The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  Collar coughed nervously twice and then answered, “Of course,” as if this sort of desperate exercise were something they did every day and for which they were prepared.

  “My men shall cover the railway stations,” Field informed him. “He may try to escape tonight by coach on the high road, or he may try tomorrow to go by the Dover train. It leaves the Victoria Railway Station at nine in the mornin’.”

  “But what about Angela?” Dickens’s voice was heavy with concern. “Good lord, he will be using her as his shield. Your men”—and he turned from one to the other, leaving no doubt that he was addressing both Field and Collar—“must be extremely cautious. You must make certain that no harm comes to her.”

  “He will not harm her, and neither shall we,” Field reassured Charles. “He will mesmerize her if he can, to make her docile, but he will keep her close, he will. She is his safe passage!”

  Barsad’s Revenge

  August 15, 1852—Midnight

  The plan laid out for the closing tight of the entire city completed, Field ushered Collar and his silent Serjeant out, offering a few final suggestions about the immediate placement of troops and the communication between outposts.

  When he returned, Thompson was sitting disconsolate on a bench by the wall nursing his head, and Marie de Brevecoeur, with Florence Nightingale watching her closely, was sputtering back to some semblance of equilibrium. Rogers had not yet returned with his constables, and we could not set the plan in motion until he did. It was Dickens’s ever-present curiosity that broke the expectant silence.

  “Miss de Brevecoeur”—Dickens spoke very softly in addressing her so as not to raise the ire of the protective Nightingale—“why is your…this Barsad…doing this? Abducting Miss Burdett-Coutts?”

  Marie de Brevecoeur looked at Dickens as if she did not understand; then her eyes, like a frightened animal’s, moved from Dickens to Field to me and finally came to rest, pleadingly, upon Florence Nightingale’s face.

  “Marie…Marie, how did this all happen?” Florence Nightingale broke that circle of men pressing around that shaken woman. She sat next to her on the arm of the overstuffed chair and took her hand. “They need to know what happened, then I shall take you home to bed.” At that half promise, Miss Nightingale had to silence Field with a stern look. It was painfully clear in his face that she was not going home, that her next residence would be an English gaol. Marie de Brevecoeur, in her confusion, however, did not seem to notice. “What happened, Marie?” Florence Nightingale coaxed.

  “’E took her because ’e hates her and her bank.” The shaken woman’s voice took on a brief renewal of strength, fired by passion, I presumed. I think she really loved the mesmerizing Barsad, was, in a sense, a willing participant in the strong hold that he had upon her. “It was her bank, in Paris, zat drove him from his place in zee university. I was his student.”

  “He taught in university?” Field almost seemed intimidated by this revelation, as if he was reassessing his opinion of Barsad’s capacities.

  “Yes. Literature and zee sciences. ’E knew so much. But ’e gambled, at cards and on boxing matches.”

  “And how does Coutts Bank figure in all of this?” Dickens gently asked.

  “’E borrowed money from them. ’E put up his small house. When ’e lost it, and could not pay, they took his house, and zen zey hounded him at zee university. ’E was but a poor scholar, but zey wanted his wages to go direct to zee bank.” She stopped, and Florence Nightingale rose to cut off the interrogation, but Marie de Brevecoeur, with a touch of her hand to her protectress’s wrist, signaled that she would go on. “Zee professors called him in. Zey would have no scandal. Zey told him not to return. Zat his students would go to other professors. ’E blamed it all on zee bank.”

  “And how did you get to England?” Dickens’s voice was soft and seductive. It was as if this woman was under his spell and was compelled to tell the whole story to him.

  “We came on zee channel boat, and all zee way ’e drank wine and plotted against zee bank.”

  “And then he went to work there?” Field took up the questioning, but in the same quiet tone that Dickens had used and which was working so well. Nary a tear had fallen in the course of her complete narrative.

  “Yes. When we came to London, it was zee only work ’e wanted. ’E had zis obsession with zee great stone bank. ’E hated it, and zen ’e came to hate her.”

