Bedlam

by Greg Hollingshead

  “He doesn’t need to do that. He already has preeminence in the field-”

  “Preeminence in the field is very often first won by luck or subterfuge, then by riding the shoulders of successive contenders. Besides, what Frenchman—” she coughed—“unless he had something to gain by it, ever acknowledged another did anything right?”

  “Reflected glory’s a gain,” I tried. “By all appearance he approves very well how we do things at Bethlem and like an honest scout will take back word to the rest.”

  “After five minutes’ conversation with Watercolours Monro he’ll have nothing to take back but ridicule.”

  “Watercolours don’t often come to town for these things—” I was beginning to see the larger picture.

  “He will if he finds out in time you forgot again to inform him of an important visitor.”

  “I won’t forget—” I said, by now distinctly uneasy, not having decided if I would tell Monro or not. The problem was, he preferred not to know. That way he could avoid the nuisance of making an appearance. Yet if he found out he’d missed something, his pride was doubly hurt, first that he wasn’t invited and second that he’d lost a chance to strut about and act the third-generation Monro. But this kind of hurt he could always drown in rage at me, whereas the inconvenience of coming all the way to town to have his inadequacies scrutinized he couldn’t do anything about at all.

  “When,” Sarah asked, “is this meeting of the greatest mad-doctors of England and France set to occur?”

  “He visits England late June.”

  “In any event?”

  “Why should we be his only stop?”

  “Why indeed?”

  She smiled, and I smiled back, at this woman for whom my love had grown in proportion to my respect for her unblinking intellect, compounded by my terror of losing her to her illness. What joy I had known in casting my life at the feet of one so steely minded, in every aspect so contained, and yet, when she had strength, so passionate and so loving.

  “Did I ever tell you, Sarah, how much I love you?”

  “Daily. More often will look like you have something to hide.”

  “Rationed, am I? All right then, who are you reading?”

  “John Wesley.”

  That old humbug. “Sarah, did you ever notice how many great authors are named John?”

  This drew another smile, before a cough. “Oh yes, and now a fresh one to their ranks. But you say John Wesley was nothing but an old actor.”

  “I do not. I only mentioned the reason he was banned from sermonizing at Bethlem was his religious system is a wretched calamity rivetted to the mind by terror and despair—” I broke off before adding, And so turns fools to madmen and madmen to foaming dogs, because one thing Sarah never was was a fool. But her illness had given her of late a morbid taste for things Methodist. If her illness was a constant reminder that my paragon of wisdom and beauty was, after all, human, so was this.

  “You don’t think, Author John, when life’s predicated on death,” she was saying, “there’s no place for terror and despair?”

  “Yes, and also for frustrated love, disappointment, and grief. Which five conditions of mind account for ninety percent of our admissions here, one-third of whom are doomed republicans and one-third Methodically mad.”

  “Now you contradict yourself. You always say madness is owing to brain disease.”

  “It is. The affliction’s physical. Methodism, like frustration, like a reversal of fortune, exacerbates a root disorder. A cracked tooth feels fine, until you bite on it or sugar gets in. The problem with talk of mental cures, you open the sluice-gates and in pour the Wesleys with their religious opiates and ghostly therapeutics. But religion has too much madness in it to qualify as its cure.”

  “And mad-doctoring too much ignorance.”

  “Which is why treatment here is palliative when it’s anything.” Now was my chance to tell her my idea for having Matthews taught engraving, and so I did. I wanted her to say this was only for myself, so I could reply that in order to be for myself it first had to be for a patient I care about.

  But she surprised me with a new tack. “You actually believe you can get your madman out, don’t you, John?”

  “If,” I replied cautiously, “I take responsibility for his actions, then yes, I think I can. I’ve wrote to Lord Liverpool and expect an answer.”

  “You assume they imagine him dangerous, but you know he’s not. Dangerous how?”

  “Alavoine’s just told me he’s offered four million pounds for the death of the King and sundry others. That’s how. And how, somehow, not.”

