The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  I accosted a tall man handing his young lady down from a carriage which had just trotted in off the Belgrave Road.

  “What is it, sir?” the man, startled, turned to me when I rather rudely grabbed his shoulder so that I could turn him to see his face.

  “Sorry, sorry,” I apologized, “I thought you were someone else.” And I fled down the train looking for another unsuspecting couple.

  In my haste, I, almost, once again, ran right into Dickens’s back. Abandoning his frantic darting from one unsuspecting couple to the next, he had stopped suddenly in the center of the platform and was turning slowly in a small circle for the purpose of intently surveying the crowd.

  I stood staring at him rather stupidly as he did his slow pirouette. I should, however, have been taking stock of the crowd myself, but I had so surrendered to the habit of observing him that I tended to forget my own humble responsibilities. Suddenly, he burst off at a run back toward the rear of the train, away from the steam engine belching forth those steady streams of smoke which signal its imminent jolting to life followed by its immediate departure in an explosion of sound and cinders and speed.

  I watched as Dickens ran up to a tall, mustachioed porter pushing a coffinlike crate on a wheeled handcart toward the mail coach, which was the second to the last coach on the train. When he accosted this tall burly chap, the man took one step back in perfectly normal surprise, then bristled at Dickens in temporary anger. I was too far away to hear their exchange, but the man was clearly and demonstrably unhappy at this unwelcome interruption of his labour. Dickens, however, was undaunted. Ignoring the man’s growled words, which, though I was just coming up to them and didn’t hear them all, sounded like they were pronounced in a thick Scottish burr and said, in translation, something like “Wot in ’ell you doohin, you bloody gorp,” Dickens first peered hard into the Scotsman’s face and then knocked hard two or three times on the side of his large box. Only then did Dickens’s shoulders sag in frustration and defeat, and his voice turn to the unpleasant task of apology. To this day, neither Dickens nor I know what a “gorp” is.

  That possibility having proven yet another embarrassment, and the train mere moments from pulling out, Dickens stood, rather forlornly, looking to me for some sort of direction. All I could manage was a clueless shrug.

  “Wilkie”—Charles’s hand was on my shoulder—“either they have found some other conveyance out of London, or they have somehow eluded us and are already on that train.”

  But even as he spoke, something caught my eye back down the length of the platform toward the rear of the train. All of the final “All aboards” had been shouted up and down, and the engine was mere moments from dragging its cargo off into the driving rain. As a consequence, the hurrying crowd on the platform had somewhat calmed and cleared. There were still a goodly number of people about, waving farewell to friends and relatives, lovers and husbands, some joyfully, some tearfully, but the crowd was not nearly so dense, nor moving so animatedly. In this momentary calm, and, in a strange, almost mesmerizing way, as if time and motion had momentarily slowed so that I could see more clearly, my eye focused upon one shard of movement out of the darkness of that storm-tossed street across the platform toward the train. For some reason, which to this day I still cannot fathom, I instinctively knew that it was them. I am neither sharp of eye nor acute of perception, and yet I knew, and with a certainty which I have rarely felt about anything in my hapless blunder-about of a life.

  “Charles, there!” I pointed excitedly, though he was right at my elbow.

  Perhaps it was the size, or the timing at that last moment, or the hurried motion toward the train that drew my attention. I honestly do not know. However, as soon as Charles sighted down my pointing arm and picked them out in their movement toward the train, he was as utterly certain as I.

  “Yes, Wilkie, it is them,” he said in a low, awed whisper as if he were looking at a beatific vision. Without any hesitation, he leapt off at a run down the platform just as the train began to move.

  What had caught my attention was yet another odd couple, two women in black, wearing veils (perhaps it was the veils that gave them away?), a towering nurse awkwardly pushing an invalid in a chair toward the last coach of the train. A single small valise was their only luggage, and it sat in the lap of the invalid patient as she was wheeled across the platform. As we watched, one of the trainmen threw open the rearmost door, jumped down, handed the valise up to one of his colleagues, and helped the female nurse lift her charge out of the chair and onto the train; then, most obligingly, the trainman helped wrestle the bulky chair on board. He managed to get them accommodated just as the train started to move. It was at that moment, as she handed the chair up onto the train, that the nurse saw Dickens burst into a run down the platform toward her, but his shouts for the trainman to stop her from boarding were utterly drowned out by the screech of the steam whistle as the train got under way.

