The Detective and Mr. Dickens (40 page)

But the coach did not immediately depart. Inspector Field was supervising the revivification of the girl. The two constables were chafing her hands and arms and cheeks. Field himself was pouring short sips of brandy from a bottle, evidently kept in the coach for just such emergencies. He passed the bottle to Dickens, who took a long and uninhibited draught of the strong liquor. The girl sputtered and coughed. Water flowed out of the sides of her mouth as the constables moved her head from side to side. Dickens leaned down, and I perceived that he was speaking with great intensity into her ear as she returned to consciousness.

Days later, I remembered that tableau through the open door of the coach, and asked Dickens what he was so intent upon saying to the girl. It took some prodding, but I finally convinced him to share with me his words, spoken so intently at the very moment when the young woman was being restored to life.

“I simply told her that I would take care of her,” Dickens admitted.

“That is all? You spoke many more words than that,” I objected.

“No, that is not all,” he continued. “I told her that life can be full, that I could help her to live. I told her that in recent weeks one clear thing which I had learned was that one simply cannot run away from reality, whether it be the reality of the world, or the reality of the undisciplined heart. She smiled at me, Wilkie. She smiled at that.”

The black police coach, with Dickens and Field ministering to the girl, rattled off to St. Mark’s Hospital, leaving poor Thompson, Serjeant Rogers, and myself standing shivering in the street.

“Th-th-thanks all ever, Fieldsy,” Tally Ho Thompson shouted after the departing coach. “Bloody guv’ner leaves me ’ere soaked to me skin, and freezin’ me bloody stones off. Thanks all to bloody ’ell, Fieldsy.”

Another coach, equipped with blankets and, I hoped, a bottle of brandy similar to that with which Field had ministered to the girl, had been summoned, and would, no doubt, soon arrive. Standing there, shivering in that Thames-side street, was but a momentary interlude in what had been a frenetic evening of adventure, the likes of which I had never before experienced, in what (when in the company of Dickens and Inspector Field) I was beginning to consider to be my rather sheltered life.

I turned to Serjeant Rogers, coincidentally, at exactly the moment that Serjeant Rogers was turning to me.

“Serjeant Rogers, well done!”

“Mister Collins, sir, we did it!”

We stopped in mirrored surprise, staring suspiciously at each other.

There was simply nothing else for it. Neither of us could help but burst out laughing at our own awkwardness and jealousy. He clapped me on the shoulder. I stuck out my hand for a triumphant shake.

A Resolution of Sorts, or, Reality Rarely Ends Well

May 12, 1851—Toward Morning

St. Mark’s Hospital is both a lying-in and a convalescent establishment. In its whitewashed rooms, the young enter our violent world and the old, beaten down by the disease of reality, meekly depart. A black police coach, bearing a stricken young woman, accompanied by an Inspector of Detectives and the most famous author in all of London, was, to understate, a singular occurrence in the round of that old stone hospital’s grim routine. Because I did not arrive until some time after Dickens and Field delivered Ellen Ternan to the ministrations of the hospital staff, it was necessary for me to piece together what occurred in the wee hours of that morning, yet what occurred there is perhaps the most singular event of this strange history. Negotiations were entered upon, and a friendship between Dickens and Field was stretched to its limits and cemented. I can only report the shards of reality, because much of what happened there that night took place behind closed doors.

When Rogers, Thompson, and myself arrived at St. Mark’s, Dickens and Field were sequestered in a small chapel off the central waiting area. Miss Ternan had been taken to a lying-in room. A young Doctor Woodcourt was in residence, and had taken charge of her care. He was a man well-known to Inspector Field, and, as was evidenced later, well trusted.

A blowsy nurse as large as Forster; and with the breath of a dragon, was manning a desk near the hospital entrance. In her own ragged idiom, she described to me what had happened there prior to our arrival: “The two gennulmuns carried the poor shakin’ creetur in an’ give ’er to Mister Woodcourt, they did. Then they waited, scuffin’ back an’ forth ’til the doctor come out an’ did a lot of ’ead shakin’ in a very positive sort of way, an’ with that, the tall gennulmun commences ’and-shakin’ in an’ equally positive way, an’ the thick gennulmun takes a share, as well, but not near so positive. An’ then, after the doctor escapes the shakin’, the two gennulmun ’appen to walk my way. ’I must speak with you…in private,’ I ’ears the tall gennulman say to the thick gennulman. They looks at me. I points to the chapel door. An’ they been shut up in there ever since.” She told her story with a kind of desperate hilarity.

