The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  When we had entered, Dickens’s disappointment that his Nellie was sleeping had registered upon his face. But, while I engaged myself with the pacification of Irish Meg, he had contented himself with exchanging pleasantries with Captain Hawkins, Broken Bert, and the parrot. It was probably the loud, bawdy chirping of the parrot that awakened Miss Ternan from her slumber.

  She came out from behind her sleeping partition with a lost look on her face.

  “Oh, Charles, what is it? I was sleeping.” She smiled in confusion when she saw him.

  “It is nothing, my dear.” But there was an undeniable tension in his voice. “I just stopped here to see you, that you are well…” And his voice trailed off in his own confusion.

  We were so awkward, the two of us, in the presence of these women who ruled our lives and whatever emotions of love we thought we possessed. We were two feckless men who had cast ourselves under their spell.

  “But we have really come for your help in solving this case.” Dickens’s voice broke my reverie and brought me back to reality. “We wish to talk with Miss Florence Nightingale. What can you tell us about her? Do you know where we might find her?”

  “Wot do you want with that witch?” Irish Meg used a term that ladies seldom apply to one another.

  “We are in search of Marie de Brevecoeur. Field thinks that she is at the center of this whole affair. We have been told that Florence Nightingale knows her better than anyone.”

  “Flory thinks she knows everything,” Irish Meg remarked sourly.

  “She would be at one of the hospitals during the day,” said Nellie Ternan, who with a finger to her pursed lips had put her mind to the problem. “She would either be at the asylum for madwomen, Bethlehem on the Lambeth Road, or at the lying-in hospital, St. Mark’s in Claremont Square.”

  “Madwomen?” I exclaimed.

  “Women who don’t have no one. Mostly whores sick from the streets or girls up from the country or wives broken by their husbands. Women whose heads don’t work no more. They goes to Bedlam to die.” Irish Meg explained it all to us with angry patience.

  “Flory works there many days to help make the poor things comfortable. She says she’s a public nurse,” Nellie added.

  “Wotever that is!” Irish Meg seemed angry at us, at Florence Nightingale, at the whole world at that moment.

  “We must find her tomorrow,” Dickens said. Then he took both of his Nellie’s hands tenderly in his own and bent to her to whisper something.

  “This will all be over soon, Meggy,” I tried to reassure my love, but she spit back at me like a cornered animal.

  “It better be, Wilkie! Or I’ll be in that Bedlam for madwomen meself!”

  “Tomorrow morning!” Ellen Ternan suddenly exclaimed, stepping back from Dickens in alarum, her hands fluttering like frightened birds to the sides of her face.

  “Wot is it, Nellie?” Irish Meg rushed to her side as Miss Ternan’s body began to quake with uncontrollable sobs.

  Dickens turned to me with a look of pain and helplessness on his face that spoke volumes. He was terrified that he was giving his beloved up to the gallows and that she could never forgive him for this betrayal.

  As she rocked the stricken young woman in her arms, Irish Meg’s eyes shot sharp daggers of recrimination right at me.

  Dickens also stared helplessly at me as if begging for me somehow to set things right.

  Everyone seemed to be looking at me, blaming me for this violent overflow of emotion, demanding that I do or say something that could make all of this pain subside.

  I was momentarily struck dumb. I had no idea what to say, how to calm her, to bolster him. I struggled to gather my wits, but I never had the chance.

  At that very moment came a powerful, insistent pounding at the shooting gallery’s barred door.

  “Open in the name of the Metropolitan Protectives!” shouted a voice of authority through the locked door. “Open, or we’ll have to break it down!”

  It was not Inspector Field’s voice.

  Dickens Plys His Trade

  August 12, 1852—Evening

  “My God, it is Collar!” Dickens found both his voice and that reckless power of mastery over threatening situations which had momentarily abandoned him in his distress over his beloved Ellen’s plight. He moved purposefully to the door as that relentless pounding persisted. Without hesitation, but to all of our horror, he opened it.

  The door opening inward caught Collar’s man, Serjeant Mussbabble, in midpound. That worthy tumbled comically into the room as if toppled off a perch. Behind him, framed in the doorway, stood Collar, glaring at the lot of us.

