Bedlam Read online

  “Which is not at all.”

  “No, I think you do understand me.”

  “But I don’t, Mr. Haslam. I don’t understand you at all.”

  I believe he took my meaning, because he looked at me a moment before he said, “Mrs. Matthews, if there’s an injustice here, it’s that in all likelihood we’ll have your husband too short a time to do him any lasting good before his bed goes to one worse off. I know this temporary separation must be hard, but try to see the larger view.”

  “The larger view, Mr. Haslam, is I don’t want my husband in here.”

  “I understand that, Mrs. Matthews.” He was taking out his watch. “But now I’m afraid I must go see if our surgeon’s regained his senses, such as they are. When a patient pushed him at breakfast, he fell down a flight of stairs.” As he spoke, Haslam pushed the door open on London Wall. Looking out, I saw the boarded-up houses from one of whose cellars Jamie had assured me a gang of French magnetic agents had dug a secret passageway to insinuate confusion into the minds of Bethlem’s inmates. “I apologize, madam,” Haslam was saying, “for bringing you onto these premises for information I don’t have to give you. In the meantime, I can assure you that from my own exchanges with your husband he’s a danger to no one and will be home in due course.”

  “Mr. Haslam,” I said as I stepped out, “I am taking this higher.”

  “We’re in England, Mrs. Matthews. You have every right to take it as high as you can—” He hesitated.

  “Crawl, Mr. Haslam? Is that not the word you want to say?”

  If this struck a hit, he didn’t show it. “No, Mrs. Matthews, not crawl: manage. As in such difficult circumstances as these are we all must—”

  And softly he closed the door against me.

  DAVID WILLIAMS

  In the calm rational fury that engulphed me after my second interview with John Haslam I wrote two letters, one to Jamie’s good friend and mentor, the republican David Williams, and one to the subcommittee of the governors of Bethlem Hospital. In both I begged interviews to discuss my husband’s incarceration. On Monday of the next week, no flow yet, Justina alternately loving and difficult, me still awaiting answers to my letters, I arrived at the Bethlem gates at ten in the morning with another basket, no books this time, only shirt, waistcoat, breeches, stockings, linen, shoes, pen, ink, paper. Bulteel, however (saying my admission Wednesday, which he pretended to be vague ever happened, must have been an error if it did), refused to let me in. The next Wednesday the same again. But Friday of that week (still no flow, Justina still erratic) I received an answer from the Bethlem clerk, Mr. Poynder, which set us on a fortnight’s dance by post that resulted in an invitation to address the governors’ subcommittee on Saturday, March 19th. By now I’d decided that with the tumult of Jamie’s disappearance and imprisonment, I had missed a month and must remain calm until my next regular date. There then followed a mysterious confusion of communication with David Williams. He seemed either not to remember my husband or, with the Government still opening private correspondence to discover traitors, to remember him too well to say so in writing. At last he agreed to receive me at his home in Dean Street, by Soho Square, on the 15th, which was the Tuesday before the Saturday I was to meet with the Bethlem subcommittee. The 15th was also, it happened, the day my menses were next due.

  Though principally I remembered David Williams as a cat in a gold hairpiece tied in back by a drab little ribbon, I hoped his professed beliefs, such as that we’re all equal in the eyes of our Benevolent Parent, would inspire him to help my husband. I was also curious to know how things went for him living in a country at war with republican France.

  Like himself, his house, which stood recessed several feet from those on either side, was conspicuous in its refusal of ostentation. The plain door was opened by his wife, a hard-favoured, high-principled spouse, the choice of a man who, though he may abjure women’s charms, has need of their services. With a look at me of mingled censure and distaste, she led me into a small cold parlour where her husband sat at a spindly walnut writing table, looking old. It doesn’t always take long for the male prime to phase into something pretty gristly, for the fine thrum to dwindle to tinny and plunking. A ruin of middle age that’s neither illness nor senescence. The thick gold hair was now a hollow puff, the cheeks each with a little pit of shadow. The bony body swaddled inside thick stiff fabric.

