Ishmael was more forlorn than Duncan had ever seen him. Duncan put his hand on Ishmael’s shoulder. “What is in London are the two people who are going to save Conawago.” He pointed to the line forming at the wide doors into the building. “Now put on your shirt and find your entrance token, and remember this is only a scouting trip. No fires in the hallways.”
As they walked toward the hospital Duncan explained that he had purchased medicines and had the loan of a leather satchel similar to what many London doctors carried. “Doctors go in and out rather freely. Once inside I will offer some powders and pills and with the pretense learn more than the average visitor,” he said. Ishmael had learned that the brown-uniformed attendants were called keepers, responsible for keeping order in the wards and galleries and supervising the lower staff.
They determined to cover every gallery of the huge building, and so listened to the advice given by a keeper to the first group of guests. They ignored his suggestion that the best entertainment would be found on the upper floor and instead explored the ground floor. They passed offices, examination rooms, and a large dining hall where dishes were being cleared from lunch. The rooms of patients past the dining chamber seemed much as Duncan had seen in other hospitals, with bedbound patients being tended by women in severe gray dresses and white aprons.
“Not so terrible,” Ishmael observed as they completed their circuit of the long ground floor and climbed the marble stairs. “Maybe he is truly ill. We could ask a nurse.”
“Not yet,” Duncan cautioned. “Reveal no connection to him until we understand the lay of this terrain.”
They proceeded past the landing of the next floor to the top, arriving in a spartan sitting area where another man in brown was offering suggestions to a growing crowd of spectators. “The House of Lords is always entertaining,” the keeper said. “Then there’s the hilarious Fairy Queen Court, Chamber of the Immortals, and the Garden of Eden, which may make the ladies blush.” He spoke with rote disinterest. “Witness the hand of judgment and the frailty of the human soul. Towels are available for a ha’penny at each end of the halls. And those wearing the tan-colored smocks be patients who need to be supplied clothing. Nothing to fear from them, for they would ne’er be allowed to roam if their physicians considered them dangerous.”
As they waited for the crowd to disperse, Duncan and Ishmael settled into a square of chairs and benches where the only other occupants were two well-dressed men who read newspapers, one of them a distinguished-looking gentleman with a doctor’s satchel in the chair beside him. Duncan sat on the other side of the satchel.
“Grafton is caught on a pendulum,” the man declared in a disapproving tone.
“Sorry?” Duncan replied.
“The prime minister. He is unable to secure votes, so just swings back and forth between his Whigs and the Tories. At this rate we’ll never get the budget needed for Bethlem. We must get reconstruction approved, you know, not just another stopgap. Have you seen the back walls lately? The fools in the last century were so bent on quickly mimicking the French that they never dug the proper foundations and now we have walls sinking. You’ll not credit it, but I’ve seen a crack running up from the gardens to the very roof!”
“Prithee, sir,” Duncan said, “I am but new here. Do you work with the patients here often?”
“Nearly every day,” the doctor replied disinterestedly as he turned the page, then shook his head. “Have you seen the price of tweeds?” he asked. “Scandalous what those Scots get away with.”
“I am supposed to examine a patient from America,” Duncan ventured. “Do you have many colonials?”
The man lowered his paper, glancing at Duncan, then fixed his gaze on a naked cherub in the faded mural on the wall. “There was a woman from Boston who kept biting her own flesh. But she finally pierced an artery and expired. Then there was the mariner from Connecticut who insisted he was the offspring of a mermaid and refused to leave the baths. It’s cold baths every day until winter now. That’s the ticket, eh? A great restorative. Focuses the mind.”
“It’s possible he considers himself an Indian,” Ishmael tried.
“Ah well, then the Aboriginal Amphitheater. That’s the formal name but most just call it the Savages. Those men love to wait for a visitor with a wig, then reach through the bars and grab it, shouting ‘Scalped, scalped!’ with a war cry. The keepers sometimes have to apply their quarterstaves to calm them.”
“The keepers strike the patients?” Ishmael asked.
