Bedlam Read online

  DOCTOR/PATIENT

  The day in April I first went to see Matthews was much like this one, an early-morning spring pause sort of day, all sunshine and blossoms. In memory it’s a Sunday, for how on a London factory day could air so calm have been so lucid? Yet I remember as we talked we could hear the demolishers joking and shouting as they levered shingles off the outbuildings west along London Wall. It couldn’t have been a Sunday.

  I arrived to find his door wide open. Dawn to dusk, seven days a week, he liked to make himself available to visitors from both sides of the custodial divide. Sometimes he greeted them seated on his Omni Imperias Throne, sometimes more informally from the stool at his work table. Spread across its surface would be fresh documentation for our destruction, intermingled with plans for construction of his Omni Imperias Palace against the day of his ascension. It didn’t seem to matter to his callers what height of self-esteem he spoke from so long as he listened, which he always did, though answering more grandly or enigmatically on some days than others. People tend to grant an oracle figural leeway. They like to stumble away from a godhead with something to think about.

  In sum, I would say that for all his determination to destroy us, as well as to exterminate all pretenders to the Throne of the Universe, belonging as that station did to himself and himself alone, Matthews’ primary impulse was conciliation. People did not come to him nervously asking themselves, Whose side will he be on? They knew he’d only ever be on the side of peace. It was not for the sake of power he sought Universal Dominion, it was ultimate deliverance from conflict. In this he was our own resident Un-Napoleon: an unacceptable identity, of course, in time of war, when the question Whose side are you on? admits of only one answer.

  That morning Matthews was alone, at work on his journal. From the doorway I could see the letters neat and glistening. When he heard me he glanced up, and though I hadn’t laid eyes on him in two months and not been in his room for a year, he showed no surprise but only came fully round on his stool to study me as I lowered myself onto his bed and studied him back.

  I don’t know what change he was finding in me. I’m aware since Sarah’s death and my children’s departure I’ve grown negligent of my appearance. Mornings I climb into the first thing that falls on me out of the closet. I don’t eat as I should, only Mrs. Clark’s tea and cakes, when I eat anything. My hair is exiting. I weep hair. When I catch a reflection of myself in a windowpane, I see a patient annoyed to glimpse another so startled at his appearance. But naked before Sarah’s looking-glass I see only a fat, weary widower in unspoused and unfamilied disarray, who happens to resemble a lunatic with a body gone amorphous from a brain too enfeebled by disease to contain it.

  As for Matthews, he was ill. A cachexia in his features seemed to confirm Crowther’s diagnosis. Yet by the scrutiny he gave my anxious entrance, an observer might wonder which of us was unempowered. Seventeen years had passed since I paid my slavish call on Liverpool and was won over and subsequently did nothing and so, to adapt Mr. Pope on duncely inertia,

  …gently drawn, and struggling less and less,

  Rolled in the vortex, and its power confessed.

  Seventeen years is a long time to walk around feeling you should act and not acting.

  “James,” I said without preamble, “it’s time I knew why the Government’s wanted you in here. It’s not because you’re mad, that’s long been evident. Nor is it some threat you once made on a now-deceased gentleman’s life. It’s what you know, isn’t it?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Because Liverpool would never be seen a coward, but he’d do what was necessary to ensure a confidence.”

  “You knew The Dark Lanthorn, did you?”

  “No, but I once paid him a visit.”

  “So did I. More than one.”

  “And yours, I take it, have done you even less good than mine. James, if you won’t, or can’t, tell me what the secret is, at least tell me who or what you’re a threat to.”

  “This is unlike you, Jack, and a strange departure from your usual condescension to me as a demented child. It must be because the Inquiry will want to know and you fear they’ll think you never did.”

  “You do know why you’re in, don’t you?”

  “Yes, it’s because I was a hero once.”

  “They incarcerate heroes, do they?”

  “Only when the achievement explodes the categories it would enhance their power to congratulate you inside of. That’s when they slip the Garter back in their pocket and call the police.”

