The Bulldog was a narrow but quite deep tavern, divided into two almost equal drinking rooms, front and back, connected by a narrow walkway. This slim corridor ran between the tap on the left, which was always crowded with men standing and drinking, and the ancient stairway on the right, which both ascended to the pub’s upper floors and descended to the basement.
The pub was crowded with standers and sitters, but at the very moment that Dickens, Dodgson, and I entered the front door, a group of students abandoned a table against the wall, and Dodgson, impressing me once again with an unacademic speed and agility, pounced upon it before anyone else in that crowded front room could claim it.
It was, indeed, quite a crowded public house. Irish Mike looked to be enjoying a very profitable evening. As we sat down, Ellen was standing at the tap waiting for Irish Mike to fill her tray with foaming pints. Thompson stood near Ellen’s server’s station at the tap, sipping on a pint of Mike’s Irish Stout and talking to a mousy-looking man who had not yet removed his brown Mackintosh. Even as we sat down, this man in the Mackintosh raised his glass to Thompson as if to say “Cheers” and left the tap to take a stool against the wall by the doorway to the garden. I don’t know why this utterly nondescript man caught my eye, but he did. All the rest of the evening he just sat on his stool like some clerk in a countinghouse, a character out of Dickens’s own Christmas Carol. I remember thinking how sad it must be to be that alone in a public place.
Loud laughter emanated from the back room. No sooner had we sat down at the table than Dickens stood up. Dodgson had already turned to converse with a table full of students next to ours. They had addressed him respectfully as “Mr. Dodgson” as soon as we sat down.
“Come with me, Wilkie. You can help me fetch the drinks from the tap. Charles can stand guard over our table.” Dickens fabricated a reason to move into nearer proximity of his precious Ellen.
But even as we traversed the crowded room toward the tap, Irish Mike placed the last brimming pint on Ellen’s full tray and she turned to pick her way through the crowded corridor and deliver her drinks to the back room. As for me, my eyes were locked on Thompson. I hoped I was glaring forth my displeasure as powerfully as possible. He saw us coming and that maddening, self-satisfied, comical smirk of his took possession of the corners of his mouth. In utter disdain for all the proprieties, he reached into the pocket of his vest and proceeded to consult my gold repeater for the time. That accomplished, he arrogantly twirled the watch on its chain as we came abreast of him and replaced it in his pocket but an instant before I could lunge at him and snatch it out of his grasp.
As we stood at the tap, waiting for Irish Mike to serve us, Dickens nodded jovially at Thompson, who smirked back at him. I glared angrily at the two of them, co-conspirators in my humiliation.
“You’re a saucy little minx, you are,” a tipsy bit of raillery borne on the smoky air from the back room put Dickens’s ears on point.
“Mister Dickens. Mister Collins. Good evenin’,” Irish Mike greeted us at the tap, but Dickens, straining to overhear the conversation passing between his Ellen and the drinkers in the back room, never heard him.
I acknowledged Mike’s greeting and ordered three pints of Irish brew.
“Allow me to introduce myself.” Thompson stuck out his hand to me, engaging one of Dickens’s ears while the other quite clearly stayed cocked towards the other room. “Terence Thompson, it is.” Our light-fingered friend grinned jovially. “Terry to most folks. In town for the ’oliday season, I am, visitin’ my sis, lookin’ to buy some ’orses.”
“Yes, quite,” I muttered, taking his outstretched hand purely to keep up appearances. To my pleasant surprise, when I came away from this handshake I found my gold repeater magically transferred into my hand. Stunned, I still had the presence of mind to secrete it in my trouser pocket without opening my fist.
Irish Mike had poured our pints of stout and was letting them settle before topping them off. He was serving pints of English bitter to two other tapsters as Dickens and I waited for our drinks.
Dickens was rather obviously craning his neck to see what Ellen was about in the back room. Thompson was babbling on about how jolly Oxford was during the Christmas season. My eyes followed Dickens’s gaze and I could see Ellen’s dark hair as she served the pints around a large round table of men.
