The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  All the upturned faces waiting on that Maidstone platform stared wide-eyed at this strange tableau atop their train.

  “I am perfectly recovered now, Charles,” Angela assured Dickens. “He cast his spell over me, but that jolt threw me against his leg and broke me out of its power. He has the money from the bank in that bag. We must get it.” She started to move toward her hanging antagonist.

  “No! Angela, stop! You are free of him.” Dickens forcefully restrained her from advancing on Barsad. “Wilkie, don’t just stand there, get the bag,” he ordered me as if I were his valet.

  Well, he was utterly insane if he thought I was going to pursue that dangerous criminal any further. Granted, the man was hanging by one arm over the side of the train, but I just stood there, frozen, completely unable to confront him.

  “For God’s sake, Wilkie, move!” Dickens screamed as he wrestled to restrain Miss Burdett-Coutts.

  Inexplicably, I moved.

  “You could never mesmerize me with a pocket watch, you fool,” that dangling man taunted Dickens as I moved gingerly over the top of the train toward him. “You are a showman just like me. All is a show, but you cannot control your actors unless they fear you.”

  There was a strange, almost pitiful, desperation in his voice even as he taunted Dickens and hung there so incongruously over that startled platform.

  I was within mere steps of him. I rose to my feet, traversed the last three steps to the edge of that railway coach where he hung, and stomped down hard upon his hand with my boot.

  My theory was that in his fall to the platform he would both drop the valise and injure himself in a heap on the ground, thus making his apprehension by the local gendarmes quite an easy proposition. There always seems, however, a great discrepancy between theory and reality.

  In reality, he landed rather lightly on the platform and, rolling over once, leapt with agility, for such a large man, to his feet. At his descent into their midst, that small congregation of waiting train passengers flushed like a flock of birds, some fleeing the platform altogether back to whence they had come, others fleeing to the waiting train, ripping the carriage doors open and launching themselves into the safety of its compartments.

  As for Barsad, when he found himself on his feet, his legs all intact, his valise still clutched in his hand, he simply turned and ran down the platform past the steam engine toward the far end, where it jutted past the station house on the edge of a small grazing pasture where, in the flash of another lightning bolt, we could see horses enclosed.

  “Halt for the Protectives!” a familiar voice barked at the fleeing man’s back, and, much to my surprise as I viewed the scene from my stage-side box atop the train, the man actually stopped, and looked back to see who had the audacity to issue such a foolish order.

  It was, of course, Field.

  Field and Rogers had materialized out of the train and stood below us, confronting the fugitive.

  “Halt and surrender!” Field ordered the fugitive, who immediately sneered at the very idea of it, shouted, “Be damned!” in answer, and turned tail to continue his flight, stumbling down the platform toward its end with his valise in hand.

  With surprising speed for such a blunt and blocky man, Field leapt after him, with Rogers in close pursuit.

  Dickens vaulted past me, lowered himself over the edge of the car, and dropped to the platform. I turned to look to Miss Burdett-Coutts, but her head was just disappearing down a ladder between the car and the tender. I had no real desire to further pursue the villain whose fingers I had just so recently stomped, but it seemed I had no choice. I, too, scrambled down in Dickens’s wake.

  The chase proceeded down the length of the platform nearly to its end before Field caught up with his fugitive and with a leap grappled him to the ground.

  But Barsad rolled away out of Field’s grasp and struggled to his feet, swinging the valise as a weapon at Field, who was still on his knees.

  That heavy case caught Field on the side of the head and knocked him sideways to the platform.

  “This is rightfully mine!” Barsad stood over his vanquished victim screaming. “She stole my life from me in Paris. She must pay for that!”

  In his triumphant concentration upon his fallen adversary, Barsad failed to see Serjeant Rogers advancing upon him from behind.

  With one heavy swing of his truncheon, Rogers knocked Barsad away from his master. The man stumbled backward from the blow, lost his footing on the slick wet boards of the platform, and tumbled off onto the tracks, still clutching his precious valise.

