Bedlam

by Greg Hollingshead

  “Not buy and sell, madam,” the King reminded me gravely. “The trade is no longer permitted.”

  “To own, then.”

  “Ah, yes, yes, yes.” He turned away looking disappointed and walked back to his doctors. “She says people should not own one another.” Returning to me, he confided in a lowered voice, “Let me tell you, my dear, why I hate the abolitionists. First, they’re in league with the French, and look what happened there. Second, they spout the vulgarest rhetoric you ever heard outside a military jakes. Third, they once counted among their allies not only my former Prime Minister, Mr. Pitt, a blade-nosed milksop and (though I loved him once) the closest thing to a weasel on two legs, but also the Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Fox, who once declared the storming of the Bastille by far the best and greatest thing that ever happened in the history of the world and would have sent me to the guillotine if we had one. Like attracts like, and those two together with the abolitionists made the traitor John Wilkes, who would have enjoyed nothing better than to see me skewered on a stake and pecked at by vultures, appear a demigod. Such men are low creatures when you compare our Prime Minister today or his father my good friend of beloved memory Lord Liverpool, both staunch (by the way) against abolition.” When I replied nothing to this—what could I?—he continued to gaze at me with an inclination of his head, like a man mentally reviewing what he’s just said, before at last returning his attention to Jamie.

  “So, sir, should Bethlem have given Mr. Haslam a pension or not?”

  “Not, your Majesty,” Jamie replied shortly. “In those days everything he touched he harmed, and he never deserved reward for a period of his life when he was too thoroughly a puppet of the gang.”

  “Gang?—gang?” the King cried. “What?—what gang? What?”

  Which was Jamie’s cue to launch into a detailed description of the Air Loom.

  At first his Majesty listened intently. But when Jamie attempted to proceed from an account of the engine itself to a history of its destructive effects upon the nation, with particular emphasis on the corn shortages that followed the miserable summer of ‘94 and the insurrection that spread like wildfire through the Navy in ‘96 and seven, his Majesty, whose mind was of a practical bent—and besides, to him all this was old news—came back to the engine, saying, “I always wondered, Mr. Matthews, how the operation at a distance of magnets could fail to keep us all daily in mind of the narrowness of our assumptions concerning the true nature of the physical universe.”

  Jamie blinked at this.

  “Mr. Priestley, Mr. Beddoes, Mr. Davy, and M. Lavoisier, with their ingenious work on these new invisible elements they call gases, have laid you staunch foundations,” the King continued. “And Herr Mesmer—lately, as you must know, gone to his rest—was admirably concerned to discover in the etherial fluid a therapeutic principle that might improve people’s physical and psychical health. Since then, as you’ll also know, M. Puységur and his colleagues have been doing scouting work on somnambulism, hypnosis, clairvoyance, etc. But tell me. Did you never think of designing a counter-instrument? Instead of building on Mesmeric principles (which nobody’s ever remotely understood), why don’t you invert those of this modern Air Loom device—which though you say it’s been commandeered by villains, you obviously enjoy a wonderful understanding of—and so fight its baleful influence that way, by doubling its own force against deducible aspects of its own vincibility?”

  By this date, being entirely out of public view, the King was a figure as beloved as his too-visible son the Prince Regent was hated, which isn’t to say our old monarch wasn’t widely assumed to have degenerated to a bloated gibbering idiot. Perhaps he had his bad days, but I must say I never heard anybody speak with more genius to Jamie about the Air Loom. You could see the gratitude in my husband’s eyes for his Majesty’s immediate grasp, for example, of the distinction between the physical and psychical effects of the machine, while appreciating how the two can never be wholly distinguished. “Look at me,” the King candidly invited him at one point in a conversation that must have lasted half an hour. “To what extent are these dreadful torments of mind I sometimes suffer the effect of an ailment as yet undiscovered by medical science? Disease unknown, cure unknown!”

  This conversation continued so long I feared Mr. Rankin’s knees would give out and he’d fall and break his crown on the flagstones. But suddenly the King exclaimed, “Now I will let you go!” and broke from Jamie to continue his progress up the walk.

