The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  Young Jekyll, still basking in the attention Dickens had bestowed, seemed reluctant to abandon Charles to the farriers and liverymen going about their chores in the barn and ring.

  “How do you know Doctor Palmer?” Dickens asked cheerily.

  “And who is that Italian gentleman?” I chimed in.

  “Oh”—Jekyll was eager to accommodate—“for the last year I have been an assistant to Doctor Palmer’s chemical researches. He learned that my father taught me to ride at a young age and he brings me out here sometimes to ride with him. In fact, I think that is why he gave me my place working with him.”

  “And the other?” Dickens prompted.

  “Guiliano?” Jekyll chuckled. “He is a tout at Ascot, a bookmaker who toadies to his gentleman clients. He knows his horses, though.”

  “Is it not a rather cold time of year to be out here riding horses?” I asked. The late-afternoon wind had come up and sent a shiver straight through me.

  “Oh no, not at all”—Jekyll, still eager to please, seemed most innocent and forthcoming—“not for true horsemen. They ride to the hounds here on the heath right into December, and when Ascot and Epsom are not in session, private horsemen match race their horses across the heath.”

  “And wager heavily upon them, I’ll bet,” Dickens was thinking aloud again.

  “Oh, that they do.” Jekyll laughed. “The horsemen fancy themselves jockeys. They race, and then drink in the clubroom and lie about their heroics on the racecourse. Naturally, the money changes hands freely. Why, only this afternoon, a new member, an Irish gentleman, challenged Doctor Palmer to a race for money. They will set the course and do it some fine day soon, I’ll wager.”

  At that, both Dickens and myself could hardly suppress our laughter. We glanced quickly at each other in acknowledgement of the success of Tally Ho Thompson’s little game.

  “Palmer is a betting man then?” Dickens pressed.

  “He lives for it,” Jekyll confided.

  “He seems not overly mournful at the death of his wife,” Dickens remarked wryly.

  “Yes,” Jekyll answered quietly, suddenly subdued, beginning, I think, to wonder, “it would seem so. It is less than a fortnight since his wife’s terrible death.”

  “And who might this new club member he is going to race be?” I was just being mischievous for we both knew it was Thompson.

  “I do not really know much about him,” Jekyll was growing more measured and suspicious in his answers, but Dickens certainly showed no sign of caring, “an Irish lord visiting from Cork, I believe.”

  “Is that so?” Dickens reflected.

  I almost laughed aloud. Dickens frowned at my self-indulgence. Actor and stage manager that he was, I think he felt I was stepping out of character, and his damning look made it clear that such an actor’s gaffe would not be tolerated in one of his productions.

  “I know we have been very inquisitive about your colleague”—Dickens set out right away to allay young Jekyll’s suspicions—“but he seems such a singular fellow that he has truly captured my curiosity.” At that, Dickens moved in close to young Jekyll, quite personal, conspiratorial. “He seems an interesting psychological case, especially to me, a novelist. Gambling in the wake of his wife’s murder? Tell me, Jekyll…seriously…what do you think of Doctor Palmer?”

  The young man caught the spirit of Dickens’s seeming to confide in him. He thought a long moment before answering. “I think that he is a man who tends to excess,” Jekyll spoke slowly, ominously. “For that reason, he seems at times a bit unstable, almost as if he were two different persons.”

  “Well.” Dickens laughed and clapped young Jekyll lightly on the shoulder, “He probably would not appreciate our making so free with the workings of his excessive mind, now would he?” and Dickens winked at the young man by way of a broad hint. “Goodness Wilkie, that wind certainly has come up. I think we’ve got plenty of information from our friend Jekyll here about the workings of private riding clubs.” He beamed at our informant. “Shall we flee back into the warmth of the city?”

  Before I could even voice my assent, Dickens was shaking Jekyll’s hand heartily and beating his retreat toward our cab parked in the road at the front gate. We left Jekyll standing there alone by the ring, puzzled I am sure.

  Once in the cab with Sleepy Rob clucking to his business partner, I turned to Dickens with genuine amazement: “Good God, Charles, what a performance. If that does not flush him out, nothing will. I am surprised he stood for it.”

