The Detective and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  “Nothing is more inexplicable than the sudden death of a small child. This is my punishment. For Nell. For Paul. For my treatment of my father. For my other Dora, David’s Dora. Oh yes, God surely has a wickedly ironic sense! He unleashes this hound of hell to plague me for my exploitation of children. Dora’s death is a judgement on me and my creations.”

  As he constructed the plots of his novels, he was constructing the edifice of his own responsibility and guilt for the unfortunate child’s death. Lemon motioned me from the room. I left willingly. I prayed that Lemon would find the words to soothe our poor driven and tortured Dickens. For me, entering that room where those two shipwrecked souls kept their midnight vigil was like descending into some underground tomb.

  I was nodding, barely awake, in a chair in the foyer, when Dickens and Lemon came down the steps at seven in the morning. The sun was up and it was a glorious new day, yet Dickens looked like some aged debauchee. His face was haggard and twisted by the tension of his grief. His rich brown hair was thoroughly disheveled and his eyes were dim and empty.

  “Ah, Wilkie, my companion of my evening walks, I am glad that you are here.” His voice was sad but he seemed lucid and rational.

  I led Dickens into the small parlor and we sat down. Lemon excused himself to freshen up. One of the servants entered and informed Dickens that the morticians, Peyrouten and Polhemus, had been summoned. We were left alone. I was terrified. I knew not what to say.

  Dickens broke the awkward silence.

  “Death seems to be closing in all around me, Wilkie. Horrible! Everywhere I look there are dead eyes, and I can identify them all.”

  I thought for a moment that he was referring to the man that Field had fished out of the Thames two nights before, but he was referring to no particular corpse, no particular eyes. He was referring to all the ghosts who plagued his imagination.

  “I wish there were some way I could lessen the burden of your grief,” I leaned to him and whispered lamely.

  “It is better that you don’t start writing novels, Wilkie,” he stared wildly into my face. “Novels try to deal with reality and reality is a sick thing, a diseased bleak house where no one should be forced to live.”

  There was a clamour out in the street, and it drew his attention.

  “The reporters, Charles,” I prompted. “They’ve been out there all night.”

  He looked at me bewildered: “Why?”

  “Because you are news.”

  Panic gripped his countenance: “Wilkie, you must drive them away before Kate arrives. They will unsettle her.”

  I felt helpless in the face of his plea. For the briefest moment I considered getting my hands somehow on a gun and firing on those Grub Street vultures. Yet I knew that I had to tell him the truth.

  “There is only one way that they will be persuaded to retire.”

  His tired eyes looked at me uncomprehending.

  “They must have a statement from you. You are the reason they are here. You are the only one who can satisfy them. If you ask them to leave, they will go. They have been out there all night, waiting.”

  “For me?” he spoke the words as if he hadn’t slept in weeks.

  “For you.” The Inimitable, that cruel sarcastic phrase crossed my mind.

  Lemon returned. “What is it?” he asked me upon observing Dickens’s new agitation.

  Dickens’s eyes darted back and forth between the two of us. “I feel like a ship that has hit a rock,” he finally said, “stove in and at the mercy of the storm.” He stopped and gazed at us for long seconds. “You surely are the best of friends,” he finally said. “I shall never forget how you have sat up with me this night.”

  With that, he stepped into the foyer and moved to the door.

  “We must get rid of them before Kate arrives,” he turned and reiterated. With Lemon on one side and myself on the other, he walked slowly out to meet his voracious public.

  * * *

  *She probably died of what is now known as Reye’s Syndrome, a mysterious disease, possibly liver connected, which follows recovery from a virus or a chicken pox.

  “It Takes a Gentleman to Catch a Gentleman”

  April 31, 1851—late afternoon

  Two weeks after his youngest child was buried in Highgate Cemetery, Dickens returned to London. He had resided during that too brief time of mourning at the spa at Great Malvern where Kate was recuperating. I dined with Forster and Wills at the Garrick Club on the twenty-sixth of April. Dickens was, of course, our sole topic of conversation. Wills, myself and Sala had held the fort at Wellington Street. Forster had relayed instructions from Dickens concerning business at the magazine. As we sat at the table over brandy and cigars following dinner, Forster was uncharacteristically expansive in his description of Dickens’s state of mind.

  “He appears to be acting very inconsistently,” Forster harrumphed, “almost, I hesitate to say it, yet I know it will go no further, almost…unstable.”

  “Unstable?” I said, encouraging him to continue.

  “Yes, his moods fluctuate wildly. One moment he may be laughing and joking, yet a short time later he will suddenly become morose and distant. I spent the night in the guest quarters. All evening Charles was lively with the children, attentive to Kate, jocular with me. About ten I said goodnight and withdrew to my room on the second floor. Just prior to retiring, I looked out of my window at the moon and, to my surprise, observed Dickens setting out across the moors. His long striding gait is unmistakable. I inquired the next morning of the servants and found out that he walked out like that every night. ‘Long wild walks on the heath’ as one of the older serving people described it. Now doesn’t that seem unstable to you?”

