The Detective and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  Within a few brief moments it was perfectly clear why Lord Ashbee chose to keep his library a secret. All the books collected there dwelt upon but one subject: ‘Lust’ in every conceivable perversion, in every possible locale, social class and human relationship. That library portrayed ‘Lust’ as the new Leviathan of our century, which would replace Hobbes’s ruling passion of self-interest with the more bestial urges of man’s sexuality.

  You must pardon my bluntness, dear reader. I simply cannot, due possibly to lack of invention, conceive of any more tactful, less brutish, manner to describe the contents of Lord Henry Ashbee’s secret library. Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman indeed! His books were the memoirs, both true and clearly fictitious, of Victorian rakes, sodomists, pederasts, flagellants, ravishers, and supposed gentlemen indulging in every possible sexual perversion known to man or beast alike. Those books—illustrated, hand-copied, privately printed, mass-produced, bound in every size, every folio variation, stiff of cover as well as soft—those books were all there, some yellowed with centuries of age, some as new as the Parliamentary Blue Books or the green monthly numbers of Dickens’s latest novel. There was no denying their existence, and yet, to my own utter amazement, I felt the impulse, the temptation, to deny them, to transform that infamous collection of books into something else, a collection about boats, or horses, or gentlemen’s fashion. Yet, I cannot transform this reality. It is a text which cannot be undermined.

  Like the outer library, the walls of this secret library were lined with shelves filled with books. But the books were not of uniform sizes bound in the standard gilt and leathers of our day, and did not form themselves into ordered symmetrical groups upon the shelves. No, these shelves were a chaos of sizes, shapes, colors, books stacked, leaned, upright, on their backs, on their sides, upside down, books coverless, spineless, books old, books brand new, books opulently bound, books tawdry in dog-eared disarray, books that were not even books, but only loose manuscript pages piled and strewn about like leaves. Other books lay in piles, some ten or fifteen volumes high, all about on the floor.

  The only furniture in the room was the large settee and deal lamp table, and a quite oversized writing desk commanding the center of the room, and surrounded by the piles of books on the floor. The wide expanse of desktop was strewn with bound volumes pressed open, and loose manuscript pages scribbled upon in what seemed a hurried, perhaps fevered, hand.

  Dickens and I moved immediately to the shelves, and silently studied the lascivious titles of the volumes strewn so negligently about.

  “Look at this,” Dickens pushed a volume at me. “My God, Wilkie, these hacks are stealing my characters for their dirty little novels.”

  The title of the book was The Amorous Adventures of Sir Mulberry Hawke.

  Other titles caught my eye as I scanned those shelves: Eveline: The Amorous Adventures of a Victorian Lady, Twemlow’s Fetishes, The Birch in the Boudoir, Sub-Umbra or Sport Among the She-Noodles, Lady Pokingham, The Sultan’s Pleasure Chamber, A Man with a Maid, A Season Amongst The Haycocks and La Rose d ’Amour or the Convent of Lust. The titles themselves were enough to bring a blush to the cheek of one perusing them.

  Glancing over, I noticed Dickens reading fixedly in one of those volumes, so I, too, procured one from an immediate shelf in order to comprehend more fully the subject matter of this provocative collection. The book which came to my hand was rather cynically titled They All Do It, and consisted of a narrative of the events of an amorous weekend at the country estate of His Scots Lordship, Sir James Dil-Dough. If you choose, though I do not advise it, you may read along with me a brief excerpt:

  The ladies were now also divested of everything, till the complete party were in a state of buff, excepting the pretty boots and stockings, which I always think look far sweeter than naked legs and feet.

