The Lambs of London (17 page)

“I hope it is not too much to expect from you,” she had said. “I know how precious your time has become.” Yet he had delayed until, that Sunday morning, she had brought pen and ink to his room. He was still lying in his bed.

“It is time,” she said. “I can wait no longer. I cannot leave William in torment.”

Charles observed her face, drawn and pale, and wondered if she were about to cry. “Surely you are exaggerating, dear?”

“Not in the least. He is in peril. He is in danger.”

He did not wish to move her further, so he took the pen and wrote a brief letter of support and encouragement. She snatched it from the pillow, on which Charles was leaning, and bore it in triumph out of the door. She returned to her own room, where she addressed an envelope to “William Ireland, Esquire.” Then she took it up, and kissed the name. A few minutes later she hurried out of the house, and walked quickly to Holborn Passage. She was coming up to the door of the bookshop when she heard William telling his father that he had invented the woman in the coffee-house. She did not know what he meant, for a moment, and then she put her hand up to her mouth. She stopped, looked around slowly, and pushed the door further open.

W
ILLIAM HAD LIED
to her. He had betrayed her. She found herself thinking of other things—of the flight of sparrows from dark corner to dark corner, of some broken glass upon the cobbles, of a linen curtain billowing in the breeze, of the leaden sky threatening rain. And then just as suddenly she felt very cheerful. Nothing could touch her. Nothing could hurt her. “I am discharged from life,” she said to herself, “after valiant service.”

She was moving quickly, not knowing or caring in which direction she was travelling, when she was filled with an overpowering sense of his absence. No one would ever walk beside her again. She had to sit down, to fight her rising feeling of panic, and sank upon a flight of steps leading to the church of St. Giles-in-the-Fields.

The air was filled with the stench of horses when eventually she stood up and made her way home.

W
ILLIAM IRELAND TURNED BACK
, having left the shop and seen Mary run down the passage. He had recognised her at once, but he had not called out to her.

He re-entered the shop. His father had turned around, and was walking slowly upstairs. William collected every item of Shakespearian material that he could find. He took the manuscript of
Vortigern
from a small cupboard below the stairs, and placed it with all the other papers and documents that he had once so carefully prepared and inscribed. He gathered up the unpublished pages of
Henry II
over which he had laboured in his room for many weeks and days, copying exactly the mode of writing which he had learned from Shakespeare’s signatures. He went quietly upstairs to his own room and brought down the inks and sheets of paper that he had got ready for his work. Here also were scraps of manuscript, containing the jug watermark of Elizabeth’s reign, which he had purchased from Mr. Askew in Berners Street. He added books, the dedications of which he had lovingly fabricated, and small drawings which he had embellished. He took up a brimstone match, with a tinder-box, and lit the pile. It did not burn easily or quickly, but the ink and wax reacted with the flame to produce a billowing black smoke which filled the shop. William opened the door, but the sudden draught increased the fire. In the smoke he could not see the extent of the conflagration but he could hear it. The wooden floor and shelves were easily consumed, and then he noticed the flames leaping up the staircase.

M
ARY WENT STRAIGHT
to her room, and locked the door. Oh there is Tizzy calling me down for tea. What shall it be today? India or China? I love the sound of the spoon in the cup. I love the tips of my fingers touching the rim of the cup. There was a knock upon the door. She put her face against it, sensing the coolness of the wood. “I will be coming in a moment, Tizzy.”

“Don’t let it get cold, Miss Lamb.”

“No. It will be hot.”

She waited until Tizzy had descended the stairs, and then she unlocked the door. She closed it quietly behind her, and listened intently for any sound below.

A few moments later Mary entered the kitchen, just as Mrs. Lamb was adjusting her husband’s napkin. “Sit down, Mary, and begin. I wonder you have lived in this house for so long and can still mistake the time. Why? What is it?” Mary was staring at her mother, opening and closing her mouth as if she had been suddenly deprived of speech. “Are you unwell?”

Mr. Lamb started moaning—a low, constant moan—as Mary took up the teapot and held it in front of her as if she were defending herself. “Can you not see what it is?” She was addressing her father.

“It is a teapot, Mary.” Mrs. Lamb went towards her, and took her by the wrists. “Put it down. This instant.”

