Bedlam

by Greg Hollingshead

  Such a schoolboyish little man Matt Lewis is! Almost a dwarf, with big flat watery buggish eyes, supercilious nostrils, crooked teeth, dire breath, and an exceeding languid manner, and yet he’s tremendously witty (in four or five languages, as far as I can tell) and seems awfully kind as he goes about what he calls “making the agreeable” with everybody on the place. And what an adept he is at it. After an interview, you stagger off glazed, yet though he’s spent the entire time talking about himself, you somehow feel singled out by his regard, as if he’s immediately spied your strengths and holds them in special, loving esteem. He’s a strange man, Matt Lewis, but what a fresh breeze of wit and intelligence he’s been for us here!

  I’m looking forward to the changes he threatens. Already to our amazement we’ve learned Mr. Wilkinson is not our true overseer but a surrogate for a Mr. Cronshaw, whom Mr. Lewis, Sr., appointed to the post. But Cronshaw’s been residing on his own estate ten miles away while pretending in his letters to Mr. Lewis, Sr., he’s been all these years here at Cornwall, where everything goes swimmingly with the Negroes (except it doesn’t). So it looks like Jamaica has two overseers tossed from their posts. Like John Haslam, Wilkinson was not cruel but supine (though not as supine as Cronshaw!), which left the Negroes at the mercy of everybody under him, a situation worse for them than if he’d been only one cruel man with everybody else scrambling to mitigate his influence.

  In any case, Wilkinson is on his way out, while Mr. Wilson and Mr. Scrubbs—the agent and book-keeper—are grovelling madly. But they don’t fool Mr. Lewis, as you can tell by his silences, which are otherwise far between. As for Mr. Lewis’s safety here, while it’s true he was not bred to so rough-and-tumble a place, you need only watch the eyes of his servant Tita—-who’s been with him since fatally stabbing two banditti who tried to kidnap him in Italy, a tale his master loves to play every part of—you watch Tita’s eyes as they watch Wilson and Scrubbs, and you know Mr. Lewis has nothing to fear from enemies of the human kind.

  But his bell rings, and as his hostess, or is it second-servant? I must make haste-

  Your loving

  Margaret

  PRICKS

  Before I myself first took the stand or saw Matthews again, a lucky chance befell me to approach the Prime Minister when, to everybody’s surprise, he briefly showed at a levee held in the lobby of New Bethlem to celebrate how much the Government was doing for poor unfortunates. Liverpool’s son is as tall, clumsy, and disordered in appearance as himself, but the younger man’s ignoble face on its long neck is not as ugly and creates a livelier impression, owing to a tic douloureux. I was uneasy as he was, and when uneasy my behaviour makes me uneasier. But, as a principal medical officer of the new hospital, I knew I must at least introduce myself, and as long as I was doing that, well, we would see. So I waited my turn, admiring how our Prime Minister withstood with noble, albeit grim fortitude a fawning assault by Monro. As I did, I thought again of Jerdan’s suspicions of the Liverpools and resolved to approach with an open mind, or the best I could summon. Otherwise who knew what I was liable to say?

  The moment our physician was pried off and sent on his way, I quick-stepped over.

  I regret to report it was not a brilliant interview. Though not unintelligent, the Prime Minister seemed vague on who I was, even after I detailed my credentials. When I went on to express delight with the new hospital we stood inside, if he noticed a forced or hollow quality to my exuberance, he didn’t let on, only watched me, half his face twitching away. Now I’d thanked him, it was evident if I didn’t keep talking he’d turn from me and all would be lost. But in my eagerness to hold him, what came out was, “I have heard your Lordship was eye-witness to the fall of the Bastille. An experience, I daresay, to tell one’s grandchildren.”

  “Sir,” he replied, “it was no fairy tale. It was savages loosing savages from a cage. The French king should have shot Bonaparte in ‘92 and saved Europe two decades and more of misery.”

  “And you needing to finish what your father begun—”

  “What did you say?”

  “I refer to your Lordship’s uncompromising approach to all things mobbish and republican, which would seem an excellent making good of your father’s legacy.”

