The Detective and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  Field moved quickly across the secret library to the door in the back corner. “We must ’ave you open, we must,” he muttered. With that he reached into the mysterious recesses of his magical greatcoat and extracted a shiny object which resembled a teaspoon with the exception that half of its bowl was cut away and the remaining edge was triply notched. Inserting this into the keyhole of the locked door, he turned it slowly backward and forth until, with a tinny snap, the spring gave and the final secret of Lord Henry Ashbee’s house opened unto us. Field gave the door one small push with his massive forefinger and it swung silently open on well-oiled hinges to reveal…a pit of darkness.

  What that pit of darkness turned out to be was an extremely narrow stairway descending into the bowels of Ashbee’s house. We needed Rogers and his trusty bull’s-eye, but Inspector Field chose not to summon him. Instead, he made for the desk, and pulled three candles and a box of Lucifers out of a small side drawer. “Saw ’em when I searched the desk,” he explained. “Wondered why one drawer was filled with candles.”

  We each in turn lit a candle, and, with Field in the lead, began our descent. As I took my first timorous step down into that dark stairwell behind the fearless Inspector and Dickens, my hand was shaking so badly that the light on the walls fluttered and flapped like public school boys at their morning exercises.

  The stairway led downward beneath the house exactly twenty-two steps. We descended slowly, alert for man-traps which may have been rigged for intruders. At the bottom opened outwards an underground passageway, floored in stone with walls and ceiling of packed dirt buttressed by thick beams, rocks and heavy wooden planks. There was moisture on the rocks of the side walls, but the stone floor was dry. The tunnel appeared rather well engineered. It was a narrow passage, and barely high enough for a man to traverse without bending. Dickens had to stoop the whole way. We proceeded with our candles fluttering ever so slightly in the soft underground air currents.

  The tunnel led from the house, beneath the back garden to the carriage house, a rather spacious (since Lord Ashbee had three coaches of different sizes and shapes) outbuilding which opened onto a tree-lined carriage path. A narrow stairway ascended to this carriage house. The underground passageway, however, continued on. When we reached this juncture, Field decided to ascend the steps, and inspect the carriage house.

  It was an expansive functional building. Completely open within, its four roof support pillars effectively partitioned off the three carriage stalls (the stables were immediately adjacent). As we emerged from the stairwell, we first, before passing on to the open gravel carriage floor, were obliged to pass through the harness room which exuded a heavy musk of leather, saddle soap and neat’s-foot oil. Passing through that spider’s web of hanging reins, drying tack and harness of varying sizes and functions, we emerged on the carriage house floor. A racy black phaeton crouched in the area against the right wall. To our left, a more sedate private hansom sat patiently, an intimate closed carriage suitable for quiet evening rides through the suburban parks. The widest of the three stalls, in the center, was empty. Inspector Field went to one knee to examine the ruts in the gravel of this empty berth.

  “A large and ’eavy coach rested ’ere,” Field decided. “When it was pulled out, it was much ’eavier still. We are lookin’ for a Brighton stage, I think, drawn by four ’orses, a vehicle suitable for long journeys.

  “They departed from here then?” Dickens asked.

  “So it seems,” Field answered. “Shut up so that no one could observe.”

  “It was she, the Ternan girl, he was hiding,” Dickens’s voice was grim with the certainty of it.

  Field nodded in agreement. His forefinger flicked at the side of his eye.

  “Nothing else ’ere,” he finally declared. “We must follow that tunnel to its end.”

  With that he turned decisively, marched to the head of the stairwell, Dickens and myself in close pursuit, and paused to relight his candle, before descending once again into the darkness.

  The underground passage continued further to a terminus in another flight of narrow stairs. The door at the top of the steps contained an elaborate hinged peek-hole. The door was unlocked and gave entrance to a circular room (upon stepping outside through the building’s only door we found that it was a shuttered gazebo set in the midst of a heavily wooded, totally secluded forest glade). The room was furnished with rounded couches which fit precisely the contours of the walls, small tables to hold refreshments, and a large circular bed precisely in its center.

  “A place for secret sport,” Field speculated, glancing at Dickens.