“The keepers, the watch, the hall constables they call themselves sometimes, though none has a true badge of authority from the parish. Entirely too enthusiastic at times,” the man said, then began rubbing at a dark bruise on his neck.
With a chill Duncan suddenly realized that the man sitting across from them was holding his paper upside down. He looked back to the man beside him as his last words registered. “You were struck? But you are a medical man,” he objected.
“We’re all medical men in a sense, eh?” the man said. Suddenly he took great interest in Duncan’s feet.
Ishmael, growing impatient, rose and before Duncan could stop him grabbed the man’s bag and opened it. As he stared inside it, revulsion grew on his face and he dropped the open bag. It was filled with dirty stockings.
The man was unmoved. “I’ll pay a good price for yours,” he said to Duncan as he lowered his paper. “You have very fine feet. Strong feet. Elegant feet. A full shilling. My credit is good. My family sends a generous allowance.”
Duncan shot out of his chair. “Am I to believe you are a patient here, sir? Confined to Bedlam?”
The man sighed. “Are we not all confined in one way or another? I came of my own free will and am at my liberty most days. I had a meal down the road just last week. But at night they lock me up. I asked them to do so because—” The man crossed his legs and hugged his knees, seeming to shrink. His voice grew small and fearful. “Because I get terrible urges in the night. My cell is wonderfully quiet. My cellmate bit his tongue off last year.” The man looked back at Duncan’s feet. “Two shillings then, but I will need to remove them myself.”
They beat a hasty retreat down the gallery, only to be stopped by a hooting crowd that jammed the passage. It formed a semicircle about a set of double doors, opened for a view inside the chamber through a set of barred inner doors. Some of the observers were standing on chairs at the back, calling for the fairy queen. As Duncan and Ishmael pushed their way through the gathering, the hooting rose in volume and an obese woman danced across the opening behind the bars. She wore nothing but a pair of too-small linen britches and a bodice woven of recently plucked plane tree leaves, several of which were also pinned in her strikingly red hair. Two attendants followed her, a tall, stick-thin man and a dwarf, both wearing hoops of wood around their necks that supported wings of brown sackcloth. Behind them came two women with cones over their noses that, judging by the calls from the crowd, made them unicorns. And at the end of the procession an elderly man holding a pail in his teeth hopped like a frog. When his companions had all passed, he stood and hurled excrement at the crowd.
Duncan and Ishmael next encountered a party of workmen patching a series of dents and holes in the plaster of the gallery wall. Beyond them, as the hall thinned of spectators, they came upon more and more inmates sitting on chairs, benches, or on the floor, staring emptily, with no reaction to their surroundings. They climbed to the top floor on the enclosed stairs at the end of the gallery and reached another set of double doors, where a smaller crowd of onlookers lingered. Several of these, in patient smocks, had filthy pieces of cloth on their heads that Duncan recognized to be the remnants of wigs. They had found the Aboriginal Amphitheater. A keeper was at the door and, to Duncan’s surprise, was allowing a single-file line of onlookers to enter the room.
Ishmael gave Duncan a grave nod as if to say he was braced against the horror that waited inside. As they joined a line, a loud shriek came from within. It
sounded more like a witch’s cackle than a war cry. A repetitive knocking sound followed the shriek, and soon they saw it was made by a man in one of the tan tunics beating on a stool with a spoon. He did not seem to notice the drool that dripped down his jaw onto the stool. Three men beside him waved mops in their hands, the handles painted with bright colors, the mop heads tinged with red paint, and Duncan realized they were meant to be spears with scalps at their points. The keepers apparently encouraged the entertainments by providing props. Some of the visitors leaving the chamber were dropping tips in a jar by the door.
Duncan studied each of the other participants in the charade of savages with increasing dread. Several had colorful stripes on their faces, and most, both male and female, had feathers stuck in their matted hair, although these were either from peacocks or the tattered remains of exotic feathers imported to adorn the aristocracy. A plump middle-aged man wearing nothing but a towel arranged as a loincloth spoke in animated gibberish to the onlookers while a woman wearing an inmate tunic painted with birds was arranging half a dozen visitors in a line at the barred door. No one in the Aboriginal Amphitheater was close to Conawago’s age.