  The interest centred in the engagement between Bertha and Charles, as the others were all anxious to see the working of his fine prick in her splendid cunt. He was in a very rampant state of anticipation, so she laid him at full length on his back on a soft springy sofa, then stretching across his legs she first bent down her head to kiss and lubricate the fine prick with her mouth, then placing herself right over him gradually sheathed his grand instrument within her longing cunt, pressing down upon him, with her lips glued to his, as she seemed to enjoy the sense of possessing it all. I motioned to her bottom with my finger, and Fanny, understanding my ideas, at once mounted up behind her mistress and brought the head of her well-cold-creamed dildoe to the charge against her brown-wrinkled bottom-hole, at the same time clasping her hands round Bertha, one hand feeling Charlie’s fine prick, whilst the fingers of her other were tickling the fine clitoris of our mistress of ceremonies. It was a delightful tableau, and it awfully excited us all when they at once plunged into a course of most delicious fucking.

  What a singular piece of writing, and what a singular use of language! I had never read a passage quite like that. Yet there it was in my hand; that scurrilous passage actually existed and there were hundreds, nay, thousands more collected there in that secret room. I returned that book to its shelf as if it were hot. Dickens, evidently possessing a greater tolerance than I for the debased use of language displayed in these books, was still reading with obvious interest. Inspector Field was not. In fact, he displayed no interest in the books whatsoever. He was prowling the room, moving the furniture, and turning things over as if they were rocks, and something might crawl out from beneath them.*

  Suddenly he dove to one knee on the rug, and plucked a ball of pinkish fluff from out of the thick pile. Reaching inside his coat with his other hand, he extracted from some inner pocket a similar rag of fabric pinned to a paper card. Rising to his feet, he moved quickly to the light. Dickens joined me in staring at Inspector Field.

  “She ’as been ’ere,” Field declared.

  “Miss Ternan? Are you certain?” Dickens asked excitedly.

  “’Er red dress lay on that chair in Paroissien’s room, and she sat on the couch in that same dress.” He held the two tiny pieces of fabric fluff triumphantly up before Dickens’s nose. “They’re a perfect match!”

  “I see,” Dickens answered with a thorough lack of enthusiasm. “You have matched whatever you have found here on this floor to that which you found on the chair in the dead man’s room, have you not?”

  “Indeed I ’ave. By George, you are learnin’, sir, to keep your eyes open and read the world. Wot a good detective you could be, sir.”

  Dickens and Field stood together, looking hard around the room for a long moment.

  “Well?” Field addressed Dickens as a mentor would his student.

  “The key to his and her whereabouts is in this room, if we can only find it and interpret it properly,” Dickens answered.

  “That’s it!” Field assented.

  “But where would he take the girl, and why, and for what purpose?” It was my voice suddenly come to life. “He was not involved in either of the murders. He does not need to protect himself.”

  “Or does he?” Dickens leapt upon my questions. “Is there yet some other secret hidden within this room in which both Ashbee and Miss Ternan are involved?”

  “Or, perhaps, not even ’idden,” Field said, joining in our wild speculations, “perhaps just sittin’ ’ere before us in plain sight.”

  Taking that cue, we joined Field in his prowling of the room. Dickens soon discovered a door, set two steps downward, in a dark back corner among the shelves. Field tried it once but it was locked from without, so he temporarily abandoned the effort with a shrug: “Could be ’is private entrance and exit. Could go to the basement. Could go anywhere.”

  We prowled along each row of shelves, and stepped over each pile of books upon the floor, but there seemed no order to their arrangement. Ultimately, it was only natural that we converge upon Ashbee’s writing desk. Spread out on its top were the pages, some piled neatly in an obvious order, others strewn about at random, of a handw
ritten manuscript.

  Atop one of the ordered piles was an almost blank leaf with the manuscript’s title scrawled across it: My Secret Life: Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman.

  Of a sudden I remembered what Ashbee had said earlier in the day, “I too am a writer, but what I write is very different from your work.” The title he had given us earlier was really only the subtitle of his magnum opus.

  “It is Ashbee’s manuscript,” Dickens informed Field. “I’ll wager it is all written in his own hand, because it is too private to trust to the prying eyes of a secretary. I will also wager that, when finished, it will deserve its place among the others of its type upon these shelves.”

  “’Ee is a writer of scurrilous books, then.” Field puzzled over it. “That could be a thing to wish kept ’idden.”