  “Legacy, Mr. Haslam? I don’t understand.”

  “Forgive me, your Lordship—” Damn Jerdan for pushing me to this. “What I have in mind is—” What fumbled plan of your father’s are you concealing? “We have a patient in our care named James Tilly Matthews. Seven years ago now, as home secretary, you signed a request we continue to keep him. It was your father, I believe, who first wanted him in. Having always wondered what his crime was, I can’t help but ask if you might let us know, so we—”

  “A lunatic republican? Why shouldn’t he still be in?”

  “You do know his case, then?”

  “I must have, once. Seven years ago this was?”

  “Your Lordship, Matthews is neither a republican nor dangerous, only the sufferer of some curious ideas, which for years now he seems well aware are—”

  But this having an appearance of special pleading, he was glancing round for his aide, to get him out of there. Before I could finish, he turned back to me, saying coolly, “You might, Mr. Haslam, want to have a word with Lord Eldon, who as you know, as Lord Chancellor, is our secretary of lunatics. I saw him a minute ago, standing right over there—” Now his aide was pushing toward him, but he turned and walked in another direction, while the Lord Chancellor, being even quicker on his feet than the Prime Minister, was no longer standing anywhere.

  That night, insomnious as usual, I worked to place in perspective the unavoidable fact I had been batted off by the son as surely—if less bloodily—as twenty years ago by the father. Yet while his Lordship’s behaviour was construable as guilty impatience, it was more likely obliviousness to a matter than implication in it—obliviousness combined with the annoyance of a man held accountable by somebody he never heard of for a triviality he couldn’t remember. While his professed ignorance of Matthews’ existence amazed me, our lunatic’s fame in the street having rivalled Peg Nicholson’s for nearly two decades, perhaps it only confirmed his Lordship’s distance from any realm that was not politics. For God’s sake, he hadn’t even heard of me, and I’m known medically halfway to China. No, I had to conclude that if at some point the father had stooped to dishonour, you wouldn’t know it from meeting the son, who like him was only a little rough at the edges. It must, I thought, be frequent in politics that by rough edges you gain a negative charge, by which all manner of idle rumours adhere and drag you down through history notorious for crimes as alien to your nature as a smiling mien. Lunatics and journalists are, after all, inveterately suspicious individuals. How much can they know for certain of what they invariably suspect?

  Or was this only me fighting aspersions against men I was still dead set on thinking well of?

  Thus till dawn’s pale fingers, etc., did I toss on my thorny bed of pain.

  Two days later was my first time on the stand.

  Sarah used to say, Never do battle with mad people, they’re crazier than you are. This advice resolved me not to fight my accusers, who though they might not be madmen, their questions did betray a certain lunatic hypocrisy offering constant temptation to return squibs instead of sober accounts. But I never did, acted instead their most pawky, obedient servant—yet never quite giving them what they wanted to hear, either for better or for worse.

  It wasn’t easy. Standing up there and gazing equably out upon that pack of yip-yapping jackals, who assumed superior doubting looks when I pointed out that a certain amount of restraint is necessary in any madhouse, feigned astonishment when I revealed that a violent lunatic has the strength of three or four sane men, and indicated by their scowls they knew I was only defending my own vicious practice when I observed that, right or wrong, the discipline of restraint has been medically accepted for hundreds of years, not only in the treatment but in the cur
e of madness.

  The Battle of Waterloo has come and gone. Napoleon Bonaparte was a tyrant who centred all power in himself while calling it the French people’s, yet still the age dreams of freedom. At our Inquiry, the bone that stuck in every craw was restraint. Spectres of madmen in bondage loomed so dreadful in the room that all anybody could talk about was chains. And who was John Haslam but the Great Enchainer? My God, look what he did to that poor wasted American. Calmly I informed them I could give no reason for Norris’s contrivance, not having contrived it, reminding them that my own preference in his case had been a method involving no chains whatsoever; that the extravagance of iron was a governors’ subcommittee decision, and yet all considered not a bad one, for unlike a strait-waistcoat, iron doesn’t grow hot, chafe, prevent the scratching of itches, militate against personal cleanliness, or get cinched too tight by an inadvertent (I nearly said drunk or vicious) keeper; that in all the years we’d had Norris, no governor ever once complained of our manner of securing him, while the madman himself was unstinting with professions of gratitude for our ingeniousness. But in every word of this I was heard as disclaiming my role in what had been done, while seeking to excuse the horror of it.

