Bedlam

by Greg Hollingshead

“Then an ignoramus is what you are.”

  “Margaret—” I heard, and there in the gloom of the cell was my husband in a blanket-gown, sitting on the edge of a bed, looking at me.

  Suddenly I had no time to argue about a basket. “I want it back,” I muttered, letting it go to fly to him. The door clicked shut behind me.

  THE PATIENT

  Now as I rocked my dear husband in my arms, with the noise from the gallery Pandemonium, I knew by his passive response he was no longer maniacal.

  “Jamie,” I whispered, letting him go and and sitting back. “Where are your clothes?”

  “You mean Robert Dunbar’s?” he asked, touching his fingers to the blanket-gown.

  “I mean why have they dressed you like a beggar?”

  “Perhaps because I’m in as a lunatic vagrant.”

  “You’re neither. I’m getting you out of here.”

  He smiled. As he did, his eyes fell to something on the bed between us, a penny notebook I now saw I was half sitting on. He must have been writing when I arrived. He still held the pencil. I extracted the notebook from under me and handed it to him, wondering how I could have forgot to bring him paper and something to write with. Did I think I was the only one of us in need of such life-savers now?

  When Jamie took the notebook from me he did it with his right hand, which also held the pencil, and yet he was left-handed. I looked to that hand, where it lay on the bed. Around the wrist was an iron shackle attached to a chain bolted to the wall.

  “Jamie, they’ve chained you!”

  He lifted the hand and gazed at it. “Where would I go?”

  His cell was a space perhaps twelve foot deep and a little more than half as wide, with rough board floors and a broken-glazed, barred window above the bed. There looked to be closable shutters, except then you would lose the light. Aside from the bed—a mattress in a wood trough—was a small seat, also wood, and that’s all there was. The wainscotting on the three interior walls was dark with age, every inch of it inscribed, the way you see in old schoolhouses. So was the plaster above, to the height a tall man might reach.

  “You could walk up and down the gallery.” My voice seemed to issue from under water.

  “I could, so,” Jamie replied, without conviction, his eyes on his notebook.

  I’d forgot what we were talking about.

  “Why are they so noisy?” I said.

  “You’ve roused them.”

  “I was supposed to meet with Haslam,” I said next, weighing the chain. “The steward didn’t know where he was.”

  Jamie shook his head as if marvelling but made no reply.

  “Oh, Jamie! Do they treat you well?”

  In answer he held up the pencil and notebook. “Jack the Schoolmaster give me these.” He meant Haslam. “There are some,” he continued, “who live shut up in the gaol of a set character, witnessing and comprehending more than they can acknowledge or act on, and when you glimpse them, what you see is eyes of alarm in a mask of consternation. A sane man imprisoned in a madhouse. This is John Haslam in the grip of The Schoolmaster.”

  “Does he teach you?”

  “Yes, though nothing he intends.”

  “Why do you call him The Schoolmaster?”

  “Because the gang do. He’s their recorder and, like Charlotte, though in a biased way, keeps notes on us all, which they consult at their leisure.”

  “Has anybody told you why you’re in?”

  “Nobody has to. It’s because I know who the gang is and labour daily to destroy them before they destroy me. So far what’s saved me is the intimacy prevailing between us. I stave off the worst effects of their brain-workings not by shutting my mind against them (which only hardens their resolve) but by cultivating attention to the cast and tenor of my own thoughts. By spotting an untoward reflection as it crops up, I remain alert to their alien incursions. Who can hope to meet the force of the Air Loom who makes himself deaf and blind to it? I count myself fortunate to be imprisoned in a building where one such as I can hardly miss it. Of course, it would be the same at St. Luke’s or Bridewell. It would be the same if my affairs took me daily inside Parliament or the Admiralty, though they’re places of work a man can walk away from at the end of the day. Or imagines he can. Every hour I spend in here convinces me more that attention to the ways of the gang is the best antidote for living and working in the kind of place that the better you know it the sicker you become.”

  “Did Haslam say when they’re letting you out?”

