The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  Inspector Field, however, never gave them the opportunity to draw their pistols or unsheath their blades. Without the slightest hesitation upon entering that smoky warren, Field threw our hostage, the slow-witted fat publican, at the five cutthroats who had risen against us. With a mighty shove, Field launched him like a beer barrel into their midst causing all manner of confusion. That momentary distraction allowed Field to wade in and deal out the first heavy strokes with his vicious knobbed stick. He put two of these rogues out of action immediately with a sharp ringing knock to the nearest knee and a powerful upward cut of the knob of his stick directly under a second thug’s chin. The first man collapsed as if felled by an axe. The second flew head over heels backward into the midst of the three women toasting themselves in the chimney corner. With those two knocked to the grimy floor howling in pain, Field turned quickly to the others and waded in with his oak-knobbed equaliser.

  Dickens, hesitating not a moment, rushed to Field’s aid and closed with one of the ruffians in a hand-to-hand grapple. The cutthroat was thick and hairy and squat. When Dickens rushed upon him, he caught our “Inimitable” in a bear hug and attempted to squeeze the life out of him. It was then that I observed Dickens do an extremely ungentlemanly thing. Thrusting his knee sharply up between his antagonist’s legs, he drove it hard into the man’s most vulnerable appendages. The pain of it forced the man to unhand Dickens and doubled the oaf over, at which juncture Dickens stepped back and, taking careful aim, kicked the already staggered man full in the face. Wearing his heavy travelling boots, which he had deemed appropriate for our little daytrip to the country, Dickens’s kick catapulted its victim backward. The man recoiled as if slammed with a sledge and, landing flat on his back, lay quite still.

  I, too, attempted to wade in to fight at Field’s side, but before I could successfully enter the fray and honourably engage the declared male enemy, I was attacked from the flanks by two doughty camp followers. The viragos descended upon me like vengeful lionesses, teeth bared and claws out. The first went straight for my eyes. The other kicked out at my sexual quarter. I was lucky to evade their onslaught, though I later discovered that I sustained a red welt the length of my cheek from a claw extended for blinding. I slipped the slashing nails of the woman rushing upon me high, and clasped in a headlock the whore attempting to dismember me below. Just as I was wrestling this unmanning attacker under control, the other wench re-entered the fray by leaping upon my back, wrapping her legs around my waist, and proceeding to pummell me about the ears.

  In the meanwhile, on another front, Inspector Field was choking an additional large ruffian into unconsciousness. Having gotten somehow behind the man, Field had pressed the shaft of his stick against the man’s windpipe and was pulling back hard as the man’s knees and feet kicked out in an earthbound version of Jack Ketch’s dance.* Dickens was keeping the remaining cove busy by snapping the man’s head back once, twice, thrice, with lightning-quick jabs to the vicinity of the man’s nose. All was happening so fast that it formed a spinning tapestry of motion into which all of us were embroidered.

  But I had not time to dwell upon the other battles swirling around me. The two women, one on my back, one’s head locked under my right arm, were prodding and pounding me this way and that as if I were a bull being baited. The woman on my back was scoring heavily with her fists to my ears and forehead. The woman down below was clawing frantically at my thighs.

  Suddenly, my jockey flew off as if yanked from her saddle by a rope.

  “Leeve ’im be, yew drunken ’ore!” a strangely familiar voice screamed to my rear.

  Again miraculously, a small white hand grasped the hair of the clawing woman under my arm and dragged her away from me.

  “Leeve ’im be or I’ll tear yer eyes out, bitch!” that same commanding voice ordered from a dark corner of that swirling tapestry.

  It was Irish Meg’s voice. I knew it now that I had a moment’s respite from the battle. She gave this second woman a good push onto a settle by the hearth and growled “Stay!” as one would to an over-frisky house dog. Then she turned back to me and a huge laughing grin bloomed in her face. “’Ello, luv,” she said as she laughed, “yew niver were verry good with wimmin.”