  At that very moment, to the stunned surprise of all of us on the platform, the train suddenly jolted into motion and began to pick up speed.

  Barsad lay across the tracks, dazed by the fall, but still clutching the valise.

  Rogers and Dickens were administering to Field, who was still down and seemed stunned.

  The train was picking up speed and bearing down on the stricken villain, who lay across the tracks, not moving, as if mesmerized by the single Cyclopean eye of that onrushing behemoth.

  The engine closed upon the poor man and I froze in my place staring in horror at what I was sure would be his complete dismemberment by that rushing, red-eyed, smoke breathing devil.

  But even as I stood anchored in my own ineffectuality, Angela Burdett-Coutts leapt past me over the edge of the platform and onto the railway line. She is after the valise of money, I thought. But I was wrong.

  Miss Burdett-Coutts grasped the fallen Barsad by the ankle and dragged him off of the tracks in a hairbreadth before the train rushed by. It would have cut him to pieces.

  Curious, how in such a frightening and heroic moment all I could think of was a literary reference. Angela Burdett-Coutts had saved Barsad from repeating Carker’s death in Dickens’s Dombey and Son.

  As the train rumbled by, Rogers scrambled down and took the disoriented Barsad into custody while Dickens and I attended to Angela Burdett-Coutts.

  “Good lord, Angela, why did you do such a foolhardy thing?” Dickens finally asked after he had ascertained that she was not hurt in any way.

  “I wanted my money back and him caught, not dead,” she replied with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. “No one believes in the Industrial Revolution more than I, Charles, but I do not think it should kill people.”

  Barsad Tells All

  August 15, 1852—Morning

  Inspector Field had been stunned when Barsad knocked him down, but he quickly regained his faculties and took control of the situation.

  “Rogers, hire a coach with a driver that will take us back to Bow Street,” he ordered. “We need to talk to friend bank robber here before Collar gets wind of this.”

  Barsad was utterly subdued. His left arm was broken from the fall onto the railway line and a large bruise with blood clotted all around graced the side of his face where Rogers had struck him with the truncheon.

  “Inspector, for the sake of the bank,” Angela Burdett-Coutts leapt to the pleading of her case almost as quickly as she had leapt off the platform to save this Barsad’s miserable life, “could we leave the details of the robbery out of this?”

  “That may be a difficult thing to do, ma’am,” Field said skeptically.

  “Could it not have been just a planned robbery or an attempted robbery? Must the whole City know that such a large amount of the depositor’s money actually left the bank?” Not only was she pleading her case, but she was actually prompting him as to how to help her conceal from the public the robbery. She knew exactly what she was about, and so, I think, did Field.

  “Perhaps, ma’am,” Field acquiesced. “I shall try me best.” And with that he bent to attend to poor Barsad, who was moaning in pain and holding his broken limb.

  I was sent to find a local surgeon, who proved a quite competent practitioner and set the arm in a wooden splint after some painful manipulation of the broken bone right there on the Maidstone railway platform. By the time this was accomplished,
Rogers had arrived with a large open post-chaise and driver. We were back in London within the hour.

  At Bow Street, the first thing Field did was to pour a generous quantity of gin into Barsad. Whether to dull the poor prisoner’s pain or to loosen his tongue, I am not altogether certain. That accomplished, however, and the prisoner made comfortable in Field’s own overstuffed chair, with the wounded arm resting on a large feather pillow, Field set about his necessary interrogation.

  “We knows you was not alone in this,” Field struck in, “so who put you up to all of it, the threatening letters, the bank robbery, the murder? We must know it all. Tell us and I can fix it so you will not hang.”

  Barsad was a beaten man, and he knew it. He saw that he had no choice but to make a clean breast of it…to his best advantage, I am sure.

  “It was Lane planned the whole crack,” Barsad began with the dodgy eagerness of a cornered animal.

  “Lane?” Dickens exclaimed.