  As she led me in, he rose alongside his table to indicate a wood bench I could sit on. Once I did that, and Hatchet Face left, he sat back down and looked at me with his attention fixed somewhere just above my head, upon the general idea I represented: “petitioner”; “wife of former protégé, latterly a lunatic”; “interruption”; “trouble”; “danger”; it didn’t matter.

  I described Jamie’s situation.

  My host was beginning to shift in his seat like a man on the brink of saying something at once reassuring and self-exculpatory, when Hatchet Face returned with our tea. He hung back until she left and we had taken our first sips. Mediocre Congou. “Alas, madam,” he then said, assuming an air of lugubrious regret, “you find in me no friend of Bethlem Hospital.”

  “Who could be?”

  “What I mean—You need someone acquainted with a governor.”

  “I need someone who loves my husband.”

  These words set off a vibration of his left eyelid. “You do understand, don’t you,” he said, assuming an air of instruction, as for a slow student, “this could be politics. Your husband was in very deep. How mad is he?”

  “Unaggravated he’s the coolest I’ve seen him since he returned from France.” Coolest to me.

  “And if aggravated?”

  “On my one visit he suffered a seizure, but it was Haslam’s doing—”

  “Whose?”

  “The apothecary.”

  “I never heard of him.”

  “Even he’s not claiming my husband’s dangerous—”

  To this Williams made no response. Were it not for that eyelid, he might have just died.

  “Do you think he is?” I said.

  With a shrug identical to one Jamie used to give—did they learn it together in Paris?—he answered, “If someone’s decided so—”

  “Can it be that easy? What do we do?”

  He shook his head.

  I took a breath. “Mr. Williams, like my husband, you were always a battler against injustice—”

  This, however, he heard not as a statement of what he didn’t appear willing to be now but as a compliment to his life’s work, which had been a failure. “Madam,” he said, shifting his thin hams to alleviate a fresh surge of discomfort, “we did as much as the times had it in them to accommodate.”

  “Will you visit him?”

  This at once ended the shifting and caused so buzzing-lidded a disclaimer of a smile you’d think he’d been asked to post himself in the next cell. To rescue him, I suppose, from his own awkwardness, I sprang to my feet. Limber with consolation, he was up too, and by these automatic actions the interview assumed a concluding momentum. Before I knew it I was descending front steps.

  Had Williams been strong in the days when Jamie loved him but was now broken by a government with a policy of destroying republicans, or had he always been this weak?

  Still asking myself such questions, I arrived home to be confronted by Justina demanding to know where I had been.

  “I told you,” I answered, taken aback, I assure you, at an inquisition from my own servant. “Speaking to David Williams, the republican—”

  “Is it him you’re pregnant by?”

  “No,” I said, too flabbergasted not to say more. “It’s James my husband I’m pregnant by!”

  “Mr. Matthews is in Bethlem Hospital.”

  “Yes, he is. Six weeks now, and I’m over two months—”

  “He came back a year ago. If it was him, what took you so long?”

  “What?” And I looked at her close, to see if she was serious. She was. “Justin
a, it’s not a human decision.”

  Now the tears rained down. Between sobs she begged me for God’s sake don’t dismiss her, she’d die if I dismissed her, she loved me so dearly, and swore she wanted nothing more than to be my dutiful servant, cleaning and cooking and serving in the house and shop, and guardian-to-the-death of my little child, and she hoped and prayed for all our sakes Mr. Matthews would be back with us soon, so we could be a complete family again, as she knew God wanted us to be.

  Reader, what would you have done? If your answer is Forgiven her, then either I lack your compassion or maternity, even in prospect, exhorts severer judgments. No mother deserving the name will risk the life of her child, and Justina’s solicitude, impertinence, and garter-belt razor now made too appalling a conjunction. I dismissed her then and there, with a fortnight’s wage, and even as I spoke the words I knew I should have spoke them the day she said Bethlem should keep my husband or the day the year before when she half undid poor Robert Dunbar.

