The Dons and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  “Yes, well, ’ee seems like ’ee’s our man,” Field affirmed my enthusiasm.

  “He seems like an absolute Leonardo.” Even Dickens could not resist my excited nostalgia.*

  “I am sure he will help us,” I pushed my advantage. “If this murdered man is truly a Christ Church man, then Charlie Dodgson will know him.”

  “Wilkie, would you—I know this is awfully short notice—be able to accompany this corpse to Oxford on the railway tomorrow?” Field paused, thinking. “And, of course, you as well, Charles, if you can get away,” he added as an afterthought.

  “Of course, I would be happy to visit my old haunts,” I answered immediately.

  You cannot imagine, dear reader, the satisfaction I felt at being declared the leader of this expedition. I was simply afraid that Dickens would not be able to go along as my valet. But Dickens was not about to pass up an opportunity to once again go on duty with Inspector Field.

  “Of course, I can get away as well,” Dickens answered rather glumly, lacking his usual enthusiasm, I am sure, because he was not, in this instance, the one in control.

  “Dispatched to Oxford then, it is.” Field raised his glass to his two willing irregulars. “Rogers, see that the body is in the railway car when the Oxford train departs tomorrow morning,” he ordered his serjeant, who had come in out of the cold fog as we were speaking.

  “What exactly do you want us to do there?” Dickens asked.

  “Accompany the body to the Oxford Protectives’ station. There was an Oxford constable down ’ere only a few weeks ago. Collar,* that fool, brought ’im around to observe our ways of doin’ things. ’Ee seemed a good man. ’Ad a pommie name, though. Reginald, that was it. Reginald”—he thought on it a moment—“Morse, yes that’s it, Morse. Use my name, and Collar’s too if you must, but this Morse was very keen on detective work and I’m sure ’ee’ll ’elp us out.” Field paused a moment to think.

  “And then we hunt up Wilkie’s friend Dodgson, I presume.” Dickens did not wait for Field to complete his thought.

  “Yes, find ’im and take ’im to identify the body.”

  “And then?” I spoke up just to let them know that I was still there.

  “And then we will ’ave to decide wot to do next,” Field snapped.

  This time Dickens waited for Field to complete his thought.

  “If your mathematical friend knows the dead man, where ’ee lives, can tell us something about ’is ’abits and ’aunts, then we will know ’ow to get on with it. If the fellow lived in Oxford and was just visitin’ London, then maybe we’ll ’ave to move our investigations up there. I’ll ’ave to see wot you two find out.”

  “What do we do after we talk to Charlie?” I asked.

  “Yes, what if young Dodgson does know the murdered man, what if the dead man is from Oxford, from Christ Church even?” I was always amazed at how quickly Dickens caught on to things.

  Field took a deep, meditative draught from his mug of hot gin.

  “Wotever ’appens. Whether all that proves true or not,” Field plotted our course, “you two come back ’ere to London on the evenin’ train, and I’ll decide wot we do next. We will keep this murder as quiet as possible until you get back and we know wot we’ve got.”

  “Done.” Dickens smiled as wide as a milk-gorged cat and turned eagerly to me. “Oh Wilkie, this is an unexpected adventure to brighten up the gloomiest time of the year.”

  I certainly could not disagree with him on that, and I must admit I was eagerly looking forward to this Oxford jaunt. I had been very happy there and I was sure that my young friend Dodgson would help us to identify this poor man with the bullet hole in his heart.

  All of that settled, there was but a momentary lull in this discourse as the publican refortified our tumblers of hot gin. It was not long, however, until Dickens brought us back to another of the mysteries of that foggy evening.

  “What do you suppose our friend Holmes of the Home Office who appeared out of nowhere tonight was after?” Charles posed the question for the general consideration of everyone at the table.

  “’Ee wos a queer duck, wosn’t ’ee?” Rogers chimed in.

  “Yes,” Field speculated “and wot is the ’Ome Office doin’ in Lime’ouse ’Ole? Those blokes in their frock coats and weskets never leave White’all. ’Ow did ’ee get wind of this?” Field wondered aloud. “And why did ’ee care?”

