“Bravo,” Field stood clapping his hands and laughing. “Quite a performance. I wish I ’ad questioned the hag nearly as well as you made it seem I did.”
“What is our next step?” I asked.
“We must find the girl, free her from this rake,” Dickens insisted, with an urgency that revealed much more, I am sure, than he wished.
“We must find our murderer,” Inspector Field corrected.
“’Ow ’sat goin’ ta git done?” Irish Meg asked, asserting her right to join the conversation on an equal footing with everyone else.
“I’ll bet a bob Fieldsy’s got a plan,” Tally Ho Thompson said, adding his shilling’s worth.
“Indeed I ’ave,” Field said, re-establishing his control, “a plan of patience.”
Dickens looked at me in disappointment.
“We must wait and watch, until Ashbee and the girl resurface. The old bawd ’as described the neighbour’oods and the ’ouses of Ashbee ’ere in the city. Tonight we must find those ’ouses, and establish surveillance. Then, we must be patient and wait for our principals to return. Mark this, they will return…and soon, I wager.”
The evening had proved so embarrassing, had been filled with so much madness and melodrama that I had completely lost track of time. I reached into the watch pocket of my vest to consult my gold repeater. “My God, it’s gone,” I could not help but exclaim. “My watch, it’s gone.”
I vaguely remember Field answering my outburst with a short cough, meant, I feel now, to camouflage an irrepressible impulse to laughter. “Isn’t that the second you’ve lost this year?” His face was struggling as he posed that question.
He did not care in the least that my watch was missing. Nothing had gone properly for me this evening. I had made an utter fool of myself, and now I had lost my gold repeater, which had cost me almost five pounds.
Dickens sat silent but, I sensed, sympathetic to my loss.
Meg tried to be helpful, suggesting I think back to when I last had the aforesaid timepiece in my hand.
Thompson said nothing.
Finally, Inspector Field burst out laughing.
I was indignant. “Just what is so funny?” I demanded.
“It’s very funny, Mister Collins.” Field spoke through the grin which he could not control. “You are such a green ’un! Thompson,” and he turned to that worthy, holding out his hand, “give Mister Collins back ’is watch.”
Tally Ho Thompson, with a disgusted shrug, reached into a side pocket of his coat, and produced the gold repeater. “Sorry, Guv,” he said. I didn’t know whether he was addressing me or Inspector Field. “Just couldn’t let such a fine opportunity pass. Snatched it whilst we were wrestlin’ with my Bess back at the theatre. Nothin’ personal.”
Everyone laughed.
Thompson was right. None of this was personal. Dickens and myself were merely slumming, playing a game. Nothing personal. And yet, I could not help but think that for all of us—Field, Dickens, myself—this whole game of cherchez la femme had become quite personal indeed.
Confessio Amatis
May 10, 1851—Midnight
This memoir continues upon its careening pace. It is my memory of Charles, but I realize now that it has become more than just that. Dickens was responsible for whatever success I now enjoy as a writer. I write of him herein, yet I also write for myself. What I write now is most difficult of all.
The reading of the bawd’s testimony done, my watch restored, there was nothing left for we amateurs to do that night. Field, true to his word, had kept us fully posted on the case.
“I ’ave work yet to do this night.” Field seemed weary. “The surveillance lists and hours must be drawn. It could be days before they surface. Gentlemen,” he nodded to Dickens and myself, “your assistance ’as been invaluable on this case. You shall be in it at the end, I promise.”
Dickens answered with a slight nod of the head and a grim smile.
“Thompson,” Field continued his dismissal of the troops, “you are earnin’ your keep. If you can keep your artful fingers out of gentlemen’s pockets, I may make a ’oomin’ bein’ out of you yet.”
Tally Ho answered with that cockeyed grin.
“Meg,” Field turned to her, and paused as if searching. “Meg, we are square. I may need you again in this affair. Be alert. You ’ave done well.”
Thus dismissed, he ushered us out, and left us standing in the street. It was at this moment that I realized what a perceptive and sensitive man Dickens truly was.
