The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  Having subdued Irish Meg temporarily, Field turned back to Dickens and myself, but before he could continue, Dickens’s curiosity took its turn to blaze.

  “You said you knew from the very beginning that Thompson was not your murderer?” Dickens pressed. “How?”

  “Some instinct per’aps. Don’t rightly know, but as I got down from the coach an’ saw Thompson manacled to the fence, ’im lookin’ straight inta me face not blinkin’, I knew. Yew gets so yew kin see it in their eyes an’ it wosn’t in Thompson’s. Murder niver ’as been ’is style. ’Ee’s always been speed an’ skill an’ gone before the crime’s been even found. If ’ee’d stayed on ’is ’orse up on Shooter’s ’ill they might ’ave written ballads an’ broadsides ’bout Tally ’O Thompson rather than Dangerous Dick ’Turpin.”*

  This speech was very unlike Inspector Field, and Dickens subsequently remarked upon it. Field was never one to rely solely upon something as ephemeral as a spontaneous instinct, a feeling. Hard facts, evidence, were the tender in which he dealt.

  “That was it?” Dickens, incredulous, pressed him. “An instinct that he was not the one?”

  “No, not atall, o’ course not,” Field scoffed. “I said that wos wot struck me as I got out o’ the coach at the scene. Once in the ’ouse, on the premises by the dead ’ooman’s side, I knew quick enough, that Thompson wosn’t our man atall.”

  “How?” Charles pursued.

  “There were other signs in the ’ouse. They all points away from Thompson. Two freshly washed champagne stems on the kitchen sideboard. Someone else wos there that night, a friend, a lover, a ’usband. ’Ooman don’t drink champagne with a burglar. But wot wosn’t there, wot ’adn’t been done wos wot proved with certainty it ’ad been no burglary. Some dresser drawers were open, an’ a table overturned, but no picture on any wall, no silver in any cabinet, no plate in any closet, nothin’ of any substance seemed to ’ave been disturbed. ’Err jewellery o’erflowed ’er jewellery box on ’er dressin’ table. There was no marks of strangulation on the body, no blows ta the ’ead, no blood on the rug. Nothin’ that shouted ‘Burglar caught in the act’ wos on the premises. But the main of it wos exactly the first thing that yew pointed out earlier this evenin’.” Field chuckled as if this were afternoon tea and tapped Dickens congenially on the forearm as that latter leaned in to him across the public house table.

  Our steaming drinks forgotten, the blazing fire unheeded, we were all captivated by Field’s deductive reasoning.

  “And what was that?” Dickens spurred the spellbinder.

  “I always said ’ee’d wear well in my line, make a fine detective,” Field teased, mischievously complimenting Dickens with a scratch of his crook’d forefinger to the side of his eye.

  “For God’s sake,” Dickens exclaimed. His impatience brought an arrogant glint into Field’s eye that declared: The gentleman amateur must always wait while the professional man builds his case.

  “Thompson niver would o’ got caught doin’ an easy crack like that,” Field said. “Somebody sent for the constables at jus’ the right time so’s they’d surprise ’im in the act.” Then Field’s eyes went hard and the jut of his jaw went serious. He tapped once sharply with his ferocious forefinger on the oak of the table and said: “It wos all a game an’ I don’t fancy bein’ cat an’ moused. If any games are ta be played, I’m the one’s ta do the playin’, I’m the one’s ta place the pawns.”

  There was an awkward silence as none of us seemed inclined to chip at this stony wall that Field had erected around his sense of himself as the master of the London night.

  “Tell hem habout the maidservant.” Rogers, prompting his superior, firmly rescued us from that pool of spreading silence.

  “Yes, of course.” Inspector Field stalked out of his hard reverie. “The whole affair keeps gettin’ more ’n’ more complicated than anyone wos led ta believe when Thompson so neatly tumbled inta our laps. A servant girl attached ta the household, her keys gone, is found dead on a stoop six flats from where Thompson ’as been taken. Maid an’ mistress ’ave both suffered the same death.”

  “What?” Dickens was taken aback. “How do you know that?”