  “He appeared and disappeared out of the fog like some kind of a portly phantom,” Dickens chuckled.

  “That ’ee did,” Field grinned at the idea. “Perhaps ’ee is our murderer.” We all had a good laugh at that possibility.

  We finished our drinks in a rather subdued languor, as if the strain of the night and all our plotting had drained our strength.

  “It is time to go,” Field finally declared, emptying his tumbler of gin. “We ’ave got more work to do on this tonight,” and he nodded to his faithful Rogers, “and you two must get up at dawn to catch the railway to Oxford.”

  I was more than grateful to see an end to this long and complicated evening. I hoped that Irish Meg was waiting up for me when I arrived at home in Soho Square. But I was not too confident of her. Since she had taken to honest work in Miss Burdett-Coutts’s bank, she had been much less ardent in her attentions towards me.

  I bid goodnight to Dickens beneath the gas lamp under the windows of his Wellington Street offices.

  “I shall collect you at your rooms tomorrow morning at eight, Wilkie,” he directed me, ever the leader, unable to take any other position in the regiment. “I think we will take Sleepy Rob with us to Oxford. We will need dependable transportation.”

  * * *

  *Charles Dodgson truly was a prodigy. He matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1849 at the age of seventeen. He took up residence in the Tom Tower in 1851 and lived there the rest of his life as student, mathematics lecturer, sub-librarian, and ordained deacon. In 1853, he became the youngest lecturer in the history of the college, at the age of twenty-one.

  *Inspector Collar, who first appeared in Dickens’s and Collins’s most recent adventure with Inspector Field (commercially titled The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens), was Field’s counterpart at the St. James’ Station in central London.

  Oxford

  November 26, 1853—Morning

  Dickens called for me in Soho promptly at eight of the clock the next morning. Irish Meg had already departed for Coutts Bank, never thinking twice about my going off to Oxford on a case of detection for Inspector Field. Instead of worrying about any possible danger to my person, all she said was “Hittle do you good, Wilkie, to get out of this beastly city for a spell.” Me thus dispatched, she tripped off like a schoolgirl to her work.

  What was attempting to pass itself off as the sun was gingerly poking at the thick fog when Dickens arrived to collect me in Sleepy Rob’s new growler. As he sat at the curbstone high up on his gleaming new coach, I could not help but think how Sleepy Rob had moved up in the world. In recent months, Rob had almost become Dickens’s personal coachman to the point that Charles had initiated an elaborate flag system in the bay window of the Household Words offices for the sole purpose of summoning him and his horse. A red paper flag set on the window ledge meant “Stop Immediately. I need your conveyance.” A yellow flag meant “Report Here Early Tomorrow Morning.” A blue flag meant “Report Here at Five This Afternoon.” Their little semaphore system seemed to work fairly well, to the point that the steady income which the connection had generated had allowed Sleepy Rob to exchange his rather tattered and worn hansom for a quite handsome new growler, entirely enclosed, which could carry four passengers quite comfortably. It proved the ideal conveyance, I soon found out, for this particular trip. Dickens somehow knew that coaches could be transported on the new steam trains, and that was why he had summoned Sleepy Rob to transport us to Oxford.

  Dickens had seen to it that Sleepy Rob’s growler was sumptuously laid out for our railway journey. Each of the p
lush overstuffed benches inside was fitted out with a heavy travel blanket to keep our legs and feet warm. Dickens had even provided a covered basket of foodstuffs to serve as our breakfast once the train got underway.

  Dickens stuck his head out of the growler’s side window and hailed me with the happy air of a man who had just been liberated from the prison of his workaday life: “Hallo, Wilkie, a foggy morn it is, but we’re off to solve a murder.”

  I scrambled into the coach and wrapped myself snug in a heavy wool blanket, for my teeth were already set a’chattering.

  “Yes, foggy and cold,” I observed. “I hope we can keep ourselves from freezing on the train.”

  “Oh, no danger of that,” Dickens assured me as he tapped the roof twice with his stick as a signal to Rob to go. “I have got wine and cheese and bread and fine cigars to warm us on our journey. It is an adventure, Wilkie,” and he laughed uproariously at the prospect.

