Bedlam Read online

  “Then he does remain incurably insane, in your view?”

  “Yes, though perhaps not so dangerous as formerly.”

  “Unless, it would seem, to the royal family—”

  Was Matthews ever dangerous to anyone? I had sat by and said nothing when Monro declared it. I myself had said and writ that he was.

  “The example of Mr. Hadfield must come to mind,” Rose prompted me, almost kindly, when I was slow to respond.

  “Matthews, your Honour, is not like Hadfield.”

  “No? How not?”

  “Matthews is a man of wit and discernment. Hadfield is not.”

  “But isn’t your professional conviction well known, Mr. Haslam, that madness is madness? That lunatics may be quieter at some times than others, but this doesn’t mean they’re sometimes sane, too many being adept at putting aside, or obscuring, delusional thinking should the situation require it, the lucid interval being, as you have argued so persuasively in your published work, a much misunderstood concept? How predictable can Mr. Matthews’ actions be when his sentiments conform at times with Mr. Hadfield’s, and Mr. Hadfield is known to have fired a pistol at the King?”

  Rose allowed me time to reply to this eminently sensible query, but what could I say that would not be heard as outright self-contradiction? More than this, the question reminded me that my failing Matthews and my betrayal of him were not unrelated to my history of listening to him as a man of sense when he sounded like one and as a lunatic when he didn’t or grew obstreperous. And sitting there with the good Justice Mr. Rose awaiting my answer, I considered how you can think of yourself as a certain sort of person yet watch yourself behave as quite another; and how easy it is that disjunction becomes simply how things are with you, and your failure to reconcile that contradiction, whenever it noses its way to awareness, you tell yourself is only the small, private price you must pay awhile longer yet if you would achieve such-and-such worthy end. And so, like everybody else, at the same time as you inwardly congratulate yourself on your goodness and work toward your admirable goal, you silently endure a nagging fissure in your soul and go on wreaking blind havoc in everything you do.

  I was thinking this or something like it when an M.P. named McManus rescued me from further hot-eared silence by leaping up to pursue a new line of questioning:

  “Do you not think, Mr. Haslam, that Mr. Matthews’ delusions of persecution are a direct result of his detention in Bethlem?”

  Not being as interested in my humiliation by Rose as I was, the committee had been for some minutes stifling yawns and sneaking peeks at their watches. Now they shot to attention with gratified looks that said, Why, that’s exactly what I was thinking.

  By their familiarity with Matthews’ journal it had dawned on them that the gang was none other than us—his gaolers—under different names. More than this: Though they had no idea what his delusions were before he was with us, they assumed that once his gaolers were taken away, his delusions would follow. In their minds, the fact he was in at all was the alpha and omega of his mental suffering.

  “An ingenious speculation,” I replied, smiling through gritted teeth, “though it would seem to assume he arrived amongst us sane. But perhaps a more pertinent question in the circumstances, sir, would be why the Government’s wanted him in.”

  Were McManus a dog he’d be a border collie. His head appeared freshly extracted from an instrument designed to foreshorten and depilate canine heads to pass them for human. As his attention readjusted to me, you could almost hear a whirring from the undersized braincase. “The question I already did ask, Mr. Haslam, was why the medical officers haven’t let him go.”

  “We were not allowed to.”

  “As you’ve just informed us.” Again he looked to his notes.

  “And why not?”

  Wanly he looked up. “Mr. Haslam, the procedure here is, we ask the questions, you answer ‘em.”

  General laughter.

  “Ho, ho, ho,” I said. “Why haven’t we let Matthews go?”

  “Well, sir, I confess the only reason I know of is his habeas corpus undertaking was refused by the Court. Is there something you now wish to add to that information?”

  My mouth opened and then it closed. As Matthews would have reminded me, The Schoolmaster couldn’t do what he couldn’t do.

  Here, a little wearily, Justice Rose said, “Mr. Haslam, if you have nothing to add to your statement, would you mind if Mr. McManus went on with his questions?”

  Now was my chance to respond that the issue was not whether Matthews should be in but why he was in. What came out instead, at first quietly, was my own anger.

