The Detective and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  The creature dove down and grovelled in the gutter after it as if his head were still inside. As he readjusted it to its precarious lean atop his head, Dickens screamed at him without raising his voice.

  “You’ve told me nothing, you greedy wretch. Tell all or I’ll take back what I’ve already given. I’ll see that you lose your lowly place here. I’ll thrash you within an inch of your life. Tell me, for I know that you know. Where did they go?”

  Dickens’s voice was hard and relentless. It sounded like Inspector Field threatening some squirming felon in some forsaken cellar in some condemned Rats’ Castle in some depraved rookery in the lower depths of London’s worst neighbourhood.

  The man was visibly shaken by Dickens’s threats.

  “’Ee ordered ’is driver to Lady Godiva’s ’Ouse of Gentlemen’s Entertainments in Upper Grosvenor Street, Mayfair.”

  “Lady Godiva’s House of Gentlemen’s Entertainment”

  April 31, 1851—late evening

  We entered one of the hansom cabs queued up outside of The Player’s Club. Dickens directed the driver to deliver us to Wellington Street, Strand, the intersection closest both to the Household Words office and to my digs near St. Martin’s Lane. That was the corner where we bid each other goodnight at the conclusion of our late evening walks.

  As the hansom rolled slowly away, I sank back into the seat somewhat relieved that the intrigues of the evening had been survived. Dickens, however, sat restless, on the edge of the upholstered bench, like some watchful bird of prey. It was not yet ten o’clock, and the streets remained busily populated. Gentlemen with canes, smoking cigars, strolled the sidewalks. Women materialized out of dark doorways to either be immediately rebuffed or to engage in commercial conversations with the ambulating gentlemen. Carriages, cabs, handcarts, and pedestrians entered the left side of the window and were propelled out of the right. Something was percolating inside Dickens’s imagination.

  “Wilkie,” he said, darting his head at me, “Wilkie, are you game for more excitement tonight, for a new species of nocturnal adventure?”

  In my relaxed posture, it took me a moment to divine his intention.

  “Really Charles, you’re not thinking…”

  “Yes, I certainly am.”

  “This is not well-considered,” I protested. “We will be recognized.”

  “We have nothing to be ashamed of,” he snapped. “We are on a case.”

  “A case,” I sputtered. “A case!”

  Simultaneously we burst into subdued laughter.

  “Dickens and Collins of the Metropolitan Protectives, eh?” I tipped him a wink.

  “Young Wilkie,” he said, grinning mischievously, “if you are going to be a novelist, and if I am going to be a detective, we must pursue reality and experience like two hounds on the scent.”

  With that he pounded up on the roof of the hansom with the butt of his open palm, and the conveyance lurched to a sudden halt.

  “Turn around, and take us to Upper Grosvenor Street in Mayfair. Do you know the location of Lady Godiva’s House of Gentlemen’s Entertainments?” Dickens asked the question without the slightest hint of embarrassment.

  “Yassir. Knows the ’ouse wellsir,” came the hospitable answer.

  There was no fog, and the moon scudded amongst stringy clouds. The hansom clattered along the Hyde Park railings before lurching to the right into the narrow crowded streets of Mayfair. Ah, Mayfair, the gentleman’s playground. Little has changed in that district in the twenty years since I visited it with Dickens that night.

  Flower girls and trinket vendors arrayed in colored scarves and ribbons hawked their wares on the street corners. Victuallers with their pots and grilles cooked loudly. Beggars and streetsweepers and dancing boskers and street musicians and dog trainers were all busily vying for the attention of the strolling pedestrians. The houses were all large and high and, almost without exception, brightly lit and beckoning. Some houses promised the more exotic of entertainments by the use of bright gaslight behind striking blue or red or orange curtains, thus projecting a prurient glow. Legions of gentlemen strolled the streets. By far the most fully represented of the various commercial species were the prostitutes, all gaily scarved and boldly painted, and either cascading with snakelike curls, or saucily tressed in the twirling French style, all low-cut, creamy white-necked, and seductively postured. Gentlemen engaged them in conversation on the walkway, or drew them to the windows of their coaches with a mere tap of their walking sticks upon lamppost or window edge.