  Sleepy Rob drove at his usual cautious pace to Victoria Station. When we arrived, he pulled even more cautiously down a rather steep cobblestoned embankment and drove right up onto the platform next to the waiting train. The steam engine stood like a racehorse in the gate. Behind it, in tow, stood five linked cars as well as the coaltender mounted behind the engine. The first two cars were enclosed passenger coaches. Behind these passenger coaches sat the Queen’s Mail coach, also fully enclosed with one heavy wooden sliding door at its centre point, and Queen Victoria’s emblem, a large gold crown, painted on its side. The final two cars were simply the flat wooden beds of farm carts mounted on the heavy iron railway wheels. These, I rather belatedly realized, were for the transport of land coaches. Sleepy Rob’s new growler was actually to be our stateroom for our train voyage to Oxford. Each of these flatbed railway cars, it seemed, could hold two land coaches, since one large stage was already being loaded onto the foremost car. Being an utter neophyte to railway travel, having actually been on a train only once before in my life, and that in not the best of circumstances,* I had not fully appreciated Dickens’s elaborate preparations for this trip.

  Inspector Field and Serjeant Rogers were already waiting for us on the platform. As we pulled up, I glimpsed their final superintending of the loading of a stark wooden coffin containing the body of our unknown murder victim into the Queen’s baggage car. Field greeted us with a growl of “Mornin’, gents” as he breathed steam and clapped his gloved hands across his chest and onto his shoulders to ward off the cold.

  Sleepy Rob was already down off his seat and unhitching his faithful business partner from the leads. As Rob led his horse away to the station livery, I realized that the horse would stay in London and we would be hiring a horse at the railway station in Oxford to pull us around that city.

  As Dickens and I disembarked from our coach, I overheard the ever irascible Rogers growling from Field’s coattails, “bloody freezin’ this morning is. I’ll be gettin’ the chaise,” and he stalked off.

  “’Ee’s right, you know,” Field grinned at his faithful bulldog’s departing back. “It is too cold to be standin’ ’ere talkin’ for long.”

  “Yes, it is,” Dickens, who already was hugging himself against the cold, readily agreed. “Why don’t we step inside to the Salle d’attente while Rob is loading our coach.”

  Field quite eagerly agreed to Dickens’s suggestion and we all stepped inside where a hot fire was burning in a small iron boiler. We had not really expected to see Field this morning, since the night before he had given orders to Serjeant Rogers about the conveyance of the murder victim’s body to Oxford. But apparently he had decided to come along and oversee the departure himself, and when we arrived inside and were warming ourselves by the small fire, we found out why. He had some final instruction in the art of detection to bestow upon us before we went about his business.

  “If you are lucky enough to identify this corpse right off when you get to Oxford,” he began, “then find out as much about the man as you can.”

  “Of course we will,” Dickens assured him.

  “You know the sort of thing then,” Field pressed on undaunted, “’is work, ’is friends, ’is haunts, the way ’ee thinks if you can get any sort of ’ook into that.”

  “Of course, of course,” Dickens made a face at him, “you know Wilkie and I have done this job for you before a few times.”

  “Yes, I know, but no ’arm in remindin’ you is all I’m sayin’.” Field always seemed obligated to give us a speech like this. “There’s Rogers,” he broke off our briefing. “I’m off. Good huntin’, coves!” and he was out the door and gone.

  Preparing our travel accommodation for the railway journey to Oxford was truly a feat of engineering, but Sleepy Rob was up to the task. A rough trestle composed of two narrow planks was laid against the edge of the flatbed of the railway car. Upon closer inspection, we observed that those planks were fastened down with four heavy bolts that fit into holes in the flatcar’s bed. This makeshift ramp traversed the four feet or so from the platform up to the bed of the car. When Dickens and I emerged from the station waiting room, Sleepy Rob was overseeing four burly men who seemed to be present on the Victoria Station scene solely for the purpose of lifting and loading large and cumbersome objects onto the trains. With dispatch, these worthies pushed our coach up onto the railway car and positioned it for the journey. That done, Rob dismissed them with tuppence all around and set about securing his precious new growler for the trip. Within minutes, all chocked and chained, we were ready to go.

