“What did she mean?” Dickens pressed.
“You really ought to talk to Flory about her, about Marie.” Miss Siddal, wiping her eyes and trying to compose herself, broke out of Rossetti’s arms like a frightened bird fluttering frantically about a closed room. She crossed to the worktable to pour a fresh glass of her calming absinthe. “Talk to Flory Nightingale. She is almost obsessed with Marie. She seems to think she can save her. But then, she wants to save everyone…even me.”
“Save her from what?” For the first time Dickens’s voice betrayed confusion. Those two, the utterly composed artist and his model in frantic disarray, volleying this conversation back and forth like a shuttlecock, seemed to have thrown him off.
“From selling herself to men,” Miss Siddal said; then she drank deeply of her numbing liqueur and collapsed onto the divan.
“But I thought she only went with women?” Dickens was lost at sea, adrift in this maelstrom of contradictions.
“That is true,” Rossetti, maddening in his equanimity, averred. “That is what I was about to tell you before Lizzie felt compelled to introduce her”—and the cold emphasis his voice placed upon that pronoun clearly signaled his dislike for its referent—“friend, Florence Nightingale, into our conversation.”
He smiled and extended his hands, palms up, out to the sides in a small gesture asking if we wished him to proceed with his explanation.
“Please, I really do not understand all of this,” Dickens begged him to go on.
“Marie de Brevecoeur told me that I could still paint her, but I would have to pay.”
“Pay whom?”
“Kate Hamilton.”
“Who is Kate Hamilton?”
“She is the keeper of a house of, shall we say, out-of-the-ordinary entertainments.”
“And?”
“Marie de Brevecoeur told us that she worked in that house.”
“As a whore for men?”
“In a sense.”
Rossetti was so detached from the monstrous reality of what he was describing that I began to feel a genuine dislike for the man. I later learned that Dickens did not trust Rossetti, either.
“What do you mean?” Dickens patiently waited for Rossetti to explain.
“She is not a whore for men in the usual sense.” He warmed to his story in the way that a painter enjoys showing the subtle play of light and shadow over his subject. “You see, Kate Hamilton’s is a specialty house, in Mayfair, rather elegant actually…”
I found myself remembering Lady Godiva’s, which Dickens and I had visited two years before in the course of the Ashbee Affair.*
“…which only indulges a single male obsession.”
The man paused. He was taunting us. I must credit Dickens with not rising to his bait, waiting.
“Voyeurism,” Rossetti went on after a long, dramatic sip from his glass of absinthe, “specifically that of men who desire to watch women make love to other women. There are private shows gotten up for this purpose.”
“Marie de Brevecoeur does this for money?” The shock in Dickens’s voice was genuine.
Rossetti was undeniably pleased with the reaction he had elicited from Dickens. That was when I realized what fueled Rossetti’s existence. He was in the business of shocking people. His art, his life, his intercourse with the world at large, was that of the incendiarist. He wanted to blow up all that was conventional, narrowly moral.
“Yes, and I must say, she is quite good at it, quite elaborate and dramatic in her presentation, as a great actress would be on a different sort of stage.”
“So you went there and saw her?” The wonder in Dickens’s voice was so that of a naive child that I began to wonder if he, too, was not playing a game with Rossetti, counterfeiting his shock and moral indignation in order to draw the man out.
“Yes, we did”—Rossetti was eager to paint this picture in all of its lurid detail—“Lizzie and I. And we took Miss Nightingale along. She seemed enormously interested in what she called ‘the social phenomenon.’ I think she just wanted to see this Marie with her bloomers off.”
That last comment betrayed Rossetti more than any of his other affectations had. Saying it, he raised his eyebrows lewdly at Dickens and me.
“It was all extremely useful for my purposes, you see,” Rossetti went on. “I have been there three times to sketch. I have captured it all. If only I can recapture it in paint.”
He sounded like some triumphant hunter brandishing his bag with the bloodlust still upon him.
