Bedlam Read online

  So he knew my letters had stopped? “Not since May.”

  “Thank God! I feared—Never mind what I feared!” And he broke into a smile that revealed, in place of the snaggly old velvet chompers, a snow-white palisade.

  “Mr. Poynder, your teeth!”

  “Boys’ teeth.” He rapped them with a fingernail. “Battle of Waterloo teeth. English or French, what does it matter once they’re all mixed together in shipping barrels?” And he gazed at me as if they’d turned him a boy again, one who’d undressed me too many times in his mind not to be confounded to find me standing so immediately before him, an entire living person. Coming out of it, he said, “You have a friend here—”

  “Jamie—!”

  “—a Mrs. Latimer.”

  “Justina Latimer? A gallery maid?”

  “Oh, heavens no. But perhaps less mad than too beautiful to be hanged, though she did murder a senior minister in government—and even, I have heard, made an attempt on the life of the Duke of York. Last year when she strangled one of our keepers, we moved her to the incurable wing. But what was he doing in the women’s quarters at four in the morning? She speaks of you with fondness though now and then seems of the opinion your leaving London without her was a grievous betrayal. A word of advice: If you visit her, watch your back. And The Monk? How’s he?”

  “The Monk” was the name Mr. Lewis was generally known by in England, from the title of an obscene novel he once wrote. As I told Mr. Poynder of Mr. Lewis’s fate, I imagined he must have spoken to Jamie to know about my connexion to Mr. Lewis. So Jamie had received my letters after all and Alavoine kept only his back?

  When Mr. Poynder was done his condolences, I said, “Pray sir, is my husband here?”

  Holding up a hand, he glanced round to see if Mr. Hunnicut listened, before he edged closer. “A retirement dream of the Poynder complexion, Mrs. Matthews: a stationer’s shop in the warm south. As one who’s been and knows trade, any advice?”

  “Go with a good range of stock. If it’s Jamaica you want, set up in Montego Bay (and only there) with cash enough to see you through the first year. The wharf and best houses burned a few years ago, but they’re rebuilding. That same year and the one following, the town was struck by two hurricanes and four earthquakes, but all has been calm since. Don’t be stubborn about sticking to pens and paper if it turns out nobody can write or be bothered to, and you’ll scrape a living well enough. Is my husband here?”

  “Montego Bay! Could a man not die in bliss to the music of such a name, even if it be in a hurricane or earthquake?”

  I waited.

  “Your husband? Not any more.” He patted his breast. “As a matter of fact I have here his August cheque—”

  “Alive!”

  “I should think alive—” and he explained how two years before, Jamie’d been removed to a private madhouse. “Bethlem splits his expenses three ways with the government and his family—”

  “I’m his family.”

  He frowned. “Why then, I don’t know. Here I’ve been thinking the third part was Jamaica sugar money—”

  “Where is this house?”

  “Hackney, by Hoxton—”

  “Not Monro’s—?”

  “No, no. But the only one who knows, though I don’t think he’s been, and who ensures all three cheques are—”

  “Haslam.”

  “How’d you know? The removal of your husband to Mr. Fox’s was the only Crowther initiative he supported in twenty years. Poor Bryan—”

  “Where’s Haslam now?”

  “Lamb’s Conduit Street, Number 56—toward the Foundling Hospital end. He’s a widower now, I guess you know—”

  “No, I don’t—only that his wife was ill. I’m going there now and will say my regrets. I can take him the cheque—”

  An astonishing offer, from the response. But the Poynder brain was nothing if not limber. From an inside pocket of his coat jacket appeared a narrow yellow envelope on which was written, in the familiar clerkish hand, the precious words, “James Tilly Matthews, c/o Mr. Fox’s, London House Private Hospital, Hackney.”

  “Very kind of you, madam—” he said, bowing. He then encouraged me to visit my friend Mrs. Latimer and while I was at it to feel free to drop in on himself, any time. When I said I would, he seemed to grow teary-eyed, before bidding me farewell with such feverish warmth I almost imagined myself a long-lost Poynder paramour.

