Meanwhile that winter, the Inquiry not until May, we set about preparations for removal to the new place. With responsibility for a smooth transition falling square on me, Matthews was not always the first lunatic on my mind, though I had every intention, as soon as I could make the time, to see what he’d say to Shaftesbury’s disturbing words about Liverpool. I was finding it hard to believe the great man who once invited me into his home could have been involved in underhand republican dealings. But what nonparticipant knows a tenth of what goes on in upper-echelon politics? Perhaps in those days it was the best, or only, way to keep the French conflagration under control. And if true, it was conceivably enough to explain why Matthews was with us, as one who knew that the father of our Prime Minister had been a collaborator with revolutionists.
Before I could see Matthews again, another matter arose to do with him. One day early in January, who should show his grizzled boat at my door but Bryan Crowther. By the look of him it was a medical emergency, and mechanically I groped for my bag. Yet, despite Crowther’s sheet-white pallor and shaking hands, it wasn’t his own health he’d come about. After coughing up a good deal of phlegm, which occupied his mouth until he located his handkerchief, he informed me that as Matthews’ surgeon he thought I should be apprised of plans now in motion to transfer him to a private madhouse.
I sat down at my desk, to learn that in Christmas week, Monro, happening to be seated at a state dinner next to a government under-secretary named Becket, had mentioned to him we had care of a lunatic who would benefit from a purer atmosphere.
While it’s possible this remark, which might be thought to run counter to what for eighteen years had been our physician’s impregnable position on Matthews, was only one more disheartening bubble from the Monro brain during a meal poor Becket must have found the longest he ate in his life, it was as likely the upshot of systematic wheedling by Crowther. Still, it was interesting Monro should be playing a role in a scheme to get Matthews out. I remember seven years ago when Matthews’ wife and friends were engaged in their final effort to free him—before she sailed for Jamaica—I commented to him that in some ways it would be a relief to see the last of our Omni Imperias Emperor.
Monro’s response was instructive. After sketching awhile in theatrical absorption, he murmured as if musingly, “And how would we do that, John?”
“Why, by letting him go.”
“And carry his Bethlem journal with him, I suppose, so he can recover his fortune as he takes his revenge on us by selling it piece-by-piece to the papers?”
This response astonished me, and I don’t know what implication of it the more: that Monro should know Matthews’ journal even existed or that he should imagine the charges of a committed lunatic could ever touch us. I don’t think it was only the bias of an author that had me also asking why any man, insane or not, should be held against his will for writing down what he considers the truth.
And there was something else I remember thinking at the time: Monro may be more dangerous than I assume. Thank Christ we’re on the same team. What I didn’t think was, Why am I relieved to be teamed with a dangerous fool?
Crowther was now informing me Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, was willing to send Matthews wherever in the countryside we wanted.
“He needs to be with his family—” were my first words, no alternative having ever occurred to me.
“Sidmouth’s been clear it must be a secure house.”
“Has he been as clear about where the money’s to come from?”
“Poynder tells me Bethlem’s authorized to pay half what it would cost to keep him here. Sidmouth’s office will match that amount. The rest must be found. On the basis of what Matthews’ friends offered before, our hope is they can—”
“That was six years ago.”
Crowther shrugged. “Six years to resent us the more and prosper enough the better to afford him.”
“When would he go?”
“Not before the Inquiry. But the Inquiry could be assured he will.”
“What the devil has the Inquiry to do with this?”
“A transfer before it starts might have them not so curious why he’s been here so long.”
“He’s been here so long because the Government’s wanted him here so long. Not us. They can be told that.”
“Good. You do it.”
“We’re looking in Hackney.”
“Don’t tell me this is all to create a sponsored resident for Monro’s private madhouse—”
“No, Matthews refused even a trip out to look at Monro’s. But a Mr. Fox’s seems—”
“You’ve already spoke to Matthews.”
Crowther coloured. With his toad-belly pallor, the flush made a shocking motley. “Now that the Government’s in on it,” he continued, almost pleadingly, “and we’ve a decent, secure destination for him, it does look like everybody could come out of this happy.”
“It’s good of you, Bryan, to have set about my happiness so discreetly.”
“Your desire,” he answered, twitching, “to be rid of Matthews in some way or other has long been known.” Hotter, he added, “Don’t now tell me you want him kept here, because it would be his death sentence.”