  Field and Dickens were standing back to back in the centre of the room taking stock. Five men lay strewn about. One, knocked head over heels against the grimy wall by Field’s stick, was attempting to right himself, but his legs didn’t work. He was a handsome man, though there were some rather evident flaws in his beauty: most of his front teeth were missing, and one eye was swollen shut and turning blue due to its correspondence with the knob of Field’s stick. Another cutthroat was trying to rise from the hearthstones. He was uncommonly red in the face due to the blood streaming out of a cut in his forehead. The other three lay still upon the floor, but from a closer perusal of their faces could be described as every bit as ugly and unkempt as these others. One of them, incredibly thin with bulging eyes and mottled skin, looked like a snake who had just been trod upon. What none of them could be described as being or looking like was Tally Ho Thompson. He was not among this fallen phalanx of hairy, filthy, deformed, grotesque, toothless, earless, mindless, heavily armed men that Field’s stick had laid so low. The blokes’ women kept to the settles in the chimney corner, held at bay both by the inert condition of their beaus and the fierce gaze of Irish Meg standing with her hands upon her hips in the middle of the low room.

  “Meggy,” I exclaimed, “what on earth are you doing here?”

  “Ask Fieldsy,” she said and grinned. “’Ee’s the one wot pulls our strings.”

  Field was busy asking the toothless snake and the bloated sloth the whereabouts of Thompson.

  “Meggy, good God, you shouldn’t be here”—I found myself leaning to her and whispering in a secretive way, which even at the time I remember thinking to be utterly absurd. “It is dangerous. This is a terrible place.”

  “I’ve been in a lot worse.” She laughed at my whispered concern. “Yew remember I used ta live in places like this afore I became yer private ’ore.” Thank heavens she was still whispering when she said that. Then she found her regular hard, ironic voice: “Wot’s a swell like yew doin’ in a den like this?” she taunted.

  “Meggy,” I was still whispering, “I thought you were content to stay at home with me, off the streets, out of places like this.”

  “Yew see, luv, wimmin can do stoopid things out o’ friendship too. Can’t we now?”

  “Where is ’ee?” Inspector Field, growling like an enraged bulldog, scuttled our private colloquy. “Where is ’ee, dammit Meg?”

  I saw the old terror of Field pulse back into Meggy’s eyes.

  “Upstairs. In a room. ’Ee an’ Bess are upstairs,” she stammered. Field exerted this strange hold over her, a frightening control that I knew I could never gain nor would ever wish to.

  “Show us,” Field ordered.

  Despite her terror at the power he held over her, Meg spoke up to him: “This an’t a good time ta be disturbin’ ’em,” she stalled.

  “Not a good time!” Unable to resist, I leaned in to her and murmured under my breath in hopes that neither Field nor Dickens could hear, but knowing that they probably would. “It is not as if anyone picks good times to disturb us, now is it?”

  Meg couldn’t help but smile. Dickens seemed amused. Field just stared. I realised that I had revealed much more of our intimacy than I had intended.

  In a softer voice, almost cajoling, Field lunged once more at his main concern: “Where is ’ee, Meggy? Tell me or I’ll ’ave ta beat it out o’ one o’ these poor coves. I ’ave ta talk ta ’im. Show me where.”

  Meg acquiesced.

  We locked that band of ruffians into that cellar den. Who knows, they probably simply returned to their drinking and whoring and the nursing of their Field-inflicted bruises.

  In a line behind Irish Meg, we ascended to the public tap and then climbed the steps farther to the top of t
he house.

  Meg stopped as we reached the top of the stairs. “’Ee’s up ’ere, in one o’ these. I don’t know which,” and I sensed that for some reason she was still stalling.

  Once again, following Field’s reckless lead, Dickens and I found ourselves at the head of yet another dim corridor ready to plunge once again into heaven knows what unforeseen dangers. I knew that Field must, and Dickens, as always, certainly would, plunge ahead into this new challenge and adventure. I, however, was not so eager. “How did you know that Thompson would be here?” I now was stalling, and Field knew it. It irritated him.

  “We’ve ’ad Meggy an’ Bess under watch ever since ’ee ’ooked it the night Dunn died,” Field hissed. “For Gawd’s sake, man, be quiet.”