  “Tell me the story.”

  “Is this to be my deathbed confession, a little early but not by much?”

  “What? No. Of course not—”

  “Jack, if you can’t tell your own patient the medical truth, how will you be able to hear what you’re wanting from me? I promise you it will do you far less good than admitting to me, who already know it, how sick I am.”

  “Then it must do me very little good. You know I was never a devotee of the bliss of ignorance.”

  “Not ignorance. Ambition. The insensibility of that.”

  “You told Butterclerk and Cluckbeck, I assume, now tell me.”

  “No, I never told them why I was in. Such innocents would have lost all heart for getting me out.”

  “Getting you out is a separate concern.”

  “The one before us being to assist you in outfoxing the hunt. I’m saying my secret can only hobble you.”

  “I feel hobbled now, not knowing it.”

  “Not knowing it and pretending you did.”

  “I’ve pretended nothing, only defended—sometimes explicitly, sometimes by silence—a decision it has not been in my power to challenge.”

  “Or understand. Your fear is not appearing in charge, when you never were. Why not act direct on what you already know is true, I mean your knowledge of what kind of man I am?”

  I took a breath. “James, the other day I was told Liverpool once collaborated with the republican government in France—”

  “Who said that?” he shot back, with a look of surprise.

  “Lord Shaftesbury.”

  He nodded, taking this in.

  “So it’s true?” I said. “Liverpool, the great assailant of all things republican? And it’s through your sometime connexion with him you’re in here? You know the details, and now his son is Prime Minister?”

  “It’s no accident his son’s Prime Minister,” came the dark reply.

  “So it does go high.”

  “To the very top.”

  “That’s it, then?” I persisted. “Is that the story?”

  “Not a fraction of it.”

  “No? Is it that he’s Prime Minister to address an error of his father’s?”

  “If Shaftesbury said that too, then he has only hints. You should ask, ‘The failure of what paternal plan has left him disappointed?’”

  “All right, James. What plan?”

  He smiled and shook his head.

  Now I stepped toward the bed and looked down at him, and when I spoke, though my words came out quiet, it was with so palpable a commotion among the nerves of my lower face that I could only think my failure to defend him before the Grand Committee, coming as it has after a decade of doing nothing to get him out, has not left me unaffected. “James,” I said. “You told me I should act on what kind of man you are. I don’t know what kind of man you are. All I know is it’s past time, if you’re to remain in my care, I did you some good.”

  “You have done some. You brought in Mr. Logan from Bridewell to teach me the engraving art. You’ve provided the necessary materials ever since, including a table to work on. As well as ink and paper, you supply me with pencils and pens, even though you know perfectly well I’m using them to keep a daily record of the abuses I witness in here. Against house rules, you allow me extra candles to work at night. You haven’t put a chain on me in fifteen years. I can go anywhere on the men’s side I please. You even
let me keep a garden plot. Aside from ensuring I receive my wife’s letters, the only good you haven’t done is freed me.”

  “James, because I couldn’t.”

  “Couldn’t you? Then why not do like most people in your position?”

  “What? Say I only did what I was told?”

  “Haven’t you always? Do they prosecute lackeys? Despise, yes, but prosecute?”

  “What if this is a matter of conscience?”

  “And how long did it take to become that? No, Jack, this smells more like fear of a House committee. And since eighteen years of not knowing why I’m in here never moved you to resign, you won’t after you know it. Nothing will change.”

  Saying this, he turned back to his table.

  And so I took my leave.

  BETHLEM HOSPITAL

  APRIL THE 17TH, 1815

  Dear Mags,

  After not showing his face in my corner for two months, The Schoolmaster has just been by to beg me to tell him why I’m in. He’s quaking in his boots for fear of going before the House Committee with no idea why he’s had me for eighteen years. Though he’s stumbled onto something of what old Liverpool was up to, I refused to tell him more. Yet I admit his request has put me in mind of the pleasure I derived from telling my story to the good doctors Birkbeck and Clutterbuck (though for them I omitted that part), I mean the satisfaction of speaking out about matters otherwise relegated to a wretched morass of pain and confusion in my head. Jack’s request also reminded me how disappointed I was when they suddenly announced they had no need to hear more. In short, now I thought of it, I was positively itching to tell Jack exactly what the story is and why I’m in and would do it in a flash if only I could think of one good reason why I should.