The woman in the painted tunic handed the visitor at the front of the column a placard labeled MUNRO, then yelled, “Die, ye British bastards!” With hoots and hollers, the Indians set upon the visitors through the bars with their make-believe weapons raised.
“William Henry,” Ishmael said in a haunted whisper. In their clumsy, irrational way the inmates were reenacting the most notorious episode of frontier warfare, the massacre of the survivors who had surrendered after the 1757 siege of Fort William Henry by the Indian allies of the French.
No one was injured in the mock melee except for an inmate who accidentally stepped on the foot of a visitor, then collapsed, weeping, with his arms extended through the bars to grasp the legs of the surprised onlooker. After confirming his uncle was not among the inmates, Ishmael, keeping his gaze on the floor now, mutely followed Duncan out into the gallery.
The most obvious opportunity now exhausted, Duncan initiated a more tedious plan, lingering with inmates who seemed capable of rational communication and inquiring after their health. He administered a few powders and pills to inmates circulating in the galleries, though one woman complaining of indigestion accepted his pill and promptly dropped it down her bodice with a disturbing cackle. They varied their questions, asking about Indians, about colonials, about men with shoulder-length hair, keeping only the element of age consistent. None knew of an inmate in his eighties, or of an elderly colonial, a wise old chieftain, or even a well-spoken gentleman of Mediterranean complexion.
As they made their way into the east wing, the crowds grew thinner. Duncan handed Ishmael his medical bag, as if the Nipmuc were his assistant, and spent more time speaking with the patients. As forewarned, they found the barred doors of the topmost chambers locked, although their outer wooden doors were open, allowing them a view inside. A man wearing a soiled velvet dress and bonnet informed them that the oldest patients he knew were all “fine gentlewomen” who spent their time making lace in a locked cell. A well-dressed man seemed quite articulate, but he spoke only in some Slavic language and punctuated each sentence with a whistle.
They encountered a row of the same plaster dents they had seen being repaired downstairs, and they watched two of the brown-suited keepers run past them to apprehend the bald man who had been methodically smashing his head against the wall at regular two-step intervals.
A staff member appeared, ringing a bell and announcing that visiting hours would conclude in a quarter hour. “We can return tomorrow,” Duncan said, unable to disguise his disappointment. Ishmael gave a mute nod but pushed on down the hall. The only people ahead of them were gathered around one more set of iron-barred doors. As they approached, a woman in a plain dress who might or might not have been an inmate put a finger to her lips for silence, but made room for them to see inside. A hand-painted sign over the entrance announced IMMORTALS in uneven letters. A badly chipped marble bust of Julius Caesar sat on a four-foot-high pedestal just inside the door. Everyone inside, all older men, wore only sheets, most of them wrapped like togas. One man had tied his around his waist and wore a placard around his neck stating HOMER. He mounted an upturned wooden box and began reading from a book in Latin, interrupted every few moments by a severe twitch that drove his head toward his shoulder.
Duncan listened. The reading was uneven, and he had the sense that the man was only reading the words phonetically, without any grasp of their meaning, but he caught the pronunciations well enough that Duncan made out that it was a poem. After hearing a reference to Daphne being turned into a laurel tree, he realized it was Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The reader was allowed a few minutes for his performance before a large man in a soiled toga came forward to replace him on the box. He had a noble bearing and wore a circlet of dried leaves over his shaggy hair. He began speaking in an eloquent bass voice, but his words were entirely gibberish. A stout man with double chins took over the box and announced times for chariot races and the defeat of the Carthaginian army, then proclaimed, “Let the games begin.” At that cue two men in togas began tossing a wooden globe back and forth like a ball, calling out nonsensical syllables each time they caught it. “Siga,” one said, then “quin” cried the other, followed by “mond” with the syllables repeating afterward.
