiar to me, though I could not at first tell what it was. The man I watched approach was of middle age, somewhat stout but not heavily so. I don’t think it was the cut of his frock coat that gave him the look of one whose spine contained an extra vertebra, with the consequence his legs appeared shorter than they were. In fact, Haslam stood well above the middle height, but that hint of top-heaviness made him seem not yet fully grown. There was also an exuberance of energy, like that of one who’s received an unexpected boon, or of a boy still inside his bubble of perfection’s hope, in the way he came striding out to me, though the closer he came, the more that hope seemed fraught with an adult perplexity bordering on outrage, mysterious amidst so much innocence or vitality or vanity of life.

  In all this, as I say, he reminded me of something, or somebody.

  By now he’d passed out of view and stood in shadow on the other side of the right-hand iron door. He then fumbled so long with the lock I thought he must have picked up the wrong key. When he first reached the door, I walked over to wait directly the other side of it, but when the fumbling grew interminable I was reluctant to discountenance him further by waiting so immediately upon the site of his embarrassment. So I walked back to where I had been, wondering if you need to be a woman to be squeamish about the feelings of a stranger it would appear you have every reason to hate.

  At last he got the lock to turn and came wincing into the full blast of the rising sun, shutting the door behind him. I made a step toward him, but my ragged crew crowded past me. With a glance of apology at me he paused to shake their hands and listen to their complaints, now and then offering solace in a manner amiably gruff. For their part, they were gratified by his attention and pleased to apprise him of their continuing afflictions.

  The apothecary’s face was common in a memorable way. It was the sort a skilled painter would situate in a crowd scene just so, to galvanize his canvas. The hair was brown with auburn lights, fine and thick, receding at the temples and lying disordered against the skull. It was unpowdered, but you don’t see much powder nowadays, and lack of it certainly no longer signifies your monarchy-loathing republican. The side whiskers, not in good trim, were long and large, the nose a lordly flute of a proboscis, or would have been lordly on a face that, though eviden
tly shaved once this morning, was not already sordid with black shadows.

  But a stronger feature still than the nose, and one that militated against this being mistaken for the face of a nab, I mean well born, was the mouth, which had too much expression about it for a gentleman’s. A droll mouth, yet one capable, you immediately knew, of forming and saying hard things.

  Abruptly he broke from his suppliants, telling them he was sorry, he must excuse himself, he had business with that woman over there.

  Which was me. We made our introductions. “Your humble obedient servant, madam—”

  “Mr. Haslam, your bullies have no right to seize and beat my husband.”

  “Did they? Was he trying to escape?”

  “Yes, because he doesn’t want to be here.”

  “He didn’t go far—”

  “He came home to me! Leadenhall Street! That’s pretty far!”

  “Then returned and hung on the gate?”

  I hesitated. The truth was too mad. “He wanted me to see where he was prisoned.”

  “A consideration that has got him in again, and the problem now is, any release of patients must be sanctioned by the governors’ subcommittee—”

  “That meets today.”

  “I’m afraid they won’t get to your husband today—”

  “They? I thought you sat on that committee—”

  “From time to time. Would this be the Matthews who insists on the Tilly? James Tilly Matthews? Tilly, what is that? Huguenot? So he’s French on one side? His mother a Spitalfields silkweaver?”

  “Yes-”