  I could barely keep from laughing aloud. The evidence for Forster’s great concern about Dickens’s mental instability was the single act which Dickens undertook more consistently than any other (except, of course, his writing). On the contrary, his fierce walks across the Malvern moors were nothing more nor less than a sign of his return to his normal exercise of both the legs and the imagination. The city streets, the Malvern moors, the Thames at midnight—they were all nothing more than the landscape of his imagination which he needed to visit regularly.

  Forster did tell one story which alarmed me, because it echoed a guilty sentiment which Dickens had expressed during that long night of the child’s death watch. Forster described how Dickens came to him with a copy of a letter he had written in August of the previous year.

  “He read me one line of the letter,” Forster recalled, “and, when he was done, he laughed insanely for a long moment. ‘And you scoff when I tell you that I am psychic!’ he said.”

  “Well, what did the letter say?” I had to prod Forster.

  “The letter read: ‘I have still to kill Dora—I mean the Copperfields’ Dora—’” Forster intoned.

  “It was a novelist’s joke thrown off more than eight months ago.” I objected to Forster’s gravity. “Surely, he couldn’t believe that his own ill-considered words could have any meaning eight months later.”

  “He brought the letter to me, and, in a very distraught state, read me that one line aloud,” Forster insisted.

  “He is a man who believes in the power of words,” Wills said, entering the fray on Forster’s side.

  “It was a bad joke, nothing more,” I said, scoffing at their old-maid superstition. But things were connecting in my mind. On the night the child died, Dickens had paced the room expressing his own guilt and seeing Dora’s death as a punishment inflicted upon him by a literary God, who did not like the way he treated his characters. Indeed, maybe that was a sign of insanity, mixing up real people with fictional characters. If it was, however, then all of us—Dickens, Thackeray, even myself—belonged in Bedlam, rather than out walking the streets, sharpening our pens.

  Within four days of that concerned dinner, Dickens was back in London. The house in Devonshire Terrace held such painful recent memories that from the evening
of his return he took up permanent bachelor residence at the Household Words offices in Wellington Street. To my great surprise, when I entered the offices the next morning, he was sitting at his desk.

  “Wilkie,” he said, rising and shaking my hand enthusiastically, “you and Wills have kept the ship from sinking, held her steady while the Captain was indisposed.” Quite pleased with his sailing metaphor, he beamed and shook my hand some more. Yet, as the day went on, I could not help but observe the very inconsistency which Forster had described. He would work with great intensity for a time, but then he would simply stop and sit looking off into space. By the middle of the afternoon, I had come to the conclusion that Forster’s theories carried more weight than I had allotted them. Dickens was, indeed, not himself. He was a man struggling against the spectres haunting his mind. Something new was needed to distract him from this now restless, now lethargic state of mental anguish. As if by a miracle, that something walked in the door at precisely five o’clock on the afternoon of April thirty-first. To our surprise, it was none other than Inspector Field of Bow Street Station.

  “Mister Dickens, sir. And Mister Collins, sir.” Field stepped out of the stairwell. “Please forgive this sudden intrusion. Doubtless, I am the person you least expected to see disruptin’ the center of your lit’rary offices. Yet ’ere I am, and, believe it or not, I’m ’ere on business.” He punctuated his last assertion with a sharp tap of his demonstrative forefinger on Dickens’s desk.

  “Inspector Field, what a pleasant surprise,” Dickens was veritably beaming as he leapt up from his chair.

  I too rose and circumnavigated my desk to greet and shake hands with Field. It was only then that I noticed the everpresent Rogers lurking at the top of the stairwell.

  Field was substantially encouraged by the heartiness of Dickens’s greeting. He scratched the side of his mouth with his crook’d forefinger, thus summoning a sly grin of renewed conspiracy. Dickens quickly pulled two wooden chairs up between our two desks and all four of us took our seats in a rough circle. Inspector Field’s momentary grin of conspiracy was replaced by an intense gravity, out of which the personal condolences of the man, and of the whole force of the Metropolitan Protectives were tendered. Dickens accepted his condolences with a sad up-and-down nodding of the head, a ritual gesture I had already seen him perform a number of times. I was beginning to recognize it as a piece of stage business, which Dickens-the-actor had improvised and polished as a stock reaction to this particular scene.

  “You said that you’re here on business?” Dickens said, breaking the silence.

  “I am indeed.”

  “It couldn’t involve our mutual acquaintance, Lawyer Partlow, so recently encountered on the peaceful banks of the Thames, could it?”

  “It could indeed.” Field took up his coy game.

  How Field knew that Dickens had returned to London, I do not venture to guess. He seemed to know everything.

  “I’m intrigued. What is it?”

  “I want you and Mister Collins to become spies in my employ,” Field put it bluntly.

  “Spies?” The word had caught Dickens’s attention just as it had mine.

  “Yes, spies.”

  Dickens and I exchanged equally puzzled looks.

  “Upon whom do you propose we commit this act of spying?” I asked.

  “On whoever is available at The Player’s Club located at number thirty-six King Street in the West End,” Field replied in deadly seriousness.

  Dickens and I looked at each other in surprise.

