The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  As I opened the door, I could not help but think how I must consign myself to a life of coitus interruptus as long as I cultivated the acquaintance and patronage of this madman of the night streets. I must admit, however, that upon seeing Dickens upon my doorstep all of my lascivious thoughts of Irish Meg were ushered rather unceremoniously into the back of my mind. Despite all, I must admit that I was instantly excited to see him, and knew instinctively that I was about to witness some break in Inspector Field’s case.

  “Charles, what is it?” I searched his face for signs that he might suspect or perceive the presence of Irish Meg in my bed on the other side of the flimsy sleeping-room door (though I am sure that he knew of our living arrangements). I tried to hide my embarrassment behind a guise of surprise and concern (I was not up to mustering “enthusiasm”) at his sudden appearance so late of the evening upon my doorstep. “What has happened?” I gasped somewhat melodramatically.

  “Wilkie, Wilkie, calm down,” he reassured me. “Nothing is wrong. I have simply had the most revolutionary idea and have already set its wheels in motion. I knew that you would wish to accompany me. You must get dressed. Quickly! I’ve got our cab waiting. I’ve dismissed mine. I spotted your faithful cabman dozing at the kerbstone and knocked him up. I think we can solve one of our mysteries yet tonight. So…what are you waiting for?”

  His words galloped forth and leapt over one another as fast as steeplechasers at Epsom. I must admit, I was caught up in his headlong rush. I stared at him aghast. Standing there in my robe with my hair all mussed and my ankles bare, I must have presented quite a sight, something out of Tom Jones perhaps. For his part, he hadn’t the slightest idea that he was asking me to forgo Meg, who was naked, willing, and already warmed in my bed.

  Much to my chagrin, he pushed his way right into my parlor and stood, tapping the head of his stick against the palm of his grey-gloved hand, as if to say, Good God, Wilkie, get moving will you! I haven’t all night! It was all I could do to station myself between him and the sleeping-room door, behind which Irish Meg was surely eavesdropping. I envisioned a need to prevent him from rushing right into my sleeping room and collecting my clothes like some demented valet de chambre intent upon dressing me up and getting me out as quickly as possible. I finally subdued him into one of my tattered Queen Anne chairs and begged him to sit still for the few moments it would take me to dress. I felt like Parson Square.

  I slid around the door into my sleeping chamber hoping against hope that Meg would choose to uphold the proprieties and not put up a squawk over Dickens’s presumptuous intrusion. My finger was to my lips in that age-old gesture of silence as I skulked into the room. Meg’s mouth, as I had expected, was twisted into a mocking scowl. I knew it was folly to expect a woman as volatile as Irish Meg to obey my silent signal. The best I could hope for was that she would choose whispered discretion over a fishwife’s snarling anger.

  “Wot the ’ell is it this time?” she snarled in a laboured whisper, against her better inclinations I am sure.

  “He wants me to accompany him upon another of his nighttime excursions. I cannot say no,” I replied lamely. I was more begging permission than offering up a decision. “If I say no, he will know that you are in here.” That last was the worst thing I could have said.

  “So wot if’ee does!” she scoffed at my cowardice. “Is it sech a stain on yer bloody shield for ’im ta know I’m in yer rooms? Bloody ’ell, I lives ’ere!” Thank God she was still whispering!

  “No, no, that is not it, not it at all,” I struggled to placate her. “Something important has happened in this murder case. He expects me to accompany him. He includes me in all of these night adventures, you know.” I smiled weakly, but she only scowled the more. “I must go. I will explain it all to you when I return.”

  “Yew won’t find me ’ere in yer bed when yew return, yew bloody ponce. Yew kin tell yer story ta yer bloody pillow!” And with that she threw her charmingly naked self upon the bed and sat like a sulking buddha, legs crossed beneath her, arms crossed over her breasts, an angry scowl blazing upon her countenance.

  I dressed hurriedly and fled. Dickens leapt up the moment I rejoined him in the sitting room, and in short seconds we were out the door and into Sleepy Rob’s waiting cab.

