Home before ten o’clock, I was relieved to find our servant Justina had opened the shop for business. Though cool in her manner toward me, she’d cleared the counter, dusted the shelves, swept the floor, and put the sign out, forgetting only some of the lights. Jamie had been in Bethlem but a month, yet for lack of his daily efforts the wholesale trade he’d patched together over the previous ten was already unravelling. We needed every customer who wandered in. In the note I’d left Justina, I wrote JAMES large, underscoring it. Beauty, not reading, being her strong suit, I hoped she’d recognize the name and gather where I was. When not flouncing by in a sulk she loved nothing more than to please me, and being popular with our customers and knowing it, why would she not open the shop? Because, while she professed to pray as fervently as I did to have Jamie back with us, she was sunnier when it was just us two. But yes, she did open the shop, yet her look, when I thanked her for it, too much resembled those I used to receive from her when Jamie’s old friend from his Camberwell days, Robert Dunbar, was often on the premises with Jamie away on the Continent. It was a look that said, Why must he be here?
I sometimes think I have too much hope of people always to admit to myself the danger they pose. Justina Latimer, now that was danger—yet how far would she need to go before I recognized what it was I harboured, and acted?
Robert Dunbar had been danger too, I suppose, but was too transparent and compliant to seem so—and necessary. It was he who helped me when I took the business retail. An eager, practical man adept with hammer and saw, he appeared at my door a year after Jamie disappeared into France. It was he who built for me, his labour gratis, the counter and dividing walls necessary to turn the office into a shop. That job finished, he stayed on to help me open the books. By the time he was competing with Justina to be first to greet the customer when the bell jingled, it was evident (if I would only give him a sign, the one he was getting from everybody else telling him his old friend wasn’t coming back) he’d next be exercising his ingenuity in my bed, his own by then a mat on a treadle we kept under the counter he’d built. With Robert Dunbar’s muscle and penetration I might have clawed my way back to wholesale. But my experience has been that while pride, desire, and the compromises of security are quiet enough temptations when met with singly, in concert they make a noise on the conscience. Finally I could not betray my husband, even if he was mad and missing in war time on the wrong side of the Channel.
It was some while before Robert Dunbar was able to grasp my fidelity for the plain dull thing it was, convinced as he was (and so like a man) my reluctance had something to do with him and therefore, if only I would tell him what it was, could be fixed. When at last, by saying it in as good as so many words, I got him to understand the difficulty did not extend even so far as his existence, the shine for Robert went off the do-gooding life. One mopish day, before he would take up his treadle and walk away, he made a fumbling, I suppose despairing, attempt upon the virtue of Justina, who welcomed his advances long enough to eviscerate one, and make an energetic start on the other, of his testicles with the razor I thought he knew she always carried.
Hardly was our poor crippled Lothario packed off to Guy’s Hospital and Justina’s tears dried than her mood, which had been in eclipse for a year, rebounded as cheerful as it was in the interval between Jamie’s first disappearance and Dunbar’s first showing his face. That’s how it stayed until the morning last March when the shop door jingled, and Jamie, back from three years imprisoned in France, staggered in like a buyer for the dead. I was too concerned for my husband’s health, not to say overjoyed to have him with me, to take overmuch notice when Justina’s mood passed again into eclipse. But in the ten months Jamie was back with us, I would sometimes catch on her face an expression of disgust with me that I should sink to being a dirty puzzle in my own bed with my own husband. This I ascribed to youth’s queasiness at the animal, as well as to the callous violations of a child-bride by her late husband Latimer (mysteriously stabbed to death in his bed when she was out of the house not ten minutes for bread for his morning tea, as she explained to the police).
But I never saw Justina’s mood so black as that morning I arrived home from returning Jamie to Bethlem. Mistaking it at first for sympathetic concern, I was amazed when, after I thanked her for opening the shop, she turned from me and coldly asked “what Mr. Matthews wanted in showing his face again” and said “she hoped this time they’d keep him—” She then stole a glance round and, seeing me angry, quickly added, “So he’d have benefit of treatment from expert practitioners—”
This was insolence from a maidservant with a politic coda, and I can only plead it was the first time I ever heard anything like it voiced so brazenly by this one. Gazing at her in my shock, I thought, As a child, Justina, you were ill-treated by a homicidal parent and when not much older by a savage husband, yet have turned out decent enough, if moody, in many ways intelligent, with good impulses, only slow to know what they are and not much skilled in the articulation of them. This reticence has left you hostile to men and what you call their performing snails. But perhaps forgiveness by me this morning, and one day heartfelt love by a good man, might assuage the bitterness of so much cruelty and loss in your life—
This was as far as I had got in my earnest delusion when the shop bell jingled, and I watched a girl as relieved to be saved by it as I was to watch her trip away.