  “It’s not his decision.”

  “He’s on the subcommittee—”

  “Just one voice—”

  “The only medical one—”

  At this, Jamie looked at me sharp, perhaps because he knew I didn’t know this for certain. What he said was, “What’s his secret?”

  “That a man with three hundred lives in his charge can have no heart?”

  “Listen. The Glove Woman, who inhabits Matron White, wants none of us up on meat days, plus one other. That means everybody abed four days in seven. She and Haslam are at war. He believes reclining does raving no good.”

  “And not-raving—” I lifted the chain—”it benefits?”

  Jamie’s reply was in the considered way I have often heard him discuss politics in Europe. “Going over the wall has set back my case. Haslam will let me up as soon as he can trust me. The terms between us are pretty clear, if he ain’t.”

  “Jamie, you were always a fighter for truth and justice.”

  “I am still. Only, the arena’s shifted to the modern age, where truth answers to no human voice and must be dived for, every diver for himself. Now all talk is pretense and meaning suspect.”

  “But not our talk, Jamie—?” At that moment I was so desperate to tell him my news, I almost believed I had some and it was not simply the ups and downs of the past month, for I was too old, and if I wasn’t and miscarried (as had happened twice before) then why raise his hopes?

  Or did he already know, and I should be asking him?

  “Your talk and mine?” he said. “That too.”

  “Jamie, no!”

  “Like The Schoolmaster, I’m of the old order but unlike him know it, and working day and night to fathom the new.”

  “What truth to be discovered?”

  “Any.”

  “What enemy?”

  “The ones just under the skin.”

  “Oh, Jamie-”

  “I know.”

  He was in my arms once more. Unresisting. Outside, the commotion raged on. Sitting back again and looking at him, I said, “Have you seen Monro yet?”

  “No, but only because he ain’t been through.”

  “Still not? Will Alavoine return the basket?”

  He shook his head.

  “How will I get it back?”

  “You won’t. They’re called basketmen because once upon a time they brought round the medicine in baskets.”

  “But visitors are allowed to—”

  “They’ll sell what they don’t eat.”

  “They can’t do that!”

  “But they will. Next time slip him sixpence.”

  “I did!”

  “For the basket, or to be brought direct to me when you couldn’t find Haslam?”

  With his shaved head and watchful eyes, he seemed to have grown still younger. I never saw him so subdued and feared his doubts of me had travelled deeper. “Are you all right, Husband?” I whispered.

  “As well as might be. Who’s asking?”

  “Jamie, you don’t blame me for putting you in here—?”

  This amazed him. “You admit it?”

  “No!” I cried. “I don’t! I didn’t!”

  “That’s what I thought your position was. Don’t forget I survived three years of French gaols.”

  “As you’ll survive this place because you shouldn’t be here either.”

  His eyes had gone to his notebook. “France was the grave,” he said, and smiled. “This is
Hell.”

  “Next time I’ll bring you pen and ink,” I promised. “And a fresh book. Look! This one’s fat already!”

  He didn’t answer, only hefted the notebook, turning it this way and that.

  I told him I’d tried to see Lord Erskine, to help him with his case.

  At this news he grew almost animated. “The gang’s had Erskine tied up for years. Even as he assured me he’d represent me, I could feel them quickening the fluid inside my brain, to let me know he wouldn’t. Already by their Air Loom warp they had him stagnated in the Commons, as I told you before. Pitt sat poised to take notes on Erskine’s first speech against the Government but soon tossed down his pen with a laugh. Had I not been there as witness, the gang had killed Erskine afterwards for an example. Last year he saved a dog from a mob in the street, assuring them it was mad. He cares about the dog, but I who saved his life may sleep in the stable.”

  As Jamie raved, I silently resolved to keep on at Lord Erskine. When Jamie finished, having nothing to answer I said, “Speaking of a defender of Tom Paine—” and told him about the Paine and Williams books I’d brought for him.

  Now he set down the notebook with care, looking where he put it. When his face came up, it was drained of colour.