  “Perhaps we should hire tasters for our food and drink.” Dickens chuckled. “He was, indeed, scowling fit to kill.” Then more seriously, “A bit heavy-handed to be sure, Wilkie, but it was what Field asked us to do. I, too, am surprised at the man’s control. He is hiding something, I am sure of it.”

  I marvelled at Dickens’s understatement. The man had stalked off as if looking for a butcher’s knife with which to cut us up and bake us in a pie.

  At the top of the hill, with his exceedingly sharp hat pulled down over his exceedingly sharp ears against that exceedingly sharp winter wind, Inspector Field waited patiently for his report. Dickens gave it with all of the novelist’s expected embellishments. I cut in once to recount the particulars of Thompson’s elaborate masquerade, which, for some reason, truly tickled me.

  “Is this not dangerous?” Dickens asked as he finished his narrative. “Palmer could drive up that road and see us here.”

  “We will be signalled if ’ee leeves the club,” Field assured us. “I ’ave a man in there.” He was truly amazing. He seemed always one step ahead of the rest of the world. “Wot yer friend Jekyll told us squares with some o’ the incidentals my men ’ave gathered about Palmer.” Field was delighted. “’Ee’s our man, I know it!”

  “What incidentals?” Dickens pressed. On this case, unlike the last, the Ashbee affair, Inspector Field seemed constantly holding his cards closer to his vest and out of view of the rest of the table.

  “Since comin’ up ta London in ’forty-two, Palmer ’as gotten involved with a fast crowd. Gamblers, rakes, drug fanciers, the ’Ounds Club down there is a refuge for such sorts, the very rich and very loose. ’Ee wos usin “is wife’s money ta support this life. Killin’ ’er for the insurance would ’elp ’im carry it on. Seems ’ee loved ’is ’orses more than ’er. Yer Jekyll ’as put aw thet in stark for us.”

  “So what do we do now?” That fire of anticipation was back in Dickens’s eye, that excitement for nighttime adventure ringing in his voice.

  “Equally intrestin’ about yer little visit down there is Thompson’s game,” Field answered. “’Tis startin’ ta git dark. Might jus’ be a good time ta look in on our slippery highwayman friend. ’Ee ought ta be jus’ settlin’ in ta the cosy o’ ’is ’ideout, eh Rogers?”

  “Right, sir,” that worthy said, smirking, possessed of knowledge to which we hated amateurs were not privy.

  “Are yew gentlemen still on duty for Inspector Field?” Our master grinned archly, turning back to us.

  Dickens, answering for me, leapt eagerly to the invitation.

  “Then let us go.” Field grinned ominously. “I’ll wager they ’aven’t frequented a den this low in a while, eh Rogers?”

  * * *

  *Collins, in writing this memoir in 1870, must be misremembering here. “What larks” is a line delivered by Joe Gargery, the blacksmith in Great Expectations, written in 1860–61, more than eight years after the exchange that Collins is reporting here as having occurred in 1852. Dickens could not quote a character he had not yet created. This could be faulty memory or an embellishment on Collins’s part, or, “what larks” could possibly have been a favorite expression of Dickens’s regular volcabulary that didn’t appear in a novel until Great Expectations, but which was in common use by him long before.

  *Little could Collins know, writing in 1870, just how far this Dr. Henry Jekyll’s researches into the criminal mind actually had taken him. The world did not know the ma
cabre results of those researches until the story was published by Robert Louis Stevenson after the discovery of the Solicitor George Utterson’s secret journal following Dr. Jekyll’s mysterious disappearance in 1883. Stevenson hypothesized the reasons for that disappearance in that famous factual speculation upon the case titled The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).

  *Here, Collins is probably referring to the character Falkland in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) and the character Prince Manfred in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764).

  *This designation upon Palmer’s calling card means “Member Royal College of Surgeons.”

  *An empty-headed character in Dickens’s last completed novel prior to these events, David Copperfield (1849).

