Bedlam: The Further Secret Adventures of Charlotte Bronte

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Life abounds with chance encounters. Most leave no residue, but some have consequences that are serious and far-reaching. Such was my encounter with a woman named Isabel White, whom I met during the summer of 1848. Such was my meeting with Dr. John Forbes. Chance encounters such as these send us down one path instead of another, and we cannot know until much later that they have changed the course of our lives.

However, I had no intimation of this on the morning I was engaged to visit Bedlam. As I sat in the parlor of the Smiths’ house at Number 76 Gloucester Terrace in Hyde Park Gardens and waited for the carriage, I thought only of the interesting material for my long-overdue book.

I heard wheels rattle and horses’ hooves clop outside. I hurried to the door and opened it. In the sun-drenched street between the rows of elegant houses was a carriage, but not the one hired for me. Down its steps clambered Mr. Thackeray.

“Good morning, Miss Bronte,” he said, all sardonic smiles. “I’ve come to pay you a social call.”

Although furious at him for what he’d done to me last night, I had no choice but to usher him to the parlor.

“How is Jane Eyre today?” His eyes twinkled mischievously behind his spectacles.

My eyes saw red. “How dare you! After introducing me as ‘Jane Eyre’ and making a public fool of me yesterday, you mock me again!”

Mr. Thackeray took an involuntary step backward. Astonishment raised his bushy eyebrows. “Why, Miss Bronte, were you offended by what I said?”

“I was and am offended.”

“I meant you no harm,” Mr. Thackeray said, stung by my criticism. His manner turned patronizing. “You are too sensitive. If you intend to survive in the cutthroat world of literary society, you must grow a thicker skin.”

“People who think other people are too sensitive are usually as insensitive as a rhinoceros themselves,” I retorted.

Mr. Thackeray glared indignantly; then he remembered his manners. “All right. If your feelings were hurt, I apologize.”

“What kind of apology is that? I could just as well call you a cad and then say I’m sorry you are one!”

“You’ve already called me a rhinoceros,” Mr. Thackeray said, nettled yet amused.

“Only because you deserved it.”

Baffled now, Mr. Thackeray said, “I don’t understand what all this fuss is about. What I said was just idle, harmless teasing.”

“No, sir!” I exclaimed with a passion. “It was in poor taste at best, and cruel at worst!”

We faced off, I all in rage and Mr. Thackeray all haughty resentment. My fists were clenched, and I know not what I would have done if George Smith hadn’t heard us arguing and rushed in from his breakfast.

“Charlotte, you have every right to be upset,” he said, “but I’m sure that Mr. Thackeray truly didn’t mean to cause you pain. Do give him a chance to apologize properly.”

These reasonable words served to dash cold water onto the heat of battle. “I am sorry for offending you,” Mr. Thackeray said with genuine contrition. “Will you please forgive me?”

“Yes, of course.” I didn’t quite trust him, but felt better now that we’d had it out.

“I’d like to make it up to you,” Mr. Thackeray said. “Please allow me to take you and a party of friends to the theater. You may choose the play.”

The idea of another social occasion made my nerves quail, but I accepted rather than have him think me still angry. We made a date for the next evening. Then my carriage arrived, and I set out for Bedlam.

As the carriage bore me away from the decorous streets of Hyde Park Gardens, I began to have misgivings. St. George’s Fields, in which Bedlam was located, contained some of London’s worst slums. Deteriorating tenements lined dirty, narrow streets filled with the poorest, most downtrodden of humanity. The stench of garbage and cesspits was sickening. But of course the city authorities would not have situated an insane asylum in a finer district.

Bedlam was an imposing edifice, three stories high, crowned by a huge dome, with a classical portico and columns at the entrance, surrounded by a stone wall. Stately as a temple, it dominated the wide boulevard. Dr. Forbes was waiting for me at the gate. We exchanged pleasantries and he led me inside. A lawn bordered with flowering shrubs and shaded by tall trees seemed out of place amid the squalid slum. So did the folks who accompanied us up the wide staircase in an excited, chattering horde. Many were fashionable ladies and gentlemen, such as one might see in Pall Mall.

“Who are all these people?” I asked.

“Visitors,” replied Dr. Forbes. “Some are here to see family members who are patients. Most have come to tour the asylum.”

To view the inmates as if they were wild animals in the zoo, I thought. I felt ashamed of my own curiosity, until Dr. Forbes pointed out a booth at the entrance, where an attendant was taking admission fees, and said, “The money paid by the visitors helps to defray the cost of caring for the patients.”

