The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  As Meg grew more comfortable in my rooms and in my bed, especially after the move to the Soho establishment, our lovemaking became a show that she would script, stage, and expertly perform. She insisted that I allow her to buy the finest lace, satin, and silk underthings, and she wore only black and red beneath her clothes. She would pose for me in her black silk stockings held up by a thin, lacy belt with pearl buttons, or in her red bone-corset audaciously laced between her overflowing breasts. She delighted in slowly removing her secret things, in unbuttoning, unlacing, sliding her silken underthings off her skin, rolling her stockings slowly up with her legs stretching into the air. With her stockings gartered to her waist, but with no underthings covering her Mount of Venus, she would perform the most extraordinary trick, which I found irresistible. Lying on her back on the bed with her legs tight together showing but a glimpse of her red nether ringlets, she would raise her legs straight up in the air from her waist until her toes pointed directly to the ceiling. As if opening the covers of a book, she would slowly open her legs to the sides and then, somehow, opening her legs even further, she would bend her knees back toward her breasts and wickedly smile. “’Tis all yers, Mister Collins, sir. Yew paid ta see it.” Is it any wonder that I so quickly grew addicted to this book that she opened just for me?

  Constantly she mocked my gentleman’s reticence in the face of my goatish susceptibility to her temptations. She laughed at how easily seduced I was, how involuntarily the word “love” seemed to leap to my tongue while I delighted in listening to the streams of coarseness that flowed from hers. Even writing about this initiatory period of my life with such uncharacteristic licence from the distance of a full twenty years makes me feel like some dessicated old voyeur spying on the unsuspecting young as they play their fleshly games. But those young were us, long gone, Meg and I forever frozen in a kiss. Writing thus, even for such a brief space in something as harmless as a secret diary, helps me to understand how Henry Ashbee, still heated from his nighttime encounters, could turn straight to his manuscript, his so-called Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, and record in detail each fevered word, provocative gesture, and wanton movement of his night’s conquest. In his twisted way, he was attempting to stave off death (or perhaps impotence). And now, life is indeed ironic, I am imitating him…because I long to remember: Meg, my young self, and my first complete addiction to a woman.

  “What is it Mister Collins wants?” Irish Meg would beckon from the bed as I stood barelegged in only my shirt at its foot. She lay on her back with her legs apart caressing herself. In the slow divesting of her “secret things” lurked the truth of the alluring possibilities beneath the surface of Victorian life.

  “Is this what Mister Collins wants?” she would softly taunt as she continued to caress herself there.

  “Does Mister Collins wish to kiss this?” she gently teased, opening herself with her fingers.

  Then rolling, suddenly, over on her stomach and pushing up on her elbows to her knees to slowly rotate her full derrière, she would mock my voyeur’s hesitance: “Or does Mister Collins want me here tonight?” She would laugh evilly.

  Sometimes she would prowl the room like a sleek cat, stop in the firelight or candle glow and touch herself provocatively, offering, beckoning. Her “come hither” look as she stood in her secret things bit into me like a hook. She was a temptress out of myth, but not past myth. She was no whore of Babylon, no Circe or Cleopatra. It was as if she were a mythic figure from the future, some fire goddess from the next century transmigrated into this cold Victorian world to mock its hypocrisy.

  It was the race she ran with me, and that race was galloping to its finish when that inconvenient knocking upon my door reined it in.

  Odd, is it not? I sat down to recount the events of Dickens’s and my second adventure with Inspector Field and now it is almost suppertime and I have only written about myself and Meg (and in ways that even I find shocking). This journal is reading like Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. It began with a knocking upon my door and yet, a goodly number of pages later, that door still has not been opened.

  But that knocking at my door, from twenty years in the past, which precipitated this chain of violent events, still echoes in my imagination as clearly as when it interrupted Meggy and me in flagrante delicto.

  “Good God, who is that?” I disengaged from our passionate course.

  “Wot the bloody ’ell!” Meg rolled off me more than a bit dismayed.

  There was a scurrying to make ourselves presentable, and, for safety’s sake, Meg stayed behind the bedroom door. I hurried to answer the now more insistent knocking.