  “The human mind, your Honour, is so intriguing unto itself, it’s perfectly understandable when unmedical persons believe they can comprehend it in a state of derangement.”

  “This committee, Mr. Haslam,” Rose shot back impatiently, “does not presume to comprehend derangement but only to inquire into the state of the madhouses.”

  “If you’d improve the madhouses,” I answered, suddenly too furious to restrain myself, “then de-license the private ones forthwith as too devoted to hiding madness away. Give the government houses funding sufficient to keep lunatics long enough to win a chance of remission. Let them open their doors so the public can see how the money’s spent, and so they never forget the face of madness and with it the fact that medicine, having scant understanding of the brain and none whatsoever how disease affects thinking, has come up with innumerable treatments but as yet no cure, no matter how hopeful religion seeks to make an ignorant public or how soothing the placebos tossed out by mountebank doctors, politicians, senators, magistrates, men of business, and other interested zealots of reformation.”

  Gasps.

  “Surely, sir,” said a voice trembling with indignation, “you don’t suggest we return to the barbarous days when people flocked to Bethlem as to the animals at the Tower?”

  “People are bedlam, sir, and bedlam people, however cleverly you conceal the resemblance. Along with the three great amusements of human life—war, politics, and the vagaries of the human heart—the mad are our living reminders of this elementary fact. When they’re not too annoying and terrifying we keep them at home. When they are, we lodge them in hospitals, in private madhouses, in prisons, or let them roam the streets. But let’s not build our walls so high against them we forget they’re ourselves merely too distressed by their as yet incurable affliction to be sociable. I repeat: incurable affliction. Refuse that kinship, sir, and I wouldn’t trust you to know your own face in the mirror.”

  “Mr. Haslam,” someone else put in, “surely you’re not telling us there’s no appreciable difference between a healthy mind and one that’s not?”

  “Have you ever examined a human brain, sir?”

  “Pickled in a jar, yes I have. What of it?”

  “Did you notice how convolved it was? How heterogeneous? If you did, I wonder you’re not as astonished as I am when a human being shows the faintest glimmer of rationality.”

  “Aren’t you overstating your case, sir?” someone else ventured.

  “Not in the least. Isn’t everybody always a little bit sick? I myself have not known any person completely healthy in body and certainly never one perfectly sound in mind. For I must agree with Dr. Johnson that to speak with exactness, no human mind is in its right state.”

  Silence while they took this in. So did I, for it was the first time I knew I believed anything quite like it. Or was anywhere near saying it. There’s a line between what everybody knows and what can be said, and once you cross it, the articulation of things sounds very different from how they looked and felt in the quiet of your own thoughts. Also, it seems, you have no brake.

  “There’s only one sound mind,” I continued, “and that’s God’s—at least so I’m assured by certain eminent divines. Which only goes to show what a marvel disembodiment is and how little surprised we should be to find Mystery still rules the affairs of flesh
and blood.”

  Another stunned silence, the kind people slip into as they witness a unique and absolute act. A Hindoo could set himself on fire in the street and they would not be more fascinated.

  Still, though this one seemed to, no moment lasts forever, and we were some minutes into the lunch hour. Rose asking for a motion of adjournment, it was swiftly provided and seconded, the committee scrabbling up their papers and scooting from the room as quick as any mob of students from a lecture hall. In the breeze of their exodus, The Schoolmaster’s trappings streamed and fluttered upon his person like the rags of a man who’d either just been flayed in his clothes or had a lunatic’s unfortunate habit of rending them himself, it was difficult to know which.

  SUBSEQUENCE

  And yet, and yet. At the governors’ annual banquet on St. Matthew’s Day, held that year for the first time in the open air of St. George’s Fields, Monro greeted me as chattily as if he’d never betrayed me, would never dream of slipping a shiv into my back, telling me about his brain-clap to do a painting of the new building and make a gift of it to the governors.

  “Better a likeness of the old,” I told him. “It’s the one disappearing.”

  This had not occurred to him, but he didn’t like it. “I’d wager, Johnny,” he replied, speaking ventriloquist-style as he scanned the crowd, “this lot’s dead keen to put the old place behind them.”