  “’Air’s Godiva’s casino over ’air,” the cabman hollered down over the side of the box as he reined in. Our cab stopped in front of a high mansion brightly lit in white, angelic light.

  “Here we are,” Dickens said with more than a trace of uncertainty.

  “Yes, aren’t we,” I answered with sarcasm. Yet, I must admit that I was excited. Fantasies of the illicit entertainments within Lady Godiva’s establishment had been slinking within my secret mind since the moment Dickens ordered our hansom to turn around.

  “Let’s get on with it,” Dickens motioned me to follow as he boldly struck out for the high iron gate to Lady Godiva’s impressive house.

  A black man of more than six and a half feet in height guarded the gateway entrance. He looked us both up and down for a long moment before opening the gate and inviting us to enter.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” he greeted us in a polite West Indian accent, which signified that we had qualified by social class to enter Lady Godiva’s notorious accommodations house, well known as one of the most opulent casinos and brothels in all of London. When our towering black Cerberus smiled, a diamond star inset in his white front tooth flashed.

  It was a gaming and drinking, as well as whoring, establishment, and its different functions were neatly compartmentalized. The largest room at the front was the casino. The long table with the wheel sunken in its center formed the hub while the lesser tables radiated from it. The casino seemed desultory and bored. A few players gathered around the central table. All seemed to be just passing time as they waited for some more engaging entertainment to begin. All the players were men, dressed in evening clothes. Two women, dressed opulently in floor length gowns and gleaming tastefully with jewels, circulated, serving drinks and lighting the gentlemen’s cigars. All but a few of the smaller tables were unoccupied. At one, a male employee of the house was dealing the French game chemin de fer out of a boot; at another, a drunken man of some sixty years, whom Dickens felt he recognized as a long standing M.P., was playing the Spanish game of Fan-Tan with a female dealer. As we passed, he suddenly lurched to his feet, threw his cards angrily down and cursed his luck with an epithet which sounded something like “Goreddammdevilsgorm.”

  Dickens smiled disarmingly as the suspected M.P., laden with a heavy cargo of drink, lugged into him heavily.

  “Owrr, beggrrpradden. Cmmumsy er me,” the man half-belched.

  “Quite all right. No harm done,” Dickens actually had caught the man and straightened him somewhat to arrest his falling down on the floor.

  The man stared at Dickens with that dumb, eternally grateful look of puppies being sold out of sacks in the street. To my surprise, Dickens did not immediately move out of range of the drunkard’s fiery breath. By all indications he was preparing to engage the sot in conversation.

  “I say, this is our first time here,” Dickens said, smiling gamely. “Could you give us some idea of the attractions of the house?”

  The man swayed with his eyes blinking. He squinted as if he wasn’t sure that Dickens was real.

  “Doan pray fanny ithher,” he pointed back at the woman sitting demurely at the now-vacant card table. “Britch arrays ’ins.”

  With that, our drunken friend staggered off to the bar. We found out later that he was one Sir Frederick Capalan, M.P. for a section of West Devon.

  “Excuse me, sir,” the woman Fan-Tan dealer said politely after Sir M.P. had reeled out of earshot.
“I could not help overhearing your inquiry, and I would be quite happy to describe the working of the house to you.”

  “Thank you. Please do,” Dickens answered. I think he was a bit surprised that a woman would speak up so boldly without being asked.

  “As I am certain you have observed, this is the casino room where all of the games of chance are offered. It is early yet.” She paused. “Later, after the gentlemen have partaken of the ladies of the house, this room will fill up, and play will be heavy and quite heated.”

  She next pointed past our friend the M.P. leaning against the bar, toward the large curved portal at the bottom of the spacious room: “Through that arched doorway is our amphitheatre, gentlemen. The entertainments will begin in just a few minutes. That is where the auctions are held. The upper two floors of the house are taken up completely by the girls’ private bedrooms. Might I suggest that you get some champagne at the bar and join the other gentlemen below the stage? You will not want to miss your chance to bid on the lady of your choice.”

