“No doubt of it,” Barbara Smith declared.
“I do not think Eliza Lane knew what she wanted,” the more analytic Miss Evans said. “I think she fell under the power of those women.”
“What do you mean ‘power’?” Dickens once again jumped alertly on point.
“I don’t really know. They were strange women. It was as if they were…I just don’t know.”
“Sometimes they were normal,” Miss Smith tried to resolve Miss Evans’s judgmental reticence, “but other times it was as if they were, well, drugged or enchanted, saying things, doing things, that they wouldn’t normally do. Wild things.”
“No, not wild really. Elizabeth Siddal does wild things,” Miss Evans corrected, “but strange, uncalled-for things. Once they kissed each other on the lips, to shock the other women in the room. But we do not shock easily. In fact, we all feel this reigning discomfort with sexuality to be one of the most prominent flaws in our society.” Miss Evans, in an extremely quiet voice, spoke with a seriousness that gave evidence of a strong inner feeling struggling with a powerful intellect.
No wonder she is gaining such a reputation as a freethinker, I thought.
“Drugged, you say? Or enchanted?” Dickens leapt to that possibility.
“I don’t know.” Miss Smith tempered her judgment, and Miss Evans nodded in agreement. “Now, Lizzie Siddal talks openly about taking drugs, but neither Sydney nor Marie de Brevecoeur ever did. For them it was sex, for Sydney only with women, she said as much, but for Marie de Brevecoeur, well…”
“I received the impression that she was interested in both women and men,” Marian Evans finished Barbara Smith’s sentence.
“Did those two women ever make any unnatural advances toward either of you?” Dickens asked, no longer embarrassed, it seemed, at any turn that this exceedingly frank conversation might take.
“No.”
“No.”
“Then why Miss Ternan?”
I could see that it was a struggle for Charles to ask that question, but he forced it out.
“I do not know,” Miss Smith said, and she seemed suddenly quite tired of this conversation.
“I do not know, either,” Miss Evans agreed, but one could perceive her interest in the problem. I think she, this fledgling novelist who in later years would even become Dickens’s equal, had a bit of the detective in her. “But…” She hesitated, thinking on it one moment longer. “But I think it was some sort of initiation rite which perhaps the others had imposed upon Eliza Lane; perhaps they had challenged her to seduce a new young woman into their unnatural circle, or perhaps it was because Nellie was an actress and on occasion wore men’s clothes onstage. She has just such a part right now in The Taming of the Shrew.”
“You ought to talk to Lizzie Siddal or Flory Nightingale,” Barbara Smith suggested. “Those two were the most interested in Marie de Brevecoeur’s philosophies. I think I remember actually seeing one of them, or maybe both, going off with the witches after a meeting. That’s all I can remember.” And with that Barbara Smith seemed to be signaling the end of her interest in this interview.
Dickens apparently picked up her cue: “We cannot thank you enough for all the help you have given us. We have a much clearer picture now.”
That last was, certainly in my case, not true at all. In fact, I was probably more confused now than I had been before we commenced our interview with these two ladies. These unsettling revelations seemed to be flooding upon us as if this murder had opened a weir.
Miss Evans, however, even as Dickens was rising to take his leave, still seemed inclined to pursue the case of these daughters of Lesbos. “I would go and talk to Lizzie Siddal and Flory if I were you, Mr. Dickens. They move in different—shall I say, more open—circles than do Bobbie and myself. We are really homebodies. They are not. Eliza Lane, Marie de Brevecoeur, would talk more openly to them than to us. Flory is a nurse. She works all over London. God knows where you might find her. But Lizzie Siddal lives in Rossetti’s house, the painter. She is his model.”
“Thank you. We shall try.” And with that we left Nellie’s two housemates sitting in their parlor wondering what this affair was really all about.
The Man with the Mustache
August 12, 1852—Midafternoon
It was almost three in the afternoon when we came out of Nellie’s Macklin Street house. The heat pressed down upon us like a huge steam iron, flattening out all of our senses.
“Where shall we go next, Wilkie?” Dickens made a sincere plea for guidance.
Whether it was the sudden heat or the unpleasantness of the previous interview I do not know, but I was utterly incapable of making a decision.
Dickens waited, but when I said nothing he pulled at his dandified goatee and held counsel with himself for my benefit: “We must see Miss Siddal and Miss Nightingale, but one we have no way of finding, and Rossetti’s house is all the way down on the Chelsea Embankment. I have been there.” He informed me of all of this as if I were his valet. “Now Browning’s house is but two or three streets over. Why don’t we try them before we go abroad looking for the others?” With that decided, he rapped smartly on the box of Sleepy Rob’s cab, causing that worthy to loll himself into consciousness, and ordered him, “To Eagle Street. I’ll tell you where to stop when I see it.”
We trotted across High Holborn toward Eagle Street just off Red Lion Square, where, Dickens informed me, Robert Browning, the poet, had taken rooms with his invalid wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the more famous poet, in order to be close to her doctors.* As we moved slowly in the press of foot traffic trying to cross High Holborn, I had sufficiently recovered my wits to the point where I remembered to tell Dickens of my unsettling exchange with Inspector Collar. He listened intently to my description of the man’s threats against Miss Ternan, set his jaw for a brief moment in anger, and then tried to scoff those threats away with bravado.
“The man is a climber, Wilkie. He likes the notoriety of this case, the rich and famous people he is meeting. He wishes to eclipse our friend Field in reputation. The only problem is that he is a fool and Field, when he wishes, will make him look like one.” Then, with a quick movement, Dickens stuck his head out the window and shouted, “Here! Pull up!” at the top of his lungs.
The Brownings lived in a high, gabled brick house whose stoop had been removed in favor of a dark wooden gangway which formed a gentle incline from the curbstone to the front door. That wooden walkway was clearly an accommodation for an invalid’s chair, which could be pushed up without lifting in order to allow entry through the front door of the house.
“Elizabeth Browning sometimes must go about in a chair,” Dickens advised me as we were getting down. “She experiences extended periods of sickliness. But she is not crippled. She can walk. And her intelligence certainly suffers no debility.”
Robert Browning, in his shirt and braces, with his bush muttonchops squeezing his angular face like furry bookends, answered Dickens’s sharp knock upon his door.
“Why Charles.” Browning, though somewhat flustered, seemed genuinely pleased at Dickens’s intrusion.* “Hallo, good morning, I mean, afternoon. Please come in. You must excuse me. You have caught me at my desk.”
“No, Robert, no, you must excuse us for intruding unannounced.” Dickens was all apologies even as Browning was ushering us into the foyer. “I know how annoying it is to be interrupted while one is trying to write, but we need to talk to Elizabeth on some rather pressing business.”
At that last, Browning visibly stiffened, even became somewhat suspicious. I do not know whether his reaction was precipitated by a jealous sense of his wife’s literary prominence being more widely established than his own or by a husband’s protectiveness. I would like to think that it was the latter.
“What is it, Charles?” Browning seemed startled. “In what pressing business could Elizabeth be involved?”
“If we might just speak to her, Robert.” Again, Dickens was all conci
liation. “It is, indeed, rather urgent. It involves the murder of a young woman of her acquaintance.”
“Oh my God!” Browning’s hands leapt to his face and cupped his bushy muttonchops. “We read of it in the Times. That poor woman at the bank. But Elizabeth barely knew her.”
“Yes, I know. Miss Burdett-Coutts told us. This, by the way, is my colleague at Household Words, Wilkie Collins.” Dickens introduced me as a necessary afterthought. “We are helping the Metropolitan Protectives in the investigation of the case.” For some reason, Dickens’s rather far-fetched portrayal of us as detectives on a case seemed to appease Browning.
“Why, of course, I’m sure that Elizabeth will be glad to see you. She is reading in the library. But you must not overly shock or excite her,” he solemnly cautioned us, “and you must not tax her for too long. She tires very easily.”
