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