The Dons and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  Time passed, two days, three, four, but that time was good for her role, her access, her credibility with the Dons. As I watched her every night, it became clear that she was becoming more and more a part of the pub’s scenery, like the faded flowers on the wallpaper or the river scenes in the student paintings on the walls. And her ease in her role fortified my courage in our game as well. One evening, as she was serving us our pints and stopped to chat, I asked her straightaway in a friendly, unobtrusive manner and a low voice not susceptible to eavesdropping how her precious Dons were taking the news of Stadler’s murder.

  “Not very well,” she said with a false smile as she waited for Dodgson and me to find the coins to pay for our pints. “It’s put them in a panic,” she assured us, making it seem like she was discussing the weather. “They’re terrified. I think because they don’t know who is doing it and they might be next.” With that, she took our money and flounced off to tend to her next customer. How interesting, I thought. They are afraid, yet none of them has gone to the police. Why? Because they too are guilty of something.

  When I was not spying on her from a table in the pub, I was watching her from long range through Dodgson’s conveniently adjusted telescope. Dickens’s assignment as his personal spy was a pernicious contract. It turned me into a voyeur; no, worse, a Peeping Tom. I found myself sitting at that spyglass, waiting for her to appear in the doorway to take the air. She knew I was watching her, I think. I half expected her to wave up at me as she stood smoking on the doorstep. I fell in love with the spying. I watched her day and night, coming to and leaving the pub. I watched her watering the plantings in the window boxes and sweeping the cobblestones in front of the door. I watched her the way that a rapist stalks his prey or a cuckold watches the window behind which his unfaithful wife has disappeared. As I watched her, my imagination concocted full scenarios around her daily routines of coming and going and working at the pub, elaborate scenes of romance and intrigue, rescue and lust, secret fantasies of my perverse imagination, the spy’s stories, the voyeur’s vagaries, the Peeping Tom’s dirty little tales.

  But that time passing with Dickens gone back up to the city also gave Dodgson and me, old school chums, the chance to grow comfortable with each other once again. We talked of poetry and of novel writing. He was infinitely curious about my and Dickens’s London life. I never mentioned Irish Meg because I did not think she would be of interest to Old Dodo. I did not want to have to explain our rather Bohemian living arrangements to one whom I quickly realized had become a rather fervent devotee of the Church of England. We also talked about the case, the murders, in all their baffling reality.

  “Whoever the murderer is, he had to k-k-kill them because they were some sort of a threat to him, or they had d-d-done what he wanted them to d-d-do for him and he was finished with them, or they were g-g-going to d-d-do something that he d-d-did not want them to d-d-do with those explosives.” I wasn’t sure that Dodo would ever fight his way through all of the hard consonants in his deductive speculation.

  “It does not seem that he needed to kill them unless they were making him nervous in some way. These murders come too close together in time to have been carefully planned. The murderer is someone who is protecting himself by killing off those who are threats to him.”

  “B-b-but a historian and a c-c-chemist?” Dodgson simply could not accept that academics could be a threat to anyone.

  “If it is some sort of political plot they are all hatching, then maybe this murderer was afraid that these two would give it all away, whatever it was that they were planning?” I argued for my theory of a conspiracy.

  “Or,” Dodgson was beginning to like my little intrigue scenario, “p-p-perhaps he was afraid of having his whole p-p-plot in the rather unsteady hands of an opium addict and a d-d-drunkard. I mean, that is what Ackroyd and Stadler were in truth, notwithstanding their being D-D-Dons.”

  “Or,” I countered, “in the best tradition of academics, perhaps they had done all the research and experimentation that he needed and so he stole their work and murdered them so they couldn’t complain. The murder of Stadler in his lab and the missing nitroglycerin certainly points to robbery.” I rested my case.

  “That is ridiculous,” Dodgson took my mockery of his beloved Academia seriously. “Was something stolen from Ackroyd as well? His research on the G-G-Gunpowder P-P-Plot? Really!” he scoffed.

  “Perhaps each was killed for a different reason? Perhaps each posed a different sort of threat to our murderer?” I backslid upon my argument.

  “P-p-perhaps each was k-k-killed by a d-d-different person with a very d-d-different weapon for a very d-d-different reason,” now Dodgson was openly mocking me, “and it was p-p-pure c-c-coincidence that they were academic c-c-collaborators at the same Oxford c-c-college and c-c-close friends who met nightly as charter members of the same d-d-drinking c-c-club. Really!”

  “What ho! What’s this? Who is this one, Dodo? I can’t keep your fellow Dons straight.” I had suddenly been distracted from our speculations on the motives of our murderer by putting my eye back to the eyepiece of the telescope and seeing Ellen emerge from the front door of the pub with a tall, slender man.

  Dodgson crossed the room and looked through the glass: “That is B-B-Barnet of Queen’s,” he identified the Don who was chatting Ellen up down below in the street. What was unusual about this scene was that it was only half past two by the afternoon clock and the political Dons did not usually make their appearance at the Bulldog until after dark.

  “Barnet of the boathouses?” I made the connection.

  “Quite the same,” Dodo nodded, his eye still pressed to the spyglass. “He seems quite t-t-taken with Miss T-T-Ternan, he d-d-does.”

  “Here, let me see,” and I relieved him in our spying.

  Ellen and this Barnet stood conversing in front of the pub. Ellen evidently asked him for a cigarette. He rolled one for her, then one for himself. As he lit her cigarette, she steadied his hand holding the lucifier, and he smiled down at her like a cat preparing to pounce on an unsuspecting mouse. Except, in this case, I was absolutely certain that it was the mouse who was seductively baiting the trap. The Don leaned close to her, perhaps to whisper something, and as he spoke, rubbed his hand up the length of her arm to her bare shoulder. Ellen stepped back as if she had been burned, raised her forefinger to him in a gesture of asking him to wait, and disappeared back into the pub.

  I observed Barnet the Don as he waited for her to return. He primped, smoothing his hair, glancing at himself in the reflective window of the pub. Ellen danced out the door with her coat on, her bare shoulders covered, still holding the cigarette that Barnet had made for her. Smiling, tossing her head as she smoked, then tossing away the butt end of her cigarette, she took his arm and the two of them strolled away from the pub down St. Aldate’s in the direction of the river. Tally Ho Thompson was nowhere to be seen, at least not within the circular ken of the magnifying telescope’s eyepiece.

  “Dodo, quickly! We must follow them.” I leapt up from the telescope and started for the door.

  “He’s t-t-taking her t-t-to the b-b-boathouses, isn’t he?” Dodgson speculated calmly from his seat in his overstuffed easy chair.

  “Perhaps. I don’t know!” I was barking at him in exasperation at his slowness, his equanimity. “Come quickly. I promised Charles I would keep her in my sight.”

  “Well, then, in that c-c-case we will need these,” Dodgson said, getting up and reaching towards his desk, but I did not hear or see the rest of what he said or did as I was already out the door in hot pursuit of our two boathouse lovers.

  When I reached the street at the base of Tom Tower, the strolling couple was still in sight at the bottom of the hill, passing the police station and heading for Folly Bridge. Much to my surprise, Dodgson was right behind me, had caught up before I had taken my first step out of the stone gateway.

  “Well then, shall we g-g-go?” he said brightly, as if we were s
etting off to shop for cheese or watch for birds over the meadow or go punting on the river.

  We pursued our two subjects down the cobblestoned way, keeping our distance, but keeping them in sight. It was an unusual December day, sunny and windless, more like English spring than the Christmas season.

  At the very base of St. Aldate’s hill, before they reached the bridge, our strolling couple turned off to the left and disappeared into a woodland path through a copse of trees that ran right up to the river’s edge.

  “He’s t-t-taking her t-t-to the b-b-boathouses,” Dodgson crowed in that voice which announces that he knew it all the time.

  “And she is going willingly,” I muttered, “despite all of our warnings.”

  “She certainly does not seem overly c-c-concerned,” Dodgson gloated, “and after all, Wilkie, it is midday. I d-d-don’t think they c-c-can g-g-get up t-t-to much mischief in b-b-bright sunlight now, d-d-do you?”

  “Only if she is reckless enough to go inside with him,” I replied sourly, knowing that he was right and that my anxiety was probably somewhat exaggerated, overwrought perhaps. “Come on, Dodo, we must not lose them in that wood.” I spoke with a calm restraint that belied the urgency I truly felt.

  “We should not follow them through there.” Dodgson spoke in the purely analytical voice of the mathematician and scholar. “The d-d-docks and b-b-boathouses are d-d-directly on the far edge of these t-t-trees. We will not b-b-be able t-t-to emerge from the wood without b-b-being observed. We will not b-b-be able t-t-to see them or where they are g-g-going from inside the wood because the b-b-boathouses will b-b-block our view.”

  He stopped speaking and we stared at each other, both of us turning the troubling situation over in our minds.

  “But I must follow them, keep them in sight,” I said, starting for the path through the wood.

  “No,” Dodgson stopped me. “The b-b-bridge. We c-c-can see them from there and they will not b-b-be able to observe us watching them.”

  They were well out of our sight down that woodland path. I was torn. Upon reflection, I realized that his was the better part of valour. If I followed them and this Barnet observed me, he could take it back to the other Dons and they would become suspicious and all of the groundwork we had laid for the penetration of their cabal and the divining of their secrets could be exposed.

  “There, up on the b-b-bridge,” Dodgson pointed, “we c-c-can see the d-d-docks and the b-b-boathouses from there.”

  “But it is so far away,” I protested. “What if she is in danger? What if he tries to…” and I left the unthinkable unsaid.

  “If we see things g-g-getting out of hand, we c-c-can run t-t-to her aid,” he assured me. “We c-c-can see them from the b-b-bridge,” he started towards it. “It is the b-b-best p-p-place.”

  In the end, I acquiesced and followed him up onto Folly Bridge, and he proved right. We did, indeed, have a clear view of the riverside stage upon which this scene of Field’s drama was going to be played.

  As we reached our point of vantage on the crest of the bridge, the two lovers were just emerging from the wood onto the low docks in front of the four boathouses in the distance.

  “Here, t-t-try these,” Dodgson handed me a square leather case. “They are an experiment that I am working on with a c-c-colleague at B-B-Balliol. We call them b-b-bioculars. They are a sort of d-d-double spyglass with focusing lenses. Two eyes are b-b-better than one, eh?” and he laughed as if this was all just some scientific proving ground for his fanciful inventions. I must admit though that he seemed to be supplied with a new machine for every occasion.

  I unpacked his strange instrument and looked through its twin tubes. What nonsense! They only blurred my vision. I pushed them back at him in disgust. “These are no good.”

  “You need t-t-to focus the lenses t-t-to your eye,” he patiently instructed me, placing the oversized spyglasses to his eyes and adjusting their tubular shafts with the thumb and forefinger of each hand. “See, here, the sighting t-t-tubes t-t-turn. Look through them and t-t-turn the t-t-tubes until you c-c-can see c-c-clearly.”

  I did what he told me, and, lo and behold, suddenly Ellen and her amorous Don seemed as if they were only mere inches away from my eye. I could see their lips move. I could see every move they made, as they circled each other, him reaching out to touch her, she flirtatiously drawing back. They walked back and forth on the docks in front of the boathouse, conversing earnestly.

  Ellen would tell us later what they were conversing about, but from our point of vantage on the Folly Bridge all I could see through Dodgson’s marvellous little spying engines was their physical presence on that dock across the water. Barnet was persistently, but not violently, moving in on her, and Ellen was flirtatiously and playfully moving away from him. It was like a dance viewed from a private box high up in a balconied theatre.

  But finally Barnet the Don triumphed in their circling dance. His relentless boring in had manoeuvered her up against the wooden wall of one of the boathouses. His two arms extended beside her shoulders, his hands flattened against the wooden boards of the boathouse wall, imprisoned her in his lover’s cage as he leaned in to achieve the object of all his pursuit, a kiss.

  But Ellen outflanked him by going on the offensive herself. As he leeringly leaned in to claim her lips, she threw her arms around his neck, kissed him full on the lips, and spun him around all in the same motion so that his back was now to the boathouse wall.