  “No,” Dickens disagreed, “being the writer of this text is not what he wishes to hide, but being the man who has lived this text, now that is a secret he could not well allow to be revealed.”

  Dickens gathered a handful of the loose leaves spread across the desk, and began to read. Inspector Field followed suit. Not wishing to seem unobservant, I did so as well.

  “Extraordinary,” Dickens exclaimed after finishing only a few pages. “Extraordinary,” he repeated a few more pages along. “It will never be published,” Dickens finally put it down after some ten minutes of feverish reading, “but the man can write, and write well. He almost makes his own perversion seem palatable. These pages are nothing more than detailed diaries of his own sexual exploits. It appears that our friend Ashbee is an obsessive rake with a twisted literary bent.”

  I remember afterwards how I inquired of Dickens what he meant by the repetition of that term “extraordinary” as he read Ashbee’s manuscript.

  “I said that?” he seemed surprised at my question.

  “Yes,” I assured him.

  “I could not stop reading. It was as if his narrative, his succession of sexual atrocities, drove me forward from one page to the next. As I read, I could not help but feel that the man behind those words, the man doing all of those things to those women whom he seduced or bought or simply forced, could well be me or you, Wilkie.”

  “The man is a pig!” Field pronounced, as the critical evaluation of his reading of the manuscript. “Tha’s all this tells us. We need some facts, not these fictions.”

  Inwardly, I had to chuckle at Field’s self-righteousness, given what Irish Meg had let slip about the Inspector’s own sexual proclivities. But he shall never see this, so my joke shall remain my own.

  We seemed at a temporary impasse as we stood around that large desk, fingering the loose pages of Ashbee’s scurrilous manuscript. Dickens, always the curious one, began to fiddle with a quaint mechanical contraption which sat upon the cluttered desk. This common species of machine is often displayed for sale in the ruder street fairs of Petticoat Lane or St. Giles Circus. It was a model of a young girl on a swing, her skirts raised, being rudely accosted by a quite erect bear standing on its hind legs. Dickens seemed bent on making it work, but the comical machine seemed to be broken. He wound it tightly, but it refused to perform. He attempted to pick it up for a closer examination, and found it anchored to the desktop. He was about to abandon his interest when, accidentally pressing upon the bear’s head, he was startled by the sudden swinging open of a concealed panel in the side of Ashbee’s desk. Indeed, that small door popped open so sharply that it administered a firm slap to the fronts of Dickens’s legs. That panel concealed a secret compartment. All Inspector Field could do was laugh, and shake his head at the continuous good fortune of Dickens, the amateur detective.

  Secreted within this hiding place were three diary-size books bound in green leather. Field pounced eagerly upon them. “Perhaps these are the facts we ’ave been lookin’ for.”

  The first and second of these volumes seemed nothing more than address books, listing names and places of residence. From a quick perusal of the first, the three of us decided that it was a listing of prominent procurers, bawds, whoremasters and houses of licentious entertainment. Many of the names and locations were familiar to Inspector Field, but he read with relish new names and addresses toward which his sharp hat and intimidating forefinger might point. What also surprised, however, was that this first book contained names of quite prominent London gentlemen, whom Dickens recognized right off.

  “Brother rakes?” Field speculated.

  The second small volume contained only the names and places of residence of women, more than two hundred, some only noted by first names, some carrying full names, some given full names plus titles or place of occupation or professional practice. Again, some very prominent and recognizable names were included therein. We all surmised the nature of this list; it could be none other than the ubiquitous Ashbee’s many conquests. Field displayed little interest in this listing, while Dickens chuckled rather merrily at some of the more prominent names. Later, he would remark that it was like reading Valmont’s account book in La Clos’s lascivious novel.