  When I opened the door, Scarlet Bess burst in as if impelled by demons. Her face bore the desperate look of frightened children and suicides. “Oh Mister Collins, oh pleese”—her hands clawed blindly at my shirt front—“’ees bin tyken up sir. ’Ee needs yew, sir. Oh pleese! Oh pleese ’elp me, ’elp ’im.”

  Her frantic pleas brought Meggy out of the bedroom. “Bess, wot’s wrong? Wot is it, luv? Don’t cry now. Wot is it?” Meg’s voice was like a mother’s calming her child, protective and loving. The woman’s ability to move from one role to another with such facility and skill never ceased to amaze and amuse me. She was a consummate actress.

  Strange that both Dickens and I were so hopelessly captivated by these actresses. I am convinced now that it was the uncertainty of them, the inability to possess a single woman but always being forced into the pursuit of many different women. His beloved Ellen and my Meggy exhibited protean powers, that slippery ability to change shape and elude one’s grasp.

  Is it not curious that this memoir is embarking very unlike the first? This second memoir seems to be developing as little more than a glorification of my own depravity. But our second adventure on duty with Inspector Field was not at all about myself and Irish Meg. Rather, it was about friendship and loyalty fighting betrayal and murder. That pull of friendship first asserted itself when Scarlet Bess burst into my rooms and Irish Meg so tenderly took her under her wing.

  “Wot is it, Bessy?” Meg cajoled.

  “Fieldsy ’as ’ad ’im tyken up for mordor, my Tally ’O,” Bess sobbed within the protective circle of Meg’s arms. “My Tally ’O’s no mordoror. ’Ee’s innersent. This tyme ’ee’s innersent. ’Ee wos with me the ’ole night las’ night, I sweer.”

  “I know. I know,” Meg soothed, but her eyes met mine over her charge’s shoulders and they were pleading for help. The next voice I heard was my own, though I had no sense of forming words or formulating coherent thoughts.

  “Now let us not have any swearing just yet, Bess”—that distant voice inexplicably seemed rather calm and unhurried—“the whole world, especially Inspector Field, knows that you would swear to anything where Thompson is concerned.”

  “But Mister Collins, sir,” she protested. “’Ee reelly wos with me las’ night. ’Ee’s innersent, I tells yew.”

  Our friend Tally Ho Thompson, former highwayman, housebreaker, pickpocket, whatever, was certainly far from “innersent” as she so quaintly put it, but that was my judgement upon his whole personality while Bess was clearly only referring to his hand in the violent events of the last twenty-four hours. “Now calm down and tell us what has happened, Bess,” said my voice, which seemed to be functioning independently of my still somewhat rattled self, as I calmly led her to a chair.

  “It’s Fieldsy,” Bess insisted, “jus’ ’cause they found ’im neer ’er, ’ee thinks ’ee did it…an…an Fieldsy’s ’ad ’im thrown in Newgate.”

  It had been almost eight months since our first collaboration with Inspector Field, but Dickens and I had not neglected our detective friend. We had visited Bow Street Station a number of times in the course of our evening ambulations, but it had been well over a month since we had last seen Field. Dickens had spent most of the holidays working on the first number of Bleak House, frolicking with his family and conducting the typically elaborate Christmas festivities in their home,
Tavistock House. The great hall of that new manse was hung so thickly with Christmas greens that Forster remarked in his usual dour way that it looked more like Sherwood Forest than Christ’s birthplace. I also had been much involved in my first holiday celebration in my new lodgings…with Irish Meg. The last time we had seen Field had been in November when we had accompanied him and Rogers to an inquest in Cook’s Court just off Chancery Lane. One night while sitting before the hearth in the bullpen at Bow Street, Field had mentioned that the inquiry into a mysterious death was to be held the next day. Dickens had leapt at the opportunity to attend, which the next morning we did. To me, it had all seemed a horrible waste of time—an obscure scrivener addicted to opium had died of an apparent miscalculation in his dosage—but when the second number of Bleak House appeared containing the Nemo section and the subsequent “inkwich,” it was all there, word for word, street urchin for street urchin, beadle for beadle, and deceased for deceased.