“When does she do this, put on this performance at Kate Hamilton’s?” Dickens was no longer the naive country bumpkin marveling at Rossetti’s urbanity. He had what he wanted. His voice had changed and sounded almost like Field’s in its grim efficiency. Rossetti noticed this change of tone and his equanimity was momentarily shaken.
“Why, she…uh…once a week, on Friday evenings,” Rossetti answered, looking strangely at Dickens. “We would be happy to take you there.” Rossetti was desperately trying to regain what he thought was his hold over Dickens’s curiosity.
“Oh no, no need, I think we can forgo the pleasure. Good day.” And Dickens brushed him off like a piece of lint from his sleeve, turned on his heel, and was out the door of that studio, which suddenly seemed very dim and dark. The afternoon light certainly was gone.
* * *
*John Overs, the workingman poet, wrote a small book titled Evenings of a Working Man which Dickens helped to publication just before Overs’s death of lung disease in 1844. Since that time Dickens had adopted Overs’s family as one of his personal projects by arranging annual benefit dinners for their support and education. It is surely one of these dinners to which Rossetti refers. Thomas Carlyle, Dickens’s close friend and the author of Sartor Resartus, Past and Present, and The French Revolution, who was Rossetti’s neighbor in Cheyne Walk, had also been a friend and supporter of Overs.
*Absinthe was a powerful liqueur popular in the Victorian era, almost a drug, reputedly able to cast one into a trancelike, hallucinatory state; hence the comparison to Tennyson’s “The Lotus Eaters.”
*Lady Godiva’s House of Gentlemen’s Entertainments was a rather elegant Mayfair brothel which Dickens and Collins had occasion to visit for the purpose of gathering information for Inspector Field in the case of “the Macbeth Murders” as recounted in The Detective and Mr. Dickens.
“I Cannot Give Her Up!”
August 12, 1852—Evening
“We must go straightaway to Bow Street, Wilkie,” Dickens informed me as we emerged from Rossetti’s high house and crossed the Embankment to Sleepy Rob’s waiting cab. “We must apprise Field of the intelligence we have gathered this afternoon.”
“Just what intelligence have we gathered?” I asked in all innocence as we settled into the overstuffed seats and Sleepy Rob began his monotonous trot across the town.
“Good lord, Wilkie!” Dickens’s exasperation at the obtuseness of my deducive powers was both visible and audible. “All of the pieces are starting to come together.”
I just looked at him in incomprehension, not willing to further embarrass myself by asking another stupid (at least in his eyes) question.
“Don’t you see, Wilkie?” he finally said to me, as if I were a child. “We know that the murdered woman was abused by her husband and turned to other women because of it. We know that these women were daughters of Lesbos and that Marie de Brevecoeur had the strongest influence upon Eliza Lane. Then Elizabeth Browning saw the Lane woman talking to the mustachioed French night guard, Barsad, outside the bank the night she was murdered. Thus, Marie de Brevecoeur, the murdered woman, and the mustachioed Frenchman are all connected. Perhaps they are the gang that Field thinks committed these crimes.”
“But the landlady in Lambeth told Field that it was four men meeting with Barsad,” I continued, quizzical.
“Good lord, Wilkie!” Dickens’s exasperation at my blockheaded myopia toward what he evidently saw so clearly would have been
comical if he hadn’t been so intent upon displaying his own detectiving skill. “These women all dress as men. Except for Barsad, the whole gang could have been women.”
I did feel somewhat stupid at not having seen it at first, but that did not stop me from trying to salvage my dignity by poking yet another hole in Dickens’s little deductive jigsaw puzzle.
“All well and good”—I nodded my head enthusiastically in the affirmative as if agreeing with Dickens’s smug reading of this lesbian conspiracy text—“but that is only three members of this mythical gang. Who is the fourth? The landlady said there were four men meeting with Barsad. And why? Why the threatening letters? Why murder one of their own?”
I am happy to say that those petty questions stopped Dickens in his arrogant tracks. He stared at me, wrinkling his forehead as he strained mightily for an answer or two. I am sorry, but the temptation to taunt him was simply too much for me to resist.