  “The bed is almost like a stage,” Dickens rasped, “a place for performances to be viewed by an audience seated all around.”

  “This special room, the underground passageway, it is a place specially built for arrivin’ and leavin’ without bein’ seen. Ashbee ’eld ’is more exotic affairs in this room,” Inspector Field ruminated aloud. “Milord certainly goes to great lengths to keep ’is peculiar lifestyle secret, don’t ’ee?” Field finished with a cynical chuckle that said ’is secrets won’t be secret for long if I’ve got any say in it.

  “He’s an inhuman fiend,” Dickens spoke with slow intense heat. “He must be stopped.”

  Lord Ashbee’s secret life had, indeed, been unearthed, but the man himself, and the girl Ellen Ternan, had flown. That house had given up all its secrets. Now, if those secrets could be properly decoded, they could lead us to the nobleman-rake and the actress-murderess who was either his prisoner, or his willing whore. We made our way back through the woods to our secreted coach. To our great surprise, another coach had pulled up beside ours. Constable Rogers and Tally Ho Thompson leaned against this second coach, smoking and whispering to another black-coated, stiff-hatted constable. The Ashbee butler, still blissfully unconscious, lay cuffed to a wheel on the ground.

  “Well, Gatewood,” Field barked. “Well, where are they? Where did the coach go?”

  The man, Constable Gatewood, faced Inspector Field with the look of a man facing the guillotine. “We lost ’im, sir,” he admitted.

  A look of inexpressible loss and despair tore at Dickens’s eyes, drew his lips backward in a painful gasp of fear.

  “We was blocked by a wagon driven by one of ’is ’irelings.” Gatewood described it, though no one but me seemed to be listening. “On the ’eye-road into London. We searched but we could not pick up the trail.”

  “We’ll pick up the trail, don’t you worry,” Field said, patting the purloined notebooks in his greatcoat pocket.

  * * *

  *In Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians, Henry Ashbee is identified as the biggest collector of pornography in nineteenth-century England. This came to light after Ashbee’s death when his estate was being inventoried. Marcus even speculates that Ashbee is the author of My Secret Life, the 4000-page sexual autobiography of a prominent Victorian gentleman. None of the Dickens biographies examine the possibility that these two very different kinds of mid-Victorian writers knew of each other or could possibly have influenced each other. The greatest novelist and the greatest pornographer of the Victorian age in close proximity could point to a mode of influence no Dickens scholar has yet explored.

  Not So Good As We Seem

  May 10, 1851—evening

  This memoir now begins to move apace. Events tumbled so rapidly upon one another, that neither Dickens nor myself had time for cool deliberation upon our roles in the drama. Dickens’s responsibilities, to Household Words, to his play in rehearsal for the Queen’s benefit, to his family, pressed upon him while, simultaneously, Inspector Field pressed the hunt for the young woman, who was, I greatly suspected, the one responsibility which, for Dickens, overshadowed all of the others.

  As for me, thoughts of Irish Meg preyed upon my mind. She was not at my flat when I returned from our little adventure in house burglary. She had let herself out, leaving no message. I had great difficulty sleeping that night. She danced in
my waking dreams, threatening to expose every flaw in my hypocritical “gentleman’s” disguise.

  Tossing upon that barren bed across that long night, I realized that both Dickens and myself were pursuing our darker selves, in the forms of these elusive women. Both Dickens and myself were attempting to prove our courage (I as lover? he as protector?). We were attempting to express those inexpressible desires, which our very age refused to acknowledge as even existing. The revelations offered up by Milord’s secret library had been shocking and profound. They tortured my faculties that long and sleepless night. How different in our longings after our Ellens and our Meggys were Dickens and myself from Ashbee? How different in wanting to act out exalted romantic fantasies, or stage much darker dramas?

  I did not come to my senses until the lights went up on our makeshift stage in the music room at Devonshire House that evening. The rehearsal of Not So Bad As We Seem went well. Dickens conducted it briskly. He acted his scenes with a grim intent, as if he felt some relief at being able to lose himself in his other stage selves: the demanding stage manager, the actor, the character in Bulwar’s play, a Lord of the Realm caught in somewhat embarrassing circumstances. Yet, he moved through the rehearsal without his usual humor, his quick and cutting wit. It was as if he were suppressing a restless agitation of the soul which longed for some resolution.