  “Miss Burdett-Coutts?” Field asked, though he need not have; we had all assumed the woman’s meaning.

  “Yes.” She raced on as if trying to escape her whole story, as if it were some sort of prison. “’E said she slighted him when she came through zee doors zat ’e guarded. ’E said she was a toff and a haughty bitch who had ruined his life and would not even deign to look at him.”

  “And all this time he was plotting to rob Coutts Bank?” Field coaxed her further along her narrative path.

  “Yes, ’e wanted to hurt zee bank, to ruin eets reputation, but ’e didn’t know how to do it.” Marie de Brevecoeur surprised us all with this answer. “’E was waiting for his chance, until zat man, zat gambler, put him up to it.”

  “Who is that man?” One could hear the excitement in Field’s voice as he got closer to solving the mystery, but he kept his voice in check and posed the question in a way that Marie de Brevecoeur felt no threat.

  “I do not know who ’e is,” she answered. “’E is a gambling man zat John met at Kate Hamilton’s one night when Liza and I were performing. John was playing at cards with him. I only saw zee man once.”

  “Performing at Kate Hamilton’s?” Field did not know this small tidbit of information which Dickens and I had gleaned from our conversation with Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal. “Both of you?”

  “Yes.” Marie de Brevecoeur seemed resigned to telling all. “We performed private shows for men to watch through peepholes in zee walls. John made us do it. ’E used zee ring.”

  “Marie, you do not have to…” Florence Nightingale, ever the protectress, tried to stop the interrogation, but Marie de Brevecoeur wanted to go on, as if she was trying to absolve her sins by exposing them to the light, as if by way of the truth she was trying to flee the enchantment her master had cast upon her.

  “But I must. Yes, we performed for men’s eyes. But Liza and I were lovers. John made us so. ’E liked to watch us, at home. When Liza visited, ’e used zee ring and we made love for him. For a time, she even moved in with us. And then John found us work doing private shows at Kate Hamilton’s casino. I was still his lover, and hers, but zis money supported our household. Zen, ’e met zis man, and zey made zee plan to rob zee stone bank.”

  “And this man, this gambler, it was his plan to rob the bank, not Barsad’s?” Field became almost clinical in his questioning, slow, quiet, like a physician asking a patient for her symptoms. “But Barsad liked the idea? Was an enthusiast?”

  “Yes, from zee very first word. ’E was so excited. ’E came to me and Liza telling us zat it was his chance to have his revenge on zee bank and zee woman. ’E was obsessed with her.”

  “Why did he hate Miss Burdett-Coutts?” Dickens was naive enough to believe that there might be some rational explanation.

  Marie de Brevecoeur thought a long moment on that question.

  One could see the impatience in Inspector Field’s eyes as he shot a sharp look at Dickens which warned: “No more questions! This is my witness!”

  But Marie de Brevecoeur wished to answer Dickens’s question.

  “’E hated her because she was a woman of great power and ’e could not accept zee control she exercised over his life. ’E felt she had robbed him and ’e was determined to rob her back.”

  “He is mad!” Dickens could not contain himself.

  “No.” Field was speculative, his forefinger scratching at the side of his right eye. “He is a thief and a whoremaster.”

  “And a mesmerist,” Dickens added.

  “A man of strange powers.
” I heard myself adding my judgement to their listing of this shape-shifting phantom’s occupations.

  Marie de Brevecoeur sank back in her chair and seemed to be resting.

  “He hates women.” Florence Nightingale interrupted our dissection of his elusive character. “He could not stand a woman possessing that sort of control over his life. He hated her because he could not control her.”

  Only now, after twenty years, as I remember this whole bizarre episode, am I beginning to understand what it was all about. It was about possession, the devil’s own possession, and all of the different kinds of possession which we Victorian gentlemen desired over our women. Our women—how ironic that I should still, twenty years later, choose that phrase. John Barsad possessed these women with his mesmeric trances. His was a tangled web that Marie de Brevecoeur was trying to escape with her telling of the truth of the story.