  HASLAM REVIVUS

  Now it was over the river in a soot-flake soup to Lamb’s Conduit Street, thinking Jamie’s mysterious benefactors must be his friends. But who? Love, time, and a mattress was all any I ever knew could afford to give. Did somebody grow rich in my absence?

  My route took me over Blackfriars Bridge and thence north and west, but on an impulse I ordered us first east, to see if No. 84 Leadenhall Street was still standing, or what condition it was in. Our passage was along The Strand through Temple Bar into darker Fleet Street with its ancient timbered houses, then up Ludgate Hill past St. Paul’s into the markets of Cheapside, through a city I knew but scarcely recognized. First, it was smokier than ever. Second, it was teeming—Cheapside was one heaving mob—and I had thought the Greenwich Road was busy. Third, every tenth building was draped in scaffolding. The year before we left for Jamaica, Drury Lane burned down, and the year before that, Covent Garden, though it was all but back up by the time we departed. It seemed the reconstruction fever had got out of hand. Everything was undergoing too drastic changes to justify my Jamaica hope that the fears I suffered there, that exactly this kind of runaway transformation must mean Jamie could not but be overlooked or destroyed in my absence, were only the natural anxiety of exile, and really things change slower at home than you imagine when away. Well, not London. Not these days.

  Our progress was a crawl. Carriage traffic and all other in Cheap-side, Cornhill, and Leadenhall was like nothing I ever experienced. But we did eventually reach No. 84, and there it was, a quiet shabby pocket of familiar time, with Hodge the Bespoke still doing business on the ground floor, thus confirming the assurances of my agent Mr. Samuel. The only difference was new, sky-blue drapes on the first floor and lace curtains on the second, but whether what Mr. Samuel in his letters invariably referred to as the “respectable family of three” who dwelt behind them would soon be slicing open a notice from me depended on whether I would ever live there again with my husband. For one thing I knew: I could not live there again without him. With Jim I could have, but not alone.

  When at last we’d completed our arc—a ride that cost me half a week’s Jamaica pay—and came to a halt in Lamb’s Conduit Street, my coachman seemed to have the wrong address: ground-floor rooms at the rear, reached by a reeking open passageway. But the exhausted young woman who answered my knock I knew was Haslam’s daughter by the way her father’s features in becoming hers, managed despite those odds to evoke her mother’s beauty.

  “Yes?” she said, and I might have been back at Haslam’s Old Bethlem door twenty years ago, trying to talk my way past his wife (with this very woman a little girl clutching her skirts). Except this time from behind my gatekeeper there wafted on a warm draft out of ammoniac darkness a demented keening.

  “I must give John Haslam this,” I said. Not knowing what else to do, I held up the envelope. “Is he here?”

  From inside, a querulous moan, overlaid by an infant’s wail. In the girl’s posture, tremendous weariness. But when she saw the name on the envelope her eyes brightened. “Would you be Margaret, then—?”

  Amazed she’d know, or remember, I nodded. “How do you—”

  Close by, a male voice said, “Henrietta, who is it?”

  The eyes held mine a meaning moment before she stepped back into the gloom, her place taken by John Haslam, slighter than I remembered him, certainly leaner, with no hair on top, the face less masklike, more sunk on the skull but handsomer somehow, perhaps more defined, or only less baffled about the eyes. “Mrs. Matthews,” he said, with remarkab
le emotion. “That was my daughter, Henrietta—Thank Christ you got my letter. Come in, come in—”

  As soon as the door closed behind me, we were plunged in darkness. Guiding me four or five steps into a cramped office where a six-to-a-penny candle guttered, he sat me down on a wood chair jammed at an angle to a small writing table and took another. We sat knee-to-knee, so close that were it not for the general fetid ambience and a taste in the air of hot tallow, I think I would have smelled him. Judging from the food stains on his shirt and his ragged dirty cuffs, he no longer much concerned himself with the cleanliness of his linen.

  I told him I was sorry to hear about his wife.

  As he nodded, his eyes went to the envelope in my hand. “That’s not my letter—”

  I told him I’d received no letter from him, and what this one was. Heart pounding, I asked him what his had said.