“Of course, Robert, we have only a few questions to ask her.” Dickens could not have been more reassuring. “Really, it is so good to see you. I don’t think we have been together since Alfred’s presentation of his great poem to the queen.”* Charles made charming literary talk as Browning escorted us to the library.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was sitting reading in a high-backed brown leather chair beneath a gas lamp which bathed her in an enchanted circle of light. Upon our entry she turned her head alertly and rose to her feet. She was not at all the invalid I had expected.
Tall and slim, with long grey hair undone and flowing to her shoulders, wearing a dark brown dress which provided sharp contrast to her exceedingly white, almost translucent face, she was quite striking in appearance. She was older than I expected, older than the voice I had pictured from reading her impassioned poems of love translated from the Portuguese.* When she spoke, her voice was thin and fragile as stemware.
“Why, Charles,” she said with a smile, “what a pleasant surprise. Please, sit down. What is it? You look so grim.” And she motioned to a small couch which faced her chair even as she was sinking back down into her cushions.
“Yes, Elizabeth, it is so good to see you. I was just telling Robert that we need to have another literary evening soon with Alfred and William and Macready and some of the others.”* Dickens entered quite the charmer, not yet ready to shock her with tales of murder.
“Oh, Charles, I would love that.” Her dark brown eyes above those pale ghostly cheeks fairly burnt with enthusiasm.
“Yes, we shall do it,” Dickens assured her. “But this is my colleague, also a writer, Mr. Wilkie Collins, and we are here on a much sadder business.”
“It is about the murder of poor Eliza Lane, isn’t it?”
“Why yes, it is.”
“It is all I have been able to think about all morning,” Elizabeth Browning informed us as we took our seats, “since Robert read it to me from the news at breakfast.”
“We”—and he implicated me as his accomplice—“are working with the Metropolitan Protectives to try to find her murderer. Angela asked us to do so. We feel that you might be able to help us.”
“What can I do? Please tell me.”
“Can you tell us anything, even the slightest perceptions, about Eliza Lane or Sydney Beach or Marie de Brevecoeur?”
“Only that I hardly knew any of them. My only acquaintance with them was at the Women’s Emancipation Society meetings. They were so different that they almost frightened me. They spoke of love between women, sexual love. I must admit it seemed unnatural to me. I am forty-six years old and I have barely learned to love a man,” she said, and smiled gently at her attentive husband.
“Is there anything that you can remark about the night of the murder which might be helpful in our investigation?” Dickens made one last plea.
She thought for a long moment.
“Only that…” She stopped to think again, as if trying to visualize something.
“And…,” Dickens gently prompted.
“I remember seeing Eliza Lane, just a glimpse of her, I think, the night of the last society meeting,” she said, then faltered. “It couldn’t be important.”
“What did you see?” Dickens pressed her.
“It was just a glimpse because I was in such a rush, and Robert was pushing me in the chair. She was talking, I think, to the guard outside the front doors of the bank before Robert summoned the man to help carry me in the chair up the steps. I did not speak to her because I was late and I was scheduled to read my poems to the meeting that night. I do not think she was still there when we reached the top of the stone steps and entered the bank.”
“What did the man look like?” Dickens was relentless.
“He had a very large mustache, I think. Robert, do you remember?”
“Not at all, dear,” he replied, even as he was elbowing Dickens as a signal that the interrogation had gone on too long.
Dickens rose to his feet in quick respect for Robert Browning’s wishes. He thanked Mrs. Browning for her help and we took our leave of her. In the foyer before departing, Dickens again thanked the husband for allowing us to intrude.
“It was Barsad in his mustache,” Dickens exulted as we sat in the standing cab, which was not moving because, in his excitement, Dickens had failed to give Sleepy Rob any direction as to our next destination. “He was on the door that night, and he was talking to Eliza Lane outside just before she broke into that meeting and cursed all of those women. Don’t you see?”
I must have been staring at him with an exceedingly bewildered look upon my face because he stopped talking and stared back at me as if I were an idiot.
“I am sorry, Charles,” I confessed, “but I don’t see. We already know he was there, or at least supposed to be posted on the front doors that night.”
“Yes, I know.” Dickens moved slowly through his explanation, adopting the pace and tone a parent would take with a slow child of two or three years. “But this puts the two of them together just before her strange outburst, and he is a mesmerist, I am certain. Don’t you see, he cast a spell upon her with his ring and sent her into that meeting to frighten those women, to drive them away so that he could get in and have a free run of the bank.”
I followed his whole line of reasoning, nodding my head up and down like a pump handle. But I did not really have a chance to answer or join in Dickens’s enthusiasm for this particular version of the conspiratorial events because, at the very moment that he finished spinning out his scenario, Sleepy Rob’s sour voice barked down from the box: “Are you gents gonna sit ’ere in this blasted ’eat all afternoon or are we bound for somewheres else?”
“Yes, of course,” Dickens answered, and stuck his head out the window again to deliver Sleepy Rob’s instructions: “To the Chelsea Embankment. When I see the house, I will know it.”
Dickens never ceased to amaze me. He protested that he barely knew Rossetti, yet he knew exactly where he lived and could recognize his house by sight. Dickens knew his city as a sailor knows every inch of the channel of his home port.
In the cab trotting across Piccadilly and into Sloane Street heading for the Chelsea Bridge Road, Dickens continued to exult in our discoveries: “Oh, Wilkie, don’t you see? This is how it is done. This is how Field does it. With every interview we gather another piece of information, fit another piece into the puzzle, and all of it leads to this Barsad. Who is he?”
* * *
*Mrs. Browning’s fame, in 1852, rested upon her authorship of “The Cry of the Children,” a poem of social outcry which championed the cause of the London poor.
*In 1852, Mrs. Browning was the well-known and widely admired poet in the family. Robert Browning, not unlike Wilkie Collins, was still struggling to find his poetic voice, and thus would be gratified to welcome such a prominent literary acquaintance as Charles Dickens.
*Dickens must be referring to a ceremony fully a year earlier, in 1851, when Tennyson presented a leather-bound copy of his long poem In Memoriam to Queen Victoria.
*Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the
Portuguese, published in 1850, only two years before the events of this particular Collins narrative, were purported to be translations, and many of her contemporary readers, evidently including Wilkie Collins, were taken in by this ruse of a literary convention.
*He refers to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the poet; William Makepeace Thackeray, his fellow novelist; and William Macready, the greatest actor of that day and artistic director of Covent Garden Theatre.
Into the Harem
August 12, 1852—Late Afternoon
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the painter, lived in a high sprawling brick house that overlooked the stinking Thames. By the time we arrived at number 16 Cheyne Walk it was all of four by the clock and we were both quite prickled by the heat. Rossetti’s establishment was fenced in wrought iron and gated, but the gate opened to our touch and we traversed a short path through a tiny grass yard to the front door. Two stone dogs, whippets by their lean and hungry look, sat on the edges of a small, square brick porch, guarding the front door. The facade of the house was smothered in coarse brown vines bearing small blue flowers, wisteria I believe, and the door was a solid oak affair buried in the foliage like the overgrown entrance to some secret garden. Dickens clacked the brass knocker twice.
The door was opened by a youngish woman in a linen peasant smock holding a baby. She looked at us pleasantly enough, even smiled slightly, but she was busy with the child, who was wrapped in a pinkish blanket. This doorkeeper did not immediately say anything. I wondered if she was a mute. That proved not the case.
“Good day,” Dickens greeted her cheerily. “I am Charles Dickens, an acquaintance of Mr. Rossetti, and I, we, are here to see Miss Siddal on a rather urgent matter. Might we come in?”
“Mr. Charles Dickens, my goodness, I am delighted to meet you, sir. I have read every number of Bleak House thus far, and David Copperfield is my favorite among your many writings. Oh yes, please come in. I know that Danny will be delighted to see you.” If this speech were evidence, the Rossetti household employed the most well-spoken and literate housemaids in the nation. “Oh please, do come in, gentlemen,” she finished. “I will run right up and tell them you are here.” And with that she handed the blanketed baby to Charles and scurried excitedly up the steps.
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