“Wilkie,” he broke the awkward silence, “I need to be alone with my thoughts. I must walk by the river this night. I trust you can find your way home alone.” With that, he marched abruptly off, and was swallowed up by the fog.
“I must be goin’,” Thompson chimed in as if on cue. “Must ’unt up me Bess an’ see if the fire is trimmed in ’er eyes.” And he too set off with a wave and that knowing grin.
Irish Meg looked at me and I at her.
“I will escort you home,” I said.
“I ’ave no ’ome but Rats’ Castle,” said she.
“Then you must come home with me.”
She raised her head, looked full into my face, and smiled a radiant wicked smile. I had said it. I had said it despite every warning which had been echoing in my rational mind the whole day. I could not help but wonder what on this earth had gotten into me. It was done. Meg’s arm was clasped within mine and we were walking together through the gaslit mist. ’Neath the first lamp, its gauzy halo illuminating her face, we stopped. There was moisture on her face, whether tears or simply drops of hanging mist I did not know. She looked into my eyes, and rose slowly to me, her arms encircling my neck, her moist open face drawing up to mine. Our lips met in a kiss that changed everything I was, and had ever envisioned myself to be.
Meg and I did not speak. There was no need for talk. It would have been a distraction from that which was so real between us. Our lips met again, and her mouth opened upon mine with an urgency that I met with both fear and heedless desire. I clasped her in my arms, and met each thrust of her velvet tongue with a clumsy counterthrust. We never spoke.
Twenty years ago, when all of this happened, even ten years ago when I had established myself as a good writer, surely not the match of Dickens, but an entertaining writer of mysteries, I could not have, would not have, written of what I am about to write. Dickens, the greatest, most powerful writer of our age, would never have considered writing of what I am about to write. Yet I must write of it now. It will never be read in my time. If and when it is read, it will show that Dickens and Collins were real human beings. Perhaps it will show that we Victorians were not just a scrabbling race of crabbed hypocrites, dryasdust and as sexually inclined as the pit of a Jersey plum. Our tendency, as novelists in the age of Victoria, is to draw a curtain over all that occurs in the privacy of our sleeping rooms. We attack society at large, we laugh at its institutions, as did Dickens in Bleak House and Little Dorrit, but we do not confront the most basic emotions of our lives. We portray love in looks, in words, in public ceremonies, but we do not portray love as men and women find it in each other’s arms and beds. It is eighteen-seventy now, and there is yet no indication that this subject will ever emerge from behind that curtain. The great painter Turner’s rooms were opened some years ago, and what was found there was shocking to some—more than five hundred paintings of the female genitalia. Graphic, obsessive paintings. Lurid in their color and abandon. I was not shocked. We all have our secret lives. That night with Irish Meg, my secret life began, and it has been the salvation of my being ever since. Talk is the stuff of novels, and that night we had little need for talk.
We hurried through the deserted streets to my room. The door closed behind us. We faced each other alone, for the first time unaccountable to anyone but ourselves. When we kissed, the urgency we had felt before, in the street, was replaced by a realization that no one was watching or judging us, that we had only ourselves to please.
I felt a new man. Our bodies searched each other out. Our mouths crushed themselves in one long breathless kiss following another.
The light was dim in my room, since I had been allowed no opportunity to ignite the oil lamps. The only real light seeped through the curtained windows. Irish Meg broke our long and passionate embrace, and stepped back. With one uncomplicated motion she unlaced the top of her dress leaving herself, in an instant, naked to the waist.
Wavering shadows played delicately across the ghostly whiteness of her breasts. I fell to my knees before her. We were gentleman and demon lover, neophyte and whore. One cannot fully escape the image of the self engrained by one’s continuous hypocrisy in society. Yet we were also people burning in a kiln of desire which turned the shells of our outward lives to ash. Only our buried selves survived to touch each other; hers better, purer; mine lower, freer. My gentleman’s world was shut out forever. Within Meg’s world of the flesh, I found a heedless refuge. She lowered herself to me, and, as we knelt facing one another like two devout supplicants praying in a darkened church, my lips sought and kissed her risen breasts. The tips of my fingers moved across her skin, her neck, her back, up across the soft roundness of her midriff, so carefully, so slowly, savoring each touch, each contour, each new possession.
