The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  “She, the Lane woman, she wrote those letters,” Dickens said slowly, thoughtfully. “But why is she dead?”

  * * *

  *This probably refers to Marian Evans’s involvement with John Chapman, who was Dickens’s publisher as well as the publisher of The Westminster Review, where Marian Evans was employed as an editor without portfolio; that is, she did all of the work and Chapman took all the credit on the masthead. In fact, these charges of sexual license on the parts of John Chapman and Marian Evans were probably accurate. She had become involved with Chapman, one of the most open and notorious philanderers in London, soon after her arrival at The Westminster Review. He was her employer, but it also seems that he enticed her into joining, as a frequent visitor and tutor in the French language, the strange ménage à quatre of his household, which included his wife, his mistress Elizabeth Tilley, who lived in, and Marian Evans.

  “All a Bloody Tangle”

  August 11, 1852—Afternoon

  “The murdered woman used the language of the letters in her screamin’ fit to the ladies the night before, then she’s found murdered where the robbery takes place.” Field’s crook’d forefinger brushed contemplatively at the side of his eye. “It is all a bloody tangle,” he said, and shook his head slowly at the initial opacity of this unholy trinity of mysteries.

  Field seemed to want to put an end to our group deliberations, but both Angela Burdett-Coutts and Dickens had other ideas.

  “I must report this robbery to Inspector Collar.” Miss Burdett-Coutts stated an obvious truth, but it confronted Field as a question.

  “Of course you must,” he replied, “but there need be no hurry in doin’ it. It takes time for a bank to count its money, don’t it? Tomorrow you can tell him. For now, you can find out for me everythin’ your bank knows about this Frenchy, this night guard who has gone aglimmer.”

  “I have brought his work papers along. I felt you would wish to look at them. Unfortunately, there is very little here.” She handed two thin sheets of grey paper over to him. “Because he had just come from Paris, it was somewhat difficult to check his past employment, and, I regret to say, it simply ended up not being done. Inquiries were attempted, but never completed, and his work record was excellent, so it was all just dropped. In fact, I’m rather embarrassed to say, we know little more than his name, John Barsad, and place of residence.”

  “Will you be going after this night guard?” Dickens asked.

  “Yes, Rogers and I will make the inquiries into him. He’s at the bottom of some of this I’ll wager.” And turning back to Miss Burdett-Coutts, Field asked, “Where does he say he lives? He won’t be there, but where is it, anyway?”

  “The address given is in Lambeth on Lower Marsh Street just off the Waterloo Road across the river,” Angela replied.

  “Then across the river we must go.” Field seemed almost jovial now that the hunt was on.

  “May we go with you today? I cannot meet with any of those ladies of the Emancipation Society until the morning, anyway,” Dickens eagerly pled his case, “and the heart of this matter lies in Lambeth.”

  Field’s forefinger crook’d and darted to the side of his eye.

  Serjeant Rogers frowned.

  Dickens waited expectantly.

  I wondered why we had to traipse all the way across the river just for Charles’s entertainment, but I should have known better. He was like a hound on the scent.

  “Why not?” Field acquiesced. “Rogers, bring the coach around. Mr. Dickens is right. We shall waste no time.”

  Rogers scurried to obey.

  Dickens’s face broke into a sunny grin of anticipation.

  “Thompson, you will stay with Miss Coutts…eyes open, yes?” Field barked his order.

  “Eyes always open, they is, guv,” Tally Ho answered with his typical nonchalance, his trademark grin slinking across his face.

  “Meggy, see if you can find Miss Ternan this afternoon, right,” Field barked his second order.

  The others dismissed, Field turned sharply to Dickens and me: “Gentlemen”—he started toward the door—“let us try to find our Frenchman.”

  “A Strenge Lot They Wos!”

