“Well, mates”—Thompson grinned—“it ain’t Buckingham Palace, but it ain’t got dirt walls an’ floors neither.” Was his reference to the grave or to some highwayman’s cave? I could not decode his meaning.
At his signal we entered, if taking two small steps to the centre of the room can be deemed an entrance. I closed the heavy wooden door reluctantly behind us, wondering if there was enough air accumulated within to serve all three of us. We needed our privacy, however, and the swinging to of the heavy door of that pestilent cistern was a necessary evil.
“To what do I owe the pleasure, gents?” Thompson knew something was up as soon as the door swung closed. “We’re a bit glum an’ intent this evenin’ are we not?” he teased.
“You are leaving Newgate tonight,” Dickens whispered urgently, though, God knows, one could shout at the top of one’s lungs in that tiny cell in that black labyrinth and not a soul would pay any heed. “Inspector Field needs you free, on the outside, in order to proceed in the solving of this murder case.”
“Fieldsy needs me agin, I knew it.” Thompson was positively gleeful. “I wos gimcracked right inta the middle o’ these murders like a puppet on a string an’ I’m the one ta wrap that string around the puppetmaster’s neck.”
I observed the infectiousness of Thompson’s animation upon Dickens. In the flickering light, that look of renewed excitement flowed back into Dickens’s eyes. Now we are in the middle of a new adventure! Dickens’s whole carriage and mien seemed to shout. Suddenly that squalid, suffocating room was infused with purpose and anticipation.
“Wot’s the plan?” Thompson’s conspiratorial glee was even drawing me into the spirit of the moment.
“You and I are to change places. We are near the same height. You will leave with Wilkie in the identity of Charles Dickens and in the morning I will protest that you forced the change upon me,” Dickens delivered his explanation as if giving an after-dinner speech at the London Tavern.
“Yew’re gointa spend the night in Newgate so’s I kin bolt?” Thompson was momentarily taken aback at the prospect. You see, it was a question of rank. Thompson was having a moment of trouble understanding why a gentleman like Dickens would give up home and hearth of a winter night to help a ne’er-do-well like him escape from Newgate. Thompson finally fought his way out of this quandary: “If Fieldsy set yew ta it, then it must be up ta snuff,” Thompson acquiesced to the plan.” ’Ow do we mount up?”
“We have come muffled in greatcoats and scarves to hide our identities. We must change boots and you must wear my gloves,” Dickens explained as he sat down on the small bed to remove his boots. “It is a brutal night outside. We are depending upon the turnkey to be not overscrupulous.”
I watched as Dickens removed his hat and pulled off his boots while Tally Ho Thompson did the same. Thompson handed his boots—much higher and rougher than Dickens’s and decidedly of the horse-riding kind—over to his understudy. I had uttered nary a word since entering Thompson’s dark den, but, as Dickens bent to pull on Thompson’s boots, I saw my opportunity to tug upon Thompson’s shoulder and move my lips to his ear. I had been well-schooled by Inspector Field on what to say and do at this juncture. This was my private part of the plan which Dickens neither knew about nor must overhear.
As Thompson straightened up at my tug on his shoulder, I whispered into his ear, “You must hit him with this as you did the footman in Ashbee’s house the night we broke into his secret library.* Be most careful. You must only stun him yet leave a mark. It is for appearances. He is one of the greatest minds in England. I hope you realise how much is entrusted to your expertise.” The black gutta-percha equaliser slid like a snake out of my hand into his.
“Turn him so that I am behind,” Thompson, understanding immediately, murmured back.
“Your feet are bigger than mine,” Dickens remarked as he stood up, interrupting our private colloquy.
“Mind those boots, guv.” Thompson chuckled. “They fits the stirrups like a glove. I’d hate to lose ’em.”
Charles was removing his scarves and greatcoat and handing them to Thompson when I spoke: “Look here, Charles”—my voice quavering despite the fact that I had known for three days what I must do—“the hieroglyphs on this wall must contain the material of ten novels. I’ll wager there are Pickwicks and Fagins and Barnwells galore represented in these divers hands.”