  While Rob was doing all of this, Dickens and I had lit up cigars.

  “Oxford must be a quite popular place,” Dickens observed as we looked around, for it seemed that the train was full of people and two coaches were mounted on both flatcars.

  Finally, the whistle on the steam engine shrieked. Immediately, we were waved aboard by a blue-uniformed trainman swinging an unlit lantern. We climbed aboard and sat in the open doors of the growler, smoking and waiting to depart. But we did not sit in the open air for long.

  The train pulled slowly out of Victoria—“getting up steam,” I think is what those better versed in the lingo of this new railway age call it—and burrowed its way through North London in its sunken causeway beneath the level of the streets and houses like a smoking steel worm slithering through the earth.

  It gradually picked up speed as it left the city. Red cinders and hot ash belched out of the smokestack and swirled back around our heads. It was a wonder this fiery rain did not catch our beavers on fire. We partially closed the shutters on the growler’s windows, leaving them open a crack so we could look out at the passing scenery. Sleepy Rob had taken refuge from the cold wind and the cinders and come inside with us, but before we had left the environs of London he was curled up asleep under a blanket on the upholstered bench opposite Dickens and me. As for us, we were perfectly content with our cigars, our goblets of Anjou wine, and our occasional glimpses out at the passing sights.

  Leaving London, picking up speed, fire and smoke bursting in clouds from its stack, our metal monster plunged through the grey English countryside. Like some latter-day mechanical dragon, our train raced through the Vale of the White Horse and turned west towards Oxford. Opening the window shutter but a crack, and watching the barren wintry landscape race by, Dickens indulged me with a bit of melancholy meditation.

  “Oh, Wilkie, the stagecoach days of Pickwick are forever gone,” he mused.

  “What do you mean?” I humoured him, knowing full well that I was in for a lecture on the perils of progress and the threats of the Industrial Revolution.

  “Just consider how different it all is. Our horse left behind. Our coach become a railway car. It’s a new world and we’ve got to deal with it. Ten years ago, it was a day’s ride to Oxford. Today, we will be there well before lunch.” He fell silent for a moment.

  I waited, having no idea where this meditation was bound.

  “But it is better, you know,” he finally said, though I am not convinced that
he really meant it. “People can move from place to place with such speed.”

  “And goods, food, wood, and coal.” I tried to catch up the spirit of his musing.

  “Yes, that’s true,” he grinned wryly at me, “and we can take a day trip to find our out-of-town murderer.”

  On that ironic note, Dickens settled back to sip his wine and puff on his cigar as we thundered along towards Oxford.

  I had not glimpsed those glorious spires in more than three years.* As we neared Oxford, I braved the wind and the cinders, removed my high hat, stuck my head out of the window, and gloried in the view of my old University town across the river and the fields. There was no sunlight gleaming off those fabled spires, for it was a slate grey November day, but my eyes drank it in as our train slowed and pulled into the Oxford station.

  As the passengers poured from the train, the tiny station suddenly became quite a hurly-burly scene.

  Our unloading was done with dispatch. Rob cashiered two young tramps (who might have been shabby pay students) and they rolled the growler down off the railway car, then fetched the murdered man’s coffin from the mail car and tied it with ropes to the roof of the cab. That accomplished, Rob went off to hire a horse, giving Dickens and me a chance to look around.

  The railway station was set off from the town across what would have been green fields had it been summertime. That day in November, however, that stretch of open park was ugly, fallow and brown. The distance between the railway and the town was traversed by a narrow dirt road along which lines of people were moving. While the majority of these people on this road were on foot or riding in hansom cabs, some were pedaling bicycles. In fact, as Dickens and I stood gawking, we realized that there were quite a few bicycles. At hitching posts where horses used to be tied, bicycles were now tethered. Some were leaned against the building. People getting off the train seemed to be collecting them and pedaling off for the short ride into the city.