by James McGee
Clearly the apothecary was expecting Hawkwood to recognize the names. He didn’t. He took a stab at one.
“Matthews?”
“Possibly a little before your time. He was the one who accused Lord Hawkesbury of treason on the floor of the House of Commons. In his defence, he told the court that an influencing device controlled by French Revolutionaries was manipulating his mind. The Air Loom, he called it. Fascinating case. He’s still here. In fact, believe it or not, he actually submitted plans for the new hospital. His talent for architectural drawing is considerable and yet he’s a tea planter by trade. Who’d have thought it? He’s undoubtedly one of our more … interesting patients. There are many others I could tell you about.”
The apothecary smiled again. “There are those who would tell you the colonel was in good company. But restrained, you ask? No, he was not shackled, despite the irons on the wall.”
“And yet he had his own quarters, separate from the others. Isn’t that unusual?”
Locke shrugged. “Not especially. A number of patients have their own rooms. Certainly, those with a tendency towards violence, like Norris, must remain segregated at all times, and chained. There are others, however, who, through good behaviour, have been granted the privilege of privacy. Matthews is one example. And there are those whose comfort is maintained by the generosity of their friends and family.”
“And the colonel?” Hawkwood prompted.
“Up until now, he was considered to be one of our most obedient patients.”
“You make him sound like some sort of lap dog.”
Locke smiled thinly. “Sickness is a strange beast, Officer Hawkwood, and none is stranger than sickness of the mind. There are those patients who thrive on the companionship of others and there are those who shrink from human contact. In either case, the patient’s welfare can also be affected by the circumstances of his or her confinement.” Locke raised an eyebrow. “You look at me as if I were mad. I assure you the theory is nothing new.
“Colonel Hyde is no drooling imbecile. He’s a well-born, educated man, a former army officer, and a surgeon to boot. He is not some prancing fool in a cap and bells. Indeed, I’d put it to you that, had you met and talked with him about the general turn of things, there’s every possibility you’d have considered him to be as sane as you or I.”
“Does he know he’s mad?”
Locke sat back in his chair. He was silent for several seconds before voicing his reply.
“You pose an interesting question. There are doctors who consider madness to be a sickness of the soul, a spiritual malaise. My own theory is that madness is in fact a physical disease, an organic disorder of the brain, which manifests itself in an incorrect association of familiar ideas, ideas that are always accompanied by implicit belief. In my view, the reason people see objects and hear sounds that aren’t there is not because their sight or hearing is deficient, it is because their brains are not functioning properly. Nor is their intelligence necessarily at fault. On the contrary, they will frequently reason correctly, albeit from a false premise. In their own minds they are being perfectly rational. And so it is with Colonel Hyde. He is perfectly lucid and articulate. He does not think of himself as either sane or insane. One could argue that is the nature of his delusion.”
“I’m sorry, Doctor,” Hawkwood said. “I still don’t understand. If you’re telling me that he was admitted into the hospital due to – what was it, melancholy? – what made him change? What made him commit murder?”
“To answer that, one would have to know how his delusion arose in the first place.”
“And do you?”
The apothecary shrugged. “In the colonel’s case, I’m not privy to the full facts of his admittance. It was Dr Monro who oversaw his arrival. I can only generalize.”
“Maybe it’s Monro I should be talking to,” Hawkwood said.
“That is certainly your privilege, though, judging by Dr Monro’s preoccupation with his extracurricular interests, I would submit that you would be unlikely to learn much. I doubt he has had one moment’s contact with Colonel Hyde since he was admitted. I can assure you, Officer Hawkwood, without fear of contradiction, that I am far more conversant with the colonel’s mental health than Dr Monro, who rarely attends the hospital, even for the Saturday meetings. But you must do as you see fit. There is also Dr Crowther, of course, though I doubt you’d find him sober, let alone lucid. When he is here, he does little except administer purgatives and emetics. That, Officer Hawkwood, is the sum total of their lamentable involvement. In their hands, treatment here amounts to little more than meaningless gestures. Purgatives are given to constipated patients. Syphilitics are prescribed mercury. Emetics are given to patients to make them vomit. It’s a way of ensuring that fluids move through the system. All other afflictions are prescribed laudanum. Do you know one of the side effects of laudanum? No? Well, there’s no reason why you should, but I’ll tell you anyway. It’s constipation. You see my point? Oh, and if the purgatives and the emetics don’t work, we bleed them or give them a cold bath. That way, they’ll either die from the flux or pneumonia. Purging, bleeding and inducing patients to vomit may be the recognized methods of mad doctoring, Officer Hawkwood, but they are not the way to treat patients like Matthews or Colonel Hyde.”
“You’re telling me there’s another way?”
“I believe so, yes. It involves a number of techniques, acquired after lengthy experience of dealing with such cases, but they all have one goal and that is for the doctor to gain ascendancy over the patient, similar to breaking in a horse or …” The apothecary paused expectantly.
“Training a dog,” Hawkwood said. He wondered if his moment of enlightenment would result in Locke rewarding him with a treat, a biscuit or a bone, perhaps? But it wasn’t to be. Locke continued, uninterrupted.