  “Peter Lane,” Barsad said, nodding, “poor Liza’s husband she had run away from.”

  “Was it he killed her?” Field pressed.

  “It had to be.” Barsad winced as he said it, from the pain I am sure. “I think he meant to do it all along. That is why he did not want her to know he was in on the bank crack with me. He was going to get Marie and me out of the country with the money. He said all he wanted was his wife back.”

  “Wanted her back?” Field enticed him.

  “He said he still loved her, but she had run off because of his gambling debts.”

  “She ran away because he beat her and treated her like a slave.” Angela Burdett-Coutts rose up indignantly in the poor dead woman’s defense.

  “How did this all happen?” Field steered the prisoner back to the track of the story, fearful, I am sure, that Collar would arrive at any moment.

  “He came to me at Kate Hamilton’s. He’s a gambler and frequents the gaming tables there. He saw Marie and Liza, his wife, doing one of their private shows there. He said he had been searching for his wife and had found her, but be could not approach her because of the circumstances.”

  “Not searching for her, stalking her! Do you not see how it was?” Angela was adamant. “He was the one who attacked us in the street, the one that Meg Sheehey drove off. You all thought he was after me, but it was Eliza Lane he wanted to kill.”

  Field and Dickens and Rogers and I all looked to each other, suddenly aware that Angela had struck upon a truth that we all had overlooked. For a moment, Barsad the prisoner was forgotten.

  “That was a close scrape for him,” Field ruminated on it. “He barely got away and it made him wary. He had to find a better way to kill her.”

  “A way that would not point to him as the murderer,” Dickens took up the story that he and Field were collaborating upon. “He needed to put it off on someone else. What better than a falling-out among thieves.”

  “How did he get you to do this?” Field turned our attention back to Barsad, who looked in danger of fainting from the pain and Field’s persistent badgering.

  “He approached me at Kate Hamilton’s, I tell you—oh.” He hugged his wounded arm, which must have been throbbing with pain.

  Field poured him a full tumbler of gin, which the man gulped greedily down.

  “Please, just tell us all of it,” Field cajoled him, “and then we will let you rest, with some nice laudanum perhaps.” That seemed to give Barsad hope.

  “He took me out of Kate Hamilton’s so his wife would not see us together, then we went to some public house in Mayfair, a posh place, and we drank late. He asked all about his wife. I told him she and Marie were lovers. He found out about my gift, how I could trance them and make them do the private shows and the séances and all that lot to make us coin. It fascinated him. He said he would pay me if I would help him get his wife back. Then, a few days later, he came into the tap at Kate Hamilton’s when Marie and I were there after a show Marie had done on her own. He said he needed to talk to me. We sent Marie home in a hansom.”

  Barsad stopped. He was running down like a clock.

  Field saw it and knew he had to get the whole story out of him before he fainted away from the pain.

  “Rogers, go for some laudanum,” Field barked, “to the apothecary on the Strand.”

  Now I knew for a fact, and that blockhead Rogers (after some hesitation) figured out, that they kept laudanum right on the premises at Bow Street Station. Thus, this order to go out to procure the laudanum was but a ruse on Field’s part to keep up the hopes of the poor beleaguered prisoner and to buy some time for the extraction of his whole story.

  Pretending to obey, Rogers left the room.

  Field turned back to the object of his feigned concern.

  “Wos it then he put you onto the robbin’ of the stone bank?” Field pressed.

  “It was. I had told him I worked there and I was tryin’ to get money out of the woman banker, her.” His eyes went to Angela’s face in lieu of pointing, which he was too weak to do. “I had told him about the blackmail notes that I had been buildin’, usin’ the things I had gotten from Marie and the women’s meetings and from the Ternan hag. It was that night he gave me the plan.”

  “And what was this plan?” Field’s voice was gentle, seductive. He knew that he almost had it all.

  “On the night that the strongbox was full, I was to mesmer the two girls, Marie and Liza…” His voice faltered. He was fading fast.

