Bedlam

by Greg Hollingshead

  What chance sanity against enemies so devoted?

  First called to the stand were our new steward Mr. Wallet and our new matron Mrs. Forbes. Both fresh to their posts, neither hesitated to condemn everything ever done at Bethlem before their own merciful arrival. So enthusiastic a scourge was Wallet that he swore Monro is absent three months at a time and the subcommittee has never toured the place in its entire history, let alone every thirty days, as the rules state they must. This from a man who hadn’t been on the premises three months. On the positive side, we heard about his own enlightened initiatives, such as getting patients out of bed in the morning and to the stove room, until you thought, This fellow will go far.

  Mrs. Forbes began by asserting she was hired because we wanted somebody “humane” (a word that as a member of the committee that hired her I don’t recall needing to be spoken). She then claimed she’d found patients lying abed four days in the week, clean patients confined as dirty, calm patients chained to walls, recalcitrant patients answered with violence from the keepers (who enchain, according to her, left and right without consulting anybody), and the apothecary—looking straight at me—giving nothing but powders, and then with a baffling reluctance.

  In all it was a churlish, ungrateful day of testimony by tireless self-promoters, and I trudged out pretty besmirched.

  Next morning first thing I went to see Matthews, to congratulate him on his journal having reached the committee.

  He brightened. “That was my doing, Jack. Wallet was pleased to deliver it direct from my hand to Rose’s. Have they grilled you on it yet?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a rack they’ll split you on.”

  “A Procrustean bed, you mean.”

  He didn’t hear this, having an announcement to make. “I’ve decided to tell you why I’m in.”

  “Good,” I said, my voice thin with calm.

  “But the day after I do, you must do something for me: A personal tour of New Bethlem, leaving here at two in the afternoon.”

  “Happily, James. Once you see for yourself what your improving suggestions have wrought, you’ll be grateful to live there. It’ll be your own Imperias Palace on earth.”

  “Once I tell you why I’m in, Jack,” he said, ignoring this, “you’ll be still more vulnerable to destruction than now.”

  “You mean the truth won’t set me free?”

  “Not this truth, before this crowd.”

  “Why sceptical of so virtuous a man as Wakefield, James? Surely your welfare’s at the top of his list.”

  “I don’t like his presumption to know what my welfare is. There’s a new breed of tyranny on its way, Jack. The coercion I’m used to is the fruit of corruption. Mushrooms on the dungheap. Nobody intends it except the brutes, but that’s their nature. What’s coming is coercion organized behind bland eyes, with all the good rational folk staunch in support.”

  “Hear, hear.”

  “They will destroy you, Jack. Listen—” He meant to the workmen, who were starting that week to demolish the main building, beginning at the far end of the women’s wing, now almost empty, and moving inexorably in our direction. “They’re tearing down your old haunt.”

  “They’re only tearing down my old haunt because my new haunt’s almost ready. James, you sound like an old man, to be suspicious of what’s coming, when what you’ve had here is—” There was no need to say more, only indicate our surroundings. “Let me remind you what awaits you in St. George’s Fields—with no small thanks to your unstinting advice to Architect Lewis—”

  “I’m used to it here, Jack. I’d rather be up against you than a Wakefield any day. In your abstracted care than his willed.”

  This statement I found shocking. I had no idea what answer to make to it. “You mean Blue-Mantle—” I attempted to correct him.

  “No, I mean Wakefield. There’s a reason Blue-Mantle chose him.”

  “And what is it?”

  “What do you think?”

  “James, this is sentiment. You must not prefer what I’ve done to you to anything in this world or any other. It would be unnatural.”

  “I only prefer it to what’s coming.”

  “You don’t know what’s coming.”

  “I know one thing: the end of you as apothecary to Bethlem. It’s too evident, Jack, and it must be glaring in the new building, that you no longer belong. So the question now is, how easiest to effect your removal? I know. We’ll hobble you against their questions.”

  “That’s why I’m here, James. To be further hobbled.”