There was a sudden struggle, and the teapot fell upon the table scattering the water and leaves all over the dark wood. Mary snatched up the fork, used for toasting crumpets over the fire, and plunged it deep into her mother’s neck. Without a sound Mrs. Lamb fell to the floor. At this moment Charles entered the kitchen, with a happy
“Buon giorno!”

chapter fourteen

My dearest de Quincey,

You will have been informed by now of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. My poor dear dearest sister in a fit of insanity has been the death of her own mother. She is at present in a mad-house from where I fear she will be moved to a prison and, God forbid, to the scaffold. God has preserved me to my senses—I eat and drink and sleep, and have my judgement I believe very sound. My father is further distracted, of course, and I am left to take care of him and our maid-servant. Thank God I am very calm and composed, and able to do the best that remains to do. Write—as religious a letter as possible—but no mention of what is gone and done with. With me “the former things are passed away” and I have something more to do than to feel. I charge you, don’t think of coming to see me. Write. I will not see you if you come. God almighty love you and all of us—

C. Lamb

O
NCE THE FIRST
astonishment and dismay had passed, de Quincey lay fully clothed upon the bed and looked at the ceiling. Then he said aloud, “What a fine story!”

A
WEEK LATER
,
A
coroner and jury were convened in an upstairs room of a public house in Holborn. Charles had arrived early, and was sitting in the front row of seats. The chamber was crowded with neighbours and spectators who had come to witness the demeanour of what the
Westminster Gazette
had called “this unhappy young woman.” There had never before been such a murder in Holborn.

Mary was brought into the jury’s presence by the beadle of the district, together with his deputy and the doctor of a private mad-house in Hoxton where Mary was presently detained. Her woeful expression, and the subdued manner in which she followed the directions of the beadle and doctor, elicited general sympathy. The sequence of events was read out to the jury, and the doctor, Philip Girtin, was then questioned by the coroner. He stated that he had examined the young woman on three separate occasions and had concluded that she was not in her right mind. He informed the jury that her derangement had been provoked “by a too sensitive mind,” overwrought “by the harassing fatigues of too many duties.” William Ireland was not mentioned.

“Is she in any position to endure a trial?” the coroner asked him.

“Most certainly not, sir. She is not in the least able to withstand such an ordeal. It would push her deeper into lunacy from which it would prove difficult to extract her.”

Throughout these proceedings Mary sat with her hands folded upon her lap. Occasionally she would look at Charles, but there was no expression upon her face.

“What would you propose then, Doctor Girtin?”

“I believe it best that this unfortunate female should be placed under my care in Hoxton. I do not believe that she is a danger to others, but I suggest that she be kept under restraint as long as I deem it to be necessary.”

“In case—”

“She may prove still to be a danger to herself.”

T
HE JURY AGREED WITH
the doctor’s conclusions. Mary was released into the custody of Philip Girtin, and in a ritual of the coroner’s court her arms were bound to her sides with a leather strap.

When Charles left the public house, he feared that he would never see his sister again beyond the confines of the mad-house. As he walked back to Laystall Street he realised that he had been crying.

C
HARLES
’
S FEARS PROVED
to be unfounded. In the care of Philip Girtin, Mary began to recover her senses. The doctor read to her from Gibbon and from Tyndale, and at those times it seemed to her that she was conversing again with her brother; he engaged her in games of cribbage and primero, to test her grasp of numeracy as well as literacy. She began to discuss with him the poems of Homer, and took great delight in quoting from Shakespeare.

He had forbad Charles her presence, fearing that the associations would prove too painful, but after three months of her confinement he asked her brother to visit Hoxton. His study overlooked a garden where Mary and the other patients were sitting. “I have just returned from the Home Office,” he told him. “I have seen the Commissioner of Lunacy on the subject of your sister. He agrees with me that she will be secure in your company as long as you give your solemn engagement that you will take her under your care for life.”

“Of course. That is the least—”

“I require you to visit her here each evening for a period of a fortnight. I must know whether you excite her too much.”

“I will remind her?”

“Precisely. But if that test is passed, as I believe it will be, then we will proceed to her eventual release. All must be calm and orderly, Mr. Lamb.”

Charles looked out of the window at her. She was sewing, occasionally looking up at the other patients.

C
HARLES MOVED TO A
new house in Islington, beside the New River, and here Mary renewed her life of freedom. When he went to his employment in East India House, she was cared for by Tizzy’s niece; Tizzy had retired to a small property in Devizes, but had declared that she could not leave Charles and Mary in the hands of a “stranger.” Mr. Lamb had died from advanced senility a few months after his wife’s murder. His last words, muttered to Charles, had been, “And that’s true, too.”

In new surroundings Mary remained for the most part calm and even serene. As Charles wrote to de Quincey soon after her arrival in Islington,

My poor dear dearest sister is restored to her senses; to a dreadful sense and recollection of what has passed, awful to her mind, but tempered with a religious resignation and the reasonings of a sound judgement which knows how to distinguish between a deed committed in a transient fit of frenzy and the terrible guilt of a mother’s murder.

In the evenings, after Charles’s return from Leadenhall Street, they sat together and conversed on every subject. Then by degrees they began to collaborate on writing stories taken from the plays of Shakespeare. They found it impossible to agree upon who had initiated the idea, each one trying to assign that honour to the other, but it proved remarkably successful. The first volume, published by Liveright & Elder, received much critical praise in
Westminster Words,
the
Gentleman’s Magazine
and the other periodicals.