  When I stole a glance at Jamie, I was amazed to see an expression unbefitting a man who’d just enjoyed a half-hour of undivided attention from his Royal Majesty.

  “He never asked to see my architectural plans,” he complained in a whisper.

  I was trying to think of something to say that was not Why should he? when the King, puffing out his chest, shouted at Rankin, “Cut ’em down, sir? Go ahead! But why stop with flags in my honour? As long as you’re up there, why not slaughter me like an animal? That’s right! Don’t hesitate, sir! Plunge ‘em in!” He meant the shears, into his breast. “Or are you no less wretched a coward than your murderous associates?”

  When Mr. Rankin proved too alarmed by this royal challenge to plunge in or say anything, his Majesty, indicating the streamers, cried, “So let the damn things fly, man!” and passed on to Mr. Fox. To him, once he’d stepped close enough to see who it was, he cried, “Is this Fox?” and when Fox acknowledged it was, shouted, “No Antichrist of Mendacity this Fox, what?” a greeting an astonished Fox, who’d not been standing close enough to hear what the King confided to me concerning his political namesake, could be seen struggling through the rest of his interview to recover from.

  NO KINGS

  At last the King disappeared inside the house, and we could all breathe again. Old Rankin climbed down off his stool and sat slumped against it. The next time I looked over he was stretched out flat on the grass like a dead man. I don’t think he’ll soon forget his audience with the King. Jamie picked up his portfolio, which had been leaning the whole time against the back of his leg, and we walked over to the willow tree, where Haslam was sitting on a bench, mopping at his brow.

  “I’m sorry I had no choice but to tell his Majesty the truth about your Bethlem days, John,” Jamie said with a look of apology.

  “And I’m sorry, James,” Haslam replied as he shifted over to make room for us, “it was you he asked.”

  I was sitting down between them when it occurred to me to ask Jamie who was paying for his keep here.

  “Bethlem, the government, and John, equally between them,” he answered, as readily as he’d assured the King that Haslam deserved no pension. “It’s how John has begged, and received, my unqualified forgiveness.”

  When I looked to Haslam, he said, with a smile, “A pension, James, would have made the expense of you easier.”

  “But rewarded with a pension,” Jamie replied, “The Schoolmaster might show, to assure me he owed me nothing.”

  “No risk of that now. Here’s your error to avoid: believing the less I can afford it, the more good it’s doing me.”

  Jamie laughed. “But I do think something like that!”

  “I know. You’re still deluded.”

  At this, Jamie crowed, “Used to be, John! Used to be! And you too! Yet how much either of us even then if you had it in you to believe my Liverpool information?”

  “I fought hard not to, James—” Haslam smilingly reminded him. “With everything I had.”

  “No,” Jamie replied. “You had more.”

  When we first sat down, Winthrup, the junior doctor, had left the house and walked out to the royal carriage, not deigning to notice us. Now an equerry in a handsome uniform, blue with gold braiding, approached from that direction. Under his arm he carried a folder bound in wine-coloured leather. “His Majesty,” he announced, with a low bow to Jamie, “wishes to compare designs with Mr. Matthews, privately, inside.”

  “Not forgot!” Jamie cried,
leaping up.

  “The King has architectural talent,” Haslam explained as we watched Jamie struggle to keep a grip on his portfolio while following the equerry toward the house. “Lately he’s been working on plans for a Corinthian temple in Kew Gardens. He’s here for inspiration from your husband’s designs.”

  “Mr. Haslam,” I said. “Thank you for taking care of my husband.”

  “Mrs. Matthews, he deserves nothing less from me.”

  No reply being encouraged by this, we sat for several minutes in silence. For a time after news of the King’s arrival had reached the party on the back lawn, their chatter was muted. But as soon as he entered the house, their noise resumed and seemed to grow. Now the musicians were tuning their instruments. I pictured Jamie and his Majesty in the parlour, studying each other’s plans. I hoped the sun was still shining bright enough inside to enable his Majesty, despite his myopia, to relish every detail of Jamie’s work.

