Bedlam

by Greg Hollingshead

  My next visitor was Jack the Schoolmaster, who hadn’t spoke to me since his annual drop-by last May to inaugurate the summer’s regimen of bleedings, blisters, vomits, and purges, which as usual he inflicted on every patient they wouldn’t kill while cheerfully declaring them useless. He gave me a medicine I swear was copper shavings in a chloric paste. I was incontinent for two weeks. It’s a kind of depletory care they practise in here: drenching to diminish the evil their system excites. Since his move to Islington, The Schoolmaster is here four hours a day at most. The rules say he must be here every day, but they don’t say for how long. Rumour has it his wife is dying and requires constant attention. Otherwise, his time has gone into the second edition of his book and various other publications in a vain struggle, a, to grow rich enough to remove his wife southward and so rescue her lungs, b, to put more distance between his reputation and the appalling truth. Struggle a’s vain because there’s no more cure for consumption than for madness, and b because the better he sounds on paper, the wider the gap between reputation and reality. In any event, I rarely see him now. He’s not as absent as Monro, or when here as elusive as Crowther, but he’s three times more absent than he used to be. On his visit he let drop he gets more work done in his library at home; there are too many distractions here.

  “Distracteds, did you say?”

  “Oh, cut it, would you—” In our normal exchanges he addresses me aloud. There is none of the brain-saying of his ostensible satellite Sir Archy.

  “How does Henrietta?” I asked next.

  But this reminder of the damage he did his daughter’s love for him when he cut off her friendship with me only annoying him, he scowled and said, “As a good daughter to her ailing mother.”

  “I’m sorry your wife isn’t well, Jack.”

  He acknowledged this by a nod but with his face averted as if embarrassed lest I see how much her suffering affected him, or perhaps fearful lest affirming the disease hasten its course.

  The pretense for his visit was to apologize for my unending incarceration. More accurately, to reaffirm it without explanation. This a week after he damned me before the Grand Committee. The real reason he was pacing my little corner in such agitation is he’s compromised down to his bootsoles, which as any honest soul will tell you is nine-tenths of the way to Hell.

  When I pointed this out, his back was to me, his head tipped back like an actor’s whose lines are tacked to the ceiling, but he made no answer. When he faced me again, I suggested he examine the ulcer in my back, but he was thinking about something else.

  “You are a medical man—?” I said.

  “The matter’s now beyond the subcommittee’s purview,” he stated, meaning my release. “The letter from Liverpool has made that clear.”

  The Schoolmaster’s heavier now, and looks older than his forty-five years. Success has proved a harrowing mistress. The poundage testifies less to constant intake, damped flame, than to insulation against conscience. More weight suggests Haslam continues to stir. Buried but alive, which means enough scraps of truth lobbed past The Schoolmaster could mean Haslam snatches enough to grow strong and so fights his way back to the helm of his own being. But I must say there was nothing in those eyes to indicate he was anywhere present. If you ask me, The Schoolmaster had come to see me out of neither guilt nor interest in my freedom but merely curiosity to see what use the gang could put me to in their scheme to murder England, Wales, and Scotland, and let Ireland go hang.

  “The problem is, James,” he said, “the Government still wants you in.”

  “Yet you happen to believe I’m sane as the next man.”

  If this was a hit he only shot back the quicker, “The next man in here, yes.” Then, for all the world as if more kindly, “When, James, did I ever tell you you’re sane? And what do you expect me to stand up and declare after your performance before the subcommittee?”

  “You could explain I’m a victim of systematic mental abuse.”

  “Which would only make you sound not in control of your actions. No, James. This is what happens when you call people cunts to their faces and denominate politicians traitors and lackeys and the royal family treasonous usurpers.” This too seemed sympathetically enough said, but I also caught in it the tenor of gang sentiment and was reminded how much they’d love to see Napoleon Bonaparte crowned Emperor of England. They’ve told me too often they intend to work that monster up to as high a pitch of grandeur as they will degrade me below any common level of human nature.