  Dismissal confounded her. Seeming at a loss what to do, she fell to her knees and clutched wailing at my skirts. When I made to disengage myself, she recoiled from my touch, springing to her feet, and with dead eyes on me sulked away to her room. That night I slept, or tried to, a table wedged against my door. Shortly before daylight she let herself out. When I went down to lock the door, the hush in the house was less of relief than reprieve. It told me I had not heard the last from my devoted maid.

  And I only wished I could say the same of David Williams.

  PETITIONER

  My meeting with the governors’ subcommittee took place four days later, in the Bethlem court-room I had first entered with the steward Alavoine on our futile search for Haslam. Now that it was full of men, it was warm and well lit, both fireplaces ablaze. The individuals I faced were eight or nine kindly enough looking businessmen in ordinary business coats, sitting round the far end of a long table. John Haslam not being among them, I recognized no one except Alavoine. You know you’re in foreign waters when that’s your familiar face. My words to them were simple and few. Nervousness took the volume out of my voice, but I think they all heard me:

  “I am wife to Mr. Matthews and demand to know by what authority my husband is detained.”

  In response, Mr. Poynder, Clerk of Bethlem, with whom I’d been in correspondence, a rangy, quiet-spoken fellow in a bag wig, with crooked teeth somewhat furred, as if his regular practice was to dip them in a solution of mouse-coloured velvet, stood up and after looking at me softly, read out in the sonorous style of a barrister-at-law the terms by which James Tilly Matthews had been admitted.

  These, however, telling me nothing new, only that Jamie had indeed been admitted, when (the 28th of January), and at whose expense (Camberwell Parish’s), which bare facts I already knew, I demanded to know further why he could not be discharged today and allowed to return home with me, his lawful wife, who hereby swore to take entire responsibility for his care and future conduct.

  They then asked me to withdraw, and I did not need to wait long before Alavoine fetched me back in, so Mr. Poynder could read me a motion they’d just unanimously passed, saying they would not comply with my request. But by a second motion, they ordered Mr. Poynder to forward a copy of the day’s proceedings to Mr. Fasson, a Camberwell churchwarden, to request that he and Mr. Clark, overseer of the poor of that parish, attend the committee at its next Saturday meeting.

  And so the following week (after two more fruitless attempts to get past Bulteel), the shop temporarily closed, there being no one now but myself to run it, I waited once more on the bench outside the court-room, this time in the company of Mr. Fasson and Mr. Clark, and these gentlemen, calm Mr. Lean and nervous Mr. Fat, confessed they were as much in the dark as myself concerning the reasons for Jamie’s admission. All they knew was, a certain government authority had required their parish to pay for the incarceration of a former parishioner.

  “What kind of government authority?” I asked.

  They supposed it would be the Board of Green Cloth. “And you thought that was only a billiard table!” Mr. Lean said, winking at me. But no, he explained, it was the Privy Council acting as a court with the power to imprison anyone deemed a threat to the Crown in an area twelve miles around the King’s household, wherever it may be: St. James, Windsor, etc. Lean and Fat together explained the Green Cloth goes into effect every once in a while, which is fair enough, but if relied on too often can prove, as Mr. Fat expressed it, “a mighty drain on the old coffers.” At £3 4s payable on admission for bedding and £1.11.6 per week thereafter, a patient can fast eat up parish funds, especially when you consider the political ones are often kept much longer than the usual year for incurables—those incurables, that is, who aren’t locked up for good as a danger to themselves or the public.

  Mr. Lean then mentioned the case of Peg Nicholson, whose cell it happened was not a hundred feet from where we sat, she having been a resident of the women’s wing nearly twelve years.