  “Inspector Collar, come in.” Dickens greeted him jovially, as if this angry policeman was a late arrival at a dinner party. “Come in. This is indeed fortuitous. I am so glad that you are here. We were just talking about you.”

  Dickens was nattering on so rapidly that Inspector Collar had no opportunity to reply. He stared wide-eyed at Dickens with the same amazement which had turned all of us to statues.

  “Miss Ternan has just this evening arrived back in the city and we have been trying to decide whether to come talk to you about this whole unfortunate affair tonight or to wait until morning.”

  Dickens was smiling warmly at the overmatched policeman, who still had not uttered a word.

  “It seems you have solved our dilemma for us. Come in, come in please. This is Miss Ellen Ternan.” And he ushered Collar right to Nellie’s side.

  As if on cue, she looked pitiably up at him with tears streaming down her face.

  Collar drew himself up on tiptoe. “Miss Ellen Ternan, you are under arrest for murder,” he blurted out, but with none of the violent authority that Field would have put into it. In fact, Collar seemed almost intimidated either by Dickens’s equanimity or by Nellie’s torrent of tears.

  Of course, Collar’s blunt, gruffly spoken charge sent Ellen Ternan into further paroxysms of sobs.

  “Really, Inspector Collar, that is a bit harsh, is it not?” Dickens was still smiling as if this were all some trivial parlor game, charades or hide the handkerchief. “You said that you merely wished to talk to Miss Ternan about the murder. You gave us no sense of such great urgency. Is there some reason for such a serious charge?”

  Collar looked like a volcano about to erupt. He spewed forth his charges in a garbled explosion of words: “You’ve been hidin’ her. You’ve known where she was all the time. You’ve all been lyin’ to me. I’ll not be fooled with.”

  “Please, please, Inspector Collar”—Dickens never changed his hospitable manner and smiling equanimity—“nothing of the sort.”

  “Nothin’ of the sort, nothin’ of the sort,” the policeman sputtered like a boiler on the verge of bursting. “Everything of the sort!”

  And Collar would not be pacified.

  Dickens spun out the story we had concocted in the cab, but Collar refused to be swayed by this latest fiction which Dickens spun out so adeptly on the spot.

  “I’ll tell you wot I think.” Collar, who as Dickens spoke managed to somewhat compose himself, still glared at Dickens as if seriously contemplating arresting him as well (and probably all the rest of us) for harboring the tender fugitive. “I think you’ve all been hidin’ her, that she’s been in this hole-in-the-wall of a shootin’ gallery all of the time.”

  “Oh, Inspector Collar”—and now it was Dickens’s turn to be chagrined—“that is a serious charge and simply not true.”

  “True or not true,” Collar backed down from Dickens’s stern chagrin, “we are takin’ Miss Ternan tonight. This is a murder case”—he raised himself up against the gravity of it and stuck out his chest as a mark of his own importance—“and she must be remanded to the custody of the bailiffs.”

  With a nod to Mussbabble, Collar ordered Nellie taken up.

  Dickens never ceased to amaze me. He could create characters on the spot and then play out their parts in the scene as if the whole world were no more than
a novel that existed inside his own active imagination. Even as Collar’s Constable was stepping forward to take Nellie in hand, Dickens was smiling once again and graciously entering into negotiations with Collar. Realizing the inevitable, he chose to hide his pain and fears for his Ellen’s well-being and attempt to make the best of a certain setback. “Must Miss Ternan be taken up tonight? It is so late.”

  As were all the rest of us, Inspector Collar seemed momentarily unmanned by Dickens’s concern.

  “Miss Ternan will present herself in the morning,” Charles pressed. “I will take full responsibility for her appearance. Surely you cannot think she will flee if I am her sponsor.”

  “I knows my duty.” Collar’s words rasped like cutlery being drawn across stone. “She’ll be in the holdin’ rooms at St. James’s tonight and she’ll go before the magistrate in the mornin’.”