“Perhaps this fourth was Miss Ternan’s mother.” I winked comically at him, but he did not see the humour at all in my speculation. Luckily, at that very moment, we pulled up in front of Bow Street Station and Dickens disembarked without badgering my obtuseness any further.
Field and Rogers were less than enthusiastic when Dickens came bursting through the door of the bullpen and interrupted what, from all appearances, seemed a rather silent moment of pipes and contemplation in their wing chairs before the cold hearth.
Field rose somberly as we entered. “Gentlemen, you look as if you have had a good day.” He said it, however, with a decided lack of engagement and sank listlessly back into his chair.
But even this cold reception could not dampen Dickens’s high spirits and elevated sense of his own detectiving skills.
“A good day, indeed,” Dickens burst upon them. “We have gathered what I think is some valuable information. I think we have identified at least three of the members of this bank-robbing gang.” And with that preface, he poured out his narrative of the afternoon’s interviews complete with all of his theories about spousal abuse leading to lesbianism and women disguising themselves as men to walk around the city hatching plots. For some reason, discretion I presume, he chose not to mention Angela Burdett-Coutts’s rather startling revelation of her ill-starred marriage to James Barton, even though she had expressly commissioned him to do so to Field. But I did not question his judgement. No one in England was more conscious of the vicissitudes of reputation than Charles Dickens, and for that reason, I presumed, this was one of those times when he chose to keep his own counsel.
“You have certainly been much more successful than we have been,” Field glumly admitted after Dickens’s euphoria had subsided. “We have not been able to turn up a single lead as to the whereabouts of our French friend, the professor. He and his mustache, if he even has a mustache, have temporarily gone to ground.”
Dickens thought for a moment. “Do you think,” he began, clearly viewing himself as a full partner of Field in the planning of the strategy for the solving of the crime (or crimes, as it were), “that if we could find this Frenchwoman, this Marie de Brevecoeur, that she would lead us to Barsad? He certainly seems to be the puppetmaster who is pulling the strings.”
“Cherchez la femme,” I said, quite wittily I thought.
The other three looked at me as if I were a drunken fool who had intruded upon their solemn deliberations speaking a foreign language.
“Uh, follow the woman,” I stammered lamely by way of translation.
They just ignored me and went back to their plotting as if I didn’t exist in their real detectives’ world. The result was a plan to seek out, the following day, the nurse, this Florence Nightingale, whom both Barbara Leigh Smith and Lizzie Siddal had advised us to consult.
“It seems, perhaps,” Field confided, “that Miss Nightingale might lead us to the others, or at least set us on their trail.”
“It is worth a try,” Serjeant Rogers grumbled out of a blue cloud of pipe smoke.
We all agreed that enough detective work had been done for one day, and that we would meet again in the morning and try to find Miss Florence Nightingale. With that, Dickens and I got up to leave, but Field stopped Charles for one last word.
“In the morning you must do something about Miss Ternan.” He spoke gently to Charles in the voice of a friend and advisor. “It is too dangerous for both you and me for us to continue to hide her. You must give her to Collar; then we will be free to clear up this mess without his interference.”
“But she is innocent,” Dickens protested. “She will go to Newgate.”
“I know…we all know…with complete certainty, that she is innocent,” Field consoled him, “but this is necessary so that we can prove her innocence without her appearing to be guilty. She must give herself up or the Queen’s Bench magistrates will find her guilty just for runnin’ away.”
“I cannot give her up.” Despite his assertion, a look of doom haunted Dickens’s face.
“Collar will persist, I assure you,” Field reminded him, rather gently I thought. “The longer she stays in hidin’, the stronger he shall suspect that she is his murderer.”
“I know that. I know.” Dickens’s voice was desperate. “But don’t you see, I simply cannot cast her into Newgate. It is a fearful, hellish place. I have been there.”
“Yes, but we cannot keep her out of the way forever.”
Rogers and I stood silently in attendance to this quiet battle of wills.
“I know that as well, but if we could only catch this Barsad, sort out this whole mess of the murder, then Miss Ternan will be a moot point,” Dickens argued.