  “Now that you’re here,” he answered, plucking the one I brought and dropping it on the table, “it don’t matter.”

  “Assure me, Mr. Haslam, my husband will see that money.”

  A low groan from the other room. An old man’s, I think. To judge from other sounds, apparently from the same room, his daughter was pacing with a fretful infant.

  “I can’t do that, Mrs. Matthews, because he won’t. But Mr. Fox will, and that’s good, because he’s the one paid to look after him.”

  “By whom? The Government, Bethlem, and what friends?”

  He shook his head. “A stipulation of your husband’s sponsor has been anonymity.”

  “Mr. Poynder said it’s my husband’s family.”

  “Mr. Poynder doesn’t know. The arrangements were initiated by Mr. Crowther.”

  “With your support.”

  “I only pursued what he begun.”

  “Is it Crowther, then?”

  “Crowther died penniless. He drank his wages.”

  “Who, then? The Quaker David Williams? He was early my husband’s devoted champion—”

  At the mention of Williams’ name, Haslam looked away. Turning back with a sigh, he said, “Yes, Williams would seem an excellent candidate, as one who owed your husband a great deal. Unfortunately, he departed this world for a better before the opportunity presented itself.”

  From the next room, muttering laughter, followed by a growl of curses.

  I was looking at Jamie’s envelope on Haslam’s table. “Mr. Haslam, my husband did receive my Jamaica letters—?”

  He looked at me. “He received some. Whether Jamaica ones, I can’t say—”

  “But Mr. Poynder knew—” I stopped.

  “Yes. It would seem your letters are how he did.” Saying this, he drew from a shelf a bulging packet, which he placed between us. “Your husband’s to you. I assumed Alavoine would be reading them, I had no idea he was keeping them. That Poynder was keeping yours I discovered too late. Now nothing can be done, I’m afraid. I have no more power over him. As the one daily about the premises and world expert on the place, my responsibility was to know what my secretary did, but I was too busy with words, and when it comes to words, even the right ones, it seems, can be a blinkered response.”

  “Or none at all. Mr. Haslam—Have you changed?”

  He laughed. “Mrs. Matthews, does this look to you like the residence of a man who’d sooner drown than swim dog-paddle?”

  “Let me take my husband his cheques.”

  “If you’ll allow me the honour to accompany you—”

  “Mr. Poynder says you’ve never been.”

  “Mr. Poynder is a fountain-head of misinformation. I’m active on the London House board. I’m there all the time. Sometimes I take the whole family. My daughter’s a good friend to your husband—”

  “I prefer to go alone.”

  “Then you must find yourself a coachman who knows the way.”

  “That—” I stood up—“sounds more like the bully I remember.”

  He sighed. “Mrs. Matthews, you’ve come at an odd time. Please—”

  Groans again, louder this time.

  “Odd, yes—Mr. Haslam, what are those sounds?”

  He was scanning my appearance. “Tomorrow,” he said, “I want you looking smart as a carrot.”

  Now I laughed. “Are you sure you’re the one—”

  “Fix your hair and wear the best thing you own. Where are you staying?”

  “Is my husband well?”

  “Well and cared for, that’s not it.”

  “It?”

  Another groan.

  “Mr. Haslam, do you keep patients here?”

  “Am I running a house for lunatics, you’re asking me? Yes, with this difference from the others: My lunatic stays free.”

  Suddenly I had no strength for the old struggle. I reached for my husband’s letters.

  He placed a hand on my arm. “Only my father, Mrs. Matthews. Another I owe a debt to. He always told me, ‘Rise, boy! Rise!’ but it was never enough—and d’you know what? He was right. A man throws off the shackles of rank and authority and learns to think for himself. This raises him up, and lo and behold the world sees him raised up, which raises him still higher. But it turns out that rise is only the perfection of his humiliation, when he realizes the folk he now and then moves among have never stopped, and never will stop, assuming he has a servant’s heart—” He lifted his hand from my arm. “Mrs. Matthews, where are you staying?”