  The question was, What would he do with it? Nothing—there was nothing he could do with it. The trouble was neither would he be moved to try—not Jack. Well what of Haslam, then? Well, what of him? Whatever else, wasn’t this Truth? And double-barrelled too, boom! boom! And wasn’t Truth what Haslam needed if he was to wax mighty enough to burst the shackles of Jack?

  Why, there it was, like a beating heart, my reason.

  Why didn’t I think of this before? Was it not the fear I’d not emerge un-powder-blackened? Was that not the real reason I didn’t tell Birkbeck and Clutterbuck? They were not too-innocent lambs, I was too corrupted.

  But what of sheepish qualms now? It’s crucial times! I’m telling Jack the very next time I see him!

  Yours in a sudden state of scarce-containable excitement

  at the prospect of dealing The Schoolmaster a

  double death-blast of Truth, with hope of

  Redemption in Jim’s eyes for too many unmanly

  showings before too many committees,

  James

  CORNWALL

  WESTMORELAND, JAMAICA

  SEPTEMBER 10, 1815

  Dearest Father,

  I write you Father on this my eighteenth birthday first of all to assure you that Mother and I are doing very well, though we miss you dearly. Since I have met you only once, your absence is the air I grew up breathing, but Mother finds her distance from you very hard and constantly berates herself that she isn’t doing more. I know we’re in Jamaica principally for safety’s sake and I do like it here, but I promise you Father once I have secured a post and put aside a little money, I shall bring Mum back to London, so she can find out first hand how you are getting along. Otherwise we have no way to know, as your letters never reach us. I can always return here once we have the knowledge you are safe and well.

  Lately Mr. Scrubbs the book-keeper has been putting me in charge of the sugar mill, and even sometimes the boiling house, so he can sneak off to town. I do like the Negroes, they have exuberant souls, but they need to be watched. Faced with a lifetime of overwork, a person will naturally seek every opportunity to shirk that obligation. And yet production must go on; Mr. Lewis expects it. How I hate it when Mr. Scrubbs cart-whips a Negro. He scoffs when I tell him he shouldn’t. If it’s good enough for our soldiers and sailors, he assures me, it’s good enough for our niggers. When I observe that no creature, human or otherwise, deserves to be whipped, he looks at me as if I am mad.

  The only other news I can think of is I have a new tutor. Mr. Pullen has decamped for Ireland, blaming the heat. As of this week I’m taught by a Mr. Noble, who is not. But at Christmas (by a long negotiation with Mother) my schooling comes to an end. I am a man now Father and hope one day to achieve as great things in the world as you have done, and this hope of mine and your achievements I celebrate by writing to you on this my majority day—

  Your devoted son,

  Jim

  INQUIRY

  At Kitchiner’s on the Sunday night of the first week the parliamentary Inquiry into madhouses began, before the bell rang us in to dinner, I took my friend Jerdan aside. (Kitchiner had long since forgiven him and allowed him back on the Committee of Taste. Being of a generous mind, Kitchiner needed little persuading, and Jerdan’s alibi that he was out of town at the time helped smooth his reinstatement.) I took Jerdan aside to tell him I thought I’d discovered sufficient reason Matthews was still in Bethlem: his knowing too much about the 1st Earl of Liverpool’s republican connexions.

