Bedlam (9 page)

“Humanity.”

“What?”

“She expects us to treat her husband and herself with humanity.”

“Which is exactly what we do, as you say so well in your little book here, and there’s an end on it!” Saying this, he pressed his watch, which sounding four o’clock amazed him. He threw the book across the desk at me and swung his boots to the floor. “Haslam, be a capital fellow and sign this squib of yours to me, as the physician of the place you do your precious ‘observing’ in. And this time don’t spare those sentiments of glitterary admiration you’re so dab a hand at—but quickly, like a good man? I needed to be out of here an hour ago—”

The next morning, I invited the steward Peter Alavoine, my Bethlem eyes and ears, to my office to give me word of Matthews. It was
raving.

“He tells me,” Alavoine said, speaking not in the register of aggrievement that his queer unplaceable dialect was perfectly suited to convey but with a quality in it of enjoyment that surprised me so much I glanced up. It was the Alavoine I knew, a grizzled stick in tiered hat and filthy red jacket but at this moment with a tamped smile about the sunk cheeks. “I must now address him,” he told me, “as James, Absolute Sole and Supreme Sacred Omni Imperias Grand Arch Emperor of the Universe.”

The delusions of lunatics, however fantastical or comic, did not normally win our steward’s indulgence. There was something in this one he relished. I am tempted to say
already loved.
It’s not every lunatic he makes sure is properly dressed when nobody’s paid him to do it—or can prove he’s paid him.

“Does he approve his new quarters?” I asked.

“No, he does not.” As he said this, a gleam in those gummy eyes lent the degenerate old face the look of a schoolboy’s. A toothless
hoary schoolboy’s. “He considers them insulting even to the most unassuming of Absolute Rulers.”

“Does he like the wood chair I found him, with the arms? Does he like the arms?”

“His Omni Imperias Throne, you mean? I think he does. He sits in it doing ledgers of rewards he intends for the execution of would-be usurpers of his power: £300,000 for the death of the King of Portugal, a million for the Emperor of Persia—”

“And of England?”

“The Infamous Usurping Murderer George Guelph (as he calls him) he includes in a special package with his Majesty’s family and government—”

“I thought he loved the King. I thought he was an unconfessed republican driven mad because he loves the King. Or claims he does.”

“Not today. Today the King’s his mortal rival. Also included in the package for execution are the Lord Mayor of London and Council; all police officers and secretaries of state; you, me, Alf Bulteel (whom he particularly condemns for obstructing lawful intercourse in families), and all other employees of this place; everybody responsible for putting him in here; the directors of the Bank of England; all courtiers, etc. For everybody, four million pounds. Though he regrets the number who must die, he says it’s not half those murdered annually by event-working gangs. Today he revealed the gangs themselves prefer to speak of
working feats of arms,
since their main assaults are against individuals who claim heraldic bearings.”

“In here they must work with lowered sights. Tell him I’ll drop by when I can.” Saying this, I bowed my head to the letter I was writing to Lord Liverpool, but I was thinking of Matthews, for
this was painful news. Lunatic or not, he knew what the incurable wing meant and knew as well as I did he didn’t belong there. We should not have added to his suffering by putting him through that, even if it was only until I could return him to his wife.

Hearing a cough, I glanced up. Alavoine was still before me, extending a fist.

“Something, sir—” the fist opening to deposit on my palm something crumbly and reddish—“you might be interested to see.”

I looked at it. “Pieces of brick, Peter? No. Not interested—”

“With your permission, sir—”

In my thirty months at Bethlem, one member of staff I had learned to listen to (aside from our clerk, Mr. Poynder, whose strengths were policy and precedent, and so rather different) was Peter Alavoine. I said he was my eyes and ears. He was also my nose, tongue, and whiskers: his cat to my old woman. When work kept me shut up in my office or the Dead House, who patrolled my world but Alavoine. Yet this feline had jackdaw blood in him, for he was ever spiriting things away. An inveterate thief. That was the hitch. I was not one of those who discover too late that what they’d thought was an employee’s love was embezzlement. I knew from the start Alavoine was crooked as walnut meat. His corruption was a cancer on a body already sick enough, and if I could have rid Bethlem of him I would have. But I couldn’t. Officially he answered not to me but to Monro, who though he rarely saw him wouldn’t hear a word spoke against anyone good enough to have worked for his father.

