At Millbank Prison on the River Thames it is a long walk from the outer gates to the cells within, through a windowless gloom, and no way to remember which way is out. Or what day is what. There is nothing to ease the ringing silence, the dank unyielding walls that chill him to the bone, no reassurance of warmth or light. The Millbank way is silence, dysentery , cholera, malaria. Take one, take all. Jacques-Louis is buried within the darkness of white walls and white hallways. He can barely tell the time of day but for the cycle of noises and visitations, so that he might be living the same night and day over and over in some Sisyphean struggle. There is no book, pen or paper to distract him from the odium of his wrongdoings or the stench of his ruined life. When he leaves the cell for one hour on a Sunday , he is blinkered and hooded, his wrists and ankles chained. He shuffles along in a yard where no words are to be spoken, no sound uttered at all. Men come and go from his cell. Sometimes it is Socrates, or the ghost of Hamlet. Abraham with his long beard accompanying Columbus returned from his voyage to the Orient and now unable to speak Portugue se with any certainty . Bats appear, their cries strangely soothing, hanging in the corner of the cell, blood dripping from their mouths. Sometimes dogs bark at him, and though he cannot be sure they are not ghost hounds, he returns their baying with his own. Other men come claiming officialdom. They smell of damp wool, unwashed linen and rotting teeth. He answers their questions in French or Latin. He growls at their attempts to measure his head. He makes suggestions, some of them impolite. He attempts to bite one of them. He is put in a restraint that pins his arms, a leather halter that stops his speech. They tell him, in the sonorous tones of Roman senators, that he is to be sent to Bethlehem Hospital for assessment. Is he mad? Has he always been mad? The Crown will not hang him if it is so.
At Bethlehem Hospital he is confined in a room alone with a barred window , very high up, offering a frosted patch of grey sky. He is released from restraints. He has never liked porridge, that glue of English life, but when it is delivered warm, with a little milk, it settles the day ahead. The Bethlehem doctors have more questions for him. They look into his eyes, tap his knees. ‘Open your mouth, Colbert, let me look in your ear, let us measure your cranium. This scar, from whence does it come?’ They scratch their answers upon page after page. He is permitted a visit to the garden. There he meets a single tree, a bare winter elm, which from time to time of fers him faint wisps of poetry . The blinding migraines recede. The bats disappear . Socrates no longer visits. Angels and prophets slip back into the walls, leaving only their handprints. He wishes for a blade that he might cut his veins. Caroline sends him writing materials and a volume of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Augusta sends him a knitted hat smelling faintly of dried rose petals. Spring arrives and seduces summer . The tree in the courtyard murmurs: ‘ My countenance declar es My inwar d grief, And hope almost despairs To find r elief ... ’ There are no flowers. A few blades of grass risk the narrow byways between the paving stones, yet, despite its words, the tree seems to be cautioning him to remember sunflowers. Poppies. Jonquil s. Peonies. Marigolds ... Roses picked and placed in a vase by the bed. Pink roses that smelled of Hannah and the scent of her as she bent to kiss him. It was only ever you, he thinks. It was only ever you. He reads ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ’ memorising the swell and fall of the words. They had read it aloud to one another , Hannah, Caroline and Augusta, while Esther had knitted and sighed, winter’s breath stirring the fire as it reached down the chimney. How little he knew of the absurdity of absolution then. ‘Ther e passed a weary time. Each thr oat Was par ched, and glazed each eye. A weary time! A weary time! How glazed each weary eye,
