The Detective and Mr. Dickens (4 page)

“DAMN SEIZE YOU ALL!!!” she screamed. “DAMN SEIZE YOU ALL!!!” she howled again.

Her husband sagged pathetically at her side. As a haughty gesture, clearly performing for the crowd, she turned, and bestowed a mocking kiss on the poor ashen man’s cheek. At this bit of bravado, this Judas kiss, the crowd went mad, and surged against the barriers. It was all the constables wielding their truncheons could do to beat back the crowd. The crowd wanted to tear her flesh, rip out her eyes, draw and quarter her. Dickens silently shook his head at the obscenity of the spectacle. We actually learned later that a thirty-year-old woman, one Deborah Thomas of St. Giles, was driven against the barrier by the rush of the frenzied crowd, and crushed to death.

As the hangman placed the thick noose around the murderess’s neck, the mob below grew more and more brutish. Nor were the roof dwellers any more compassionate or sympathetic toward the two poor wretches.

“She dares to wear black satin, that harlot!” gasped a well-born woman in an expensive black satin gown and shoulder muffler, who was observing the proceedings through a small set of opera glasses. “Well! I’ll never wear black satin again, you can be assured of that!” she announced.

“No respectable woman should be watching such a thing as this,” Dickens muttered, “nor any respectable gentleman either. Collins, Field is right. These things should be done inside the walls of the gaol.”

“Quite so,” I agreed wholeheartedly, “exactly the solution.”

“And deprive all these nice people of their fun?” Forster piped up sourly.

“It is not funny.” Dickens was subdued, not angry. “That a woman in this age should be driven to this is deplorable.”

The traps were sprung. With a sharp downward thrust, the Mannings stabbed through the floor of the scaffold, and imbedded, quivering, in the empty air. The crowd gasped and panted at this moment of completion. Howls of satisfaction and murmurs of ecstacy rolled like waves through the crowd. The husband and wife were hung side by side. Like demented marionettes, they performed their dance of death. The woman’s legs kicked out, as if trying to reach the faces in the front row. The husband died more meekly. He spasmed once or twice in midair, before going as limp as his backbone had been all his life. The unspeakable crowd spewed hate.

“TO HELL, HUSSY!” they screamed.

“BURN, DEVILS, BURN!”

“DIE, WHORE! DIE AND BE DAMNED!”

Dickens turned to me, “It’s a bloody raree-show!” he exploded. “Worse, it’s a bloody damned pagan sacrifice to Satan!”

I wasn’t surprised at his emotion, his anger; what surprised me were his words. The man never cursed. It was as if he had too much respect for the language which was his constant companion to profane it.

As we walked back over Hungerford Bridge, talk turned to Inspector Field. “That man is London’s real ‘Shadow,’” said Dickens. “I’ll bet he knows every inch of this city as if it were his own parlor. That man’s a good man for us to get to know, Wilkie.”

*
Hangings as widely-covered social events were something which the English had a tremendous fondness for and gave up grudgingly. In fact, though hangings were not nearly so public later as they were in Dickens’s time, it took the English over 100 more years to outgrow them. In 1955, Ruth Ellis, who had shot her high-society lover in the head, had the honor of being the last woman to be hanged in England.

*
The generic nickname for a professional hangman.

*
A gas-filled hand-torch which was also frequently used as a weapon.

*
The generic English name for Asylums for the Insane.

*
One subject of interest which weighs down the pages of first the Daily News and then Household Words and All The Year Round, yet which few biographers have observed or commented upon in any depth, is Dickens’s fascination with detectives, with the London underworld, with the intellectual aspects of crime solving.

*
Criminal slang for thieves who dress as gentlemen and, usually in groups, work crowds at public gatherings.

At the Station House

April 5, 1851

Dickens started his weekly magazine that next year. He discarded the idea of “The Shadow.” Instead, he and Forster and Wills named the new periodical
Household Words
. I became one of its regular contributors.

I continued as the favoured companion of Dickens’s night walks. During that period, when he was working so hard to get
Household Words
underway, his nocturnal forays served purposes much more complex than mere post-prandial exercise. They were his physical and psychological outlet. It was as if the long day working in the office brought him slowly to a boil, and his walks through the dark streets were his way of letting the pressurized steam escape. He prowled those streets like an obsessed spy. He had ordered a large brass bedstead brought into the Wellington Street offices, and had fallen into the regimen of spending the first four nights of the work week—Monday through Thursday—there, living like a bachelor. He, of course, rejoined his family in the country for the weekends. Mrs. Dickens, Kate, had been afflicted with a strange undiagnosable dizziness and headache since February of that year, and had been under the private medical care of Doctor Southwood Smith at Great Malvern.

His father, John Dickens, died late in March of that year, rather suddenly, of an old urinary complaint which years before had forced him to retire from the Navy Pay Office. Dickens had known nothing of his father’s condition until summoned from Malvern to his father’s bedside when a bladder infection cast the old man into a violent delirium. John Dickens died the next morning with his son in attendance. Dickens had been a dutiful son, and had loved his father well, though there was evidence that he didn’t take the old man very seriously. Forster, for one, had accused him of creating Mister Micawber of
Copperfield
out of the raw material of John Dickens, but Dickens had always steadfastly denied it. When his father died, Dickens took it hard, sank into a near wordless state of depression for days afterwards.

