Bedlam (23 page)

Intending no more than to sound from the tenor of Tuke’s visit the prospects for our habeas corpus, I stumble upon my oldest and once dearest friend teamed with the leader of the gang in control of this very hospital. No wonder, though you begged him, Williams has done nothing to get me out. Face to face with him in the lower gallery was like running into an old friend when you’re abroad without your illusions. The former wholesome façade detaches and falls away to reveal a ramshackle edifice. Though his conversation had every appearance of a succession of low, convolved brain-sayings—addressing me, for example, as
mon compère
(as if slyly to acknowledge our French time together)—the fact there was no hint of a presence in him, along with the fact he uttered every syllable aloud, suggested he hasn’t been taken over. Not yet. More likely his guilt for abandoning me years ago, and again more lately by doing nothing to get me out of here though you begged him, had him
blurting with each word he spoke the last he intended. He’s only human, after all, which is one way to say why it’s only ever been humanity in the abstract he’s fought for.

As for Bill the King, word from the gang has always been he stoops to human form only when confident of widespread human desolation. Probably he’s achieved access to the old Quaker because like him he’s out to destroy this place and substitute something more covertly oppressive while it shows the world a happier face. Bill’s habitation of Tuke must also owe something to the affinity between, on the one hand, his own desire to engineer the death of our true monarch George and, on the other, Tuke’s Quaker abhorrence of rank. (Though if Tuke truly abhorred rank as much as he thinks or pretends he does, then Bill could never touch him.)

Of course, none of this begins to address the question how The Schoolmaster could dare to go against Bill the King. Brain-saying Augusta at my committee hearing is one thing. Openly defying Bill, whatever body he’s in, whatever sentiments he’s espousing, is another. Because this was no mistake of identity. If I could glimpse Bill the King in Tuke, The Schoolmaster would know he was in him as soon as Tuke’s shadow brushed London Wall.

Still, the question—like a Liberty Bell proclaiming a riddle (Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of
what!?)—
goes on pealing: What is going on? I have no idea, though I do confess to a hope our habeas corpus will succeed. All I must do is satisfy my medical examiners of my mental health. And once we win and I’m back, O my Life’s Love, with you and young Jim in the tranquil privacy of our parlour, the true history of who I am and what I have done will unfold like a revelation, and I shall be its letterer. And unlike my log of madhouse abuses, it’s a story people will be pleased to read, as in it they discover a glimmering testament of honour
and courage racing to and fro in a midnight of intrigue, lettered in plain ink upon plain paper by one of their own, and know there lives and breathes among them a man who with Cicero asks only, Let me die in the country I have often saved.

Until that wished-for time of home lettering,

your loving

James

84 L
EADENHALL
S
TREET

O
CTOBER
19
TH
, 1809

Dearest Husband,

I have only this minute got in the door from my first meeting with Drs. Birkbeck and Clutterbuck of the College of Physicians. Having seen you but once, their reluctance to make a definite comment on your case is understandable, but one thing is clear: They like you, Jamie. Which gives me every hope they’ll judge in our favour. When I just now told Jim this, he spun me in a dance round the kitchen. Your son having lived his life under the weight of his mother’s sighs, any prospect of her happiness makes him positively giddy.

That’s all I wanted to say: Your examiners seem such generous, fair-minded men that I have sunny expectations of our habeas corpus—if, that is, the judge can be counted on to hear them, and if there’s any justice in England he can.

Your loving

Margaret

P.S.Jim has something to add.

Dear Father,

Mum and I—did she tell you?—have twenty fingers crossed for you! And twenty toes too!! (And it’s not easy to cross all your toes!!! Did you ever try it????)

Love, Jim

Here it is not yet December and already Drs. Clutterbuck and Birkbeck have paid me four visits together, sometimes the one asking questions, sometimes the other. In addition, Dr. Birkbeck has paid me two visits solo. These men are the two ascendant meteors of the Royal College of Physicians that Dick Staveley has persuaded Monro to allow to examine me, so they can provide testimony in favour of my habeas corpus challenge. Between them they’ve plied me with every modern stratagem of mental scrutiny. The more I said, the more there was to say. Yet just when the pieces were starting to fall into place by the discipline of the telling, they assured me they’d heard enough. Each has now separately mulled over his findings and concluded I’m perfectly sane and intends to say as much in his affidavit before the court.

