“I shall see you soon,” Dickens continued, as if not wishing the conversation to end, not wanting to let this particular adventure go. “It shall not be many nights ’ere I shall need a walk in the neighbourhood of Bow Street.”
“Good. I shall expect you.” With that, they shook hands again.
Even as the man was moving out of the door, Dickens, almost nervously, continued to babble on: “As they say in America, I shall see you if I don’t kick the bucket.”
Inspector Field stopped in mid-exit, flashed his sharp ironic grin from beneath his sharp square hat as his sharp forefinger scratched the side of his exceedingly sharp eye, and laughed, “Bucket indeed! ’Tis the bucket that kicks us, my good friend, not us the bucket.” With that, he was gone.*
* * *
*Wilkie Collins’s journal comes to an abrupt end at this point at the bottom of the final page of the leather-bound commonplace book in which he was writing. Collins makes no indication that the narrative is complete; nor is there any indication that it isn’t. Perhaps other commonplace books existed which carried further the story of the collaboration between Charles Dickens and Inspector William Field of the Metropolitan Protectives. This particular journal, needless to say, exhausted itself at a rather felicitous point. It does, however, leave the fates of Irish Meg Sheehey, Tally Ho Thompson, Scarlet Bess, and Collins himself, not to mention poor Ellen Ternan, somewhat unresolved.
More from William J. Palmer
The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens
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The ghastly double murder of a society doctor's beautiful wife and her maid reunites celebrated novelist Charles Dickens, his protege Wilkie Collins, and formidable Inspector Field of the Metropolitan Protectives in another brilliant quest for justice. They manage to defend old friend and ex-burglar Tally Ho Thompson, who's arrested at the scene, but then the case takes the men from the pestilential cells of Newgate to the city's steamiest dives. Gamblers, thieves, swells, whores, and Collins's fiery lover, Irish Meg, all join the chase of a killer who is the stuff of nightmares.
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Someone is threatening Angela Burdett-Coutts, the banker, feminist, and philanthropist, one of the richest, most powerful women in England. Soon after she alerts her friend Charles Dickens to the threats, the Coutts Bank is robbed, and a member of the Women's Emancipation Society is found strangled inside. The murder brings the burgeoning feminist movement under scrutiny. Inspector William Field of the Metropolitan Protectives begins his investigation, aided by the eager amateur detective Dickens and his apprentice Wilkie Collins. Yet Dickens's own reputation and career are threatened by his love for the striking young actress Ellen Ternan. Ellen is a liberated "hoyden" herself, and a prime suspect in the murder. In order to prove Ellen’s innocence, the two novelists may have to expose their own secrets.
The Dons and Mr. Dickens
A spellbinding Dickensian romp with the canonical author at Oxford, where the greatest minds of England toil…and one mind toils day and night with thoughts of the perfect murder.
One dank November night, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins are called to a part of London notorious for its opium dens—where an Oxford History Don has been found murdered. Eager to escape the drudgery of a London winter, the two amateur detectives willingly accept Inspector Field's orders to travel on the new railway line to Oxford, where Collins was once a student, to conduct an undercover investigation. Once in Oxford, they enlist the help of Collins's old schoolmate, Charles Dodgson, a brilliant mind on the verge of becoming the youngest don in Oxford's history. Together, they encounter a complex conspiracy punctuated by murder, political radicalism, and revenge.
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The Detective and Mr. Dickens Page 31