  This whole description of the lurid act of buying human flesh for sexual purposes was communicated in a most demure and respectful style, as if she were directing us to some white-curtained parlor for the serving of high tea. Dickens tipped her a shilling, then made boldly for the bar. My imagination was suddenly glutted with images so perverse, that I could not help but hang back a bit until I had regained my equilibrium. What disoriented me was that, in the center of those perverse scenarios of my imagination, there moved a gentleman who greatly resembled myself.

  “Sssharrmpayerrn,” the M.P. from Devon growled at the barman. The sparkling white wine was served to him, and, at a silent gesture from Dickens, to us as well. Sir M.P. turned and squinted hard at us. “Harrmenntt arr met urr troo bleefrore,” he waved his champagne glass with such abandon, that when he put it to his lips he drank nothing but air. He immediately held the empty glass out to the attentive barman with a look of honest bewilderment on his face.

  The barman refilled his glass, and he downed it immediately in one long pull. His arm, like the mechanical appendage of some automaton at the great Crystal Palace Science Exhibit, came up for another refill. This time, however, he took only a dainty sip.

  “Gemmellmammellmum,” he said, there being some question whether that word would ever escape its grapple with his tongue, “troo the treeayturrr,” and he pointed drunkenly into the darkness through the Moorish portal, thus signifying the way to the theatre. He took another sip of champagne, turned unsteadily, then, swivelling the upper extremity of his besotted body back toward us, made a rather eloquent motion for us to follow. When he reached the arch of the portal, he stopped for another foray into his champagne glass. For some inexplicable reason, this long sip seemed to momentarily steady our Parliamentary guide. He actually became capable of addressing us with a near coherence: “Heere’s weere ye takes yeere pick,” he pointed into the darkness. “Shee arkshuns off the cunts.”

  Dickens looked at me with nervous amusement and we followed the M.P. in. The darkness, the closeness of the room, the proximity of a rather thick crowd of drinking, cigar-smoking gentlemen, made me momentarily uncomfortable. Dickens, however, was committing the feel, the smell, the sounds of that prurient sexual darkness to his novelist’s memory.

  We took a place close and just to the right of the small stage. On the stage, the gaslamps went slowly up, spreading a circle of jaundiced yellow light in front of a hanging scarlet curtain. The gentlemen quieted expectantly.

  I looked guiltily at Dickens. At that moment, I felt that our imaginations were in no manner up to the task of envisioning the reality of what would soon occur on that stage.

  Suddenly, our reticence was exploded by the striking up of a gay chord on a piano and the parting of the scarlet curtain. A large blonde woman, all paints around the eyes and heavy rouge on her cheeks, took center stage. Her scarlet gown failed miserably (and intentionally, I am sure) to enclose her voluminous breasts. She swept forward and burst into a doggerel song.

  The time has come, Derri Da, Derri Da, Derri Da,

  To buy a girl, Derri Da, Derri Derri Derri Da.

  A gay girl,

  A play girl,

  A fey girl, Derri Da, Derri Da.

  Buy a girl,

  For a toy,

  And she will not be coy,

  When she plays with your Derri Derri Derri Derri Da!

  She sang lustily, like a provincial music hall performer, and, tucking her breasts temporarily back into her gown, called for the auction to begin.

  “Who is she?” Dickens asked, tugging at the sleeve of a shadowed gentleman standing beside us in the darkness.

  The gentleman, with a mocking laugh, apprised us that the scarlet singer was the mistress of the house, Lady Godiva herself.

  The words of the novelist in eighteen seventy are not adequate to describe what next occurred on that stage. Yet, I am not really writing a novel. I am a clandestine Boswell for Dickens. This memoir is not meant to be published. It can’t be published now, because our readers would never believe it, and, besides, one doesn’t use real people in one’s novels. No one knows about these events, not even Forster who insists that only he shall write “the Inimitable’s” biography. Yet, as Dickens said, we must learn to deal with reality—and what was taking place on that stage was reality with a vengeance. I feel that I must somehow find the words to describe it. It is my fervent hope that if anyone reads this document, long after I am gone, that what follows will not prove overly offensive, though offensive, I am sure, to many it must ultimately be.

  The blonde woman pranced about the stage as, one by one, she brought forward her merchandise for sale. Displaying each object placed on the auction block, she called for bids and directed each successful purchaser to the cashier for the collecting of his evening’s prize.