  Dickens was, of course, an honorary member of The Player’s Club as he was of all the various London actors’ establishments, but he rarely went there, The Garrick Club being the regular meeting place of his particular theatrical circle. I had no doubts, however, that he could enter The Player’s Club at any time and be greeted with every courtesy of the house.

  “The Player’s Club? Why?” he asked, posing the natural question.

  “I need information concernin’ the identities of the four men in company with Solicitor Partlow the night ’ee was murdered. We are makin’ little progress on this partic’lar case. The man lived alone, ’ad no relatives. ’Is landlady says ’ee went out every evenin’, when not otherwise engaged, to dine at The Player’s Club. Yet, and ’ere’s the rub, ’ee rarely returned to ’is rooms before three or four in the mornin’. Player’s Club closes doors at eleven-thirty, says I. Landlady ’as no further explanation.”

  At this juncture of his narrative, Field pulled in on the reins and stopped for a short breather.

  “We ’ave traced ’is movements of that evenin’ to The Player’s Club where we ’ave been brought up rather short.”

  “Brought up short? How’s that?” Dickens glanced at me.

  “Blokes won’t talk to us,” Rogers admitted.

  “No one on the premises seems inclined to discuss the dead club member,” Field said, taking up the narrative with equanimity. “It is almost as if the ’elp at The Player’s Club ’olds some irrational fear of ’im. Or perhaps they ’ave been instructed not to give out information concernin’ any club member. We could, of course, get a writ from the Queen’s Bench and break in there and accost the members present concernin’ their dealin’s with Partlow and their whereabouts on the night that our dead friend went for ’is fatal swim, but we would probably not obtain much useful information, it almost always bein’ the case that gentlemen intensely dislike bein’ disturbed in the private environs of their club rooms.”

  “That certainly is the case,” Dickens agreed.

  “It ain’t like trampin’ into some Rats’ Castle and ’aulin’ out our man for questionin’,” Rogers interjected. “Gennelmen is a diff’rent problem.”

  “Indeed they are,” Inspector Field said. “Gentlemen require much more subtlety, discretion, and delicate persuasion in order to get ’em to peach on their fellow gentlemen. In other words, gentlemen, it takes a gentleman to catch a gentleman.”

  “Precisely.” Dickens’s eyes were sparkling.

  “Therefore, I concluded that if I just ’ad a friendly ear mixin’ with the unsuspectin’ members some busy club night, such as tonight, say, and if the conversation perchance turned to the gruesome death of Lawyer Partlow, that somethin’ perhaps might be learned. And then I said to myself…didn’t I Rogers?” (Rogers nodded emphatically) “…I said, our friend Mister Dickens ’as many connections in the theatre, was an acquaintance of the deceased, would be welcomed at The Player’s Club. And there you are.”

  “And there you are!” Rogers repeated for emphasis.

  “Well,” Field pressed our decision, “will you do it?”

  “Spies, Wilkie,” Dickens said excitedly, “what do you think of that?”

  “Well, really…”

  “Splendid! We’ll do it,” he replied to Field.

  Field immediately was up and shaking both of our hands enthusiastically. “Welcome to the Protectives, gentlemen,” he said with great relish.

  “We are yours, Inspector Field, but how are we to proceed? What are we to do?” Dickens inquired, turning to the more practical aspects of the undertaking.

  “We need to know where Partlow went, what ’ee did, in whose company ’ee did it. If you could go there, converse with the members, it would be quite ’elpful. Rogers.” He turned to his faithful shadow, who was rummaging in the pouch which he carried slung over his shoulder.

  “Yes sir,” Rogers answered, handing over a folded newspaper.

  Field immediately unfolded it to reveal the sensational headline: “PROMINENT WEST END SOLICITOR MURDERED.” It was a two-week-old Times.

  “You carry this,” Field directed Dickens, as if he were some playwright blocking out the movements of his actors. “You let it be known that you ’ave been out of the city an’ ’ave been catchin’ up on the news. You’ve been readin’ about Partlow’s murder. Terrible thing. That’s the tack. It is our ’ope that this ruse will loosen some gossip’s tongue. Who know
s, it may even flush our killer.” With that, Field turned to me. “And you, Mister Collins, are very important to this scheme. While Mister Dickens is entertainin’ ’is audience and tryin’ to draw ’em out, you remain in the background carefully observin’ the crowd, notin’ every reaction, eye peeled for any suspicious movement, ’urried flight or nervous tick.”

  “Spies indeed,” I scoffed. “What you want is the net of Hapheastus.”

  “Don’t know the gentleman,” Field’s face was deadly serious, “but if ’is net will catch us a murderer, tell ’im to bring it along.”

  “Your plan is excellent,” Dickens said, taking the newspaper. “I can’t wait to set it in motion.” He didn’t bother to ask me if I would accompany him. Like any bold knight, he simply took for granted that his faithful squire, his Sancho, would be at his side. Of course, he was right!

  All of the sadness, the loss of his power of concentration was gone from Dickens’s mien. He was animated, trembling to act. He could have been a character in one of his own novels. “It takes a gentleman to catch a gentleman,” Field had said, and Dickens was in the process of inventing a gentleman detective to work side by side with the professional detective.

  “Spies!”

  April 31, 1851—evening