Bedlam

by Greg Hollingshead

  That made it six against five, with three to be determined. Fair enough odds, at least on the face of it. Had Lambeth bothered to show, they would have been even.

  I wondered if the gang had moved the Air Loom in closer, even so far as into the building, or if they’d bother, being already well represented in person, as it were. Closer is better, inside is best, but no man or woman within a hundred feet of the machine is safe from its worst effects.

  “Shall we begin?” The chairman’s name was Wood. Having every appearance of a London broker doing his duty on a public committee that he never wanted to be on, he was one of the two governors manifestly inhabited. Anybody unwilling to do what he’s doing is easily taken over. In this he resembled Haslam, with the significant difference that by the time Wood is more than a hundred feet from these premises, he’ll be himself again. Haslam it’ll take more than a walk out to free of The Schoolmaster.

  I nodded, peering at him close, trying to make out which agent it was.

  He cleared his throat but never swallowed. This was a ploy, for inhabited ones swallowing make a tell-tale sound like the creaking of a wicker basket when you compress it with both hands.

  “Very well—” He was scanning down a list of questions undoubtedly prepared for him by The Schoolmaster, the only one in the room with anything like full knowledge of my case. (The gang sometimes refer to him as The Recorder, for his skill in shorthand, and indeed he pretends to register everything that passes. These exertions he calls dictating, by which he endeavours to intrude his style of being upon my own.) “May we ask first, Mr. Matthews, your views on the current political situation in France?”

  “I have no views on that situation, sir,” I soberly replied. “My own affords me no prospects of it.”

  The subtlety of this answer passing Wood by, he seemed satisfied. As he looked to the next question on his list, I turned to my friends to see how I was doing. Staveley, who used to be so dropsical I never expected him to live to be thirty but looks fine now, give me a thumbs-up.

  “But you have in the past concerned yourself with that situation, have you not, Mr. Matthews? Did you not on more than one occasion travel to that country, and were you not imprisoned there for your activities, indeed for some time?”

  “Yes, I was. And now bitterly regret that involvement.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because it’s parted me from my family and friends.”

  The elision confused him. “But you’re not still in France—?”

  “No, sir, only still imprisoned.”

  “And this has been a source of suffering for you, has it, Mr. Matthews, this im—this separation from your family and friends?”

  “Yes, sir, it has. And remains so. Most grievously.”

  Now Jack the Schoolmaster, who was sitting next to Wood, with his arms crossed against his chest and his chair tipped back on two legs, thudded forward and leaned over to say something in his ear. It was as Wood tipped his head to hear what The Schoolmaster had to tell him that I caught a glimpse of the agent in charge there, and to my amazement it was the one they call Augusta. I would know that sharp, powderless countenance anywhere.

  Having apparently been directed by The Schoolmaster what line of questioning to pursue next, Wood (or I should say, Augusta) said, “Mr. Matthews, do you know why you’re a patient in this hospital?”

  “I do.” Again I looked around and was heartened to receive encouraging looks from my friends.

  “And what is that reason?”

  Though I next had every intention (having every need) to say clearly what my reason was, the question even as I made to answer it was toppled from view by a succession of mental cascades not unlike diarrheal purges.

  “The reason—ah—” It was no use. I had forgot the question. Worse, by a mounting paralysis in my tongue I knew I was being not only brain-said but fluid-locked (as they call it), which means they were simultaneously working the Air Loom to constrict the fibres of my mouth-parts. I couldn’t have spoke even if I had any idea what I wanted to say. This must have been the doing of The Schoolmaster, Augusta having nothing like the necessary skill.

  “Yes, sir. The reason. Why you’re here.”