  “The Africa Hotel, Trafalgar Square!” Dickens shouted up, and with a crack and a clatter we were off.

  “What is this all about, Charles? Where are we going at this hour?” As I settled into the cushions of the cab and pulled the musty blanket around my legs against the chill, I felt I deserved some explanation in light of what I was giving up to accompany him on this nighttime excursion.

  “It is about genius, Wilkie.” His eyes blazed with excitement. “It is about solving the mystery of how those two poor creatures were murdered. It is about meeting one of the most extraordinary and knowledgeable young men in the Empire. But above all, it is about soliciting his help in understanding what you have so melodramatically christened these ‘Medusa Murders.’”

  “Who is this extraordinary personage?” There was more than a slight note of skepticism in my voice. I do not know whether Dickens was holding back his name under the instinctive impulse of the novelist to build suspense or simply for the purpose of aggravating my curiosity.

  Dickens was, however, not yet ready to reveal the identity of his mystery man. “The idea came to me as I was walking back to the Household Words office from the Shooting Gallery after you had hailed your cab in Leicester Square.” His eyes were bright and his voice was lively and eager as it always was when talking about himself and the workings of his own devious novelist’s mind. “It came to me just like, like”—he groped a moment—“like a header of a revelation, you know, Saint Paul, that sort of thumper. I rushed to The Explorers Club on lower Regent Street and inquired if he was there.” He was utterly caught up in his story as the cab rolled into the Strand and proceeded toward Trafalgar Square. “As luck would have it, he was, indeed, there.”

  Your usual good luck and my ill, I could not help but think.

  “Because I am not a member, I could not enter to seek him out, but the porter, enamoured of a half crown which I dangled before his eyes, assented to reconnoitre the club for me. My man was just finishing his after-dinner brandy in the Honoured Guest’s lounge. The porter, now positively aflame for that seductive half crown”—Dickens, in metaphorical jollity, was becoming transported with the telling of his story—“carried a note and my card to the Honoured Guest requesting a private audience within the hour concerning matters interesting and mysterious. The note evidently piqued his curiosity because the gentleman in question, whom I had met only once before at a public gathering of the Geographical Society, returned in person to the foyer to make the arrangements. He is waiting for us in his lodgings at the Africa Hotel this very moment.”

  “For God’s sake, Charles, who is he?” I blurted out, my patience at his building an artificial suspense having reached the end of its tether.

  “Why, Burton, of course.” But before I had a chance to demonstrate my ignorance, Dickens bounded on. “I was simply walking along Leicester Square recasting in my mind the exchanges of our Shooting Gallery conversations when Field’s words ‘exotic poison’ shot like an arrow into my mind. Those words immediately conjured up Burton. Perhaps he can help us.”

  “Burton?” I had not a clue as to who this ‘genius’ was.

  “An extraordinary man.” Dickens was positively glowing with admiration. “Has been all around the world, Wilkie. An adventurer. Has gone places you and I would not even think of going if we knew they existed in the first place.” He laughed. “But not just an adventurer, not just some bearish soldier of Empire. No, he is an educated man, a scientist and a great reader and a fine and evocative writer. He is, indeed, a prodigy is Dick Burton, a genius I feel, destined to be a great man.”*

  Dickens never ceased to amaze me. It was astounding the people he knew, his ability to track them down in the middle of a
raw London evening, and be immediately welcomed to their home and hearth. I wonder if he ever spoke of me, his literary protégé, in the terms he used that evening to describe Burton. Sleepy Rob circled Lord Nelson’s monument and reined in before the high oaken doors of the Africa Hotel. “But how can this Burton chap help us on this case?” I asked as we disembarked from the cab.

  “He is a young man,” Dickens warmed to his subject, “whose age belies his intelligence, knowledge, and experience. He has an encyclopaedic memory, a mind that is a veritable storehouse of information. If anyone knows of ‘exotic poisons,’ it will be Dick Burton.