  Promptly at one o’clock the next day a carriage pulled up beneath my hotel window. Not at all ready, I watched it in the hope it wasn’t Haslam. But he it was who climbed out and stood a moment looking round. He was cleanly if old-fashionedly dressed. He glanced up, in my direction, but there must have been a reflection off the pane, for I don’t think he saw me before he strode inside.

  When the maid knocked, I was not half dressed. I’d stayed up reading my husband’s letters, then couldn’t sleep for the commotion of love, horror, and dread they threw me in, then overslept. When at last I came downstairs in my riding-habit, Haslam, who was standing in the centre of the lobby facing the street, wheeled round and boomed, “Can you do no better than that?” at which Mrs. Doherty (whose establishment it was), the young couple she was in conversation with at the desk, and a traveller seated on a divan at the window reading a newspaper all looked at me. As I continued my descent, a foolish grin splitting my burning face as if nothing could be more amusing than this gentleman’s teasing, he added, just as loud, “I mean it. Have you nothing finer?”

  Reaching him, I told him in a low, furious voice that the only thing finer I owned was a ball gown and did he expect me to wear that? (When Mr. Lewis discovered all the English ever do in Jamaica no matter how hot it gets is eat and dance, he made a gift of one for me in blue silk, for when he needed a woman on his arm.)

  “Yes,” Haslam said, looking at his watch. “I do. Go put it on.”

  I stared at him. Had the double catastrophe of disgrace and ruin cracked him another way?

  “Quickly!” he cried. “We go nowhere until you change.”

  Back in my room, Betty fastened me into my silk gown and helped make something of my hair. When I came down again, Haslam, this time the only one in the lobby, instead of showing himself pleased by my efforts (as I should never have expected), muttered, “What took you so long?” before hurrying me out the door with a shout to the coachman: “Reading Lane, Hackney!” We practically galloped off.

  Now I demanded to know what this was all about, but only handing me an envelope containing Jamie’s cheques for Mr. Fox, he spent most of the ride talking about his daughter, Henrietta. Two years before, she’d eloped with a brute named Felpice, living with him in Manchester a year before he sauntered drunk into a canal. Widowed penniless, she worked as a gallery maid in a private Manchester madhouse until, her condition grown unmistakable, she returned home at last, to give birth to a healthy girl, delivered by Haslam himself.

  To hear him tell the story, things could not have turned out better. His dream was his daughter wo
uld one day ascend to Matron of Bethlem. In other words, the unhappy girl, her dash for freedom ending where it started, except with a fatherless infant to rear and a senile relative to nurse, now bore the burden of her parent’s devastated ambition. But when I implied as much by asking wasn’t Matron of Bethlem a dreary fate to wish on your own child, Haslam assured me Henrietta wished it too, and he only wanted her happy doing what she had the will and talent to do. He added that taking her back, and holding her to his bosom, was the best thing he ever did in his life. Just now their circumstances were hard, but there was a new life in the house, and new love, which gave them strength, and that was enough.

  This causing me to remember he also had a son, I inquired after him. Quietly Haslam spoke the terrible words, “Lost at sea.” It had happened the previous winter and by the emotion in his face remained a crushing loss. Before I knew what I did I touched his hand and told him I too had lost my son. At this news he couldn’t speak, but only directed at me a sorrowing gaze, then looked away, biting his lip. The rest of the trip we passed in silence.

  We were now in open country. Cattle grazed in the fields, and once we stopped for a river of sheep to flow round us. We must have travelled a good three miles. When a low paling swept in close on the right, our pace slowed until, by a massive dusty willow, we came to a halt before the front gate of a handsome three-story brick house set in a good acre of lawn and garden. The air out here was clean and fresh, and altogether the establishment had the open airy look of a country house with its windows flung open on a Sunday morning. And festive too, for patriotic streamers flapped on wires strung from the willow-twig arch over the lawn-gate all the way to the front door. These, however, for some reason Haslam cursed our entire march up the flagstone walk. My own attention was on something else: an excited hubbub of sound that from inside the carriage had sounded like a convocation of herring gulls on a distant pond. But climbing down, I realized it was human: the excited timbre of a garden party in back of this very house.