  But when I tried to direct the committee’s attention to the flaws in the administrative structure at Bethlem—viz., nobody talked to anybody, except me to Alavoine and Poynder, who were responsible to Monro—they imagined I was blaming my legitimately absent superior (a brainless figurehead, as was evident from his recent performance before them), when who was the one mainly there? Yet if I attempted to speak with the authority of nineteen years of having been there, I was considered as therefore obligated to have done more. Much was made of my move of residence to Islington twelve years before, because in their minds it was then I surrendered any control I once might have had of the steward, matron, keepers, and gallery maids. So again I was simultaneously responsible for everything yet not in the least in control. Despite the fact that in nineteen years I was never absent from Bethlem more than three days at a time without the express permission of the governors, the reason patients lost toes was I was never there. But of course if I was there, then why didn’t everybody have all their toes? Because there was not enough money even to wrap every lunatic foot in flannel? Oh no, not that. It must be the apothecary’s fault.

  When I next visited Matthews, he was keen to know how it went.

  Badly, I confessed, reminding him that such ritual inquisitions are by their nature unfair: calculated to paint the witness as fool, knave, or some compelling blend of the two. But I had known this and played my part so well that several individuals—governors who’d never previously deigned to meet my eyes—came up afterwards to thank me for not letting the bastards push us around.

  At first Matthews only looked at me. Then he said, “It’s for the best, Jack. Don’t prolong it.” He seemed exhausted, and from the awkward way he sat on his bed you could tell the pain he was in from the ulceration in his back. By the look of him it was interfering with his sleep. I offered to examine it, but he waved me off, preferring to conclude what he’d started. He now told me a wild tale of his hand-lettered impositions on the credulity of the French and his frustration when the British government twice refused their overtures.

  “James,” I said. “With a hand, pluck, and guesswork like this, a man could rule the world.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  Later, summing up, he said, “Jack, I was only ever on the side of peace, but Liverpool and his demoniac associates were intent on assassinating both nations, by which they’d as good as assassinate me too. Their refusal to pay me was only a symptom of their obliviousness. At every opportunity I struggled to explain to them the implications of their actions, but selfish men like to think their lies are containable. They don’t want to know a man is not an island but a delicate play of connexion, and it takes very little to close down the game. But once that happens, he’s a monster in human disguise, and the rest comes easy as pissing the bed.”

  “They were politicians, that’s all, James. Advancing the narrow interests of their country.”

  “No, Jack, that’s what they weren’t doing.” Here he leaned so far out of his Omni Imperias Throne that his nose almost touched mine and whispered, “Where’d the money go, Jack? Where’d the jewels go?”

  I looked at him blank a moment, but only for a moment.

  “Ah, Jesus Christ,” I said.

  He sat back looking grim. “You’re hardly the most trusting fellow, Jack. So the question is, Why have you been assuming halfway honourable intentions of the bastards? Is it because once dead, their hated authority ceases to operate and the names of venal brutes assume a grateful sheen? Or could it be some other reason, closer to home?”

  The demolishers that day were practically in the next room. Their dust hung in veils of grey haze.

  “You see, Jack, David Williams was right about that much: England was as intent on war as France was.”

  “I thought your money-delivering, wherever it ended up, had taken care of that.”

  “So did I. But how can a child understand that Lust for Power, War, and Avarice are old bedmates who stay immortal by buggering each other all night long?”

  “Surely, James, freedom must ever be fought for.”