  Monro’s hat was pulled down over his face so I couldn’t see who was in there. To further throw me off, he was pretending to sketch away. On his right hand The Schoolmaster sat hunched, swarthy-jowled, his eyes drilling into me, insinuating his influence. Here it might well be asked how he could be right in front of me, effectually brain-saying me direct and yet at the same time fluid-locking me by means of the machine, and I admit it was unaccountable, like a contradiction in a nightmare—but does it wake you? I can only think another gang member was working the machine, one, like Augusta, under such strict supervision by The Schoolmaster that her fluid-locking was emitting waft after waft of his mental effluvia. I confess it surprised me to realize that as merely the gang’s recorder, not to mention one not very skilled at the machine—which for that reason they seldom let him near—he was capable of so much influence. Then again, I should not forget the victim was myself, who as a recorder in my own right have long been his particular prey.

  Once more I glanced round at my friends, whose faces now showed not so much encouragement as consternation and alarm. If Dunbar looked queasy before, he was nauseated now. Staveley looked in dire need of a drink. The baboon man gazed back at me impassive about the face, but in his eyes was something like concern. As for Justina Latimer, she glanced at me smiling when I turned, but I would say this was less to do with me than a studied pose for the admiration of those members of the committee who kept sneaking peeks.

  Shaken, I turned back to Wood. As I did, a drop of that same sweat departed the end of my nose, and my tongue caught it. A good thing, for the salty elixir seeming the courage of my own mother’s unending labour distilled, it had the magical virtue of instantly unlocking my mouth-parts. “I’m here,” I declared, “for you to do your worst, you hard-favoured, magnet-working cunt.”

  Mr. Wood blinked at this and seemed to take note of the appellation.

  Strictly, what I had said was untrue. Augusta’s principal duties are keeping in touch with gangs in the West End and influencing the female sex with her brain-sayings, which by the way are invariably in French, a language cunningly devised to insinuate depravity in the female mind. She seldom takes a hand at the machine, let alone deploys the magnet, and clearly she was not doing so at this moment. But I felt it was best, everything considered, and with Jack the Schoolmaster so fierce on the job, to strike back hard as I could. Though Augusta is every inch the country tradesman’s wife and always starts out friendly and cajoling, the instant she knows she won’t get her own way, she spews at you the most scabrous malignance. I knew full well I’d pay dear for my blunt taunt, but I was heartily sick and tired of being pushed and pulled every which way by these dreadful bullies.

  I didn’t have long to wait. Already probing for attention was a mounting tickle in my anus, by which I deduced they were pushing up the quicksilver, as they call it, a means they have (among many) of disarming any expression of indignation at their perfidy. Still I resolved to fight on.

  “You know as well as I do,” I said, “I’m here to be destroyed by a notorious gang of Air-Loom-working magnetic spies, of which you yourself are not an unsignificant member.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Wood said. “Heirloom-working spies?”

  “Air-Loom-working spies, yes.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you.”

  “And how, Mr. Matthews, do these spies ‘work’ these heirlooms?”

  “I am unable to respond to that question,” I told him.

  “And why is that, sir?”

  “It would not serve the matter at hand.”

  This answer elicited from The Schoolmaster a lively outpouring of whisperings into the ear of Wood, who scarcely had patience to hear him out before he declared, in a state of heightened irritation, “The mat
ter at hand, sir, is your mental competence. Whether these spies exist or not must surely have bearing on that fundamental question.”

  “No, sir,” I replied. “It’s universally acknowledged there always have been and always will be spies among us. That, alas, is not enough to prevent anybody from being a lunatic.”

  “But if a fellow believes there are spies of a kind and in a place there ain’t,” another governor put in, “mayhap he just might be a lunatic?” This was uttered at a high pitch of nervous exasperation, but so struck was the speaker at the sound of his own whinging voice in the room he immediately lost heart and ended weaker than he started. But at least you knew he spoke direct for himself and was not one who’d been taken over.

  “But if,” I said, addressing him in the tone of gentle reasonableness one assumes with a feeble-minded friend, “he believes there ain’t spies when there are, surely he’s the madder, when everybody knows there have been, are, and ever will be.”

  Now another spoke up. “But what of these gangs? How do you mean they work heirlooms? What are they? Antiquaries? Smugglers? That’s a straightforward question, by God!”