  From the look on his face, Haslam was chafing from the King’s peremptory treatment of him. When at last he spoke, it was in a self-justifying vein. “Two principles I always followed, Mrs. Matthews, when dealing with lunatics: First, never deceive them. Second, always show yourself a superior person.”

  “And if you aren’t?”

  “Then make it your duty to appear so.”

  “And that’s not deception?”

  “No,” he replied irritably. “It’s self-management. Decus et tuta-men. Dignity and defence. Any doctor who lays aside dignity and defence will find himself despised and nothing achieved.”

  “If you ask me, the dignity of doctors consists in looking grave and saying nothing, to mask their own ignorance. I suggest your own method’s closer to candour, as the King seemed to recognize.”

  Frowning at this, Haslam lapsed into gloomy silence. When at last he spoke he said, “Candour’s a weapon too, and has a double edge. I became a casualty at Bethlem of my own power, and all the more for feeling I had so little.”

  “But not so abused as your patients.”

  He sighed, though as much with sorrow, I would say, as impatience. “Two terrible truths of human nature, Mrs. Matthews: One, victims love their oppressors, just a little. Two, oppressors hate their victims a little more with each injury they do them.”

  “Why are you telling me these horrid things?”

  “Because Bethlem taught me them, and for that reason they seem necessary to any apology I could make for failing your husband so long.”

  “You don’t need to recite depraved conundrums to do that. You were more concerned for your own career and reputation than the welfare of hundreds of wretched sufferers dependent on your care. That’s all. That’s enough. You could have acted; you didn’t.”

  “The situation was impossible. It broke me. You should know that in a moment of rage I assaulted your husband.”

  “Does that surprise me? Was his entire Bethlem tenure not one prolonged assault?”

  “After that I did act.”

  “Sporadically and at last. For him, at least.”

  “I would say I should have acted sooner but don’t know how I could have, as the man I was then. All I know is what I know now: a weight on me that feels very like remorse. I wish I didn’t feel it, but I do, every hour of the day and every waking hour of the night.”

  “Because your brain knows if you don’t.”

  “Brains are prone to certain kinds of error. One is assuming they were capable then of what they are only now.”

  “So are people prone to certain kinds of error.”

  “And conversations to grow senseless.”

  For several minutes there was only birdsong, the nickering of the King’s horses, the flapping streamers, the rising commotion from behind the house.

  To bring us back to something we might agree on, I said, “Mr. Haslam, you can’t afford to keep my husband in this place, and I want him with me. Perhaps we could—”

  “What could we do? Work together to get him out? Does he want out? Did you ask him?”

  “I’m only thinking, once it’s sunk in that I’m—”

  “Mrs. Matthews, your husband has never not loved you, but he does understand that if there’s any place he might continue untor-mented by the gang, it’s here. The upset of change from a place he’s continued such a long time so relatively steady and well, in a society where he can serve a useful function, could very well exacerbate his condition. As I’m sure you can see, his general health is not the best, but here, I would say, it’s the best it can be. He’s a social creature, your husband—”

  “So he should stay here so the gang keeps away? Is this the counsel of a mad-doctor who always railed against private madhouses and considered all delusions the effects of diseased brain tissue?”

  “Have we been talking about delusions?”

  “The gang is one.”

  He smiled. “Are you sure?”

  Now Fox stepped out his front door, but seeing Rankin had failed to remove the foot-stool, he went back inside. “Mrs. Matthews,” Haslam said, “I only mean, if you love him—”

  “Mr. Haslam, I think the question is, do you?”

  But Fox had already come out again and was walking in our direction, and this circumstance Haslam took advantage of not to answer me, though he had plenty of time. He now introduced me to Fox and told a story about him. It seems Fox once took a furious, suicidal maniac to the third floor of this house to calm him with the view. On the way back down, the lunatic pushed him against the balustrade crying, Now I’ll cast you down and leap after!

  Bah! Fox calmly replied. Any child could do that. Come downstairs with me, and I’ll throw you back up here.

  You cannot…the lunatic replied irresolutely, following Fox down the stairs.

  “Is that not how it happened, Charles?” Haslam now asked.