  “Very well. You shall be.”

  “Proceed. I’m every inch ears.”

  Matthews opened his mouth, then closed it. He put a hand to his head. I told him I could come back another time, when he felt stronger. He nodded. I took my leave.

  TESTIMONY

  Almost a week passed in which I was overwhelmed by duties arising from the transfer of patients to New Bethlem (in fours, in hackney carriages). But I did find an hour Thursday morning to drink coffee at the Baltic in Threadneedle Street with Jerdan, whose investigations had confirmed old Liverpool’s dealings with revolutionists in the days before things went to the dogs over there and like Pitt he turned vociferously anti-French.

  “Which is only to be expected,” I said. “Politicians leg it from failure.”

  “They soon actively wanted war, to install an English ruler in France.”

  “That was ambitious—”

  “Guess who.”

  “David Williams.”

  “Very amusing. The Duke of York.”

  “What? The King’s ox of a second son? The soldier’s friend, who loves nothing more than a filthy joke? The one who struts about with his shoulders pinned so far back his centre of gravity drags behind him like a train?”

  “What better puppet?”

  “But this is bizarre, fantasy King-pleasing, not treason.”

  “No, but true enough and not widely known—not a rumour. And there was something else, something so outrageous, unbelievable, or otherwise shocking that nobody I have access to has more than intimations.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  “By my infallible journalist’s secret sense. By the curiously dense space of uneasy silence that surrounds the name of the 1st Earl of Liverpool like a dirty fog.”

  “That’s not much to know. He made everybody uneasy. He was an uneasy man.”

  “I assure you, John,” Jerdan answered, looking at his watch, “it’s more than that. Liverpool intended to live forever. But how? Was it by raising a scrupulous yet somehow undemurring son to do his posthumous bidding? One thing I do know, John. No more in those days than now was love lost between our gentlefolk and the monarchy—”

  “What are you saying? Everybody knows the 1st Earl was a loyal friend to the King, his most vocal defender.”

  “Yes, but why so emphatically? And what’s easier for a politician than words, any words? John, I’m saying a treasonous scheme wouldn’t surprise me. I’m saying your lunatic has knowledge of more than the usual sculduddery of war-time politics, and it has made him a danger to men still alive and still in power. Unfortunately, my sources are now dry as mummied quims. If you’d know more, I suggest you pay a call on our Prime Minister to express your delirious gratitude for his gift of a new hospital, and while you’re at it sound him for what error of his father’s he’s still mopping up after. You don’t need to walk in making accusations. Just sound him.”

  Finding this an over-daunting task and not liking the presumption of treason, I told Jerdan I’d think about it but with the transfer to the new place was lately up to my ears in work.

  “Not evasion, this, John, eh?” he replied, eyeing me. “You do still want to know why your man’s in, don’t you?”

  “Assuredly. But do you know how much effort it is to move a hospital single-handed?”

  He only shook his head and reached for his coat, saying, “A great deal, no doubt. And you’ll get
round to the Prime Minister in your spare time—”

  That was Thursday.

  On Monday it was Monro’s turn to climb up on the stand—the only one he got, which was a good thing, because his first impulse was to blame everything on me: abuses of patients by keepers, errors in the administration of medicine, deaths of patients nobody told him were sick (because he wasn’t there to tell), and of course the imposition of restraints, viz., “I mentioned to Mr. Haslam that I thought there might be a diminution of the restraints, but he always mentioned to me that there would be mischief, and that I should be responsible for any accident.” When not blaming or contradicting me, my colleague showed himself wonderfully incapable of the sort of answer expected in a reforming age. For example, when asked if there might not be thought something indiscriminate about a universal spring regimen of bleeding, purging, and vomiting, his response was that this had been the invariable practice at Bethlem since long before his time, having been handed down to him by his father and his father before him, and to be honest, for himself, he’d never been able to think of anything better to do.