“Moot? Perhaps. But we can only keep Collar away for so long.” Field was shaking his head negatively the whole time he was speaking. “And, Miss Burdett-Coutts will have to report that robbery soon as well.”
“Not if we recover that ten thousand pounds before anyone even knows it is gone.” Dickens sounded like a solicitor arguing his client’s case. “Do you think that Miss Burdett-Coutts wants the whole world to know that her bank’s security was penetrated for ten thousand pounds?”
“No. I don’t suppose so.” Field said it slowly, contemplatively, as if weighing the idea for the first time which I am certain was not the case. “All we are sayin’, Charles”—and Field glanced quickly at Serjeant Rogers, whose head nodded dutifully in support—“is that if Miss Ternan turns herself over to Collar voluntary-like, then things will most assuredly go better for her and we shall gain some time to sort this all out.”
“Without that Collar’s constant interference,” belligerent Serjeant Rogers punctuated his master’s point.
Dickens was sorely outnumbered and he knew it. His eyes were desperate as he looked grimly from Field to Rogers, hoping for some reprieve. But their faces were like stone. Finally, he relented.
“I will take her to Collar in the morning,” Dickens begrudgingly assured them, “but we must find this murderer. That is the only way we can save her.”
“We know that, Charles.” It was Inspector Field’s turn to be consoling. “And we shall get it done. We shall find out wot happened that evening of the murder and we shall find the man”—and he paused for a quick pull at his pipe—“or woman, who did it.”
Dickens blanched. “Woman?” he repeated. “But you do not think that…?”
“No. No. You misunderstand me.” Field was all reassurance. “All I meant was that there are so many women dressed as men poppin’ up in this case that any of them could be our killer.”
“Oh.” But Dickens still sounded suspicious, as if he did not trust Field’s expression of unequivocal belief in Ellen Ternan’s innocence.
Out in the street in front of Bow Street Station, Dickens still looked stricken.
“Wilkie, I must see her tonight.” A sadness had overtaken his countenance, which was truly pitiable. “I know that I must, but I just do not think that I can give her up.”
In the cab on the way to Hawkins’s den in Leic
ester Square, I tried to turn his attention to more practical considerations. In short, I attempted to rehearse him in a fabricated story to tell Collar to account for Miss Ternan’s whereabouts over the previous two days. We agreed that after Nellie left my flat the morning after the fateful night of the murder, she went off to visit her mother in the country and upon her return had gone to Dickens, who immediately escorted her to St. James Station and Inspector Collar.
“Oh, Wilkie.” Dickens’s voice struggled in pain as Sleepy Rob’s cab rolled to a gentle stop at our destination. “How can I tell her that I am going to betray her?”
“You are not betraying her, Charles,” I tried to reassure him. “It is simply what must be done, the best, the safest path to take.”
Nellie Betrayed
August 12, 1852—Evening
At the shooting gallery, the situation was directly opposite of what we had expected. Nellie seemed quite composed, almost resigned to her fate, while Irish Meg was all aflutter.
When we arrived, Nellie was fast asleep on a small pallet behind a flimsy partition. Irish Meg, however, was pacing the floor and smoking one of Captain Hawkins’s rum-soaked cigars.
“Oh, Wilkie, I hates it here,” she confided after taking me aside as soon as I walked in with Dickens. “It’s so dark and dirty and closed up, and that twisted little man with his filthy parrot gives me the frights.”
I tried to calm her, but she would have nothing of it. She poured out her complaints in a torrent, ending with how terribly frightened Nellie was, how fearful of Newgate and the gallows. “I’m so afeared for Nellie,” Meg confided. “What are we to do?”
“Our only concern is for doing what is best for her,” I assured Meggy with greater certainty in my voice than I truly felt.
Thus was I able to calm her, which was not such a burdensome task owing to her great devotion to Dickens’s Nellie. In fact, in the time since Nellie’s liberation from Miss Burdett-Coutts’s Urania Cottage, she and my Meggie had become almost like sisters.
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