  When I made no answer, only shook my head, he said, “James, I don’t need to remind you, if you would only tell me why you’re in here, there might be something, even now, I could do.”

  When I made no answer, it was as good as the end of Jack’s visit, and he soon took his leave.

  MOTHER AND SON

  My next two visitors arrived together the following Wednesday.

  Being in a doze when they entered, I at first mistook them for figments. But unless the gang is dream-working you with grotesque phantoms of their own making, a dream, however fantastical at first, when examined close is only ever yourself, and no less familiar. This was two other people. “You’ve come,” I whispered, or thought I did, before I opened my eyes.

  There was no reply, only a rustling of skirts and a scrape as of something set on the floor.

  Our embrace was a dissolve of tears. When she sat up, she looked to the one with us. I looked too.

  “Hello, Papa.”

  These words issued from the fairest mouth beneath the shapeliest nose and clearest eyes I ever saw. When the lips floated in for a kiss, I saw his mother’s, but those eyes spoke of my own mother’s too. “Hello, my son,” I whispered, groping for his hands, tears brimming, babbling and squeezing, hardly knowing what I said.

  Margaret’s fingers were in my hair-bristles, then softly smoothing the creases at my brow.

  “Your health, Father?” he asked. “Do they treat you well?”

  “They treat me just as they know how to, my darling Jim—”

  He smiled at this uncomprehending, but Margaret looked at me dubiously, with her old face. She’s an old woman now, and she regarded me as sceptically as I did her poor greenish-black gown and threadbare jacket as she stood behind him, with a hand on his slender shoulder. He was a flax-haired angel. Small, like me—I must adjust my wall-notch—but I would say eleven or twelve years of age, which is what he would need to be. “Do you go to school, Jim?”

  “I do, Papa,” and he prattled awhile about his school and the teachers and friends he had there, until the tears flooded my cheeks, alarming him. “Is everything all right, Papa?”

  “It is, Jim,” Margaret gently assured him (causing him, with a manly impatience, to shrug off her hand). “Only very happy to see you. Now you must let your father and me talk.”

  “Before a keeper appears—” I confirmed, squeezing his fingers.

  Sighing, Margaret sat on the edge of my bed to recount how for a decade she retailed tea, but the East India Company showing scant mercy for the independent shop, two years ago, to pay her debts, she sold all stock and furnishings to our long-time suppliers Crump & Co., who have hired her as book-keeper at their Holborn offices. Now our shop is the premises of a bespoke tailor named Hodge. Hodge of Leadenhall.

  Bespoke put me in mind of Justina Latimer’s hat. My question of Margaret why our former maid was at my subcommittee hearing seemed to nonplus her. “I can’t imagine but don’t like it,” she replied, looking perturbed. “All I know is when we pass in the street she pretends not to see me. Someone said she was modelling hats in the Burlington Arcade.”

  “The scarlet bonnet with the green-grapes—”

  “You should see the sunflower one.”

  “She was friendly enough.”

  “The more our concern. Something’s up, but I don’t know what. Did you know her former husband, the one murdered in his bed, was a republican sympathizer—?”

  “And who are her asso
ciates now?”

  “Gentlemen.”

  “That could be our answer.”

  Margaret looked at me close a moment and then provided a synopsis of her efforts to win my release, saying I could read it in full in the copies of her letters she’d brought. Her efforts stretch back twelve years and are more extensive than Dunbar ever dreamed of. She even once solicited the help of David Williams, who has done nothing. Now I understand how despite two sources of income she has no money.

  “I’m sorry I was overcome before the subcommittee,” I said. “After all your work to get me so far, it would seem they’ve won the game.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Mags, no. You can’t spend the rest of your life on me. We must concentrate on family visits.” I squeezed Jim’s hand. “From them I’ll draw the strength I need to work on The Schoolmaster direct. I think part of him—I mean the Haslam part, such as remains-regrets I’m still in here.”

