The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  “’Ee’s down there doin’ sumpin’.” Field was grim, losing his patience, cultivating his mood for breaking down doors or striking out with his murderous knobbed stick. “We must git ta ’im. ’Is own evil is all we’ve got left.”

  “A stairway down, it must be here someplace.” Dickens seemed the only one capable of retaining his composure. Field was so angry and frustrated that I would not have been alarmed to see smoke coming out of his ears. I was as terrified as a schoolboy in the dark. Dickens, however, was already searching the kitchen for a hidden stair or a trapdoor. “Field, I need that light”—he shook the Inspector out of his steaming reverie, and we joined him in his search for Palmer’s secret stairway.

  If he is down there, somewhere, beneath this house, I thought, the pressure beginning to pulse once again through all of my terrified person, surely, by now, he knows we are here, has heard us whispering or marked our footfalls, and is lying in wait for us to descend into his trap.

  There was no secret stairwell in the kitchen or the front parlour. At the end of a short corridor was a rather spacious room, which served, it seemed, as a combination library, for its walls were lined with glass-fronted cabinets filled with books, and as a music room, for its centre was dominated by a small, upright spinet. Ironically, upon the piano sat a hand-painted miniature of Doctor William Palmer and his young wife, she now almost two fortnights dead. Under the small Persian rug upon which the spinet bench sat, we found the trapdoor. It pulled up to reveal a narrow stairway down into the depths beneath the house.

  There was a weak, flickering light, as might be given off from a small lantern or from a fire dying in a hearth. That weak light was dancing seductively in that cellar at the bottom of that concealed stair. Our three heads hung over that hole in the floor, staring down both fearful and curious. At length, however, the increased intensity of that sweet, acrid smell drove us back. My eyes were actually smarting from the burn of it.

  “Now I kin place it,” Field whispered, “the smell. It’s opium, but somethin’ else as well.”

  “Is he down there, do you think?” Dickens had become a damnable genius for verbalising that which was plaguing my mind.

  “Only one way ta find out.” Field resigned us to our fate as, with his heavy knobbed stick in one hand and his bull’s-eye in the other, he stepped through that trapdoor onto those stairs and led us down into that flickering dark.

  The cellar was divided into two low rooms, each equally perverse in its own way. The smaller of the two rooms, into which the narrow wooden stairway delivered us, was some sort of obscene museum or torture chamber or stage for flagellant scenarios. Gathered in a tight knot at the foot of the stair, we gaped as Field shined his bull’s-eye over the dirt and stone walls of this dungeon. On those walls were hung all manner of primitive weapons—South American blowpipes and hatchets, African spears, arrows, and slings—and medieval implements of torture—whips, chains, leather masks, gloves, iron manacles—and grotesque instruments for sexual perversion—huge indiarubber dildos, benches for sexual bondage. As the light crept over this eccentric collection, we catalogued it in stunned disbelief. That first room was a combination primitive armory, medieval torture chamber, and perverse sexual theatre of the sort that Lord Henry Ashbee and his colleagues of the Dionysian Circle might employ.*

  As Field’s timid light passed over those obscene walls, other senses awakened to the death lurking in that cellar. The heavy damp mustiness of the air diluted that sweet, acrid opium smell. The silver webs of spiders heavy with mummified sacks of death were strung up in corners, while torn cobwebs hung from the ceiling rafters to brush across our faces and stick in our hair as we traversed the room.

  The faint flickering light was coming from the far room through a low doorway upon which no door was hung. Even before we stooped through that low hole in the dividing wall we could see that the second room was a scientist’s laboratory. All the accoutrements—bottles of vile-looking liquids, edifices of glass tubing, dishes, jars, containers of odd shapes and sizes—of the experimenter in chemical concoctions were collected on two narrow tables lining the two walls visible through that low doorway. This laboratory room was also hung heavy in smoke, which gave the low light a deceptive golden hue, a romantic mellowness that belied the perverse squalor of those two cellar rooms.

  We passed through the low entranceway, and then all three of us stopped short in shock.