  “And here’s a straightforward answer, sir. Our politicians are lackeys and traitors and the royal family a set of treasonous usurpers, and the reason—”

  Here again what I next meant to say crumbled and fell away out of view. As on occasion one will fade from a pressing scene of affairs into a succession of lethargies, I found myself in a slow tumble from one swoon to the next. Evidently, Augusta had chose to wreak her vengeance on me sooner rather than later. To this end she’d brazenly taken over The Schoolmaster’s saying of my brain by sucking it. (Brain-sucking is a process by which, after first using the Air Loom to apply a magnetic attachment from their brain to yours, they make a vacuum out of their own and so withdraw from yours the entirety of its thought-contents.)

  “Sir? You were saying? The reason—?”

  That Augusta should have hit on this moment to do what she was doing was shocking in the extreme but hardly surprising—unlike what happened next, though even it had many precedents in the shameful history of this gang.

  “Mr. Matthews, will you please answer the question?”

  “I cannot, sir. I have lost my—”

  “Power of intellection, sir? Is that what you mean to say? And is that not the reason you’re here? Yes? No? Won’t answer? Then let me ask you this—”

  Though at first sight, The Schoolmaster’s and Augusta’s impositions might seem as nonsensical as they were shameless, they did have a consequence in keeping with their ultimate goal, for the question Wood next asked was so preposterous there was nothing I could say or do but pour my every ounce of strength into a straight face.

  What question was it, you ask? Reader, hold on to your hat.

  “Do you count yourself grateful, Mr. Matthews, for the treatment you have received while at this hospital?”

  The extreme effect of this question on me owed less to its pre-posterousness than to the immediate solution it provided to the mystery of twelve years of random kindnesses from The Schoolmaster: all to engineer at this moment a touch of the forelock (were it not shaved off) and a “That I do, sir.” It’s marvellous how an entire history will come pouring into a single instant.

  A proper understanding of what happened next was granted me only days later, on a nauseous sick flood of horror. For that tickle at my anus had not been them pushing up the quicksilver, as I’d foolishly imagined, but rather someone at the machine—likely The Glove Woman—insinuating into my fundament an exotic form of the magnetic fluid, obtainable only by an unspeakable process called gaz-plucking, by which such fluid, having been rarified and sublimed by its continuance in the bowels of a lunatic, they make use of the Air Loom to extract in a gradual way, bubble by bubble. This, reaching my vitals at the precise moment Chairman Wood put to me his outrageous question, caused the muscles of my face to screw into a fixed grin. It’s a process the gang call laugh-making, and in my weakened mental condition, I was its helpless victim, falling off my chair with my face locked in such a horrible grimace of hilarity as to throw the entire proceedings into unadjournable uproar. By the time I was carted from the room, my face, tongue, and brain were froze fast, with nothing remaining in my mental realm save the dumbstruck faces of my supporters, like kites snapping stiff against vanquished skies.

  BETHLEM HOSPITAL

  (NOW—I MUST FACE IT—MY LAST LONG HOME)

  13TH OF AUGUST, 1809

  Dearest Mags,

  I know by my Air-Loom-induced susceptibility to that Influencing Engine how sorely I have disappointed you all. No words can express my regret in having done so, and undoubtedly no words will, for the chances you ever read this are as good as nil. But even inside here, hope like a precious plate keeps springing from the shelf to smash again, and so I take up my pen to beg that you assure Jim I did everything in my power to withstand their brain-saying, thought-working, etc. If it had been only (only!?) The Middleman at the controls and the rest of them simply queering the game by owling me from the safety of the living empty shells of selected governors, I might have prevailed, but with the double-barrelled assault on my thinking substance by The Schoolmaster and Augusta, plus The Glove Woman laugh-making me by insinuating fingerlings of hilarity into my lower orifice, it was more than any human being could hope to withstand.

  But rest assured, my Dearest Ones, I am recovering, though slowly, and yes, even learning to grow a little reconciled to the now certain knowledge I shall never leave this dreadful place again. Please tell Jim how sorry I am to have let him down.

