The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  This extraordinary speech (both for its formality and its deference) delivered, Field and Rogers moved, without any farewell to Dickens and me (as if they did not want Collar to suspect that we were acquainted), toward the great doors.

  Dickens watched them go.

  I watched Dickens, and noted the momentary surprise in his face at this unexpected snub. But he quickly gathered up his bruised dignity. He went first to Angela Burdett-Coutts and, taking her hand, assured her, distinctly within the hearing of Inspector Collar and his man, that he was totally at her service in quest of a resolution of this frightening affair. Turning next to Inspector Collar, Dickens shook that worthy’s hand heartily, all the while exclaiming what an interesting case of murder this was, how fascinated by the working of the Metropolitan Protectives he and his magazine Household Words were, and how grateful he would be to be kept informed of the turnings and developments of this case.* He was all fulsome smiles as he wrung that startled policeman’s hand.

  Outside, on the steps of the bank, Serjeant Rogers was waiting.

  “He wants you to follow us to Bow Street, sirs.” Rogers delivered his master’s message and, without formality, scurried off down the stone steps to join Field in the post-chaise, the driver of which immediately put whip to his horses and spirited our fellow detectives off in a rush.

  * * *

  *Dickens had, indeed, written four feature articles in Household Words two years before detailing the operations of the Metropolitan Protectives. “On Duty with Inspector Field” (August 1850) had been the first of those four essays.

  “Outside of My Jurisdiction!”

  August 11, 1852—Afternoon

  We did as we were ordered, hailed the next passing growler, and followed Field and Rogers to Bow Street Station. Upon entering, with Irish Meg in tow, we found Field and Rogers reclining in their high-backed chairs before the cold hearth and fanning themselves with blue books in the infernally heavy air.

  “Ah, Dickens”—Field rose to greet us—“Sorry I wos so standoffish back there, but I wanted to keep it all very professional with Collar. It is his case, and he is goin’ to have to be dealt with.”

  “Is that why you wanted us here, to apologize?” There was that mischievous twinkle in Dickens’s eye. “I can assure you that I fully understood your motives and behavior from the moment you arrived at the scene.”

  “Indeed.” Field jollily tapped the side of his eye with his frolicking forefinger. “In that case, wot did you think of our friend Collar?”

  “As detectives go”—a wide grin broke out through the thicket of Dickens’s foppish goatee—“and I’m only closely acquainted with one, mind you, and Serjeant Rogers of course,” he said as an afterthought, to which Rogers reacted predictably with a sour stare, “the man seemed rather slow and unobservant.”

  “Collar is a fool!” Field spat. “But he will be thorough, because bein’ thorough is all he can be.”

  “And in his thoroughness,” Dickens observed, “Miss Ternan is sure to come under suspicion?”

  “Yes, undoubtedly. I presume that’s why you were so insistent that I join you at the scene of a murder that is outside of my jurisdiction.”

  “In the past nothing ever seemed out of your jurisdiction,” Dickens taunted him.

  An amused grin spread slowly across Field’s face.

  “That missin’ night guard is the key to these goings-on,” Field finally broke the silence.

  “And we must find him before Collar does.” Dickens picked right up on Field’s train of thought as if they were Siamese twins.

  “Collar could not find his own shirt in his own dresser drawer,” Rogers scoffed.

  “So how do we go about finding this night guard?” Dickens asked. “This Frenchy.”

  “You leave that to Rogers and me.” Field seemed supremely confident. “But I wants you and Mr. Collins to work t’other side of the street.”

  We looked quizzically at him.

  “We must talk to these women, find out about this Eliza Lane. Meggy will help. I asked her more than a month past to join their group, to observe them, in pursuit of this letter writer who is threatening Miss Coutts.”

  Catching my rather perturbed look, first in his direction and then in Meggy’s, Field proceeded with his explanation.

  “I did not inform you, Mr. Collins, because I wanted all to seem natural. Only Mr. Dickens and Miss Coutts knew wot wos afoot. The letters smelled of someone who wos close to her, and I wanted someone on the inside to observe this group of political ladies.”

