The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  As we climbed those grey stone steps, the heat so beat upon us that entering that cavernous building of marble floors and mahogany desks provided a relief, an escape from the heat and the airless, stifling torpor of the London streets. We found Miss Burdett-Coutts in her private offices on the second floor and were ushered in immediately by her clerk.

  “Oh, Charles, I am so glad to see you.” She rose fervently from her desk upon our entry and seated us on the purple plush couches around a low deal table that also inhabited her office rooms.

  “Angela, has that man Collar been here this morning?” Dickens plunged right in as soon as we were seated.

  “No, but—” she began to answer.

  “Good,” Dickens did not let her finish, “there have been some new developments that you should know.”

  “Oh no, I have been afraid of this.” Miss Burdett-Coutts startled both of us with the tremor of anxiety in her voice, as if she already knew the bad news that Dickens was about to deliver.

  “Angela, there is no need for great concern,” Dickens tried to calm her. “It is about Ellen. Collar suspects that she is involved in this murder.”

  “Oh my God!” It was Miss Burdett-Coutts’s turn to be startled, but as she sank back into the cushions of the couch there was also a quite palpable exhalation of relief in her voice, as if she had just been spared a painful revelation. “What is it? What has happened?”

  With dispatch Dickens related all the happenings of the morning. Miss Burdett-Coutts listened intently, absorbing each new revelation, from the scarf to the sequestering of the fair fugitive to the reappearance of the mother, with ascending expressions of alarum and sympathy registering on her face. When Dickens had finished, she gathered herself for a long moment and then leaned ominously toward us, her face still clouded with that anxiety she had exhibited upon our first entering her office.

  “Oh, Charles, this is all getting so out of hand,” she began. “I fear there is more.”

  This conversation was developing like a lawn-tennis match. It was our turn to be startled once again.

  “Angela, what is it?” I could not tell which of them was more fluttered by the revelations that were flying like a shuttlecock back and forth across the table.

  “I fear there is something that you and Inspector Field ought to know. I had not thought of him until this horrible murder and robbery at the bank, but his memory has hung heavy in the back of my mind for oh these many years. I did not want anyone to know about him. I honestly do not even know if he still exists or where he is. But he could be involved in this.”

  “For God’s sake, Angela, who are you talking about?” There was exasperation in Dickens’s voice, a frustration that this was all so complicated already that no more complication was really welcome.

  “My husband.”

  “Your what!” It was not difficult to understand Dickens’s consternation since everyone believed Angela Burdett-Coutts to be unmarried.

  “Well, not, not really my husband,” she stammered, “my once husband. He deceived me, ran off, jilted me after demanding money from my father. It was annulled.”

  Dickens just stared, wide-eyed, at her.

  Thus Angela Burdett-Coutts began her strange narrative. I cannot reproduce all of her exact words, but here, in summary form, are the startling facts of the history she unfolded for us.

  “His name was James Barton and he seemed the perfect gentleman,” Angela began. “He was such a talented man in so many ways, but it seems his greatest talent was for seducing women, rich women, widows mostly, and making off with as much of their money as he could. I guess I was different, much younger, only twenty-three. I think he planned from the beginning to marry me, actually did marry me. My father saved me from a life with James Barton, but I don’t think James Barton ever intended to have a life with me in the first place.”

  One could clearly perceive that this revelation was quite painful for Angela to tell. Sadness and regret were palpable in both her voice and her countenance. She told us how she met this cad, Barton, at the stables off Rotten Row in Hyde Park. At that time, almost twelve years before, she was in the habit of riding almost every day, which she still did, though on a less frequent and strenuous schedule. Barton also kept a horse there and got into the habit of riding with her a number of times a week. Soon he was always there waiting for her when she arrived for her ride. He was older (about seven years, in his early thirties), handsome, unutterably charming, and such a joy to be with that the young Angela fell hopelessly in love in the shortest possible time. It was just she and her father living in the family mansion in Kensington, her mother having died some years before. She told how her father was utterly devoted to her.