“Well? Haven’t you just implied I’d seek his release with no regard for how it was attained—?” This was juvenile petulance, but I didn’t like his knowing insinuation about the Inquiry. In a complacent tone I added, “New Bethlem should serve him well enough.”
“They’re building it in reeking unsalubrious swampland,” he answered hoarsely, “as you’ve often enough said yourself.”
“Oh, I think we can count on the governors to know what’s best for our patients—”
That I meant the opposite yet did not intend, either, what that implied would have been clear to anyone who didn’t fear I’d crush his backstairs initiative. But the man before me had by this time dissolved to a welter of twitches and tremblings.
“Now, Bryan—” I said, looking him in the eye as with any lunatic, but pulled away when he exploded from his chair and fell across my desk braced on shaking arms, blasting me with his foul breath, yet was at first too overcome with emotion to speak, it was all he could do to continue rasping for breath. Before he half-uttered his heartfelt curse on me—“God damn you to Hell, Haslam”—his eyes fluttered and rolled back in his head. He then pushed clear of my desk and reeled for the door, where he stretched out a hand to steady himself against the jamb but missed it and went staggering into the hall, where he fell with a thud and a grunt and seemed to lie still. Yet when I went to him, he convulsed at my touch, and when I spoke in his ear, he erupted in a gnashing paroxysm.
I called out for keepers. In the end it took four men to cinch him in a strait-waistcoat and place him in a cell. There he spent the night bellowing and sobbing and crying out for his mother. Within forty-eight hours, though still a little shaky, he was calm enough to pick up a scalpel. But he never truly recovered, and over the next several weeks, with the Inquiry winging ever closer, hints began arriving from Poynder that the plans for Matthews’ conveyance were beginning to unravel. It was just like our surgeon to set delicate machinery in motion and then disappear into a bottle, as it was just like Monro to come out with something utterly contrary to his stated policy.
Though by this time I had long since felt Matthews had done his duty by Bethlem, I was too enmeshed in my own obligations and worries to glimpse a way to salvage Crowther’s initiative without the appearance of condoning it. Our surgeon was in need of no more humiliation (by being picked up after by his nemesis) than he’d already brought on himself. More practically, with the Home Office refusing to do more than match Bethlem’s share, if Matthews was to be moved, we were short of money. Staveley had disappeared. Although as he’d stood up to damn me with his question he had every appearance of a small shopkeeper, half a dozen like him might be counted on to chip in. But to find the other six we needed Staveley. They hound you for years to do something, then when they could, they vanish into the suburbs. As clear as I can reconstruct my muddy thinking, it was this: If Monro, Crowther, and Staveley can’t find it in themselves to see their initiative through, why should I, when they set about it behind my back?
Meanwhile, I was prey to glimpses of myself through the eyes of men motivated to seek my destruction. Crowther had known as well as I did I was the one whose reputation would pay for our incarceration of Matthews. Perhaps it was the overwork, but by winter I was bolting up from the covers in a sweat of dread. Besides everything about Norris, the Inquiry would want to know everything about Matthews, and sooner or later someone would ask me why we’d kept him so long. With Liverpool’s predecessor to the Prime Ministership, Mr. Perceval, lately felled by the mad assassin Bellingham, the question was easy if asked of Hadfield or Nicholson. If asked of Matthews it was not.
Of course, I could always assure them Matthews was on his way to Mr. Fox’s, with a few details to be worked out, but that might too much resemble our lengthening Norris’s neck chain: too little, too timely. Or I could bare-faced lie again and so at least be consistent. But could I? Exhausted or not, would I really be bolting up in the night if I still enjoyed the illusion necessary to utter a convincing lie? My only motive for denying my rhetorical outburst that night in The Sow and Sausage, or saying nothing when Monro called Matthews a menace to the public, was defence of Bethlem when assaults were being made on our integrity. Integrity? My God, it was the Government that wanted him in, not us. Had my behaviour really been no worse than a mad-doctor’s negotiating the survival of his madhouse? A strategy of honour, reputation, and fortune? In an age of show, those three do tend to conflate. But where was Bethlem now? And where was I? After eighteen years of blindly carrying out the Government’s dirty work and calling it good medicine, I was waking in the night in a state of unease befitting a castaway in far deeper seas than your quack next door. Not only had my first priority not been the health of my patient, but I had stood up in public and lied about it. A puppet on strings played by he-didn’t-know-what hands, who if he didn’t soon find out what was what, was at risk of answering the Inquiry’s question the way he did Staveley’s: with dumb, hot-eared paralysis.