There were occasions, however, when Mary was not so composed. She had said to Charles, for example, “Thoughts come unbidden to me. Do you see them flying about the room?” Her distress grew more palpable and ominous. At these times Charles would accompany her over the fields to the private mad-house in Hoxton; she would take her straitjacket with her, and willingly surrender herself to Philip Girtin. De Quincey had written to Charles, after hearing of one such episode:

I look upon you as a man called by sorrow and anguish and by a strange desolation of hopes, into quietness, and a soul set apart, and made peculiar to God.

T
HE FIRE STARTED
in the bookshop by William Ireland, on that fateful Sunday, had claimed no victims.

“I smell sausages,” Rosa Ponting had said.

“No, my love. That is smoke.” Samuel Ireland had walked to the top of the staircase, and had seen the flames in the bookshop.

“Oh my lord,” was all he said.

He rushed over and grabbed Rosa just as she was about to take up a roasted egg from the fender. “Wherever are we going, Sammy? What is it?”

“Out. Up.”

He pushed her out of the room, and hauled her up the two flights of stairs to their bedroom. The window here looked over a neighbour’s balcony in Holborn Passage. “I cannot squeeze through that, Sammy. I really cannot do it.”

“Very well. Do you want to be boiled like suet?”

He thrust open the window, breaking its sash in the process, and somehow she managed to press herself through the available space.

Shortly after they escaped, the whole house was consumed in flame.

T
HE SHAKESPEARIAN PAPERS
were destroyed. That had been William’s intention. Soon after the fire he had written a letter to his father—who, with Rosa, had moved to Winchelsea—in which he asked for forgiveness.

That I have been guilty of a fault in giving you the manuscripts, I confess and am sorry for it. But I must at the same time assure you that it was done without a bad intention, or even a thought of what would ensue. As you have repeatedly stated to me that “truth will find its basis” even so will your character, notwithstanding any malignant aspersion, soon appear unblemished in the eyes of the world.

Samuel Ireland never replied to his son.

William then published a sixpenny pamphlet entitled
The Recent Fabrications of Shakespeare Exposed and Explained by Mr. W. H. Ireland Who is Himself the Sole Agent and Actor of These False Transactions
. He concluded his account with a “general apology” in which he stated that “I did not intend injury to anyone. I really injured no one. I did not produce the papers from any pecuniary motive. I by no means benefitted by the papers,” and added that “Being scarcely seventeen years and a half old my boyhood should have in some measure screened me from the malice of my persecutors.” A paragraph in the
Morning Chronicle
aptly summarised the public response to this production. “W. H. Ireland has come forward and announced himself author of the papers attributed by him to Shakespeare; which, if
true,
proves him to be a
liar.
”

I
N THE SUMMER
of 1804 Mary Lamb suffered one of her more prolonged attacks. She had been confined in the mad-house for several weeks when Philip Girtin spoke to Charles, who had been visiting his sister.

“She needs occupation,” he said. “Entertainment.”

“What do you suggest, Doctor Girtin?”

“She has told me that she once directed a play with you and your friends. Is that correct?”

“Certainly. We were rehearsing some scenes from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
when—when she became ill.”

“Can you not revive them? It may offer her some sense of life as, how can I put it, continuous.”

So Charles had persuaded Tom Coates and Benjamin Milton to present with him a slimmer version of the play of the mechanicals. They had been wary of entering a private mad-house, but Charles had emphasised to them the cleanliness, brightness and good order of Philip Girtin’s establishment. “Besides,” he said, “I am sure that it will greatly assist Mary in her recovery.”

So they agreed to take on the roles of Pyramus and Thisbe, while Charles would “double” as Bottom and the Wall. On one Sunday afternoon, in late spring, they donned their costumes in an adjacent parlour and then appeared before a group of Girtin’s patients who were sitting on small chairs in the communal dining-chamber, some fifteen of them, including Mary Lamb. The males were all dressed in black coats, white waistcoats, black silk breeches and stockings. Their hair was powdered and frizzed, to accentuate the extraordinary neatness of their appearance. The ladies were dressed in no less elegant style with embroidered cotton gowns, green shawls and mob-caps.

Charles had decided to vary the theatrical entertainment with some passages from the speeches of Theseus and Oberon in the same play; but he would leave out the lines of Theseus concerning

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

Are of imagination all compact.

All appeared to be going well, except that the audience had the habit of sitting solemnly through the comic scenes and laughing heartily at the more serious perorations. Mary Lamb, sitting in the front row, seemed to delight in all the impersonations. She particularly enjoyed the performance of Benjamin Milton as Thisbe, and laughed out loud when he chanted his lament over the body of Pyramus: