The Dons and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  “The others are dispersing in all directions.”

  It was almost half past eleven when the revellers stopped staggering out of the public house.

  “Shall we g-g-go?” Dodgson asked. “Inspector Field has p-p-probably g-g-gone straight there.”

  “No. Wait.” There was no room for objection in Dickens’s voice. He did not explain, but his eye stayed riveted to the telescope, and I knew that he was waiting for his Ellen to emerge from the pub.

  Long minutes passed.

  The street below was dark and deserted with only the dim glow of the Bulldog’s gas lamps for illumination. Suddenly, those lamps blinked out. For Dodo and me, the street below was a dim grey haze. For Dickens, it must have been clearer.

  “There is Ellen coming out,” he announced. “She is alone.”

  “Well, then, let us g-g-go.” Dodgson started for his greatcoat.

  “Wait!” There was alarm in Dickens’s voice. “What’s this?”

  “What’s what?” I squinted to see down into the gloom.

  “There’s a man…out of that mews next to the pub. He is following her up the street.”

  “Is it T-T-Thompson?” Dodgson also was bent to the windowpane, trying to penetrate the darkness of the street below.

  “I don’t think so. Not tall enough. My God! He is after her! Where is Thompson?” And Dickens leapt up from his seat, grasped his greatcoat in passing from the back of a chair near the door, and rushed out.

  * * *

  *An allusion to Thomas De Quincey’s prose essay, The English Mail Coach (1849).

  *This lewd comment refers to that sexual position in which the woman sits on the man’s lap facing away as the sexual act is performed. Its derivation, according to Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang, is said to come from the phallic paintings of St. George sitting on his horse with his lance extended before him.

  *Dickens obviously is recycling the case of Dr. Palmer the poisoner.

  Night Sounds

  November 30, 1853—Midnight

  Dickens plunged down the spiralling stone stairs of Tom Tower, pulling his greatcoat on as he went. Dodgson and I followed, but by the time we had struggled down the stairs and out through the small door inset in the towering wooden gate, he was already running up the street. We ran after him, afraid that he would lose himself in the unfamiliar streets and alleys of nighttime Oxford.

  But our fears were unfounded. As we reached the first turning, Blue Boar Street going sharply and narrowly to the right with the blackened stone steps of Oxford’s medieval town hall on the far corner and the high black stone wall of Christ Church running all along its near side, Dickens was waiting for us, standing stock still in the middle of the cobblestone street.

  He was listening.

  He raised his hand in a command for us to stop and be quiet.

  We obeyed.

  This silent waiting and listening was his only recourse. He had plunged heedlessly after his Ellen and the man he had concluded was stalking her. But when he reached the street, she and the stalking phantom were gone. We listened. Nothing for long moments. Dickens waited like a coiled animal, ready to spring. We were searching for some sound, anything, a footstep.

  Suddenly a woman’s scream, in the darkness of Blue Boar Street, sharp then muffled, broke the silence. Then a man’s voice shouting something unintelligible.

  My head swivelled to the sounds in the distant dark. When I turned back, Dickens was already gone, plunging into the black well of Blue Boar Street. Dodgson and I ran after him down that dark tunnel, stone buildings careening by on our left, the great dark wall of Christ Church looming on our right.

  We seemed to run on forever until the street turned precipitously to the right, sloped sharply downward, and perceptibly narrowed. I learned later that Blue Boar Street turned into a narrow alley called Bear Lane. Whatever its name, it was little more than a dark mews barely wide enough for a single horse and cart to pass through. Just inside this black hole of an alley we found Ellen Ternan.

  She was on her knees on the cobblestones ministering to the fallen figure of a man. Dickens ran up to them and went to one knee beside his beloved.

  “Ellen, are you hurt?” He ignored the wounded man, who proved to be Thompson.

  “Yes, yes, I’m fine. Tally Ho drove them off.”

  “Them?”

  “Yes. Two of ’em. Get after ’em.” Tally Ho Thompson’s voice was laden with pain, but also angry and impatient. “Get after ’em, I say. That way. Through that passage there. The one was after the other.” He was pointing the way from his back on the stones through a narrow passage in the high stone college wall.

  “Two of them?” I repeated stupidly, looking first in the direction he was pointing and then at Dodgson.

  “Get after them, Wilkie.” Dickens quite graciously volunteered me for this hazardous duty. “See if you can catch up to them, but don’t engage them. See if you can see where they go.”

  “Two of them?” I repeated.

  “Yes. For God’s sakes, Wilkie, go! You will lose them.”

  Not understanding, totally unwilling, utterly terrified, I took off running into that infernal passageway that the fallen Thompson had pointed out. For some strange illogical reason utterly unbefitting a mathematician, Dodgson followed.

  Even as I was plunging into the blackness of that passage, I was asking myself: “Why isn’t Dickens doing this? Why am I being sent and he is staying?” But I did it nonetheless. Thank the Lord that Dodgson followed, for I had no more idea of where I was or where I was going than does a blind man in a maze.

  A short run brought us to a heavy door that stood ajar. It had either been open already or had been somehow opened by the men we were pursuing. We passed through it and emerged onto the frozen grass of a small quadrangle.

  “It is P-P-Peckwater Quad,” Dodgson informed me.

  “There,” and he pointed through the darkness. “A man running, around the c-c-corner of the library.”

  Dodgson was a better man than I because I could not see a thing across that gloomy quadrangle. Yet I took off running in that direction with Dodgson lumbering along behind me. He may have had sharper eyes than I (for my shortsightedness was legendary in those days), but he was cursed with an academic’s lungs. When I reached the far side of the quad, I had to pull up and wait for him because he had become winded about halfway across.

  “Which way now?” I asked as he drew up, gasping. “There,” he pointed, “around there I think. G-g-go ahead. I’ll c-c-come along as soon as I c-c-catch my b-b-breath.”

  Wonderful, I thought, now I am alone with two strong-armers in some maze of a college on the darkest night of the year. But I ran around the corner of the library nonetheless and came into a grassy area with the high steeple of Christ Church Chapel towering over me.

  I heard running footsteps on stone receding in the distance but could see no one. I stopped and listened to the night, Dickens’s touch. Nothing.

  Dodgson came up, around the corner of the building, still breathing in laboured gasps.

  “Where have they gone?” I asked him, as if he had more privileged information than I.

  “I d-d-don’t see anyone,” he answered. “They c-c-could be into the main quadrangle, but then they would have to g-g-go through the g-g-gatehouse to g-g-get out. Or they c-c-could g-g-go through the c-c-cloisters to the Meadow B-B-Buildings and into C-C-Christ Church meadows.”

  “They could be anywhere, then?”

  “Yes,” he agreed.

  “This is futile.” I gave up the chase and began choosing my words to explain my failure to Dickens.

  We retraced our steps in the darkness and returned to Bear Lane, where Dickens and his Ellen had Tally Ho Thompson up and on his feet.

  “We lost him—them—in the darkness,” I explained lamely.

  “They escaped into the c-c-college,” Dodgson, fully recovered, speculated. “They either reside there, or they g-g-got out into the meadow on the othe
r side.”

  Dickens did not seem too angry at our failure. All of his attention was focused on his Ellen, who seemed unmolested. Thompson, on the other hand, was limping gingerly around in a small circle testing his right leg.

  Ellen was shaken but unhurt. Her voice quavered as she tried to tell us what had happened: “I was on my way to St. Mary’s Church to meet all of you when this man’s voice shouted at me from the darkness. Then a man rushed upon me! He was tearing at my clothes. He called me a slut. Oh, it all happened so fast. Then Tally Ho was fighting with the first man and another man came at the two of them. He knocked them both down. Then those two other men ran off. Then you came up.”

  “Second bloke knocked me off me pins,” Thompson explained. “But ’ee knocked first bloke down too. Then the two of ’em ran off, they did. It was strange, like second bloke drove the first bloke off.”

  “Can you walk?” Dickens inquired.

  “Yes, but pretty rough.” Thompson had regained his smirking equanimity. “If I was a ’orse, I’d shoot me.”

  “Field is waiting for us at the church,” Dickens plotted our next move. “Let us go there and see if we can figure out what happened here.”

  Following Dodgson’s lead, we traversed Bear Lane to a narrow passage that took us through to the High Street. St. Mary’s was just down the hill on the other side from where he brought us out. In that chill November midnight, St. Mary’s was a gloomy-looking place, its steeple piercing up into the cold sky as if trying to stab the stars. The Radcliffe Camera brooded behind the church like a giant toad squatting amidst all the towers reaching towards the sky.

  When we entered the church, we disturbed a tramp sleeping in one of the back pews. He growled at us as we passed, turned over, and went back to sleep.

  “To See More Clearly”

  December 1, 1853—After Midnight

  “What a God-awful gloomy place,” Thompson said as we walked down the central aisle of St. Mary’s Church.

  Dodgson frowned at that, but let it pass as Rogers and Field with young Constable Morse in tow stepped out from behind a thick stone pillar.

  “Where ’ave you been?” Field’s voice could barely hide his impatience. “And why are you together?” His angry forefinger raked at the corner of his right eye as if he wanted to poke it out. “I told you not to be seen together. God save me from amateurs!” He turned in exasperation to Rogers and young Morse. It made me want to retch to see the look of satisfaction bloom in Rogers’s face as Field put us in our place.

  “Yes. I know. I know,” Dickens placated him. “But Miss Ternan has been attacked in the street and Tally Ho saved her. He has injured his leg.”

  Field turned to Ellen and to Thompson, his impatience turning to concern.

  “Oh, I’m sound, guv. A bit of a gimp is all,” Thompson assured him, limping comically three steps up the aisle and back for his benefit.

  “Wot ’appened?” Field turned to Dickens and Ellen Ternan. “’Ere, sit down,” and he ushered them into a nearby pew and seated himself looking backwards in the pew in front of them. The rest of us stood aimlessly about waiting to hear the full story. Dickens began:

  “I was watching through Dodgson’s telescope when Ellen came out of the Bulldog. A man followed her up the street. He must have been waiting for her.”

  Ellen Ternan looked sharply at Dickens as he made this revelation. She knew she was being watched, but not by him and not so closely. Dickens drew back from her look. He knew he was in for it, for not telling her that he was spying.

  “I turned at Blue Boar Street, which is the way to my lodgings, in case anyone was watching me go,” and she cast another sharp look of disapproval in Dickens’s direction. “I did not see anyone following me, but it was dark.”

  She looked around at all of us and realized that she had our strict attention.

  “I walked to the end of Blue Boar Street to Bear Lane, where I was going to take the passage through to the High Street,” she went on, “but that is where the man shouted at me to stop.” Ellen stopped her narrative as if obeying his order.

  “Wot did ’ee say?” Field prompted her. “Where was ’ee? Was ’ee after you from behind? ’Ad ’ee been followin’ you, do you think?”

  “No. He was in the dark shadows by the college wall. I could not see him at all, I could only hear his voice. He stopped me with his voice. He frightened me so that I could not say anything. It was as if he was waiting for me there.”

  We looked at each other around the circle that had closed about Inspector Field and Ellen Ternan.

  “If this man was followin’ you,” and Field shot a look at Dickens, who gave him a quick nod, “then ’ow did ’ee get in front of you to be lyin’ in wait?”

  “I do not know”—Ellen’s hands, clasped tight in nervousness, came up to her lips as she spoke—“but he was waiting there in the dark for me.”

  “Wot did ’ee say to you?”

  “He called me a slut. He shouted, very ugly, ‘Come here, you little slut!’ When I did not say anything, he said it again: ‘Come into the meadow with me, you little slut,’ he said. ‘I’ll pay, never you mind.’ That is what he said,” and Ellen looked at Inspector Field as if for an interpretation.

  “It sounds as if ’ee thought you were a ’ore,” Field, rather bluntly for Dickens’s taste, obliged her. “Go on.”

  “Then I tried to run. But I did not know exactly where he was and he came at me and cut me off. That is when I screamed and he hit me.”

