Bedlam (4 page)

“I beg your pardon, madam,” he managed, once he’d retrieved his stick and let me go, advising, “Stay clear now—”

And so we were set marching, as the one called Rodbird, a grim-beaked facetious individual, in a nasal tang befitting his hawk countenance, addressed poor Jamie (who tottered before him, head streaming with blood, dazed and lost), calling him his
Little Fly-Coop
and his
Wee Darling Home Pigeon,
and other grimly
jesting endearments, as he pulled him to his feet and pushed him in the direction of the gates. And when Jamie stumbled and would fall, Rodbird clutched the back of his shirt—Robert Dunbar’s shirt—and half-carried, half-marched him before him, and when I angrily demanded to know what right they had to seize and beat my husband, “By his right to be where he belongs,” Rodbird advised over his shoulder. “Straight back up his own arsehole.”

Too soon we arrived at the gates, which stood open. The porter, who until now had not let go of my arms, rotated me away and give me a shove, and the gates clanked and were locked even as I threw myself against them. And so it was now my turn to shout through the barrier as they supported him one at each shoulder in the fashion of soldiers a dazed and stumbling prisoner as they escort him to his execution.

For some good time after Jamie was taken into the building and the doors slammed shut, I called out that I was his next of kin and had given no consent for his confinement and must speak to someone in charge. I shouted until I was hoarse, and still no one came back out and no life stirred in the hundred and more windows I could see as far east and west as the building stretched. Black pits, all, except for the ones on the ground floor nearest the gate, which had been boarded up, as if to prevent direct communication of visitors with those within. At last, my voice ravaged, I sank down in bitter abjection, my back against the bars. It was then I saw my commotion had attracted a coterie of the sort as might indicate not all Bethlem’s lunatics, once discharged, wander far.

A snag-toothed young woman who leaned on a crutch informed me without preliminaries, “Saturdays Bulteel don’t take up his post till past nine-thirty.”

“What time is it now?” I asked.

“Not nine,” someone offered.

“Not nine,” a child with the haggard look of a dying sweep put in, “on account of it ain’t eight.”

I nodded and several nodded back.

In the quiet you could hear the dawn hubbub of London Wall and from across the way in Field Lane the clamour of the shopkeepers as they opened for trade.

“When does the committee arrive that sees to Saturday admissions?” I next inquired of my on-lookers.

I might as well have asked them the best means to determine the longitude at sea, for they only continued to look at me. But not for long. Soon a head among them bound in greasy rags, of a sort more often seen washed up on the banks of Fleet Ditch, revolved toward a scarlet rim of light along the eastern rooftops. Now we were all looking, for the sun rises faster than you can ever believe, and so it did, a ball of molten scarlet adhering a moment to that rickety horizon before lifting clear. We were still looking when footsteps sounded at my back. Twisting where I sat, I saw a man in a snuff-coloured coat crossing the forecourt toward me.

No more than Jamie had I ever set eyes on the famous Dr. Monro, or any picture of him. Yet, imagining this must be him, I scrambled up, watching him as best I could with a green sun bouncing before my eyes. Still coming on, he held up a key to mean he’d let himself out and we’d talk. When I nodded, he offered a guarded smile before his eyes returned to the pavement in front of him. I stood up and brushed myself off.

In John Haslam—for that’s who this was, not Monro, physician of the place, but Haslam, the apothecary—there was something right away familiar to me, though I could not at first tell what it was. The man I watched approach was of middle age, somewhat stout but not heavily so. I don’t think it was the cut of his frock coat that gave him the look of one whose spine contained an extra vertebra, with the consequence his legs appeared shorter than they were. In fact, Haslam stood well above the middle height, but that
hint of top-heaviness made him seem not yet fully grown. There was also an exuberance of energy, like that of one who’s received an unexpected boon, or of a boy still inside his bubble of perfection’s hope, in the way he came striding out to me, though the closer he came, the more that hope seemed fraught with an adult perplexity bordering on outrage, mysterious amidst so much innocence or vitality or vanity of life.

In all this, as I say, he reminded me of something, or somebody.

By now he’d passed out of view and stood in shadow on the other side of the right-hand iron door. He then fumbled so long with the lock I thought he must have picked up the wrong key. When he first reached the door, I walked over to wait directly the other side of it, but when the fumbling grew interminable I was reluctant to discountenance him further by waiting so immediately upon the site of his embarrassment. So I walked back to where I had been, wondering if you need to be a woman to be squeamish about the feelings of a stranger it would appear you have every reason to hate.