When looking westwar d, I beheld A something in the sky . ’ A spear of sunshine reaches into his cell from the high window . He begins a letter . Ma chèr e Car oline, I find myself in the barr en lands cape of shame and regr et. I have taken you into this place with me, my beloved daughter . I do not ask for your for giveness. Believe me that I neither seek it, nor could I acc ept it, but while my mind is lucid, I feel an explanation might assist you in understanding that terrible night. She wor e a blue bonnet ... When he finishes it, he is so sickened by the words he has written, he tears the letter into small pieces which he d eposits in the slops bucket. But he knows he cannot turn away from the brutality of the truth. It is his duty. He begins another letter, contain ing a complete testimony to his ugliness, so that there can be no doubt of what he is. He addresses one letter to Caroline and one to Augusta. It is agreed by learned minds, as autumn d eparts the sky, that he is not mad at all. It is confirmed in writing. Not mad. ‘Did you attempt to fool us, Colbert? Did you?’ asks a limacine man smelling of camphor and marsh, his collar oily and his fingernails begrimed. ‘Pretending madness to avoid the noose,’ he says, as he completed the government papers. ‘Many have tried and failed. It will not do.’ Jacques-Louis is chained within a panelled wagon that jolts across snow-covered terrain. He glimpses winter trees between the rough boards. His teeth chatter and a dread of life more acute than any he has ever known descends upon him as he enters once more the confines of Millbank Prison. ‘Well, Colbert,’ says the prison’s governor , ‘if you have attempted to es cape your fate, then your return here is a spectacular failing. But if you are mad, and have been mischaracterised by the good doctors of Bethlehem, as I fear may yet be true, then this is indeed a bitter day for you.’ He is returned to the congress of solitary confinement, the shuffling walk chained and hooded each Sunday , the monotony of the unforgiving darkness, the cold bed and walls. The voices resume their whispering. He
will not shout back. Instead he walks the streets from Hyde Park along Oxford Street into Mayfair and through Belgravia towards the marshlands that are becomin g Pimlico, then down to the river and along to the bridge. Five st eps forward, turn, five st eps back, turn. In Green Park squirrels observe him. Several people are carrying umbrellas, but the rain has never worried him. He finds his father beside him, looking as if he is on his way to the palace. His wig is powdered and he wears a waistcoat embroidered with cornflowers, a violet silk jacket and a white scarf about his neck. The duke says, ‘Plato thought he was living in a great age. Diderot insisted that, “If the laws are good, morals are good,” but can that ever be true? Rousseau, born on a full moon, enchanted us all with his declaration: “Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.” He conceived of a world where virtue, in his estimation, would make bold the will to do good. But each man is born into the morals, vices and economies of his time and place of birth, Jacques- Louis. Robespierre might have believed he was wielding a virtuous and new morality , alive at the very heart of things, but still he was just moments from his death in the lar ger calculation.’ Jacques-Louis wonders if the dead meet and mingle to share their stories in some nearby realm unglimp sed. When a child was born, was it cast midstream into a tributary of moment and place, carrying with it memories and hopes? Not so much born new, an innocent, but a renewal of the people from which it sprang, to see what yet might grow? Did death provide answers? ‘None, as far as I can see,’ his father r eplies. Jacques-Louis’ days of existence are numbered. Soon it will all be behind him. There will be a yard and a scaffold. He wishes for a guillotine rather than a noose swinging in the breeze. He would have preferred the certainty of that instrument of precision to the possibility of a long strangulation. But who is he to ask favours? He winds the blanket about his head to cover his eyes when the pain comes. Hannah, bearing a candle, beckons him away. A snake moves across the floor, long and black, followed by a hooded figure, but he will not look at her face. He is taken to the office of the prison governor who informs Jacques-Louis that the Crown, in its infinite wisdom, has offered him leniency . Instead of
being hanged for his crime, he is to be sent away for the term of his life. Never to return to England. Never to stain Her Majesty’ s fair shores again. ‘I believe you have daughters, Colbert?’ the governor says, as he moves a small brass bell on his desk without allowing it to ring. ‘You have a voyage ahead from which you will not return. I think it best you try to forget them, and they you. On Norfolk Island, if the accounts are true, you will find the place governed by a particular kind of man. One who will calculate the anguish of your soul. That seems to be a requirement of the post.’ At this the governor meets Jacques-Louis’ gaze. ‘A man of your cleverness, Colbert, I wish you well.’