  “Because there’s no marks o’ violence on the corpses.” Inspector Field had a precise order for dispensing his revelations and, no matter how hard Dickens or anybody else might press, that order was to be observed. “The whole affair is suspicious from the first alarum. Both wimmin died with the same twisted look on their faces, as if their ’earts stopped an’ their faces froze right in the midst o’ a scream o’ ’orror.

  “Has soon has we saw the housemaid’s corpse,” Rogers affirmed his master’s declaration, “Hinspector Field looks hat me han Hi looks hat him han we both know with ha certainty. ‘My Gawd,’ says I, ‘their faces his the same.’ ‘An’ ’orrible!’ says he.”

  “Indeed, both wimmin seemed ta ’ave died the same death. A ‘death rictus’ the Protectives’ surgeon names it. We’re still waitin’ on the surgeon’s report. Seems these murders are more tangled than our usual garden-variety Soho stabbin’s an’ Bloomsbury bludgeonin’s an’ Sloane Square stranglin’s.”

  “Looked like they wos frightened to death,” Serjeant Rogers added brightly.

  “My God,” said my own voice this time. Perhaps I was feeling neglected at having listened so long without interjecting anything unconsidered, which in those years seemed my stock in trade. “My God, what sort of a Medusa monster can be so horrible that it can stop women’s hearts in the very middle of a scream?”

  Dickens looked at me as if I belonged in an asylum for the incurably literal.

  Field chuckled, but politely, behind his hand.

  That arrogant little martinet Rogers laughed openly at my extravagance.

  “I don’t think we’ve got a Medusa killer stalking the streets.” Inspector Field turned my alarum into an ironic joke. “I’m bettin’ it wos the champagne.”

  “Wot?” Evidently even smug Serjeant Rogers hadn’t been privy to this speculation on Field’s part. Now it was my turn to smirk at his momentary (and undisguised) discomfiture.

  “What do you mean?” Dickens inquired, capturing all of our incredulity and delivering it to Field tied in an adamant red ribbon.

  “There’s more yet,” Inspector Field went on. “One o’ our constables finds an empty champagne bottle in the dustbin outside the mews door o’ the murder ’ouse. ‘’Ow did it get out there so soon,’ I asks, ‘if the champagne wos drunk jus’ that night in the two stems we found in the kitchin?’ There’s no sign of any other kitchin dust in the bin an’ the kitchin box that the ’ousemaids empty into the outside dustbin is ’alf full.”

  Field stopped for a maddening sip at his burnt gin.

  “And?” Now it was Charles who couldn’t restrain his curiosity.

  “I think the servant girl pinched a ’alf empty bottle an’ drank the dregs as she wos leavin’ the ’ouse. That’s wot I’m bettin’ on. The two wimmin was poisoned, but only one by plan,” Field finished.

  All of us around that public house table, Serjeant Rogers included, stared at our convener, aghast.

  “Poisoned!” I gasped.

  “My Tally ’O ud niver poison no one,” poor Bess sniveled. Marooned in her distraught state, very little of what Field had been saying had penetrated her watery upset.

  “We know that, Bess.” Field reached across the table and touched her on the shoulder, at which she jumped as if scalded. But the softness of Field’s voice and the gentle lightness of his touch—my God, the very fact of his reaching out to touch someone at all not in the act of taking them into custody—was a startling deviation from his typical mode of operation.

  “It’s all right, Bess girl,” Field cozened her in a voice as thick and smooth as Devon cream. She accepted his gentleness suspiciously, but he patted her twice more and assured her, “The sooner we spring your Tally ’O from the Gate, the better.”

  Turning back to us from that brie
f and highly irregular interlude of choreographed compassion, Field tipped his gin cup and waited for more reasoned reactions.

  “Poisoned!” I repeated myself, having assumed the mantle of the company’s undaunted stater and restater of the obvious. “Gad zooks, what a horrible death.”

  “Are you certain?” Dickens’s more controlled voice reasserted the sway of rationality and logic that my blathering interjections had undermined. “Have you any other evidence besides the two wineglasses and the discarded bottle?”

  “No. None at all,” Field readily admitted, clearly disappointing Serjeant Rogers, who thrived on basking in the glow of his master’s ratiocinative powers. “Yet poison is a certainty that I ’old without condition ta be the case. I jus’ know it!” he finished with passion, punctuating his certainty with a hard tap of his forefinger to the solid oak of our table.