Charles, momentarily distracted, took two steps across that pinched cell in the dim candlelight to peruse the shadowy wall toward which I pointed. As he straightened to comment upon my observation, Thompson, who had moved as silently as a cat behind Dickens, tapped him at the back of the ear. In the flickering light Charles’s eyes suddenly went wide, then vacant. He collapsed face first into my arms, his dead weight almost knocking me to the floor.
We carried him to the bed and laid him amongst the ragged blankets. Guilt flooded into my consciousness. My God, what have I done, I thought. His eyes were closed and he lay deathly still. Oh Lord, he’s dead. Panic gripped me like a huge tentacle pulling me beneath the surface.
“You haven’t hurt him, have you?” I was still whispering like a felon. “We haven’t hurt him, have we?” I took my share of the responsibility.
Thompson was standing there grinning in that maddening way of his. “’Ee’ll be fine. Not ta worry a tot. ’Ee’ll ’ave a small robin’s egg back o’ ’is ear come mornin’ but ’ee’ll still be able ta write those novels as easy as a jumper clearin’ a ’edge. Or”—and his mocking grin widened—“would yew like ta be writin’ ’em for ’im?”
I was tempted to go for the man’s throat, but we had more pressing business at hand.
In Dickens’s greatcoat with the scarves wrapped high around his chin and Dickens’s top hat perched high upon his head, Thompson could easily pass for Charles. Thompson was clean-shaven of face, though somewhat stubbly after four days in Newgate, and Charles had just recently begun to affect a square little goatee, like some Russian czar or Gypsy busker (quite ridiculous-looking, I thought), but the scarves covering Thompson’s chin concealed this one defect in the disguise. Thompson looked to me for approval. I nodded emphatically. We solicited one more examination of Dickens’s condition on the ragged bed—breathing steady, sleeping soundly—then stepped out into the black corridor.
As we groped our way along the walls of that dark labyrinth, Thompson in the lead, a position that I would assume as soon as we reached the prison yard, I remembered what Inspector Field had said three nights before in the snug of the Lord Gordon Arms: “’Ee’s an actor, for gawd’s sake! ’Ee art ta be able ta mimic anyone, ’specially they’re same size as ’ee.” He’s not an actor, I thought, my nerves starting to fray like a piece of old worsted, he’s a highwayman and pickpocket temporarily walking around onstage. This is not going to work.
When we reached the door to the gallows yard, I stopped Thompson with a hand to his shoulder. “Let me go first,” I ordered. “The turnkey has seen and marked me. If we are stopped, I am prepared to bribe the lock. If that does not work, you must be prepared for violence. Field and Rogers will be waiting outside down the street.” With those curt and rehearsed directions delivered, I pulled on the rope latch of the door and plunged out into the driving sleet of the Newgate gallows yard. I glanced quickly back over my shoulder. Tally Ho Thompson was, indeed, following jauntily behind.
Dickens is the lucky one, I thought, sleeping peacefully while I must face this terrible uncertainty. I had complete confidence in Field’s plan, in Thompson’s disguise, in the inattention of the turnkey, in the abetting bitterness of the weather, yet my heart was racing in fear of discovery. Some people perhaps, like Thompson, are simply bred to be felons, but I, incontrovertibly, was not one of that breed. I was terrified of being caught, horrified at the spectre of embarrassment, frightened that I would prove myself a complete fool in carrying out this task of derring-do that had been assigned to me, and I vowed to never again allow Dickens to draw me into any of his
mad schemes of this ilk. In the future, I would assert myself more forcefully against his presumptuous will.
We crossed the courtyard bent low against the driving sleet and approached the turnkey’s cubicle. The man, muffled as tightly as we against the winter cold, poked his head out quickly from his hovel and measured us in the most cursory and weather-avoiding way. He did not ask us to step in and unwind our mufti of collars and scarves so that he could peruse our identification. He did not ask to see again the document of passage that I had supplied upon entering, and that I had ready to hand in my greatcoat pocket. As we stood before him, he seemed to immediately decide that the two gentlemen, who but thirty minutes before had entered the prison on Inspector Field’s authority, were still the same heights and shapes (or near), were still bundled tightly against the winter wind, were still above suspicion. With little more than this cursory glance, the keeper of the lock turned back into his shelter to fetch his huge ring of keys from their peg on the wall. Then, hugging the prison wall to avoid the cut of the sleeting wind, he moved to open the door for our embarkation.
