The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  I feel that it was more than friendship that fueled Dickens’s fascination with this case. My theory, which I almost hesitate to present, may seem rather farfetched, but it is the best explanation I can concoct for the terrible restlessness and nervous agitation that Dickens displayed during those four days and nights of waiting. I think that what so drew Dickens to this case was the possibility that a gentleman had actually poisoned his own wife. Dickens was fascinated by this act of spouse murder. I certainly do not imply that Dickens wished his wife dead, or, heaven forbid, ever contemplated killing her, but their marriage at that time was not a source of joy for either of them. Kate’s persistent illness served to keep them apart—she in the country for her treatments, he in the city with his work—for long periods of time. In a sense, it was as if Dickens had simply outdistanced Kate, left her behind as he plunged forward in his career and his fame as one of England’s great men. And then, of course, there was his guardianship—for, at that time, that was all it was—of the Ternan girl.

  Forgive me, it was just a feeling, a groundless theory, not really worth considering. But, to use Dickens’s own words, every man has his style, and Dickens’s was ungodly hard to grasp. He was, if anything, protean, always changing in his life and mind and writing. Might it be possible that Charles Dickens could be a great man, and a loving husband and father, and a good friend, and a murderer? During those four days of waiting, Dickens would sit at his desk by the bow window overlooking Wellington Street, working most of the time on the second number of his new novel, which bore the ominous title Tom-All-Alone’s: The Ruined House that Got into Chancery and Never Got Out.* It was due to go on sale in serial gatherings in February or March. I was writing my article for Household Words on the lighthouses (or the lack thereof) on the Devon coast, which would lead off the next issue. At intervals that afternoon, when restlessness would overtake him, he would burst into my office with some new speculation upon the poisonings case.

  “Evidently, the body told them nothing, Dunn’s corpse I mean,” he would say, his words, like an idea fired from a pistol, preceeding him through the door to my working closet, “or they would have come for us by now.” Or, “There has been no word from Thompson,” he would say, “he must be in deep hiding and they have not found him yet else they would have sent for us, don’t you think, Wilkie?” He needed my reassurance, on an almost hourly basis, that Inspector Field had not forgotten us. I placated him, and sent him back to his writing. That, after all, was my role as a Victorian version of the court jester, acolyte to the great man.

  But the one thing, I think, which troubled him the most was the failure of Inspector Field to set in motion the plan for interviewing the hitherto invisible Doctor Palmer. His whole mien gave evidence that his impatience and restlessness stemmed from his intense desire to meet this man. I think Charles was utterly fascinated by the criminal potential of the man, perhaps he saw the elusive doctor as the next great villainous character in his gallery of corrupt and evil gentlemen that hitherto included Sir Mulberry Hawke, Tigg Montague, and Steerforth the seducer. He even, descending into depths of morbidity, started referring to Palmer as “Doctor Death.”

  With Thompson nowhere to be found, Palmer not interviewed, Dickens unravelling before my very face, the open eyes of the dead man staring at the stopped-at-midnight hands of the Boar’s Head Tavern clock—is it any wonder that I fled this madhouse of unanswered questions and unresolved desires so gratefully to Irish Meg? Yet, though she offered the enticing diversions of her bed, she offered little else in the way of consolation. My plight was that of a man trapped between two powerful magnets. Meg pulled in exactly the opposite direction of Dickens. She openly mocked our absorption with Inspector Field’s murder case.

  On the third of those four nights of waiting, I had begged off Dickens’s company by complaining of a headache. As I was muffling myself up to leave for home, Dickens offhandedly observed that I was getting to be quite a “domesticated animal.” He does not know how right he is, I thought. Then he joked that Thompson had been getting so with Scarlet Bess, “but certainly seems to have thrown that over.” And then he showed me out with the question: “Do you really think Thompson might have been having an affair with the dead wife, Wilkie?” Little things disturbed me during that time. Dickens said it as a joke, but for some reason I took it to heart. In the hansom on the way home, I was sure that Dickens knew all about Meggie. Thoughts of marrying her raced in my mind. But I can’t marry her, I thought, I am a gentleman. Thompson has not married his Bess. But he is no gentleman. Or is he? Perhaps Dickens was right. Perhaps who you are is simply a matter of style. But a gentleman marry a woman of the streets?