We did not have to wait long for Dickens and Field to emerge from their private colloquy. As they came through the door, they paused to shake hands, Dickens placing his left hand over Field’s already clasped hand, and clearly offering a fervid “Thank you.”

Field, probably due to the pain in his shoulder, looked almost defeated. Dickens looked empty, as if all his words had been expended. It was not until twenty years later, on the day of Dickens’s funeral, that I learned exactly what had transpired behind those closed doors. They had struck a pact, out of mutual respect and mutual debt. The “tall gennulmun” had thrown his public position and respectability to the winds, and had spoken from the promptings of his heart. The “thick gennulmun” had chosen to humanely reinterpret the law, to the upholding of which he had relentlessly dedicated his life.

In that pub near the Abbey, on the day that Dickens was laid to rest, I was told the details of the pact. It was an agreement that Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus would have nodded at with approval. In exchange for Ellen Ternan’s freedom, Dickens pledged that he would be on call for any detective work that Inspector Field required. He promised that he would give Field access to every level of society to which Dickens, in his position as one of the best-loved men in England, could be admitted. Willingly, Charles sealed this pact with this Mephistopheles of the London streets.

I know not what powers of persuasion Dickens employed upon Inspector Field. Dickens had, after all, saved Field’s life in that dark alleyway. I do know, however, that Miss Ternan never faced prosecution for any of the crimes of this affair. I learned that, within a week, upon her recovery, she was placed in Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts’s home for fallen women at Shepherd’s Bush. It was not until full five years later, when it became public knowledge that Dickens was her protector—before he, in a public newspaper notice, declared his separation from his wife—that the world learned of the existence of Ellen Ternan.

I could not help thinking, as the “tall gennulman” and the “thick gennulman” emerged from that chapel, shaking hands, of the first time I had seen them shake hands. It had been at the foot of the gallows. Dickens, like the St. George that I always think he thought himself to be, that night in that hospital chapel, saved his beloved Ellen from an encore performance of Mrs. Manning’s grisly dance of death.
*

Someday the world shall learn the truth about Charles and Ellen, but the world shall not learn of them from me. In the more than twenty years since Dickens took me under his wing, we have become more than friends, more than simply collaborators and fellow writers. And yet, the man that we paid our last respects to in Westminster Abbey lived in close proximity to Ellen, from all evidence a murderess, for the last fourteen years of his life. Whenever I thought of Ellen living under his protection, I wondered if he ever feared that she had the potential to do to him what she did to the first man in her tangled life. When
Great Expectations
was the talk of all London, years after the time of this memoir, the woman Estella was praised as a most interesting character. There was, of course, speculation among Dickens’s friends, never voiced in any public way, and certainly never intimated to Dickens himself, that Estella, in all her cold beauty, was indeed Ellen. But, as I read
Great Expectations
, I became fascinated by the appearance of Lawyer Jaggers’s housekeeper. It seems to my dull critical sense that Ellen Ternan could well be both characters: the object of love and adoration as well as the tamed murderess.

There was nothing left to do after Dickens and Field emerged from their private discourse in the hospital chapel. Miss Ternan was to remain there, under the care of young Doctor Woodcourt. That young genius also insisted upon examining the injured shoulder of Inspector Field, and the graze-wound to the forehead of Serjeant Rogers. As it was, indeed, well past two in the morning, we left our two policemen to the doctor’s tricks. We clapped Tally Ho Thompson on the back, offering our thanks in that peculiar gruff, male way. When he bid us goodnight, there in the street, he looked eternally young and brash and bright, as if he had just arisen from a night’s sleep. He walked off jauntily, as if he had not at all spent the evening scaling buildings, fighting duels, riding at breakneck speed through the fog, wrestling giants, and swimming rivers. “Think I’ll go look for me Bess, I will,” he offered to no one in particular, as he left us standing there, both bone-tired, in that wet and foggy street.