“Exactly. The patient must never think he or she is in control. It is not the patient who must set the agenda. It is the doctor. One must not confuse this with punishment, however. Corporal punishment, even severe chastisement, must always be considered a last resort. I do not believe it is possible to gain ascendancy over patients whose thoughts are constantly consumed by their plots to escape. I can safely say that by using understanding and kindness I’ve never yet failed to obtain the confidence and respect of insane persons.”
“Or their obedience?”
The apothecary inclined his head. If he resented the barb in Hawkwood’s question, he did not let it show. “Indeed. Honey, not vinegar, is the answer.”
“So that’s why he has his own room, his own belongings?”
“In part. And, as I mentioned, the colonel is not without benefactors. It is, however, more than anything, a matter of providing stimulation.”
“Stimulation?”
“You recall I mentioned the wound below your eye?” The apothecary pointed with his finger. “May I ask if you have suffered any other injuries; to a limb, an arm or a leg perhaps?”
Too many to remember, Hawkwood thought, though the most recent, the knife wound in his left shoulder, had been sustained not on the battlefield, but in the swirling darkness of the Thames riverbed. It wasn’t a memory he enjoyed revisiting.
He nodded warily and wondered where this was going. The apothecary was too damned perceptive, he thought.
“And during your recovery period, the more you used your arm, the quicker the wound healed; would I be right?”
Hawkwood nodded again. Though, if truth were told, the damned shoulder still ached with a vengeance if he slept awkwardly.
“And so it is with the brain. It is like a muscle. The greater the activity, the more exercise it receives, the healthier it is likely to remain. That is why the colonel was allowed his study area, his books and his drawings and his paper and pens. D’you see?”
Hawkwood nodded.
“They also proved most useful as a reward.”
“Reward?”
“For adhering to the hospital routine. It’s an e
stablished practice. We make the patient aware that if there are any infringements, privileges such as access to writing materials, personal possessions and so forth, may be withdrawn. For someone with the colonel’s intellect the removal of such privileges would be a very serious matter and, in the long term, likely to be detrimental to his health. A patient he may be, but with his military background he is a man who understands only too well the consequences of not observing protocol. It has proved a most effective system with a number of our patients.”
“Really?” Hawkwood said. “From where I’m standing I’d say the colonel didn’t give two figs for your so-called routine, or your damned protocol, and that makes me wonder just how well you knew him.”
“On an intellectual level, I would say I knew him tolerably well. I’ve spent a number of hours in his company. We would talk of all manner of things: literature, politics and science … medicine, of course. We are, after all, both doctors, though our backgrounds are somewhat different. My family comes from modest stock. The colonel’s family were land owners. We both studied abroad, however. I studied in Uppsala before going on to Cambridge. The colonel attended the university at Padua. He was – is – a learned man. You saw his library. I even consulted with him on several occasions, seeking his advice on the treatment of some of my patients. His understanding of anatomy far exceeds my own and his knowledge of medicine in general is far superior to that of Dr Monro and that drunken sot, Crowther. I found his assistance invaluable. Some of his opinions were rather … innovative. It made for interesting discussion.”
“You sound as if you liked him,” Hawkwood said.
Locke reached for his handkerchief and spectacles. It was a tactic Hawkwood had come to expect. It allowed the apothecary a few seconds to compose his reply.
“Perhaps I did. But then, you’ve seen the calibre of the staff. Is it any wonder I sought out his company?” The apothecary held up his spectacles and squinted through the lenses. Satisfied that he had removed every smear, he tucked the handkerchief into his waistcoat pocket and placed his spectacles back on to his nose. He looked, Hawkwood thought, not unlike a self-satisfied barn owl.
“When I asked you if you knew how the colonel’s delusions arose, you said you could only generalize,” Hawkwood prompted. “How?”
The apothecary placed his hands palm down on the desk, and nodded. “From my study of other patients in my immediate care, I believe it’s as if every event in their lives, even those that might appear trivial to someone else, carries a hidden significance. It is as though their brains are under attack from a never-ending whirligig of possibilities. Thoughts swirl through their heads in a maelstrom until one thought eventually forces its way to the surface and breaks free of the maelstrom’s pull. Suddenly everything becomes wondrously clear, as if the mind has been set free to soar above the clouds. From that point, every germ of thought becomes indelibly linked to that blinding moment of enlightenment.
“I believe that sense of awakening is so intense that the fabric of the delusion begins to expand backwards and forwards in time, forming a kind of framework, an explanation, if you will, for events that took place long before it existed, perhaps as far back as childhood. It’s the same going forward. Whenever a new experience is received, that too is perceived to be an intrinsic part of the framework.”
Hawkwood’s head was starting to ache. It occurred to him that the colonel wasn’t the only one whose brain was spinning. “So to the colonel this moment of enlightenment would have been like some kind of …” he searched for the word “… revelation?”
“That’s as good a definition as any.”
“And this revelation gave him the idea to escape?”
“I see that you have begun to follow my reasoning.”
“So to us, killing the parson was cold-blooded murder, but to the colonel it would have made perfect sense.”
“Yes.”
“Cutting the priest’s face off made sense?”
