“It…it…it is Eliza Lane…who was…oh lord…who was…murdered.” That last terrible word drove her to bury her face in her hands once again.
But Meggy, who had her firmly by the shoulders, purred in her ear, “It is all right Nellie, it is all right. You can tell him. He will understand and help us, he will.”
Thus bolstered, Miss Ternan raised her frightened eyes and, haltingly, attempted once again to speak.
“I saw her…the poor murdered girl…I was with her that afternoon. Oh, Mr. Collins…I’m so afraid they will think I killed her.”
With that frightened admission she again buried her head in Irish Meg’s shoulder, which was already wet with her tears.
Meggy’s and my eyes met. She must have seen the plea for help in mine because she gave me a quick nod and, in a gentle, almost motherly voice, coaxed Nellie back.
“You must tell him all of it, Nellie,” Meg cajoled. “He is the only one who can help us. Trust me, he will help. He is a good man.”
What my Meg said about me made me forget all of my fatigue and annoyance.
“Yes, tell me Nellie,” I responded to Meg’s challenge. “I am totally at your service.”
“It’s the…the scarf I fear,” her voice shook.
My eyes darted to Meggy’s, questioning.
“Tell him about the scarf,” Meggy whispered in her ear.
“Meggy said it was a bright green scarf,” Miss Ternan took up her narrative, seeming to steady a bit, “that killed Eliza.” She stopped briefly for breath, but did not break down. “I fear it is my scarf that killed her.”
“Yours? But how?” I suddenly felt terribly out of my depth.
“She took it away with her that afternoon.” Nellie seemed almost mesmerized by the narrative she felt compelled to spin out. “I gave it to her…as a present. She admired it, and she seemed so lost and unhappy, and then Meggy told me she was…choked with it.”
“But why were you together that afternoon?” I asked.
“That is the hard part to tell,” Meggy interceded. “It is sick and not Nellie’s fault.”
“What is it? You must tell me.” I turned my attention back to Miss Ternan. “Did she threaten you? Try to blackmail you?”
“No, no, worse.” Miss Ternan seemed once again on the verge of breaking down at the enormity of it.
“She tried to make love to her.” Irish Meg usurped Nellie’s voice once again. “That is why it’s so hard for her to tell it.”
Meggy’s trying to make it easier seemed to spark her own courage. Immediately Nellie found her voice, and it was stronger and more detached, as if she were telling a story in which she and the murdered woman were mere characters.
“She has been bothering me for weeks,” she began. “Touching me, hugging me—once she kissed me on the mouth. She said she saw me onstage in the play dressed as a man. She has asked me to go with her and the others, Marie I think, though Marie has never done any of this to me.”
“Done what to you?” I was taken utterly by surprise at the direction in which this conversation had turned.
“Talked of love, this other love, tried to lure me. Eliza only did it when we were alone, but she was always in Marie’s company. I had decided they were lovers.”
“Who is this Marie?” I turned to my Meggy for help.
“Marie de Brevecoeur, the Frenchwoman who dresses like a man.” Meggy taunted my flawed memory. “I’ve told you about her before.”
“What did this Lane woman say to you?” I turned back to Nellie Ternan.
“She was at our rooms that afternoon. That was the first time she threatened me.”
“Threatened you!” my voice betrayed my alarm.
“Yes,” Nellie went on, “for weeks she had made her perverse advances and I had rebuffed them, but yesterday she threatened me with exposure over the Ashbee affair. She seemed to know all about it.”
“Good lord! How?”
“I don’t know. She knew everything. She said: ‘You were raped by a man. You know what men can do.’”
At that, the tears once again welled up in her eyes and I thought we were going to lose her, but she steadied herself.
“She said: ‘You know what men can do, and will. Women are different. Have you ever been with a woman?’ And she started touching me again, caressing my arms, moving very close to me, whispering, luring.”
She seemed utterly lost in her story, speaking in a low, frightened rasp.
“‘Have you ever been with a woman?’ Eliza Lane said. ‘We do things men cannot do. If you let me do them to you, you would understand.’”