  Forster was his usual dour self, sleepwalking through his part. Mark Lemon did his usual cutting up (falling to his knees and pleading in the terms of Falstaff’s “Banish” speech when he forgot or misremembered his lines). Dickens, however, seemed oddly unaffected, aloof from all the little nuances which make life on the stage a worthwhile lark. It was as if we were all apparitions in one of his dreams, and he was waiting for the moment when he would awaken from us, and reenter the real world.

  It was she who was on his mind. All the rest was merely social duty. I must confess that when I thought of Dickens possessing his Ellen Ternan, I envisioned a great man undone; a Lear perhaps, or an Agamemnon; a strong, powerful man reduced to nothing by la belle dame sans merci.

  At the end of the rehearsal, as the cast, in high spirits, was breaking up, he took me aside, his co-conspirator.

  “I must see the girl’s mother. She is in the custody of Inspector Field for questioning this night at Bow Street,” he said with that breathless excitement of the hunter in his voice. “I must observe her. That old whore is responsible for these attempts to debase her daughter; I am sure of it. Let us postpone our dinner. Let us take a cab to Bow Street directly. Let us hear the old bawd’s story for ourselves.”

  He offered this agenda without the slightest doubt that I, as ever, would immediately assent, and that we two amateur detectives would hail a cab, and set off once again for another evening of underworld reality.

  Thus, dear reader, you can only imagine how taken aback Dickens was when I declined his offer!

  “I will not accompany you tonight.” Dickens’s eyebrows raised. “I am exhausted. I have barely slept in the last three days,” I lied. “Beyond that,” I continued in a weaseling way, “I am, temporarily, heartily sick of the sordidness of this affair, and, for this night at least, it is my desire to avoid hearing the protestations of that corrupt old whore. I need a respite from it, Charles. Tomorrow I will be a new man, your faithful bulldog, and we will walk out wherever you choose, but tonight I must decline.”

  He shrugged, trying to hide his disappointment.

  I must digress. I made feeble excuses because I could no longer stand the torments of my own fantasies. In truth, I did not accompany Charles to Bow Street because I had to see Irish Meg again.

  Yet, I had no idea what I wanted to say. In no way had I been able to subdue my desire for her (yet no gentleman could allow himself to articulate such feelings for one of her debased station in life). Conversely, I had been totally unsuccessful in convincing myself to put her off. Rejecting her became a rejection of myself, of whatever potential for becoming a true novelist I entertained. I remembered Lemon’s favorite speech: Banish Lemon, Banish Forster, Banish Dickens, Banish Field, but Banish Irish Meg Sheehey was something I could not do.

  The disappointment showed on Dickens’s face. He had come to take for granted that I would always consent to accompany him on whatever nocturnal adventure he chose. Yet, he was gracious: “You must come to Household Words tomorrow morning, and I will recount the old bawd’s story to you.”

  “I’ll be there.” We shook hands resolutely upon it.

  Despite my protestations of fatigue, I did not return to my empty flat. I set off at a brisk pace, hoping to collect my thoughts as I walked, toward Covent Garden.

  The night air was damp and the streets were foggy. Ill-smelling winds blew off the Thames sending waste paper and biting clouds of dirt hurtling through the atmosphere. I had gotten so familiar with the West End streets from accompanying Dickens upon his night walks that I did not even have to think in my progress toward Covent Garden. The walk allowed me total preoccupation with my thoughts, yet when I arrived, I had made no progress whatsoever. I had learned to move with ease through the landscape of my outer world, but my inner world was like a labyrinth in which I felt irretrievably lost.

  I felt confident that Irish Meg would be plying her trade in the vicinity of Covent Garden this night, either as an agent of Inspector Field or as a testament to her higher status due to Field’s sponsorship.