  “Then do it for the patients and staff of the new. Keep us in mind who we are and what we come from.”

  “Now, now, man,” he muttered, still scanning. “Play the game.” I’d have said something bitter to this had he not immediately stretched out his arms and strode across me with a great false shout of delight at someone who when he saw who it was gave a start of unbridled contempt.

  Not long after, a toast was offered to my health by an alderman named Atkins, who I never saw before, congratulating me on the honest rigour I’d showed in my testimony. But this gesture failing to be followed by three cheers or calls for a speech, I could only raise my glass and return a tremulous smile. Fortunately, everybody immediately drank, as if to forget, and I sank down once more invisible. Still, for the record: The only note heard all afternoon from that crowd of clerks and businessmen was sober self-congratulation, with now and then a muffled dirty guffaw of triumph.

  In October, a report issued by the Court of Governors of Bridewell and Bethlem roundly declared Monro and me innocent of any wrongdoing. Vindication, it would seem, and clear sailing once more—until this winter past, when the parliamentary committee published their own report, of which, on Wakefield’s instruction, a complimentary copy was posted to every Bethlem governor. Though this other report contained not a single item of information the governors didn’t already know, its authors were explicit in their advice it be read through with care before the April election of the medical officers. To further assist our employers in their deliberations, Wakefield kept up a barrage against us in the press, declaring in the Examiner, for example, that by our testimony Monro and I were bold-faced deceivers who must be toppled from our high perches and stripped of any honours we’d accrued by our inveterate scheming. And just to make sure, Rose himself is said to have wrote to the governors intimating he didn’t want us re-elected.

  Needless to say, our governor champions cowardly backed down, voting to postpone our re-election until Monro and I could report to them on the testimony we’d already given. In this way they forced us, as in a nightmare, to become our own assassins, as we attempted to defend ourselves against the absence of any specific charge.

  In our joint submission we repeated our justifications concerning Norris and Matthews and generally defended our behaviour and practices, with frequent reminders to our readers that they had already absolved us.

  My oral version of an answer the committee greeted with considerable applause, which might have promised a prosperous issue. But since I was in the present humiliating situation subsequent to being toasted by these self-same bastards, I was not deluded. This was all rope-jumping to satisfy no one. Even Monro, by his doleful looks, understood we were dead. Being a half-wit, he was half right. At a special meeting on the 15th of May, the Court of Governors cravenly reversed their verdict by voting overwhelmingly not to re-elect us. For Monro this is no great financial setback, since he never made more than a hundred pounds per year from his Bethlem post and still has his thriving Hackney madhouse, plus a few others, to keep him in paintbrushes. Even so, to soften the blow for him at the same time as ensure the dynasty that spawned him sleeps on, last week the governors elected his idiot son Edward co-physician of Bethlem.

  Her apothecary has received harsher treatment. Though Poynder (who in his detached way nimbly escaped prosecution) did, as treasurer of the Court of Governors, the decent thing of moving I be granted a pension of two hundred pounds per annum, his motion, after it found a reluctant seconder, was grimly defeated. Upon a begging application from me, a subscription list was undertook for the relief of me and my aged father, but to date no fist-fights have broke out to be first in line to sign. A keeper like the idle, skulking scoundrel Rodbird, a casualty of gin and paralysis, basks in the sunshine of a valetudinary pension, while the apothecary, who served the place in a manner that bolstered its reputation worldwide, gets nothing. Finally, to crown my humiliation most exemplarily, at the same time as they awarded Edward Monro the sinecure of co-physician, the man we hired only last year as our new steward, the insufferable Mr. Wallet, was appointed apothecary of Bethlem.

  So here I sit in the solitude of my Islington study and write everything down. This house is come into the market, and at the price the agent’s asking (for a rapid sale) I won’t be sitting here long. Neither will the books on these shelves. First thing Monday fortnight, my entire library goes on the block. The Leigh and Sotheby’s buyer tells me catalogues containing more than a thousand items can take three days to get through. And then there’s my mahogany bookcase, with drawers and wardrobe and mahogany ladder. A lucrative week? We shall see. “Works of exceptional taste and learning” they’re calling them. I don’t know why, they’re only what any educated man of medicine should have, with here and there something bizarre and unaccountable, viz., A Parliamentary Inquiry into Mad-houses 1815, or A Curious Collection of Books Handprinted in Black Letter, undated.

