The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  Florence Nightingale confessed to us later that no one was more shocked than she to be greeted by the very object of our search. “Marie had always been in evidence as a sitter at séances,” Miss Nightingale declared, “but she had never revealed herself as a member of the establishment previous to that night.”

  Having never seen either Dickens or me in person, no recognition showed in her face when she opened the door. In fact, she did not even seem to recognize Florence Nightingale, who greeted her openly—“Marie, good evening”—as soon as she opened the door. She looked upon us with a strange, uncomprehending blankness, as if she were one of those faceless plaster heads upon which wigs are displayed for sale. Florence Nightingale, raising an eyebrow at the strange emptiness of her acquaintance, introduced us, using our own names, as two curious gentlemen desirous of being admitted as sitters to that evening’s séance.

  “Are either of you gentlemen seeking correspondence with a particular spirit from beyond the grave?” Marie de Brevecoeur, eyes downcast, asked in an utterly emotionless voice.

  Dickens looked at me, and I at him.

  With a quick touch of her hand to his wrist, and a subtle shake of her head, Miss Nightingale prompted Dickens’s answer.

  “Ah, why no,” Dickens stammered. “We would, ah, just wish to sit and view the proceedings if we might.”

  “Very well,” our empty-eyed hostess replied in that same dead tone, as if she were already herself a member of the spirit world. “You are welcome to sit at the table and observe, but you must maintain silence and not address any of the spirits who may appear, even if they are recognizable to you.”

  It was clearly an oft-rehearsed speech, but it gave Dickens pause.

  “To us? How could you conjure spirits who are known to us?” Dickens actually stepped back from her in alarm.

  “Madame Fontanelle does not control the spirit world, sir,” Marie de Brevecoeur replied languidly. “She only serves as a medium for those spirits who wish to contact one of the sitters at her table. There is a three-crown sitter’s fee for the séance,” she concluded, and waited discreetly with her hands folded at her waist for us to pay.

  Upon payment of our fee, our guide ushered us down a long and narrow, dimly lit corridor with closed room doors spaced at intervals on our right-hand side. She stopped before an open doorway, hung in beads, at the back. That portal offered admittance to a large, low-ceilinged room, so dimly lit that one could barely make out its walls. As we passed through those strings of hanging beads, our guide faded back into the dim corridor behind, and disappeared. This momentarily stopped Dickens in his tracks, probably because he wanted, above all, to keep her within his sight, but at the prompting of Florence Nightingale, by means of yet another discreet push to Dickens’s shoulder, we vacated the doorway and entered the séance room.

  The stage was set for the performance. In the middle of that darkened room was a large cloth-draped table. Already seated, by my quick count, were seven other sitters. In the center of the table sat an ornamental oil lamp in the shape of an angel with outspread wings which provided the room’s only shadowy light.

  We seated ourselves at the table. Dickens and I sat together at one side while Florence Nightingale took a single empty seat directly across from us. Our presence effectively filled the seats around the table, except for one thronelike wooden chair which had been purposefully left unoccupied by the sitters. Looking around the table, I encountered the curious stares of a rather motley collection of séance sitters: two gentlemen in somber black suits whose faces floated above the table like severed heads; a workingman in a rough country jerkin accompanied by a voluminous woman, presumably his wife, in a lumpy country bonnet pulled down around her ears; a sad old lady with grey hair and resigned eyes; and two military-looking men who upon questioning afterward turned out to be customhouse officers drawn on a lark to this spiritualism by their shared hatred of government bureaucracy and their shared liking for hot rum cordials.

  In that exceedingly dim light, we examined one another with equal curiosity as we waited, silently, quite expectantly, for that exotic event to begin. At exactly eight sharp, we were startled to attention by the loud sounding of what must have been a Chinese gong secreted somewhere in the darkness. In fact, that sound so startled some of the gentlemen, Dickens and myself included, that we leapt to our feet upon its intrusion into our silent waiting.