  Dickens recoiled as if he had absorbed the blow. It was really quite fascinating to observe him in her presence. I have never seen a man so seized and rendered helpless by a woman’s spirit.

  “He knocked me down and then he caught me by the hair and tried to drag me to my feet. ‘Get up, you whining little slut! You are going into the meadow with me whether you like it or not.’ That is exactly what he said. I think he was going to rape me.”

  She stopped in her telling of this unsavory tale.

  “That’s wot ’ee said, all right. I ’eard ’im,” Thompson broke the awkward silence, “right before I tapped ’im on the ’ead.”

  “Thank God for Tally Ho,” Ellen recovered herself. “He came just in time.”

  Thompson grinned for all of our benefit.

  “Thank God you made him let go of my hair.” Ellen actually laughed. “Lord, did that hurt.”

  What had been a threatening ghost story was turning into a rollicking adventure tale. Field abruptly brought us back to reality.

  “Thompson. Wot ’appened next? ’Ow did ’ee get away?”

  “I ’it ’im on the side ’o the ’ead from behind, but ’ee didn’t even blink. ’Ee let go of ’er and turned on me. Cursin’, ’ee was, but I don’t know wot ’ee was sayin’. Like Ellen said, it was all goin’ very fast. We fought. ’Ee got me around the middle and was squeezin’ and I wos ’ittin’ ’im in the ribs, but ’ee wouldn’t let go, then everythin’ got more strange.”

  We all stared at Thompson in suspense.

  “Well? For God’s sake, man, what!” Field’s voice echoed our exasperation.

  “There wos another man there, that’s wot,” and Thompson’s maddening grin signalled his delight at being the centre of our attention. “’Ee knocked us both to the ground from behind. That’s when I ’urt me leg. I couldn’t get up.”

  “So then what happened?” Dickens took over the role of prompter.

  Young Morse’s eyes were getting progressively larger as this story continued to unfold.

  “The first man, the bigger one who had attacked me, ran off.” Ellen Ternan took up the narration once again. “The other man ran after him. I was on the ground and all turned around, and did not know where they went at first, but when Charles came up, Tally Ho said that they ran into the college.”

  “Did you see two men?” Inspector Field turned to Dickens.

  “No. I did not see the men at all. When I arrived, Ellen was helping Thompson on the ground.�
��

  “You didn’t see where they went?”

  “No.”

  Field turned back to Thompson and Ellen Ternan.

  “Were these men together? Confederates?”

  “No. I do not think so.” Ellen thought for a brief second and added, “I think the first man was alone and trying to…well, to…”

  “To attack her,” Dickens finished that unsavory sentence for her.

  “All I know is they ran off together.” Thompson threw in his tuppence.

  Confusion was beginning to drive this narrative. Field attempted to rein it in.

  “Did not anyone see ’is face?”

  Thompson and Ellen looked at each other first, then said, “No,” in unison.

  “He had a dark knit hat, the sort that seamen wear, pulled down over his forehead,” Ellen slowly remembered, “and a scarf wrapped around his mouth.”

  “Yes, I remember the seaman’s ’at now,” Thompson chimed in. “’Ee wos all muffled up.”

  “Wot about the second man?” Field pressed.

  “Never saw ’im,” Thompson was quite certain. “’It me from behind.”

  “But you said ’ee was smaller than the first?” Field tried to wring every bit of information out of them.

  “Maybe because the first was so thick and so strong.” Thompson threw up his hands helplessly. “I didn’t see ’im.”

  “That seems to be the theme of all of this,” Dickens addressed Inspector Field, attempting, I felt, to head off any more interrogation of his Ellen.

  “Yes, that’s right, trying to see more clearly is wot we are most definitely up to,” Field petulantly desisted.

  “I’m sorry,” Ellen was sincere, “it was so dark you could hardly see at all.”

  A heavy silence fell over the whole group. The saints bleeding from their wounds, pierced with arrows, stabbed with knives, gazed down in painful silence from the walls. The Christ, hanged above the altar, stared silently down. The gargoyles on the pillars bared their fangs. The silence was oppressive in that gloomy place.