The Lambs of London

by Peter Ackroyd

  MARY WENT STRAIGHT to her room, and locked the door. Oh there is Tizzy calling me down for tea. What shall it be today? India or China? I love the sound of the spoon in the cup. I love the tips of my fingers touching the rim of the cup. There was a knock upon the door. She put her face against it, sensing the coolness of the wood. “I will be coming in a moment, Tizzy.”

  “Don’t let it get cold, Miss Lamb.”

  “No. It will be hot.”

  She waited until Tizzy had descended the stairs, and then she unlocked the door. She closed it quietly behind her, and listened intently for any sound below.

  A few moments later Mary entered the kitchen, just as Mrs. Lamb was adjusting her husband’s napkin. “Sit down, Mary, and begin. I wonder you have lived in this house for so long and can still mistake the time. Why? What is it?” Mary was staring at her mother, opening and closing her mouth as if she had been suddenly deprived of speech. “Are you unwell?”

  Mr. Lamb started moaning—a low, constant moan—as Mary took up the teapot and held it in front of her as if she were defending herself. “Can you not see what it is?” She was addressing her father.

  “It is a teapot, Mary.” Mrs. Lamb went towards her, and took her by the wrists. “Put it down. This instant.”

  There was a sudden struggle, and the teapot fell upon the table scattering the water and leaves all over the dark wood. Mary snatched up the fork, used for toasting crumpets over the fire, and plunged it deep into her mother’s neck. Without a sound Mrs. Lamb fell to the floor. At this moment Charles entered the kitchen, with a happy “Buon giorno!”

  chapter fourteen

  My dearest de Quincey,

  You will have been informed by now of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. My poor dear dearest sister in a fit of insanity has been the death of her own mother. She is at present in a mad-house from where I fear she will be moved to a prison and, God forbid, to the scaffold. God has preserved me to my senses—I eat and drink and sleep, and have my judgement I believe very sound. My father is further distracted, of course, and I am left to take care of him and our maid-servant. Thank God I am very calm and composed, and able to do the best that remains to do. Write—as religious a letter as possible—but no mention of what is gone and done with. With me “the former things are passed away” and I have something more to do than to feel. I charge you, don’t think of coming to see me. Write. I will not see you if you come. God almighty love you and all of us—

  C. Lamb

  ONCE THE FIRST astonishment and dismay had passed, de Quincey lay fully clothed upon the bed and looked at the ceiling. Then he said aloud, “What a fine story!”

  A WEEK LATER , A coroner and jury were convened in an upstairs room of a public house in Holborn. Charles had arrived early, and was sitting in the front row of seats. The chamber was crowded with neighbours and spectators who had come to witness the demeanour of what the Westminster Gazette had called “this unhappy young woman.” There had never before been such a murder in Holborn.

  Mary was brought into the jury’s presence by the beadle of the district, together with his deputy and the doctor of a private mad-house in Hoxton where Mary was presently detained. Her woeful expression, and the subdued manner in which she followed the directions of the beadle and doctor, elicited general sympathy. The sequence of events was read out to the jury, and the doctor, Philip Girtin, was then questioned by the coroner. He stated that he had examined the young woman on three separate occasions and had concluded that she was not in her right mind. He informed the jury that her derangement had been provoked “by a too sensitive mind,” overwrought “by the harassing fatigues of too many duties.” William Ireland was not mentioned.

  “Is she in any position to endure a trial?” the coroner asked him.

  “Most certainly not, sir. She is not in the least able to withstand such an ordeal. It would push her deeper into lunacy from which it would prove difficult to extract her.”

  Throughout these proceedings Mary sat with her hands folded upon her lap. Occasionally she would look at Charles, but there was no expression upon her face.

  “What would you propose then, Doctor Girtin?”

  “I believe it best that this unfortunate female should be placed under my care in Hoxton. I do not believe that she is a danger to others, but I suggest that she be kept under restraint as long as I deem it to be necessary.”

  “In case—”

  “She may prove still to be a danger to herself.”

  THE JURY AGREED WITH the doctor’s conclusions. Mary was released into the custody of Philip Girtin, and in a ritual of the coroner’s court her arms were bound to her sides with a leather strap.

  When Charles left the public house, he feared that he would never see his sister again beyond the confines of the mad-house. As he walked back to Laystall Street he realised that he had been crying.

  CHARLES ’ S FEARS PROVED to be unfounded. In the care of Philip Girtin, Mary began to recover her senses. The doctor read to her from Gibbon and from Tyndale, and at those times it seemed to her that she was conversing again with her brother; he engaged her in games of cribbage and primero, to test her grasp of numeracy as well as literacy. She began to discuss with him the poems of Homer, and took great delight in quoting from Shakespeare.