  “What, Jamie? What is it? Will they sell them?” I asked, thinking this was the problem.

  “And have you as whore to make copies!” he cried. “So they can file evidence world-wide that I know the pure form of everything you all pretend to!”

  “Pretend to, Jamie? Pretend to what?”

  “Equality and brotherhood, to disguise a senseless game of power whose goal is the ruin of two nations and my destruction, that’s what!”

  “Jamie, I pretend to nothing!”

  “Nothing? And I suppose Sir Archy can’t read?”

  “Him again?”

  “And again and again, with the magnet he commits unspeakable crimes with!”

  “Magnet?” I cried, struggling to take him in my arms once more, babbling anything to keep him talking. “What can a man—”

  “Sir Archy’s no man!” he screamed and would have sprung from my touch, except the iron chain preventing this, he grew furious and yanked at it as if he would pull it out of the wall or rip his hand off in the attempt. To lessen the damage, I threw myself on that arm, but in his fury he was superhumanly strong, and I could only hang on. This is how we were when the door slammed open, the room filling with the roar from the gallery, and John Haslam rushed in, blasting Jamie with so ferocious a glare his body seemed to freeze in the air then flop down limp on the bed.

  “Mrs. Matthews!” Haslam cried. “What the God-amighty did you do out there? And what’s this—?”

  “I did nothing!” I wailed. “I was brought here when you couldn’t be found!”

  “Forgive me, an emergency—our surgeon suffered a blow. Come, before you cause more chaos.” He returned to the door.

  “I’m not leaving him like this!” I cried.

  He looked at me a moment and then came back to the bed. “Very well. We’ll talk here. Mr. Matthews, please tell your wife why you’re in.”

  But this, though kindly enough asked, was cruel. When Jamie, half insensible, attempted to answer, his tongue fused in his jaw, and the torment caused him by the struggle against that restriction was dreadful to witness. In all the years of his illness I never saw him so overcome, and in my mind two ideas arose in grim contradiction: If he’s this ill, Bethlem is doing it and If he’s this ill, Bethlem is where he belongs.

  “Your answer, madam,” Haslam informed me, before he strode out into the din of the gallery shouting, “Mr. Alavoine! Mr. Hester!”

  When I tried to stroke Jamie’s brow, his head jerked from my touch as from an electric charge. His eyes fluttered back in his head, his body lifting and twisting in a slow convulsion. I was hovering dumbstruck over this awful process when suddenly I was in flight from the room, spirited as if by thieves—it was Alavoine and another—who allowed me no time to shout or resist. We sped amongst gargoyle faces falling away lamenting and foaming, through an iron gate, down a staircase and outside, to whisk along a rubbish-strewn passageway that reeked of stewing laundry. Haslam must have followed close, for when we halted at a scarred door, he stepped around us and (after fiddling with the key) unlocked it and entered before us. I was carried in and set in a chair. As soon as my Hell dogs released me, I leapt up. They were moving in to push me down again when Haslam dismissed them with a look. As they slunk out, I saw the other besides Alavoine, the one called Hester, was a doughy massive Albino with a cherry-pit-and-porridge complexion and the look about him of an egg-sucking hound.

  It was a large, deep-bookcased office smelling of mildew and embalmments and lit by a dirty skylight. I was standing before a desk stacked with books and papers looking down at Haslam, who sat not looking at me, rubbing his temples. I took my seat again and worked at breathing as deep as I could.

  “Mrs. Matthews—” he began.

  “Why is my husband in here?”

  He sighed. “Insanity.”

  “What kind?”

  “Are there kinds?”

  “Tell me he’ll be out after eleven more months like any other harmless madman.”

  “He should be out at least by then, but I can’t absolutely make you that promise.”

  “You have no idea why he’s in, do you?”

  “No, I don’t. Not the formal reason.”

  “Was it not the Privy Council that admitted my husband?”