  With the receding gong as her processional, a tall, commanding woman of severe visage muffled completely in Arabic veils, shawls, and flowing skirts materialized out of the darkness and beckoned for us to seat ourselves in order for the séance to begin.

  She took her seat in that elaborate armed chair and placed her two hands, palms down, upon the table. Bowing her head almost into the oil lamp, she began to chant in what, I am sure, was supposed to be some theatrical imitation of some mystical incantation.

  This Madame Fontenelle, upon her appearance out of the darkness, had looked somewhat familiar to me, but muffled up as she was in all of those harem veils, I could not place her immediately. As soon as she began to speak, however, I looked sharply at Dickens and he at me. The recognition was clear and instant in both of our faces: that voice, that singsong cadence so reminiscent of the opening incantation of the witches in Macbeth. It was none other than old Peggy Ternan, Ellen’s unscrupulous actress of a mother, wrapped up in that exotic mufti, playing this new role in this different incarnation of theatre.*

  In the dimness of the room with her head down upon the table, I am sure that she had not yet recognized Dickens and me, but we certainly had recognized her. We had, however, no time to ponder our discovery, for even as her unintelligible chant began to heighten in intensity, sharp rappings seemed to emanate from the table before us, and that very table seemed to take on a life of its own, moving, jumping, tilting, bouncing, to the point where every single sitter around its maniacally animated border had instinctively placed his hands upon it in a vain attempt to calm and steady its startling palpitations. It was moving about so roughly that I feared the oil lamp might fall over and set us all on fire.

  In a moment, however, the rappings and thumpings and joltings of the table calmed, but for an occasional paroxysm when it would suddenly lurch upward, then settle back. As the spirit rappings subsided, our muffled medium, Madame Fontanelle, took center stage.

  “Keep your hands upon the table,” she commanded in her strong clear actress’s voice. “It calms the spirits, helps them to escape the charmed circle of the table’s circumference and show themselves singly to us.”

  As she spoke, she slowly unwound the veil which circled her head and freed her face for the conjuring of the spirits. With the unveiling of her face, I was certain that she would recognize Dickens and me, but, to my surprise, she did not. Instead, she gazed straight ahead into the flame of the lamp with a fixed stare as if she were mesmerized by it. It was that same sort of empty, unquestioning look which had haunted Marie de Brevecoeur’s face when she had opened the door.

  “Who is it that we wish to contact tonight? Whom do you seek? To whom would you speak? The souls of the living and the souls of the dead are both restless in this room tonight. I can feel their torment, their longing to reach out.” She chanted in a flat, dead singsong her rehearsed litany of conjurations.

  “To my daughter Mary,” the grey-haired old lady begged, “gone these two long years.”

  “Aaiiieee!” our medium screamed as she leapt to her feet with her arms outstretched. “She is here. She is here. I can feel her presence in the room.”

  With that, the old lady herself jumped back in her chair as if burnt and cried out, “I felt her touch. She is here. I know she is here.”

  Slowly, in a far corner of the room a light seemed to rise up out of the floor. That light fluttered in shadowy waves up the walls like wavering candle flame and drew the attention of everyone at the table. But nothing happened, and that eerie light slowly subsided.

  “I can feel her presence
,” our pseudomedium kept up her chant. “She wishes to walk amongst us.”

  “Oh where are you Mary Macalester? Where are you?” The old lady’s voice seemed to take on the incantatory cadence of the medium’s chant.

  At their prompting, that eerie light began to rise once again in the far corner of the room, except that this time the figure of a young woman in a flowing white gown walked in the fluttering shadows.

  “It is she,” the old lady moaned. “It is she.”

  Suddenly that light died, and that ghost disappeared, and Peggy Ternan’s voice recaptured all of our attentions with its incantatory litany, which in turn set off another round of table rappings and jumpings. It was all we could do to subdue the buckings of that possessed object by pressing our palms upon its surface.

  “Whom else do you seek? To whom would you speak? Who is there? Who is there?” Our medium seemed caught up in the fervor of her delirious connection to the loose spirits prowling the room.