A bell rang. The crowd rapidly thinned out. A keeper tapped Duncan’s shoulder. “Time, mate,” he said.
Ishmael held up Duncan’s satchel and the keeper hesitated. Duncan fixed him with a sober gaze. “Observations on acute dementia require quietude and assiduity,” Duncan scolded.
The keeper held up his hands. “Pardon, doctor. Weren’t familiar with ye.” He glanced down the hall. “I recommend no farther, though,” he warned. “But if ye do, there be towels on the table at the end.”
They listened to a man wearing a Cicero placard shout observations about government, facing his fellow inmates. Duncan realized the participants were not performing so much for onlookers as for themselves. It was the reality they had created for themselves, locked into daily repetition. The half-naked man shouted “habeas corpus!” and the speaker sullenly walked away, then helped pull an old man to his feet, handing him a crutch. The lame man recited several verses of the Iliad, then stopped mid-verse and bowed toward a shadowed corner, where someone had coughed. Two men reverently helped the frail figure there to his feet. He wore a long mop head on his skull, which threw his face in shadow. Ishmael began pulling Duncan away, but he resisted. The frail man tightened the waist cord that bound his toga over his skeletal body and began speaking in a voice so hoarse that Duncan could not understand. One of his attendants handed the man a ladle from a bucket. He drank and started over, then paused as one of the others lowered a placard over his neck that was labeled PLATO. The man with the twitch approached and flipped the placard to show ARISTOTLE. The aged man’s voice was louder now. “The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival,” he said, his voice cracking with the effort. It was indeed a quote from the great Greek philosopher. The voice strengthened and offered a new recitation. “There is no great genius without some touch of madness,” the inmate said, and looked up in surprise at the applause from both inmates and audience.
Suddenly Duncan’s heart leapt as he recognized the features in the shadow of the mophead. The frail man was Conawago. Ishmael gasped and pushed past Duncan to clutch the bars. “Uncle!” he cried. Conawago did not react, just kept speaking toward his cellmates.
“Conawago!” Duncan shouted. The old man gave no sign of hearing. Duncan tried the name he used when passing for a European. “Socrates! Socrates Moon!”
Conawago still did not respond, but both his attendants did. They tried to turn him toward the door but he refused, clearly irritated at the interruption. The Nipmuc continued his performance, though now he switched to Shakespeare and b
egan mixing up his words. “Alas your question, poor Yorick? To be or not to be?”
“Uncle!” Ishmael shouted again, and the old man very slowly turned. Duncan’s heart soared as he stared straight at them. But Conawago’s face remained empty. Tears began streaming down his cheeks and as one of his companions escorted him away, he was wracked with a sob. As he shuffled to the bench in his corner, he tossed off his filthy wig, then sat and buried his head in his hands, weeping. The half-naked man approached and with a distraught expression reached through the bars to pull the heavy doors shut.
Duncan and Ishmael walked to the end of the hall in a daze. Nothing in this bizarre place seemed real. They had found only a weak, empty shell of the man they had known as Conawago. As they reached the last cell, oblivious to how close they were to its door, an inmate threw the contents of a chamber pot on them.
Chapter 12
ISHMAEL SPOKE NO MORE. FOR the first time since Duncan had met him as an orphaned youth, his deep reservoir of strength seemed utterly drained. Duncan hailed a hackney at the gate and they rode in silence through the busy streets, the hubbub of the city providing a welcome distraction to their despair.
“He heard me,” Ishmael finally said as they pulled onto the Strand. “He saw me. I know he did. He saw me and turned his back. It was a mistake to come, Duncan. Conawago has already left us. That was but his ghost.”
“He saw us and didn’t see us,” Duncan countered. He too had been reliving the nightmarish scene in his mind. “We don’t know what that place does to a man’s brain. He’s fragile. Many of the inmates clearly have visions and illusions. It may become difficult to know what is real and what is not.”
The King's Beast Page 24
