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am?”
    “I want him out.”
    “No more than do I. If it was up to me, all but the dangerous ones would be out today. Back to the attic, the stake in the yard, or the hole in the floor with the crib over it. Harmless ones lacking homes to go to could be Tom o’ Bedlam again, with his metal arm-clip licence to beg. But who can wind back the clock? Nowadays, once the mad exhaust the tender mercies of their families, they come, if they’re lucky, here to Bethlem Hospital, where for a little while we treat their suffering, before we push them out again, cured or uncured, because we need the bed.”
    “Mr. Haslam, please open this gate so I can see to my husband.”
    “Mrs. Matthews, I can’t. First, because it’s not a visiting day. Second, because the rule here is, disobedience so extreme as an attempt at escape is met by a temporary suspension of all privileges.”
    “But he returned!”
    “To do that, he first had to escape.”
    “This is insufferable!”
    “I can see that. But if you come back Wednesday morning at ten, we’ll go over the details of your husband’s admission. Afterward I’ll take you along to his private room, where with your own eyes you’ll see how we do the best possible in circumstances constrained by a ruinous shortage of funds. The sad fact is, the recent upswell of public solicitude for lunatics that’s been a consequence of madness striking down our mighty monarch King George hasn’t translated into an injection of hard currency for our oldest and finest public hospital devoted to the care of unhinged minds. But I promise you, Wednesday you’ll go away from here assured I’m as steadfast in my intention as you—only mine is for the real benefit of three hundred patients and not the hoped-for benefit of one.”
    I looked at Haslam then, attending to what was still visible in his eyes, that eloquent opaqueness of emotion. For a moment neither of us spoke, until, saying only, “Wednesday,” I stepped around him and walked away. It was do this or burst into tears and so enact the seal of his power upon me.
    But before I reached Broker Row, I glanced back to see, I think, if my ragged crew had been there the while, because the first thing I noticed was they were gone. It was now only John Haslam standing before the iron door he’d come through, the image of a man who’d locked himself out. Except, even as I looked round, heturned from the door with an odd little wave and made a pantomime with the key to show me he could not get it to work and found this amusing and seemed to think I would too. Yet considering his treatment of me just now, this was strange. Besides, I was too flustered to be caught looking back to indulge that collusion, and turned away, so abruptly I nearly twisted an ankle.
    But that odd little wave stayed in my mind, and there, as I walked on, it was joined by another, by which I realized what Haslam reminded me of. It was something I once saw when I was a girl of seven or eight and have never forgot.
    I was with my mother in Southwark High Street. (O Dearest Parent, though a poor widowed schoolmistress with barely means to dress and feed thy Daughter, Thou gavest her something of infinitely greater worth than fine food and fine clothes: experience of what genuine love is, and love of reading and good books, so as a Woman she might not only by the common superiority of female virtue but also by an uncommon strength of female intellect be truly worthy to love a good and intelligent Man!) She and I were on our way to the fair in the last year of its operation—and if you know when they closed down Southwark Fair for good, you will know my age to the year. As we went, we were passed in the street by a chair carrying an English seaman who’d survived shipwreck in the South Seas by crawling out of the surf to spend two years in solitude on a tropic island. When I saw him he was just off the ship that rescued him, then at Wapping Docks. Having contracted a fever on the