  “I should think whoever wants him in here knows the danger he presents to them better than you do.”

  “What does that mean? You think he’ll act?”

  “I don’t know if he’ll act. I don’t know him at all. I’m saying somebody thinks he’ll act, and you don’t know why or what they expect he’ll do. All I know is what you’ve told me: He’s been four times to Paris immediately before and after our declaration of war with France and has publicly charged the Ministry with treason.”

  “Which in these times,” I said, “is all it would take to get him in here. Republicans are locked up on any excuse at all. But make a strong, simple case to the right party for freedom for a lunatic that your own, celebrated expertise can guarantee is harmless, his republicanism merely the going fantasy it is, and who’ll object?”

  “I’m only saying, John, somebody does seem to object to this one’s being free. And it could just be that everybody—you, Bethlem, the government, and your madman—will be securer with him in than out. So don’t be surprised when his release turns out more difficult to achieve than you imagine. Don’t be surprised if the only way to get him out is something not for you but for his wife and friends to undertake, and their last resort—”

  “What? A writ of habeas corpus? A legal challenge for us to say why he’s in or else release him? But if we can’t say, we could be damaged—”

  “Not Bethlem so much perhaps as Author John’s great good reputation. Of course, the writ could fail—”

  “Or not. Which is why I must do everything I can before it ever comes to that—”

  “For him, you hope, but mainly for you. Like your engraving initiative—”

  “Ah, yes. Blinded by my self-interest to the creep of it, am I?”

  “No more than the next lowly apothecary newly famous throughout Britain and Europe.” She coughed. “Perhaps more accurate to say, in your newfound confidence a little over-sanguine in your hopes.”

  “What? Deficient in terror and despair, when I must daily stand by and watch you suffer?”

  She smiled. “At least you have this place, where the inmates bear some of it for you, by bearing so much. I just hope all this fame, combined with your conviction a mad-doctor must impose his will on his patients while calling himself a model of civility, never causes you to lose sight of the miserable humanity he shares with them.”

  “But I am different from what they are,” I said wearily. “They’re lunatics.”

  Hetty had begun to squirm. Jenny would need to be sought out and discovered in a sweating clutch with the new assistant keeper. I swept up our daughter and left my beloved invalid to continue Methodizing her mind against all scheming and pride below.

  LIVERPOOL

  London nowadays is one great dark shop that grows more sprawling, crowded, and foul-aired by the hour. The hackney cab I rode in that Wednesday morning to the home of Lord Liverpool carried me down the centre aisle—Cheapside, Ludgate, Fleet, Strand, Cockspur, Haymarket, Piccadilly—with glimpses left and right of bejewelled showcases of goods, while on the pavement everybody was all mixed up together, shopper and hawker alike. What democratic zeal a hunger for lamps, wine, gloves, gold, maps, cheese, soap, hats, knives, toys, fans, tea, bread, and silk brings out in people—or a hunger to grow rich by selling them. Such daily public commotion! Such hotch-potch surgings of colour in the fog
! There must have been ten thousand lamps ablaze out there, and this was nine-thirty in the morning. Thanks to the King’s carriage stopped for some reason in Holywell Street, it took us an hour to pass through the City gates into The Strand. But it’s always like this, whether the King’s abroad or no. Who would guess last year’s harvest was stubble? Who if they never saw a newspaper would know this was a country at war?

  Who for that matter would have predicted, now that Christianity’s grown too enfeebled to inspire yet another century of mass slaughter, that a mere political idea could set armies marching? But how mere really is republican égalité, that has every French soldier convinced his country belongs to him and the only reason he’s marching against other countries is to hand them over to their own people? Could this deluded wretch in his motley strength be a harbinger of what’s to come in Britain, as it has in America and France? Was what I viewed from my carriage that morning human order and confidence in its new, prevailing incarnation, or was it sheer outright confusion confounded, the rush before closing time?

