Bedlam

by Greg Hollingshead

  “None, Mr. Williams,” I assured him, “join you in that emotion so ardent as myself. But even as I was busy serving my country, I was flung in here.”

  “You made too-great demands on yourself, my friend. Superhuman demands.”

  Did I? a voice inside me retorted. Was that the only error made, then, David?

  Now more than our old philosophy came flooding back. All of a sudden it was February 11th, 1793. This was the day after we declared war on France in response to their starting the month by declaring war on us. In my own carriage I had driven David Williams, fresh back from Paris, to meet the British foreign secretary, Lord Grenville, at an interview I’d personally arranged. The plan was Williams would deliver a letter and oral message from Grenville’s French counterpart, Lebrun. The letter was Lebrun’s sincere apology for the French declaration of war and a moving plea for peace. Considering war had only just been declared, this was an extraordinary thing for a foreign minister to do. When Williams explained to Grenville’s under-secretary, Mr. Aust, that the purpose of our visit was nothing less than a French overture for peace, Aust looked at him in wordless astonishment.

  “The French government,” Williams repeated into the silence, “is prepared to make great sacrifices to preserve peace.”

  But having said this, he pretended to accept at face value Aust’s coldly formal expression (once he recovered himself) of regret that Grenville was at the last minute unavailable to meet with us. Instead of objecting to such treatment, Williams merely left his name and address and walked out. They could contact him for the letter when they were ready to read it.

  As soon as we were back outside on the pavement, I importuned him, saying, “David, for God’s sake why didn’t you give Aust the letter, as you’ve travelled all the way from Paris to do?”

  “Because,” came the agitated reply, “it’s too evident our government’s as intent on war as France is. If I deliver this letter, Lebrun will go to the guillotine. This is collaboration with the enemy.”

  “But he won’t if the letter brings peace!” I wailed. “And it’s now the only hope for that! David, you can’t go by the behaviour of a man’s under-secretary! Aust knows nothing! Give the letter to him now! Believe me, it’s not too late! He’ll pass it direct to Grenville, who, don’t you remember, is the Prime Minister’s cousin! You know as well as I do his Lordship’s up there and will take it direct to Pitt, who will want to see you, which will give you a chance to deliver Lebrun’s oral message!”

  But Williams refused, declaring that nothing could persuade him to place a human life in danger for a hopeless cause.

  “David, listen to me! How many more lives will be lost if you don’t act now? I assure you, Grenville won’t disappoint us, but it’s imperative that he see the letter! Please, I implore you! If you would only exert yourself, you could prevent the war!”

  But Williams laughed at this, and however much I pleaded, he remained adamant. This behaviour was owable in part to genuine concern for Lebrun, who after he was apprehended in a hayloft, disguised as a farm worker, did in fact go to the guillotine, in December of that year, singing “La Marseillaise.” But mostly Williams was a timid man. Not every republican is cut out for revolution. In his view, politics should proceed like Nature, by degrees. He’d attended the French king’s trial in December and was as horrified at it as at the Paris chaos. Back in London he was doing his best to appear calm and reasonable, even as he was trembling so wildly he could hardly speak. What terrified him was the prospect of Government prosecution as a traitor, for communicating with his Majesty’s enemies. We both knew what they’d tried to do to Tom Paine. David didn’t want his next book suppressed; he didn’t want to be gaoled for sedition. He didn’t want to be half-hanged and his entrails removed and burnt while he was still alive, as required by the Traitorous Correspondence Bill that Pitt had rammed through. Who in those days wasn’t afraid? Yet in his case, any fear was groundless, for I had already placed French money in British hands to ensure, among other things, his safety from prosecution in this country. I could have told him that, but he wouldn’t like it.

  When he continued refusing to give Aust the letter, I was left no option but to feign a sudden resolve to settle in France, dropping to my knees to beg letters of recommendation to the French ministers. These he absolutely refused to provide. Refusing then even to climb back into my carriage, he turned on his heel and walked away.