  “It is my hope,” Dickens continued as we passed quickly through the outer foyer of the hotel—bamboo chairs and settees cushioned with black plush pillows, tribal masks and fans, and feathered ceremonial headdresses decorating the walls—and mounted the stairs, “that in the course of his journeys or in his extensive reading Burton will have encountered deaths similar in their horror to those of the two poor women.”

  His long legs taking the black marble stairs two at a time, with my shorter ones double-stepping to stay abreast, we rapidly ascended to the third storey, the top, and, at the end of the corridor, beneath the slope of the roof, found the number that Dickens had been given.

  I was gasping from the climb when Dickens tapped lightly twice upon the door with his stick (not at all in the brutal manner in which he had saluted my door). I was still breathing in gulps when the door slowly opened.

  The room was spacious but dim. No gas was lit. The small fire in the hearth and two candles, sitting in holders upon a desk covered with open books on the far side of the room, provided the only light. The ceiling sloped with the contour of the roof so that in its inner half a man could stand to his full height, but in its outer half, where the aforementioned desk and a small daybed covered with an eye-catching white fur pelt were located, a man could reside only in a sitting position. Burton had opened the door from within and had stepped back to the centre of the room. The candles glowed behind him giving a yellowish tint to everything. To his side, the fire flared then fell, sending long shadows up across the sloping ceiling.

  Even in that dim light, the first thing I noticed about Burton was the deep fire burning in his eyes. As we stepped in and he stood looking at us, sizing us up, his eyes seemed to blaze with an intensity, an openness, a curiosity perhaps. Who are these specimens? his eyes might have been asking. Of what tribe are they? What language might they speak? Have you ever seen the flash of a cat’s eyes when caught in a light after dark? It was that sort of bright intensity that beamed from Burton’s eyes. Though not overly tall (Dickens stood half a head above him), nor excessively broad of shoulder, nor thick of neck or arms, he was, nonetheless, somehow an imposing figure. His hair, which dipped into his collar, was as black as ebony as was his mustache, which turned down at the corners of his mouth giving him a rather fierce Turk-like countenance. Even when he smiled, which he did immediately upon our entrance, that mustache gave him a frightening barbaric look. As he stood before us, I sensed a muscular tiger’s body, lithe and trim, yet coiled tight with a power and grace that could erupt into violent motion at the slightest alarum.

  “Mister Dickens.” He stepped forward with his hand outstretched. “This is, indeed, a great honour for me. As you know, I aspire to be a writer, and to actually have the greatest writer in England in my poor room is…well…I can’t tell you…” and he gave up the attempt, overcome by the intensity of his writerly emotion.

  Charles took his hand warmly. “It is all my honour, indeed,” he assured Burton. “Those of us who know you rest in the complete certainty that quite soon all the honour shall fall to you both for your exploits and your writings.”

  Visibly moved by Dickens’s high praise, perhaps because he was not a man used to that sort of encouragement, Burton was momentarily speechless, but then, remembering himself, he stretched out his hand to me: “I am Richard Francis Burton. I don’t believe we’ve—”

  “I am sorry.” Dickens pounced upon the introduction. “This is my colleague and also a fellow writer, Wilkie Collins. He, too, shall soon garner the honours of the literary world.”

  His interruption of my sexual interlude with Meg, his insistence that I dress and follow him out into the raw London night, his coy withholding of the object of our expedition’s pursuit in the cab—all was forgiven when he rewarded me with that morsel of praise. He does think I can be a writer. I must have beamed the affirmation of it. The honours of the literary world, indeed. Nothing Meg could have offered me that evening could have tempted me more than that snippet of praise from Dickens.

  Pulling a worn armchair of indeterminate lineage and design out of the shadows of a corner, and turning his straight-backed wooden desk chair around, Burton begged us both to sit. Graciously placing our coats and hats atop a large steamer chest and satisfied that we were settled comfortably, he poured us each a cup of brandy, snifters evidently not being included among his household furnishings. That done, Burton sat with his legs crossed beneath him on the white fur skin covering his bed. He looked like a savage at a jungle fire.