  You travel from desperate Moorfields to gracious Mayfair with its splendid squares (Hanover, Berkeley, Grosvenor), or cross the slough of the Tyburn Road to new-built Marylebone, to Cavendish Square, or Portman, and it’s a voyage east to west, old to new, low to high, poverty and lunacy to wealth and privilege. The farther west you go, the fewer the hawkers and beggars and the quieter the streets, until by the time you reach St. James Square you have left the shop. Out here, the stables and amenities are close by but hid, and the stately silence of gentle lives conducted inside homes and private gardens leaks through stone walls and spreads along the broad streets. Here the air is breathable. Here death is unlikely and when it happens, seemly. Here is where you move your family when your stake in the shop has paid off. Here is where everybody wants to be.

  Lord Liverpool lived in a house that came with his second wife. It was a handsome four-story structure designed by Robert Adam, faced in Bath stone, in Hertford Street at Hyde Park. Liverpool’s granting by next-day’s post my request for an interview on the subject of Matthews I took for a positive sign. The matter must have weighed a long time on his Lordship’s mind, I reflected, and how grateful he must be for a chance to lift it off. When he answered his door in person, things seemed more propitious still—though strange. A roll-necked morning-gown hung askew on his clumsy frame, the sash half untied and sleeves rolled back. An ebony cane shook under his hand.

  “Mr. Haslam,” he said, his breath very bad, for he leaned heavily forward on the cane as the dull rays of his eyes passed through me, scanning the street as if for one of Matthews’ assassins. “A pleasure—No end of respect for the work you’re doing—Come in, come in—”

  So I did, and found myself in a hallway floored in black marble and with walls oak-panelled to twice my height. Some distance ahead, a staircase went up, with railings in Chinese fret. To the side of that, a door, through which I was directed, opened into the deeper glooms of a study, my host hobbling after.

  “You must excuse the wretched state you find me in, Haslam—A rheumatism of the knees—”

  He was a tall man, old and ugly, heavy-torsoed, with long, unsteady legs. He was one of those who carry about with them their own prickly climate, by which they transform entire rooms to worlds of unease. High-born, that’s all, in the old style, but in this day and age too clumsy and irascible not to seem as ill-bred as his visitor must have struck him.

  I apologized if my visit had him on his feet when he shouldn’t be.

  “Were you not invited—?” he wondered abstractedly, indicating a settee I should sit on, as with difficulty he lowered himself into an easy chair and groped for a bell set a-top a book on a little ormolu table. We then sat in virtual darkness while he spoke gravely of his days as war minister and the long nuisance of our colonies in America. I must say I sympathized with his Stoic acceptance of a career spent mostly carrying out his superiors’ orders with no more say than concurrence. Silently I vowed to bear my Monro yoke with a dignity as seemly. He then castigated the French and the disaster of republicanism there. Like his friendship with the King, these views he was well known for, ever since things went horribly wrong across the Channel. It was an impressive note of moral indignation he struck, marred only by an unfortunate lapse now and then into a vacant grin. But when he fumbled for the book on the ormolu table and held it up and said, “It’s genius, Haslam. I never read anything so fascinating on the subject of insanity,” I knew this was a true-blue gentleman, the kind it behooves a man not born one to learn from. “I swear I don’t know what to admire more,” he declared, “your compassion for those wretched sufferers or your devotion to improvement of their care.”

  “Thank you, my Lord,” I said, my face ablaze. “I do my best.”

  “I know you do. This nation is in your debt.”

  Now a Negro dwarf entered carrying a tea-tray, which he set on a mahogany tea-stand that he wheeled between us.

  His cup rattling noisily as he returned it to its saucer, Liverpool said, “But enough of you and me. What news of our madman?”