Inside, the visitors’ footsteps and chatter echoed in a vast hall with high ceilings, lit by sunlight from many windows. So far Bedlam seemed a respectable institution, not the gloomy dungeon I’d imagined. It did not even smell any worse than other buildings in London, whose sewers taint the air everywhere. Dr. Forbes escorted me through a chapel, then the basement, which contained the kitchens, pantry, and laundry. There labored people I first took for servants.

“The patients who are well enough work to earn their keep,” Dr. Forbes said.

I took a second look at the men cutting vegetables with sharp knives and the women pressing sheets with hot irons. I was glad to see attendants standing watch over them, for I’d not forgotten George Smith’s warning about dangerous lunatics. We inspected the kitchen gardens, where patients watered neat rows of plants, and the recreation grounds where they strolled. Dr. Forbes talked about the therapeutic benefits of fresh air and exercise. The crowds of visitors lent the place a holiday air. I could almost have thought myself on tour of some great country manor, if not for the howls and shrieks that periodically emanated from the asylum.

“Shall we proceed to the wards?” Dr. Forbes asked.

I eagerly agreed. We went up a spacious staircase. The women’s ward had sunny corridors furnished with carpets, comfortable chairs, oil paintings, marble busts, and baskets of flowering plants. Matrons in white caps and aprons supervised the patients. These were young women and old, modestly dressed and clean. Some wandered aimlessly. One muttered to herself as she passed us; one followed us, plucking at my sleeve. Other patients welcomed visitors to a table that displayed knitted mittens, lace collars, pincushions, small baskets, and other handmade articles.

“They’re allowed to sell the things they make,” Dr. Forbes said.

I purchased a lace collar for my friend Ellen, and a wool muffler for John Slade. I know it is strange to buy something for a man I might never see again, but I have stockpiled a collection of small gifts, in case he should return.

So far the gifts were all I’d found to take with me from Bedlam. Where were the dramatic sights that would inspire a new novel? Mrs. Smith had said I have a taste for disturbing things, and I suppose she was right. Alas, my taste would not be satisfied here.

Then Dr. Forbes said, “I can show you some things that the general public is not allowed to see, but they’re not for the fainthearted.”

Various experiences had toughened my heart to the consistency of leather. I assured Dr. Forbes that I was ready for my tour behind the scenes at Bedlam. We watched doctors set leeches on inmates who were sick with physical as well as mental ailments, and apply hot, pungent, medicinal compresses on the shaved scalps of patients who moaned and resisted.

“It removes turbulent spirits that are thought to disrupt the brain,” Dr. Forbes explained.

We saw patients sitting in bathtubs of cold water, metal lids locked over their bodies, only their heads showing. Dr. Forbes said it calmed them, and indeed they seemed calm to the point of insensibility. In one room a man wearing a gag lay trussed in a “blanket gown”-a garment wrapped and tied tightly around him so that he could not move.

“The blanket gown keeps him from hurting himself or anyone else,” Dr. Forbes said.

I thought of Branwell, who’d suffered from violent fits due to drink and drugs. A blanket gown would have come in handy for him. The memory of him saddened me. Indeed, I found the patients more saddening than inspiring, and they were hardly a suitable subject for a novel. Critics had called Jane Eyre coarse, shocking, and vulgar. God help me if I set my next book in Bedlam!

Leaving the treatment rooms, we met two physicians who asked Dr. Forbes for his advice about a patient. As he spoke with them, I looked around a corner and saw, at the far end of a passage, a door that was open just enough for me to see darkness on the other side. The darkness called to that which is dark in me. I approached the door, which was made of iron and had a large keyhole. I wondered why a door so obviously meant to be locked was not. What lay beyond?

Reaching the door, I peered around it. Into my face blew a cold draft that smelled of urine and lye soap. I saw a dim, dismal corridor with an arched ceiling, its only light from a barred window at the end; I heard wails and gibbering. A not entirely disagreeable fear shivered through me. I had a premonition that the corridor led to something I should not see but must. My heartbeat quickened with anticipation; I looked over my shoulder. No one was about. No one saw me step through the door.

The wails and gibbering echoed around me as I tiptoed down the passage; they sounded like utterances from Hell. On either side of the passage were doors, each with a window covered by metal grating set at eye level. I peeked through these. In one locked cell after another, through a maze of corridors, I saw a man or woman imprisoned. Some crouched in corners like animals in pens, but others were in wrist and ankle cuffs, chained to beds. How they struggled and moaned! These were scenes from a medieval torture chamber. I’d stumbled upon the dark heart of Bedlam.