  “And?” Field coaxed.

  “And…and send Liza in to drive out all those other women, then break into the strongbox with the ripping chisels. When we had the coin, I was to leave Liza tranced there, and tied up, for the Protectives to find while we got away. But he was to come in and save her, and that is how he proposed to get her back.”

  “But he murdered her instead?” It was Dickens’s stunned voice this time.

  However, before Barsad could make any answer to that, he fainted dead away.

  “He killed her, Lane did.” Field was as grim as a judge. “He killed her and meant for the whole thing to be hung on this one,” and Field nodded down at the unconscious man slumped in the chair.

  “It was all a ruse so that Barsad would take the blame for the murder,” Dickens simply repeated Field’s revelation as a way of understanding it. “He changed the plan. He did not care at all about the bank robbery. It was to murder his wife all along.”

  “He is a rich man,” Angela added. “Liza said that he gambles, but he does not care about the money. Oh, he was so cruel to her when she was his wife. He made her hate all men.”

  “He is a dodgy one all right,” Field agreed. “He had been stalkin’ his wife and then he started stalkin’ this Barsad when he found out about the power of that ring.”

  And all of our eyes were drawn to the ring on Barsad’s finger as he sat unconscious in that chair.

  Suddenly the quiet of the room was shattered by a terrible scream. It was Marie de Brevecoeur, standing clutching the bars of the cage on the far side of that long, low room, straining at the sight of Barsad slumped in that chair.

  “Oh God, is he dead? Is he dead?” she sobbed.

  She had awakened out of her drugged sleep only to see her lover and master lying unconscious before her terrified eyes.

  Field started to silence her with a sharp command—“You there, be…”—but he gave off and thought better of it. Instead, he moved to the cage, unlocked it, and led Marie de Brevecoeur out, every bit as solicitous as Florence Nightingale had been when she cared for her the night before. He nodded for Dickens to rise and he gave her that overstuffed chair next to the unconscious Barsad.

  “He is only sleeping. His arm is broken and he is in pain, but he has fallen asleep and that is best for him now,” Field gently reassured her.

  This was quite a new Inspector Field that I was witnessing. He spoke softly rather than murderously. He coaxed rather than threatened. He made himself out a friend to these captured criminals rather th
an their worst possible nightmare. But he wanted more from them, needed them on his side, at least for the moment. I had a distinct feeling that as soon as he got everything from them that he desired, as soon as they finished playing the roles that he had scripted for them, he would cast them into Newgate to rot without another thought. But for that moment, Field was a consummate actor playing against his type.

  “But you can help us, Marie.” Field’s voice was utterly unthreatening, almost fatherly, as if she were no more than a slightly wayward child. “We need to catch the man who has caused all of this trouble. He is Peter Lane, poor Eliza Lane’s estranged husband. He killed her. He planned all the while to put the murder off on you and your friend there asleep in the chair. He was using you, do you not see it?”

  Marie de Brevecoeur, who was still dull under the influence of the drug that Florence Nightingale had administered to her the night before to calm her and make her sleep, looked up at Field with wide eyes and slow powers of comprehension.

  Field waited.

  “Her husband killed her?” Marie de Brevecoeur finally saw the light.

  “Yes.”

  “She hated him. ’E beat her.”

  “Yes, we know.”

  “She told us ’e beat her.” Marie de Brevecoeur seemed to be wandering in a cloud.

  “He was the man you saw with John Barsad. You remember, do you not? You told us you saw him once.”

  “Yes, I remember now.”

  “Will you help us find him? Can you point him out for us?”

  “Yes, I zink so. May I go back to sleep now?”

  Field solicitously escorted her back to the pallet in the cage, and she slipped into sleep as easily as if it were a burial at sea.

  “She is a wreck,” Field observed in a low stage whisper when he returned from tucking her in. “Between the trances and the drugs, she barely knows who she is. But, unfortunately, she is all we have got. She is going to have to find this Lane monster for us.”