  August 11, 1852—Late Afternoon

  London’s late-afternoon streets were crowded as Inspector Field’s black post-chaise threaded its way toward the river. The thick ranks of foot passengers opened before us and closed behind as Rogers on the box coaxed the horses through the twisted streets. The heat shimmered in the afternoon air as we crossed the Thames at Waterloo Bridge. Putrid smells rose off it like steam from an open cesspool. The streets of Lambeth were hung with a haze of dust unstirred by any breeze. Lower Marsh Street, which harbored the house number we were seeking, was dustier than any other area in London proper that summer due to the huge excavation for the new train station. Waterloo Station it would be named in years to come, but, as we rode past, it was simply a gaping hole overrun with rough men moving dirt.

  The number we sought, 49 Lower Marsh, was a high crumbling house coated with the dust and soot of a century. It stood locked in a chain of other such dirty houses. Its windows were small and narrow, its roof steep and bristling with stovepipes sticking up at all angles like pins in a cushion.

  Up four rickety steps perched a tall, thin common door wearing five small letter boxes up its front like buttons on a shirt. Each box wore a single number, 1 through 5, signifying, we presumed, the different flats. Field knocked upon the door with his murderously knobbed stick, but no one answered. When he tried the doorknob, it gave amenably to his turn and opened into a common hallway commanded by a narrow stair rising up into the darkness. The only door opening off of this common hall bore no number, yet stood ajar, as if eavesdropping upon the comings and goings by the front door. Field, impatient with the lack of interest in his stern knocking, moved to this door and barked: “Who is in there? Come out for the Protectives!”

  A woman of not immediately determinable age in a slatternly dressing gown and smoking industriously from a straight-stemmed corncob pipe slouched into the doorway and stared disinterestedly at Field as if he were some itinerant tinker trying to sell her an old pot. Upon closer inspection, this woman was not old (though her face was lined), but not young, either, in her early forties I would wager, yet with strong marks of hardship etched upon her countenance.

  “I am an inspector of the Metropolitan Protectives,” Field addressed this staring, smoking woman. “We have been told we could find a Mr. John Barsad livin’ here.”

  “Could’ve found him livin’ here two days ago, guv, but he’s gone now, he is.” The woman spoke with a blithe unconcern, as if she had seen everything there was to see.

  “Gone? What do you mean? When?” Field pursued his dogged questioning, knowing that he was too late.

  “Left is wot I means”—the woman, with some impatience, blew smoke toward Field’s face—“in the middle of the night two nights ago, lock, stock, and all those books, just disappeared he did, a fortnight’s rent in arrears.”

  “Pardon me, ma’am, but who are you?” Field was asking the questions, but Rogers was writing the answers down with a black pencil in a little paper notebook.

  “Smithers, Amanda Smithers.” There was no annoyance in her answers, only a world-weariness which seemed to ask, Why would anyone care? “It wos Amanda McMurphy once, but Smithers changed it to Smithers when he married me. He’s in Lambeth churchyard these eight years now.”

  “Mrs. Smithers—”

  “Amanda, sir,” she interrupted, and actually gave Field a weak smile, as if perhaps she was considering him a candidate to replace poor dead and buried Smithers.

  “Yes, Amanda.” Field was being unbearably polite. “Can you tell me all about Mr. Barsad? Wot did he look like? Wot did he do? All you knows about him?”

  “Yes I can, sir.” And she flashed him that coy smile again through the blue cloud of pipe smoke around her netted hair. “Won’t you and your gentleman friends come into m
y parlor?” With that, she waved for us to follow her through her smoke-webbed doorway.

  She sat down on a shiny and frayed couch of pale blue velvet and laid her extinguished pipe on a small deal table at her knee. The four of us ranged ourselves around the tiny parlor room, Field taking a seat next to her on the widow’s couch, Rogers filling the small wing chair just beside, Dickens pulling the only other chair in the room, a wooden straight-backed specimen, up to the deal table. I leaned as unobtrusively as possible against the sooty mantelpiece.

  “Well,” Field reopened our colloquy, “tell us about your Mr. Barsad.”

  “A quiet one he wos, and a strenge lot they wos who come to visit him reg’lar.”

  “He had regular visitors, did he?” Field gently prodded her.

  “He did, uh strenge lot they made, too, the four of them, him and t’other three. All men. They would come in and go right up. I never seen their faces, but they come reg’lar and they stayed late, sometimes the whole night. I always heard them come and seen them go up, in the evenin’s, after dark, but I rarely seen them leave. They’d always sneak out after I’d gone to sleep.”

