The Detective and Mr. Dickens

The Detective and Mr. Dickens

Being an Account of the Macbeth Murders and the Strange Events Surrounding Them

A Secret Victorian Journal
Attributed to Wilkie Collins

Discovered and Edited by
William J. Palmer

Copyright

Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
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New York, NY 10016
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Copyright © 1990 by William J. Palmer
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

For more information, email
[email protected]

First Diversion Books edition April 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62681-732-6

Also by William J. Palmer

The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens
The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens
The Don and Mr. Dickens

This book is dedicated to
William J.
and
Ellen Jane Palmer

Editor’s Note

This memoir, written in the style of a novel as befits its author, was recently discovered amongst the papers of Sir William Warrington, bequeathed to the University of North Anglia by the estate of Mr. George Warrington. Sir William, the renowned Lincoln’s Inn solicitor and, as he was to many famous persons during the latter half of the last century, counselor to Queen Victoria in the final decades of her reign, was Wilkie Collins’s personal solicitor from 1866 until Collins’s death in 1889. These papers have recently been opened to the research scrutiny of scholars. This manuscript is a discovery destined to add more than a mere footnote to literary history. The revelations contained in this document redefine the “myth” which, thanks to reticent and overprotective biographers
*
, has grown up around the life of England’s greatest novelist, Charles Dickens. This manuscript revises the accepted view of Dickens as eminent Victorian and presents a fierce chimera of a restless man pushing against the restraints of his place, his fame, his whole society. I wish to thank the University of North Anglia for permitting me to edit and publish this hitherto unpublished (and almost certainly suppressed) literary document.

—William J. Palmer

*
Principally John Forster, Dickens’s closest friend, colleague, first biographer and guardian of the holy flame, and Edgar Johnson, the dean of the twentieth-century Dickens biographers, whose fine and nearly definitive two-volume
Charles Dickens:
His Tragedy and Triumph studiously avoids dealing with the material contained in this memoir. Fred Kaplan, Dickens’s most recent biographer, in his eloquent
Dickens: A Biography
, rejects this earlier biographical overprotectiveness.

Remembering

June 14, 1870

It seems only yesterday that we were young, and he would set aside his glass of port or burnt sherry, and, springing to his feet with a hungry gleam o’erspreading his countenance, say, “Young Wil, we need a walk. Come, let ‘the Inimitable’ show you his favorite streets.” He always gave himself that appellation in the same half-joking, half-serious tone. I didn’t like it. I found it vulgar. I’m sure he really believed it, though he wanted you to think it was a joke. From the earliest confidences of our lifelong friendship, I was always resentful of that arrogant appellation. With him in the field, writing novels has been twice as difficult because he is everywhere and you must, else you cannot call yourself a novelist, struggle to avoid imitating
him
.

I was beardless then and twelve years younger than he. I was already in small, tight spectacles but his eyes were still clear and eagerly searching for new material in the world. Sitting in the
Household Words
offices in Wellington Street, Strand, or in the Garrick Club, the actor’s spot, he would say, “Come Wilkie, let’s see what’s abroad this fine English night.” We would put on our hats, and perhaps a scarf if the wind was up, or a greatcoat if it was getting on past Michaelmas Term, and together we would head out into the foggy night streets of London.

He is dead, “the Inimitable,” how ironic. We will all imitate him in this. The funeral drones on. They will bury him in the Abbey. The faces of his family and friends, lined up in the pews like wax figures on the shelves of a candle shop, mourn him. The church is filled with friends, the curious, those whose business includes the death of a great man.

About halfway back, alone in a small side pew, is a face I know, a face from our past when we used to walk the streets in search of adventure.

Ah, the streets. For more than twenty years, beginning in ’forty-eight it has been my good fortune to share his night streets. He took me up after reading some articles on murder and shipwreck which I had published in the
Daily News
. I was so young, and trying to be a writer. I was quite fit then, and he told me he felt safer with me along. He was obsessed with the streets. He would gaze out the windows into the black night eager to escape the warm, safe confines of his well-appointed
Household Words
office where he often slept when his wife and children were down in the country (which they were more often than not). Imagine giving up warm rooms, brandy, the capacious chair and good fellowship of friends like Lemon and Forster and Leech at the Garrick Club to walk out among thieves and beggars and the fallen women who crowded the gaslit streetcorners offering their only portable, perishable property for sale to any stranger attracted to their wretchedness. It was as if he needed the streets to satisfy something in his restless personality, perhaps to convince himself that he was real, and not just some figment of his own overactive imagination.

As for me, I went along willingly—no eagerly. It was an exciting time for me, an honor to be taken up by the writer who commanded the field. I would, however, be remiss not to admit that I could have been observed frequently and nervously glancing back over my shoulder as we strode boldly into some of the darkest, most labyrinthine pockets of damnation in that city of night. That familiar face in the mourning pew, halfway down the aisle, brings it all rushing back into my memory.

