Maureen Johnson - The Madness Underneath

I recalled the woman I’d seen, and accidentally destroyed, in the bathroom. Could she have been from around that time? It was possible. I’d been looking at a lot of paintings from the mid-1600s in art history and they looked very similar, but peasant dress in the Middle Ages and Renaissance probably didn’t change all that much. I was going to have to start studying clothing history if I was going to see these people.

But if this area hadn’t burned, what had been here? What was underneath Wexford? Maybe that was where I should start. There had to be maps.

“Time’s up,” she said.

I had only written part of the answer to one question.

“Can I ask something?” I said, passing back the paper.

“Of course,” Mrs. Feeley said.

“What used to be here?”

“Can you be more specific?”

“On this site.”

“Wexford was originally built as a workhouse.”

“No, I mean further back than that. I mean this whole area.”

“Well, I don’t know the entire history of the site, but what period are you wondering about?”

“Around the Great Fire. Maybe just before and after?”

“Well,” she said, “in that period, this area would have been just outside the boundaries of the London Wall. Quite literally just outside of. Bishopsgate was a boundary street. There would certainly have been a number of fields. Henry the Eighth also used the area to store artillery and train soldiers. That’s why the streets have the names they do—Gun Street, Artillery Lane.”

“Are there maps?”

“We don’t have much of a cartography section, but there is quite a collection at the British Library.”

“Is that far?”

“Not at all. It’s just next to King’s Cross station.”

Having tanked my pretest, I still had three hours left to kill in the afternoon. If I hurried, I could probably be there within a half an hour or so.

The words British Library call to mind something ancient. I was expecting a grand old building. Instead, it was a modern place, with lots of interactive screens, weird tables with “stand-up chairs,” which were essentially boards you could lean against and work standing up, and swish cafés.

It turned out there were multiple map rooms, but to access them, I first had to go downstairs to a room full of lockers, where we had to leave our coats, all liquids, and all pens. Everything we were going to carry with us (money, computers, paper, pencils) had to go in a clear plastic shopping bag. Then I had to get a library ID card. Then I had to go online and spend half an hour trying to figure out what I needed. Then I had to order it. I put in the request and was told that my maps would be available in about an hour to an hour and a half, so I walked around for a while and watched other people study. I obsessively checked my status, waiting for the message telling me that my map had come. Finally, it arrived. I was handed a stack of massive, flat portfolios, like huge folders, which I gingerly carried over to one of the nearby tables. I opened up all the flaps of the first one, revealing a single page inside. It looked almost new, yet it was from 1658, and they were letting me touch it.

It was a close-up view of London back when London took up mostly just a single mile along the Thames, encased by a wall. The artist had drawn ships sailing down the Thames, rows of houses, and arches all along the London wall. (These were the actual “gates” of the wall, and their names still existed: Bishopsgate, Aldgate, Moorgate…I knew all of these places.) I had to look close, but I could see windmills and trees and even tiny little people. There were fields in places I knew to be bustling parts of East London.

And there was Artillery Lane, spelled here “Artillerie Lane,” the very street that ran along Wexford, where the Royal Gunpowder was located. It was next to something called the Artillerie Garden. I looked this one up quickly online—it was a munitions storehouse and training ground for the military. Just across Bishopsgate, in a little warren of buildings, I saw the word Bedlam.

I’d heard that before. My grandmother used it a lot to mean insane. Like, when her two little dogs heard the can opener going, her kitchen became Bedlam.

I looked up Bedlam. Bedlam—the Bethlehem Royal Hospital. One of the world’s first psychiatric facilities, except what all the information described hardly sounded like compassionate medical care. There were manacles and chains and all forms of restraints, buckets of water, cold and terrifying cells. The public could even come in and pay to see the patients. It was a human zoo. Mad preachers shouted from the windows and gained devoted followings. Brilliant but sick patients drew elaborate diagrams of mind-controlling machines. The hospital had been in several locations, but for quite a while, it was that tiny tower with the flag, which sat where Liverpool Street station is now.

Wexford was practically on top of it.

Now my mind was moving swiftly. If the hospital had been there, presumably many people had died there. Presumably they needed to be buried. I looked up “Bedlam burials” and was rewarded instantly with many hits. Current Archaeology had a front cover story called “Bedlam Burials.” There was a picture of a skeleton neatly packed in the dirt, being unearthed. I turned up more articles on lots of skeletons being uncovered. They’d found them in 1863, when they were building Broad Street station, which was long gone, but had been close by. And in 1911, they found piles and piles more when they were tunneling their way to Liverpool Street.

We were sitting right on top of the graveyard of the world’s most infamous mental institution, which is arguably many hundreds of times worse than being on top of the old haunted burial grounds that things are always being built on in America. Loads of mad ghosts…who might be disturbed by, say, a major explosion that might have, quite possibly, opened up some kind of crack that they could pass through? And they might, for instance, kill people with hammers…

Now I had a reason to call Stephen.

Stephen wasn’t answering his phone. I tried several times as I ran back to the Tube and wound my way through the insane King’s Cross rush-hour traffic in an attempt to get back to Wexford before anyone noticed I had gone. I got home fifteen minutes before dinner. Jazza was sitting on her bed, looking like a small child who’d just seen a wolf eat her pet bunny.

“Hey,” I said. “How’s my favorite roommate?”

“Have I told you that I’m wretched at German?”

“You tell me that daily,” I said. “But I don’t believe you.”

“Well, I’m not good enough for someone applying to study German.”

“But you’re good enough for me, and isn’t that what counts?”

“Not really. I’m going to fail.”

I had no idea how she was doing in German, but I doubted she was going to fail. I was going to fail. I was the failure of our room.

“Do you have any Cheez Whiz?”

Things had to be bad if she wanted predinner Cheez Whiz.

“Do I have any Cheez Whiz? She asks stupid questions, my roommate. Heater or microwave?”

“Microwave.”

While I was in Bristol, I had been sent three jars of my favorite substance on earth. I took one of them from my bottom desk drawer. I was carrying the cheezy goodness back down the hall when Charlotte materialized from the direction of the fire doors.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said.

“Are you keeping up with everything okay?”

I couldn’t say yes to this and keep a straight face. Plus, from the way she curled up the question at the end, I got the distinct impression that Charlotte already knew the score.