  “No, Jack. Freedom is only fought for in a world where it’s considered as a right. Calling freedom a right puts a whine in the voice and a clench in the fist for the simple reason it’s gang talk. But if you call freedom what it is—an obligation—then you open the door to knowing that whatever’s in it you need, another needs as surely. Only when that’s been understood can anything change. Bringing down kings and ministers because they’re kings and ministers only leads to more kings and ministers with amended titles. Everybody has obligations, both to himself and to the world, but he has only one right.”

  “Only one, James? What sort of revolutionary would ask for only one right?”

  “A sadder but wiser.”

  “What is it? The right to destroy?”

  “No. To breathe.”

  “Aah—”

  “Is this mockery?”

  “Not at all—James, you’re not saying, are you, I have an obligation to free you?”

  “I’m saying we have one to free each other.”

  This I let go as an empty parry. What will a goat not eat, or the mad not say? A goat under terrific pressure of mind.

  “So that’s it, James?” I said next, surprised by a note of pleading in my voice. I would say I had heard enough. “That’s why you’re in? Private bribes?”

  “No. I’m in because the motive of the 1st Earl of Liverpool and his secret Cabinet when dealing with the French revolutionists was only on the face of it, or perhaps only at first, peace in Europe. Their real or subsequent intention was to provoke the French to invade England and in the panic and alarm of that, themselves overthrow our King—perhaps by means of an assassination they could blame on the French—and thereby install Liverpool’s son at the helm of affairs, and once the war with France was won, put the Duke of York in charge over there.”

  “The Duke of York—” I said, wiping the sweat from my face and gazing at the dirt on the trembling handkerchief, for this confirmed Jerdan’s information, and what better way than his son head of Britain for Liverpool to live forever? “The Duke of York,” I said again, not knowing what I said. “The soldier’s idiot friend—Let me, James—” I can’t tell you how sick I was of his tale. “Let me—” I took a deep breath and let it out. “You’ve been in here for eighteen years, first, because Liverpool and his associates had secret dealings with the republican government in France; second, because the money and jewels you carried from France were used to line the private pockets of Liverpool, Pitt, Grenville—”

  “Liverpool, yes. Possibly Grenville, as the one in charge of secret funds. Pitt never thought of money and for that reason was never out of debt, but constantly surrounded by those with an interest in bailing hi
m out. All the better with French money. There were also their particular friends and who knows what other of their cronies in Cabinet, who got whatever they could where they could, not to mention the royal family, to keep them mollified—That was one and two, Jack, but mainly there was Liverpool’s plot to overthrow the monarchy and put his son in charge. And the only question now remaining is why have I told you?”

  “To hobble me before the committee.”

  “How?”

  I was finding it an effort to breathe. “By giving me old news as difficult to prove as to believe concerning politicians in a government nobody remembers. Information I can’t usefully or credibly reveal.”

  “No, that’s not it. The idea was never to destroy you by having you know too much and stand up and announce a truth you can’t prove and nobody will believe. It wouldn’t be like you, Jack, and won’t happen. No, like our excursion to New Bethlem tomorrow, this is for John Haslam.”

  I know now I should have listened to what he was telling me. For one thing it was the first time I ever heard him speak my name. For another, I find it hard to believe the reason I was soon afterward staggering from his room to vomit out my guts in the gallery was shock at treason in government.

  NEW BETHLEM

  Politicians betray their country all the time. It’s one of the things they do. If lawyers are despised because lawyering puts the law above human decency, politicians are distrusted because everybody knows the game of power requires them to put their own professional survival before that of the people they’ve been elevated to serve. What difference really between underhanded practice in politics and private corruption—even treason? If one, why not the other? But if it wasn’t evil in politics I needed to learn, it also wasn’t the fact that guilty parties will seek to silence an accessory once he grows a threat. As a revelation, that too was one I had guessed a long time ago, only failed to act on, having too much invested. It wasn’t what Matthews’ revelation said about government, or how guilty parties behave, that was now affecting me, it was what it said about my career, two decades of compromised principles and injustice to a patient who deserved better, two decades of toad-eating to build a reputation now on the brink of ruin because the powerful had played me as casually as they’d sit around a tea-table dripping honey on the nose of a cat.