The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  It seems that Rogers, who with foresight had been dispatched by Field to guard the back of the inn, had heard, from his post below, the commotion emanating from the selfsame open casement out of which Thompson had escaped. Hearing the sounds of Thompson’s flight across the rooftop, he had been waiting at the bottom when Thompson swung himself down out of that handy chestnut tree. As Thompson paused in his flight to pull on his trousers, Rogers had run at him and cast his net, which he had taken to carrying folded small in a pocket of his greatcoat since having confiscated it from a drunken tar in a waterside pub some months before. The constables had been called, Rogers told us later, because that sailor had taken to amusing himself with netting whores and refusing to release them until he was allowed liberties with their persons.

  “Seems yew’ve netted a big ’un.” Field joked, all at Thompson’s expense. “We could ’ave it stuffed an ’ung on the wall o’ the Bow Street Station.”

  “And ye shall be fishers of men,” Dickens struck a biblical stance over the trussed-up Thompson.

  Not to be outdone, I taunted him as well: “Perhaps ’tis a mermaid’s gotten tangled in our nets?”

  “Hit’s Thompson, hit his.” Rogers was fair dancing with glee. “Han my net wrapped him hup like ha hobbled herring.”

  Thompson never said a word. I am sure that he was amused. He was such a good-natured fellow and treasured a joke every bit as much if not more than the next man. I am sure he was lying there all trussed up in that net with that maddening grin on his face already plotting his escape once liberated from this tangle. Inspector Field took no chances. Sending Rogers to enlist two of those strapping bumpkins from the public room, he had Thompson carried back into the Spaniard’s Inn, down a labyrinth of corridors on the first storey to a secluded cozy in the back of the house most probably used for gambling. With the door locked, the fire lit, the bumpkins dismissed, and Thompson unencumbered, we all sat down around a circular oaken table covered with a green felt to play out this hand, though, as he made abundantly clear right away, Field felt that he held all of the cards.

  “’Ow long ’ave yew known where I wos?” Thompson opened the colloquy.

  “Since day afore last,” Field answered readily, “when one o’ my constables watchin’ Palmer spotted yew. I figured yew’d be lookin’ for ’im.”

  “This is passin’ stoopid.” Thompson said it almost offhandedly as if they were discussing handkerchiefs and riding boots rather than murder and poison. “I ’aven’t done anythin’. I wants ta git Palmer jus’ like yew do.”

  “No need for yew ta be runnin’ away then, is there now? That was stoopid!” Field thumped his expressive forefinger upon the oaken table for emphasis. “I don’t want yew back in Newgate anyhow.”

  Thompson’s head snapped up and he looked Field full in the face as if trying to read the detective’s dark designs.

  Field grinned evilly back at him as if to say, Yew are my creature, an ’ must play out my ’and.

  In an instant, Tally Ho Thompson understood, regained his heedless equanimity. That maddening grin bloomed in his face and, with a tight little laugh, he thumped the table with the knuckles of his right hand as if to say, Go ahead, Fieldsy, shuffle the cards an’ deal me in.

  Those two, the detective and the highwayman, hunter and hunted, communicated more in a grin, a look, a thump on the table, than most men reveal in testimony under oath or interrogation under torture. They could read each other like clear writ texts. Their bargain struck, they proceeded to put their heads together and formulate a plan.

  * * *

  *“Jack Ketch” is the generic English term for the hangman.

  *The Wembley Whip, it seems, according to numerous accounts of his pugilistic victories and exhibitions in periodicals as diverse as The London Times (1846-54) and Captain Marryatt’s sporting stories in Punch, was a much more famous boxer than either Chelsea Smalls or the Tewksbury Duck (mentioned in Collins’s first memoir).

  Shoe Lane in the Snow

  January 25–28, 1852

  The best-laid plans sometimes become snowbound. The morning after our nocturnal adventure at the Spaniard’s Inn, the great snowstorm of ’fifty-two struck. It effectively imprisoned all of London and her environs for three days. One could move around only on foot, and only for short distances at that, due to the depth of the drifted snow and the rather extreme cold. London’s streets became like white canals, a snowbound Venice of the North, except that no snow gondolas seemed available for transporting people to and fro.