On Monday I tried to see Lord Erskine, a mad-eyed republican Scot famous for his unsuccessful defence of the second part of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man. Though Jamie’d told me Erskine had agreed to act as his counsel, I soon learned either this was fantasy or Erskine had changed his mind. I couldn’t get past the man’s secretary, who said his Lordship was no longer taking criminal cases, and when I mentioned Bethlem, added nastily, “—and never did charity for lunatics.”
The small hours of Tuesday and Wednesday I spent tossing and turning in a struggle to believe I had delivered Jamie back into the best medical hands in the kingdom, which would soon enough return him to me. It was true what Jamie had said: If Bethlem hasn’t cured them after a year and deems them a danger to no one, they’re released, whether the family likes it or not. So there was no reason to believe I faced more than eleven months’ wait, in which case our child (if we were so blessed) had a chance of growing up secure in a loving household of London tea dealers, whose head was only at times of exceptional distress prone to pluck a privet-leaf and call it Orange Pekoe.
As, however, to the mysterious circumstances of Jamie’s admission to Bethlem: What if this was no ordinary lunatic case but a political one, meaning he’d be held as long as who-knew-who wanted him held? But how to set about finding who wanted what, when I had no idea what Jamie had done (if it was more than crying “Treason” in the House) or was thought to have? For that matter, was it for new transgressions or old?
Meanwhile, life must carry on. The staff in the shop now just us two, those were desperate days. Nauseated by worry, exhaustion, and perhaps something else, I had no reserves of patience with Justina, who at times behaved with such sullen insolence I must dismiss her, but then where would I be? My fear was any increase in demand on my energy and time and I would crack. Alert to my fragile condition, Justina chose a thousand small ways to punish me for the crime of wanting my husband back. So she would linger two or three seconds longer at a task before moving to greet a customer, or silently wipe away tears that were somehow my doing, or when she burned the pudding apologize so vaguely as to imply it was only to be expected given all she now had to do. These little needling things reminded me, if I didn’t already know it, how selfish what some call love can be.
Wednesday dawned warm (for February) and foul. Leaving Justina pacing crackly as a cat, I made the walk that by now I knew pretty well, this time carrying a basket of goods I imagined Jamie would appreciate: warm stockings, clean linen, a half-dozen oranges, a block of chocolate, a plate and knife, a toothbrush. My basket also contained two books, the first the second part of Mr. Paine’s Rights of Man, which (Lord Erskine being unsuccessful defending) was rare, having been burned. “The flames,” I can remember Jamie once remarking, “is where the English consign the Rousseau of British democracy.” I didn’t think he’d read the second part, but I knew well his enthusiastic opinion of certain sentiments in the first, as well as those in Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, written against our King and nobility. The second book in my basket was Jamie’s hero the republican David Williams’ Letters on Political Liberty, which I did know he’d read but thought he might like to have by him, as Williams (a Welshman like Jamie’s father) had once been instrumental in his first mission to Paris.
At the gate, as I half anticipated, the animal Bulteel made a great show of knowing nothing of my visit and would see me off, but you could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Well before I could make a scene, he turned away and wrote me out a ticket, instructing me to wait inside the gate for my guide, the hospital steward, Mr. Alavoine, who—whether by arrangement or chance was not clear—was standing only a few feet away, in conversation through the bars with a dissolute lascar. This Alavoine I knew was the monster of depravity known to Jamie as Sir Archy, and I must say, with his greasy ginger-yellow locks and his ginger-white grizzle and his tiered black hat pushed back high on his degraded brow and his dirty red coat and his breeches buttoning between the legs, he showed himself as unwholesome a human figure as I ever met with in my life. When at last the horrible fascination he exerted on me palled to mere disgust, my attention reverted to the situation I found myself in.