I look round at the little company. Alas, I think, they do not know me. I am John's friend, and he has vouched for me and so they have taken me in. But they do not know how afraid I am. They do not know that I have long been parted from God. They do not know there is a madness in me which renders grass and trees as lunatic lines and splodges. They have taken me in to Bedlam, but they do not know that my spirit rejoices in chaos. I am wrong for them and I will do them wrong, and they do not know it. I opened my mouth to begin upon telling them what kind of man I was, but no words came to me except mumbled words of thanks for their prayers, "for which," I told them, "I hope to make myself worthy." And I saw Pearce nod approvingly at my sudden humility.
And so my first day at Whittlesea began. In the company of Ambrose and Hannah I was taken on a tour of the Hospital. The rain I had been spared on my journey was now drenching the featureless plain, swept into squalls by the wind.
As Ambrose unbolted the door of George Fox and it swung inwards, I, all unthinkingly, hurried in to be out of the wet and so drew suddenly upon myself the nervous glance of some forty men lying in two cluttered rows the length of the barn.
At once, a commotion began. Some of the men stood up. I saw one clutch the hand of another, as if in fear. Some laughed. Others moved forward and stared at me, as at a strange exhibit. One rolled up his filthy nightshirt and giggled and bared his buttocks that were covered in sores. The stench of the place was very bad, the night pails being full and all the "Decayed Friends" (as Ambrose termed the mad people) appearing lousy and unwashed. But none was shrieking or crying, as I has been told the mad of the London Bedlam did constantly. None was chained up, but could move freely about the big barn. And they were not in darkness. Four small, barred windows let sufficient light into the place for me to see that at the further end of it had been constructed a gallery, reached by two ladders and on this high gallery stood an enormous loom.
"I see there is a loom," I said to Ambrose. "Do these men weave things upon it?"
"Yes," said Ambrose, rubbing his large hands together. "The loom. Transported by cart from the workhouse shut down at Lynn."
My thoughts, which the man with the naked bottom still sought to preoccupy by jigging up and down in front of me, returned at once to Justice Hogg and my lost role as Overseer. Now, I would never succour the poor but serve the mad instead. But there appeared to be little difference between these two categories of people, many of the faces staring up at me having about them the same look of despair as I had perceived in the paupers gathering sticks near Bidnold.
"What is manufactured on the loom?" I enquired of Ambrose.
"Sail!" he said.
"Sailcloth? For Men-of-War?"
"No, Robert. For the fishing fleet at Lynn. They send us herrings in payment."
Ambrose then addressed the occupants of George Fox. He spoke to them kindly, as to a child, and they were mainly silent while he talked except for two at the further end who began to swear at each other in some of the foulest language I have ever heard. Ambrose instructed the men to roll up their pallets and take their slop pails to the cess pit and to put out the trestles for breakfast. I know now that this same routine is followed every morning, but Amrbose gave the instructions with great enthusiasm, as if he were announcing some happy new tiding. And indeed, when he had finished, one old man, around whose scrawny limbs were wound a great quantity of bandages, began to applaud. And Ambrose nodded at him and smiled. He then said: "And I will tell you now that great good fortune has come to Whittlesea. Behold Robert. He has come from Norfolk to help us all in our work for the Lord. Say his name to yourselves. Say Robert. And keep the name precious. Because he is your Friend."
The company then, to my embarrassment, started to mumble my name over and over again. Almost all were saying it, except one who began to utter a small piercing noise resembling very well the cry of the peewit. I did not know what was expected of me in the way of words, so I said nothing but performed a little obeisance such as I used to perfect before a looking glass in my Whitehall days. And I followed Ambrose out and we walked in the rain to Margaret Fell.
We found Hannah and Eleanor here. The pallets had been rolled away and the night pails emptied and bowls of cold water had been brought, in which the women of Margaret Fell were washing their faces and hands with a blackish soap. They were about thirty-five in number and of all ages, the youngest being no more than twenty or twenty-five.
"Tell me," I whispered to Ambrose, as I was shown the carding combs and spinning wheels with which the women worked to produce a grey lumpy yarn that was made into mops, "how have such young people been brought to madness?"
"By a hundred ways, Robert," he replied. "Madness is brother and sister to misfortune, not to age. Poverty is a prime cause. Abandonment another. We have one here, Katharine, who was deserted by her young husband in the middle of the night and now she will not, cannot, sleep and all her madness is from the exhaustion of her brain and body."
"Which one is Katharine?"
"There, washing her neck. With her clothes very torn. For this is what she does in the night: sits and tears to rags whatever we dress her in."
I looked towards this person. I saw a tall but thin young woman with black hair straggling to her waist and black eyes that reminded me of Farthingale's, except that they were larger and sadder and the skin under them bruised by her sleeplessness.
"There are cures for such an affliction," I said, remembering that at Cambridge Pearce used to chew mallow root and endive to still his moist brain into repose.
"Yes," said Ambrose, "and we try them for Katharine and sometimes she will sleep an hour or more, but a shortness of breath wakes her. She feels herself to be suffocating and speaks to us of weights on her head, pushing her down."
I was touched by the condition of this woman and, as Ambrose once again made the request that the inmates of Margaret Fell ponder my name and say it to themselves, I wondered at the power this word "sleep" has assumed in my mind. Days were coming, I was certain, when I would have to open my case of silver-handled surgical instruments and hold in my unpractised hand the scalpel with the words "Do Not Sleep" upon it. In allowing myself to become Robert I had surely ended what the King called my "dreaming time", and in my state of wakefulness much of what I longed to forget or ignore would now be grossly visible to me once more. And what must I come across on my very first day but a woman who slept not at all and whose wakeful stare – a perpetual, uncourted vigil over all the hours of light and dusk, darkness and dawn – had brought her to madness? Can there be, I thought bitterly, any more terrible exhortation on earth than that which the King had given me? When he gave the words to the engraver, what degree of suffering did he have in mind for me?
As if to answer this question, I soon found myself with Ambrose inside the third habitation of the Whittlesea Hospital, the place they call William Harvey.
"I have already suggested to you that anyone entering here for the first time feels as if he has stumbled into hell. Except that it is not fiery. It is chill and dark and foetid, having only one small barred window in it and no rushlights or candles at all, for fear the inmates might wound themselves with an open flame or set on fire the straw pallets.
The people in William Harvey are kept chained up and harnessed to bolts in the wall and truly the existence of the King's lions in the Tower is more free than theirs. But these are people descended so far into madness that they would, if not clamped into iron, commit obscenity or murder upon each other or mutilate their own bodies which, from the great restlessness of their limbs, appear as if truly possessed by some devilish power.