She stood, and made herself naked before me. Woman, all openness and acceptance, leading me into her shadowed garden. I rose, still fully clothed, feeling like a fool.
She undressed me. We made love. Our bodies spoke in an age-old language which no modern code could ever match for eloquence or fire. I have never had a sweeter conversation, never entered into a clearer, more honest dialogue. We never spoke. We made love, with no thought of what century, what cold country in which we lived, no thought of what rank in society, what moral status we upheld in the warped mirror of Vanity Fair. We made love out of desperate need: her need to survive; my need to prove that I was alive. She was too passionate to be a whore, and I, certainly, was no gentleman.
As I look back upon that night from this distant harbor of twenty years, the image of Meg, naked in my arms, does not float my mind back into the past, but rather steams it into the future. Meg, in her determination and passion, is a castaway on this cold island of the Victorian age. She once, later, said to me, “You mark, a time’s gonna come when wimmins an’t gonna ’ave ta sell themselves as either ’ores or wives ta live. A time’s gonna come when wimmins will be able ta work at anythin’ jus’ like men, do all the things men do. Now, if you tries to do wot a man does, git ahead, you end up like Missus Manning, at the end of a rope, either the law’s or your own.” Meg is an extraordinary woman, because she was born too soon, but did not let that stop her. Through her, I envision a time when all women will be free to be as passionate as Meg was with me that night.
When I awoke to the grey London sunlight, Irish Meg was gone and my life as a Victorian gentleman was forever changed. My secret life had begun.
The Siege
May 11, 1851—Dusk
Darkness was just beginning to descend upon the city, brooding outside of the Wellington Street bay window. The meager sun staggered through the murk of cloud and fog and gas, to disappear into some unmarked sinkhole out in the direction of St. Albans. It was almost five when Rogers rose up out of the fog to summon us once again to an audience with Inspector Field.
As usual, Rogers was chafing at the errand.
Looking much refreshed, after the haggard state in which he dismissed us the night before, Inspector Field greeted us heartily at Bow Street Station. He was leaning in the doorway, smoking a cigar, and watching the lurid sun sink into the lurid smoke of the western suburbs.
“There are stirrings,” Field greeted us. “I feel that we may flush them tonight. The beaters are on the ’unt. We must set ourselves in the path of the driven game.” He grinned, quite proud of his elaborate metaphor.
“Ah, the hunt is on, is it?” Dickens answered, with more enthusiasm than I had expected, after the melancholy afternoon.
“My surveillance runners ’ave offered two reports. Preparations are bein’ made at the Soho flats. Servants, caterers, lights blazin’ all through the ’ouse. All is quiet at Kensington Gardens. A few lights. Servants perhaps doing daily maintenance. No sign of Ashbee or the Miss Ternan in residence. The Soho ’ouse is the place, gentlemen. It is surrounded by my Protectives. They ’ave strict orders to allow entry into our little net, but no exit.”
“You feel then that the society of rakes plan to meet tonight?” Dickens asked the obvious question.
“All the preparations are in place,” Field said, scratching at the corner of his eye with his masterful forefinger, even as that forefinger held his cigar. “I think we should go there. Thompson is bein’ fetched. ’Ee may be of use again.”
With that, he turned to Rogers, who had been standing attentively at the curbstone next to the horses, and gave what, at the time, I thought to be a rather peculiar order.
“Serjeant Rogers, return to the Kensington ’ouse, use this chaise, and take command of that surveillance.”
“But sir…” a crazed look of panic came into Rogers’s eyes. He knew that he was losing his chance to be in on the denoument. I felt a great secret delight at his helpless frustration.
“Your job is to be alert over there,” Field said, stifling Rogers’s protest, having clearly foreseen it. Field spoke with a cold authority, which intimated that no opposition was to be brooked in the matter. “Your job is to watch every comin’ and goin’, every light goin’ on or snuffed. We aren’t sure that the Soho ’ouse is the meetin’ place. It would be like ’em to change at the last moment to throw us off the scent. Stay alert at Kensington, Rogers. Our prey may run right into your guns,” Field finished with a flourish.