“The Inimitable” is dead now, and soon the Vultures will descend upon his life and pick it to pieces. Things will be made known which have remained hidden and secret. Surely some clever young Grub Street hack will find out about Ellen sooner or later. But they’ll never learn the whole truth of it. Only I, and that solitary mourner halfway back, know the whole story, the real story.

And he knows more than I. He knows how it was all settled. Perhaps if I approach him, he will tell me what sort of gentleman’s agreement he and Dickens arrived at which gave “the Inimitable” the focus of his last twenty years.

He sees me looking at him from my pallbearer’s chair sideways to the aisle up next to the ornamented, brass-handled casket. I want to lean around the corner of the catafalque and wave to him. But that would be out of place here and now. We exchange grave nods, but our eyes hold on each other, and I know that he is remembering exactly as I am. Without warning, he tips me a quick sly wink, and I have to suddenly cover my mouth with my black-gloved hand, and pretend to cough, in order to hide from the mourning multitudes an irresistable grin. By heaven, we had some times together, the three of us.

My familiar friend is a burly, balding man. He looks different without his hat. Whenever London’s guilty (and are not we all?) saw that hat approaching, they tried to escape its relentless jurisdiction. I remember it as a flat square brown hat that could slice right through a crowd. His shoulders are wide, and his neck thick, yet he isn’t hulking. He stands below six feet, and his face, though proportioned to that powerful neck, is not overwide. His eyebrows are dark black and strong, but it is his keen eyes which rule. Nothing escapes those eyes; they move like pickpockets, dipping deep into every soul without anyone ever realizing until they have passed on. His sharp hat and sharp eyes can cut to the heart of the matter as deftly as might Lord Jarvis Hillis-Millar, the Queen’s Surgeon-General.

But now, across the funeral congregation, those clear eyes are misty. He is a man I never could have imagined shedding tears. Yet he is on that verge. We are both, perhaps, getting old.

It has probably been a year since I have last seen him, my familiar friend. “The Inimitable” hadn’t much time (or strength) for the streets in recent years. I had ceased accompanying him on his fierce night walks years ago. God only knows when the last time was, that Charles and this familiar friend had been together. Yet our friend was there, sizing up the crowd, catching my eye, tipping his ironic wink which said to me:
Do you remember the heat of the chase? The pleasure of the game?
He raised his forefinger, crooked in that familiar way, as if just lifted out of the trigger housing of a pistol, to scratch softly at the side of his eye, as Deacon Hornback’s voice rose to some crescendo of elegiac nonsense.

That forefinger, yes! It was his most powerful weapon. He had a tendency toward tapping people familiarly on the chest with that forefinger as he questioned them. He had the abrupt habit of suddenly punching his forefinger over his left shoulder and spitting, “Now hook it,” when terminating a conversation with some vagrant or street boy or powdered whore. But his forefinger was always the most intimidating when pointed directly at his target like the barrel of a gun. With his sharp hat, his sharp eyes, and his exceedingly sharp forefinger, my familiar friend had gained quite a reputation for cutting to the bone of reality, cutting across the whole fabric of society, cutting through all the appearances which clothe the truth.

My familiar friend, alone at the funeral, was one of “the Inimitable’s” closest associates, though few—not Forster, nor Wills, nor Dolby, nor any of the members of the family—would recognize him. He was “the Inimitable’s” one firm friend of his beloved streets. Ah yes, they were colleagues indeed. My familiar friend was Detective Inspector Field, of the Metropolitan Protectives, Bow Street Station.

Field, his sharp brown hat restored to his head, was standing outside the door of the Abbey when I emerged, waiting to take me into custody. The street in front was flooded with people, horses, cabs, and the inevitable street vendors who were the first profiteers on Charles’s death. There would be many more to follow. When I finally made it to his side, he had already been recognized and accosted by another denizen of the madding crowd, an eager young newspaper reporter intent on probing his presence at the funeral of the great man.

“’Ee and I were acquaintances and colleagues. I greatly admired the man.” Field scratched the side of his eye with his forefinger.

“Colleagues?” the young man probed.

“No, no, not a’tall,” Field assured him. “Just an acquaintance I greatly admired. Now please, do you mind? An old friend.”

Field shouldered his way through the crowd to my side.

“Field, how good to see you, how good indeed.”

He caught the true enthusiasm in my voice and smiled.

We both suddenly remembered where we were and our faces fell.

“A bad business this,” he finally said gruffly, nodding toward the emptied church. “I’d rather ’ave met up with you and ’im any other place on earth.”

“I agree. I agree,” I agreed, stupidly.

“We did ’ave some strange journeys, put on some intricate little performances, the two writer swells from the West End and their detective friend, didn’t we?” He gently broke the awkward silence with three affectionate taps of his forefinger to my cravat.

“We certainly did,” I nodded. “He had no better friend than you.”

Dickens was there in both of our minds, in black waistcoat and black silk scarf, walking briskly beside me, perhaps smoking a cigar, as we hastened to follow Field’s Juggernaut pace down the dark maze of streets, into some pestilent London rookery.