  He moved stealthily to the first door on the dim corridor and listened. The door was badly hung, crooked on its frame. No light seeped from beneath it, but muffled indeterminate sounds did. Out of another of the numberless inner pockets of his capacious greatcoat Field produced a bull’s-eye. Stepping back away from the door so as to shield the light, he struck a lucifer and lit the lamp.

  “Dickens, Collins, follow me in quick. Meg, pull fast the door behind us so the sound don’t carry,” he ordered in a whisper.

  Moving back to the threshold, he tried the outer latch. It gave to his touch. Pushing silently and slowly on the door, he found it offered no resistance, was not barred. Those guttural sounds from the darkness within continued unabated. With a sudden move, Field sprung through the door, uncovering his bull’s-eye to illuminate the room. Dickens and I followed on his heels, pulled along by Field’s blind confidence in his own powers. As soon as all three of us cleared the threshold, the door swung sharply shut behind. Meg had done her part.

  What we had broken in upon was startling, grotesque, comic, and indeed, eye-catching. It was truly fuel for the voyeur who lurks within every novelist. The room was small and dominated by a curtainless canopy bed in its centre. That bed, when Field shined his bull’s-eye upon it, looked to be occupied by a huge writhing octopus. That many-tentacled monster struggling in the dark turned out to be two naked whores and a starkers red-bearded ruffian having their ways with one another all at once. The blonde who was riding the face of the red-bearded man on his back on the bed looked up into the bull’s-eye and shouted “Wot the fock his this!” in surprise. For some comic reason, she reminded me of twisted Phil Moody’s foul-mouthed parrot. The red-haired whore riding his hips—her curls cascading around her face and streaming down her back, then flaming up in the bull’s-eye’s light like those of a malevolent Medusa—simply stared uncomprehendingly and quickened the pace of her ride to the finish. The moaning sounds we had heard from outside that ill-hung door were coming from deep within her expressive chest. In the harsh light of the bull’s-eye, the women’s breasts moved voluptuously like dunes shimmering in a Mediterranean sun.

  Plunging us into darkness once again by thrusting the bull’s-eye under his coat, Field backed up quickly toward the door, extending his arms to his sides and thus pushing Dickens and myself forcefully in his path. He made no apology to that six-armed, six-legged octopus as we fled. He only muttered “Damn!” in the hallway once the door was again closed behind us. To our knowledge, those three indulging themselves acrobatically in that first room barely noticed our intrusion and simply went on about their romantic business.

  “Wot?” Meg queried when we backed out.

  “Wrong room, uh, very confused, uh, tangled up in there,” Dickens stammered. Field was already moving on burglar’s feet down the corridor to the next waiting door.

  Candlelight flickered out from beneath this door, accompanied by a familiar splashing sound. Not hesitating, not even considering a knock, Field flung the door open and confronted a fat burgher, or perhaps schoolmaster, sitting in the middle of the room on a chamberpot. A body formed a bulbous lump beneath the comforters of the bed, but did not poke its head out when we entered. This was turning into one of those comical nighttime misadventures out of Mister Fielding’s Joseph Andrews or Charles’s own Pickwick Papers.

  Field pulled the door shut in frustration and glared at Meggy as if to say: Yew know where ’ee bloody is, don’t yew? Why must we go through all o’ this clumsy ’ouse-breakin’?

  Meggy set her lips and said not a word.

  Never one to give up, more stubborn than a Spanish Inquisitor, Field stalked in disgust to the next closed door. He put his ear to the wood. Neither light nor sound emanated from the room. His bull’s-eye at the ready, Field tried the door. It did not give. Just the slightest ripple of a mad glee washed across Field’s face and suddenly I knew exactly what he was going to do. I think, perhaps, that he enjoyed breaking down doors and charging into the unknown more than all of the other, less forceful, more intellectual aspects of his profession. He stepped back three steps and hit the door running with his shoulder. He splintered it around the latch where the bar, undoubtedly, was in place on the inside. Stepping back once more, he kicked it in with the heavy heel of his boot. It took two more small kicks to clear the splintered debris from the doorway so that we could enter the darkened room.