“Good work, lass,” one of the men taunted her boisterously, his lewd voice carrying over the murmurings of the crowd. “What would you say to riding me a St. George?”*
Ellen, swirling around their table as she delivered her pints, simply ignored this obscene raillery and laughed as she pirouetted away with her empty tray held out before her like a shield.
All the colour went out of Dickens’s face in an instant. That told me that he too had overheard the lewd comment.
“Wilkie, get the drinks when they are ready”—he hesitated—“please.” He tried to make it sound as if it wasn’t an order. But before Ellen had fought her way through the loiterer in the walkway, he fled back to our table, not wishing, I suppose, to have to face her in light of the insults he had just overheard her having to endure. Ellen, on the other hand, seemed not the least concerned with the whole incident. She saw me as she returned to the tap and blessed me with one of her most winning smiles. To anyone who might have been watching, it was simply a serving girl ingratiating herself to a gentleman who by his dress bore the promise of generosity.
It occurred to me that if Dickens actually thought he could, like St. George, shelter her from all sexual innuendo, then he was embracing the most fundamental hypocrisy of the almost universally hypocritical Victorian age. For a novelist whose whole career focused upon exposing Victorian hypocrisy, this sudden delicacy seemed rather out of character.
We drank our pints.
Ellen stayed quite busy serving the tables in both rooms.
Pouring one beer after another with only brief surcease to greet a new customer or to answer a question from an old, Irish Mike seemed indefatigable.
The man in the Mackintosh sat morosely by the door.
Then Stadler walked right by the Mackintosh man and out into the garden.
“There he goes,” I alerted Dickens and Dodgson, whose backs were to that part of the pub.
“Who?” Dickens turned quickly to look.
“Stadler, the Don with the mustachios,” I answered.
“He’s just stepping out t-t-to have a p-p-pee,” Dodgson assured us. “All the gentlemen d-d-do it.”
“Yes, quite,” Dickens accepted Dodgson’s explanation. “Couldn’t you cut him off when he comes back in? Bring him over to meet us? Eh?”
“Of course, I shall t-t-try,” and Dodgson was up in an instant and moving towards the garden door in pursuit of his prey.
We looked on as Dodgson quite skillfully, a matter of timing it was, bumped into Stadler just inside the doorway as our walrus Don came back in rubbing his hands together from the cold. They exchanged pleasantries. Dodgson pointed out our table to him. Dickens and I sat drinking, studiously unaware. But to our disappointment, friend Stadler, our most likely candidate for Ackroyd’s murder, did not return to the table with Dodgson.
“He has promised t-t-to join us later,” Dodgson assured us upon his return. “He said he would b-b-bring his p-p-pint into the front room and join us for a moment when he t-t-tires of his c-c-companions.”
An hour passed.
Ellen circulated through the pub delivering pints. Everyone seemed to like her. She brought us another round and smiled at Dickens as he paid. It was really quite comical watching him contain himself.
“Let us hope you tipped her well,” I could not resist taunting him.
“You and Field and this whole business can be damned,” he said as he raised his glass and smiled tight-lipped at Dodgson and me.
“Cheers.” We raised our pints to him in unison.
The man in the brown Mackintosh stared like a stone statue.
Stadler finally
stumbled back out of his lair in the back room, smoking a fat cigar and precariously balancing a half-full pint in his unsteady hand. He was obviously quite drunk. His cigar in no way resembled the thin cheroot we had found in Ackroyd’s rooms.
“Ah, Stadler, how g-g-good of you.” Dodgson rose hospitably to greet him. “These are the gentlemen I t-t-told you about, up from London they are, and hoping t-t-to p-p-pick your b-b-brains.” He nodded at Dickens and me even as he was quite adeptly commandeering a wooden chair from his students’ table next to ours and seating the Chemistry Don in it. “Charles D-D-Dickens,” Dodo understandably, made the more prominent introduction, “and an old schoolmate of mine from our undergraduate days, Wilkie C-C-Collins of B-B-Brasenose.”
“The Charles Dickens?” Stadler’s attention steadied despite his obviously tipsy state. “The novel writer that everyone is always talking about?”
“Yes, the same.” Dickens smiled benignly.