  I remember it as clearly as if it were only yesterday. My eyes ricocheted between two stunning features of that dim underground den. On the far wall of that cellar, on the rough mantle of the hearth in which a fire was guttering out, stood a large ornamental clock with its hands stopped straight up at midnight. Below and to the left of that stopped clock, the wide-open yet empty eyes of Doctor William Palmer stared up at us.

  It was a room in which everything seemed to have stopped, like the lives of those two murdered women with their faces frozen in a scream. At first, I (and the others, I am sure) thought that Palmer was dead. He was not moving. His eyes were open and vacant and staring. But it was only the opium. He was lying propped up on a pallet on the floor, one opium pipe cradled in the crook of his arm as tenderly as a babe, two others discarded on the ground next to his place of rest. Sitting as still as a buddha with his eyes wide and empty staring up and his skin as yellow as parchment in the waning firelight, he looked as if he were a character in a tableau in a wax museum. But he was not dead. When we entered through that low doorway, the movement caught his eye and he turned his head ever so slowly toward us. His mouth twisted slower still into a jagged smirk of glazed satisfaction. His eyes looked straight at us, then through us, as if he took us for something quite else, devils perhaps, stumbling out of some dark cavern to carry him off, or Sodomite revelers, descended into these secret rooms to join him in his pipes and in some unspeakable orgy of the flesh. He looked straight at us, but what he saw in his opium dream would only be the wildest speculation upon my part.

  He began to laugh grotesquely, then abruptly stopped. He drew deeply upon his opium pipe, but it was empty, burned away. All he puffed was insubstantial air. It troubled him, and he sighed pitifully.

  Field moved hungrily to an open drain in the middle of that laboratory room’s wooden floor. We followed. Water, an open sewer, could be heard moving sluggishly beneath that hole in the floor. Field went down upon one knee at the vent hole. He extracted a long shard of glass, as from a chemist’s jar, from a gap in the floorboard where the vent hole cut through.

  “’Ee ’as thrown sumpin’ out, broken a jar into this ’ole, I’ll wager.” Field carefully placed that shard of glass into a paper envelope and deposited it in one of the inner pockets of his greatcoat.

  When we turned back to Palmer, he was staring up at us with a stupefied grin upon his drugged face.

  Field stood over him. For a brief moment, as the doctor looked up at him with that death’s-head grin and Field glared down at him in anger and frustration, I felt that we might have to restrain our policeman friend from beating this drug-glazed object of his professional hate to death with the knob of his murderous stick.

  But Field did not raise his stick to Palmer. He began to speak to him in a harsh, quiet, barely controlled voice.

  “Yew killed ’em all, didn’t yew…?”

  “Yew murdered yer wife for the money an’ the others ta cover up the deed…”

  That glossy-eyed cadaver stared up at Inspector Field in wonderment.

  “Yew poisoned those two young women, din’t yew…?”

  Suddenly Palmer blinked. He shook his head as if trying to right himself, to snatch his muddled brain back from the grasp of the opium.

  “Yew killed yer own wife…” There was a cold anger in Field’s voice as he confronted this suddenly shaking object of his digust.*

  Palmer was struggling to his feet, but he only made it to his knees. With both hands he reached up to Field, imploring, bereft, begging for something, yet still not able to s
peak, still a captive of the opium. For a long moment, his hand outstretched in a gesture of supplication, he held Field’s eye.

  Abruptly, with a snap forward and back of his head upon his neck, Palmer seemed to right himself, reenter the reality of that cellar beneath his house, his private laboratory and opium den.

  “I loved her, you fool!” he growled at Field like a vicious cornered animal as he struggled to his feet. “I loved her”—he shook his head sadly, as if he were going to cry—“and she slept with other men…that Thompson fellow, my Rodrigo. He killed her, you fool. Rodrigo killed her because she still loved me. Rodrigo killed her…Rodrigo…Rodrigo…” and his voice trailed off as he slowly sank back down upon his pallet and floated back off into his opium dream.

  His head lolled, but his eyes popped back open and that sly, demented grin crept back across his face. He began to croon in a strange sort of Oriental singsong. He strung together mad phrases which seemed to be some sort of disconnected explanation and apologia for not being a better host:

  I must flee to my pipes, you see, you see?