  The nurse was startled. Moving too quickly and powerfully to be either feminine or innocent, she jumped aboard the moving train and slammed shut the compartment door.

  Seeing this, Dickens stopped short and, without hesitation, changed direction and ran for the moving train. Because it was still moving slowly enough for Dickens to catch it, and because an observant and obliging gentleman who spied him running for it pushed open a compartment door and grabbed Dickens by the shoulder as he dove though it, Charles was able to get on board rather easily.

  “Wilkie, for God’s sake, come on!”

  I had not moved, but Dickens was shouting for me to once again take my life in my hands and leap onto this smoking behemoth which was rapidly picking up speed. Inexplicably, I ran for that open door and leapt for Dickens’s outstretched hand as the train jolted by.

  He pulled me in and we were off in hot pursuit.

  “They are behind us on the train, Wilkie.” Charles had stopped to puzzle it out. “At all cost, we must not let them get by us. He will try to secrete her and himself. He may even change his identity once again. He has seen us. He knows we shall be searching for him. We must go slowly and look not only for him and his charge, but for any sign of his passing or his hiding. If we are blessed with good fortune, he will immediately abandon his hostage and attempt by whatever means to save himself. Once Angela is safe, he is no more our concern as I see it. We can leave him to the authorities in Dover when the train arrives.”

  I was certainly relieved to hear that last, and to realize that Dickens was not recklessly seeking violent confrontation with this phantom.

  “Where the devil is Field?” leapt from my mouth as, I thought, a quite natural reaction to our dilemma of being aboard a speeding train in pursuit of a confirmed bank robber and possible murderer. “Should not he be conducting this search?”

  “Quite possibly he did not even board the train, not knowing, as we did, with certainty, that our friend Barsad had gotten on board.”

  “Oh, Charles, I do not like this. What if he has a pistol or some other dangerous weapon? Innocent people could get hurt. We could get hurt!”

  Dickens, that heedless idiot, actually broke into a grin and chuckled at my alarum. “No one is going to get hurt, Wilkie,” he assured me condescendingly in the tone a beekeeper might use to a skeptical child.

  When we had vaulted into the train, we landed right in its midsection. But it was a long train, for those days, and we were still probably some four coaches from the rear, where our kidnapper had boarded with his hostage.

  “We must search slowly through every coach, Wilkie,” Dickens proclaimed as he set off to do just that. In each coach, a narrow corridor with a window every ten feet or so ran down one side while the windowed (and window-shaded, which somewhat complicated our task) inner compartment doors formed the interior wall and opened inward from the corridor. Of course, the outside of the train was all lined with compartment doors out of which Barsad could leap into the dark and the storm at any moment, provided that he decided that th
e risking of life and limb by ejecting oneself from a swiftly moving train was his only means of escape.

  I, of course, followed at Dickens’s heel like the faithful bulldog that I have always been. One after another we opened the compartment doors to intrude upon startled travelers and importune them for information that they did not possess concerning our two fugitives.

  Dickens would fling open each door and interrogate the startled occupants of each compartment. “A tall man or woman with an invalid woman in his charge. Have you seen them? Have they passed by you?” All was happening so fast that he did not have time to realize how absurd and confusing his questions must have sounded.

  Repeatedly the compartment passengers would stare wide-eyed at this lunatic who had so rudely burst in upon their slumbers, or their reading, or their quiet contemplation of the rainy night speeding by outside their windows, and then would shake their heads in the negative in astounded silence. But by the time any spokesman could muster a protest or a curse, Dickens would be gone, lunging for the next compartment, accosting the next lot of unsuspecting travelers.

