Anne Perry - Seven Dials

He looked up at her. She had touched a nerve.

“It’s your job!” she said wildly. It was not fair, and not really true. She knew nothing about him and had no business to make such a statement. If he had been angry with her she would not have blamed him.

“Martin had heard of me,” he said very quietly, but as if deep in thought, not faltering as though he might stop. “I have befriended many soldiers who have fallen on hard times, drink too much because they have thoughts and memories they can’t live with and can’t forget. Or because they don’t know how to fit back into the lives they had before they went to war.” He drew in a long breath. “It may be only a few years for the people at home, whose lives are much the same every day, little dreams. For them the world stays the same.”

She did not interrupt. It was irrelevant so far, but he was feeling his way toward something.

“It isn’t like that in the army. It can be just a little while, but it is a lifetime,” he continued.

Was he speaking about Egypt, about himself, and Stephen Garrick, and Lovat? Of all the lost and hopeless men he ministered to here in the alleys of Seven Dials?

“Martin tried to help Garrick.” Sandeman stared at the floor, not meeting his eyes. “But he didn’t know how to. Garrick’s nightmares were getting worse, and more frequent. He drank to try and dull himself into insensibility, but it worked less and less all the time. He began to take opium as well. His health was deteriorating and he was losing control of himself.” Sandeman’s voice was sinking. She had to lean towards him to catch the words.

“He couldn’t trust anyone,” he went on. “Except Martin, because he was desperate. Martin thought perhaps I could help, if Garrick would come to me… or even if I went to him.”

“Why didn’t you go?” she asked, hearing the edge to her voice she had not meant to allow through.

He was too deep in his own thoughts to be stung.

“Just because he lives in Torrington Square instead of a doorway in Seven Dials doesn’t mean he needs your help any less!” she accused him. “He was obviously in his own kind of hell.”

He looked up at her, his eyes hollow. “Of course he was!” he grated. “But I can’t help him. He doesn’t want to hear the only thing I know how to say.”

She did not understand. “If you can’t help nightmares, then who can? Isn’t that what you do for these men here? Why not for Stephen Garrick?”

He said nothing.

“What were his nightmares?” she prodded, knowing she was hurting him, but she could not stop now. “Did Martin tell you? Why couldn’t you help him face them?”

“You say that as if it were easy.” Anger lay just under the surface of his voice and in the stiff lines of his body. “You have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Then tell me! From what you are saying, he is sinking into madness. What kind of a priest are you that you won’t hold out a hand to him yourself, and you won’t help me to?”

This time he looked up at her with rage and impotence naked in his face.

“What help have you for madness, Mrs. Pitt? Can you stop the dreams that come in the night, of blood and fire, of screaming that tears your mind to pieces and leaves the shards to cut you, even when you are awake?” His whole body was trembling. “What can you do about heat that scorches your skin, but when you open your eyes you’re covered in sweat, and freezing? It is inside you, Mrs. Pitt! No one can help! Martin Garvie tried to, and it has sucked him into it. When he came to me, his fear was for Garrick, but it should have been for himself as well. Madness consumes not only those afflicted, but those who touch it as well.”

“Are you saying Stephen Garrick is insane?” she demanded. “Why aren’t his family treating him? Are they too ashamed of it to admit that is what is wrong with him?” It was beginning to make sense at last. Many people denied illness of the mind, as if it were a sin rather than a disease. Had it been cholera, or smallpox, no one would have hidden it. “Have they taken him to an institution?” She did not mean to have raised her voice, but it was out of control. “Is that it? But why Martin as well? Why couldn’t he at least have written to his sister and told her where he was?”

His face was filled with pity so deep it seemed the pain of it wounded him as if he would carry it long after he had finished trying to make her understand it. “From Bedlam?” he said simply.

The word struck a shiver through her flesh. Everyone knew of the hospital for the insane that was like a house of hell. The name of it was an obscenity, an abbreviation of Bethlehem, the most holy town, the asylum of dreams, and this was the prison of nightmares where people were incarcerated in the torture of their own minds, screaming at the unseen.

She struggled for a moment to find her voice. “You let that happen to him?” she whispered. It was not intended as an accusation, at least not entirely. She had admired Sandeman; she had seen a compassion in him too deep to believe indifference in him now, for any reason. What she had seen was real, she had felt it in the dignity with which he had regarded the drunken man the day she had found him.

He looked at her with hurt for her judgment of him, and defiance. “How could I have prevented it? We each have to find our own salvation, Mrs. Pitt. I told Garrick what to do years ago, but I can’t make him do it.”

She was about to correct him, say that it was Martin Garvie she was thinking of, then she realized what he implied. “Are you saying that Stephen Garrick’s madness is his own fault?” she asked incredulously.

“No…” He looked away, and for the first time she knew he was lying.

“Mr. Sandeman!” Then she was uncertain what she could add that would help.

He raised his head to meet her eyes. “Mrs. Pitt, I have told you more than I want to, just in case you can help Martin Garvie, who is a good man seeking to help someone in far deeper pain than he can understand-and he may suffer for it… terribly.” There was a plea in his voice. “If you have the power to reach anyone who can get him freed, before it is too late… if… if that is where he is.”

“I will!” she said with more passion than belief. “At least now I know something, somewhere to begin. Thank you, Mr. Sandeman.” She hesitated. “I… I don’t suppose you know anything about Mr. Lovat’s death, do you?”

The ghost of a smile crossed his face. “No. If you ask me to guess, I should think it is exactly what it looks like-the Egyptian woman killed him, for whatever reason of her own. Perhaps it goes back to something between them in Alexandria. I thought at the time that he did her no injury, but perhaps I was mistaken.”

“I see. Thank you.”

This time he did not offer to walk with her as far as the street, and she left alone, determined to find Pitt as soon as possible and tell him where Martin Garvie was, and persuade him to get him freed, whatever it required to do it.

ALL AFTERNOON SHE BEGAN and half finished tasks in the house, stopping every time she heard a footfall, hoping it was Pitt returning, so she could tell him.

When he finally did come home, as usual he walked in his stocking feet down the passage to the kitchen, so she did not hear him until he spoke. She was so startled she dropped the potato she had in her hand, and spun around to face him still holding the peeling knife.

“I know what happened to Martin Garvie,” she said. “At least I think I do… and to Stephen Garrick. Thomas, we have to do something about it. Immediately!”

His expression darkened. “How do you know? Where have you been? Did you go back to Sandeman?”

She lifted her chin a little. If they were going to have a disagreement about it, or worse, it would have to wait. “Of course I did. He is the only one who knows anything about it.”