  “Something like that, John,” Fox replied, smiling, “something like that—” Turning to me, he said, “I hope, Mrs. Matthews, you won’t seek to whisk your husband away from us too soon. He’s our guiding light.”

  “He doesn’t want to leave,” I admitted.

  “No?” Mr. Fox looked pleased at this. Then thinking perhaps of my feelings, with an anxious glance at Haslam, he added more soberly, “He’s been happy with us, I assure you.”

  I now passed Fox the envelope containing Jamie’s cheques. After he ascertained what it was, he bowed and tucked it into his coat.

  Meanwhile I watched Mr. Rankin, moving slow as a man underwater, emerge from the house and set about picking up the foot-stool.

  “I do apologize about the streamers, John,” Fox said, watching Rankin in the idle way people have of looking to the object of another’s gaze. “Still,” and he gave a mischievous great yawn, “his Majesty seemed to like them.”

  Haslam’s response was a grunt.

  When Fox turned back to us, he wore a worried expression. “John, why the devil would his Majesty say I’m not an Antichrist of Mendacity?”

  “Perhaps he could tell.”

  “But why should it ever occur to him I could be?”

  I might have explained, but Fox had turned away again, to watch Mr. Rankin re-enter the house carrying the foot-stool. ‘The doctors tell me his Majesty has little stamina,” he said, still looking toward the house. “We can’t assume he’ll stay many minutes in the garden—”

  And so we made our way back there, and exactly as we came round the corner his Majesty appeared from inside and the orchestra struck up “God Save the King.”

  At first his Majesty looked about him squinting and unsteady, but the strains of the anthem and the lifted voices of so fine a gathering soon erected him to full magnificence, and you knew as soon as the singing stopped he’d wade into the crowd and closely question each quaking individual. But not many steps from the house, he stumbled, causing all four doctors to rush forward to help him to a chair. And though, to judge from his querulous response to their solicitude, his Majesty did not appreciate the assistance, it was
sitting down that he received our Three Cheers. After that, the orchestra switched to a tune they called “Who Wants a Wife?” by a Mr. Bishop, though it sounded like Mozart to me, and Jamie came breathlessly out of the house to organize everybody for a quadrille-dance, a new step so much the rage it already reached Jamaica before I left.

  As people were taking their places, the woman next to me, a genteel soul, confided, “Let me tell you, my dear, I’ve been in Heaven, and the tunes they play there are better than this.” When I asked her what sort of music they have in Heaven, she considered a moment before she replied, “Why, common sense, to be sure.”

  The next minute everybody was looking to their feet, everybody except the doctors, who had their patient to watch over; the Methodist couple, for whom any sort of dance floor, even a greensward, was a trap door to Hell; their daughter, who by her fidgeting clearly wanted to but whom they would not allow; and the King, who conducted the orchestra from his chair with spirited curlicues of his walking stick while shouting out encouragement to the dancers.

  Such a memorable afternoon it was. What providence to find oneself in that place at that time, to dance that dance, now on Haslam’s arm and now Jamie’s, now on Fox’s and now a madman’s, now on the madman’s father’s and now his brother’s. Few of us were much practised at quadrilles, but weren’t we watching our feet and weren’t our hearts in it? Weren’t we being moved by the music on this summer’s day under the generous eye of his Royal Majesty? Wasn’t this the sort of moment life sometimes, somehow, despite everything, throws up, that remains so shining in the mind that you never forget it as long as you live? And don’t such memories help keep in view how wondrous it is to be afforded any opportunity at all, even this one—and why not this one, when it’s everything it is and nothing it isn’t—to live and breathe on this green earth?

  The King’s stick faltering, the doctors closed in once more, to help him out of his chair. And so, as the orchestra struck up “Rule Britannia,” which we all gave hearty voice to, his Majesty was led back into the house, calling to us over and over, “Now I will let you go! Now I will let you go!” and though it took a long time for him to be helped through and out the front door after the music ended and we stopped singing, we didn’t speak or move, only closed our eyes in the light of the setting sun until we heard the slams of the doors of the royal carriage and the coachman’s cry, and the horses stamp and whinny and take it all away.