  Each of the women, when summoned from behind the curtain, put on a brief display of their various charms and accomplishments. The stage was raised about three feet above the floor. As we stood below, looking up, our eyes were on a precise line just below the waist level of those women who in succession occupied the stage. As the auction progressed, we found ourselves looking into a succession of exposed and, in fact, proffered Mounts of Venus.

  The women were dressed either in some exotic costume, such as that of a French sailor, an Egyptian princess, an Amazon warrior, or in some seductive state of deshabille formed out of lascivious black or red stockings, lacy garter belts and diaphanous peignoirs. On stage, they proceeded slowly to discard, piece by piece, every article of their costumes until they stood entirely naked before us, except perhaps for some small trinket of jewelry.

  Thus unencumbered, these women proceeded to expose themselves by every imaginable contortion of their supple young bodies. They fully displayed, against a backdrop of their meticulously powdered white skins, their pink and brown secret aureoles and their richly forested nether labia. A description of the performance of one auction lot will suffice.

  She came in the costume of a French cabaret dancer, and when she kicked high and bent over, throwing her skirt up behind, it was revealed that she wore nothing beneath her voluminous petticoats. At commands from Mistress Godiva, she seductively unwrapped her skirt and, one by one, dropped her petticoats to a total of three until she stood naked from the waist. At the command of some gentleman’s voice, she unfastened her tightly laced corset thus freeing her breasts and leaving her standing totally naked before the company. Other voices from beneath the stage commanded her to expose herself in different ways. She took a wide stance and at each gutteral command from the dark pit displayed herself in a series of slow archings of her back and bendings of her hips. With her fingers she caressed herself on command and opened and closed the labia of her Mount of Venus. Turning and bending at the waist until her palms lay flat upon the boards of the stage, she exhibited her full derriere; placing her hands on her hips she spread its creamy globes upon orders from the voices in the darkness.<
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  We had known that rituals of this sort took place beneath the surface of our society, but, I am sure, neither of us considered how perverse and dehumanizing these sexual rituals could be. And yet, there was a fascination about the scene. Dickens stared directly ahead, unflinching, at the sub-human display unfolding on the stage. He later told me that it was more base than a slave auction he had once observed in Virginia.

  The sex auction continued. As the whores’ clothes fell with a gathering monotony, I thought of many things. These women were degraded marionettes, dancing on the strings of the perverse male imaginations gathered in the darkness. I remembered the murderess, Mrs. Manning, dancing on her string and hissing back at the crowd as the noose was tightened around her white neck. Each winning bid in this flesh auction bound each naked wretch in an evening’s net of submission. I remembered Field’s hand clamping Scarlet Bess’s fragile white wrist in its relentless grasp, and Irish Meg smiling nervously and reaching forth her glass for more gin. Scarlet Bess and Irish Meg, both whores, yet somehow still human. They still clung, perhaps hopelessly, to some small, fragile remnants of their womanhood, their humanity—but not these wretches. They were like the dead child I had glimpsed in horror only a fortnight before. They looked as if they were still alive, but they were dead inside. Their only existence was in the minds of these sick men who bought their bodies.

  Some men construct their fantasies of women in their imaginations, and then attempt to bring those fantasies to life in configurations of words. Through the ages (except in this age), sexuality and writing have been great allies. David’s songs, Sappho’s hymns, Boccaccio’s wry stories of men and women joined in joy, Cleland’s epic obscenities. Words can turn sex into magic. Sex, in its real state, as it was now appearing before us, was tortuous and artificial. I felt trapped within this “real life” text, which Dickens was composing as we pursued Inspector Field’s “real life” murder mystery. We had all become characters in some yet unwritten novel. I had voluntarily allowed Dickens to imprison me in his imaginary text. But, as those women struck their naked poses, I desired only to escape this prisonhouse of words within which Dickens had enclosed me. Reality is the stage upon which all men commit their crimes, but writing about reality is the prison where the novelist serves his sentence. I watched him in the yellow-tinged darkness. He could not take his eyes off of the women on the stage. What will he do with them, I wondered? Will he attempt to capture their degradation in words?