  Your husband lately doomed by a shocking alliance of superhuman forces,

  James

  P.S. Why was Justina Latimer there?

  TWO VISITORS

  As another has said, I am not mad but my thoughts sometimes are.

  This unfortunately was not the opinion of the Bethlem subcommittee in the wake of my gang-infested hearing. They now declined to believe my friends would hold me, if they’d so adamantly argue I’m sane when I’m so manifestly not. My friends’ lack of judgment was considered by the committee a sign as bad as the one that in twelve years of punishment (in their word, treatment) for insanity, I have steadfastly refused to admit I suffer from that condition.

  In the weeks after my hearing, Robert Dunbar was allowed two visits to my sickbed. On both occasions the letters for me from Margaret he carried were taken away before he reached my cell, with assurances I’d see them once they were scrutinized. I’m still waiting. During Dunbar’s second visit, he reported that Camberwell Parish, which had high hopes my hearing would win my freedom, in their disappointment now refuse to pay the continuing cost of me, and are full on our side in support of my release at their discretion. This is why Robert Dunbar, in the company of William Law (a Camberwell churchwarden) and the baboon-faced man at my hearing (who it turns out is the new Camberwell overseer of the poor, one Joseph Sadler), waited on the committee to demand my release, suggesting I be removed from Bethlem and placed, until my harmlessness be established, in the Camberwell workhouse strong-room. (Justina, by the way, was not there with Sadler. Her presence remains as consternating a puzzle to Dunbar as to me.) When the committee’s response to Camberwell’s generous-minded offer was assorted demurrals and evasions (its composition being in the course of the usual rotation different from that of the one that first suggested I be handed over to Camberwell Parish for safe-keeping), the Camberwell officers declared, “In that case, Gentlemen, we have nothing more to do with him. Let us know the amount that is due, and we’ll tender it in bank notes. If you hold him, you hold him at your own expense.”

  As Sadler afterward reported to Dunbar, the committee’s response was hastily to refer the entire business to the next meeting of the Grand Committee, which was at Bridewell on October 4th, when Sadler and Law were a good deal surprised to hear several of the Bethlem subcommittee who attended declare I’m not only as insane as ever but too int
ransigent a lunatic ever to be allowed at large. The last of these to speak was Wood—or should I say Augusta—who stated outright he considers me highly dangerous to the safety of his Majesty. Haslam and Monro were there to grimly concur. Topping off the proceedings, the chairman of the Grand Committee stood up and read out a letter, dated September 7th, from Lord Liverpool (not the 1st Earl, who died last year, but his son, the 2nd Earl, as home secretary—the grave is nothing to these people), who recommended I be detained as a fit and proper patient of this hospital. Further, he committed the Government to relieving Camberwell Parish of all my expenses, including those of my funeral, should I die here.

  Where else do they now expect me to do it?

  Liverpool’s letter was the clincher and the matter settled. All my champions off the hook and not the shadow of a continued charge on anyone except the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who can afford it.

  So here I remain in my dank corner with an ulcer in my back that promises to kill me yet. Luckily my brain was so abused during my subcommittee interview that death itself has come to seem a little agreeable. So many lice—why go on scratching? Like all weavers, my mother was Melancholy’s shuttlecock, and so these days am I. The Schoolmaster says Melancholy’s a mosquito: Brush it away in haste and it leaves a festering sting. Allow it to drink its fill and it lumbers off harmless. I’m allowing it to drink its fill. Five weeks it’s taken me to letter the above account of what Dunbar reported on his two visits, every penstroke an application of will. As for engraving, it’s out of the question, I’m at too low an ebb. I confess at my darkest moments I wish I never had a son or was told I do, when it means my life in here is so grimly shadowed by the absence not just of Margaret but of one I never knew. Night and day I lie curled in a condition of mental torpor. The simplest thoughts and routinest sounds from the gallery arrive hedged with mystery, while every item in every newspaper touches on me. I never knew so many special editions.