  Imagine how startled I was in that shadowy darkness when right next to me Dickens raised his voice to request an audience with one of those restless spirits.

  “Is Miss Eliza Lynn Lane there?” he inquired. “Recently murdered.”

  This last elicited a gasp from more than one of the sitters about the table, and brought a hand up to cover the mouth of the large countrywoman in the bonnet. But Dickens’s request did not in the least interrupt the fervent incantations of Madame Fontanelle. It did, however, elicit a reaction from a different quarter. Quick muffled sounds of panic suddenly erupted out of that far side of the room where the ghost had just so recently walked in that eerie, shadowy light.

  A chair overturned.

  A woman screamed.

  A body fell.

  Footfalls.

  A door slammed to.

  “Come on, Wilkie”—Dickens was up and moving away from the table, which suddenly, inexplicably, ceased its rappings and lurchings—“we must get to the bottom of this.”

  Simultaneously, that old witch Peggy Ternan seemed to emerge from her incantatory trance and recognize us.

  “Aaiiiee!” she screamed. “What are you two doing here?”

  Dickens was up and moving across that darkened room in the direction of where that ghostly girl had walked.

  When I caught up with him in the darkness, he was tangled in a hanging silk curtain behind which the theatrical effects had been staged. Groping his way through the curtain, he kicked over a bucket of sand, in which we later found three candles of differing lengths embedded; bumped into a hanging gong, sending ripples of sound off over the darkened room; and tripped over an upturned chair while further tangling himself in a series of thick hanging strings which seemed suspended from the low ceiling. As Dickens blundered about in this chaos of disrupted objects in the thick darkness, I tried to follow him as closely as I could, reaching out in an attempt to right him as he fought his way through these unseen obstacles. He must have finally reached the wall of the room because, cursing, which he rarely did, the blunt objects which had barked his shins and the hanging strings which had wrapped themselves like snakes around his head, he groped his way along until he found, quite by chance, a doorknob. He flung open that door, and moonlight from a small first-storey porch suspended over a dark mews poured into the room. Sitting on the floor of that small porch, her arms hugging herself and her eyes wide with fear, clad in a flowing white gown, was Marie de Brevecoeur. When Dickens burst through that door and came upon her, both of her hands leapt to her mouth in fear.

  “Where is he? Where has he gone?” Dickens demanded.

  “There.” She pointed. “He is making for the horses in the stable.” It was not the voice of that blank-eyed, mesmerized thing which had answered the door earlier in the evening. It was as if she had awakened or been set free from some evil spell.

  Following her direction, Dickens leapt down the rickety stairway that led to the ground and set off running after whomever, Barsad I presumed, he was pursuing. I, too, descended and started after him, but I immediately thought of Inspector Field and Serjeant Rogers. I turned back and ran toward the street to alert them. But Field and Rogers were on their toes. I met them at full run coming around the corner of the building.

  “There,” I said, pointing. “Charles is after him. They ran off that way.”

  Field took stock of the situation in the quick pulse of a moment.

  “Rogers, secure the witnesses in that room,” he ordered, pointing to the open door beneath which the ghostly Marie de Brevecoeur lay dazed. “Let no one leave till we’ve talked to them. Collins, show me where.” And he set off running down that moonlit mews.

  “The stables, she said,” I shouted after him, trying to keep up, hoping that might give him some direction.

  We ran the length of that dirty corridor of dustbins, splashing through dark puddles where drainpipes from the tenements emptied their foul refuse to the ground. When we reached the intersection with another crossing mews, however, we met Dickens coming back, alone, out of breath, and dismayed.

  “He got away from me,” Dickens confessed as if he had committed some grievous sin. “I chased him to the backs of those buildings over there”—he pointed to a block of high, wooden tenements looming darkly over the street—“and then he just seemed to disappear into thin air.”