  No sooner was this remarkable admission abroad in the room than he confided, “You know, I really don’t depend a vast deal upon medicine. I don’t think it’s the sheet anchor, though it may be necessary to give it at particular times. The disease is not cured by it, in my opinion, and if I’m obliged to make that public, then I must do so.”

  It’s true, Tom. The medicines don’t work as cures and never did. Yet if now and then certain over-sanguine, or too-ambitious, elements in the profession must be reminded of this stark fact, it don’t mean the head of a public hospital needs to stand up and announce it to a parliamentary committee.

  The irony, of course, was that our inquisitors, being already thoroughly sold by Tuke and his disciples on the genteel treatment of lunatics as the only authentic means of cure, were more dead-set against medicines than Monro ever was, nay, against any medical treatment of madness at all. What shocked them was not the sentiment but the contradiction of his position it betrayed. Monro behaved like a simpleton, but that didn’t mean he could have saved himself if he didn’t.

  Now I was braced for anything at all to come out of his mouth, and it was a good thing I was, because when they asked him why he sanctioned irons at Bethlem but not at his own private madhouse in Hackney, Monro, looking poleaxed, exclaimed, “Why, if a gentleman was put into irons, he wouldn’t like it!” When invited to expand upon this might-be-thought archaic response, he confessed, “I am not at all accustomed to gentlemen in irons. It’s a thing totally abhorrent to my feelings.”

  Universal silence.

  Finally, to conclude his testimony, just to make sure everybody went away knowing that the brain of a third-generation-at-the-helm can lack a grasp of elementary historical facts just as easily as it can contemporary expectations of one in a high position of public trust, he graced us with two staggeringly candid answers:

  Q: Do you know anything, Dr. Monro, of the age of Bethlem Hospital? Was there any establishment for lunatics previous to the present one?

  A: I really cannot tell.

  Q: Do you know whether there are any records of this hospital existing?

  A: I do not know.

  Few collegial experiences can strike dismay in the heart like watching a man you’ve worked with so long he’s familiar to you as your own prick exhibit himself in public as the perfect numbskull you knew he was within the first minute you met him. When spurning is not on the cards, familiarity breeds contempt, yes, but also a sort of connivance, to muffle the irritation. But then one day you see exposed to unforgiving daylight the viperish nincompoop you’ve been in bed with all these years and think, But I knew this. How could I have chose to forget it? And then you think: Good God, what else have I chose to forget?

  Next morning I saw Matthews. Though I hadn’t told him when I’d come, he seemed to have a monarch’s privileged access to knowing. When I entered his cell, he was regally sprawled on his Omni Imperias Throne, like one ready to tell his story. I told him of Monro’s performance. He smiled. “They’re going to get you too, Jack.”

  I smiled back. “You think so?”

  He nodded, still smiling. “But just to be sure, you need to be told why I’m in.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  By this time it was the second week of May, with the city grown unseasonably sweltering. Owing to the stench of the drains (which, now that they approached the end of their use, hadn’t so completely stopped being bearable that you didn’t suspect the only reason they’d ever been was they had to be) and the crises and overwork and broken sleep that went with evacuating the residents of an entire hospital amidst the uproar of its demolition during a government inquiry against everything it ever stood for, Matthews’ narrative jigged through my mind like a Punch and Judy show through a mobbed fairgrounds in a failing twilight.

  Having followed his friend and tutor in radicalism, David Williams, to Paris in the autumn of 1792 to accomplish what he could in the way of preventing war between England and France, Matthews returned alone to London at the beginning of January to arrange a meeting between Lord Grenville, the British foreign secretary, and his friend Williams, when he would return in February. To do this, Matthews met on the ninth with our Prime Minister, Mr. Pitt. And none too soon, because the next time Matthews sought an interview with him, only a week later, the belaced tea-drinker (as he called him) was already in the clutches of the gang—a circumstance proved to Matthews’ satisfaction when Pitt’s secretary refused to see him again. Which also (Matthews assured me) explained the mystery of how Pitt came to make his famous volte-face from gracious friend of liberty to heartless despot.