Their confidence in me has been gratifying and offers further hope of a positive outcome to our case.

For fear they’d think me credulous or deluded, I neglected at first to mention anything involving magnetic workings by French spies. But Dr. Birkbeck (who was first to question me) proved so sympathetic a listener and so manifestly holds the welfare of the
ordinary man tight at his heart, I soon told him everything, namely, “A London gang of event-working assassins, finding my senses proof against their fluid-working (as they term it), have appointed French magnetic spy-workers to actuate the proper persons to pretend I am insane, for the purpose of plunging me in a madhouse, to invalidate all I say by confining me within the measure of the Bedlam-attaining-airloom-warp, making sure by the poisonous effluvia they use that I’m kept fully impregnated, so as to overpower my reason and speech and destroy me in their own way while all should suppose it was insanity which produced my death according to the principle
Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad,
a running joke with them they dolefully intone then burst out laughing.”

Yet even as I thumb-nailed my case, I wondered,
Why on earth risk damning myself out of my own mouth?
Then I thought,
If you can’t tell an honest man the truth, who can you tell it to?
And so I explained all, setting forth the complicated matter of the various procedures of the various gangs and some things that happened to me before I was thrown in here, and how I’m on their calendar for destruction, and the only thing that will save me is if I more than forgive, if I
thank
them for their treatment of me. Otherwise, as they constantly inform me, I should not expect to escape their clutches alive. Yet what they want of me I can never give them, for to thank them would be to betray every principle I ever stood for and so would spell my destruction another way.

On a different occasion, after listening to my account of my Paris years, Dr. Clutterbuck—a forceful, manly, handsome fellow with a thick, strong nose and impressive underbite—broke a long silence by reminding me who it was that Dr. Mesmer, when his science was rejected as charlatanism by the French Academy,
appealed to but the people? And wasn’t it true that Mesmerism salons were frequently fronts for radical societies? And he assured me with a knowing look he has it for a fact that M. Brissot, the French Girondist-revolutionist leader, was a Mesmerism devotee, at least he was until he came to power. Then there was Lafayette, who fought in America alongside the colonists at Valley Forge and has been quoted as saying the main force behind that revolution was Mesmerism; Bergasse (converter of Brissot to Mesmerism in the first place); the husband and wife revolutionists the Rolands; and a dozen others, including, of all people, Marie Antoinette herself, though he guessed a queen can afford to dabble, or might imagine she can. After confessing he’d always wondered if she was behind the Mesmerism plan to free the King from prison by a magnet beaming an escape plan, he asked me if when in Paris I was ever in contact with Dr. Mesmer himself, or M. Puységur, or with Restif de la Bretonne, or Bonneville, or any of the former Cercle Social? Abbé Barruel, perhaps?

Though surprised at Clutterbuck’s original train of association, I paid his sympathy the courtesy of a straight-faced answer, assuring him that while I was never in contact with any French disciples of Dr. Mesmer that I was aware of at the time, from what little I’ve been able to understand of his theories, I would guess he might be on to something. Certainly his strategy of cloaking his doctrine in mystery accords with the methods of the gang, as it does with the policy of a republican like Brissot, who always argued that to produce revolution out in the open is to doom it to failure.

I added I’ve sometimes wondered if Mesmer’s technique of having people grip iron bars plunged in tubs of magnetic filings and so pass into swoons and orgasmic ejaculations could have served as inspiration for the two metal rods I’ve lately noticed
affixed a-top the Air Loom. (These enable the one at the controls of that machine to reach up and grasp them and so weaken the force of the magnetic assailment on anyone who’s just glimpsed a gang member inhabiting a victim. In this way the member appears to the glimpser to
step back
inside the victim, which is what Augusta did when I saw her inhabiting Wood. But nobody swoons.)