  Dickens’s face fell. I think it was only then that he realized that the man was not going to listen, that he could not write this particular chapter in the Dickens style but would have to settle for Collar’s inferior version. He turned to his Ellen and, when their eyes met, the pleading in his caused the tears to rush forth once more in hers.

  After a moment of silent suspension in time, Dickens turned back to Collar, his features under perfect control, his voice steady: “May I have a moment, Inspector, alone with Miss Ternan? To prepare her.”

  “Let her go.” Collar nodded to his familiar. “One minute,” he cautioned Dickens, “then we take her away.”

  It was one of the longest, tensest minutes of my memory.

  Dickens retired to the back of the dim shooting gallery with Nellie.

  Collar and his swarthy constable stood waiting with faces of stone by the door.

  Even Broken Bert’s parrot seemed momentarily awed and was uncharacteristically silent as those two old inseparables lurked in the shadows on one side of the cold hearth.

  Captain Hawkins stood leaning against the hearthstone with shadows bisecting his smooth-shaven head and a bemused look upon his face, as if this were all just a Sherwood Forest game and he was just waiting for Dickens to give the signal so that he could spring into action like some latter-day Little John and rescue us all from the terrible pall that Collar’s intrusion had cast over the dingy premises.

  As for me, I stood frozen in the viperous gaze of Irish Meg. She looked at me with utter disgust, as if I were the arresting officer, as if I were the informer who had led Collar and his man to the shooting gallery and had given Nellie up to them.

  It was one of the most uncomfortable minutes of my life, but it finally ended when Dickens returned, leading Nellie, her tears dried, her countenance resigned to being taken away by those two glowering policemen.

  And take her away they did, without another word from either side.

  Dickens followed them out into the street, but Collar packed the girl into his black post-chaise with little ceremony and drove off.

  When Dickens returned, it was as if his whole demeanor had caved in upon itself. Where he had been urbane, conciliatory, hospitable, and even jocular with Collar, he was now anxious, worried, helpless, and guilty in our presence.

  “There is nothing more we can do tonight,” he finally announced after a long moment of all of us looking to him for guidance and him looking into the blackness of the cold hearth and thinking on it. “I think he believed enough of our story that there will be no repercussions upon you and Bert, Captain. I think the best thing we can do is go home now,” he said, turning to Irish Meg and me. “It has been a hellish day, Wilkie. Damn, he must have followed us from Bow Street. We should have been more careful.”

  Out in the street, with Irish Meg already handed into Sleepy Rob’s cab, Dickens took me lightly by the elbow for one last word.

  “You take the cab, Wilkie. I need to walk all of this off tonight. I will see you in the morning early. There is so much that needs to be done.” And then he paused for just a moment, thinking, my elbow still in custody. “It is all topsy-turvy, Wilkie,” he finally said, letting me go, “but as novelists it is our task to make it all work out.”

  “Tell that to Irish Meg!” I replied over my shoulder as I climbed into the cab. We left him standing there in the feeble gaslight, all alone, bearing the full weight of the whole affair.

  Bedlam!

  August 13, 1852—Morning and Afternoon

  The next morning dawned much too soon, and when I arrived at about half ten at the Household Words offices, it appeared that Dickens had enjoyed every bit as rocky a night’s sleep as had I. First, I had been forced to deal with all of Irish Meg’s resentments toward both of us for leading Collar to Miss Ternan and then giving her up. In addition, I had proceeded to toss and turn all night, haunted with guilty fantasies of daughters of Lesbos and nude artists’ models writhing in my fevered brain.

  As for Dickens, it did not take a phrenologist to intuit that in his anxiety for his Ellen he had not slept a wink.* However, we had been given our assignment by Field, and nothing was going to stop Dickens from carrying it out.

  Honoring me with but the most perfunctory of greetings when I arrived, Dickens unceremoniously spun me around, out the door, and into Sleepy Rob’s cab. With that, we were once again off to play detective.