  Meg was, indeed, waiting when I returned to my rooms. She was wearing a white blouse and a serviceable, almost nunlike, blue jumper, but I could see at her ankles that she had black stockings on beneath. Her arms snaked around my neck as I came in the door. She kissed me long and hard without the formality of a greeting. It was a desperate sort of kiss, excited to see me but wary of my motives for spending so much time away from her. “I’m glad yer ’ome, Wilkie.” Very domesticated, I thought, wifely. Good God! “Yew’ve given all yer time ta ’im the last few days.” She spoke that “him” as if it were a pronoun for Satan.

  I kissed her hard once again as a means of evasion, to close her mouth and not have to open mine, though both of our mouths were open, our tongues coupling.

  “Yew wants me right now, don’t’choo, luv?” There was a hard triumph in her voice as she realised that her control over me was firm.

  Kissing her hard yet again, I answered with my hands, moving them to her waist and pulling upward upon the skirt of her prim housewifely jumper until it bunched at her hips and I could get my impatient hands beneath it. My fingers ran over the tops of her stockings where the garters hooked and moved up to the warm mounds of her arse. As my hands finally touched her bare skin below, our lips fought each other off and, moving down her by flexing my knees slightly, my hands kneading her arse and pressing her hard against me, I buried my head in the sanctuary of her breasts. “Oh yes I want you…right now I want you,” I begged.

  She moved herself firmly against me, up and around, in control, arousing me with the slow movement of her hips as if she were a Greek or Indian dancer. Her hands caressed the back of my head, moved down to the valley between my shoulder blades, pressed my face hard against her breasts. “Yew wants ta fuck me right now, do yew?” her voice was harsh and guttural. “Yew wants ta fuck me, but yew don’t wants ta pay, issat it, sir?” She was teasing me, I think, though her voice still had that hard-edged, domineering quality about it.

  “I will pay,” I begged, submission in my voice, playing her game, whatever that was, kissing at the fabric over her breasts, running one hand greedily down over the top of her thigh and up between her legs in the back to caress the tight moist silk gathered there.

  Her hands moved slowly over the back of my head as her hips pressed hard against my chest. Moving her hands down over my ears to my shoulders, she pushed me to my knees and stepped quietly back, disengaging us. I knelt before her like some avid supplicant in the temple of a pagan goddess. With one fluid motion, she pushed the straps of her jumper from her shoulders and let the shapeless dress slide down into a pile on the floor around her feet. Stepping out of that circle of nunnish restraint, and with a single motion stripping that white blouse over her head, she stood before me in only her red-and-black secret things.

  “Yew stays on yer knees a moment yew do,” she ordered, as, turning her back to me and bending at the waist, she pulled down those red silk pantaloons, which I had felt bunched between her legs. This stripping away of the final veil revealed the full, white globes of her glorious arse. She paused, slightly bent over, letting me look as she knew I loved to do, becoming less harsh and more playful now, less angry and more loving, yet still adamant in her control as she turned back to face me. “Yew must kiss me ’ere ta pay for wot yew wants.” She moved
up close before me, taking a legs apart and hips outthrust stance of challenge and intimidation as I knelt before her.

  Like a border around a Turner painting, her black secret things set off the fiery red blaze adorning her mound of Venus. Into that unholy fire, I buried my face.

  What ensued there on the floor of my parlour, not even knowing if the door to the corridor was closed behind, was the fiercest, most savage dance of love that Irish Meg had ever enticed me into.

  How quaint, is it not, that I should phrase this indecorous description in that way, “enticed me into”? Not only does my language come up short grammatically, but it breaks down in terms of truth as well. My appetite for Meg’s charms needed little enticement. I became, with little resistance, her slave at the mere unveiling of her secret things and secret places. Is that not what these games of love and literature and detecting are all about, the discovery of the secrets of others and the entering of them?