  Out of Bess’s hysterical sobbing, Meg managed to extract the sequence of events that had precipitated her knocking upon our door. The murder of a woman had been discovered, and Bess’s lover, Tally Ho Thompson, who was acting the role of Poins in the new production of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, had been taken up for the crime.

  It was a splendid production with horses riding on- and offstage, and Thompson had proven just their man. Macready had retired from acting after his last performance in Macbeth, but he had stayed on in his position as director of the Covent Garden Theatre, and Thompson (probably due to the association with Dickens) had, from the beginning, been a favourite of Macready. Not only did Tally Ho Thompson act the riding and duelling and fighting parts onstage, not only did he possess a marvellous name to grace the programs, but he took care of the horses as well. He had proven himself invaluable to the company, and the resulting steady employment at good wages had allowed him and Scarlet Bess (who, like Meg, was now off the streets) to take modest accommodations in Seven Dials.

  “My Tally ’O could never mordor no poor girl like yew nor me,” Bess, on the verge of fainting, wailed. “Yew’s got to ’elp us, Mister Collins. Yew an Mister Dickens, yew could talk to ’im, tell ’im my Tally ’O could niver mordor no poor girl.”

  Meg, cradling the poor girl in her arms, looked up at me, and I realized I had no choice in the matter. Little did I know how much more complicated than Bess’s sketchy version the matter truly was. Nor did I realise just how inconvenient that knock on my door was.

  * * *

  * For those who have not yet read The Detective and Mr. Dickens, the first suppressed journal discovered amongst the Collins papers, Lord Henry Ashbee was the gentleman rake, whoremonger, opium addict, pornography collector and author, and member of the notorious defloration society, The Dionysian Circle, who was the principal antagonist of Dickens and Inspector William Field in the events recorded in that first manuscript.

  Dickens and Field, Together Again

  January 9, 1852—night

  I surprised a hansom lurking in the Soho dark; its proprietor dozing on the box, its four-legged engine breathing smoke in the winter chill. It was greatcoat, heavy woolen scarf, and hold-on-to-your-hat weather. The wind off the river stung our faces. We closed ourselves snugly into the cab, which maneuvered slowly through the grimy narrow Soho streets before it clattered off into the Charing Cross Road.

  The awakened cabman, grateful even for a short trip across the West End on such a night, thought nothing of the stout young man in the tiny spectacles clambering into his cab flanked by two statuesque caped women. I am sure he assumed I was some night-stalking gentleman who had commandeered two Soho whores. I am sure that he assumed I needed transport to the scene of my planned trinitarian perversions; or, perhaps, he was resigned to his cab being the site, albeit rather cramped, of my double assignation. Whatever he thought, he must have steeled himself for the worst. He merely grunted from beneath his great black muffler and crooked hat when I tapped on his seat with my stick and shouted up, “Number Sixteen Wellington Street, Strand!”

  I was fairly certain that Dickens would be there this blustery night. After the frenetic activity of the Christmas holidays and the welcoming of the New Year, Kate, once again “in her Anti-Malthusian state” as Dickens put it, had taken the children and servants from Tavistock House and withdrawn to Great Malvern to rest under the care of the family physician, Doctor Southwood Smith.* Since the departure of his family from Tavistock House, Dickens had reverted to his familiar bachelor schedule of working long hours in the Wellington Street offices and sleeping on the premises in order to begin the next day at an early hour. The iron bedstead which he had ordered hauled in before he even commenced publication of Household Words (and which from the beginning I had speculated to be simply an excuse for not going home to his wife at night) still graced the Wellington Street offices. Besides his usual fierce editing of Household Words, he was digging in on the second number of Bleak House. He had completed the first number just before the holidays and, even during the hilarity of the New Year’s celebrations, had expressed his eagerness to get back to work on his novel. Thus, I expected to find him there, if only he hadn’t gone out for one of his insane walks.