  Against my better judgement, on the second day of the city’s icy imprisonment, and leaving Irish Meg in our warm bed, I set out for the Wellington Street offices. For almost two days Meg had busied herself at convincing me (by the applications of her considerable charms and acrobatic talents) that she had gone to the Spaniard’s Inn without consulting me purely out of motives of friendship, and not at all out of boredom with me or our life, or urges to infidelity and longings for her old ways, or even desire for public house gin. Actually, I did not press her hard for explanations upon why she had gone there. It had seemed obvious enough. Scarlet Bess had asked Meg to accompany her there, and Meg had acquiesced. In the almost four months that Irish Meg and I had been sharing our living arrangements, I had come to realise what an aggressively independent woman she truly was. Life for her was a constant competition for control: of one’s own destiny, of the desires of others, of the knowledge she was constantly collecting from the books I procured for her and which she read voraciously. She developed various strategies by which she maintained her control. She had, doubtless, come to exert a powerful control over me and my habits.

  Nonetheless, snowstorm or no, and despite Meg’s inducements against, I felt compelled to visit Dickens, drawn to him (and whatever news of the case he might possess) like a gossip drawn into back-fence conversation with the other neighbourhood crones. Labouriously I traversed the snowbound streets between Soho and the Strand in order to look in upon Charles. I knew, in his restlessness, that he would be straining to escape this imprisonment by the weather. How right I was in my assumption!

  Dickens opened the office door like a shipwrecked sailor spying a full-masted ship bearing down upon his desert isle. “Wilkie, I am so glad that you have come.” He ushered me solicitously in out of the cold. “I have not heard from Field and I am about ready to call upon him in Bow Street.”

  He was alone there in the Household Words offices. Wills was snowbound in the suburbs, and Dickens had received word that Kate and the children were all snug at Great Malvern. He had decided not to chance the journey through the snowdrifts by coach to be with them. He told me that he wrote to her: “This shall all melt in a day or so, and we shall all sit down together to a nice shepherd’s pie.” How he expected to get his letter delivered, however, I had no idea.

  It was good that I had come. He was as nervous as a caged tiger. The writing of his new novel, titled that day, I think, Tom-All-Alone’s, was not a strong enough inducement to keep him at bay. After observing him for little more than an hour, I feared he was on the verge of rushing out into the streets and collaring some poor passerby. After accusing that unsuspecting innocent of engineering the Medusa Murders, he seemed fully capable, out of sheer restlessness, of hanging his victim from a lamppost. In truth, he was literally unable to sit at his desk longer than ten minutes at a time.

  I assured him that no one else was out in the city of London, that we were not missing out on any of the action of the case. Nonetheless, he would stand in the bay window looking out at the white wasteland of the city with the forward tilt of his body signalling how he longed to be out chasing after murderers and metaphors with his detective colleague. I managed to calm him down that day, but two more days passed before the storm truly abated and another day yet before I thought it sane to attempt to slog my way back to the Strand to look in upon him.

  The sun was out and the snow already beginning to melt as I stepped out into the Charing Cross Ro
ad for the walk into the West End. Coaches and hansom cabs were not yet able to negotiate the streets and highroads, but at the rate the snow was melting they would be splashing through the mud as soon as most of the water ran off into the river. Dickens, as harried as he had been two days before, again met me at the office door and, this time, would not allow me to convince him of the ill-advisedness of going out in the slush to Bow Street. He never even gave me time to remove my muffler and gloves before he too was greatcoated and top-hatted and we were setting off in quest of Inspector Field.

  Little did we know that at that very moment, as we were stepping out into the snow and slush, Inspector Field was gathering his greatcoat, placing his exceedingly sharp hat upon his exceedingly blunt head, taking up his murderous knobbed stick, and dispatching Serjeant Rogers to search us out and summon us back into the world of the detective. As we turned into Bow Street out of King’s Alley, we almost ran up against Serjeant Rogers trudging along with his head down muttering incoherently for the enlightenment of his boots. When he saw that it was both Dickens and me, together and right there, his face lit up as if he had just witnessed a Christian miracle. “Mister Dickens, Mister Collins, hi wos jus’ sent for ye.” He was ecstatic. “He wants ye ta come ta Shoe Lane. Somethin’s hup hat the doctor’s house.”