It was clear that Rogers didn’t believe Field’s words of reassurance for a moment. It was clear that he felt betrayed, sold off in favor of we rank amateurs and a convicted highwayman, who at that moment arrived in a hansom cab with a jaunty wave and a grinning “Evenin’, gents.”
The hunting party was assembled. Rogers betook his sullen self away.
“Follow me gentlemen. You as well Thompson,” Field ordered with a private chuckle.
“Don’t mind if I do.” Nothing seemed to penetrate Thompson’s perpetual good nature. He’s the devil’s jokester, I thought fancifully, placed on earth for no other purpose than to mock the pretension of we Victorians.
We four boarded the black coach, which had earlier transported this identical crew of cracksmen on our nocturnal visit to Milord Ashbee’s Notting Hill estate. We clattered cross London to a close, fog-shrouded neighbourhood. Inspector Field, eschewing the bull’s-eye, which the driver offered, led us slowly through a maze of black and narrow thoroughfares. How the man saw his way through that dark underworld, I cannot explain, yet he led us to a dark doorway, directly across from what Field informed us was Milord Ashbee’s Soho house. It was surrounded by a low iron fence, and, unlike any other house in the street, it blazed with light in every window.
“It looks as if something surely is on there tonight,” Dickens whispered to Field.
“Let’s ’ope,” Field growled, then, as if talking only to himself, he muttered, “it’s almos’ too bright, too invitin’.”
We settled into the damp mist to wait for the curtain to ascend, for Ashbee’s coach to appear, for Ellen to step out dressed in silks and furs and sparkling diamonds, for other coaches to unload Lords of the Realm, all evil old men like Thackeray’s Lord Steyne. We waited, hugging ourselves, chafing our arms in the effort to stay warm. Every coach that traversed that Soho street clattered by. Seven o’clock passed. The great bells of St. Paul’s signaled eight.
“Damn it’s cold and damp!” Tally Ho Thompson broke a long dull silence with a quite obvious observation.
Thompson startled Inspector Field into speech. “It’s gettin’ too late,” he said. “It should ’ave ’appened by now.” Abruptly, he marched out into the fog to consu
lt, we presumed, with his brother detectives posted in positions surrounding the house.
After it was all over, Rogers, gloating, narrated for us what had transpired at his post as we waited shivering in that Soho doorway. I am sure that he suitably embellished his own role, and exaggerated his ingenuity, but I have no other source for these events, so I am forced to repeat them as he later portrayed them to us.
Serjeant Rogers, on post at Milord Ashbee’s Kensington house, is startled by a sound up the way. He sees a coach exit a side street down one set of buildings from the dim house he is commissioned to watch. He notices this coach because it represents absolutely the only movement in the neighbourhood. Rogers marks it but pays no real attention.
Moments later, however, another coach exits the same narrow thoroughfare and echoes hollowly away. Rogers glances up, but soon subsides back into the torpor of his surveillance. Milord Ashbee’s house shows but two dim lights.
More quiet minutes pass and lo, yet a third coach emerges from that selfsame mews and catches Serjeant Rogers’s attention. He feels it an appropriate time to stretch his legs. He rises, scratches at his beard, mutters “busy little side street this evenin’” into the oversized lapels of his greatcoat and sets off walking in the shadows of the buildings toward this unusually trafficked street.
The narrow mews in question is empty when Rogers arrives at its mouth. Nothing seems amiss. Nevertheless, he settles himself behind a large dustbin and waits to see if any more coaches arrive.
He does not have to wait long. Within minutes a sleek phaeton drawn by a matched pair of blacks pulls up. A long gentleman in a dark Aylesbury, a silk waistcoat and carrying a cane steps out. The gentleman converses pre-emptorily with the driver. The driver reaches beneath the box, extracts a bull’s-eye, ignites it, and steps down to light the gentleman’s way.
The Detective and Mr. Dickens Page 25