  He had forbad Charles her presence, fearing that the associations would prove too painful, but after three months of her confinement he asked her brother to visit Hoxton. His study overlooked a garden where Mary and the other patients were sitting. “I have just returned from the Home Office,” he told him. “I have seen the Commissioner of Lunacy on the subject of your sister. He agrees with me that she will be secure in your company as long as you give your solemn engagement that you will take her under your care for life.”

  “Of course. That is the least—”

  “I require you to visit her here each evening for a period of a fortnight. I must know whether you excite her too much.”

  “I will remind her?”

  “Precisely. But if that test is passed, as I believe it will be, then we will proceed to her eventual release. All must be calm and orderly, Mr. Lamb.”

  Charles looked out of the window at her. She was sewing, occasionally looking up at the other patients.

  CHARLES MOVED TO A new house in Islington, beside the New River, and here Mary renewed her life of freedom. When he went to his employment in East India House, she was cared for by Tizzy’s niece; Tizzy had retired to a small property in Devizes, but had declared that she could not leave Charles and Mary in the hands of a “stranger.” Mr. Lamb had died from advanced senility a few months after his wife’s murder. His last words, muttered to Charles, had been, “And that’s true, too.”

  In new surroundings Mary remained for the most part calm and even serene. As Charles wrote to de Quincey soon after her arrival in Islington,

  My poor dear dearest sister is restored to her senses; to a dreadful sense and recollection of what has passed, awful to her mind, but tempered with a religious resignation and the reasonings of a sound judgement which knows how to distinguish between a deed committed in a transient fit of frenzy and the terrible guilt of a mother’s murder.

  In the evenings, after Charles’s return from Leadenhall Street, they sat together and conversed on every subject. Then by degrees they began to collaborate on writing stories taken from the plays of Shakespeare. They found it impossible to agree upon who had initiated the idea, each one trying to assign that honour to the other, but it proved remarkably successful. The first volume, published by Liveright & Elder, received much critical praise in Westminster Words, the Gentleman’s Magazine and the other periodicals.

  There were occasions, however, when Mary was not so composed. She had said to Charles, for example, “Thoughts come unbidden to me. Do you see them flying about the room?” Her distress grew more palpable and ominous. At these times Charles would accompany her over the fields to the private mad-house in Hoxton; she w
ould take her straitjacket with her, and willingly surrender herself to Philip Girtin. De Quincey had written to Charles, after hearing of one such episode:

  I look upon you as a man called by sorrow and anguish and by a strange desolation of hopes, into quietness, and a soul set apart, and made peculiar to God.

  THE FIRE STARTED in the bookshop by William Ireland, on that fateful Sunday, had claimed no victims.

  “I smell sausages,” Rosa Ponting had said.

  “No, my love. That is smoke.” Samuel Ireland had walked to the top of the staircase, and had seen the flames in the bookshop.

  “Oh my lord,” was all he said.

  He rushed over and grabbed Rosa just as she was about to take up a roasted egg from the fender. “Wherever are we going, Sammy? What is it?”

  “Out. Up.”

  He pushed her out of the room, and hauled her up the two flights of stairs to their bedroom. The window here looked over a neighbour’s balcony in Holborn Passage. “I cannot squeeze through that, Sammy. I really cannot do it.”

  “Very well. Do you want to be boiled like suet?”

  He thrust open the window, breaking its sash in the process, and somehow she managed to press herself through the available space.

  Shortly after they escaped, the whole house was consumed in flame.

  THE SHAKESPEARIAN PAPERS were destroyed. That had been William’s intention. Soon after the fire he had written a letter to his father—who, with Rosa, had moved to Winchelsea—in which he asked for forgiveness.

  That I have been guilty of a fault in giving you the manuscripts, I confess and am sorry for it. But I must at the same time assure you that it was done without a bad intention, or even a thought of what would ensue. As you have repeatedly stated to me that “truth will find its basis” even so will your character, notwithstanding any malignant aspersion, soon appear unblemished in the eyes of the world.

  Samuel Ireland never replied to his son.

  William then published a sixpenny pamphlet entitled The Recent Fabrications of Shakespeare Exposed and Explained by Mr. W. H. Ireland Who is Himself the Sole Agent and Actor of These False Transactions. He concluded his account with a “general apology” in which he stated that “I did not intend injury to anyone. I really injured no one. I did not produce the papers from any pecuniary motive. I by no means benefitted by the papers,” and added that “Being scarcely seventeen years and a half old my boyhood should have in some measure screened me from the malice of my persecutors.” A paragraph in the Morning Chronicle aptly summarised the public response to this production. “W. H. Ireland has come forward and announced himself author of the papers attributed by him to Shakespeare; which, if true, proves him to be a liar.”