  “Palmer?” Dickens asked the obvious. “But his house is in Chelsea?”

  “No. T’other,” Rogers cryptically answered.

  “What? Not Palmer? What other?” Both Dickens and I were stumped.

  “Spaniard doctor name o’ Rodrigo.” Rogers, who had never met the aforementioned, dispensed the name like any other meaningless bit of information.

  “Aha!” Dickens looked at me and I nodded knowingly back. I must admit, however, that I hadn’t the slightest clue to what his “aha!” meant.

  “We’ll take the Strand, then Fleet Street, they’re clear.” Rogers waved for us to follow and, at Dickens’s prompting, briefed us upon the situation as we went.

  It seems a surveillance constable had followed Doctor Rodrigo Vasconcellas home from Bart’s to his third-storey rooms in Shoe Lane the evening before. Posted in a narrow mews across the street, the constable waited for the good doctor to turn off his gaslamps and retire. The Metropolitan Protectives have a defined set of procedures for surveillance and a constable cannot leave his post until he is sure his subject has retired for the night. This particular constable, watching Doctor Vasconcellas’s third-storey window, never reported in.

  “We sent relief to his post this mornin’”—Rogers seemed puzzled—“han the constable reports him that Doctor Rodrigo niver went hout han niver turned down his gas hall night.”

  “Why, what do you make of that?” Dickens asked the obvious.

  “Don’t make nothin’ hov hit,” Rogers rejoined, “but Hinspector thinks somethin’ his wrong hand worth lookin’ hinto.”

  “I should say so,” I said, as we tramped through the snow toward Shoe Lane.

  Doctor Vasconcellas’s rooms were located at the top of a high, gloomy box of a wooden tenement house. It was a sunny day and in the bright glare off the melting snow, we could not really tell from below whether or not the gaslamps were still lit in those rooms. Field’s constable popped out of his mews to greet us upon arrival, but reported absolutely no movement on the part of his subject.

  “Passin’ strange ’tis.” Field’s crook’d forefinger scratched at the side of his eye as he stood in the middle of that melting street looking up at that unresponsive window. “Let’s ’ave a look,” he decided, preparatory to vaulting up the icy stone steps and into the gloomy building. The rest of us, of course, followed like the dancing tail of a crazy kite. Field, Dickens, and Tally Ho Thompson had put their heads together and carefully laid their plans for trapping Doctor Palmer and solving the case of the Medusa Murders, but what happened next simply had not been accounted for in that plan.

  We climbed the wooden steps to the top of that dark house and found Doctor Vasconcellas’s door. Field knocked politely.

  No answer.

  Field knocked again, and when total silence continued his sole answer, that violent gleam sparkled in his eyes. I swear the man truly loved kicking in doors, and he was measuring this one in gleeful preparation.

  Stepping back only one step, Field raised his heavy boot and gave the door one sharp kick over the latch with his heel. The wood barely splintered, but the door sprang open as if mounted on the face of a Swiss cuckoo clock. It was a delicate little bit of boot surgery.

  Field stuck his head in the door, and then, stepping back and frantically extracting a clasp knife from one of the inner pockets of his capacious greatcoat, he sprang the blade and rushed into the dimly gaslit room with Rogers close behind.

  When Dickens and I reached the door, Field was up upon a chair cutting down the body, which dropped limply into Rogers’s waiting arms. He lowered it to the floor. It was Doctor Vasconcellas, staring up at us with wide eyes and a twisted look of agony frozen upon his face.