Dr. Clutterbuck greeted my attempt to humour him by smiling in a vague way before charging off on a tangent. “You know, Matthews, one thing I’ve noticed about Mesmerism, it makes people honest. Any English follower of Mesmer I ever met, while he might be too suspicious of the five senses for the comfort of a dull, plodding Forceps like myself, you can be sure he won’t be out to deceive or flatter anybody. The simple fact is, Mesmerism may reduce the human body to a puppet or machine, but I never met a Mesmer advocate who had time for the empty forms and silly conventions of common life.”

I confessed I never knew any English Mesmerism practitioners or even that they existed.

“Whether it all be imagination or no,” Dr. Clutterbuck concluded enigmatically, “there were many in those mad times who thought it wasn’t. And I don’t think you should be punished just because it happens you’re still one of’em. Don’t the doctors in this place understand there’s no better way to fix a man in a conviction, however absurd, than to persecute him for it?”

That was Dr. Clutterbuck.

Dr. Birkbeck, the second last time I saw him, cut short my tortuous account of the weeks preceding my imprisonment at Lille, observing only, “What happened in France was a mad business start to finish, eh Matthews? You know what Mr. Coleridge called
it, don’t you? ‘The Giant Frenzy.’ As one tumbled head-over-heels by that tumult, you concur, I trust, with our poet’s designation?”

I said I did.

Later, as they were leaving, Dr. Birkbeck, who is a short, sturdy, jaundiced-looking fellow with a long chin, pumped my hand with terrific vigour, saying, “Matthews, if you’re mad, believe me, so was our mighty opponent of revolution, Edmund Burke.”

Who foamed like Niagara,
it’s been said, but I held my tongue.

“To put the matter in a nutshell,” he concluded, releasing his grip, “you shouldn’t be in here.”

Telling me this seemed to cheer him enormously, but he has a restless conceit about him, which over the next several days the injustice of my situation must have enflamed, for on their last visit to me, he and Clutterbuck brought along Monro himself, and as soon as the three arrived in my corner, Birkbeck rounded on Monro saying, “Tell us, Doctor, is there any particular subject apt to cause this man maniacal hallucinations?”

Caught off guard by the question, Monro replied that to his knowledge there was not, though he did believe me unhinged.

“I take it then, sir, you judge this Air Loom business to be more than a philosophical point?”

Monro asked what heirloom business he referred to.

Looking vexed, Birkbeck said, “Could you please, Dr. Monro, tell us in plain words why you think Mr. Matthews is insane.”

Evidently Monro had no warning of anything like this on its way, or if he did, had been too busy floundering around in the usual birdlime of his understanding to heed it, for he only blustered out that while it might not convince any of us to hear him say it, he had a feeling he could positively rely on that I’m totally insane.

Now Birkbeck drew himself up. “From what I can see, sir, the
main proof you have of this man’s insanity is his inflexible resistance either to admit he’s mad or to render thanks to the medical officers of this hospital for the injustice they’ve done him in keeping him here. From my discussions with him, it’s evident he harbours a profound antipathy toward both yourself and Mr. Haslam, whom he holds primarily responsible for his twelve-year confinement. In the circumstances, sir, I find such antipathy so far from evidence of his madness as to constitute certain proof of his inviolable sanity.”

Monro’s response to this outburst was briefly to look a little sheepish, particularly like one who has just received a short, sharp rap to the skull. He then emitted a series of protesting bleats.

The two medical gentlemen have now submitted their affidavits, in which they make the strongest possible case for my sanity.

So too have Mr. Sadler and Mr. Law as representatives of Camberwell Parish. Theirs gives an account of their interviews before the Bethlem and Grand Committees and also of what happened last week, when, still not giving up, they came again to demand my release and were told by Mr. Poynder—or so I was brain-said by Charlotte, luckily at the time freed from her chains long enough to be on her hands and knees scrubbing the clerk’s office floor, having just provided The Middleman a similar service performable in the same position—that I’m now considered a state prisoner (which I always was) and therefore officially out of Camberwell’s hands. While this is neither good news nor any kind at all really, at least such a statement included in the affidavit may rouse the judge to ask himself why on earth I’m a prisoner of the state.