  Flee, you see. Pipes, you see.

  When the rage must bite and the world must fight,

  When the horses race, when I hate my face,

  The pipes stop time and set me free,

  You see?

  I flee.

  We all flee, you see?

  You, me, she.

  To our pipes, you see.

  Then he stopped his mad song and for one terrible moment he became once again lucid. He stared straight up at Field and, in a voice of pure hate, level and vicious, stated the one truth that Field did not wish to face: “You plague me with her death, but no one will ever believe you.”

  It was a bravura performance, one of the most innovative and eccentric bereaved husband acts ever gotten up. It was worthy of the stage at Covent Garden or any other theatre in the West End. He protested his innocence with a mad, disconnected intensity. He had clearly smoked those three pipes of opium. Its seductive musk still hung in the air. Yet, his characterisation of a man in mourning for his murdered love was disciplined, unfaltering, confident, and flawless, worthy of a Garrick or a Macready. We all bore witness to his performance, an audience of three in his cellar theatre, but none of us believed it.

  “Yew killed ’em all!” Field repeated in that tight voice of controlled hate.

  But Palmer just stared up at him with that mad, cadaverous, blank-eyed stare. No, none of us believed Palmer’s act, his protestations of innocence, but there simply was nothing we could do. There were no clues or proofs left for us to find, no new paths toward understanding for us to take. Yet, in concert with Inspector Field, we all knew that Palmer had killed them all. That murky firelit cellar room went silent as Field glared down at Palmer in professional hate and Palmer replied with the empty smirk of the village idiot.

  With a sudden violent pivot on the toes of his boots, Inspector Field, without so much as a look back at that drugged lump on the floor, stalked out. Dickens followed, imploring in desperation, “Surely there is something more we can do.” But this was not one of his novels. He could not invent the evidence against Palmer out of the fertile play of his imagination. He could not create fresh characters to testify against Palmer, or bring already dead characters back to accuse him. Fact had proven itself much less manageable than fiction.

  As they left that laboratory room debating, I straggled after them. As Dickens and Field began to mount the narrow steps up out of that dungeon of bizarre weapons and dildos, I reached the empty doorway that separated the two cellar rooms and paused for a quick, last glance back at Doctor Palmer. Slumped on his pallet on the floor, ringed by his empty opium pipes, his eyes came up and, for a brief moment, met mine.

  He winked.

  Whether in madness or in mockery, I do not know, but he winked. It was certainly nothing that could be used at the Queen’s Bench. I did not even know how to interpret its meaning (if, indeed, it had any meaning). Why then did my mere reception of that wink make me feel like a co-conspirator, as if I had poisoned those women myself, as if I had turned so many lives to stone?

  We left Palmer there, chanting his opium songs, floating in his grand illusions, twirling out his great expectations.

  * * *

  *In Collins’s first secret journal, the Dionysian Circle was a defloration society of rich and noble rakes who kidnapped and menaced Dickens’s fifteen-year-old actress-lover, Ellen Ternan.

  *In Collins’s first memoir, in a private moment, Irish Meg confessed to Wilkie that Inspector Field’s wife had died of consumption in 1849, only one year before the events of that memoir, and that Field had, a number of times, hired her for sexual solace.

  “Bleek ’ouse Indeed!”

  March 15, 1852—early evening

  Bitter March evening. Wind cutting like a saber off the Thames. No sun seen for at least a week past. Implacable damp. Mildew creeping out of every mews, staining every cobblestone on every street in that pestilent city.

  Fog smothering all and every. Fog rolling off the river in a smoky flood. Fog obscuring everything farther than ten meters from any ill-advised traveller’s frost-pinched nose. Streetlamps adorned with misty haloes; their weak gaslight filtered through a coarse, yellow-grey, smoke-streaked blanket of fog.