  “James, I should think our Prime Minister’s change of views on liberty had more to do with French predations on the Continent. For example, their advance on Antwerp.”

  “No, Jack. The other way around. War was only the second of two fatal consequences of Pitt’s refusal to see me again. The first consequence preceded the war by eleven days, not five after Pitt’s refusal. Do you remember what happened on January 21st, 1793, and what you were doing when you heard?”

  “Doesn’t everybody? I was living with Sarah in Shoreditch. Young John was not long born. I’d just come out of a public lecture, by Dr. Hunter. It was the buzz in the foyer. The French had executed their King.”

  “And ten days later declared war on Holland and Britain.”

  “You’re telling me the execution of Louis XVI and our subsequent war with France were both consequences of Pitt’s refusal to see you in January of 1793.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What was it you wanted to say to the Prime Minister?”

  “It was hardly a matter of ‘say,’ Jack.”

  “What, then? Ask? Deliver? Do?”

  “I had already delivered. Though I didn’t know it at the time, the gang had been kiteing him ever since. Kiteing is when they employ their magnetic impregnations to lift into the brain some particular idea—here, war with France—so it floats and undulates in the intellect for hours together, fixing the victim’s attention to the exclusion of all other thoughts. Pitt was not himself. He would have tried harder to prevent the war.”

  “What, James, had you delivered?”

  “Money and royal jewels from the French, against an Allied advance.”

  “You delivered a French bribe not to press the war?”

  He nodded. “I’d set it up in September with Liverpool, before I first went to France.”

  “An odd sort of diplomacy, don’t you think?”

  Instead of answering, he told me a story of Williams’ refusing to present Grenville with a letter from the French foreign secretary Lebrun, in fact, washing his hands of the entire business, and I begun to see why he felt so abandoned and betrayed by his former mentor. When he next told me his response to this impasse was to return quick to Paris, I said, “Without papers? What did your wife think of all this heading off to the
Continent in war time?”

  “Margaret didn’t like it any more than I did. It always pained me to leave her, which she knew. She worried for my safety.”

  “Did she agree with your politics?”

  “She’s my wife, Jack, and stands by me. I’m seeing her soon.”

  I answered nothing to this. What I thought was, For your sake, my friend, I hope so. It had been only two months since I wrote her myself, not enough time for my letter to reach Jamaica, let alone an answer back. Then I said, “James, you don’t know that.”

  “But I do.”

  “The next letter that comes from her, I promise you, you’ll see it.”

  “No, Jack. This is not about letters getting through. You can’t be both arbitrary and just. You can’t act like a caring fellow all on a whim. That style of governance may feel natural to the one in power, but the name for it is tyranny, and tyranny’s the reason it makes no difference whether Margaret’s in Savannah la Mar or London, because either way when she writes a loving word to me she has no way to know if I will ever read it.”

  “Is that where she still is? Savannah la Mar?”

  He shook his head, more in exasperation I would say than denial—I hoped it meant he’d received something from her, something lately—and seemed ready to return to his story, but talk of Margaret had upset him, and that was all for today.

  CORNWALL

  WESTMORELAND, JAMAICA

  JANUARY 9TH, 1816

  Dearest Jamie,

  You arrive in a new place and getting used to everything keeps you so busy it never occurs to you it’s not always been the way it is now and won’t always be. With everything a new encounter, who thinks of novelty or change? What a surprise therefore when last week Cornwall turned topsy-turvy. No sooner did we receive, just before Christmas, word from London Mr. Lewis had died, than who should arrive in a curricle and pair with a gig for his fierce-looking servant, two black boys we never saw before riding mules, and eight oxen to haul his baggage, but Mr. Lewis’s son Matt, to view his inheritance. Such an uproar his arrival threw us into! The news travelling as if by mindsight, all work was immediately dropped, and every white, black, goose, and dog went pelting to greet his new master.