  “But who is this other man?” Field demanded, his voice hard again, knowing that he had it all from her and this was the only piece left in the puzzle.

  Marie de Brevecoeur’s head shot up as if she had been dozing or dropping back into a trance.

  “I do not know,” she answered softly, apologetically. “John never told me, never gave him a name. ’E was just zee man from Kate Hamilton’s who will help us make our fortune, who will tell us when zee money is zere. Liza wanted to know his name, too, but John would not tell us.”

  At that moment, Rogers entered with a disheveled lot of constables. Some were, by the order of their dress, clearly on duty, and the others, by the evidence of their various attitudes and attires of unpreparedness, had been collected from their off-duty entertainments. With that turn, Field cut off the interrogation of Marie de Brevecoeur, still unresolved, and went about the deployment of his troops.

  The woman, under the care of Miss Nightingale, was put away for the night on the pallet bed in the unoccupied cage of the bull pen.

  Field wrote out the descriptions of Barsad and Angela, and the assignment for each and every constable individually. It was a requirement of the Protectives that every constable know how to read, but from the manner in which these men turned their assignment pages about, hither and yon, upside and down, I wondered how stringently that regulation was being enforced.

  Field forcefully warned them of the man’s penchant for disguise and phantomlike elusiveness. He emphasized Barsad’s height as the bellwether of identification. All that done, he sent them off to their posts.

  As for Dickens, Thompson, and myself, Field sent us home until morning; Thompson to nurse his cracked head, us to get some sleep. His last order to us was to meet at Victoria Railway as early as possible in the morning to help watch for the fugitives at the departure of the Dover train.

  The Duel

  August 15, 1852—Morning

  Victoria Railway Station in the morning was a humming swarm of milling people going about the business of empire. Victoria was the new stepping-off point for England’s international commerce, the gateway to the Continent, from whence stern bankers and men of business embarked to buy and sell, barter and bargain and best their commercial counterparts in France and Spain and Italy and beyond. The days of the Dover stage, which Charles would fondly remember in A Tale of Two Cities, were gone forever. Everyone went by train. At that time, there was no other railway terminus like it. Waterloo, which was just then being built, would ultimately surpass it in size and splendor, but in 1852 Victoria was the only gateway to the south coast by rail.

  Field’s men had been in place at Victoria since two in the morning. Field and Rogers themselves had been there most of the night. Field’s men were stationed at the barrier. The only problem was that the barrier was not the only point of entry to the platforms. Coaches and pedestrians could drive up or walk in right off of either Eccleston Street or the Belgrave Road, and proceed directly to the trains. Cabs could deliver their passengers almost to the doors of the railway coaches. The Dover train left at nine. Dickens and I arrived at half eight.

  As we rode across London from the Wellington Street offices, our summer-long imprisonment in that suffocating heat was finally broken. We entered the cab under a dark and glowering sky, and as we turned into the Strand headed for Trafalgar Square lightning flashed dramatically over the dome of St. Paul’s. In brief moments the rain came in waves off the river, beating down upon us in torrents, pummeling poor Rob as he sat unprotected on the box, turning the streets into rushing streams flowing around the horses’ hooves and drowning the trudging boots of the foot passengers. But through it all Sleepy Rob drove on and delivered us to our destination.

  The Dover train stood at platform 1 wheezing and belching steam and smoke as its boilers were slowly brought up to running pressure. The platform itself resembled Covent Garden Market. It was crowded with porters wrestling luggage about, with victuallers peddling pastries and sausages, Scotch eggs and country pies, loaves of bread, slabs of cheese, and flasks of cheap wine. Trainmen officiously consulted their pocket watches. Young gentlemen, dandies in frock coats, loitered smoking. Stern men of business, checking their repeaters, anxious to get on with the ruthless machinations of commerce, waited impatiently. Gay families in bonnets and parasols off on holiday to Provence or the beaches of southern France rushed about. And in the midst of this madding crowd waiting to board the Dover train stood Field, like a lighthouse in the deepest dark, his gaze sweeping steadily over that roiling sea of faces, bags, carts.