  This Barsad was proving a will-o’-the-wisp. Always before, in our other cases on duty with Inspector Field, the villains—Lord Henry Ashbee, Palmer the poisonous doctor*—had been full-blooded, red-eyed devils whose crimes had been confronted in all of their perverted reality. This Barsad was of a different sort. He seemed able to shift shape, to control minds, to appear and disappear at will like some magician.

  “He could be anywhere,” Field consoled Dickens, “lyin’ low in some dark corner, off over the rooftops. But he is on the run now, and we can still catch him. I will put our constables at every way out of the city, on the high roads. He may try to escape back to France with the money. Or he may rely on his disguises, his multiple identities, to sustain him here. He moves quickly from place to place. We must set our men in the railway stations and we must watch the river. He cannot fly away. We shall circulate his description and stop every man of his height, mustache or no mustache. The river police will help us. My men will take the railways.”

  Our heads were spinning at Field’s whirlwind plan.

  “He is our man, ’elst he wouldn’t have run,” Field added as he brushed past us and headed back to the rear door of the spirit-rapping room.

  Back in the phony spiritualist’s rooms, Rogers had all the witnesses, including old Peggy Ternan and Marie de Brevecoeur, who was in tears and being comforted by Florence Nightingale (ever the nurse), seated around the now docile and ordinary table. He had found the gas and had lit the room’s two jets, flooding with light that room which had before been so dark and mysterious.

  The evidences of Barsad’s spiritualist artistry were unmasked. The table was ingeniously suspended on three invisible wires which at ceiling level were attached to three ropes which ran through wooden pulleys across the ceiling to that corner of the room where Barsad controlled his effects. The eerie light had been produced by the candles of different sizes and lengths shining through a shimmering, transparent silk curtain. Marie de Brevecoeur had, of course, been the woman in white who had walked in such a ghostly way behind that selfsame curtain. Almost literally, these evidences of his handiwork proved Barsad the puppetmaster, as Field had suspected all along. He pulled not only these real strings which made the table move, but so many others. His sinister mesmeric meddling with the minds of his company of female puppets had produced these exotic entertainments.

  Each of the other sitters at the séance was questioned and sent home. All proved either legitimate mourners of lost loved ones, or simply curious dilettantes in search of a taste of the unusual. That left us with old Peggy Ternan and Marie de Brevecoeur.

  Both women were visibly shaken by their abandonment by B
arsad, to whom they seemed curiously bound.

  Inspector Field started in on Peggy Ternan right away. His anger this time, I am quite certain, was not of his usual theatrical sort. I actually feel that he hated this desiccated woman who always claimed that someone else was responsible for her criminal acts.

  “You have been in it with him all along, haven’t you?” Field moved close to her and spat the words.

  “No. No. I did what he told me, that is all,” the woman said, cowering before Field.

  “And wot wos that?”

  “These séances and…”

  “And wot?”

  “That is all,” she lied. One could see the panic in her face. “He hired me to be an actress in his little plays. ‘People pays for this spiritualism, and I gives it to them,’ he said.”

  “You lie, you wretch!” Field flogged her with his accusations. “You are in it for the blackmailin’ of Miz Burdett-Coutts, for the harassin’ of your own daughter, for the robbin’ of the bank, and for murder.”

  “No. No.” The woman’s voice was desperate, which signaled that she might be getting closer to telling the truth. “Not for murder. We weren’t there, were we, Marie? He sent us off didn’t he?” She turned pleadingly to Marie de Brevecoeur for corroboration.

  All of our eyes turned to Marie de Brevecoeur for her answer, but that poor confused woman burst into tears and buried her face in her hands.

  Field did not care a whit. He bore down all the harder upon old Peggy Ternan.

  “You wrote the blackmail letters, didn’t you?

  “You followed your own daughter and threatened her with exposure, didn’t you?

  “You became his familiar and put on these séances, didn’t you?

  “You helped him murder her and rob the bank, didn’t you?”

  Field pounded the questions into her cowering form as if he were trying to beat her to death with a hammer.