  And that was the last I saw of him, until now, when I thought, And how staunch a defender are you, David, of what you believe in? Aloud I said, “I apologize, sir, if my behaviour when we knew each other ever caused you inconvenience.”

  If he suspected irony in this (as well he should), he didn’t show it, only shook his head. “There’s nothing to forgive, my friend. You were not in your right mind.”

  Oh, was I not? And how right in your mind are you, a republican fart-catcher to an enterprising Quaker? “May I ask, sir,” I said, bowing, “how it is you come to be here with Bill—ah, Mr. Tuke?”

  “Oh, I’m on The Retreat’s board—” came the reply, so offhand you’d think being caught bare-faced in the company of Bill the King counted for nothing. But then, did he even know it was him? “It’s long been Mr. Tuke’s hope,” he continued, “to discuss treatment with Mr. Haslam, whom he views as one of the nation’s most enlightened providers.”

  “And how have you found him yourself?”

  “A more compassionate warder than he wants us to know. His gruff wit’s most exhilarating, don’t you agree? I always did appreciate a man unafraid to stand up for his convictions. With a clientele so many and brutal—worthy exceptions notwithstanding—” and this time I bowed so low and long the blood filled my head like a butcher’s calabash—“I should think you’d learn pretty quick to be brusque.”

  These statements I could make nothing of. Clientele? So we were customers now? Yet if this was a business, what quality of service did he think naked beggars queue to receive? And what was this about appreciation of a man ready to fight for his convictions? A gracious compliment or a self-damning gap of memory?

  “You look excellent well, James,” he next threw out. This one so nonplussed me I was tempted to spin round and flap my shirt-tails to give him an excellent whiff of my abscess. It was now apparent he had no intention of acknowledging Margaret’s visit to him. Having done nothing for me, he considered the matter dead and buried. Why else did he not fear I’d wonder at his shocking silence? “After everything you’ve been through, James,” he went on, “hospital life evidently agrees with you. I never saw you half so collected in Paris, nor the last time we spoke in London. Mr. Haslam, I daresay, is doing something right.”

  Before I could blast away at this wretched drivel, a call echoed down the gallery. “Mr. Williams, will you catch us up, or do we wait?”

  Even at this distance you could smell Bill’s fury: fumes of nightshade and hellebore. I’m the last person he’s going to want David Williams talking to.

  “Coming, Will!” David called out—Bill I heard at first and give a shudder—and with a brief glance at Phippard, as if politeness might enjoin a farewell there too, he pressed my hands once more. As he did, he dropped his voice to utter words that though they resembled specious babbling and as such failed utterly to qualify as the apology he owed me, did offer grounds for hope: “I pray the next time we meet, my dear Matthews, it’s someplace more congenial.” And adding, louder (the public part, the former for my ears only), “Keep well, old friend—”

  And so, as I watched my hero canter down the gallery like a grateful dog to a new master, I said to Phippard, “Well, Midshipman, what was that about? Could it be my old friend is now a craven pawn of Air Loom instigation?”

  The exclusively naval nature of Phippard’s concerns precluded any actual reply.

  “Or is he a great man yet?” I murmured, after watching the three of them pass single-file through the gate in the wall of iron bars and disappear from view.

/>   Again Phippard gave no sign he understood, but I think he did. His world is full of great men.

  OLD CORRUPTION

  SEPTEMBER THE 29TH, 1809

  My Beloved Wife,

  Can you guess who’s just been to visit? Bill the King—in William Tuke! And if that wasn’t enough, who did he bring with him? Brace yourself: David Williams.

  Intending no more than to sound from the tenor of Tuke’s visit the prospects for our habeas corpus, I stumble upon my oldest and once dearest friend teamed with the leader of the gang in control of this very hospital. No wonder, though you begged him, Williams has done nothing to get me out. Face to face with him in the lower gallery was like running into an old friend when you’re abroad without your illusions. The former wholesome façade detaches and falls away to reveal a ramshackle edifice. Though his conversation had every appearance of a succession of low, convolved brain-sayings—addressing me, for example, as mon compère (as if slyly to acknowledge our French time together)—the fact there was no hint of a presence in him, along with the fact he uttered every syllable aloud, suggested he hasn’t been taken over. Not yet. More likely his guilt for abandoning me years ago, and again more lately by doing nothing to get me out of here though you begged him, had him blurting with each word he spoke the last he intended. He’s only human, after all, which is one way to say why it’s only ever been humanity in the abstract he’s fought for.