  An evening as cruel and discouraging as this must, naturally, be the one upon which Dickens would insist that I dine in with him and then walk out into that slashing wind and stifling fog. It was an established ritual with Dickens. Upon the evening, no matter what the weather, that the first little green numbers of his newest novel hit the streets, Dickens had to walk out (this time with me in tow) to spy upon his sales. We had grown comfortable in the role of spies, and this was a somewhat easier assignment than those which in the near past Inspector Field had bestowed upon us. We were spying upon a small street kiosk of the circular yellow sort out of which a large potbellied seller of ballads and broadsheets with a voice that could lead lost ships to port was hawking the first number of Bleak House to the surprisingly steady flow of customers who had braced the wicked elements of the evening to satisfy their hunger for the newest Dickens offering. Indeed, the little green numbers were leaving that street stand faster than lawyers abandoning destitute clients. Business, in other words, was quite as brisk as the evening weather. Dickens was exhilarated. I think that Charles constantly needed the reconfirmation that his audience still loved and needed, not so much him, but the stories of his imagination. He loved to watch the ordinary people, his people, the ones he really lived his life for, flock to buy his words, affirm his view of their world. “It has always seemed miraculous to me, Wilkie,” he once confided, “that I write a chapter one day and it appears in print the next, or we meet a chap in the street of an evening and he is a full-blown character in one of my novels a fortnight later.”

  We were standing in the shadow of a wall of a formidable stone building, a bank, I believe, in the Strand with the fog swirling around us when Field suddenly materialised, like some menacing truth, out of the vapour. More than a month had passed since that frustrating day and night in pursuit of Doctor William Palmer’s secret life. For Dickens and I that had been the closing of the case which I had so whimsically, at its very inception, dubbed the Medusa Murders. For Inspector Field, however, as we would certainly learn in the course of our twenty-year association with that gentleman, no case was ever closed until he, and he alone, was satisfied that justice had been done. That, unarguably, was certainly not the reality of this case of the Medusa Murders. Oh, there had been an inquest, an investigation, even a court hearing upon the case to see if it should actually go to the dock. That hearing had taken place this very day.

  As we loitered there watching those little green leaflets of Dickens’s words being plucked from that commercial tree and carried off into the fog, Field cut his way out of that stifling grey blanket with befitting sharpness.

  “Aha! A private surveillance, eh?” Field greeted us with
a deep bellow. “Workin’ a case without yer detective colleague, are yew?” he joked. “Yer man Wills told me yew might be ’ere,” he explained, coming to a halt before us.

  “Not at all.” Dickens laughed and shook Field’s hand heartily, happy to see him. “Just checking sales, that is all.”

  “Sales o’ wot?” In the excitement of real murders and living characters by the coach-load, it had evidently slipped the detective’s mind that his colleague, Charles Dickens, still occasionally indulged himself in fictions and associations with the characters of his imagination.

  “The first number of Bleak House, my new novel.” Dickens beamed. Little stirred him more than turning one of his offspring loose upon the London streets.

  “Wot manner o’ title is Bleek ’Ouse?” Field followed the pointing of Dickens’s finger to the busy broadsheet kiosk. “Sounds a bit grim for an entertainment, yew asks me.”

  “But no one asked you, my friend,” Dickens jibed right back.

  “Well, they ought ta ’ave. Bleek ’Ouse indeed! Sounds like some Rats’ Castle claptrap, or a prison story, or a depressin’ mad’ouse tale.”

  “In a way”—Dickens smiled—“it is all of those, except all of England is the Rats’ Castle, the prison, the madhouse.”

  “But what sends you out looking for us on a horrible night like this?” I interrupted their literary conversation, for my teeth were chattering like castinets.

  “We lost Palmer at hearin’ today.” Field’s mood went from joking to somber in the flick of a racehorse’s tail. “’Ee got Jaggers o’ the Temple ta speak for ’im. Niver even ’ad a show ’is face at Queen’s Bench. Now thet ’ee’s gathered ’is lawyers ’round, we’re sunk.”

  “That is absurd!” Dickens bristled. “The man is a murderer.”

  “Not in the eyes o’ the magistrates.” Field seemed resigned to this defeat. “Jaggers ’ung it all on the Spaniard.”