  “Four men you say”—Field seemed to be turning her information over slowly in his mind—“meetin’ regularly here?”

  “Yes sir. Two of ’em would come together most of the time. Then lately another one’s been comin’ by hisself. Kinda strenge, ain’t it?” And then she began to get gossipy with Field, moving closer to him on the couch and placing her hand conspiratorially on his knee. “You’d think a handsome man like that quiet Mr. Barsad would want to invite a woman up for tea and fixin’s sometime all by herself, wouldn’t you?” She paused to note Field’s reaction to this confidence, and when he nodded jovially, she went right on. “But he never did, certainly not me he didn’t. Our Mr. Barsad just buried himself in all those books of his, and didn’t seem to have no time for nothin’ except his strenge night meetin’s.”

  “Meetings?” Dickens interposed, providing a brief surcease in the tender exchange of confidences between the Widow Smithers and this newly discovered object of her affections.

  “Wot sort of meetin’s?” Field drew her attention back.

  “Reg’lar meetin’s with the same two men goin’ up and stayin’. And strenge noises like they wos Papists doin’ scaremoneys, strenge noises and movin’ about the flat, him talkin’ and them answerin’.”

  “So you would eavesdrop on Mr. Barsad and the men who went up to visit him?” Field stated it congenially enough, but she took immediate offense.

  “Not eavesdroppin’ no,” she bristled. “Checkin’ the hallways each night. It wos my job as mistress of the house.”

  “Wot did Mr. Barsad look like?” Field abruptly changed the subject.

  “He wos a tall man he wos, and he kept very close. Went out to his work most nights, and held his meetin’s the only nights he wos home. Always carried a book with him. I pretended he wos a perfesser. That’s sort of the name I give him, though I never said it to his face. ‘The perfesser’ ’cause he read so much.”

  “And a mustache, right?” Rogers asked, in the way of all lawyers who already know the answers before they ask the questions.

  “No, he wos a clean-shaved cove, he wos.”

  “Tall is right,” Field said levelly, “but he had a quite bushy mustache, didn’t he?”

  “No sir. No mustache.” She was looking at all of us strangely. “He shaved himself clean at least every other day.”

  “No mustache?” Dickens wasn’t really addressing her.

  “Good lord, are you all deaf? He had no mustache!”

  “Yes, well, fine.” Field regained his conciliatory voice. “We just thought that the man we were lookin’ for had a mustache.”

  “Well he didn’t.”

  “Can you tell us anything else about him?” Field moved on.

  She thought a moment, coyly glancing up once to see if Field was looking at her. “His ring,” she finally declared.

  Both Dickens and Field spoke at the same time. “His ring?”

  “Aye, his ring.” It was as if she had gone into a brief trance, musing fondly on this morsel of memory. “He wore the most beautiful blue ring. He always held it up to his face when he talked to you, like he’d put his finger to his lips and all you could see wos that ring flashin’. When he talked to me, I always listened to every word he said.”

  “Did you ever have any trouble with him?” Field asked. “Any violence?”

  “No, no, he wos a good one,” she protested, “much better than most of the ones, those workmen on the train yard, who takes my rooms. No, until this last fortnight he mostly paid his rents on time, and never caused no fuss.” Then, holding up both her hands in a gesture of assurance, she finished by forcefully asserting: “I don’t pry, I don’t, but I watches them come and go, and I wonders about the noises and the meetin’s. A strenge lot they wos, but I don’t pry.”

  “Could we see the rooms he let now?” Coming from Field it was more a quiet demand, her consent taken for granted, than a request.

  “He had the attic room.” She submitted without question, trying her washed-out little amorous smile on Inspector Field once again. “I’ll show you up.”

  The merry widow fetched her keys and led us up the steep and creaking steps to the top of the house. The rooms were low and dark. Two greasy little windows graced their ends, tucked back into the steep angle of the roofline like discarded and forgotten letters.