Two days after the funeral, I supped with Dickens. The offices of
Household Words
were in a homey, three-storey building with a gracefully bowed-out front about halfway up Wellington Street, Strand, on the right hand side. It wore the number sixteen on its right lapel. Its bowed front provided its character. The bow reached up for two storeys, and was all expansive bay window, which provided a perfect flood of light of the sort absolutely necessary for literary work. The master’s office was on the drawing room floor, ten steps up from the ground-floor entrance, where Wills guarded all comings and goings like some overly polite Cerberus. Dickens’s desk and the cushioned wooden chair in which he sat were nestled into the curve of the bay window. His office more closely resembled a handsomely furnished study in some wealthy bachelor’s flat than a newspaper office. Two smaller offices, sparsely furnished with desks and chairs, took up the back of that second floor, and provided spartan work space for itinerant contributors who needed to be on hand to consult with the master in the process of readying their articles for the magazine.

Dickens had put in a feverish day. He had, by my imprecise count, bounded up and down that short flight of stairs to consult with Wills on editorial details no less than twenty to thirty times. When not vaulting the stairs, he paced back and forth before his desk, like some caged resident of the Zoological Gardens. It didn’t require a high degree of intelligence to realize that his father’s death hung heavy on his mind, and to sense the pressure building within him. I was there, working in one of the back offices, the whole afternoon. About five, Dickens popped his head in with a strained smile.

“Wilkie, can you stay and dine with me? I’ve got another hour or so of work, and then perhaps some bachelor fare, brandy and cigars, eh?”

He wanted company, and I, as always, was honored to provide it. Being a friend of Dickens then gave me a status in the London literary world which I had not yet earned with my pen. People didn’t identify me as Collins, the young writer with the rough edges, but rather as “Dickens’s
protégé
, who would soon, no doubt, produce great things.”

It wasn’t a very witty dinner. We dined on chops catered in. He picked morosely at his food. We sat silently smoking our cigars afterward.

“Wilkie, this will simply not do,” he said, finally breaking our morbid silence. “Let us walk out and get some air, see what amusement might be abroad tonight.”

I was more than happy, in fact eager, to oblige him. In short minutes we were hatted, gloved, scarved, walking-sticked and on our way.

It was a cool (verging on raw), damp April night. A slight mist hung in the halos of the gas lamps in the Strand. He walked briskly with his typical long stride. As usual, he headed into the darkness of the city in the direction of the river. For some reason, some kind of magnetic attraction perhaps, he was always drawn toward that pestilent ribbon of water that bisected the great city.

As we walked through darkened neighborhoods, his pace quickened. Normally, his head swiveled from side to side, eyes darting into every doorway and dustbin, alleyway and dusky mews, but not this night. He wasn’t looking for the chance encounter with some rookery character, whom he could observe and file in his capacious memory for use in some future novel. This night he walked as if he knew his destination.

Somewhere in the West End—we had moved so briskly that, in my struggle to keep up, I had lost all sense of direction—he braked to a sudden stop beneath a lone gaslight at the dark junction of three streets.

“I wonder…” he mused aloud, as I came up puffing from the exertion of our mad gallop across London.

“You wonder what?” I gasped.

“If that could be the very station house out of which our friend Inspector Field works?”

It took me a long moment to figure out what he was talking about. It had been more than fifteen months since Dickens had met Field for the first and (to my knowledge) only time, yet the Detective Inspector was suddenly our mutual friend. A street marker bolted to the brick wall of a building immediately behind our position on the street corner beneath the gaslamp read: “BOW STREET, West London.”

“Perhaps it is,” I finally answered. “It has been more than a year, but I believe he did say Bow Street Station that morning at the gaol.”

“Splendid!” Dickens exclaimed, and set straight off across the street.

“Let us go in, and see if our friend is on duty,” he said, as we read the words etched on the glass of the door:

METROPOLITAN POLICE
Bow Street Station

“Let us go in,” he urged, and, of course, we did.

The reception area of the station house was a drab open room with a blue-uniformed constable sitting at a desk near its back wall. Low wooden benches sat along both side walls. A door, closed, in the back wall directly behind the constable’s desk, was the only break in the whitewashed monotony of the room’s interior decoration.

“My name is Dickens,” he said, addressing the constable on duty, “a friend of Inspector Field. Might I inquire if he is in tonight?”

“Oh, aye, sir,” that blue worthy answered in immediate recognition. “He surely is sir. In the bullpen sir. Go right on back sir.”

I think if he would have fired off one more overeager “sir,” I would have slammed my walking stick down on his desk in protest.
Even the Peelers read Dickens
, I thought, with my usual dose of petty envy.

Dickens swept past the obliging constable into the inner sanctum of the Bow Street Station. The bullpen was a larger open room filled with desks, bookcases, wide message boards on each side wall, with layers of notices on white paper pinned atop one another so thickly that the boards looked like ruffled chickens, a large metal cage (bars from ceiling to floor) filling one corner, a smaller barred holding cell filling the other corner, both cages occupied, the small one by a quiet woman with a child at her breast, the larger with an octopus of tattered rags which turned out to be three drunken tramps sleeping loudly in a pile, a fireplace built into the opposite corner, and four cushioned wooden rockers pulled up to the dancing blaze.

Two of the rockers were occupied. At our unannounced entrance, the two men turned quickly to identify us, on alert. One was a constable in blue uniform. The other, in his sharp black coat and sharp inquiring eyes, was unmistakably Inspector Field, whom I had met only once some fifteen months before. He seemed to recognize Dickens immediately and his face broke into a cordial smile as he rose to greet us.

“Dickens, a welcome surprise, good to see you again.”

“This is my friend, Wilkie Collins,” Dickens said, presenting me.

“Of course, Mister Collins,” Field said, as he extended his oversized hand. “I remember you well. You were one of the party at ’Orsemonger Lane when the Mannings ’ad their last dance. I remember the large pocketwatch you wore on a chain and kept in the front pocket of your brocade vest that evening. I remember thinking ’ow you would be a lucky man to go away from that crowd with such a ’andsome watch still in your possession.”