  Dickens’s restless walking of London at night was one of the idiosyncrasies of which few were aware. Since early in our acquaintance I had been privileged to accompany Charles on his night walks into some of the most disreputable pockets of our rapacious and decaying city, and to this day I still do not fully understand why so often of an evening, no matter the weather, he felt compelled to be up and prowling his beloved streets. I had given the psychological motivation underlying his obsessive walks hours of speculation: he had a compulsive need to feed his novelist’s memory by observing the city’s night life; walking stimulated his imagination in the way that carnality stimulated that of our scurrilous friend Ashbee; the act of sitting and writing all day occasioned a physical restlessness which drove him out into the night streets after dinner; or, perhaps it was a fear of indigestion or insomnia that pushed him to exhaust himself physically each night before retiring. But no matter how much time I invested in thought upon the subject, I still had not the slightest idea what attractions those damp, fog-bound, pestilent, narrow, ill-lit, dangerous streets held for my “Inimitable” friend. Perhaps it was simply the risk he craved.

  Whatever his motives, Dickens loved his night streets and had, from the beginning of our friendship, honoured me with the standing invitation to accompany him on his headlong treks. “It’s good for both the circulation and the imagination, young Wil,” he would say before we set out, like intrepid explorers, into the wilds of London. But, once again, I have wandered off into a Shandy-esque digression while our hansom cab is rapidly approaching Wellington Street.

  While we were galloping across the town, Scarlet Bess remained in her violently agitated state, despairing under the prospect of her beloved Thompson going to the gallows. Meg consoled her in the corner of the cab as best she could while I agonised over the probability of Dickens still being in. But the wind was up so fierce and the hour was so early that I hoped this night he had forgone the streets for the comfort of the office hearth. My head out the window as we rounded the corner off the Strand and turned up Wellington Street, I saw the gaslamps still ablaze in the second storey. Our cab clattered to a halt and we three tumbled out. “Wait here! You are engaged!” I ordered the cabman even as I was rushing to knock on Dickens’s door.

  In contrast to the turbulent events of the previous spring when his father and his tiny daughter had died, when Household Words had been just underway, when he had Not So Bad As We Seem in rehearsals for the Queen’s Performance, and, of course, when we had first gone on duty with Inspector Field and he had been captivated by young Ellen Ternan, Dickens’s life in the fall and winter of 1851 had become regularised. I must admit that I had been quite preoccupied with Irish Meg and thus had not been so frequently with Charles of an evening. Yet I perceived that his life had calmed.
For the next twenty years I would observe how that tranquillity always seemed to come upon him when just beginning a new novel (and Bleak House, as he had described its general contours to me, promised to be his largest undertaking yet, even more ambitious in its social exploration than had been Dombey and Son). Since November he had been writing steadily on it, even while editing Household Words with his customary imperiousness, even while installing his family in the new manse. But no matter how domestic or scheduled or intent upon composition Dickens’s life became, he still needed to feed his addiction to the night streets.

  This night, however, he was still in. “Ah, Wilkie, what a well-timed surprise,” he said as he answered my knock. “I was just getting ready to go out for a walk. We haven’t had one together in weeks.” Only then did he see the two women in my company, which occasioned an “Eh? What’s this?”

  “Honestly, Charles, I don’t really know,” was all the satisfaction I could give. “It’s all rather a garble so far. And Bess isn’t helping by shaking into hysterics every minute or so.”

  “Oh Mister Dickens, sir, they’s tyken up my Tally ’O an’ they’s going’ to ’ang ’im,” she blubbered.

  “Please, come in out of the wind.” He ushered us in and fastened the door. As we climbed the steps to his office and living quarters, he whispered behind the two women’s backs, “What is it, Wilkie? Has he killed someone?” It was then I saw the fire of anticipation blaze up in his eye. I knew in a trice that he was excited at the prospect of some new adventure that might provide some new material or characters for some new novel. Of course, that certainly was not all that he was thinking at the time. The fire in his eye was his sensing that once again we were at the centre of the action of real life, of murder and mystery and the eternal muddle of his night streets. The art of it would come later.