  Dickens offered him, then me, a cigar. He took it eagerly. One received the impression that, despite his dining at the Explorers Club, Burton led a rather Spartan existence devoid of the usual amenities—such as cigars—common to the life of a London gentleman. He literally lunged to his desk for a vesta and, after fastidiously lighting our cigars before his own, drew the smoke deep into his chest.

  “Mister Dickens”—he smiled his fierce smile from his savage posture perched on the skin of that wild animal—“such a fine cigar places me utterly at your service. You said earlier in the evening that you had some questions to put to me. Fire at will.”

  “It is about a murder, two murders really, right here in the West End,” Dickens began, and Burton’s black brows raised in a disarmingly innocent display of shock at the barbarity of civilisation. “We and Inspector Field of the Metropolitan Protectives believe that the two women were poisoned, but the police surgeon has not been able to provide us with a clue to the cause of such a horrible death. There are no traces of the usual poisons, such as arsenic, in the bodies.”

  “Horrible? How were they horrible?” Burton seized upon one of Charles’s words. “I mean, in what ways were the deaths horrible?” Burton was hooked, his eyes burning for information.

  “It was the horrible twisted looks upon their faces as they died,” I interjected, not wanting to sit there in silence like some pull toy that Dickens dragged around after him.

  “What do you mean?” Burton pressed.

  Dickens echoed Field’s description of the two corpses as best he could and tried to lighten the mood a bit by ending, “And Wilkie here, due to the looks on the dead women’s faces, christened them the ‘Medusa Murders.’”

  “It was as if they were turned to stone in an instant,” I defended myself against Dickens’s irony.

  “Faces twisted…as if turned to stone.” The smoke from Burton’s cigar languidly trailed out of the corner of his mouth as he held counsel with himself. “A grotesque death rictus,” he murmured as if remembering faraway places. After one more puff at his cigar, he straightened his shoulders, which had been hunched over in thought, his head rose up, and a single word exploded like a dart from an African native’s blowpipe: “Curare!”

  “What?” Dickens and I exclaimed in unison.

  “Curare,” he repeated; “is really a portmanteau term for a whole group of vegetation-derived poisons. Your corpses sound like curare to me.”

  “What is it? Where does it come from? How is it used to kill?” Dickens’s questions tumbled out like Jill after Jack.

  “Curare is any of a variety of different substances”—one could sense the schoolmaster in Burton emerging—“extracted from the saps of jungle plants. It is used by the Indians of the Amazon of Brazil and the pygmies of Africa as an arrow and spear poison for hunting and warfare.”

  �
�How does it work?” Dickens asked.

  “I have only seen one instance of its effect upon human beings. It was when we came upon the immediate aftermath of a battle between two native tribes on an excursion into the Amazon jungle of Brazil out of the port of Janeiro. We heard the skirmish ahead in a clearing, wild whoops and screams of either hatred or agony, so we fired our muskets into the air to scare whoever it was off and they all ran. They left behind three dead men. Warriors, from the looks of their paint. Those men looked as if they had been stopped in their tracks, brought up short and frozen in mid-air. Curare poisons seem to induce an instant paralysis by somehow interfering with nerve impulses to the human muscles. In a substantial dosage, it can induce a most sudden death.”

  “Good God!” I gasped.

  “Like turning a person to stone.” Dickens looked at us, the myth of Medusa surfacing in each of our minds.

  “That must be it…curare.” Dickens was merely speculating aloud, not addressing either of us in particular. “But there were no knife wounds or puncture wounds of any sort upon the victims. Is that the only method of administering the poison?”

  “Not a’tall,” Burton was quick to answer. “Jungle natives dip their arrows and axes and spear blades in it in order to more efficiently kill their enemies, but it is a liquid and could be dissolved in another liquid or in food, or it could be injected. The puncture hole of a single hypodermic needle, between the toes, say, could be easily overlooked in a surgeon’s inquest.”