  IN THE SUMMER of 1804 Mary Lamb suffered one of her more prolonged attacks. She had been confined in the mad-house for several weeks when Philip Girtin spoke to Charles, who had been visiting his sister.

  “She needs occupation,” he said. “Entertainment.”

  “What do you suggest, Doctor Girtin?”

  “She has told me that she once directed a play with you and your friends. Is that correct?”

  “Certainly. We were rehearsing some scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when—when she became ill.”

  “Can you not revive them? It may offer her some sense of life as, how can I put it, continuous.”

  So Charles had persuaded Tom Coates and Benjamin Milton to present with him a slimmer version of the play of the mechanicals. They had been wary of entering a private mad-house, but Charles had emphasised to them the cleanliness, brightness and good order of Philip Girtin’s establishment. “Besides,” he said, “I am sure that it will greatly assist Mary in her recovery.”

  So they agreed to take on the roles of Pyramus and Thisbe, while Charles would “double” as Bottom and the Wall. On one Sunday afternoon, in late spring, they donned their costumes in an adjacent parlour and then appeared before a group of Girtin’s patients who were sitting on small chairs in the communal dining-chamber, some fifteen of them, including Mary Lamb. The males were all dressed in black coats, white waistcoats, black silk breeches and stockings. Their hair was powdered and frizzed, to accentuate the extraordinary neatness of their appearance. The ladies were dressed in no less elegant style with embroidered cotton gowns, green shawls and mob-caps.

  Charles had decided to vary the theatrical entertainment with some passages from the speeches of Theseus and Oberon in the same play; but he would leave out the lines of Theseus concerning

  The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

  Are of imagination all compact.

  All appeared to be going well, except that the audience had the habit of sitting solemnly through the comic scenes and laughing heartily at the more serious perorations. Mary Lamb, sitting in the front row, seemed to delight in all the impersonations. She particularly enjoyed the performance of Benjamin Milton as Thisbe, and laughed out loud when he chanted his lament over the body of Pyramus:

  “This cherry nose,

  These yellow cowslip cheeks,

  Are gone, are gone!

  Lovers, make moan;

  His eyes were green as leeks!”

  She only grew restless when her brother stepped forward in the role of Oberon and began to recite the final speech:

  “To the best bride-bed will we,

  Which by us shall blessed be;

  And the issue there create

  Ever shall be fortunate.”

  She sighed very loudly when he spoke the line, “Ever true in loving be,” and then suddenly leaned forward as if intending to pray. But her arms were dangling by her sides. As Tom Coates said later, “She died as quietly as she had lived.” The cause of her death was later pronounced to be “disorder of the arteries.”

  WILLIAM IRELAND DID NOT abandon the world of writing. He published more than sixty-seven books, among them Ballads in Imitation of the Antients and Neglected Genius. A Poem Illustrating the Untimely and Unfortunate Fate of Many British Poets. Containing Imitations of Their Different Styles.

  He also opened a subscription library in Kennington. Among the books that he sent out to borrowers was Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb. He never again alluded to his own Shakespearian adventure. But every year, on the anniversary of Mary Lamb’s death, he left a bouquet of red flowers beside her grave at St. Andrew’s, Holborn. Charles Lamb grew old in the service of the East India Company, together with Tom Coates and Benjamin Milton, and was buried in the same churchyard.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PETER ACKROYD is a master of the historical novel: The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde won the Somerset Maugham Award; Hawksmoor was awarded both the Whitbread Novel of the Year and the Guardian fiction prize; and Chatterton was short-listed for the Booker Prize. His most recent historical novel was The Clerkenwell Tales. He is also the author of Shakespeare: The Biography and the Ackroyd’s Brief Lives series.

  ALSO BY PETER ACKROYD

  Fiction

  The Great Fire of London

  The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

  Hawksmoor

  Chatterton

  First Light

  English Music

  The House of Doctor Dee

  Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem

  Milton in America

  The Plato Papers

  The Clerkenwell Tales

  Nonfiction

  Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag:

  The History of an Obsession

  London: The Biography

  Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

  Biography

  Ezra Pound and His World

  T. S. Eliot

  Dickens

  Blake

  The Life of Thomas More

  Shakespeare: The Biography

  Ackroyd’s Brief Lives

  Chaucer

  J.M.W. Turner

  Poetry

  Ouch!

  The Diversions of Purley and Other P
oems

  Criticism

  Notes for a New Culture

  The Collection: Journalism, Reviews,

  Essays, Short Stories, Lectures

  edited by Thomas Wright

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2007

  Copyright © 2006 by Peter Ackroyd

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ackroyd, Peter, 1949–

  The Lambs of London / Peter Ackroyd.—1st. ed. in the U.S.A.