No hansom cabs were about, as it was so late of the evening (or early of the morning), so we were forced to walk back to our usual parting point at the bottom of Wellington Street. We dragged our weary selves along in quite untypical silence. He was either too tired or too reticent to talk, even to me, his faithful bulldog. To experience Dickens, wordless, was a near-historic event.

*
It seems somewhat strange that Inspector Field, a officer of the law, would make such an exception. Yet Field was an extremely intelligent politician as well as a dedicated policeman. He must have realized the public-relations potential of his relationship with a voice in London as influential as that of Charles Dickens. Perhaps the four articles on the Metropolitan Protectives which appeared in
Household Words
in the months immediately following the events of this memoir, all of which reference Inspector Field by name and recount his exploits, were actually contracted for that very night. This does not imply that Field was a shameless publicity hound. Rather, it acknowledges that the Metropolitan Protectives were a new and undeveloped organization and Field was fully aware of the need to get the message of the Protectives’ value and proficiency out to the general London populace as well as to the politicians who control the purse strings of law enforcement.

The Queen’s Night

May 16, 1851—Evening

Dickens had no time, whatsoever, to recover from the turmoil of that long and dangerous night. When I looked in upon him at the
Household Words
office the next day at noon, he was miraculously reinvigorated. He did not appear at all a man who had not slept for days. He did not appear at all a man who, only a night before, had knocked an attempted murderer off his pins, and saved a damsel in distress from certain death in the fast tide of the Thames. He was bright and quick and full of enthusiasm, as if the sun had suddenly come out in his life, after a long, dark winter of discontent.

“The play’s the thing now, Wilkie,” he laughed. “We have but three days, and we are going to rehearse as we have never rehearsed before.”

He meant it. For the next three nights, he drove us like a tyrant. He screamed at everyone, but no one seemed to care, because it was so clear that the old Dickens had returned from the abyss into which the deaths of his father and his baby daughter had cast him. It was utterly impossible not to believe his plea, that if one actor falls down in his part, we all fall with him. Thank God that the Duke of Devonshire, who had actually supervised the construction of the stage in his spacious music room, and who had turned all the comforts of his library over to the actors as a luxurious green room, was deaf. During those three nights of rehearsals, it seemed that Dickens was shouting his directions, and repeatedly stopping scenes in mid-line with his impatient “no, no, no, no, that’s not it!” in a voice loud enough to be heard out in the traffic of Picadilly. There was, of course, good reason to rehearse so hard. The Queen was coming to our opening performance. Most of the Court would be in attendance as well. The tickets were outrageously priced at five guineas, with all proceeds going to the Actor’s Benevolent Fund, and were being unhesitatingly reserved by the most noble figures in London society. Indeed, this Royal Amateur Performance of Bulwar Lytton’s new play,
Not So Bad As We Seem
, was taking on all of the appearances of becoming one of
the
social events of the season. Dickens was determined that our performance would be professional, and he drove us like galley slaves.

The Queen’s Night, May sixteenth, arrived all too soon. Dickens was thoroughly unsettled, convinced that, due to his personal problems, he had not rehearsed us nearly enough, and that the performance was doomed to a humiliating failure. He could not have been more wrong. More than an hour before the performance, the splendid royal coaches began pulling up and disembarking their elegant occupants at the Picadilly curbstone, outside the Duke of Devonshire’s front gate. A ragged crowd had congregated across the street, but soon that small gathering of the curious had swelled to a worshipful mob of gawking, craning faces, waiting for Queen Victoria’s coach to make its appearance. As each coach pulled up, and disembarked its passengers, the same scene was played in mannered repetition. A gentleman, in black trousers and coat with a severe black hat upon his head, would step down, turn back, and offer his hand to an elegant, fair-skinned, bejeweled lady, who, upon securing both feet upon the ground, would dart a nervous glance across the street at the huzzaing crowd pushing at the makeshift barriers, which a small detachment of the Protectives in evidence had thrown up. The women’s jewels flashed in the gaslight of the palace. The women’s hair shown like gold or glistening ebony. The polished coaches rattled off, to be replaced by the next vehicle for speculation.