  “Simply this, my Lord—” As I started to speak, I noticed I sat forward on my seat, elbows planted on knees, hands framing air. It was an attitude intended apparently to convey that I would come direct to the point and not waste his Lordship’s time with distracting details, such as our madman’s frequently professed eagerness to murder him as a diabolical traitor. “Matthews is a lunatic but hardly dangerous. Normally by the time they’ve been in a year, we return ones like him to their family and friends.”

  “You have many like him—?”

  “As harmless, yes. Few so acute of intellect. None for so long, unless—”

  “Acute of intellect, yes, go on—”

  “In this case too, his wife’s made it clear she wants him back and will undertake full responsibility for his actions—as, for that matter, will I. So it does seem a needless expense for Camberwell and for us, and certainly a most painful detention for his family.”

  “Painful, perhaps. But not needless—By no account needless.”

  I nodded, waiting to be enlightened.

  Instead he said, “And—?”

  “My Lord?”

  “Continue.”

  “I confess I have no more to say. My point is simply he’s not the kind we usually keep.”

  “Well, Haslam, you surprise me. I was rather expecting you’d travel all the way from Moorfields only if you had some particular piece of intelligence from him to impart. Something—ah—telling, even useful—”

  “No, nothing like that, your Lordship. The man’s a lunatic.”

  “So he is,” Liverpool murmured and seemed to reflect. Then he said, “Here’s how things stand. There’s what you have determined—or haven’t—about Mr. Matthews and what I have. And it’s by reason of what I have that you’ve got him.”

  “Perhaps, my Lord, if you were to indicate, in general terms, what it is you have, it might assist us in our treatment—”

  This irritated him too much to conceal it. “To the deuce with your treatment, sir. It’s not your treatment you’ve come about, it’s how to be rid of him. But allow me to tell you where this begins and ends: Your Matthews is a dangerous fellow. More dangerous than you can begin to conceive.”

  “Has he made a threat against your life, my Lord?”

  “Nothing so trivial, I assure you. I’m not a coward, Haslam, if that’s what you’d imply—”

  “Not at all, my Lord—”

  “Because a Hawkesbury shall not be shot like a dog, Mr. Haslam. A Hawkesbury laughs at death. And if you’re thinking, what harm can a peaceable madman do, remember that the radical fever that has gripped this nation for nearly a decade now is itself a state of collective mental illness. Madness is not an extenuation, Haslam, it’s the problem.”

  Before I could reply to this, he started pitching about in his seat. When I saw it was a struggle to stand, I sprang forward to help. He batt
ed me off. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

  Something nudged at my hip. It was his little black man, to escort me out.

  As I reached the study door, Liverpool said, “Haslam—?” He was standing in the half-light like a stricken wraith, one arm across his stomach as if that part pained him as much as his knees.

  “Yes, my Lord?”

  “If he says anything interesting, you’ll let me know.”

  “It is mostly lunacy, my Lord. Delusions of greatness, counterfeit letters found on the ramparts at Lisle hinting plots against him, money owed him and never paid, agents on all sides. That sort of thing.”

  “Yes, of course—But you know what I mean.”

  “Not yet.”

  “What’s bothering you, Haslam? The fact I’d expect sense from a man you’ve been asked to keep as a lunatic? Is that it?”

  “Something like that, my Lord.”

  “Did you never hear of such a thing as a lucid interval?”

  “I did. I consider it a medical fiction propagated by private mad-doctors to encourage spurious classification of the mad, to engender false hope in their families, for the purpose of extorting money to have them kept longer.”

  “Once mad, always mad, in your books, is that it?”

  “Until recovery.”

  “So why argue a madman’s convictions?”

  “Lunatics are not unacute, my Lord—”

  “You said that a few minutes ago about this one and have hammered the general point in your book. It’s the same thing I’m saying to you. Matthews-a-harmless-lunatic don’t pass muster with me, Haslam. I thought I’d made that clear.”

  Here I might have stammered out a response, but he doubled back. “I take it recovery’s not also a fiction of your profession?”

  “I see patients get better under our care, my Lord. In some months, nearly one in three. I don’t know how or why.”