  As if by some divine intervention, almost at the very moment that her name was mentioned, Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts burst in with Tally Ho Thompson in tow. We all turned to her entrance in surprise, but no one said a word because of the taut look of alarm on her face.

  “Oh, Charles, Inspector Field.” Her voice quavered at the gravity of the message it was her burden to bear. “That terrible murder was not all.”

  “What is it, Angela?” Dickens moved to her side to try to calm her.

  “Coutts Bank! Oh, Charles, this has never happened in all its long history. Coutts Bank has been violated. Ten thousand pounds is missing!”

  “All a Muddle!”

  August 11, 1852—Afternoon

  The whole company was stunned by Miss Burdett-Coutts’s announcement. Even Field was struck momentarily dumb.

  “How wos it done?” Field finally broke the awkward silence.

  Tally Ho Thompson, who had been standing discreetly in the background, took a quick step toward us, all ears, unable to mask his professional curiosity.

  “It was taken from the day vault.” Angela Burdett-Coutts’s voice wavered as she began.

  “Wot is the day vault?” Field interrupted.

  “It is a barred cabinet about the size of a secretary. The main vault, which is a full iron room with an iron door and multiple locks, is opened only once a day, at two in the afternoon. All currency, receipts, and document transactions which occur in the final hour of business are locked into the day vault for transfer to the main vault the following day.”

  “Is it customary to have that much in the day vault?” Field interrogated her as if she were the criminal.

  “No. Not really. But it varies. Monday is a very busy day at Coutts Bank. All the business transactions of the end of the week find their way to Coutts Bank on Mondays. We also have many rather large depositors, merchants whose ships have come in Saturday or Sunday or that day, and who must make a late deposit. That currency could find its way into the day vault. Ten thousand pounds would not be an unusual amount for a late Monday.”

  “How did they get into it?” Serjeant Rogers took the liberty of asking a question, and Field nodded his approval.

  “They cut the lock out with ripping chisels.” She gestured as if she were sketching a picture in the air with her hands. “The day vault has an iron barrel gate that swings closed over its drawers. The lock hangs in a square iron box on this barrel gate. They used ripping chisels to cut off the lock. Each drawer also has a separate lock, but they either picked them or smashed them open.”

  “And once they wos in, they just emptied the drawers and left,” Inspector Field ended Angela Burdett-Coutts’s narrative for her.

  “Quite so.” She nodded.

  We had all risen when Angela and Thompson entered, and we still stood in a ragged circle staring at one another.

  “It’s all a muddle, isn’t it?” Dickens broke the silence which had taken custody of the room.

  “All a muddle it certainly is.” Field slapped the back of his high wing chair, circled around it, and sat down. Dickens ushered Angela Burdett-Coutts to Rogers’s chair, much to that worthy’s sour and silent frowning. The rest of us stood ranged around them. Dickens actually sat down on the hearth stone and lit a cigar.

  “It seems a confusin’ muddle of different crimes.” Field suddenly vaulted out of his chin-pulling contemplation. “But they are all tangled together if you asks
me.” With that pronouncement, he was up and pacing, pulling his chin again. “We really have three different crimes here, but they’re all part and parcel of each other.”

  “How do we have three crimes?” Angela Burdett-Coutts asked, puzzled.

  “We have a murdered woman and a robbery of bank funds.” Dickens interceded for Field with what seemed like an answer, but which turned quickly into simply another version of the question: “But what is the third crime?”

  “The threatening letters,” Field promptly answered. “Mark me, they are part of this as well.”

  “How?”

  “How?”

  Serjeant Rogers’s voice and mine, the only boroughs not yet heard from, spoke out almost in unison.

  “I don’t quite know yet,” Field confessed. “It’s a bloody tangle to be figured out.” And with that he sat back down in his chair and lit his cigar.

  He and Dickens sat opposite one another, their minds swirling around that tangle of crimes like the blue smoke from their cigars swirling up around their heads. Angela Burdett-Coutts sat to Field’s side and I stood at the back of her chair. Rogers leaned against the hearth. Meggy had joined Thompson on a long bench set against the far wall, and the two of them were engaged in an earnest muffled whispering. For all I could tell, Irish Meg was probably complaining to Tally Ho Thompson that Field had not yet broken out the gin.