  In this haphazard way we progressed through two coaches. Ignoring the drawn shades, he broke into one compartment and surprised a young couple who had progressed well past the preliminary stages of the act of love. In another, he burst in upon a congregation of Jews in shawls chanting around a lighted candle. In yet another, and by far the most dangerous, he interrupted a rough man cleaning his fowling piece, and, I am sure, if that weapon would have been loaded, Dickens would have been shot on the spot because the man, by animal reflex, raised it toward us to hold us off.

  In this manner, we made our way toward the back of the train until we entered the mail and large baggage coach which stood immediately forward of the last, into which Barsad and his charge had boarded. It was in this mail coach that we finally picked up the trail.

  When we entered that wide, open coach stacked high with portmanteaus, crates, and all various sizes of shipping boxes, we at first thought that it was unoccupied, but as we progressed to the rear and reached the mailbags piled high atop one another, we heard the low moaning of a man painfully returning to consciousness.

  The mail clerk was sitting propped up upon the bags which served as his rough pillow and holding his head gingerly as if it were a cracked egg.

  “She burst in, she did,” the poor man groaned as Dickens bent down over him, “and smashed me square in the face.”

  “Where did they go?” Charles shook the man’s shoulder with a gentle urgency. “The tall woman who hit you, where did she go?”

  “There wos two of them,” the mail clerk sluggishly remembered as Dickens helped him to regain his feet. “There, up there.” He pointed unsteadily toward the ceiling in the corner of the coach. “The one dragged the other up that ladder.” And he pointed once again even as he collapsed back down onto the mailbags. Evidently, his weakness from the blow to his face had reasserted its wobbly governance over his knees.

  Dickens, so solicitous but a moment earlier, abandoned him like a burdensome relative and scrambled over the mailbags into the shadowy corner toward which the man had pointed. Attached to the dark wall, a wide ladder rose up to a hatchway in the roof of the coach. When I arrived, clawing my way over the mailbags, Charles was already halfway up it, climbing to the top of the train. The hatch at the top was open and Dickens disappeared through it as the violent dark clouds rushed past straight above. I, of course, was damned to follow no matter where my personal demon led. Why I remained so recklessly faithful to his lure of becoming a novelist no matter what the risk, I simply do not know.

  When I emerged into the driving air atop that speeding railway coach, Dickens was recklessly in the act of leaping across the gaping crevasse between our mail coach and the next coupled coach toward the front of the train. As I steadied myself in the rushing air—thank God, it had stopped raining, though the deck of that speeding rooftop was still quite slick from the wet—I could see that Dickens was moving in pursuit of two shadowy figures progressing slowly over the top of the train toward the steam engine. In the rushing wind, with bright cinders spewing back all around from the engines like a swarm of berserk fireflies, those dark fleeing figures did, indeed, seem like phantoms.

  Stooped low against the wind, Dickens steadily made his way along the roof of that coach in the wake of the receding figures. And then he leapt again, fearlessly clearing yet another crevasse between jolting, lurching railway coaches, and I realized that I could no longer just watch, holding hard to the safety of that open hatch. To my chagrin, I realized that I was cursed to follow Dickens along the top of that train straight to perdition.

  As I timidly crept along, all that prodded at my mind was the image of my body being ground to mincemeat beneath the iron wheels of that speeding train. I don’t remember jumping that first crevasse between coaches. I must have simply closed my eyes and done it, and done it again at the next coupled juncture and the next. I vaguely remember timidly scuttling forward, bent over with my hands steadying myself against the moving roof of that speeding coach, then actually crawling on all fours as low as I could possibly crouch in order to stay on. But though I was beyond comprehension of how I progressed, I did nonetheless progress to the point where I was within hailing distance of Charles and the two fugitives he was pursuing.