  Dickens and I stood for long minutes in Field’s company before he ever noticed our arrival. We watched as his eyes searched the crowd for our two fugitives. When he finally acknowledged our presence, there was an edge of frustration in his voice.

  “Damn, there are too many people out there,” he complained to Dickens. “They could be anywhere, in any sort of disguise. He is probably watchin’ us right now, waitin’ for his chance to get aboard.”

  “He won’t get past us,” Dickens assured Field with a confidence to which I am not sure he fully subscribed. Field confessed later to Dickens and me that the whole affair was bungled. It was, after all, Field rationalized in retrospect, the first time he had ever attempted, or for that matter even considered, closing down the whole city to keep a fugitive from escaping justice.

  As we stood at the barrier watching Field’s relentless gaze sweep the bustling crowd, I felt a sudden sense of the futility of his efforts. This scene before us was out of his control. It was too big a stage with too many players. There were too many people coming from too many directions in too many various forms of conveyance.

  “Look sharp!” Field turned to Dickens and me with his plea for help, which in his inimitable way turned out to be a gruff order. “We are lookin’ for a couple, tall man with a woman. He will surely be in disguise. She will be led against her will.”

  At Field’s command, Dickens and I redoubled our surveillance of the platform. It was no use. This day’s train seemed completely booked with couples of all shapes, sizes, colors, and enormous configurations of luggage that they all seemed to be quite conveniently hiding behind.

  I tried to make some sense out of that crowd of milling passengers. As my eyes moved from one departing couple to the next, desperately searching for some telltale sign of a disguise, of resistance on the woman’s part, or of anything out of the ordinary, the whole platform suddenly deteriorated into a chaotic swirl, all ran together in a whirling dance.

  They could be anyone, I thought. We are undone.

  Then Field proceeded to exacerbate my sense of confusion and futility.

  “The train leaves in three minutes,” Field barked. “He could already have her on board for all we know, or he could be waitin’ to make a rush just before the train pulls out when the mob is the most dodgy. We must git out amongst them. It is our only chance now.” And he pushed his way through, making for the train.

  “Charles, Collins,” he spat our names back over his shoulder as his pace picked up to a trot, “you take the platform on that side of
the train. Rogers and I will get this side.” As we came abreast of the first railway coach, which was, of course, the last coach on the train, Field punctuated his order with a fierce stab of his commanding forefinger to the right; then he broke off down the left side of the straining, steaming train.

  “All passengers on board!” Two conductors, each consulting his official pocket watch, standing on each side of the small metal porch mounted on the rear of the train, leaned out and shouted down the crowded platforms on either side of the coupled line of railway coaches.

  I followed Dickens around to the right of the bellowing trainmen as he broke into a run at Field’s command. However, as we came around the corner of the coach and the platform opened up before us, he suddenly brought himself up short and I, rather clumsily, ran right into his back.

  “Sorry,” I said stupidly, and then I realized why he had come up of a sudden so short.

  “Good God, Wilkie.” He was staring into what was now an uncontrolled mob eight railway coaches long all struggling to board the waiting train through the more than sixty or so carriage doors on this side alone. “We’ll never find them in this mess.” It seemed like a declaration of despair, something I had never before heard Dickens utter. “But we certainly must try.” He immediately righted himself and plunged into the crowd.

  I waded in after him wondering how on God’s earth it had come to pass that I was here doing this and feeling such a terrible burden of responsibility for something so far out of my ken or control.

  Charles ran up to an elderly couple tottering, the man with the aid of a cane, slowly toward the train. He blocked their way and without saying a thing peered hard at them, then reached out and pulled at the man’s beard. Satisfied, he hastily said, “Sorry, sorry” and continued on, leaving the stunned couple utterly mystified if not terrorized.