  Needless to say, all this thrashing around certainly had alerted anyone who was inside that room (or the whole inn, for that matter) to our intrusive presence. When Inspector Field shined his bull’s-eye through that splintered portal, Scarlet Bess was sitting up stark naked in the bed like a hapless doe caught in the shine of a poacher’s lantern, and Thompson, also as starkers as the day he was born to be hanged, was on his bare feet in the middle of the room pulling on his shirt and reaching for his breeches.

  “Thompson! ’Alt!” Field shouted, shining the light on our highwayman’s struggle to enter his clothes.

  Field’s order actually gave Tally Ho Thompson pause. He straightened, turned to us (still quite bare from the waist down—Meg told me later that she got more than a glimpse of the scene and that she fully understood why Scarlet Bess and all the others were so drawn to that rogue), and grinned his maddening grin right into the harsh light of Field’s bull’s-eye. Then, without hesitating for as much as a parting salute, his breeches in his hand, he dove out of the open window into the darkness below.

  Scarlet Bess screamed.

  Dickens stared, aghast.

  Field rushed to the window.

  “My God, he has committed suicide!” I exclaimed.

  That open window was, after all, three storeys above the Caen Wood. It was only natural on my part to assume that he had fallen to his death. The more I think about it in retrospect, however, the sight of that white arse disappearing out of that open window strongly reminds me of one of Mister Hogarth’s comical etchings from Marriage á la Mode: Cuckolded Husband Surprising His Wife and Her Lover Who Is Forced to Flee Alfresco.

  “Roof is flat outside ’ere,” Field, whose head and trunk were half out the window, shouted back over his shoulder. “’Ee’s ’ooked it inta a tree.”

  None of us were immediately able to divine what that meant, but before we could bother Inspector Field for an interpretation, he was through the window and scrambling along the roof shouting something unintelligible into the pit of forest darkness below.

  Dickens, of course, without the slightest hesitation—in all of our years together I never figured out whether Charles was just naturally intrepid or utterly foolhardy—climbed right through the window behind Field and negotiated the roofline to the edge where Field stood peering into the moonlit abyss. I had given up trying to keep up with the two of them. They never thought before they leapt. They never harboured the least doubt about their capabilities. In other words, whether novelist or detective, they were both daft.

  When I caught up, they were both peering down into the skeletal tangle of branches of a venerable chestnut tree all messy with frozen hanging Spanish moss. It seems, Field filled us in later, that Thompson had run across the roof and launched himself into the web of branches of this tree, by which lattice he had descended to the gr
ound and, we presumed, made good his escape. It was a risky business for sure, but Field did not seem the least surprised by Thompson’s acrobatic ingenuity. “Damn, the man’s a marvel.” Field laughed. “Come on,” he commanded us all. We followed him at a run back through the window, past the more modest, though still bedded, Scarlet Bess, through the corridor into which at the clangour all the occupants of the other rooms in various states of deshabille had emptied, down the stairs, and out into the stableyard of The Spaniard’s Inn. That is where the next surprise of an evening replete with surprises awaited.

  Rounding the south corner of the inn from the stable-yard where the forest virtually runs right up against the side of the building, a comic tableau spread out before us in the filtered moonlight beneath an ancient chestnut tree.

  Dancing gleefully round a trussed-up bundle on the ground in a pugilistic imitation of the Wembley Whip* was Serjeant Rogers. The bundle, it turned out, was Tally Ho Thompson, inextricably tangled in a cord net of the Sandwich Islands fishing sort.

  “Hit worked perfect,” Rogers gushed to Field as we came up to him. “Hevry Constable should hev huone.”

  “I see. Good work, Rogers.” Field clapped him on the shoulder. “I see our sprightly friend ’asn’t ’ad the opportunity ta put ’is pants on yet.” Field chuckled. “All tangled up in yerself, are ye?” he taunted Tally Ho Thompson, who had given up his struggle with Rogers’s net and lay there on the ground like a piece of cargo waiting to be lowered into the hold of a ship.