  “Meggy!” Field commanded her attendance.

  She leapt to his call as if she were still one of his familiars of the night streets. Somehow I resented that. I certainly never addressed Irish Meg in that way, and, if I did, I suspected that she would not jump to my call as she did to his.

  “Meggy”—Field’s voice was more mollifying as she stood before him—“we need to know more about this Eliza Lane who wos murdered. We need to know wot the other women know about her. You have become friends with Miss Ternan. You must go and talk with her and the two other women there about this murdered woman. Mark all they say about her. The smallest things can be important.”

  Meggy’s head was nodding up and down faster than the bale on a spinning jenny. Field paused to think, but he didn’t dismiss her. When Meg started to withdraw out of his fearsome reach, he barked, “Stay!” and stopped her as if she were Bill Sykes’s dog.*

  “Charles”—Field’s attention shifted instantly to his next minion—“I have asked Meg to talk to Miss Ternan because I felt the conversation would be uncomfortable for you and for her and I thought she would speak more frankly to another woman about another woman.” He explained this quietly to Dickens, but quickly shifted back into his sharper-edged voice of command. “But I want you to talk to the artsy ladies in that group, the writers, Miss Nightingale, Miss Siddal, Miss Taylor, Mrs. Browning the sickly one. Find out wot they know about the murdered girl. They’ll know about her. It’ll be all over the prints by mornin’. You and Collins have done this for me before. You knows how to do it. We’ll meet here day after tomorrow in the afternoon to see wot we knows.”

  “Now Meggy”—and he turned back to his spy—“wot happened last night when the murdered woman was so angry?”

  * * *

  *Collins’s reference is to that fierce housebreaker’s vicious dog in Dickens’s Oliver Twist.

  The Women’s Emancipation Society

  Looking Backward to an Evening in July

  My Irish Meg caught her breath and coughed self-consciously at Field’s command for her to take center stage, but she knew she couldn’t escape. To her credit, however, she saw her chance and decided to make the best of it.

  “Fieldsy,” she begged, “if I’m to tell it all I’ve gots to have a drink, a nice gin? That would be good, wouldn’t it?”

  “Wot a smashing idea!” Tally Ho Thompson chimed in, counterfeiting his best Oxford gentleman’s voice.

  Even Field had to smile at the audacity of the two of them. With a nod and a wave of his hand, he sent Rogers off to liberate the gin bottle from the cupboard.

  In that short interlude while the cups were being washed and the gin bottle was passed around, my mind wandered back to an evening in early July when my Meggy had come home from one of her first meetings of the Women’s Emancipation Society. She had come home in such an exhilarated state that I could no longer contain my curiosity, my need to penetrate that society’s secrets.

  “Just what goes on at those meetings?” I could not help but ask.

  “Oh, Wilkie,” she began in a breathless whisper, as if she were telling deep secrets, “they’re mostly respectable women and yet they talks about the wildest things.”

  “Such as?” I inquired, my curiosity piqued.

  “Why, wot we’re doin’ ’tis nothin’,” she went right on with great animation.

  “What do you mean, ‘what we are doing’? You don’t talk, in the company of those women, about what we do, do you?”

  “No. I haven’t…yet,” she said with a coy grin, and I realized she was teasing me. “But I might,” she laughed.

  The idea! To think that what we did in the privacy of our Soho rooms might be described aloud to a circle of women in some public meeting at Coutts Bank or at Bedford College!*

  “Oh, Wilkie, don’t look so stricken. I don’t talk about us. I listens. They talks of free love, does some of them, the Frenchwoman who dresses like a man in imitation of some other Frenchwoman.* And Miss Siddal who has no meat on her whole body and takes laudanum and poses in the nude for Mr. Rossetti’s paintin’s, and the midwife to the poor with the bird name, Miss Nightingale, and that housemate of Nellie’s.”

  “Which one?” And I realized that I was eagerly encouraging her gossip.