“To Colonel Hyde, yes.”
“So escaping may not have been his sole ambition. It was only the beginning. And unless we discover the nature of this … revelation, we won’t know the form of his delusion or what he might be planning to do next?”
“That is so, broadly speaking.” Locke leaned forward, his face earnest. If he was impressed with Hawkwood’s apparent grasp of the situation, he gave no indication. “And that, of course, is the problem, for the colonel’s delusion is his reality, no one else’s. Only he does not know that. You recall, I told you about Matthews and his Air Loom, the thing that he believes controls people’s minds?”
Hawkwood nodded.
“Let me show you.” Apothecary Locke opened a drawer in his desk and took out a sheaf of documents. He began to sift through them. Hawkwood moved to the desk to look over Locke’s shoulder.
“Here,” Locke said. Extracting four sheets from the bundle, he spread them out on the desk.
Three of them were clearly architectural drawings.
“These are Matthews’ plans for the new hospital. As you can see, they are of a very high standard. And this –” Locke said, passing over a fourth sheet “– is his Air Loom.”
Hawkwood stared down at the drawing in front of him.
It looked like a piece of furniture, a large box with a set of four large organ pipes protruding from the top. On the left-hand side stood three barrels which were connected to the box by flexible hoses resembling the tentacles of some strange sea monster. Seated in front of the mechanism was the figure of a man. His arms were manipulating two huge levers. Three other human figures were also shown, one standing, the other two lying down. Each one appeared to be transfixed by what looked to be a beam of light radiating from the device. The drawing, like the other two, had been very skilfully fashioned. Each component of the device had been designated a letter of the alphabet. The key to the letters was written in a neat copperplate.
“What are these?” Hawkwood pointed at the beams, which were tinted a pale yellowish-green.
“Magnetic rays. They are controlled by the man you see seated at those levers. He is using the beams to manipulate the thoughts of his victims.”
“And he really believes all this?” The whole thing was preposterous, Hawkwood thought.
“Most assuredly, and yet this is the same man who produced these splendid architectural drawings. If you knew nothing of Matthews’ circumstances, and someone else had shown you these plans, I’d wager that you’d never for one moment suspect the artist was of unsound mind. Am I right?”
Hawkwood stared down at the designs. There was little else he could do except agree.
“You understand what I am saying?” Locke said.
“I think you’re telling me,” Hawkwood said, “that, unless you happen to know the colonel’s history, to look at him there’s no way to tell that he’s mad.”
Locke nodded. “Essentially, yes. He can formulate ideas and arguments, but in his case it’s as though – how can I put it? – his thoughts and feelings, even his memories, have been taken over by an outside force. To the colonel, it would be as though messages are being forced into his brain.”
Hawkwood hesitated, trying to grasp the implications. “Messages? You mean he thinks people are talking to him, telling him to do things? Like … what? Voices in his head?” Even as he posed the question, he thought the idea sounded ludicrous, but to his surprise the apothecary nodded.
“And these … voices … told him to murder the priest?”
Locke made a face. “A simplification, but, yes, I do believe that might account for his actions. Not unlike Matthews and his revolutionaries.”
“Tell me about the priest,” Hawkwood said.
The apothecary’s face seemed to sag. He suddenly looked older than his years. “There you have me. The Reverend Tombs was here because I chose to disregard the hospital’s regulations.” He looked up. “Ironic, wouldn’t you say?”
“What are you telling me, Doctor?”
&
nbsp; Locke sighed. “A hundred years ago, the superintendent thought it would be a good idea if visiting days were introduced, allowing the public to interact with patients. The scheme proved very popular. The crowds flocked, the patients flourished. But then the gawkers began to arrive, and with the gawkers came the pedlars and the pickpockets and the pulpit bashers, not to mention the doxies. Come to Bedlam, pay tuppence and watch the lunatics perform. What fun! It wasn’t long before Bethlem became just another attraction, like the Tower and the Abbey. So, the visits were stopped. No more sightseers, no more pedlars, and no more preachers. It was the governors’ fear that their sermons were as likely to inflame the patients as pacify them.”
“But you didn’t agree?”
Locke steepled his fingers. “On the contrary. At the time, they were probably right. It’s hard enough trying to keep the poor devils quiet as it is, without having some irate Wesleyan ranting up and down the corridors. But there are preachers and there are preachers. I am not a particularly God-fearing man, Officer Hawkwood, but I’m quite prepared to believe in the efficacy of prayer and contemplation as a means of calming the fevered mind. Not that it works in every case, of course. But, in certain instances, I would consider the taking of counsel to be very therapeutic. And they do say, after all, that confession is good for the soul, do they not?”
“They might also say that ten o’clock at night was an odd time to be hearing someone’s confession.”
The apothecary flattened his palms on the desk. “The governors’ ruling still applies. Although I personally saw no harm in the Reverend Tombs’s visits, I felt that a certain amount of discretion was advisable. At that time of night there are fewer staff around, not so many eyes to see or mouths to spread idle tittle-tattle. Though I understand that on this occasion Reverend Tombs was a little later than he had intended. He told Attendant Leech he’d been attending to parish matters. A burial, I believe it was.”