  “If yew knows all this so strong,” Bess shrieked, “then why’d’jew cast my Tally ’O in gaol? Why ’ave yew left ’im in that awful place?”

  The softness was still in Field’s voice, but it was clear that his patience was being strained. Never had we ever seen him allow one of his creatures of the streets to speak out against his omniscience, to challenge his judgement and authority, yet he was allowing Bess, in her distraught state, to question him. There was a reason he was indulging Bess in such a way, I was sure of it. “We will ’ave ’im out of there soon, I promise.” Field once again patted her arm reassuringly, almost paternal in his concern. It was so unlike him.

  “In fact, I need Thompson out o’ the keep as soon as possible.” With a quick snap of his head, a high sign, he motioned for Dickens and me to follow him. He rose, and with a quick silent sweep of his forefinger motioned for Serjeant Rogers to stay with the two women. This order slashed a quick look of pain and resentment across Rogers’s incredibly uncomplicated face. Irish Meg, busy attending to her hysterical charge, saw none of these eloquent silent gestures. Like obedient pull toys Charles and I followed Field down the corridor into the tap.

  It was not crowded. Only one local character and what, from her dress, looked to be his whore sat drinking gin against the far wall near the hearth. We took up station at the wooden bar and Miss Katie Tillotson replenished our glasses with smoking gin.

  “I need Thompson out o’ there soon,” Inspector Field in an even voice confided. “I need ’im out an’ I need ta ’ave power o’er ’im, ta control ’im when we git ’im out. Scarlet Bess will ’ave to do us for that, I’m afeerd.” And suddenly I knew why he had been so solicitous toward her back there in the drinking chamber. He never did anything without reason. “I want ’im ta work once again for me,” Field went on, “jus’ as ’ee did in the Ashbee affair.”

  Field was inviting us in as co-conspirators, but neither Dickens nor I knew why.

  “What can we do to help?” Dickens offered, as usual volunteering our services in dangerous undertakings without once even considering consulting me. “Wilkie and I are at your service.”

  That light was in Dickens’s eye once again, that eagerness in his voice, which signalled his readiness to take risks, to sally out into Field’s tangled underworld and do battle with the monsters who inhabited its labyrinthine ways. That light of the novelist burning to live out the fantasies of his fiction most certainly was once again smouldering in his eyes. We are off, that light flashed out, upon a new adventure, and I knew that somewhere in back of it lay some tiny reassurance for one skeptical Wilkie Collins that said, Never fear Wilkie, follow along with us and we’ll make a novelist of you yet.

  “Yes, of course, what can we do to help,” to my utter disbelief I heard myself offering aloud.

  “As I said.” Field spoke in a low voice even though Miss Katie sat smoking her pipe at the far end of the tap. “I need ’im out, but the crime is too great for me ta simply release ’im inta my own Protectives’ custody. An’ if I did, all o’ London would know ’ee was under my power an’ ’is usefulness for my purposes would be gone. But if ’ee escapes, ’ee’s out there on ’is own, dangerous, a threat ta everybody, an’ ’at’s jus’ ’ow I want ’im ta be. An’ ’at’s why I wants yew two ta ’elp ’im escape.”

  “But why us?” Dickens was a veritable fount of questions this night. “Why not two of your constables, men unknown to the turnkeys at Newgate? Why us, two gentleman amateurs?” The gleam in Dickens’s eye told me that he was toying with Field. He didn’t believe for one moment that two Bow Street Constables could effect the release of Tally Ho Thompson from Newgate any more efficiently than could Dickens and Collins, Detectives.

  “Yew two are perfect for a Queen’s shoppin’ list o’ reasons.” Field had that same game-playing twinkle in his eye that was flashing from Dickens’s mischievous orbs. “But one o’ the best is the Fleet Street appetite for the sensational crime.”

  “What!” Dickens was puzzled. “There’s already been a double murder, how much more sensationalistic can the crime be?”