  “Why, the big horsey one, Marian Evans. She’s always talkin’ about how the laws won’t let women either think for themselfs or do any of the things that men do.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like makin’ love without bein’ proper married,” Meg snapped back.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, I mean, think about it,” she continued on without so much as a by-your-leave. “Nobody cares that you’re keepin’ some whore called Irish Meg. Everything’s just ducky. But they all knows I’m a whore, so they thinks nothin’ of it. Your friends, Mr. Dickens and Fieldsy, they know about us and accepts me as real people, but if most people knew about us, they’d see me as a pox upon your good name.”

  “But that is exactly why we do not publicly flaunt our domestic arrangement here.” I tried to make her see the pure logic of it.

  “But I’m not a whore anymore, Wilkie.” She wasn’t really angry, just frustrated that I wasn’t understanding these strange distinctions she was making about the inequity of a double standard for gentlemen’s behavior. “You don’t still think of me as a whore, do you, Wilkie?”

  “But I am in love with you, Meggy,” I said, and it was true. I also knew it was my strongest argument with her. “I am addicted to you and I do not care what society says. What do we care, if we have each other?”

  “Sometimes I care, Wilkie. Sometimes I sees myself as no better than just a kept whore.”

  “But you are not a kept whore. We are lovers. I love you. I just said that.”

  “I knows that, Wilkie. But it’s just the fuckin’ that binds you to me, and mebbe havin’ someone to talk to afterward on a lonely night.”

  “No, you are wrong.” I had to defend myself. “Since the first moment I saw you I have been fascinated by you. I am hopelessly in love with you.”

  “Oh, Wilkie, it’s such a muddle,” she said, and snaked her arms around my neck and pulled me to her in a passionate kiss.

  I said not a word. This conversation had unsettled me. I wanted things to remain as they were between us.

  But Meggy could not leave well enough alone. She was too full of her Women’s Emancipation Society and its intellectual delights.

  “They’s women who writes books and articles, Wilkie, just like you and Mr. Dickens do.”

  “What books?” My ungovernable curiosity le
d me right into her trap. She wanted to impress me with the intellectual company into which she had gained entrance.

  “Why, Miss Evans has made into English from German a fat book about Jesus, and Mrs. Harriet Taylor, who is really Mrs. John Mill, wrote an essay called ‘The Enfranchisement of Women’ just last year in one of your magazines, The Westminster Review, but they wouldn’t put her name on it, and I’ll wager none of you men ever read it,* and Miss Nightingale, tonight, at the meetin’, she wos readin’ from a pile of papers she writ and I writ out wot she said. I keeps a little leather book, too, like that one you writes your ideas in.” And with that she sprang to fetch it.

  “These women writes in a whole new way, Wilkie. They’re strange women, but wot they says strikes home. They writes about wot women are, and how women feel, and wot they ought to do. Here’s wot Miss Nightingale read just tonight.” She held her commonplace book up before her face and read from it as if it were Holy Scripture.

  “‘Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity—all three—and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?’ That’s wot Miss Nightingale asks and that’s the main problem, she says—that no one lets women do nothin’.”*

  She paused just long enough for me to realize that I was in for a long night.

  “Barbara Smith—you know, Wilkie, Nellie’s other housemate—she is the outspoken one. ‘Oh bosh!’ she says when some of them starts complainin’. Some of them are really mean and hateful. You wouldn’t believe.”

  “Oh wouldn’t I?” I had grown quite sanguine in the face of her lecture. “Who are these hateful women and just what do they say that is so hateful?”

  “We call them ‘the witches,’ we do. Nellie, Miss Evans, Barbara Smith, Flory Nightingale, and me do. We’re the younger ones in the group. There’s ‘the witches’—the Frenchwoman Marie de Brevecoeur, Sydney Beach, both of them dress like men, mostly in ridin’ pants, and Eliza Lane. Then there’s ‘the riches’—Miss Burdett-Coutts, Miss Harriet Martineau, who started the society, Madame Tussaud, the famous businesswoman in wax goods”—and she laughed at her wit with a gay trill like a tiny bell—“and Harriet Taylor, who would not take her husband’s name. And we call ourselves ‘the wenches.’ Those three groups are the ones who are there all the time, but there are others who believe in the society’s goals. Like Mrs. Caroline Norton, who has been in court against her husband almost twenty years now, and Mrs. Browning, who is brought up in a wheelchair when she can come.”