  This piece of intelligence elevated the eyebrows of my journalist friend. When he recovered from his bemusement, he peppered me with questions to elicit every detail of my conversation with Shaftesbury, and subsequently Matthews. He then thought a moment and concluded, “As your lunatic assures you, John, there’s more to the story. Shaftesbury’s right: Nobody gives a tinker’s curse what the Prime Minister’s father did twenty-five years ago. They’re not going to rig a habeas corpus decision without good reason. The question is, What plan or error of his father’s is he concealing?”

  “Could the answer not be simply he wanted him Prime Minister to have a paw kept on Matthews and others like him?”

  “Why?”

  “Republicanism—?”

  “From what you’ve told me of Matthews over the years, John, he graduated from republicanism a long time ago.”

  “Do they know that?”

  “Even if they didn’t, they’re not going to interfere with every habeas corpus hearing of every lunatic republican. It must be something else. Do you know, John, I’ve spent twelve years listening to you agonize about this lunatic and now you finally have me interested?”

  Later, dinner finished, too much of Kitchiner’s good wine consumed, as we put on our coats, I confessed to my friend how vulnerable I felt going before the parliamentary Inquiry with no real idea why Matthews was in.

  “You’ve known from early days it was a Bow Street political decision, John,” he replied. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “But why have I stood for it all these years?”

  “I don’t know. Why have you?”

  “What could I have done?”

  “Resigned, if it bothered you so much.”

  “Would that have got him out?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. Perhaps these hearings will do it.”

  “They’re not about that.”

  “No, but you seem to think they’re about why you’ve kept him. Do you truly believe anybody cares? Any more than they care what a dead earl nobody liked once did? Isn’t this only Conscience, up to her tricks?”

  “I should have done more for Matthews,” I said glumly.

  “They used you, John. Just as they did Matthews. Try to understand it that way. You’ll experience a whole new range of emotions. Meanwhile, let me see what I can find out—”

  Here his carriage arrived, and we said our goodnights.

  Next morning, on May 1st, in a gritty chamber of Westminster Palace, the hearings got off to a sweating start with testimony from a brand new Hercules on the scene, a Yorkshire magistrate named Godfrey Higgins, who’d just arrived from shovelling a fresh steaming load of torture, murder, and arson out of the York Asylum stables. An atmosphere of huffing indigna
tion thus established, Edward Wakefield rose to make his indictment of Bethlem, to illustrate which he passed round the picture of the late James Norris, consumption having in late February laid his enervated demons to rest. Wakefield’s performance proceeded pretty much as you’d expect—with two surprises. First was the enthusiasm the committee brought to his every word. To hear their gasps, you’d think their Bethlem suspicions so disturbing that if Wakefield didn’t confirm them quick, they must face the fact the only possible source of such depravity was the vulgar ferment of their own imaginations.

  A second surprise: From the nature and order of their questions and also certain peculiar expressions on everybody’s lips, it was evident they were intimately acquainted with Matthews’ journal of Bethlem abuses. (Over the years, he’d crowingly read out favourite passages to me, pluming himself on the retaliation he’d make, so I knew the language.) For their convenience, the committee kept that seminal document on a little table behind and off to one side, for consultation at their leisure. A common sight became an honourable member squeezing out of his seat to refresh his memory.

  So much for my satisfaction the charges of a madman could never touch us. But you have to wonder if the extraordinary precision, beauty, and uniqueness of Matthews’ penmanship didn’t itself promise truth to a degree the spawn of a mere printing press can only feign. What’s a product of mechanical duplication against a perfect original creation from a human hand?

  Strange times. Seven years ago that spring we were tilted at by Butterclerk and Cluckbeck, the Quixote and Panza of modern medicine. Their delusions, though dangerous, were also ludicrous, and by a concerted effort we sent them packing. Now our assailants were Wakefield and Rose, a republican who’d linked arms with a close friend to the King, and those two had hoisted themselves on the shoulders of a pair of incarcerated madmen, one incorrigibly violent who in his last days sat for a pathetic memorial, the other who like God in Heaven has kept a record of universal suffering, and this pathetic memorial our accusers gazed at in awe and pity, and this record they pored over like Methodists consulting a missal.