At last he got the lock to turn and came wincing into the full blast of the rising sun, shutting the door behind him. I made a step toward him, but my ragged crew crowded past me. With a glance of apology at me he paused to shake their hands and listen to their complaints, now and then offering solace in a manner amiably gruff. For their part, they were gratified by his attention and pleased to apprise him of their continuing afflictions.

The apothecary’s face was common in a memorable way. It was the sort a skilled painter would situate in a crowd scene just so, to galvanize his canvas. The hair was brown with auburn lights, fine and thick, receding at the temples and lying disordered against the skull. It was unpowdered, but you don’t see much powder nowadays,
and lack of it certainly no longer signifies your monarchy-loathing republican. The side whiskers, not in good trim, were long and large, the nose a lordly flute of a proboscis, or would have been lordly on a face that, though evidently shaved once this morning, was not already sordid with black shadows.

But a stronger feature still than the nose, and one that militated against this being mistaken for the face of a nab, I mean well born, was the mouth, which had too much expression about it for a gentleman’s. A droll mouth, yet one capable, you immediately knew, of forming and saying hard things.

Abruptly he broke from his suppliants, telling them he was sorry, he must excuse himself, he had business with that woman over there.

Which was me. We made our introductions. “Your humble obedient servant, madam—”

“Mr. Haslam, your bullies have no right to seize and beat my husband.”

“Did they? Was he trying to escape?”

“Yes, because he doesn’t want to be here.”

“He didn’t go far—”

“He came home to me! Leadenhall Street! That’s pretty far!”

“Then returned and hung on the gate?”

I hesitated. The truth was too mad. “He wanted me to see where he was prisoned.”

“A consideration that has got him in again, and the problem now is, any release of patients must be sanctioned by the governors’ subcommittee—”

“That meets today.”

“I’m afraid they won’t get to your husband today—”

“They? I thought you sat on that committee—”

“From time to time. Would this be the Matthews who insists on the
Tilly?
James Tilly Matthews? Tilly, what is that? Huguenot? So he’s French on one side? His mother a Spitalfields silkweaver?”

“Yes-”

“And Welsh father? Interesting. Good. Well. Now we’ve got that far, why’s he with us?”

I was stunned. “You don’t know?”

“Nobody’s told me, and he refuses. All I know is his trade, which is tea-broker, and a story of how he’s preventing French chaos here by doing battle with a gang of French magnetic fluid-workers responsible for all madness in this hospital. Ever since he discovered the existence of this gang and others, his energy has gone into opposing what he calls their
event-working.
Their response has been to have him labelled insane and so rendered harmless, for in here, he says, every word he speaks against them is chalked as another symptom—”

“He told me he’s in by an order of the Privy Council. He also mentioned Lord Portland—”

“Your husband’s never spoke of Lord Portland to me, and the only kind of privy he’s mentioned is the close-stool kind, how the stinking condition of ours is an insult to the nostrils of a gentleman, and how a dusty vapour he calls Egyptian snuff overcomes him, conveyed by the gang from Nile marshes in August heat, when stagnant pools emit their nauseous stench. Mind you, it’s also such vapours as Egyptian snuff; effluvia of arsenic, sulphur, and dogs; gas from the anuses of horses; and vapours of human seminal fluids, both male and female, all harnessed in barrels, that power his Air Loom—

“Mrs. Matthews, we don’t exactly comb the streets. Most people can bellow at the gates as much as they like. This is not a private
madhouse that must solicit patients of paying families. As to your husband, I would say he’s a republican—”

“He’s not!”
At least, no longer—

“—in a condition of nervous collapse. Unable to vent his politics for risk of being hanged, he talks nonsense. Whatever the particulars of his initial admission, he’s hied himself back to safety inside the finest madhouse in the world. He’s a lunatic who knows exactly what he’s doing, and while he goes about it, your duty as his concerned spouse is to ensure your visits have a calming effect.”

“I’ve tried to visit him ever since I found out he was in here! The porter won’t let me pass!”

This appearing to contradict my claim Jamie had brought me to see where he was kept, Haslam just looked at me. Then he said, “He’s willing to see you?”

“The porter says not. I say he’s lying!”

“Why would he lie? You know, it often happens the patient feels betrayed by those that put him in here—”

“I didn’t put him in here!”

“Is your husband clearer about that than I am?”

“I want him out.”