  “Haslam can afford a spate of remorse. But once he’s immured in his next book, the mood will pass, and soon as that one’s finished, it’ll be on to the next. All he must do is stay buried in words until Death collects all Conscience’ pricks. There’s no peace of mind like the grave.”

  “So what’s to be done? A quid to Alavoine and over the wall?”

  “No, you’re too famous not to be pursued till capture. There’s only one way left: a legal challenge of habeas corpus, before the Court of the King’s Bench. Why do they have you? But it’s dangerous. If we think Monro and the governors are unsympathetic now, wait until we come at them with this. And if we lose, you won’t be going anywhere you can escape their revenge. Robert tells me Haslam’s kept you supplied with candles, paper, and suchlike. All that will end.”

  “No it won’t, Jack’s not petty. But we do need to have him full on our side, as the one who knows most about me. Then it’ll be up to the governors to say why I’m in, and they can’t do it because they have no idea, and those who have and are still alive can’t reveal it.”

  “Why? What is it?”

  “Oh, Mags, don’t make me tell you what I know. You’re the poorest liar I ever knew.” She nodded, aware she was.

  Her candour inspired me to explain. “The trouble with knowing things so far beyond top secret they sound like fantasy is that the constant exposure to the deluded inadequacy of others’ understandings makes you feel mad and alone. At first you ask yourself, What instead of this poppycock would he be telling me if he knew what I do? But the fact is he don’t and never will, and the repeated mental exercise is so hard on your brain you give it over, and that’s when it dawns on you he’s a puppet controlled by forces he’ll never understand and you will be too if you don’t watch out.”

  Perhaps Margaret knew what I meant, perhaps she didn’t. Her attention was on another effect of knowing too much. “But, Jamie, if you know why you’re in, you must have some idea who wants you in, which means you can guess their reaction to a habeas corpus proceeding.”

  “They’ll try to stop it.”

  “But how? It’s a purely legal undertaking—”

  “Mags, I’m not in by law. This is bigger than the courts.”

  “So politicians influence judges?”

  “Is the King shy of snipers?”

  “Will they stop at habeas-corpus-fixing?”

  “Won’t that be enough?”

  “I’m asking, will we be putting you in danger from without, Bethlem reactions aside?”

  “Not, I should think, as long as I’m in here. Out will be another matter.”

  “Out I’ll guard you with my life. Out we can leave the country. First things first. We’ll try not to lose, Jamie, but we could, even if they don’t interfere. Even with Haslam on our side, for he knows too little. All we can do is bring in witnesses to your character and outside medical experts to examine you and trust that together they provide affidavits strong enough to convince a judge.”

  “The question,” I said, “is whether The Schoolmaster cares more about his position than the truth.”

  “Don’t forget there’s also the truth of his public portrait of Bethlem, which his honour will require him to defend.”

  “Put that way, our case does seem hopeless—”

  “Hopeless, are we? Not in here, surely?” This was wit from The Middleman, now looming over us like a vulture.

  With a quick glance to see he wasn’t interfering with Jim, Margaret threw her arms around me, but the ulcer in my back causing me to flinch, she pulled back. “Jamie, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  As she said this, The Middleman placed one bony claw on her shoulder and the other on Jim’s. I squeezed Jim’s hand tighter, but mine was sweating and our grip slippery. “Hour’s up, Silly-Tilly,” muttered The Middleman, never one to allow a space of compassion.

  “It’s not been an hour!” Margaret cried, looking frantic at me. “Jamie, what—?”

  “I’m all right, Mags. It’s nothing—”

  With a tug at her elbow, The Middleman pulled her away. At the same time, he used his knee to break my grip on Jim’s hand. Then, holding Margaret at bay, he reached down for something alongside my bed: a wicker hamper.