“You say that she tried to blackmail you into this unnatural love?” I pursued that telltale revelation.
“Yes, she knew all about the Lord Ashbee horror.” And the poor thing sank once again into Irish Meg’s arms, sobbing.
I waited a moment until her fragile emotions subsided, and then addressed her as tenderly as I could: “How did you reply to her blackmail demands?”
“She told her to go stuff it, she did!” Irish Meg cut in.
I silenced her with a grim scowl. Let the woman tell her own story, I glared.
“I told her that I couldn’t pay her, that I had no money,” Miss Ternan said, and roused herself to continue her narrative. “But that was when she said that it wasn’t money she wanted. ‘What I want,’ she said, ‘is to see you naked.’ That is when I fled into my bedroom, and locked the door against her. I did not come out until I was sure that she was gone. She took my green scarf away with her. Oh God, and now she is killed with it!”
“It is…it is…it is monstrous,” I finally found the proper word.
Irish Meg’s face broke into a scoffing grin. “Not so monstrous,” she corrected me, “as some of the things your London gentlemen will pay any street whore to do.”
“What did you do?” I changed the subject. “After she had gone?”
“I made myself a cup of tea,” Nellie answered, as if it were the most natural thing on earth to do. “Neither Bobbie—that’s the name Barbara Smith goes by with us—nor Marian were at home, and I drank my tea and fell asleep, from the shock of it, I suppose. I didn’t wake up until Bobbie came in at six and we had to get ready to go to the society meeting.” Nellie was speaking very quickly now, in a rush. “Then we went to the meeting. I was terrified that Eliza Lane would be there. I didn’t think I could face her, but she wasn’t there. Then she came in, and screamed at us. All I wanted was to run away.”
I thought a moment. The three of us sat quietly staring at each other, hoping that some solution might arise out of all of our shared confusion. Finally, it came to me.
“But you went home that night, did you not? Surely Miss Smith and Miss Evans were there, can attest to your being in for the evening well before the time of the murder.”
“But Wilkie, that is the problem.” Irish Meg interceded once again as the tears welled up in Nellie Ternan’s eyes.
“What do you mean? I don’t understand.”
“I was with Charles,” Miss Ternan burst out in a voice of utter despair.
“She loves him, Wilkie, can’t you see?” The tone of Meg’s voice pleaded for understanding.
“What do you mean? I don’t see at all.” I was talking at Miss Ternan but, again, it was Meg who answered.
“She spent the night with him, Wilkie,” Meg insisted, speaking meticulously as one would to a slow-witted child. “Don’t you see? When Liza Lane wos murdered, Nellie and Mr. Dickens wos together.”
“I did not go home from the meeting,” Nellie Ternan whispered. “I was with him that whole night. In the St. George Hotel.”
It must have been my face, the pure astonishment, which triggered Irish Meg’s impatience.
“Good Gawd, Wilkie, don’t you hear wot she’s sayin’? Do we have to paint you a pitcher?”
I could hardly believe it. Images of her and Charles in bed at the St. George, Laocoönian images, coiled in my mind. Nellie and Charles in be
d together…in defiance of all propriety, all class and custom, all of the unwritten laws of the gentleman in Victorian society.
Only now was it all coming clear to me. Unless she could prove her whereabouts, she would be taken up for murder, but the one person who could prove her whereabouts could not afford to do so. If Dickens stood up for her, his reputation as a gentleman, his marriage, his position as a leader in society, his charity work, perhaps even his career as England’s favorite writer, would be destroyed. Failing to prove her whereabouts that evening could cost Ellen her life, but proving them honestly would most certainly, in another sense, cost Dickens his.
“We, she, Nellie, was afraid to stay at her flat for fear that the Protectives, that other one, would come and take her away,” Irish Meg explained. “So I told her she could stay here for the night.”
“Collar?”
“Yes, him.”
“When he speaks to Bobbie Smith or Marian Evans, they must tell him that I did not come in that night; then he will suspect me and he will come for me.” And, once again, she burst into tears.