  “It killed my father to have to do what he did,” Angela said, reflecting upon this pivotal event in her history. “All he wanted was for me to be happy.”

  “What did your father do?” Dickens asked, rather unimaginatively I thought.

  “He paid him to leave me alone.” And at that revelation Angela began to weep as if the unearthing of this buried secret was something that still, all these years later, caused her great sorrow.

  It seems that this Barton convinced her, on the pretense of a holiday at the seashore, to run off to Bournemouth Sands to get married.

  “Now, I cannot believe that I was so gullible, so stupid”—Angela was actually laughing at herself through her tears—“but I was madly in love and he was so handsome and charming.”

  But her father, Martin Burdett-Coutts, had been suspicious of this Barton chap all along and had hired a solicitor to make inquiries into Barton’s past. By the time that the solicitor reported to her father, however, it was too late. She and Barton were off and the sham marriage was done. But Barton never attended their honeymoon. As soon as the marriage ceremony was ended, he abandoned his new bride in their seaside hotel in Bournemouth and rode straight to London to break the bad news to her father and extract his pound of flesh; several thousand pounds of cash might be a more accurate representation of it. In return for the money, husband Barton disappeared into the Continent without even so much as a farewell note to his unblushed bride.

  “Oh, he was so smart about it,” Angela remembered. “He married me, but he made certain that the marriage could be annulled if the right terms were met. The merchandise was as yet undamaged.” Angela tried to make a weak little joke out of it. “Father bought him off so that he would not hurt me any more.”

  An awkward silence hung over the three of us for a long moment when Angela had finished her story.

  “Why are you telling us this now, Angela?” Dickens gently coaxed her back to the present.

  “Because, because…it could be him,” she stammered. “Perhaps he is back. Perhaps he is writing these letters. Oh, Charles, I have never talked of him to anyone. When Father died six years ago that part of my life ended forever and I became the chief officer of Coutts Bank. Now the past is coming back to haunt me. I cannot allow it.”

  “Just what makes you think that it is him?” Charles was leaving his role of understanding confidant and gratefully reassuming his more familiar role as inquisitive detective, collector of people’s stories and the motives of their hearts.

  “I cannot say for certain,” she said, then thought on it for a long moment. “It is just his style. This is a bad man, Charles, a very intelligent and resourceful man. Everything that Inspector Field has conveyed to me by way of Mr. Thompson reminds me of him. He can play any role he wants. He can be one person one moment and another person the next. That was how he was so successful with all of those women before me. That was what my father found out about him.”

  The poor woman looked exhausted as she sat there on that regal couch. It was as if this outpouring of the secret past had drained her of all her strength. Dickens moved next to her on the couch and took her hand. Reassurance was the only thing on his mind.

  “Angela, I must tell this story to Field.” Dickens’s voice was firm yet gent
le. “But he will be the only one. Wilkie and I will never utter a word of it to anyone else. There have been no hints of this very private information in any of the threatening letters, so I do not think that this man is their source. I feel this elusive night guard from the bank is our man, but one never knows. Please do not worry. Field will do everything that he can to put these troubling crimes to rest. In the meanwhile, however, you must be very careful in your handling of the other policeman, this Collar. Miss Ternan is presently his prime suspect and I fear we must leave him with that ridiculous misapprehension for now. Wilkie and I must go do some work for Field today, but we shall keep you well informed. Keep Thompson close by; he is a good man. And, for God’s sake, do not get yourself all upset about some ghost out of twelve years past. That man has probably been shot by some angry husband years ago.” And he ended his lecture with a mischievous chuckle.

  Both Angela Burdett-Coutts and I could not help but laugh. Dickens had a talent for doing that, for inserting a comic twist into even the most serious considerations. We left Miss Burdett-Coutts much more composed than she had been when we arrived, when she was still bearing the burden of her secret past alone.