  So what now for John Haslam? Rented rooms closer to town, where the opportunities reside. A package to be made up of my books, with a cover letter and résumé of my achievements in the field, for posting to Marischall College, Aberdeen, whence in due course should arrive a medical degree. That way I can practise in London. It’s unlikely the College of Physicians will embrace me, but I could scrape by on a dozen patients of modest means if they’re sufficiently chronic or hypochondriacal, and for so few there’s no need to lick arseholes in Warwick Lane. At the Medical Society, at least, I have a few friends. If I ever have fifty pounds to rub together, I can stand for the board of St. Bart’s, or even St. Luke’s. I can always do duty as an expert witness, which I’m told I have a flair for, and the pay, though sporadic, is good. I have more than one book left in me. Somebody needs to clarify the issue of restraint of lunatics, and while they’re at it say something on behalf of the keepers. And of course I’ll champion public mad-doctors, who are the ones with medical training. After that, if time still weighs heavy on my hands, perhaps I shall take up Jerdan’s offer and scribble for his London Gazette.

  Who says a man can’t start over at fifty-two? One door closes, another opens. Isn’t that how it works, out in the world? The harder part will be knowing who John Haslam is, now he’s been stripped of The Schoolmaster. It’s an end James Matthews devoutly wished, but I think he preferred I do it by choice. Perhaps I’d have got around to it, given time enough—wasn’t I beginning to feel the pricks? Mad Bess piles on rags as she goes, but Mad Tom strips down till he’s begging naked. She knows who she don’t want to be; he needs to remember who he is. When he wasn’t raving, Matthews knew who Ma
tthews was, and he was in Bethlem. So then will Haslam know Haslam now Haslam’s out. Why else go down with the champion of that weird brotherhood?

  MARGARET MATTHEWS

  1818

  JIM

  Mr. Matt Lewis had not long returned to England for his first visit when I began to think it was time Jim and I went home too. Though in early adolescence Jim had found it sometimes difficult to conceal his impatience with me and my fears, as he grew in maturity, so he did in compassion. During those months of Mr. Lewis’s absence, he behaved as loving with me almost as he used to when a child. Sometimes we’d eat a meal just the two of us, and when clearing the table he’d make a gentle claw of his free hand and scritch my cropt head as he passed. From a slight, fair youth at fourteen and fifteen, by eighteen he was sun-darkened and strapping: the handsomest, kindest, most thoughtful young man I ever knew. But now he was done with what schooling Jamaica could offer and was chafing to see the world. I resolved that as soon as Mr. Lewis got back we would leave.

  I should not have waited. Six weeks before Mr. Lewis’s return, Jim received a nick on his ankle while overseeing a crew of our Negroes burning cane trash. By next morning the infection was virulent and by the morning after that he didn’t know me or where he was. Sometimes the fever abated, and he’d grow calm and seeming lucid and tell me how much he loved me and I must find his father and he’d join us as soon as he was feeling more himself. Holding the compress to his brow, I assured him I would never leave him, while silently I cursed I had ever brought my precious child to a place where a light scratch could reduce hale youth to this. This and worse. In the tropics it’s a short step from the sick-chamber to the grave. Three days after Jim received the scratch he died.

  With my beloved young man gone, my Jamaica world fell apart. I was now unfamilied in Hell, and but for the kindness of my friends, I might have taken my own life, out of despair for Jamie and to be with Jim. It was Christabelle who prepared the body in the Negro way, the best in those latitudes. By the day of the funeral—which owing to the heat was inside twenty-four hours—I hadn’t slept for so long I was in an automaton state, but at the sight of my boy’s coffin descending into the dry earth, were it not for black hands restraining me, I would have thrown myself after it. Those same hands guided me to bed, where I was made to drink a potion that put me to sleep for two days. I awoke knowing I must either find my husband or discover what his fate had been.