  She held for the kiss for a rather long moment, I thought, then, breaking free from his arms, retreated laughing towards the water’s edge. And the whole dance of seduction began again, the circling, the touching, the pressing in, until another kiss was won and Ellen was once again imprisoned in his arms. All the while, it seemed to me, spying from afar, Barnet was attempting to lead her to the doorway of the boathouse against which he had manoeuvered her for the kiss. But Ellen would not follow him there, and, in fact, after the second kiss, she broke away from his more pressing embrace and looked as if she were shouting at him, protesting perhaps, scolding him for his impertinence.

  Who knows, we could not hear a word from the bridge. I could only interpret the movements of her body, the language of her hands, the defiance of her back-thrown head. I thought that she was refusing him in no uncertain terms, but then, to my surprise, she moved close and kissed him gently on the cheek.

  At that moment, a drunken tramp emerged from behind one of the other boathouses, and with his hat pulled down hard over his face and his clothes in utter disrepair, came shambling along the docks towards the two negotiating lovers.

  They were not aware of this intruder at first as they spoke quietly, close together, after Ellen had bestowed her gentling kiss upon him. But, as the tramp drew abreast of them, the movement, or perhaps he made some vulgar sound, startled them away from each other. The tramp never even acknowledged their existence as he moved in a drunken sideways stumble past them along the dock and finally into the wood towards us on our spying pedestal above on the bridge.

  It was, of course, Thompson. Once again, he appeared out of nowhere in one of his chameleon disguises. He never spoke to the two startled lovers. They never saw his face. But his mere migration across the plane of their supposedly private world utterly destroyed the mood and provided Ellen with an avenue for escape.

  I watched their lips move through Dodgson’s bi-oculars. She was obviously making excuses as to why she must go. He was obviously protesting why she must stay. Finally, she just turned and began walking away towards the path through the woods in the same direction that Thompson’s drunkenly shambling tramp had taken. Barnet the boathouse Don followed her, pleading his case to no avail. The sexual spell was broken. Ellen had escaped the threat of the boathouses this time.

  From my perch on the bridge, I waited breathlessly for them to emerge from the green cover of the woods back into my spying eyes. I feared that under the cover of the trees, Barnet would attempt to molest her in unspeakable way
s. Just as I was about to race down off the bridge and into the trees, the two of them emerged back out onto the cobblestones of St. Aldate’s Street. None of the perverse things I had imagined ever happened as they came along the wooded path because as they returned to the street they seemed quite congenial, quite at ease with one another. Ellen had clearly said or done something which had assuaged our amorous Don’s disappointment.

  They strolled back up the hill towards Christ Church and the Bulldog, with her bodyguards strung out behind like pull-toys. First Thompson slouching along the way, then Dodgson and I following at a distance. Dickens really had nothing to fear. His love was well protected by watchful eyes.

  The only irony of the whole episode, however, was the small teasing sense I had that Ellen Ternan was rather enjoying her role as seductress and spy, was not put off in the least by the crude advances and liberties taken by the Dons whom she was spying upon. I did not feel that was a perception that Dickens would want me to share with him when he returned.

  The Spies Report

  December 8, 1853–Evening

  Dickens and Field returned on the afternoon railway on Thursday of that week. Naturally, the first thing they demanded was a full report on all that had transpired in their absence. I held nothing back in describing the amorous walking out of Ellen and Barnet the boathouse Don. Field was delighted—“She’s got ’er ’ooks into ’im,” he exclaimed (we were gathered in Dodgson’s rooms)—while Dickens almost visibly winced.

  Since it was well past six of the clock when this reunion of our detectiving party took place, and none of us had yet eaten our evening meal, Inspector Field proposed that we procure some victuals and then proceed to the Bulldog to view the evening’s performance. We repaired to the High Street Hotel and dined on roast lamb and Yorkshire pudding.

  “It is time to stir the pot a bit with our murderous little group of Dons,” Field declared over dinner. “Besides, they would certainly expect someone from the police to interview them now that two of their group ’ave been murdered. Morse”—and he caught that young fellow with a forkful of tasty lamb just entering his maw—“you and I will approach them in the pub tonight. You can introduce me as a detective down from London looking into it. We will see what they say to that.”