After I finished my letter to Liverpool, I followed Alavoine to the basement, where some of the incontinents—what we called our dirty or straw patients—had lately been demoted, for lack of space. In one of the cells he indicated a gap in the ceiling arch. The
brick could have struck and even killed the patient, who seemed frail. Mercifully she was locked by the arm to the wall, her only comment, “How can I catch larks when the sky’s falling?”

“You can’t,” I told her.

The brick landed in the centre of her cell where it broke in a dozen pieces, being like all the bricks of this place, of inferior and unseasoned composition. Alavoine’s point to me was not the badness of the brick or the uselessness of the mortarwork, nor was it the danger to the patient, but the larger consideration that no one who lived and worked in the building was safe.

Walking ahead with a lanthorn, he led me past more straw-patient cells into an entire other world, the last you’d expect to find down here: the section of our basement we lease to the mighty East India Company, a treasure-trove of pallets and shelves stacked with sacks and baskets emitting every fragrance of spice, and with crates of pepper, tobacco, tea, fruit—all the way to where the shelves ended and the floor fell away to clammier air and different darkness.

“What’s this?” I said. “Where are we?”

“Under the east wing.”

“But this space—?”

“Fresh dug.”

Fresh but with a sour reek of rotten metal from the ancient city dump Bethlem was built on. My first, shameful thought: How many straw patients we could fit down here! To Alavoine I said, “Who did it? Matthews’ magnetic villains, to set up their Air Loom for more precise beaming of mayhem into patients’ skulls?”

“No,” he replied, not amused by raillery at Matthews’ expense. “By diggers hired by the East India governors.” And I followed him down a springing ramp of boards to witness how, out of greed
for more space, they’d widened doorways, compromised exterior walls, and undermined piers intended to uphold the structure rising three storeys above us. I was shown leaning uprights, sagging joists, and universal dry rot, until it seemed at any moment a thousand tons of bricks, timbers, and lunatics would come raining down on our heads. In my nervous glances upward and repeated moppings of perspiration from my brow, Alavoine discovered dramatic affirmation of his point. I would characterize his expression while lighting my hurried steps out of there as severe tending to grim, yet with a certain satisfaction about the mouth that betokened consciousness of a hand well played.

Before reaching daylight, I resolved to argue again before the Saturday subcommittee the imperative of calling in a surveyor to tell us how or if the walls could be underpinned. If my words failed to convince them, I’d lead a delegation down there and let their own cold sweat do it. But I knew this time would be different: Even as I made the argument, I would understand it was too late.

Let me explain. When at age thirty-one I had first took up this post, the fever of renown burning in my veins told me Bethlem and I would rise together. Monro thought Bethlem was his; I knew it wasn’t. He would ride in once a month; I would live on the premises. He would see patients now and then; I would visit them daily. I was the one who would make of Bethlem a masterpiece that would say to the world,
Here is how you order a hospital for lunatics.

But then one of various series of experiments I undertook on arrival issued very naturally in a small book. Though nothing new, this little opus was the thing of mine that got cried up as the masterpiece—which, by catapulting me to fame as an author on madness, demoted mighty Bethlem to my materials only. At the same
time, it promoted my thoughts from her low, intractable galleries to a struggle more hygienic and winnable: the selection and arrangement of words on a page. Except, the more I grew used to rarer elevations, the more I wondered how I had ever been pleased to imagine nothing more for myself than a life spent shoring so dreadful a place against its final ruin.

Such pride I wish to God was never mine. But it was, and now, if I am to grasp how my fortunes came to take the nightmare course they did, my only hope is naked candour, or as much as I can muster.

As for Matthews, though his condition drastically worsened once he learned of his transfer to the incurable wing, that was only the crowning blow after a year of no visits from his wife. For this he blamed me and Monro, as the medical officers, and our porter Bulteel. (Why on earth, if she was so keen on his rescue, didn’t she at least write him? Did she think the quicker he sank, the stronger her case? Or was her life too crisis-filled to afford the luxury of uncut losses? I didn’t think that was it. Something about this one told me we were still under siege—invisibly only because she couldn’t get over the wall.) As for me, like Alavoine but in my own way, Matthews affected me more each day. My fear now was he had come to us an addled republican in a state of nervous collapse and would leave a barking lunatic. A lunatic who when first he knew me was intrigued and now he knew me better was revolted.