It has worked, I thought, we’re out. Field is, indeed, a genius.
The turnkey worked his key on its huge ring at the small door inset in the high iron gate. I stood, with Thompson in Dickens’s guise directly behind, waiting for the key to turn and the door to open, and our passage out of that infernal place to be signalled.
The key turned, the lock surrendered, and that muffled clown worked at the door’s large black iron hasp. With a sudden pull, that small door sprang open, giving passage to a bitter blast of wind from the street that blew me backward into my partner in crime. Perhaps because my Oxonian was not a full top hat, perhaps because it was tight-fitting and pulled down almost to my ears, I was able to keep it on when that lash of wind rushed in upon us. But perhaps because Dickens’s Tilbury was higher and wider, and did not tightly fit the contours of Thompson’s head, my partner in gaol-break was not so lucky.
Dickens’s hat went pinwheeling off of Thompson’s head and across the prison yard like a flushed grouse scurrying for cover. It rolled on its brim over the smooth stones and came to rest hard against the base of the gallows tree. Thompson hesitated but one brief moment, in which time he darted first a brief glance at the open door through which the wind was rushing and then a glance at me straightening and staring wide-eyed at him, and then he did an inexplicable thing.
He ran after the hat!
He ran back into the prison yard to retrieve that bloody hat!
Good God, I thought, his hair is much darker than Charles’s and he is beardless. Now we are done! Inspector Field’s plan had worked so well, each step ticking off like a piece of precision clockwork, and now the hazard of the elements, some vengeful Aeolian banshee, had stepped in to ruin it all. “Victims of the ill-judged execution of a well-judged plan,” I think Samuel Johnson once said. That was certainly what we were at the moment.*
He chased that spinning hat across the prison yard and retrieved it from the grasp of the gallows. He returned, walking naturally, not hurrying the slightest, probably doing it so casually just to plague me (who wanted only to get through that open door and away from this infernal den before the world gave way beneath my anxiety), walking toward me and the uncomprehending turnkey. As he strolled so nonchalantly, Thompson pulled the recalcitrant hat down around his ears and wrapped the woollen scarf tighter around his chin. I swear, though I could not see his mouth beneath the mufti, that the man was grinning the whole way, mocking me with his heedless unconcern, his actor’s ease at being onstage. In a sense, that whole little melodrama, which had entwined me in a web of such excruciating suspense, was but an actor’s choice. Instead of bolting for the open door immediately upon the opportunity presenting itself, Thompson instead chose to remain in character, maintaining his role as Dickens rather than assuming the role of an escaping murderer. He reacted with an actor’s instinct and his audience of one bought it utterly.
“She’s a mean wind off the river this night, gennulmuns.” The turnkey was already turning tail to flee back into the shelter of his tiny box even as he ushered us out through that small wind-lashed door. “’Old onto yoore ’ats,” he tossed a final bit of sage (though rather obvious) advice back over his shoulder as he clanged the door closed behind us.
Then we were, miraculously, in the street. I breathed a towering sigh of relief. Thompson, I am sure, beneath his scarves, was grinning madly like some fearless idiot incapable of even recognising a threat when it jumps up and tweaks his nose.
As I look back upon it now from the safe vantage of twenty years, trying to capture the tension of the scene in my words, I am almost moved to laughter. Strange how the haze of memory, of “recollection in tranquility,” can brush a comical cast over what seemed at that time a life and death situation. As I remember Thompson scurrying across the yard to retrieve that hat, pressed against the face of the gallows like a newly severed head just dropped from under the guillotine’s blade, it all strikes me as more comical then threatening, actually absurd. Perhaps comedy always lurks in the underbrush of life and one must attain a certain perspective upon it, flush it into flight, before one can perceive its laughing face.