  She mounted and rode above me there on our Soho parlour rug like some African queen rising above the throngs of the everyday on the shoulders of her bearers. She rallied me to her service, my fire-queen, and collapsed in ecstasy upon me as our flames consumed us both. Metaphors notwithstanding, we made savage love on the parlour floor. It was magnificent. It burned off from my mind any thoughts but those of my deep and secret need for Meg, a need that liberated a second secret self that lurked beneath the false façade of my existence as a proper Victorian gentleman. We lay for long minutes, she atop me like a warm quilt, in the sweet aftermath of our lovemaking.

  She was the one who broke the spell. She rolled off with a muffled ribbon of a laugh.

  “What is it?” I inquired, still struggling to catch my breath.

  Lying upon her side and propping her chin upon her elbow and hand, she considered. This was no prelude to playful pillow talk. Good God, we were naked in the middle of the parlour floor.

  “Yew men are such a muddle.” She was too studied to be spontaneous. This was a speech that she had rehearsed to deliver after making love. I am quite sure, however, that she did not envision delivering it in the middle of the parlour floor.

  “What do you mean?” I really did not desire this colloquy. A sudden and intense exhaustion was overtaking me, beckoning me to a warm bed and sleep, preferably wrapped in Irish Meg’s arms.

  “Yew ’ave been gone the better part o’ a week chasin’ around after Mister Dickens and Fieldsy. ’Tis the middle o’ winter. Yew men are sech children, little boys lookin’ for adventure.”

  “Meggy,” I tried to argue, “there have been three murders and Thompson stands accused of all.” But she was in no mood to listen or to interrupt the rehearsed script of her speech.

  “Really?” She laughed hollowly, that rehearsed as well. “I ’ave spent all me grown years tryin’ ta escape the streets an’ yew an’ yer Mister Dickens rush to seek out their filth an’ death. ’Tis as if yew must follow ’im anywhere ’ee leads.” Did I catch a hint of jealousy in her voice?

  “The streets are the landscape of his imagination. They bring life to his novels. I believe him when he tells me that,” I tried to defend Charles, and then myself, “and if I can be a great novelist like him, I must find my landscape as well.”

  “Why not make me the landscape o’ yer imagination?” Meg teased, half-serious, as she rolled over atop me once again and kissed me about the eyes. “Don’t scowl, Wilkie, loke some wounded bear. Yew git so ’ard ’it when I don’t agree with yer childish ways. I could really love yew, Wilkie, but yew won’t let me. Yew are too much the gentleman an’ the wantin’ ta be novelist…too much like ’im. Life ’as ta be somethin’ yew kin put in a book, can’t be somethin’ yew jus’ injoy.”

  She didn’t deliver her speech with malice, rather with a pensive sort of regret, as if she wanted me to be something more, or perhaps less, than I was. It certainly was a dilemma living with that woman. She tended to look so deeply into things.

  At any rate, caught between the powerful pulls of Dickens on one hand and Irish Meg on the other, four days of waiting passed. On the morning of the fifth day after the discovery of Dunn’s corpse and the disappearance of Tally Ho Thompson, Dickens and I were working upon the final layout of the upcoming Household Words issue when we were interrupted by an insistent banging upon the downstairs door. Wills, Dickens’s ever-vigilant office Cerberus, jumped up immediately and we could hear him clicking across the wooden floor below to answer the door. The harsh banging, which did not cease until Wills flung open the door with a heated “Good Gawd man, stop that pounding,” drew Dickens and myself to the head of the stairs. We found ourselves looking straight down upon Serjeant Rogers bursting in out of the thin cold sunlight of Wellington Street. Before Rogers said his first word, Dickens looked at me and I at him, and we knew right off that he had come to summon us back into the fray.

  “Look sharp, gents.” Serjeant Rogers glowered up the stairwell. “Hinspector has sent me for yew huonce hagain.”

  “Do you know where Thompson is?” I shouted down.

  “Have you located Palmer?” Dickens shouted down.

  “Hin the cab,” Rogers growled back up at us, “git yer coats hand hats!”