  The third miniature volume was a true diary, and it was this one which gained and held our attention. Each entry was a narrative description of a meeting of a group called the Dionysian Circle. Each entry was dated and included the names of each of the members in attendance. The number of participants varied from five or six to as many as fifteen gentlemen, and some very prominent gentlemen indeed, their places of occupation stretching from the Houses of Parliament to Lincoln’s Inn to the City to the richest estates in the suburbs of London. The purpose of their meetings was presented quite straightforwardly and graphically. Their society was an organization founded for the sole purpose of staging and participating in the most elaborate sexual orgies imaginable.

  “We must take these and study them,” Field had found his facts. “Every name, every place of residence ’ere, is a link to Ashbee and the girl’s whereabouts.”

  Dickens’s nose was buried in the third diary. “Extraordinary,” he muttered once again, “positively extraordinary!” It was unlike Charles. He was not given to flights of fulsome hyperbole. “Look at this!” He veritably leapt at us with his discovery. “Read it. It is the key.”

  Field took the book from Dickens and began reading where directed. “There,” Dickens said, “that is what they plan for Ellen.” In his excitement he forgot the formal mode of address he had previously used whenever he referred to Miss Ternan in conversation.

  Following a long description of the initiation of two supposedly virgin sisters into the rites of the Circle, and the orgy which expanded out of that brutal ceremony at the penultimate meeting, appeared this passage, the final entry in the diary:

  The Circle convened on the twenty-fifth day of March, 1851, at eight of the evening. Lord Edgeley had contrived to kidnap the young woman who had been discussed in our previous meeting and promptly convened the meeting of the Circle as he held her against her will in the basement of his city house near St. James Park. Twelve members accepted his invitation upon the assurance that she was but fifteen years of age, fresh from the country and exquisitely endowed with virgin charms as well. Full access to each of her different virginities was promised by the usual method of the drawing of lots. I was fortunate enough to draw her mouth and the number one. The girl was terrified but the continuous assaults upon her charms soon subdued her.

  What followed was a meticulous account of the group rape of this kidnap victim by the assembled membership of the Dionysian Circle. Dickens, however, quickly pointed to the final paragraph:

  The lot has fallen to me as the convener of the next meeting of the Circle. I have been instructed to procure the delicacies for the satisfaction of each of our various appetites and to appropriately plan and choreograph the entertainments of the evening. I have in mind a play, a play in which the members of the Circle are both audience and actors, a theatre of the lewd, with the actresses playing their roles and the male members of the Circle taking the stage as actors, a theatre of the real
where the purely physical drama is not simulated but is actually performed for an audience, where art meets the fever of the hidden life. I must choose the proper location for my stage. There must be room for the audience and abundant light so that the actors’ motions can be closely observed. The Notting Hill Gate estate would be the best but the Kensington house would also serve quite well as would the rented apartments in Soho if they are still available. Those details shall be attended to after my cast is obtained and I have written my script.

  With that prefiguration of the next meeting, the diary runs out.

  “The names of some of the most powerful men of the realm are mentioned in this book,” Inspector Field observed.

  “This is indeed a very exclusive and aristocratic circle of pleasure seekers, and the richness of their tastes in entertainment is matched only by the richness of their purses,” Dickens assented.

  “’Tis a delicate group to deal with,” Field seemed almost hesitant.

  “He means her to be the actress in his play. We must find her, before they do to her what they have done to all of these women before,” Dickens said, and slammed the small green leather book down on the desk. “Partlow, Paroissien, this Dionysian Circle of rakes, they seek women out, force them to play their parts, and when a woman refuses to follow the script, they bend her to their will. Ellen is innocent of that murder. That is clear to me. She was defending her honor, refusing to play their lewd part.”

  Field glanced quickly at me, a look of rather strained tolerance on his face.

  “Yes, we must find ’er,” Field finally assented, “but we must also be careful in ’ow we go about it. We are dealing with very powerful men. Our first charge must be to locate and place under twenty-four ’our watch each of Ashbee’s residences.”

  Inspector Field deposited into the inner recesses of his capacious greatcoat the three small diaries. That done, I fully expected the order to break off our little experiment in housebreaking and withdraw, but one other avenue yet remained to be explored.