  It is strange though. After that, after hearing her secret, I could never think of Angela Burdett-Coutts in the same way again. After hearing her story, she seemed so much more human to me, much less intimidating (as I think I had held her to be as the master of the greatest bank in England). And then, years later, whenever I thought of her secret story, I always thought of Dickens’s own Miss Havisham, his bride left at the altar. But no one could ever accuse Angela Burdett-Coutts of shutting herself off from the world. She had dedicated her life to the women of London.

  Strange Interviews

  August 12, 1852—Afternoon

  Sleepy Rob, sitting outside of Coutts Bank on the box of his double hansom cab in his perpetual doze, seemed oblivious of the oppressive heat of the day. A tap of Dickens’s walking stick to his wheel awakened him. With his long face and his slow eyes, he looked like a reluctant hound.

  “Yes guv, ’ere and waitin’,” he assured Dickens. “Where will it be now?”

  “Macklin Street. Miss Ternan’s lodgings.”

  At the Macklin Street house, we pulled up behind a black police post-chaise sitting abandoned at the curbstone. Even as we were stepping down, Inspector Collar and his man with the foreign and unpronounceable name emerged. We had proceeded there in hopes of finding either Miss Barbara Leigh Smith or Miss Evans, or both, at home. We had not expected once again to have to deal with the annoying Collar.

  “Mr. Dickens, Mr. Collins…” Collar addressed us in that curt idiom of martinet clerks speaking to their inferiors of the public. “We seem to be making all o’ the same stops today.”

  “Yes, don’t we,” Dickens humoured the man. “We came here in the hope that Miss Ternan and Mr. Collins’s secretary, Miss Sheehey, had returned.” But he could not leave it at that. His resentment got the better of his judgment. “I had hoped to find them here so that I could warn Miss Ternan of your absurd suspicions and advise her to consult with you immediately.”

  Collar visibly flinched when Dickens pronounced the word “absurd,” but he immediately recovered himself. He, clearly, was not used to dealing with a person like Dickens, who could be a commanding presence when he chose to be. Collar was a mean little toad of a man with eyes too big for his face and a bullying arrogance which perhaps worked well on the poor and downtrodden of the streets, but which had no effect whatsoever upon an adversary like Charles Dickens.

  “No help for you here, I’m afraid.” Collar grinned stupidly. “She hasn’t come back, and those two don’t know nothin’ about it.”

  “Ah, good, they are at home. Good day, Inspector.” And Dickens swept by him in dismissal, leaving me marooned in the company of those two stunned policemen.

  Then Collar did a rather peculiar thing, perhaps as a way of saving face, perhaps as a warning to Dickens not to treat him so cavalierly. With a simple extension of his arm as if it were a gate, he detained me for a moment from following Dickens in, and solemnly took me into his confidence.

  “I have heard that some eighteen months ago,” he began in a low conspiratorial voice, “Miss Ternan wos the prime suspect in a quite similar murder. Of a theatrical man? Stabbed in the back with a sharp object?” He paused for that bit of evidence to sink in. “And Inspector Field, who wos investigatin’ the case, did not think there wos evidence enough for the bench to proceed against Miss Ternan. Now why wos that, Mr. Collins?”

  “Why, why, I’m sure I, I, I haven’t the slightest…,” I stammered. I simply was not suited for this sort of intrigue. I was incapable of lying credibly. Even as my tongue was stumbling about in its clumsy attempt to evade Collar’s interrogation, my body was breaking through that flimsy barrier of his upraised arm and fleeing into the house.

  The inner door of the three women’s lodgings had been left open for me. I caught up with Dickens in the front parlor, where he was just seating himself in a small overstuffed chair directly opposite Miss Barbara Leigh Smith and Miss Marian Evans, who shared a small settee pulled up to a low table covered with blue books and literary journals.

  “Fetch yourself a chair from the kitchen, Wilkie,” Dickens ordered, not even looking at me.

