His Last Fire by Alix Nathan Page B

a basin of tea were given but not taken. Crouching on the floor in misery, he found the reindeer cameo under his bed and holding it tight in his fist beat his head against the floorboards in joy and wretchedness.
    He was confined for days. When at last I was told, Foart said:
    â€˜A case of hallucinatio maniacalis . I cannot let him out.’
    He rejected my pleas; furibund patients were a danger. Then suddenly he allowed Edward into the garden which was badly in need of weeding. From where, having encouraged him to eat himself back to strength, it was not hard with signals, rope and a waiting trap to have him over the wall.
    Once more he roamed his land. Among rocks and bilberries. The magistrate relented, with assurances from me. But Edward was broken. He would not go indoors, for doors could close, be locked. Even near to the house someone might assault him with Babylon, ditches, laudanum, tragi-comedy. Electrical treatment to the head.
    He moved the tent far into the woods, stoked a continuous fire, dosed himself with brandy, ate meat raw or ashy, blackened in the flames. He would countenance no one, scarcely even me. I kept some watch but wouldn’t spy. He knew quite well that nobody would come if the tent caught fire in deep night and cooked him, stupefied, curled like an infant under piles of skins.
    I returned to Brighthelmstone. Sold my valuable knife collection, opened a house for so-called lunatics. In Edward’s library I’d found Locke’s essay. Madmen have not lost their reason, he says, rather, ‘having joined together some ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for truths.’ My asylum was no Collegium Insanorum. Certainly there were no strait-waistcoats, mechanical aparatus, bleeding, blistering. No well-clad mad-doctors. No self-analysis. Above all, no confinement.
    I sought out Maria. The daughter of my employer before Edward. She had chosen to rehabilitate her dead mother’s muddied reputation, rather than marry me, her mother’s footman. By now her mother was surely forgotten by the world and I had something more to offer her. We could run the place together, treat madmen with understanding, common-sense, kindness.
    Approaching her house, I relived her mother’s incessant demands, domination. Maria’s eager grasp in dark corridors and stairwells. Perhaps she had married, I thought, moved away.
    Her mother’s portraits covered the walls; her mother’s novels filled shelves; her notes, poems, letters were piled in boxes, mounds, scattered over tables, floorboards. Maria sat in her mother’s chair, by the window’s perfect seascape, stout but recognisable. Looked round at me, her hands scuttering like mice among papers on her lap. Stared, unblinking. Turned back to the sea.

F ORGIVEN
    â€˜Y ou’ll be dead within the month,’ apothecary Sawbridge tells him.
    That’s how it is with Sawbridge. Their friendship, Harley’s only friendship, has grown out of the muck of truth. Has sprung up like rhubarb, bold and sour, its leaves poisonous, its body acidic, curative. They’ve never lied to each other, never eased discourse with sweet deceit.
    Everything is grist: Reform, finally in place, trade unions, Ireland, cursed evangelicals, geology, dissection, Shelley, the railway, God. Sawbridge is moderate; Harley, the school-teacher, still radical. They set out their life-stories like specimens pinned through the heart, to closely scan and criticise. All is admitted, nothing discarded.
    For years they argue over the tale of the dog so loyal that it would let no one approach the body of its dead master. Famished, it ate the upper part of the man’s face, some of his neck, one of his shoulders. Sawbridge sees it as a simple demonstration of the limitations of the animal mind. Harley insists it is an emblem: the master freedom, dead, the dog revolution, intractably loyal to the concept, able to survive only by doing it violence.
    Sawbridge