  The Spaniard’s Inn

  January 23, 1852—night

  While Jack Straw’s Castle at the top of Hampstead Heath was a respectable inn and public house, at the bottom of the heath, set back from the road opposite the Vale of Health and sheltered by an overhanging grove of trees, lurked a house of an entirely different colour. This was the Spaniard’s Inn. Named after an infamous pirate and highwayman of the seventeenth century whose Christian name had long since given way to his nationality, its sign, bearing the effigy of a grinning Spanish pirate, complete with a drooping mustache, an ominous eye-patch, and an ugly scimitar, hung askew, one of its chains having broken at the dark entrance to what seemed but another country cowpath. In the two intervening centuries up to 1852, the time of this memoir, the notorious reputation of the Spaniard’s Inn had not been raised one whit. It remained in wide renown as the refuge and playground of all manner of ruffians, cutthroats, and criminals. It was the country estate of the habitants of the Rats’ Castles of the city, a place to cool off and dig in and hole up when the heat of the Peelers got too intense. The Spaniard’s Inn was the sewer into which all of the scum of the city ultimately drained when it had nowhere else to go.

  Inspector Field had instructed Sleepy Rob to wait at the top of the hill so that we might have proper conveyance home when the evening’s adventure was over. Thus, the four of us, the two professional detectives and the two amateurs, descended into the heath-side woods in the Bow Street post chaise. At Field’s command, the driver reined in an appropriate distance from the Spaniard Inn’s sign. The January moon was well committed toward full and the usual fog had not yet shown its face, so we were able to observe the bulk and contours of the building from this distance. It was, indeed, a sullen, shadowy place. Set back from the road in a thick grove of ancient oaks and chestnut trees, it looked a moody, brooding, bleak house. A narrow, rutted carriage path drew a half-circle from the Heath Road to the inn’s hitching rail and front porch and then out again through the trees and back to the selfsame road. A cart, a carriage, a coach, or a horseman might enter from either side of the wood, which formed a barrier between the inn and the road, but not undetected. A sentry posted upon the porch of the inn commanded a clear view in both directions up the turnaround. Field advised us that such a sentry, usually smoking and drinking from a jug on the porch, was always set, and could signal to the inner occupants of the inn by merely knocking upon the shutter in a centuries-old cutter’s code.

  “We’re not goin’ ta surprise nobody ’ere tanight,” Field assured us. “As soon as we enter the lane, the word’ll be passed. Let’s jus’ ’ope they’re too drunk ta know ’oo we be right off.” Giving his directions to the driver, he turned back to us: “We’ll go in fast, yew two stay behind me. These’re not gentullmun we’re dealin’ with ’ere. These won’t stand on propriety, or ’esitate ta strike out if stirred.”

  He ended his directions with a knowing nod to Rogers and a tap on the box with his murderous, knobbed stick. At that, the driver snapped his reins and we turned into the dark tunnel of trees leading to the Spaniard’s Inn.

  It slumbered ghostly before us as we rumbled up through the overhanging foliage, its high slate roof broken by seven dilapidated gables. A long sprawling building of three storeys, the length of its front was belted with a pillared porch up three steps from the rutted lane through which we were careening. Low, broken-down stables extended into the woods from its backside like the useless legs of a cripple. The main building’s south end, out of which rose a high smoking chimney, was built of stone while the other half of the building, which looked of a more recent vintage (sometime in the previous one hundred years) was built of wood of a common clapboard design. On the porch, sitting on an ancient high-backed settle just to the side of the high double door, with a jug between his knees, sat a solitary man who gaped at us wide-eyed as we galloped up.

  Field, not waiting for the carriage to stop, leapt out, landed at a run, and charged up onto the porch. The startled man with the jug and a corncob pipe, whom I presume was the afore-described sentry, had evidently been surprised by our rapid approach. He was just beginning to knock on the shutter behind his settle when Field, with one swift blow, broke all of his knuckles under the knob of that murderous stick. The man howled in pain, his whiskey jug rolled all the way across the porch and down the steps, and he fell to his knees moaning.

  Field never paused to even consider the man’s agony, but bulled his way through the double doors into the public tap of the Spaniard’s Inn. He strode across that high-raftered room at double military march time straight to the tap with Dickens and me right behind. Charles was as startled, I am sure, at Field’s sudden speed and violence as was I. Serjeant Rogers, inexplicably, had disappeared. As we remaining three crossed the room, I remembered seeing, blurred in my excited vision, country folk, sitting at tables over pints of ale to our left and right, gaping in mute inquiry. We must have been quite an exotic sight: a burly bull of a man wielding an ugly knobbed stick followed by two well-dressed gentlemen wearing looks of startled apprehension.