  “Mrs. Matthews, the fact a lunatic’s talk is full of politics don’t necessarily mean he’s a victim of them. One result of the recent bloodbath of republican fraternity in France is that every second Englishman now construes himself his own master, which would be well and good except in most cases he’s already got one. So a fellow happy and secure in his station one day, the next is a-boil with confusion and ingratitude. One in three admissions to Bethlem is a pretender to the throne, and believe me a pretender to the throne is ten times the trouble of a lunatic who’s merely convinced he’s visiting from a distant star or filled with frogs. One thing can be counted on from a convinced Monarch of the Realm: he won’t take calmly to being ruled.”

  “Why have you chained him?”

  “Because strait-waistcoats are itchy and hot.”

  “Mr. Haslam, you know what I mean. Why anything? Why can’t he be up and about like the rest of them?”

  “Like the rest of them that are allowed to be up and about? Because he escaped.”

  “Why have you taken his clothes?”

  “No one’s taken his clothes. They’ll be at the laundry, if he hasn’t tore them to ribbons in a fit. I seem to recall he doubted they were his.”

  “How long do you threaten to chain him?”

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Matthews, I don’t threaten, I execute, for as long as it takes. Now that he’s in our care he must, for his own good, be governed by our rules.”

  “Your rules are enforced by animals.”

  “Animals can be trained. Does one man complete the reformation of a four-hundred-year-old hospital in eighteen months?”

  “A reformer, Mr. Haslam? I wouldn’t have guessed.”

  “That’s because you imagine I’m your enemy.”

  “If you weren’t, you’d take me back to my husband.”

  “Visiting hours end at noon. There’s no use traipsing up there now.”

  “Who received him when he first arrived?”

  “That would be the steward, Mr. Alavoine, who was just here. Whether Dr. Monro advised him I can’t say because I don’t know.”

  “Pray let me speak to Mr. Alavoine.”

  “I can’t do that, because it’s not his business, which is only to assign the patient the degree of care and confinement the case requires. All Alavoine will tell you is he was advised by the physician, whether he was or not, because that is the rule.”

  “May I speak to Dr. Monro?”

  “Of course.
As soon as you have found him.”

  “He’s not here?”

  “No.”

  “Is he expected?”

  “He is always expected, he does not always arrive. When he does arrive he seldom stays long. He has Brooke House, his private madhouse in the sunny pastures of Hackney, to see to, and it tends to consume what energy his easel don’t. You see, our physician’s an enthusiast of the paintbrush. And since he don’t believe in records, I won’t know why your husband’s in until I talk to him, except I haven’t seen Monro in a fortnight and only assured you I’d tell you today because he needed to be here Monday morning without fail, and I thought to myself, if he misses Monday he’ll be in later Tuesday or first thing Wednesday at the outside. Except here it is Wednesday noon and no sign of him. So there it is. But tell me this. When you saw your husband just now, did you notice a new reserve in his manner?”

  “Why? Have you poisoned him against me?”

  “Yesterday I asked him if he wants to be in here, and he said he does, he wants to be part of what I’m trying to achieve. It appeals, I think, to his republican inclinations.”

  “He’s not a republican.”

  “Isn’t he? Of course, who nowadays could afford to admit it? He’s not that mad, but he is a lunatic, and before you devote any more energy to his premature release, you should ask yourself if this in any way resembles an involuntary confinement, and if it don’t, whether it deserves to be complicated by a lot of hysterical agitation that won’t have your husband home any sooner than if you did nothing but your spousal duty, which is to impart the special consolation afforded by present views of future happiness and comfort.”

  This advice he was pouring into my ear as he ushered me down a narrow, crooked, unlit corridor. Unlocking the door at the end of it, he said, “Mrs. Matthews, finally it don’t matter who put your husband in here, or why. Obviously somebody has, and obviously, it so happens, this is where, for now, he needs, and wants, to be. Not only for his health but in these days—I won’t mince it—for his safety. If he’s not a republican he certainly does at times manage to sound like one. And perhaps if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll recognize the reason you’re so keen to know who put him in is not so you can better get him out, because you can’t, and won’t, but so you won’t have to accept that in your heart you want him here as much as he wants to be here.”