I understand there’s also an affidavit from Robert Dunbar
declaring the Bethlem damp is destroying my health. This will be Margaret’s doing, inspired by my telling her I have an ulcer in my back. Another Dunbar affidavit—how he ran into The Schoolmaster at The Sow and Sausage and Jack mentioned I’m as sane as he is—is also in the file. Apparently Dunbar told the story to the subcommittee before they saw me. Let’s hope it counts for more in writing. As for The Schoolmaster, he won’t block my release, but he won’t enable it either.

The affidavits go next to the judge, a Justice LeBlanc, of whom nothing is known. He decides if he sees me or no. If no, our habeas corpus has failed.

I expect The Schoolmaster will file a detailed, explicit affidavit saying the court must ensure this
automaton
on whom he is the world expert should not be allowed to join too many others like him roaming the nation at the expense of royal safety, with an addendum to defend his honour, swearing he was never in The Sow and Sausage on the night claimed by Mr. Dunbar, who’s evidently been imposed on by a stranger cunning enough to tell him what he wanted to hear.

There will also be an affidavit from Monro, a terrible flood of self-inflating gabble that will spell out the ways I’m a living menace to the royal family, the Government, and the public, and conclude by declaring me the most deranged lunatic he ever met with in a career dating back to the birth of his grandfather.

One affidavit I do know of (by means of Charlotte) is from one “Peter Mortimer,” who rode with me in ‘96 in that coach from Dover to Dartford on my final return from France. In it he declares me a danger to his Majesty and his subjects. This Mortimer it turns out is not only a Bethlem governor and member of the Grand Committee that recently refused to discharge
me, but the very same wretched puppet of a French magnetic agent named Chavanay who accosted me on the Channel boat, stretching himself beside me on the deck and whispering, “Mr. Matthews, are you acquainted with the art of talking with your brains?”

When I replied in the negative, he said, “It is effected by means of the magnet.”

That, I now learn, was my induction to the horror, but try telling that to the Bethlem governors.

Of course, Liverpool’s letter instructing them to keep me will be part of the package.

From the pens of what other enemies, that I never even knew I had, affidavits will flow, I don’t know.

No one in here has any information. Even Charlotte’s brain-sayings have grown intermittent and unhelpful. I don’t know why. She was always good at keeping in touch.

It’s a waiting game.

With the ulcer in my back now a weeping suppuration, I no longer recline like the carved perpetual maniacs above our gates but lie curled on my bed, staring at the wall. Each brick and the pattern it makes with the rest is familiar to me as the image of my own hand, or soul. If there’s a distinction between brick, hand, soul, I no longer know what it is. Thus my imprisonment
informs
me. Instructs me to mouth
Goodbye Mags, goodbye Jim.
And wonder how even for a little while I could have imagined these bricks won’t be all I’ll ever know again.

Sometimes too I wonder if I should have gone to France in the first place and done there what I did, seeing as how it’s enabled them to pretend the purpose of my imprisonment has been to let me know I should not have, when its true purpose has been to
save their necks by shutting me off from the world, thereby seeking to perplex my understanding of who I am. They think if only I lose sight of my identity, I’ll lose sight of theirs and, if I do happen to remember it, will have no sane audience to inform, and on the rare occasion that I do, as an inmate of this place will command no authority to be heard. By this tortuous punishment they pretend to tell me,
Now, don’t you ever do that again.
A curious injunction, even were it not a fiendish ploy. Well, would I do it again? Now that by that same “punishment” I am in a position to observe first hand how such daily coercion operates, of course I would. Who could call himself a man who wouldn’t?

Unfortunately, getting out is another story. We have a lunatic in here named Barrington who’s convinced he can see and breathe and travel underground. Every other day he needs to be stopped from digging a hole in the yard to bury himself. I think sometimes I must be his unhappy brother.