“Good lord, Miss Ternan”—I fear my exasperation shone through in the roughness of my voice—“you must stop your uncontrolled tears or they shall make you ill.”
Irish Meg shot an angry look in my direction.
Her look annoyed me. Had I no voice in any of this? I glared back at Meggy in rebellion, but she was too busy comforting Miss Ternan to notice.
“Wot shall we do, Wilkie?” Meg finally looked up from her ministrations.
I had a quite reasonable answer awaiting her: “We shall all go to bed and get a good night’s sleep,” I declared. “There is nothing to be done about any of this tonight.”
For once Meg agreed. At my direction, she guided Nellie Ternan off to our bedroom, where, I presumed, she would tuck her in and, somehow, lullaby her off to sleep before her body was utterly drained of all liquid.
Alone! I felt great joy and relief in my sudden solitude. Not even bothering to undress, I arranged my greatcoat over my exhausted form reclining on the settee when, to my chagrin, Irish Meg glided like a hectoring ghost from the sleeping room to once again prevent me from enfolding myself in the beckoning arms of Morpheus.
“Oh, Wilkie, thank you, you are a brick. She has been sobbin’ ever since I told her of the murder this afternoon. She is sure that she’s goin’ to Newgate to be hung.”
Oh God save me, I thought. I feared that Meg wanted to talk, when all I wanted was to sleep.
“But she is so different now that you’ve talked to her,” Meg babbled on.
I pulled the greatcoat up close around my neck, shifted my body to the most comfortable position on that short velvet settee, and attempted to counterfeit sleep, but Meg continued animatedly like some market-day gossip.
“Oh, Wilkie, I’m so scared of all this. Some of these women are so strange.”
“How are they so strange, Meggy?” I said with an obvious lack of enthusiasm.
“They’s so different from wot I’m used to.”
“How’s that?” I turned over and tried to bury my head under a small pillow, but Meggy snatched it away.
“Like that time Liza Lane asked me if men ever hired me to make love to other women, and Miss Evans, Nellie’s housemate, she came to one meetin’ sportin’ a big brown lump on the side of her face, and she moved into Mr. Chapman’s house but then came back to live with Nellie and Bobbie Smith at Macklin Street. I got my suspicions about some of these ladies, Wilkie.”
“But they are not your problem.”
“I know that, but Fieldsy makes them my problem. I’m his spy. I probably always will be. Oh, Wilkie, I don’t want everyone I meet to always think me a whore.”
“They don’t, Meggy. I don’t. I love you.” It was all I could do to keep my eyes open.
“I wants to be respectable, Wilkie, be educated like them, work for a livin’ respectable. Oh, Wilkie, you’re the only one I can talk to.”
Lucky me! I silently mourned.
“You’ve been so good with her, Wilkie. This afternoon, all she could do wos bury her head in my shoulder and cry. She is always so quiet, so apart, almost invisible you know, at our meetin’s, but tonight with you, she seemed to be findin’ her voice.”
That is fine, I thought, but just how can you be so sure that she didn’t kill her? She has killed before.* How can you be so sure that she was with Dickens? Simply because she says so? But I was only whistling in the wind. I knew that it was only too possible that she and Dickens had spent the night together, that Charles was her alibi, God help him. That was the last sinister thought I remembered before I plummeted into sleep.
* * *
*In the affair of “the Macbeth Murders” as narrated in Collins’s first memoir, commercially titled The Detective and Mr. Dickens, Ellen Ternan, after being drugged and raped by the stage manager Paroissien, killed her attacker with a pair of household shears.
Phantom Dreams
Looking Backward to a Night Walk in July
But I could not sleep. Restless dreams haunted my fragile slumber. Perhaps I slept for an hour or two. I was, after all, exhausted. But it was a wakeful sleep, and after some time the torment of my tossing and turning left me wide awake on my back on that lumpy settee staring up at the ceiling, plagued by the phantoms of my own mind and my tendency toward visions of impending disaster.