  Doctor Rodrigo’s Ill-Kept Secret

  January 28, 1852—late afternoon

  The hanged man’s lodgings were a jumble. Neither I nor Field nor any of the others was immediately able to determine whether that chaos of medical books, scientific journals, and blue books strewn thither and hither amongst dirty shirts and stockings and all manner of soiled apparel, boots, shoes, and eating utensils was simply the ordinary housekeeping arrangement of our Doctor Vasconcellas, or the result of a violent struggle. The bittersweet smell of opium smoke still hung in the air. The rope from whence Field had cut the dead man down had been looped over an exposed ceiling beam and secured to the leg of a heavy chest on the far side of the room. Beneath that ceiling beam had been pushed, cutting a swath through the clutter of the room, a heavy oaken desk. Field later speculated that Rodrigo had either climbed up or been dragged up upon that desk, gotten the noose placed around his neck and jumped or was pushed off. A long-throated clay pipe, its bowl stained with that black oily residue of opium, lay abandoned on the floor beside a low divan of Oriental design. The pipe’s bowl was cold, and thus Field was not readily able to determine if the man had smoked the opium just prior to taking his own life the night before or if this was but a discarded pipe from a previous session with the drug. A note in English on white writing paper rested beneath a flowered paperweight in the desk from which, it was speculated, the suicide jumped. That was the text of the poor dead man’s lodgings that Inspector Field was, I am sure, prepared to read.

  For the longest time, Field bent over the corpse looking hard into its empty eyes.

  The corpse stared back wide-eyed, that silent scream contorting its face.

  Field’s right hand ran over the rope burns upon the corpse’s neck. Their feel, evidently, caused him to scratch once, twice, speculatively, at the side of his eye.

  Straightening up from his kneeling position, Field moved to the pipe, felt its bowl, examined its ashes. Returning it to exactly where he had found it, he next moved to the suicide note upon the desk. It was printed in block letters, not written in script. It was also unsigned. Taking it up, Field read aloud to the rest of us.

  I KILLED HER. HE MOURNS HER DEATH, AND REJECTS MY LOVE. WITHOUT HIM, I CAN NOT LIVE.

  “My God!” Dickens exclaimed as Field finished reading. “He has committed suicide out of unrequited Sodomite love for Palmer. That is it. That is what it means, does it not?”

  “This is no suicide,” Field scoffed, handing the note over to Serjeant Rogers. “’Ee didn’t ’ang ’imself.”

  “What?” Now it was Dickens’s turn to be perplexed. As for me, I was so utterly confused by all of it that my head was spinning and I felt as if I needed to sit down.

  “Oh, ’ee ’ad plenty o’ reason ta commit suicide.” Field chuckled slyly at Dickens’s consternation.

  “But he did not commit suicide?” I expressed in my tone of voice both my skepticism at Field’s chosen stance and my support for Dickens, whom
Field’s surprising declaration had momentarily unsteadied.

  “No indeed, Mister Collins, ’ee did not.” I could sense Field smugly poking fun at my imperception.

  “Now just how do you know that?” I was quietly petulant, though trying my best to keep sarcasm out of my voice. Nothing seemed to bother Dickens. In fact, he seemed rather amused at this exchange between Field and me.

  “Yes, enlighten us please, Inspector Field,” Dickens chided him good-humouredly. “I can promise you that we shall prove a rapt audience for your instruction in the fine art of detectiving.”

  Field glanced at Dickens as if to say: Aha! So the gentlemen are ready to listen to the facts, are they? But he did not say it. Instead, he dwelt directly upon the ill-kept secrets of that text written in the signs there before us in Doctor Vasconcellas’s room.

  “One cannot speckalate as ta whether Doctor Rodrigo’s twisted love for Doctor Palmer wos ever answered,” Field began, “but one can speckalate that ’ee wos bein’ blackmailed a’cause o’ it.”

  “By whom?” Now Dickens was truly interested.

  “Probly by Palmer, ’oo, it seems, wos the object o’ that love. Per’aps by Dunn, ’oo ’ee may ’ave killed in order ta silence ’im, either consarnin’ the murder o’ the two wimmin or ’ee an’ Dunn’s sexual tendencies.”

  “What!” Again, it was Dickens’s turn to be taken utterly by surprise by Field’s pronouncement.

  “We searched Dunn’s room hin the cellar hov the theatre,” Serjeant Rogers took this opportunity both to explain and to gloat that he was possessed of information to which Dickens and I were not privy, “hand his trunk wos full o’ wimmin’s dresses.”

  “Both men were Sodomites, it seems,” Inspector Field took up the speculative narrative once again. “Perhaps both were bein’ blackmailed. In fact, if Palmer wos responsible for all this, they probly were bein’ blackmailed by ’im. ’At’s why Dunn lured Thompson inta the middle o’ the murder. ’At’s why Rodrigo in ’is cloak an ’ood played ’is ghostly game.”