  Rogers had evidently been dispatched to Wellington Street on foot because he had commandeered Sleepy Rob’s cab for our conveyance, that worthy having fallen into his morning doze at the kerbstone after delivering me to the Household Words office earlier. Galloping north out of the Strand into Bloomsbury, then continuing north past Regents Park through King’s Cross and onto the Hampstead Highroad, Serjeant Rogers dispensed little information. Yes, Doctor William Palmer had been located and they hoped to obtain an interview. Yes, they knew where Thompson was. “We have, hi means Hinspector Field has, known where he his for two days he has,” Rogers gloated as the cab emerged from Saint John’s Wood and careened off the highroad at the base of Downshire Hill to begin its climb toward Jack Straw’s Castle at the top of the heath. It was certainly a familiar locale for Dickens. His perpetually indigent friend, Leigh Hunt,* had lived for years in a small rented cottage just off the heath. “We’ve been keepin’ hour heyes hon him,” Rogers officiously assured us, “Thompson that his, for two days now.”

  “And you have not taken him up?” Dickens asked, somewhat surprised.

  Rogers shook his head a solemn “no” as our cab came up onto the top of the heath and rolled into a flat, open space used as an outer coachyard for the large and elegant inn, Jack Straw’s Castle, the view from whose upper rooms commanded the wide, wooded expanse of Hampstead Heath below.

  Pulled up to the edge of the hill that descended to the heath at the far end of that flat meadow, perched like a black vulture waiting for its dinner to go still below, was the sinister black Bow Street Station post chaise. Two constables, one holding the reins of a grazing horse, sat on the box. Inspector Field, alone, occupied the uncovered carriage. He stood up to greet our arrival and gestured for us to join him in the open carriage. The thin, cold sunshine made the day brighter than most of its January brethren, but we could see our own horse’s breath in the frigid air. Back to our left across that open expanse of brown hilltop meadow, the grey, red-shuttered bulk of Jack Straw’s Castle rose up to its gabled rooftop overlooking the turning where the Heath Road curved down into the pine trees and the gorse. Out to our right over the edge of the bluff, o’erspread like a Constable view,* stretched the wide brownish green expanse of the Hampstead Heath.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemun,” Field greeted us as we joined him in his carriage. “Yew’ll be glad ta ’ear that our slippery Doctor Palmer ’as resurfaced an’ is jus’ down there.” He pointed down in the general direction of a somewhat far-off break or clearing in the forested expanse of this end of the heath. “O’er there, neer the ponds, that’s ’is ridin’ club, it ’tis, an’ ’ee’s there amusin’ ’imself right now.”

  As we registered our appropriate silent surprise at this intelligence with perfectly predictable raisings of the eyebr
ows and shruggings of the shoulders, Field unceremoniously extracted a monocular, vulgarly known as a “spyglass,” from one of the capacious inner pockets of his greatcoat. “That is the ’Ampstead ’Ounds Ridin’ Club.” Field extended the monocular to its full length and handed it to Dickens. “’Ee’s the swell in the red coat an’ small black ridin’ ’at.”

  Dickens put the monocular to his eye and scanned the heath until he settled upon what I presumed to be the club in the clearing that Field had pointed out. “Yes, there he is!” Dickens exclaimed excitedly. After spying for long moments, Dickens, remembering himself, passed the monocular to me.

  As I put it to my eye, the trees of the heath seemed to leap right up to the end of my nose. With little difficulty, I found the clearing and the riding club, which Inspector Field had designated. It consisted of two white wooden buildings, one clearly a barn for horses, while the other was a more residential building with a porch and curtains that probably housed the clubrooms and dining areas. Appended to these buildings was a quantity of white fencing in the form of two horse-training rings and a chute into the forest that must have been the beginning and end of the club’s bridle path. Looking through the monocular, my eye moved along the fences until it came to rest upon a group of three men standing by a gate behind which two magnificent Arabians were being hot-walked in a training ring. Only one of the three men seemed dressed for riding; he was in the aforementioned red coat and his back was to our vantage point.

  “The one on the right in the red ridin’ coat”—Field bent toward us, pointing vaguely out over the heath—“that’s ’im.”

  Tall, thick in the shoulders and neck, he looked a powerful and dangerous man. Suddenly, as if he could feel someone spying upon him, he turned and seemed to look right up at me. Inadvertently, I ducked down in the carriage, afraid, I guess, that he had seen me, or had, at least, caught a glint of sunlight off the spyglass. Both Dickens and Field smiled at my quick ducking reflex. “He can’t see yew way hup here.” Rogers shook his head in disbelief.