  As for Bill the King, word from the gang has always been he stoops to human form only when confident of widespread human desolation. Probably he’s achieved access to the old Quaker because like him he’s out to destroy this place and substitute something more covertly oppressive while it shows the world a happier face. Bill’s habitation of Tuke must also owe something to the affinity between, on the one hand, his own desire to engineer the death of our true monarch George and, on the other, Tuke’s Quaker abhorrence of rank. (Though if Tuke truly abhorred rank as much as he thinks or pretends he does, then Bill could never touch him.)

  Of course, none of this begins to address the question how The Schoolmaster could dare to go against Bill the King. Brain-saying Augusta at my committee hearing is one thing. Openly defying Bill, whatever body he’s in, whatever sentiments he’s espousing, is another. Because this was no mistake of identity. If I could glimpse Bill the King in Tuke, The Schoolmaster would know he was in him as soon as Tuke’s shadow brushed London Wall.

  Still, the question—like a Liberty Bell proclaiming a riddle (Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of what!?)—goes on pealing: What is going on? I have no idea, though I do confess to a hope our habeas corpus will succeed. All I must do is satisfy my medical examiners of my mental health. And once we win and I’m back, O my Life’s Love, with you and young Jim in the tranquil privacy of our parlour, the true history of who I am and what I have done will unfold like a revelation, and I shall be its letterer. And unlike my log of madhouse abuses, it’s a story people will be pleased to read, as in it they discover a glimmering testament of honour and courage racing to and fro in a midnight of intrigue, lettered in plain ink upon plain paper by one of their own, and know there lives and breathes among them a man who with Cicero asks only, Let me die in the country I have often saved.

  Until that wished-for time of home lettering,

  your loving

  James

  84 LEADENHALL STREET

  OCTOBER 19TH, 1809

  Dearest Husband,

  I have only this minute got in the door from my first meeting with Drs. Birkbeck and Clutterbuck of the College of Physicians. Having seen you but once, their reluctance to make a definite comment on your case is understandable, but one thing is clear: They like you, Jamie. Which gives me every hope they’ll judge in our favour. When I just now told Jim this, he spun me in a dance round the kitchen. Your son having lived his life under the weight of his mother’s sighs, any prospect of her happiness makes him positively giddy.

  That’s all I wanted to say: Your examiners seem such generous, fair-minded men that I have sunny expectations of our habeas corpus—if, that is, the judge can be counted on to hear them, and if there’s any justice in England he can.

  Your loving

  Margaret

  P.S.Jim has something to add.

  Dear Father,

  Mum and I—did she tell you?—have twenty fingers crossed for you! And twenty toes too!! (And it’s not easy to cross all your toes!!! Did you ever try it????)

  Love, Jim

  EXAMINATION BY EXPERTS

  Here it is not yet December and already Drs. Clutterbuck and Birkbeck have paid me four visits together, sometimes the one asking questions, sometimes the other. In addition, Dr. Birkbeck has paid me two visits solo. These men are the two ascendant meteors of the Royal College of Physicians that Dick Staveley has persuaded Monro to allow to examine me, so they can provide testimony in favour of my habeas corpus challenge. Between them they’ve plied me with every modern stratagem of mental scrutiny. The more I said, the more there was to say. Yet just when the pieces were starting to fall into place by the discipline of the telling, they assured me they’d heard enough. Each has now separately mulled over his findings and concluded I’m perfectly sane and intends to say as much in his affidavit before the court.

  Their confidence in me has been gratifying and offers further hope of a positive outcome to our case.