  “That’s for my husband!” Margaret cried, knowing what was coming. “Leave it!”

  With difficulty I struggled to stand, but in a feat of balance, as he gripped Margaret’s arm in one hand, the hamper in the other, The Middleman placed his boot sole flat against my chest. I flew across the bed and slammed the brick wall. When my senses returned, I saw Jim belabouring The Middleman with childish blows as Margaret fought the brute for the hamper until, growling, “Damned bitch,” he yanked it from her with such force its contents ascended in air: linen, fruit, cutlery, books, paper, ink, letters—a good dozen packets of letters, tied with string.

  Some items hit the wall and fell, the ink smashing. Others scattered along the floor.

  Margaret swung on me beseeching, “Jamie, tell me!”

  Roughly pushing Jim ahead of him, The Middleman was using his foot to sweep the hamper’s contents out into the larger room. Over his shoulder he said, “Come for these, Silly-Tilly, and you know what’s up for your arse.”

  “I have an ulcer in my back,” I told Margaret quietly.

  “Are they treating it?”

  Looking to Jim, I shook my head No.

  Margaret looked too, in time to see The Middleman disappear round the corner with him. She kissed me and flew after.

  Which left me to rock on my bed, listening to my wife’s imprecations and son’s sobs fade together down the gallery.

  84 LEADENHALL STREET

  SEPTEMBER 22ND, 1809

  Dearest Jamie,

  If only there were a better way than a letter you’ll never read to let you know Haslam had an ear cocked lest I was offered trouble and when I was, himself escorted Jim and me to the gate, with a vow to discipline Rodbird for his abuse of us and to see that Alavoine passes on my letters, once they’re approved—

  Jamie, we have every reason to expect our habeas corpus will go ahead. We’re now in search of the most sympathetic and persuasive medical men to examine you and pronounce on your case. Our thinking is if the judge can be persuaded you’re not in on medical grounds, he’ll want to know what grounds you are in on.

  Beloved Husband, today as Jim was helping me prepare our dinner he asked if heroes often go unrecognized. His classmates knowing you better as a lunatic than as saviour of our country, he’s now old enough to suspect more in this than schoolyard malice. My answer was yes, heroes nearly always go unrecognized, when they’re not despised or resented as naifs, fools, prigs, or troublemakers. The greatest—and luckiest—achievement of a hero is to be hailed as one. For that he must be commonly agreed to have risked or (better) sacrificed his life to save or signally benefit the lives of others. Failing this, courage and honesty seldom please, seeming self-righteous rebukes to everybody else’s sly small way of sidling along.

  In answer to this he smiled and
said, “I think sometimes the more I know of the world the less I want to be in it—”

  “But you are in it,” I cried, “because of one thing: love. Love’s the complication and you must let it always be—!”

  Jamie, how I wish you had been here from the beginning for the succession of miracles that has been our Jim’s youth, as he’s ascended from one level of mind to the next, now and then gazing around him exhilarated, like a mountaineer taking in a prospect. And when he’s been too long on one plateau before his next ascent, you know he’s in its shadow because how restless and moody he grows—Then all at once, before you realize it, he’s reached another summit, and O then to see the sunshine in his face! This has been the hardest part of all, my husband, harder I think sometimes than our own separation: to know how much you and he have missed in missing your lives together.

  I pray you forgive this bitter reflection—

  Your loving

  Margaret

  FRIEND TUKE

  It’s been a month now, and I’ve not seen Margaret again, only two thin packets of her letters, the first retrieved from the gallery doorway by Reverend Jupp (a Methodist in for melancholy) before The Middleman returned for his spoils, the second by way of Alavoine thanks to The Schoolmaster—or should I say Haslam. With something more in his eyes than the usual desolation, Jupp slipped me the first packet two days after Margaret’s visit, as we passed in the gallery. The second was tossed onto my bed last week by the keeper Davies, our whistling postman from Hell.