  Landing after a frantic leap across coaches, I looked up and realized that I was on the roof of the same coach which Dickens and the fugitives occupied. It was the forwardmost passenger coach on the train, with only the coal tender and the steam engine mounted in front. At its far end, Dickens stood in direct confrontation with the two fleeing objects of our foolhardy pursuit. Even in the murkiness of the day and the rush of the train, I was able, to my surprise, to see and hear their exchange. The tall powerful veiled figure in the woman’s black dress loomed above Dickens while the second woman had sunk to the roof of the coach. Dickens was standing with his back to me confronting this pair. The tall woman (or man), the criminal Barsad, faced Dickens defiantly, the valise clutched in his hand like a weapon. Angela Burdett-Coutts seemed either to have sunk to the floor in exhaustion, or have been thrown or pushed down there. She seemed inert, utterly submissive to her captor.

  Strangely, I felt the train beginning to slow. Perhaps the engineer has sighted this congregation of lunatics atop his moving train and is slowing down to insure that we don’t fall off, I thought, hoping against hope that some reasonableness might still be in force in this murky, rushing, insane world I had found myself trapped atop.

  Though I could not see very far ahead in the rain and mist, the train was pulling into a station. I learned afterward that it was Maidstone, a regular stop on the Dover run.

  Dickens and Barsad were within mere feet of each other. The hulking man incongruously imprisoned in the woman’s skirts made, however, no hostile move toward Charles. Angela lay in a bundle at his feet, and I was unable to ascertain if she was even conscious.

  I crept closer to them over the top of the train.

  A shuddering gust of wind accompanied by a brilliant flash of lightning illuminated the whole length of that slowing train and revealed the station coming up upon us. It blew aside the woman’s veil, allowing the flash to reveal for the first time the face of that shape-shifting phantom whom we had been pursuing all over London for so long.

  John Barsad’s face was broad and rough with glowering black eyebrows, but bore no bushy mustache as had been described. There was a dominance in his face that bespoke the power he seemed able to wield over these women who came under his influence. Yet, as that flash of light illuminated his face, it also revealed a mere man who, it struck me then and I remember it now, seemed every bit as terrified as was I.

  “There is no place left for you to go. You can’t escape England,” I heard Dickens shout as I crawled closer. “Let her go. You have not murdered anyone. If you harm her, they will hang you.”

  Suddenly, the man in woman’s clothes thrust out his
hand toward Dickens’s face. I, at first, thought that he was trying to strike Dickens down. But that was not his intent. He was extending his ring, set with a large blue stone, out toward Charles’s face as if it were a weapon.

  “You see it, do you not?” this Barsad screamed over the dying hiss of the wind as the train slowed to enter the station. “Stay back! You see the ring. Look at the ring. I will throw her off if you do not. Look at the ring.”

  His words seemed to freeze Dickens for a moment. I was afraid that he was actually being drawn under the man’s powerful spell. But it was merely a brief hesitation on Dickens’s part. He, almost immediately, did an equally bizarre and unpredictable thing.

  Slowly extracting his gold repeater from his waistcoat pocket, Charles swung it on its fob in the air between himself and the desperate man.

  “No. You look at mine,” Dickens coaxed. “Follow it in the air. You see, follow it in the air.”

  This strange tactic utterly unmanned Barsad. He dropped his ringed hand to his side and stared unbelieving at Dickens. At that instant, a flash of lightning crashed overhead, illumining the strange scene. The train was almost to the platform, slowed to but a gentle crawl.

  “You think you can mesmerize me, you fool!” Barsad laughed maniacally, drawing the stares of every waiting passenger on that platform as the train glided slowly in and jolted to a stop, throwing all of us atop it off our balance.

  At that small jolt, the prostrate Angela came suddenly back to life and, in a quick, rolling scissors motion with her legs, cut the legs out from under her tormentor.

  Barsad pitched heavily down onto his back on the roof of that railway coach and would have rolled right off of it had he not caught himself upon a small upthrust edge. His body toppled over the side and he was left hanging there, only a few feet above the platform, dangling precariously by one clawing hand. In his other, he still clutched that bulky black valise.

  As soon as Miss Burdett-Coutts tripped him up and he went down, Dickens rushed to her. He bent down and took her protectively into his arms, but she shook herself free and scrambled to her feet.