I knew that Dickens loved the girl. He had told me so himself in one of his rare moments of personal revelation. We had been walking his beloved night streets perhaps two weeks earlier, only days after the attack upon Miss Burdett-Coutts in the street which my Meggy had foiled. He was troubled that evening. Over dinner he had shown me a copied text of the latest of the threatening letters that Angela had received. Staring up at the ceiling in my sleeplessness, I remembered it as clearly as if it had happened the day before rather than some weeks earlier.
“They are getting more violent, Wilkie,” he had prefaced his concern as he spread the letter out on the desk which also served as our dining table when we ate in at the Wellington Street offices. I had seen the first of these letters that afternoon six weeks before at Urania Cottage, but I had not been made privy to the second in the series. That second letter, Dickens had let drop in conversation, had been much like the first, threatening Miss Burdett-Coutts with violence because of both her business and her Urania Cottage philanthropy. I had to agree, however, that this third letter was more disturbing than what I had seen and heard of the other two.
Miss Coutts,
Keeper of Whores and Sodomites!
Judgement Day is at hand!
Your Bank will pay!
Your whores will die!
Your life will be misery and pain!
I am watching you, and my time
is coming soon.
the Phantom!
This letter actually threatened individuals—Angela herself, the inmates of Urania Cottage—and it was peppered with exclamation marks, the most violent form of punctuation. I could not help but think how much the Grub Street tuppenny dreadfuls would love to get their sensation-mongering little hands on it. “Mysterious Phantom Stalks Whores, Sodomites, and Bankers,” they would trumpet in their garish running heads.
“This phantom, whoever he or she is, comes right out and declares that it is stalking her.” Dickens broke the grave silence which had fallen between us as I read the note.
It was that unsettling letter that made Bow Street Station our first stop that evening after dinner.
“Angela will be there,” Dickens had explained when we set off without even having our usual postprandial coffee. “Something must be done and Field has a plan.”
When we arrived at the station house and entered the bullpen, Tally Ho Thompson, ex-highwayman, thief, cracksman, swell mobsman, housebreaker, spy, and, God help us, actor, was the first to come forward like a gentleman to shake our hands. Dressed in a brown tweed suit with a matching vest framing a dark cravat and with a jaunty
peaked cap on his head, he looked like a Scotsman going out to play at that silly game of golf. He shook our hands enthusiastically. “Mr. Dickens. Mr. Collins.” He pumped my hand so aggressively that he spun me off balance and had to reach out to catch me by the arm to steady me. “Uh, sorry sir, haven’t seen you for such a stretch.”
Inspector Field, Serjeant Rogers, and Angela Burdett-Coutts were also there but greeted us in a more subdued manner than our friend Thompson. Disdaining either preface or pretension, Field plunged directly into the business at hand.
“This foolishness has gone on too long, it has,” Field growled. “We should have paid more attention to it when Mr. Dickens brought that first note. By custom, however, writers of letters like these are makin’ empty threats.”
“But what do you think this latest, more violent, letter means?” Dickens straightforwardly expressed all of our fears.
“Who knows wot it bloody means?” Field was not one to dwell at length on guesswork. “It could be a disgruntled employee or someone upon whom the bank has foreclosed or someone who has been refused a loan. It could be someone who thinks he knows something or someone who thinks he can scare Miss Coutts into paying. Wot it means is not my main concern.”
“What then?” Dickens pressed.
“Whoever this letter writer is, he’s out to harass Miss Coutts. The violence of this last makes me think this phantom might really mean her harm. He has already once attempted to attack her in the street.”
“Better safe, eh?” Dickens agreed.
“Exactly.” Field’s forefinger scratched decisively at the side of his eye as Rogers nodded sagely in agreement. “And that is why we’ve brought friend Thompson along tonight.”
We all stared blankly at Field, waiting for some explanation.
“Miss Coutts”—he addressed her (as he always did) as though she were a bank rather than a person—“I would like you, just temporary to be sure, to take on Mr. Thompson here as your personal bodyguard, just till we clear up this puzzle of the letters.”
The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens Page 8