Bedlam (24 page)

84 L
EADENHALL
S
TREET

D
ECEMBER
11
TH
, 1809

Dearest Jamie,

And so we arrive at the eve of the Court’s decision, which should be tomorrow or next week but in any case soon. Jamie, we’ve done all we can, and nothing remains but to hope. With Truth on our side, Justice should be too, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned these twelve years, it’s the Law doesn’t work that way.

Here, in short, is my worry: The assumption of all knowing parties when informed of your case is that those who want you in will justify your imprisonment under the
Traitorous Correspondence Bill
of 1793—viz., your supposed correspondence with French revolutionists—for this is their best (if not only) legal means to counter our medical argument. Yet, so far as we can determine, they haven’t done it. Which means either they’re incompetent or like the Bethlem governors and medical officers they don’t know why you’re in, or have forgot, in which case we’ve won…Or else you remain so great a threat to them they don’t dare invoke that bill lest it open the door to revelations too damning to themselves. If this latter is the case, their position may be securer
than we know and their influence, as you have feared, extend deeper than the courts, in which case we were defeated before we began.

Jamie, I indicate the matter so nakedly only to see it sharp and clear for myself. I think you know it already. In any case we shall both know the outcome of all our efforts before you read this. Let’s hope when you do read this you’re home again, and we can laugh together over what I can only pray are unfounded fears.

Tour loving Margaret

The most fascinating part of telling the French segment of my story to Dr. Clutterbuck, aside from the little impression it made on him, has been how the discipline of the telling has marshalled my memories to a coherence they never knew. Lately individuals from those years have populated my mind like denizens of a
cam-era obscura.
I shall here letter them, and so put to better use than roaming my cell the hours to our habeas corpus outcome.

When, in February 1793, David Williams abandoned our shared cause of peace, leaving me stranded with my hired carriage, he broke my heart. One day your beloved brother, the only hero you ever had, departs forever the parental strife, leaving you guilty and abandoned. What can you do but throw yourself weeping at the legs of first one parent then the other, your world split wide open, and who will be left to love you tomorrow? What can a child do but peacemake? Knowing what Williams’ undelivered oral message must be, I went direct to Lord Liverpool—in those days still Baron Hawkesbury—and laid it all before him: information even more remarkable than Lebrun’s begging letter for peace. What was it? That Lebrun’s government sought the assistance of the
British government to crush their then-opposition, the bloodthirsty Jacobins, and so end the war and the mounting Terror.

With Hawkesbury I had a connexion, having already delivered on his behalf letters and valuables to the French government, and vice versa—services for which, as I reminded him, I’d not been paid. He received this information in a noncommittal, I would almost say doubting fashion, as if he hardly knew who I was. Superciliously he informed me the Government, if it saw any point, would form an answer in due course. Once it did, and I was the one chose to convey it to France, they’d contact me. I told him I’d wait. But when a month passed and nothing happened, the news from Paris growing daily more dire and rioting spreading through the French provinces like grass fires, one morning toward the end of the second week in March I proceeded to Hawkesbury’s office frantic for an answer and was denied access even to the building. This telling me where things stood, I shot straight back to Paris. Answer or no answer, papers or no papers.

My arrival occurring on March 19th—the very day after the French commander Dumouriez’ defeat by the Austrians at the Battle of Neerwinden—Lebrun, still French foreign minister, was tail-wagging eager to receive any friend of David Williams, and a regular beagle of despair when he learned I carried no message from Grenville.

Perchance M. Matthews can himself provide some inkling as to British demands for peace?

Mais oui,
I sighed (lifting a trembling hand to my brow). But might I first impose on Monsieur for a bed for the night?

Bien sûr, M. Matthews. J’ai agi sans aucune consideration, vous êtes épuisé. Demain, c’est assez bientôt.

Next morning, over a late breakfast in my stateroom, I provided
Lebrun with a hand-lettered outline of the Allied campaign (including diagrams for an attack on Toulon), along with a step-by-step guide for France to negotiate peace with England.

He went away rubbing his hands like a cuckold in a farce.

After lunch he was back, for clarification of the step-by-step guide. Over breakfast the following morning, I presented him with a thirteen-page memorandum in question-and-answer form, the questions British demands, the answers positions France would do well to adopt. I wish I could say this memorandum and the outline of the Allied campaign arrived fluidically. In fact, they cost me two entire nights of thinking and lettering. I was feeling my way in the dark.

But we did attack Toulon. In the course of my London interviews I had picked up certain hints. An informed guess.