I was headed back the way I’d come when I felt a touch on my shoulder. My heart vaulted up into my throat with a mighty thump. Gasping, I whirled. Before me stood a young woman, small and thin and pale. She wore a plain gray frock and a white shawl. A white bonnet framed brown, curling hair and delicate features. Violet-gray eyes too large for her face calmly met my gaze. Shock paralyzed me, and not just because she’d crept up on me so unexpectedly.

I am haunted by those I have loved and lost. Although they are dust in their graves, I encounter them time and again in persons I meet. This woman was my sister Anne in every lineament.

“Excuse me, madam,” she said, and her voice was Anne’s, sweet and gentle.

The terrible memory of Anne’s passing swept over me like a black wave. Anne had meekly accepted every remedy we pressed upon her; foul medicines and painful blisters added to her suffering, but she patiently endured. I took her to the seaside for a change of air, a last-resort treatment recommended by her doctor. Alas, it didn’t work. Anne died at the age of twenty-eight, in Scarborough. She was buried there, on a headland overlooking the sea she always loved. But here, with me, was her ghost.

“Who are you?” was all I could think to say.

“I’m Julia Garrs,” she said, and curtsied. “What’s your name?”

“Charlotte Bronte.” Now reason overpowered fancy. I saw that she was not my sister reincarnated. She was some ten years younger than Anne had lived to be, and prettier; she had a full bosom, Cupid’s bow lips, and thick, black eyelashes. She was a stranger.

Relief flooded me as I said, “What do you want?”

“I’m lost,” she said. “Will you help me get home? My baby is there. He needs me.”

I deduced that she was a visitor who’d wandered here by chance just as I had. “Certainly.”

She smiled, and as I escorted her along the passage, she took my hand. Her fingers were cold and frail, and I shivered: it seemed that Anne had reached from her grave to touch me. I lost my sense of direction and could not find the door. We turned corner after corner until we came upon a matron. She was a heavy woman with a coarse, red, common face. “Julia!” she said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Julia shrank behind me. I wondered how the matron knew her name and why she was frightened. “We’re visiting the asylum. We got lost,” I explained.

The matron sneered. “You may be a visitor, mum, but she ain’t. She’s an inmate.”

I was shocked. “But-”

“But she looks so normal.” The matron laughed. “I know. All the visitors think so. You’re not the first one she’s tried to fool into helping her escape. She charms the attendants into letting her out of her cell.” The matron’s tone hinted at the sort of wiles Julia employed. “Then she goes looking for her next mark.”

“Is this true?” I asked Julia.

She clung to my hand but averted her eyes from mine.

“Oh, it’s true, all right,” the matron said. “She’s in Bedlam ’cause she killed her own baby. Born out of wedlock, it was. She drowned it in the bath. Afterwards, she went mad. Thinks it’s still alive.”

I stared at Julia in horror. The matron yanked her away from me and said, “Come on, then, girl. You’re going back to your cell.”

As she led the reluctant but meek Julia down the corridor, she said to me, “You hadn’t ought to be here, mum. This wing’s not on the public tour. It’s for the criminal lunatics.”

Stunned by fresh shock, I said, “How do I get out?”

The matron pointed. “The door’s that way.”

I gladly went in the direction she’d indicated. Then I heard a loud rattling of wheels. I saw, down the passage, four male nurses pushing a cart on which lay a patient wrapped in a blanket gown. He bucked and writhed; he grunted through the gag in his mouth. The sounds caused my own mouth to drop. My heart began a thunderous pounding.

The unintelligible noises that a human makes are as individual and distinctive as his voice speaking words. A sigh, cough, or groan can reveal identity. Every fiber of my being told me who that madman was, even though reason said he could not be.

The nurses pushed the cart into a room; the door slammed behind them. Torn between disbelief and fearful hope, I hurried to the door. I peered through the grated window and saw the nurses wrestling with the madman, removing the blanket gown. He was tall and thin, with sinewy muscles, clothed in a torn white shirt and black trousers. I strained to see his face, which was hidden by the gag and his disheveled black hair. A white-coated doctor with a tonsure of gray hair and a bland, bespectacled face tinkered with a strange apparatus-a clutch of squat black cylinders connected to a machine. Long wires protruded from metal posts at their ends. Nearby stood a wooden table fitted with leather straps with buckles and a set of clamps at the end. I watched the nurses heave the madman onto the table. They tried to buckle the straps over him. As he thrashed and struck out at them, his face turned toward me.

It was lean and swarthy, dripping with sweat, the nose like a falcon’s beak. His mouth was an agonized grimace around the gag. His eyes were a rare, brilliant, crystalline gray. I saw them in my dreams every night. He did not see me now. I clapped my hand over my mouth to stifle a cry of horror mixed with recognition.

My first, visceral impression had proved true: the madman was John Slade.