  Our first stop, however, was at St. James Station, where Dickens attempted to see Miss Ternan, and was apprised that he could not see her until after her arraignment before the magistrate, which would not occur for yet another day because of the heat and the magistrate’s inability to deal with its excesses. In other words, the magistrate had decided that it was simply too hot to hold court and had most probably retired to the country to go fishing on some shaded waterway. Dickens, of course, was irate. But since neither Collar nor his man Mussbabble was in attendance, he had no one to vent his wrath upon except a poor illiterate constable just emigrated from Scotland, who must have been the only person in the British Isles who had never heard of the inimitable Charles Dickens. Needless to say, Charles was sorely frustrated. Thus, it was good that we had our task to perform for Inspector Field. Nonetheless, Dickens was fuming as we set off on our search for Miss Florence Nightingale.

  The Bethlehem Lunatic Asylum is located across the river by the Lambeth Bridge just off the Lambeth Road near that hot and dusty neighborhood where we had first gone looking for our French friend Barsad. “Bedlam” is the name by which it is popularly known. The heavy day was moving into sluggish afternoon by the time we got to that stage of our “investigation,” as Dickens called it (“chasing phantoms” seemed to me a more accurate description).

  We were fortunate, upon inquiry, to find Miss Florence Nightingale at work in the women’s wing of that horrible place. As we traversed the corridors in search of her, the sounds of madness assaulted our ears. Through doorways and out from behind flimsy partitions, wild animal sounds, growls and grunts and barks and screams, shrill shrieks and deep guttural moans, bleats and brays and long painful groans mixed and formed themselves into an angry mob which seemed to be bearing down upon us at every turning of our journey through that terrible labyrinth of a building. It was like walking through a zoo in which all the animals were aroused.

  We found Miss Nightingale. She was working in a long, low-ceilinged, dimly lit ward which was windowless. In the August heat, this room was an airless, stifling place, cursed with the vilest of smells, of unwashed diseased bodies, of incontinence, of lingering death. It was hard even to breathe in Bedlam.

  Florence Nightingale was tending to two women simultaneously when we came upon her. One of her charges seemed dead from her injuries already. With a face swollen by large yellowing bruises, she lay still on a narrow bed. She wore an utterly blank look upon her wide-eyed face as she stared silently up at the ceiling. The other patient was directly the opposite. Her arms and legs tethered tightly to the bedposts, she writhed angrily against her restraints and cursed and ranted madly in some utterly unintelligible language whose lexicon existed solely within th
at poor woman’s broken mind.

  “Good Lord,” I exclaimed to Dickens in an alarmed whisper as we came upon Miss Nightingale and her charges. I had not intended for anyone but Dickens to hear me, but, as I was to perceive upon further acquaintance, Miss Nightingale missed very little of what went on about her.

  “Good Lord, indeed,” she wryly critiqued my exclamation of surprise and shock at the conditions of her two patients. “The Lord wasn’t very good to these two. All we can hope is that he makes up in some other life for the way he has treated them here.”

  “Miss Nightingale, I am Charles Dickens and this is Mr. Wilkie Collins. We desperately need to talk to you on a matter of some urgency.”

  “You may talk all you wish, and I shall try to answer, but I must care for these two poor souls because there are others waiting to be tended to.” The woman, though slight of stature, had a directness about her that asserted a clear control over this conversation. In her sense of realistic priorities, those two helpless women had unarguable precedence over these two intruding gentlemen.

  “How on earth did they get this way?” Dickens’s curiosity overcame his delicacy.

  “That one has been beaten by her husband regularly for years. It’s laudanum in heavy doses makes her sleep like that with her eyes wide open. She is only eighteen years old.”

  “And this one?” I asked timidly.

  “She is in the last stages of a brain sickness caused by syphilis. She’ll be gone within the week.” Even as she finished, I was drawing back in shock and revulsion from that poor tethered madwoman, as if I might catch her terrible disease simply from bending over her bed.

  “Good Lord,” I muttered again.

  “But what do you two want of me?” Her directness again brought our conversation out of the realm of idle curiosity and placed it firmly into the realm of distasteful reality. “I know who you are. Nellie Ternan and Meg Sheehey have spoken well of you. I presume they have put you onto me, have they not?”