The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  “Seems! I know not seems,” our Shakespeare wrote.* The truth is that nothing is ever what it seems. Barsad was not our murderer; that role fell to the jealous husband. The murderer was not our bank robber; that role fell to the charlatan mesmerist. The blackmailer was not the angry hoyden; she took the unenviable role of the murder victim, while the actress-mother helped fill the role of the blackmailer. And the women—Ellen Ternan, Irish Meg, Angela Burdett-Coutts—survived it all. In this strange adventure on duty with Inspector Field, villains upon villains seemed to arise* until the crimes and criminals seemed to swirl us all into a confusing vortex.

  Seeming, indeed. No, nothing is ever what it seems, and that should be the first commandment of this exotic business of detectiving. What one comes to realize about this trying to solve mysteries is that they are oftentimes not so mysterious as we make them seem. Villains are not always inexplicable monsters as were Lord Henry Ashbee or Dr. Palmer the poisoner. Sometimes they are simply murderous husbands like Peter Lane who cannot stand losing control over their wives. And Barsad was no murderer, no terrible monster. He was but a confidence man with a strange gift who found himself beyond his depth.

  When we arrived at Bow Street with our prisoner in hand, a strange crowd was waiting for us as if the end of the case had been signaled throughout the city by jungle drums. Collar and his man were there, checking up. Captain Hawkins and Broken Bert, with his obscene parrot perched rakishly on his shoulder, had ventured out to inquire into the progress of the case and had decided to wait. Those four worthies were eyeing each other warily when we drove up and escorted the bloody husband in.

  Collar, predictably, needed to be told all, though no mention was ever made either of Angela Burdett-Coutts’s stolen money or of her mysterious annulled husband, who, to my knowledge, was never mentioned again. Perhaps the one thing we Victorians had learned to do better than any of our forebears was to keep our important secrets secret. Collar also displayed little interest in Dickens and me once Field and Rogers had handed over the murderer to him all bagged and dressed like a Christmas turkey.

  Field, probably just to get rid of the annoying little man, made it clear that Collar could claim all the credit for the solving of this particular case (or cases), and that worthy acquiesced graciously to Field’s wishes.

  “What a twit!” Field laughed as soon as Collar and his man had passed out of sight with their prisoner.

  Field sent Rogers directly to Newgate to liberate Miss Ellen Ternan, and within the hour she had joined our jolly little circle at Bow Street. It was well after midnight, but the sunshine of Dickens’s joy when they were reunited shone like midday. Miss Burdett-Coutts and my Meggy rushed to welcome her even as Marie de Brevecoeur looked on under the protective wing of Florence Nightingale.

  All would turn out well for all of these women. Within a fortnight, Field would arrange to have Marie de Brevecoeur remanded to the custody of Angela Burdett-Coutts, who would promptly install her at Urania Cottage for a recuperative period of adjustment.

  Things would never be the same for Dickens and his Ellen again. He could never again be her guardian and protector. Irish Meg and I knew that he was her lover, though his adoring public never would. And Irish Meg and I would never be the same again, either. The Women’s Emancipation Society had taken care of that.

  “Oh, Charles”—and Ellen Ternan looked into Dickens’s eyes with a love and gratitude that seemed so genuine—“you have saved me once again.”

  “Saved ’er arse. Saved ’er arse,” the obnoxious parrot felt impelled to comment.

  Broken Bert, with startling swiftness and accuracy, knocked the offending parrot off his shoulder and halfway across the room.

  Only momentarily distracted, we all turned back for Dickens’s answer, for whatever news of the case he was surely going to impart.

  But his Nellie was the only presence in his eyes. For a moment he looked a bit uncomfortable at her pronouncement. He hesitated, as if choosing his words with care.

  “No, dearest Nellie,” he finally answered. “You did nothing wrong. The truth saved you, not me or Wilkie or Field. We merely served to bring that truth out into the light.”

  As I think back upon it, that admission upon Dickens’s part was somewhat of a Rubicon for him. It was the first time ever that he gave the lie to the Saint George, slayer of dragons, role that he so favored playing on the stage of his rather awkward relationship with his Nellie.

  By this time, the bedraggled parrot had dragged himself back up onto his master’s shoulder and regained his petulant voice. Despite his so recent chastisement, he could not refrain from commenting upon this happy domestic scene.

  “Frilly beggars and frothy ’ores. Frilly beggars and frothy ’ores,” he crooned, capturing all of our attentions. “All’s well that ends well. All’s well that ends—” Broken Bert’s sharp hand cut him off in midsoliloquy.

  * * *

  *Collins here is misquoting Hamlet’s speech from act 1, scene 2 of that Shakespeare tragedy. Addressing his treacherous mother, Hamlet actually says: “Seems, Madam! Nay, it is; I know not ‘seems.’”

  *Here, Collins is paraphrasing Alexander Pope’s famous phrase “Alps on Alps arise” from An Essay on Criticism (1. 232).

  A New Woman

  September 10, 1852—Morning

  Though the case was closed, and one of the shadows which hung over the difficult attraction of Dickens to his young actress love was lifted, the last blow was left to be struck. That, to my chagrin, was reserved for Irish Meg.

  She insisted upon going to work, as a teller at Coutts Bank.