  Of course I had heard of Peg Nicholson. Whenever Bethlem comes up in conversation, she’s the inmate everybody agrees they’d most like to shake the hand of. Peg was an upper servant in a good family who misconducted herself with a valet and was let go and reduced to needlework in a room over a stationer’s in Wig-more Street. From there she first sent the King a petition intimating he was a tyrant and usurper. But real fame came only when, at age fifty-two, she made a public attempt on his Majesty’s life, using some say a rusty, some say an ivory-handled, some say a worn-to-razor-sharpness, dessert knife—though by her own account she was only trying to deliver a second petition and in her nervousness happened to draw the knife from her pocket along with the paper. Accounts of the incident vary, but the one I know has the King, who was in the midst of receiving the petition with a noble condescension, avoiding the sudden knife at his breast by stepping back. Peg then making a second thrust (or perhaps only, as she said, once again encouraging him to take hold of the petition), the King’s footman wrenched the weapon from her hand, at which his Majesty declared with the greatest equanimity and fortitude, “I am not hurt. Take care of the poor woman. She must certainly be mad.”

  And things might have gone well for her had she not at her Privy Council hearing insisted she wanted nothing but her due, which was the Crown of England, and if she wasn’t given it, the nation would be drowned in blood for a thousand generations. And so, by the King’s express direction, for the past dozen years she’s resided in Bethlem, where by all reports she does nicely, though daily expecting a visit from His Majesty that never comes.

  “Now, Peg would be a Green Cloth case,” Mr. Fat leaned over to remind Mr. Lean.

  “Aye,” Mr. Lean agreed. “And Monro and his father together were the doctors consulted. Once Peg was in here, old Monro used to play at cards with her. It’s him who said it’s possible to be insane and still take a hand at whist.”

  “Is your husband a threat to the Crown?” Mr. Lean now politely asked me, as if enquiring after Jamie’s taste in pocket handkerchiefs.

  “My husband,” I assured him, “wouldn’t harm a flea.”

  “I know,” said Mr. Fat warmly. “He don’t have to. Not in these perilous times. Do you remember that missile from an air-gun that broke the window of the King’s carriage and passed out the other side, about two years ago—?”

  “And how the mob,” Mr. Lean taking up the story, “once the coach reached St. James, flipped it on its side and half destroyed it? Of course by that time his Majesty was home safe in the palace—”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do remember something—”

  “These days you can’t look sideways at the lowliest fart-catcher,” Mr. Fat continued, “but they’ll toss you in here and throw away the key. It’s all this revolution in the air. The nabs is quaking in their boots, and when they quake they come down hard on the poor and unsuspecting. They come down very hard indeed.”

  As he said the last of this he looked at me smiling, not grimly,
I don’t think, at the thought of coming down hard on the poor and unsuspecting, but to let me know he was pleased to believe with me my husband wouldn’t harm a flea.

  And then the court-room door opened and the steward Alavoine emerged to summon the two of them in, and I was left alone to wonder, yet again, what it was Jamie had done to get himself in a place like this. Told Lord Liverpool he’d live to see his head on a pike at Temple Bar? Created a curfuffle in the public gallery of the House? Are these offences of the sort likely to get you locked up in a madhouse? Perhaps Lean and Fat were right: In times like these they could be. But why would Haslam, whether or not he knew why my husband was in, act so sceptical when I mentioned the Privy Council? Even new to the job, he’d know about the Board of Green Cloth, through the case of Peg Nicholson, if no way else. Or has he listened to too much political fantasy from too many lunatics to believe Jamie could have had dealings with the leaders of Britain and France and so got into actual hot water? If so, for all he’s found out about him, he doesn’t yet know my husband or what he’s capable of.

  My vigil on the bench continuing, my thoughts moved next to Haslam’s assertion that this committee saw all patients on their admittance and discharge. Well, they hadn’t seen Jamie. And neither this week nor last while waiting on this bench had I seen anyone enter or leave that room who resembled a patient, either pending or dischargeable. In a population of three hundred, were so few admitted and sent away each week, there’d be no one to pass before this committee two weeks running? Then again, how would Haslam know whether the committee saw them or not, if he came to the meetings only once in a while?

  Now the door opened, and without Lean and Fat emerging, Mr. Alavoine indicated with a haughty look it was my turn. And so inside once more, and everything was the same as the week before except every face but Alavoine’s and Poynder’s was different. Again no Haslam. This time I was not invited to say anything but only made to listen to a resolution read out by Mr. Poynder that Mr. Matthews continuing to be insane—