“I’ve never read any of your things,” Stadler confessed, seeming actually rather proud of his neglect, “but among many of my colleagues you are quite the rage. Wait until I tell them I met you right here in Oxford,” and he laughed too loudly, obviously enjoying the prospect of it.
“Yes, I am here to do some research for a new novel, a sensational murder story, and when Mr. Dodgson mentioned that you were a Chemistry Don, I hoped that you might be able to help me.”
“Help you? How?” This Stadler was settling into his chair, sipping from his pint, puffing his cigar.
“Why, my fictional murderer is a poisoner. He kills off his wives for their money with poisons he cooks up in his private laboratory.* You being a Chemistry Don, I hoped you might recommend a good wife-killing poison, one easy to secrete in food or drink and hard to detect in its symptoms and effects.”
Stadler laughed as though it was a hilarious joke on all of us.
Dickens waited patiently, smiling like a half-witted fool.
Dodgson and I wondered what Stadler found so funny.
“Don’t know a damned thing about poisons,” he finally said, explaining how thoroughly the joke was on us, and had another hearty laugh at our expense. “Couldn’t recommend a good poison if I wanted to make away with my own wife, if I had one. All my work is in incendiaries, explosives. Sorry, old chap.”
“Oh, that’s quite all right.” Dickens kept smiling like a silly sod even as he took a sip of his beer. “It was just an offchance. When Dodgson mentioned chemistry…well, you know. But explosives, now that sounds exciting.”
“And a b-b-bit d-d-dicey, eh,” Dodgson put in his words of encouragement.
“Oh, explosives can be dicey all right,” Stadler quite easily donned the pretension of the professor, “if you don’t know how to handle them.”
As Stadler was speaking, Field and Rogers entered the pub by the front door and fought their way out of their greatcoats. I watched them walk by behind our explosive Don’s back. Though they were disguised quite appropriately in respectable merchant-class clothes, wool coats and trousers, button collars and grave cravats, they still looked like policemen to me, bulldogs on leash! I imagined that everyone else in the pub saw through them in the same way. But nobody seemed to notice, and they quietly purchased their pints and found themselves two stools along the wall across the room from the Mackintosh man.
Ellen noticed them. I saw her head turn quickly at the tap when she heard Field’s voice ordering.
“What kinds of explosives?” Unheeding, Dickens was engrossed in his conversation with Stadler. “Do you make them? Actually set them off?”
“Oh yes, of course,” Stadler bragged pompously, “but mostly I try to find new ways to use them, or new combinations of explosives to do more efficient things. Soon, I hope, we’ll actually be using controlled explosives down in the collieries to help extract coal.”
“My God, wouldn’t that be terribly dangerous?”
“Not with the right explosive used under properly controlled conditions.” Stadler was quite sure of himself for a man intoxicated with both his own expertise and copious amounts of beer. As he spoke, he waved for Ellen to bring him another pint.
“Fascinating,” Dickens encouraged.
“It really is.” Stadler, his glass empty, leaned in over the table to Dickens as if he were Victor Frankenstein out of that Gothic tale imparting the secret of life. “I have been studying exactly that,” he thumped the table, “the instability of explosive compounds. I have been corresponding with a young Swedish chemist who is living in St. Petersburg. Alfred Nobel is his name. He is combining a new explosive he calls nitroglycerine with ordinary black gunpowder and the results are extraordinary. The outcome could be the most powerful explosive known to man; but it is dangerously unstable. And that is where I come in,” and he slapped the table once more as he collapsed back in his chair at the very moment that Ellen sat his fresh pint down on the table before him.
“Fascinating,” Dickens repeated. “Nitroglycerine, you say? Here, allow me,” and he paid his Ellen for the man’s pint.
“Cheers.” Stadler raised his glass to Dickens before taking a deep draught.
We all waited for him to drink. An expectant silence fell over our table. I could not tell whether Dickens was just waiting for Stadler to go on or if he had been momentarily distracted by Ellen’s closeness.
Finally, Stadler spoke in that wistful philosophic vein that great minds and maudlin drunkards sometimes take.
“You know, instability is fascinating,” he began, in what would have been a very thoughtful Oxford professorial tone if it hadn’t been punctuated by a large hiccup. “I live with instability. The chaos of the microscopic world. But everything is chaos.” And he turned to Dodgson. “Did you know that Ackroyd has been murdered in London?”