  I insisted that I still had a great deal of secretarial work for her to do at home in our tidy little Soho domestic establishment, but she would have no more of that illusion. Miss Burdett-Coutts had offered her a job at the bank and it was all she could think about. She even dragged me out to help her buy what she called her “banker’s duds.” We, I should say “she” since all I did was pay, settled upon a grey silk lady’s suit in two pieces: a rather tailored jacket (taking into consideration Irish Meg’s generous form) to be worn with a highnecked white blouse; this wedded to a long skirt tapered down over her hips to the floor. I must admit that in it she greatly resembled the legions of “new women” who seemed to be asserting themselves more and more in London society every day. Nonetheless, it was difficult for me to see her in that way, since I was so attracted to what she was and to what she had once been.

  “But I must be respectable now, Wilkie, now that I’m workin’ in her bank,” Meg laughed as she tried on her dress and modeled it for me in the seamstress’s shop. “And in order to be respectable, you has to looks respectable.”

  She said that with a mischievous twinkle in her eye.

  “Oh, Wilkie, I can’t wait till tomorrow.” She was so happy, so content with herself. “Oh, Wilkie”—and she kissed me on the ear—“you gave me this chance. Now it’s like I’m finally free of the streets, no more a whore.”

  “You were never a whore to me,” I protested. “I loved you from the first moment I saw you.”

  But it was a lie, and I knew it as soon as I said it (and perhaps she knew it as well). I was drawn to her precisely because she was a whore and the pleasures of her world excited me.

  “You were drawn to me, all right,” she laughed, “but not with the purest of intentions. Oh, I knows you loves me, Wilkie, and the best part is that we’re friends, you and me.”

  I had no idea where this was going, as was so often the case when she ambushed me with her philosophy.

  “It’s different with this job though, Wilkie. It’s my chance to be out on my own, to be real in the world and do respectable work for a change, but it’s more than that, too. I loves you, Wilkie, but I’m not the same girl you fell in love with.”

  For an instant that vision of her, my fire woman, her sitting before the blazing hearth at Bow Street Station, the flames sending bright light burning through her rich red hair, flashed int
o my mind. I fell in love with her fire, and now I felt as if it was burning me up.

  “These women have made me see meself in such a different light. That’s why I’m goin’ to work at the bank. It’s the last step, don’t you see?”

  I must admit that I did not see at all why she had to leave our comfortable little domestic establishment, but I nodded my head up and down nonetheless.

  “You saved me from the streets, Wilkie, and I shall always love you for that, but I have to do this, you see, I just have to.”

  “But I love you.” It was the only feeble argument I could muster.

  “Oh, I knows you do, Wilkie”—she kissed my pitiful mouth—“but I loves me, too, and this is somethin’ I has to do for meself.”

  The tragedy was that I couldn’t get excited at her prospects. All I could think about was how I was losing her, and how there was really nothing I could do about it.

  The next morning, her first day of work at Coutts Bank, I counterfeited happiness and pride in her triumph. She kissed me fervently in the doorway. “I shall be home at six and tell you how it went,” she assured me eagerly.

  As she bounced out of my arms and tripped off down the street in her smart new suit, she seemed so alive. When she turned to wave, her face lit up in a smile so radiant that it brightened the length of that grimy Soho street. I knew that it was only a matter of time until I would be losing her. Her passion was palpable. I had never seen her so excited.

  More from William J. Palmer

  The Detective and Mr. Dickens

  A delightful Dickensian romp with the canonical author teaming up with a famous upstart to solve a devilish murder.

  In Victorian London, Charles Dickens and his protege, the renowned author Wilkie Collins, make the acquaintance of the shrewdest mind either would ever encounter: Inspector William Field of the newly formed Metropolitan Protectives. A gentleman's brutal murder brings the three men together in an extraordinary investigation that leads Dickens to the beautiful young actress Ellen Ternan. Almost immediately, she becomes the love of his life. But first, Dickens must protect her from the noose, as she is the main suspect.

  The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens

  An eerie Dickensian romp with the canonical author investigating a crime that will take him into the cells of Newgate Prison and places even darker and more terrifying.

  The ghastly double murder of a society doctor's beautiful wife and her maid reunites celebrated novelist Charles Dickens, his protege Wilkie Collins, and formidable Inspector Field of the Metropolitan Protectives in another brilliant quest for justice. They manage to defend old friend and ex-burglar Tally Ho Thompson, who's arrested at the scene, but then the case takes the men from the pestilential cells of Newgate to the city's steamiest dives. Gamblers, thieves, swells, whores, and Collins's fiery lover, Irish Meg, all join the chase of a killer who is the stuff of nightmares.

  The Dons and Mr. Dickens

  A spellbinding Dickensian romp with the canonical author at Oxford, where the greatest minds of England toil…and one mind toils day and night with thoughts of the perfect murder.

  One dank November night, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins are called to a part of London notorious for its opium dens—where an Oxford History Don has been found murdered. Eager to escape the drudgery of a London winter, the two amateur detectives willingly accept Inspector Field's orders to travel on the new railway line to Oxford, where Collins was once a student, to conduct an undercover investigation. Once in Oxford, they enlist the help of Collins's old schoolmate, Charles Dodgson, a brilliant mind on the verge of becoming the youngest don in Oxford's history. Together, they encounter a complex conspiracy punctuated by murder, political radicalism, and revenge.

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