The documents passed. Though the French executive council refused (as my “guide” required them) to admit responsibility for the war; transfer what remained of the French royal family from prison in France to England and provide £500,000 for their maintenance there; move the Assembly out of Paris; restore Avignon to the Pope; give England a few islands, one of them Tobag; and entirely disarm, in which event England would immediately follow suit; the French council did declare themselves prepared to grant various concessions involving the frontier, as well as the indemnification of Savoy and of the German princes. On April 2nd, they voted to respond in good faith to the “British demands” and so obtain peace with England.

With this in writing and sealed with the French seal, I returned to London, but the British government in its wisdom rejecting the overture, I met again with Hawkesbury (who lo and behold would see me again). But from his reluctance to acknowledge I
ever did any service to the country, as well as from certain things he arrogantly let drop at that interview, I glimpsed the abomination of our Government’s larger intention. I staggered out of there horrified at the iniquitous gulf this country was hunkered at the brink of. All night I wandered the Thames bank, trying to think why I shouldn’t fill my pockets with rocks and wade in. The plain fact was I’d been used. And Williams too. The bastards’ nefarious workings infected everything they touched, and they touched everything. But as the sun come up over Redriff, I knew what I had to do: gallop back to Paris, like a horse to battle demons in a flaming stables.

The above was as far as I got last week in my lettering when Margaret come in to tell me how our habeas corpus went. At first as she approached, seeing she carried no hamper of goods to ease a continued stay, I imagined good news. Then I saw her face: blank shock—and something else, or was it?

The writ has failed. The judge has ruled I’m wholly unfit to be at large. Margaret’s twelve years’ struggle has come to this.

Solemnly, after she next told me the good part—that the judge ruled I be given my own dry upper room, to be fitted out at moderate expense by the steward (meaning Sir Archy), with my own fire, and my health seen to—she recounted the interview with The Schoolmaster she had just come from.

As soon as he sat her down in his office (now the small room off the main-floor hall, where he used to only see patients), he set about to impress upon her how he’s wanted me out since the day I arrived and what a shame it is for all concerned that Liverpool’s letter has now rendered my release impossible.

This was flim-flam, pure and simple. “You sought that letter,” she said.

Well, yes, they did, he acknowledged with guilty haste, Monro insisted upon it, but only after the committee doubted my friends would secure me. And he explained how at the time I was admitted, there was no official procedure, but as a matter of fact it was the magistrates of Bow Street that first charged I be held, with Camberwell Parish only paying my keep. For this reason, the Bethlem governors always considered me in by government direction. That’s why a letter from Liverpool had been sought, to regularize
(read
legalize) the arrangement and put the finances of my keep on a solid footing. Still, they were ready to let me go, if only Justice LeBlanc ordered it. But he didn’t. The matter thus clarified, The Schoolmaster fixed upon Margaret a look (it seemed to her) a sublimely uneasy balance of sympathy with us and complacence with the
status in quo.

“But there was something else,” she told me. “A relief he couldn’t conceal. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that over the years he’s grown too attached to let you go.”

“That’ll be Haslam,” I said, meaning, Not The Schoolmaster. Though I knew that if I said no more, what I did say had the appearance of an empty rejoinder, I kept mum. The matter was too complicated: Haslam would also want my freedom.

Rammer-straight on her wood seat, directing a cold stare at The Schoolmaster, Margaret had said, “What happens now?”

“Nothing, I’m afraid. Mrs. Matthews, you must believe me when I tell you that habeas corpus was absolutely the only way to fetch your husband home. LeBlanc’s decision has been in every respect unfortunate. But I must say your husband’s cause wasn’t helped by the fool’s-cap investigation of Butterclerk and Cluckbeck.
If those two comedy-clowns hadn’t aggravated Monro with their deafness and blindness to lunacy, your husband would be with you today.”

“Their conclusion he’s sane seems to have annoyed you.”

“Annoyed, Mrs. Matthews, and amazed. When you consider a person cannot correctly be said to be
in
his senses and
out
of them at the same time, or when you consider madness is opposite to reason and good sense the way light is to darkness and straight to crooked, don’t you think it’s truly wonderful when medical professionals fail to discriminate transactions of daylight from materials of a dream? When, after a few visits with a lunatic, they, in full public view, entertain opinions diametrically opposed to those of men who after twelve years of his company and careers spent observing madness can be expected to know him better than they do and can diagnose his condition better than they can? And don’t you also marvel that the convenience of being disburthened of the expense of a pauper lunatic should never once have entered the thoughts of officers of so poor a parish as Camberwell?”

“Mr. Haslam, it appears this result has touched you in some personal way I don’t fully understand.”