  Our interview with Nellie’s two housemates took place in a bright, pleasant room befitting the residence of three young ladies. The drapes were open and the sunlight poured through the windows, making the pinks and yellows of the flowered wallpaper dance as if the room were in the middle of a meadow. Similarly, the two women were dressed in summery colors, Miss Smith in a white ruffled blouse, very feminine, over a quite ample light brown skirt that flowed to her booted ankles, and Miss Evans in a pale blue dress. Miss Evans was a tall, horsey girl. Conversely, Miss Smith was a robust, freckled, sunburnt outdoorswoman, who looked to be of the rough-and-tumble school. It was she who, with a note of complaint, opened our conversation.

  “Honestly, Mr. Dickens, those policemen have done nothing but harass us for the last two days.”

  “That is true, sir,” Miss Evans added, in her deep thoughtful voice. “I feel as if they have been camped on our doorstep like wolves, waiting for that poor girl to return.”

  “It is bad, Mr. Dickens,” the lively Miss Smith chimed in. “All they can see is Nellie as their murderer. I’m sorry I had to tell them, but they waved that scarf in our faces and we both knew it was hers. But that does not make her a murderer, does it?”

  “Oh, sir,” the shy, thoughtful one in her husky deep voice spoke from the heart, “we are so worried about Nellie. She has not been home now for two nights. Maybe she is murdered, too.”

  Both women stared at him, wondering, I am certain, how he could be so confident of Nellie’s safety, so unmoved by her disappearance.

  “Mr. Collins and I believe that the best and only way to help Miss Ternan allay the suspicions of the Protectives is to find the real murderer of Eliza Lane”—their eyes widened at this—“and we need your help.”

  “Yes, of course, anything.” Barbara Smith nodded her head fervently in the affirmative.

  Dickens was in fine form and full control of the interrogation; the amateur detective who fancied himself a professional was on full point. I sat there like a statue trying to think of some way I could assist him.

  “We need to know more about the murdered woman,” Dickens mused. “What was she like? Who were her friends?”

  I saw my opening. “Meg told me there were three factions in the Women’s Emancipation Society,” I spoke up, “the riches, the witches, and the wenches.”

  Barbara Leigh Smith giggled at that.

  The less lively Miss Evans glared.

  “Miss Lane was one of the witches. What can you tell us about them?” As I finished, even Dickens was staring at me in mild surprise.

  “Eliza Lane was troubled, angry,” Miss Evans began. “She had been abused by her husband.”

&n
bsp; “He beat her, used her in perverse ways.” Miss Smith showed no reticence toward revealing these uncomfortable facts. “That is why she fled her husband. She was terrified of him. She has some relatives, an aged aunt I think, with whom she lives. She is…was…a very confused girl.”

  “How was she confused?” Dickens pressed.

  A look passed between Miss Smith and Miss Evans then, as if they were silently asking each other whether they should go on, as if they were somewhat embarrassed at what they were about to say. Dickens caught it immediately, read it in an instant.

  “Please, ladies, this is not just idle gossip,” he assured them. “We need to know all about this poor dead woman, her habits, her company, the confusion of her mind. It is the only path we have to her killer.”

  His little speech seemed to ease their misgivings.

  “She turned to women, she did,” Barbara Smith blurted out. “Said right out in a meeting that she never wanted to be with a man again.”

  “She fell in with Sydney Beach and Marie de Brevecoeur,” Marian Evans took up the narrative. “They both dress like men, in imitation of the French writer, George Sand. Marie is from Paris. She has said so. Sydney Beach is a very quiet, retiring woman, but Marie de Brevecoeur—”

  “Is a monster!” Barbara Smith cut in.

  Both Dickens and I stared at that accusation.

  “—seemed to us”—and Miss Evans looked at Miss Smith briefly, though not in admonition—“somewhat sinister in her attentions both toward Sydney Beach—”

  “Who I think is a true feminist even though she argues for free love,” Barbara Smith interrupted again.

  “—and toward Eliza Lane.”

  “Do you feel…” Dickens hesitated, his mind working to rephrase what I guessed must be a rather delicate question. “Miss Ternan told Irish Meg that Eliza Lane made unnatural advances toward her,” Dickens began again. “Do you feel that Eliza Lane was involved in that way with Miss Beach or Miss de Brevecoeur?”