“No more than do I. If it was up to me, all but the dangerous ones would be out today. Back to the attic, the stake in the yard, or the hole in the floor with the crib over it. Harmless ones lacking homes to go to could be Tom o’ Bedlam again, with his metal arm-clip licence to beg. But who can wind back the clock? Nowadays, once the mad exhaust the tender mercies of their families, they come, if they’re lucky, here to Bethlem Hospital, where for a little while we treat their suffering, before we push them out again, cured or uncured, because we need the bed.”

“Mr. Haslam, please open this gate so I can see to my husband.”

“Mrs. Matthews, I can’t. First, because it’s not a visiting day. Second, because the rule here is, disobedience so extreme as an attempt at escape is met by a temporary suspension of all privileges.”

“But he returned!”

“To do that, he first had to escape.”

“This is insufferable!”

“I can see that. But if you come back Wednesday morning at ten, we’ll go over the details of your husband’s admission. Afterward I’ll take you along to his private room, where with your own eyes you’ll see how we do the best possible in circumstances constrained by a ruinous shortage of funds. The sad fact is, the recent upswell of public solicitude for lunatics that’s been a consequence of madness striking down our mighty monarch King George hasn’t translated into an injection of hard currency for our oldest and finest public hospital devoted to the care of unhinged minds. But I promise you, Wednesday you’ll go away from here assured I’m as steadfast in my intention as you—only mine is for the real benefit of three hundred patients and not the hoped-for benefit of one.”

I looked at Haslam then, attending to what was still visible in his eyes, that eloquent opaqueness of emotion. For a moment neither of us spoke, until, saying only, “Wednesday,” I stepped around him and walked away. It was do this or burst into tears and so enact the seal of his power upon me.

But before I reached Broker Row, I glanced back to see, I think, if my ragged crew had been there the while, because the first thing I noticed was they were gone. It was now only John Haslam standing before the iron door he’d come through, the image of a man who’d locked himself out. Except, even as I looked round, he
turned from the door with an odd little wave and made a pantomime with the key to show me he could not get it to work and found this amusing and seemed to think I would too. Yet considering his treatment of me just now, this was strange. Besides, I was too flustered to be caught looking back to indulge that collusion, and turned away, so abruptly I nearly twisted an ankle.

But that odd little wave stayed in my mind, and there, as I walked on, it was joined by another, by which I realized what Haslam reminded me of. It was something I once saw when I was a girl of seven or eight and have never forgot.

I was with my mother in Southwark High Street. (O Dearest Parent, though a poor widowed schoolmistress with barely means to dress and feed thy Daughter, Thou gavest her something of infinitely greater worth than fine food and fine clothes: experience of what genuine love is, and love of reading and good books, so as a Woman she might not only by the common superiority of female virtue but also by an uncommon strength of female intellect be truly worthy to love a good and intelligent Man!) She and I were on our way to the fair in the last year of its operation—and if you know when they closed down Southwark Fair for good, you will know my age to the year. As we went, we were passed in the street by a chair carrying an English seaman who’d survived shipwreck in the South Seas by crawling out of the surf to spend two years in solitude on a tropic island. When I saw him he was just off the ship that rescued him, then at Wapping Docks. Having contracted a fever on the voyage home, he was being carried to St. Thomas’s Hospital. He was bundled up in blankets, helpless as an infant, and he was waving at the passing scene with a slow, kingly wave, his mouth formed in a little smile like a digestive grimace. Maybe it was his eyes that made that smile appear so uncanny, for
they seemed to gaze at me from out of that haggard young-man’s face as from ten thousand miles away, but there was something more in them than distance. My mother and I were not at the fair, only on our way to it, and yet the sight of him gave me a confused idea he was somehow of the company of those we would see when we got there. I mean the tumbling posturemaker lad and the midget lady and the Scotsman who broke glasses by shouting at them. It was that same look in the eyes.

In those days, crowds were not so well-behaved as now, and when an unusual figure passed, they seldom failed to let him know their feelings. If he met their approval they might offer up a hip-hip-hooray. If not, they were as likely to pelt him with offal. Or if there was something about him peculiarly incensing—if, say, he had the look of an Italian—then they might spill him out of his chair and set upon him with kicks and cudgels. But in the case of the seaman it was as if he carried along with him through the streets so commanding a space of silence and unease that the entire scene blanched and faltered before him as he went. Many averted their eyes. Others hesitated, or stepped aside, hardly seeming to know what they did, like automata, or animals suffering a premonition. And it was not just because he had the look of a sick man, or a dying person, though he had both, it was something else.