  “Don’t touch it!” Field growled, raising his stick to a large hairy potbellied sloth of a barman, who was reaching for the rope of a cast-iron bell hanging on the wall over the tap. The bloated barman froze in mid-reach as Field vaulted over the bar and jabbed the knob of his stick deep into the man’s protruding belly. “Yer not tippin’ yer friends, yer not.” Field’s face was right up against the man’s grizzled jowls.

  Meanwhile, Dickens had turned, placing his back against the bar, to face the room (and me still stumbling across it). His instinctive intention, I am sure, was to protect Field’s back during the interrogation of the barman. Where in God’s name is Rogers? I thought. As I reached Dickens’s side, I, too, turned to measure the threat from the rest of the room. No one at the trestle tables along the walls showed any inclination toward moving upon us. These tapsters seemed simple country folk, small groups of men and women in floppy hats and coarse farming smocks come to the dim pub in the forest to drink off the fatigue of their day’s work. They gaped, their pints in their hands, as if we were some freaks from a travelling carnival come to invade their quiet haven. Four strapping bumpkins occupying a table in the chimney corner stared, but showed no sign of vaulting to their publican’s rescue.

  “Where is it?” Field prodded at the barman’s belly with the knob of his stick.

  “Where’s wot, guv?” the oaf tried to counterfeit guilelessness.

  “Don’t give me wot.” Field slapped him across the side of the head with that exceedingly sharp hat. “The cosy, man! Where’s the door ta cosy where the reg’lars o’ the ’ouse drink?”

  Field slapped him again with that exceedingly sharp hat and prodded him again with that murderous stick.

  Dickens and I gaped at the tapsters and they gawked at us. My head swivelled from them to Field to the curious bumpkins in the chimney corner and back to Field.

  “O’er there.” The barman pointed to a door under the steps which rose up to the rooms on the second floor. “O’er there and down ’tis,” he said, his voice surly. Field must not have liked the man’s tone because he snapped his stick up and tapped the man hard enough on the breastbone for his breath
to whoosh out and his hands to cross his heart as he doubled over.

  “Now,” Field instructed in a brutal Yorkshire schoolmaster’s voice, “yer goin’ta escort us down there with nary a sound, arn’cha lad,” and placing his hat back on his head, then grabbing the publican by the scruff of the neck with his free hand, he steered him toward the door under the stair. Dickens and I followed like leery cubs being led into a strange den.

  Above-ground, in the public tap, the Spaniard’s Inn looked a respectable-enough public house where one might order up a jugged hare or a steak-and-kidney pie to go with one’s pint of bitter on a night like this with the January wind howling dismally in the naked trees outside. Below-ground, however, the Spaniard’s Inn catered to a quite different clientele. Even before we started down into the darkness, I could sense the difference, the danger. Descending those cellar stairs, the very air, heavy with cigar and pipe smoke, closed upon our throats like a strangler’s hands. At the bottom of the stone steps, a dim corridor moved to our right toward flickering firelight. The pungent odours of fowl cooking, human sweat, and horses assailed our noses. Traversing that dusky corridor, we turned a short corner and blundered into the midst of the Spaniard’s underground tap.

  It was a low, heavy-beamed room, its wooden ceiling blackened by two hundred years of heath fires and pipe smoke. The ruddy glow of a well-stoked fire lit the room in a shimmering gold. The settles and tables were gathered for warmth around that glowing hearth in the chimney corner.

  The tapsters of this other barroom of the Spaniard’s Inn were quite a different gallery of rogues than had stared at us in the public room above. Around the tables, glowering into their pints, or reclinging on the settles sipping their hot gins, congregated the most grotesque band of cutthroats and their red-lipped whores that Dick Turpin ever suffered to ride the roads of England. As we turned the corner and entered right into their midst, I noted how heavily armed the men who immediately confronted us were, and how unarmed we were (Dickens and I, that is). When we turned the corner and disturbed the tranquillity of this den of thieves, the five men, sitting at the tables pulled up to the hearth, spontaneously leapt to their feet, and faced us down. Each wore a pistol in his belt and had a knife strapped to his leg. In the brief seconds upon our entering the room, these coves had measured us, decided we were the bulls, and reached for their weapons.