  For fear they’d think me credulous or deluded, I neglected at first to mention anything involving magnetic workings by French spies. But Dr. Birkbeck (who was first to question me) proved so sympathetic a listener and so manifestly holds the welfare of the ordinary man tight at his heart, I soon told him everything, namely, “A London gang of event-working assassins, finding my senses proof against their fluid-working (as they term it), have appointed French magnetic spy-workers to actuate the proper persons to pretend I am insane, for the purpose of plunging me in a madhouse, to invalidate all I say by confining me within the measure of the Bedlam-attaining-airloom-warp, making sure by the poisonous effluvia they use that I’m kept fully impregnated, so as to overpower my reason and speech and destroy me in their own way while all should suppose it was insanity which produced my death according to the principle Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad, a running joke with them they dolefully intone then burst out laughing.”

  Yet even as I thumb-nailed my case, I wondered, Why on earth risk damning myself out of my own mouth? Then I thought, If you can’t tell an honest man the truth, who can you tell it to? And so I explained all, setting forth the complicated matter of the various procedures of the various gangs and some things that happened to me before I was thrown in here, and how I’m on their calendar for destruction, and the only thing that will save me is if I more than forgive, if I thank them for their treatment of me. Otherwise, as they constantly inform me, I should not expect to escape their clutches alive. Yet what they want of me I can never give them, for to thank them would be to betray every principle I ever stood for and so would spell my destruction another way.

  On a different occasion, after listening to my account of my Paris years, Dr. Clutterbuck—a forceful, manly, handsome fellow with a thick, strong nose and impressive underbite—broke a long silence by reminding me who it was that Dr. Mesmer, when his science was rejected as charlatanism by the French Academy, appealed to but the people? And wasn’t it true that Mesmerism salons were frequently fronts for radical societies? And he assured me with a knowing look he has it for a fact that M. Brissot, the French Girondist-revolutionist leader, was a Mesmerism devotee, at least he was until he came to power. Then there was Lafayette, who fought in America alongside the colonists at Valley Forge and has been quoted as saying the main force behind that revolution was Mesmerism; Bergasse (converter of Brissot to Mesmerism in the first place); the husband and wife revolutionists the Rolands; and a dozen others, including, of all people, Marie Antoinette herself, though he guessed a queen can afford to dabble, or might imagine she can. After confessing he’d alwa
ys wondered if she was behind the Mesmerism plan to free the King from prison by a magnet beaming an escape plan, he asked me if when in Paris I was ever in contact with Dr. Mesmer himself, or M. Puységur, or with Restif de la Bretonne, or Bonneville, or any of the former Cercle Social? Abbé Barruel, perhaps?

  Though surprised at Clutterbuck’s original train of association, I paid his sympathy the courtesy of a straight-faced answer, assuring him that while I was never in contact with any French disciples of Dr. Mesmer that I was aware of at the time, from what little I’ve been able to understand of his theories, I would guess he might be on to something. Certainly his strategy of cloaking his doctrine in mystery accords with the methods of the gang, as it does with the policy of a republican like Brissot, who always argued that to produce revolution out in the open is to doom it to failure.

  I added I’ve sometimes wondered if Mesmer’s technique of having people grip iron bars plunged in tubs of magnetic filings and so pass into swoons and orgasmic ejaculations could have served as inspiration for the two metal rods I’ve lately noticed affixed a-top the Air Loom. (These enable the one at the controls of that machine to reach up and grasp them and so weaken the force of the magnetic assailment on anyone who’s just glimpsed a gang member inhabiting a victim. In this way the member appears to the glimpser to step back inside the victim, which is what Augusta did when I saw her inhabiting Wood. But nobody swoons.)

  Dr. Clutterbuck greeted my attempt to humour him by smiling in a vague way before charging off on a tangent. “You know, Matthews, one thing I’ve noticed about Mesmerism, it makes people honest. Any English follower of Mesmer I ever met, while he might be too suspicious of the five senses for the comfort of a dull, plodding Forceps like myself, you can be sure he won’t be out to deceive or flatter anybody. The simple fact is, Mesmerism may reduce the human body to a puppet or machine, but I never met a Mesmer advocate who had time for the empty forms and silly conventions of common life.”