I was coming along the front hall, still blinking from the basement, when our clerk, Mr. Poynder, accosted me in a state of wordless excitement. After fumbling a letter into my hands, he fell back to view my reaction. Poynder is an odd fish and since the first day I met him has had an odd effect on me. Sometimes, talking to him I feel it would take very little for everything suddenly to shift
and the two of us to start communicating in an altogether different capacity—though what it would be I can’t imagine. When my reaction to the letter was blushing incomprehension, he stepped to my side to help me decipher the French. After that I was excited as he was and set out to tell my wife, Sarah, but my route taking me through the incurable wing (which for the men is at the far east end of the building, suspended over our fresh-dug Black Hole of Calcutta) I first paid a visit to Matthews, who was crouched quietly on his bed, writing or drawing on a sheet of paper, his Omni Imperias Throne standing empty.

“James,” I said, rustling the letter at his ear, “here’s something to interest you. The celebrated Philippe Pinel is coming to visit us.”

No response. Matthews is a small, fair-haired man with the sharp, handsome features of an intelligent clerk, an impression compounded that day by his neat grey shirt and snug-fitting waistcoat. Hunched over his work, he seemed sharper and smaller than ever. A specimen of a lunatic patient so exemplary he didn’t look like a lunatic at all.

“He’s writing a book on the management of lunatics,” I continued, “and eager to see first hand how we do things here. He wants to meet everybody, inmates included. He even mentions by name two of our more famous: Peg Nicholson and James Tilly Matthews. Peg I assume because she tried to kill the King, and you because he approves whatever you did to advance republicanism in France—”

“Who told you that?”

“—or whatever it was you did there.”

“Why do you persist in calling me a republican, Jack? Are you so ardent a monarchist?”

“Ain’t England a monarchy and I an Englishman?”

“And if it was a republic?”

“Then it would be perfectly unimaginable to me.”

“No longer England, you think?”

“I think I should not know where I was—”

“Or who? And do you now?”

“Not when I find myself once again in debate with you.”

At this he only looked at me disgusted and turned away.

“Forget politics, James, you’re to meet the great Pinel.”

“Who is he?”

“Most recently, director of the Salpêtrière Hospital for female lunatics, in Paris. A genuine revolutionary: you’ll have much to talk about. In ‘93, when he was put in charge of the insane at another Paris hospital, the Bicêtre, his first act was to strike the chains off the patients. Most were immediately afterward strapped into strait-waistcoats, but in a legend of Revolution what’s that but a detail? Pinel’s one of only two or three Frenchmen capable of appreciating the difficulties of management in a place like this, and he approves what he’s heard.”

“About you.”

“In part about me. He read my book—”

“This is flattery to insinuate themselves. Next they’ll have their Air Loom set up in the stove room. If this Pinel’s not their instrument, he’ll be one of them, sent out as him. The only question is, Why a Frenchman? A perverse and vicious taunt, I suppose.”

Thinking that if Matthews was in a state to talk to Pinel, he’d talk to him, and if he wasn’t, then Peg Nicholson could tell him about the avenging dolphins slicing through the Thames to offer her the throne, I was leaning over Matthews’ shoulder to see whose death he was ordering this morning. It seemed to be a printed page he was writing on.

“Who tore that out, James?” When he made no answer, I leaned closer and was astonished to see him shaping the next letter himself, as he’d apparently done the entire page, freehand, and yet it was perfect, every character upright and level as if typeset, the latest still glistening wet. And all done with a chain on his wrist.

“James, what kind of talent is this?”

No reply.

“What does it say?”

“It recounts atrocities committed in this place.”

When I leaned closer to read, he put his other hand over it and looked round at me. There was a puff-paste quality to his features, and I wondered if water had been discharged from his brain, and that’s why he was calmer. It frightens me sometimes how little we know.

“A perfect lettering of everything,” he said, and returned to his work.

“Everything?”

“Everything. You’ll be thrown to the wolves.”

“Why? Don’t Anne Gibbons and Jane Taylor, who murdered their husbands, though whether their own or each other’s has never been—”

“Each other’s.”

“Good. That’s settled. Don’t the darlings both separately and together write me
billets doux?
Am I not well-loved here?”