“Yes, I read it. T-t-terrible thing.” Dodgson encouraged him to go on.
“Terrible. Terrible.” Stadler wandered drunkenly. “Not poisoned, but shot with gunpowder, they say. Instability”—he directed his jumbled train of association at Dickens.
“I am sorry, but I know nothing about it,” Dickens feigned ignorance.
Suddenly, Stadler stood up, grasping his half-drained pint in one hand and scissoring his cigar in the other. “I must get back to my friends,” he declared through yet another explosive hiccup. “All that plotting going on without me, you know,” and he laughed at what he evidently thought was a tidy joke.
Dickens stood also, thanking him for his company.
“Honour to meet you, sir.” He shook Dickens’s hand genuinely if rather shakily, and with a nod to Dodgson and none to me, he turned to leave. But after one step, he turned back as if he had forgotten something. “Sorry I couldn’t poison your wife for you,” he leered at Dickens, who gaped back in amazement.
“Perhaps I’ll have to blow her up rather than poison her,” Dickens recovered, “with nitroglycerine.”
“Yes, quite right, nitroglycerine,” Stadler guffawed as he left to rejoin his fellow Dons in the back room.
“Seems like a nice enough chap,” Dickens remarked with heavy sarcasm.
“D-d-drunk as a lord.” Dodgson could not hide his disdain.
“A dead…no, murdered…historian who was studying the Gunpowder Plot, and now a chemist experimenting with explosives. For a place called Christ Church, you seem to have a rather violent faculty,” Dickens quipped.
Dodgson almost spit forth the beer he was in the act of swallowing.
“He did not seem the least bit uncomfortable discussing his friend Ackroyd’s death,” I observed. “He actually seemed rather saddened by it.”
“That was b-b-because he was in his c-c-cups,” Dodgson speculated.
“Or because he did it,” Dickens countered. “Perhaps Stadler is not as drunk as we think. Perhaps even in his cups he is still a very good actor.”
At that moment, we were interrupted by Ellen Ternan’s voice: “Are you chaps ready for another round?” She had placed her hand on Dickens’s hunched s
houlders, and at her touch and the surprise of her voice speaking so close by, he sat bolt upright as if he had been struck by lightning. If anyone was watching our table he would certainly have found his spasm queer.
“Yes, p-p-please,” Dodgson answered. “My t-t-turn.”
“Good.” Ellen smiled, and then, lowering her voice, “we will meet in the church at midnight. I have told Tally Ho to tell Field,” and she tripped off between the tables towards the tap.
“Good,” Dickens said. “We need to know what she has seen.”
The rest of the evening in the pub passed uneventfully. After a while, I saw Field and Rogers leave their position against the far wall and make their way into the rear room. I presumed they were positioning themselves to eavesdrop on Stadler and his fellow Dons.
Dickens was the one who made the decision.
“Enough for one night,” he declared, standing up from his empty pint. It was ten of the clock, still an hour from closing, when we left the pub. Dickens proposed a return to Dodgson’s rooms to freshen up before we set out for the church to meet his Ellen.
From the beer and the stress of the evening’s small subterfuges, I was really rather fatigued and quite in danger of dropping off as soon as I sat down on Dodo’s loveseat.
As soon as we entered the rooms, Dickens went straight to the telescope. Remarking my drowsiness, Dodo scurried off to brew some coffee.
I dozed.
Dickens spied.
Dodo returned with steaming mugs.
Time passed.
“The pub is starting to empty out,” Dickens alerted us.
We joined him at the window. The people in the street below looked like Lilliputians as they poured out of the narrow doors of the tavern.
“There go Field and Rogers,” Dickens was like a narrator leading us through the text of the evening from his point of vantage at the telescope. “The Dons are leaving en masse. Stadler is crossing the street right towards us alone.”
“He is g-g-going t-t-to his rooms in c-c-college,” Dodo was sure. “He will enter through the T-T-Tom T-T-Tower g-g-gate and c-c-cross the quadrangle t-t-to the c-c-cloister passage.”
The Dons and Mr. Dickens Page 11