As I and my charge stood there in the dark street outside Newgate with the wind howling all around and the sleet pelting down like devil’s spit, I felt as if I had just walked some pirates’ plank or run an Indian gauntlet in the American Wild West…and survived. Sleepy Rob’s hansom cab clattered up out of the darkness in the most natural way. The two of us stepped into it with the ease of practise, and it rolled off down the street away from that dreadful prison as if it were but another smooth-turning part in some ingenious machine. Which, of course, it was. And, the grand machinist, the master of these machinations, awaited us.
Sleepy Rob’s cab took us straight to Inspector Field. He was sitting in the sinister black post chaise with THE METROPOLITAN PROTECTIVES, BOW STREET STATION rendered in a circular medallion on its side door, parked only minutes away in the privacy of Shoe Lane. Field and Rogers stepped down from that vulture of a coach as we pulled up. Thompson and myself climbed out of our cab even as Inspector Field rushed up to me, grasped my hand, and began pumping it as if he expected that vigorous motion to produce a flow of water from a well. As Field shook my hand, I had a sense of him turning me toward him while I simultaneously had a vague sense of Serjeant Rogers accosting Tally Ho Thompson in a similar way behind my back. Then suddenly, persisting in holding my hand tightly in one of his, Field, for some inexplicable reason, as if possessed by some mischievous impulse, reached up and knocked off my hat. As I looked at Field in surprise, my knees suddenly buckled and all went black in my head. It was a rather quick sensation of sinking underwater before all sentience left and I drowned in the black void of unconsciousness.
I learned later that just as I had set up Dickens for Thompson’s facile trick for the rendering of unconsciousness, so had Field’s brisk handshake maneuvered me into position while Rogers gave Thompson the high sign to hit me with the very equalizer with which I had supplied him earlier in the evening.
I awoke more than two hours later in the back of Rob’s cab surrounded by constables in a completely different area of London with my hands bound up by my own cravat and my ankles tied together by my own braces. Rob was also sporting a rather ostentatious bulging under his left eye, which he swore was administered by the tall man in the tall hat and the grey scarves whom he had acquired at Number Sixteen, Wellington Street, Strand, earlier in the evening and conveyed to Newgate Prison. I, of course, affirmed his halting story as best I could in my befogged state of recovering consciousness. A constable had found Sleepy Rob’s four-legged business partner grazing unconcerned in the middle of the way on the Chelsea Embankment miles from Newgate and well out of Inspector Field’s Bow Street bailiwick.
Both myself and Sleepy Rob gave sketchy narratives of what had happened since my entering the cab outside Newgate with the tall man in
the tall hat whom I steadfastly asserted was Charles Dickens. The constables wrote down our muddled statements, taking me for a gentleman badly confused by a tap on the head and Sleepy Rob as the slow-moving, slow-witted imbecile whom he gave consistent evidence to the world of being. No report of Tally Ho Thompson’s escape had yet surfaced in the flow of police communications by the time we were released at almost five in the morning.
I had a splitting headache and Sleepy Rob was utterly noncommittal. He didn’t seem to mind at all the large brown mouse swelling beneath his left eye. He retrieved his business partner from the hitching post in the alley behind Chelsea Town Hall, packed me into his cab, and delivered me to my Soho rooms. Irish Meg was waiting up for me in the parlor, sitting with her legs tucked up beneath her on the love seat, with her face streaked with tears of worry. As I opened the door, she leapt up and ran into my arms, crushing me in her embrace as if holding on to the last spar in a shipwreck, pulling my face down to her kiss in desperate need. She kissed me long and passionately, and then she buried her face in my chest and held me fast in the circle of her arms for a long moment.
Suddenly, however, she stepped back from me. The old fire once again blazed up in her eyes, that anger and defiance I knew so well. Without the slightest warning or the least provocation, she slapped me hard across the face. “If yew ever put me through somethin’ like this again, Mister Wilkie Collins,” she hissed, “I swear I’ll ’ave yew done!”
* * *
*John Forster was Dickens’s closest and oldest friend, solicitor, confidant, and ultimately biographer as well as Wilkie Collins’s fiercest competitor for Dickens’ favor.
The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens Page 8