“Then understand this, Mrs. Matthews. Your husband is too intelligent to give himself away to an interviewer whom he has every reason to convince of his sanity. How harmless your husband is may be debatable, but whether or not he’s a lunatic is not. What offends me is that your comedy-clowns should hold this hospital and its officers in such contempt as to fail to recognize a fact so obvious as your husband’s insanity. The world didn’t need to be assured yet again that a lunatic can be rid of his condition as easy as being declared he’s not one.”

“Even if that declaration procures him the care he needs? The
care is real, Mr. Haslam, the rest is words, vanity, and politics. Why cling to impotent distinctions when a human life hangs in the balance?”

“Mrs. Matthews, as a man of medicine I can’t declare a man sane when he’s not.”

“You don’t need to. The puzzle is why others’ doing it should so incense you.”

“Puzzle? What puzzle? My life in medicine has been devoted to fighting against public deception concerning lunatics. Declaring your husband sane is for the Butterclerks and the Cluckbecks, who have the hunger of their ambitions to feed. I’m as sorry as you are they couldn’t help him—”

“No, Mr. Haslam. At the end of the day the hunger of ambition is your own. What has finally kept my husband in is the letter from Liverpool. In the wake of it, the medical arguments have counted for nothing. You can blame Birkbeck and Clutterbuck as much as you like. The rub for you is nobody—not the doctors, not the politicians, not the judges, not the governors—cares a fig what you think about madness. And I must say I don’t either, because it’s long been too evident that you care less about my husband than about your own self-advancement.” Margaret stood up. “Now let me speak to him.”

Before he rose as if exhaustedly to escort her upstairs, The Schoolmaster only directed at her, she said, eyes like two empty jam jars.

Now, that interview over, she was sitting on my bed, her emotion communicating in the fierce, rhythmic way she was pressing my hands.

Presently she inquired after my back.

Curled on my side, my head on my pillow, gazing at her skirt
tenting dark over her knees, I admitted it felt now and then a little uneasy.

She sighed. Then she told me two awful pieces of news.

First, last night Justina Latimer, whom she hadn’t spoke to in a decade, had burst in on her in a state of clamorous alarm, saying certain parties in Government, alerted by our habeas corpus endeavour to my continuing existence, were prepared to do harm to her (Margaret) and Jim if I didn’t from this day keep my mouth shut.

“What?” I cried. “They sent Justina to threaten us?”

Not according to our former maid. By her account she’d chanced on the information through a gentleman friend, an intimate of the Duke of York.

“Dear God. Not York-”

“Why, Jamie? Do you know him?”

“The King’s son. A dolt-”

“So not involved—?” she asked hopefully.

Oh yes, involved. Involved as can be.
But I didn’t say it, only shook my head.

Margaret looked at me doubtful a moment and then seemed to resolve to be satisfied, continuing with the rest of what she needed to tell me, namely, that from a quality of menace intermixed in Justina’s manner, she (Margaret) had a darker suspicion that our former maid, as a victim of blackmail concerning how her husband really died, was herself expected to play a part in the harm. This forewarning from Justina was the better, or perhaps only the more frightened part of a bid to preclude the occasion. When she begged Margaret to flee with Jim, she also begged her to take her with them, begged like a woman in fear for her life.

“If Justina’s part of the plot, she must move in high circles,” I
commented, “where it seems madness is now so much in vogue a lunatic’s word can strike fear in
beau monde
hearts. Flee where?”

Margaret shut her eyes before she spoke—at least, I think she did.
Eyes closed, eyes stayed open.
My blood ran cold.

That’s when she dropped the second bomb-shell. On her way here she’d stopped at a shipping agent’s to put down payment of passage for her and Jim on a schooner leaving at week’s end for Jamaica. Our house was already in the hands of a rent agent, who would oversee Hodge the tailor’s tenancy of our shop.

This second piece of news took away what was left of my breath. “No—” was all I could whisper, looking down to see my hand clutching a piece of paper with a Jamaica address on it.

“Forgive me, Jamie. I wouldn’t tell you any of this, but you must understand we need to leave. Either Justina’s telling the truth and Jim’s in danger from Government agents or she’s lying and he’s in danger from her. I can’t—I won’t—risk his life—”

“Give me something to sign,” I said hoarsely. “Sell the house and shop. David Williams has been here—” My voice sounded faraway, hollow and pleading. “He’s going to get me out.” If this was true, it changed everything. “We’ll emigrate as a family. The gang never mentions Jamaica—” Not by name, no, but their affiliates operate throughout the West Indies, magnet-working in the sugar trade (which they dominate much as they do the corn and cotton in America), boasting obscenely of
sucking the sugar stick, black jokes to be cracked,
etc.