  “I want Thompson’s escape ta be a ripper, a screamer in big ’eads on every front page an’ broadside in London. It won’t be if ’ee jus’ escapes on ’is own. The gaolers at Newgate are notorious for coverin’ up escapes until they are news no more, or until they’ve sent their own blood’ounds an’ bounty ’unters out ta catch the rabbit an’ either skin ’im or bring ’im back for roastin’.”

  “So?” One could not help but sense that Dickens was a bit impatient with the extravagance of Field’s quaint metaphoricism.

  “So, if the famous Mister Dickens is connected ta the escape o’ an accused murderer, suddenly all the front pages, sesame or such-like, swings open ta us. The connection o’ one Mister Charles Dickens, novelist, ta this escape will be grist for ev’ry paper mill on Fleet Street an’ Grub Street.”

  The man was truly a marvel. He missed nothing and he thought of everything. There were more angles to his intelligence than there were pretenders to the French throne or titled murderers in Italian opera. Field was one of those rare specimens who always seemed to know exactly where he was going and never wavered from that path. As long as I have known the man, going on twenty-three years now, I have never ceased to be amazed at the talent he had for plotting, for moving his characters (like Thackeray with his puppets in Vanity Fair) from room to room and house to house and county to county. If, as Field often said of Dickens, the novelist would “wear well in my line,” then the opposite certainly might be true. The detective, if by some miracle he could write, would make a captivating novelist.

  Leaning conspiratorially close to the two of us and lowering his voice even further, though Miss Katie had not moved one inch from her smoking perch at the opposite end of the tap, Field whispered: “The play’s the thing, gentlemun. Now ’ere’s me plan.”

  * * *

  *George Lillo’s The London Merchant (1731), popularly known as George Barnwell after its young protagonist, was one of the first of the Newgate plays of crime and punishment, and, perhaps, the play most oft-mentioned or alluded to in the novels of Charles Dickens. The play was acted every year on the London stage throughout the nineteenth century.

  *Dick Tirpin (1706–1739) was a legendary highwayman who robbed stages and plagued individual travelers all over England for twenty years in the early eighteenth century. Noted for his equestrian skills, the speed of his hit-and-run tactics, his charming way with the lady passengers he robbed, and his anger toward any gentleman who raised a voice or a hand against him or any member of his gang, he was immortalized in the Victorian popular press and mythicized in the ballads, broadsides, and penny dreadfuls of the day.

  The Escape

  January 12, 1852—evening

  Three days passed before Inspector Field tipped us the wink for putting his plan into motion. The cue for mounting this melodrama in his Newgate Theatre of the Real materialised in the form of Serjeant Rogers, who stepped down from the Bow Street Station’s black post-chaise just after the dinner hour and knocked upon my door with an irritable shar
pness that brought Irish Meg into her doorway across the hallway. When I opened my door, Rogers was staring at Meggy and, turning to me, offered a smug look of prudish disapproval. So the gentleman his keepin’ his whore. Rogers’s look censured me on the spot. Thank God Meg couldn’t see his face or she might have clawed out his eyes. Always as officious as Queen Victoria’s butler, Rogers snapped back to the matter at hand and delivered his message in a curt, clicking style.

  “Tonight his the night, Hinspector Field has hinstructed me to hinform you. You har to hire public conveyhance, fetch Mister Dickens, hand proceed with hour plan hat Newgate. Hi’ve halready marked the cabman Mister Dickens put on halert t’ other night. He han his horse har waitin’ hacross the street.”

  Serjeant Rogers delivered this speech as if each word were a deliberate insult to his professionalism. From the beginning, he had never been comfortable with Dickens and me, the gentleman amateurs, intruding upon his bailiwick, drawing the attention of Inspector Field away from the contemplation of Roger’s own superior merits as a detective. Like a jealous wife, he wanted Field all to himself. He reminded me of that pretentious boor Forster.*

  His missive delivered, Rogers could not help but nod, step back, and cast yet one more stony look of disapproval at Meggy and me before turning on his heel and descending the stair.

  “Bloody little weasel,” Meg hissed after him (though he was gone and couldn’t have heard) as she crossed to my doorway. “Wot is it?” she asked as I drew her in out of the hallway.

  She knew that something was wrong. Her arms were around my neck and her body clinging to mine in a frightened way (most unlike her) even as I swung the door closed.