  She lit the single gas lamp mounted on the wall inside the door. It sent dim fluttering waves of yellow light out over the weirdly angled space. One thin partition with a low curtained door separated the attic into two rooms. There was little to see. The bigger of the rooms was sparsely furnished with a distressed table which served as a desk, two frayed and torn stuffed chairs, and a dirty rug of coarse material that resembled a horse blanket. As we entered, the scurrying sounds of tiny feet brushed across the floor and disappeared into the sooty walls. Field found a pile of guttered-out candles in one corner.

  The back room held a low pallet covered with tattered sacking which must have served as the man’s bed. Other than these sparse furnishings, the room offered up little in the way of evidence for Field to ponder, except for one item which seemed to momentarily pique his interest. From beneath the ragged bed, Field extracted a pair of rather petite women’s bloomers of fine silk. He studied them carefully before giving them into Rogers’s keeping. Their fine smooth fabric seemed out of place amidst the coarseness of all the other furnishings.

  Inspector Field thanked the enamored Widow Smithers profusely as we descended from those squalid attic rooms. She, in turn, inquired with transparent curiosity into where he could be reached if any more pertinent information came to her mind.

  “St. James Station, it is,” Field answered with a backward wink to the rest of us. “Just ask for Inspector Collar.”

  We left her beaming in the doorway in anticipation of her next rendezvous with her new policeman friend.

  A murderous sun, the color of blood, hung over that gloomy black river as we crossed Waterloo Bridge. The bells of St. Paul’s tolled seven as we lumbered into Bow Street. I cannot speak for Field, Rogers, and Dickens, and I know it was well past the summer solstice, but for myself I can say that it seemed as if we had just lived out the longest day of the year. I was exhausted.

  At Bow Street Station, Inspector Field reminded Dickens of our charge for the following day, attaining interviews with the members of the Women’s Emancipation Society. The indefatigable Dickens announced his intention to walk back through Covent Garden to the Wellington Street offices, but I begged off this time and hailed a hansom to transport me to Soho.

  All across the West End in that cab, my feet aching, my neck bristling from the oppressive heat, I envisioned an evening’s quiet repose in the cool shelter of my flat, a bottle of sherry uncorked, and Irish Meg by my side offering her delicious companionship. The cab delivered me to my door, and I st
ruggled into the building primed for mindless rest, but there is no rest for the wicked.

  Irish Meg and Nellie Ternan were waiting for me in the parlor. Dickens’s Nellie was in tears.

  This Other Love

  August 11, 1852—Evening

  “Meggy? Miss Ternan? What is it? What is wrong?” I could see in their faces that my hopes for a quiet evening were dashed.

  “Oh, Wilkie, you’ve got to help her.” Irish Meg opened her argument like a chancery solicitor. “Nellie is beside herself.”

  How could I not see that? The annoyed question sparked in my mind. Why did she bring Nellie here? Why didn’t they go to Dickens? He is her guardian. These questions flooded through me and drowned my enthusiasm for this whole affair.

  “Of course, of course, Meggy, I will help. Please, Miss Ternan, do not cry. Tell me what is the matter.”

  Some hypocrite had taken possession of my tongue and was toadying shamelessly to these two women in utter disregard for my desire to simply recline upon the settee (which they had usurped) and doze off.

  “Wilkie, it is very hard for her to tell.” Irish Meg spoke as if Miss Ternan had no voice of her own. “She is very—”

  “Meggy!” I cut her off, unable to conceal my impatience. “Let her speak. Let her tell me what is wrong.”

  Meg shot one of her withering looks at me, but did not proceed. Instead, she returned to comforting Nellie with an arm around her shoulder and her lips whispering in her ear.

  “Miss Ternan,” I finally said in a quite even and controlled voice, “I am very sorry if I have been sharp, but it has been such a long and shocking day, and you and Meggy caught me by surprise. Please forgive me. I wish only to be of help. Please, tell me what is wrong and what I can do.”

  She slowly raised her eyes to mine. They were filled with pain and fear. I was afraid that she was about to burst into tears again. But I was wrong. Somehow, she found her voice, though her words were fragmented and shaken.