  I took up a post in the deep black shadows of the mouth of a small mews opening into the wide back carriage court of the Covent Garden Theatre. Other whores strolled about. Horses coughed and stamped in the damp night air. Coachmen and postilions loitered about smoking and laughing to pass the time. What if she has already enticed a rich customer, the thought festered. A gnarled flowerwoman scuttled across the court, singing “Derry Derry Da, Derry Da, Derry Da,” in a mad wavering voice.

  As I watched from the darkness, I could not help but think of how I was creating a kind of fiction. I had often felt I was a character in one of Dickens’s novels, but this night I was no longer Dickens’s character; I had become my own. Yet, I was still but a character in a fiction, not yet real.

  Three gaslamps in a line down the middle of the court struggled against the blackness of the sky, and the shifting clouds of fog. The haloed light dropped bright cones of illumination to the bases of the posts upon which they were mounted. Only the aimless whores and the loitering servants moved in and out of these tiny islands of artificial light. I stepped for a moment out of the shadows, and consulted my new gold repeater. Back in the shelter of the dark, I calculated that Macbeth was still in the fourth act.

  And then she was there.

  I had glanced away for but a brief moment and somehow she had materialized beneath the center lamppost. She leaned, with her back to the post, as if that narrow cone of light was her enchanted circle. She wore her usual exceedingly low-cut gown. The whiteness of the tops of her breasts reflected like a pool upon which the tigerish beauty of her face floated. The gaslight caught her hair and set it aflame. She posed, motionless, the stuff of men’s dark dreams. My eyes were drawn to her as a ship to the Lodestone Rock, or a sailor to a siren’s song.

  Things never work out in reality the way one envisions them in dreams. I started forward out of the shadows of my place of concealment to greet her. However, as I moved toward her in the fog, she straightened and greeted a figure emerging from the backstage door of the theatre. I recognized Tally Ho Thompson as he sauntered languidly into Meg’s lamp light, and lit a cigar by means of a Lucifer struck upon the post.

  Since I wished to speak to Meg alone, I quickly withdrew once again into the shadows. I remembered that Thompson’s character died violently in Act Three; thus, his evening’s work was completed. They engaged in quite natural-looking conversation. I wondered if they were both still on duty for Inspector Field. The only hint of intimacy occurred when she reached for Thompson’s cigar, took it from his hand, and drew deeply upon it. They both laughed as she exh
aled a large puff of grey smoke.

  Impatient, I abandon my safe shadows, and once again started for Meg’s charmed circle of light. My intention was to lure her away from her conversation with Thompson by means of some pretext. Before I had advanced more than five steps, the whole composition of the scene changed.

  A tall buxom woman suddenly stepped out of the shadows to stand glaring at the two of them. She pointed at Thompson, and began to scream in short violent bursts.

  “Oi’ve ’eerd yee’re han hactor on stage. ’At makes yew too good for the likes o’ me, don’ it now?”

  The heads of both Thompson and Irish Meg snapped around to look at the screaming woman. I stopped in my tracks, half in shadow, half out.

  “Or mebbe yew like yee’re fine uptown ’ores better, his that hit?” The woman, her face livid, spat her accusing question at Thompson.

  “Bess, wot’s wrong?” Thompson tried to placate this flaming virago. “I’m workin’ for Fieldsy. I ’aven’t been able to drop in at Rats’ Castle because I’m on a job for Fieldsy. Hit was this or Newgate, you see.”

  “Yee belong in Newgate for talkin’ to the likes o’ this slut.”

  Irish Meg recoiled at the insult, but quickly recovered. “You dirty ’ore,” Meg hissed back, “you smell of the scum of the river where yee’ll end up, floatin’ with the other dust.”

  At that, in blind jealousy and rage, Scarlet Bess, screaming vile words, which I cannot reproduce even in this private memoir, advanced upon Irish Meg, as one might imagine the Yorkshire Ripper vaulting out of the mist upon his unsuspecting victim.

  There was madness, but there was also something exotic and strangely comic about her headlong charge. Thompson took a placating stance in front of Irish Meg, both hands upraised. Scarlet Bess launched herself at him from a yard or two away, and the speed of her charge took them both to the ground, where she proceeded to flail wildly at his head and shoulders with both her small fists.