The Dons and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  Dickens’s finger was still upraised.

  We waited.

  A long silent moment passed.

  The door opened, just a bit wider.

  A hand pushed a loaf of bread through the aperture at about knee level and dropped it to the floor inside the door.

  As the hand holding the skin of wine came through the narrow opening between the door and the wall, Dickens pounced.

  Reaching swiftly up, he fastened upon the wrist holding the wine skin and pulled hard.

  Bathgate lurched forward against the partially opened door and sprawled into the room.

  The door slammed forward as well, swinging full into my face where I was poised too close behind, and pinning me hard against the wall. I was temporarily incapacitated, both stunned by the blow to my face and wedged tightly between the wall and the door, thus unable to help Dickens and equally unable to see what was going on in the room.

  The pistol fired off with a huge frightening boom which, inside that small closed space, sounded to me like a ship’s cannon.

  A heavy, dull thud.

  A deep grunt.

  A yowl as from a wounded animal.

  The sound of a scuffle on the floor.

  A shout of triumph: “Yes! I’ve got it.”

  A critical comment: “I say. Well d-d-done!”

  And finally I managed to extricate myself from behind the door and stagger, disoriented, holding my bloodied nose, out into the now brightly sunlit room.

  Dickens was sitting atop what seemed to be a semi-conscious Jack Bathgate on the floor. He had Bathgate’s pistol in his hand. Dodgson was standing over the two of them, beaming.

  Our improvised mantrap swung to and fro in the air above the fallen man.

  “Oh Wilkie, it worked perfectly.” Dodgson could not hold back his excitement at the triumph of mathematics over criminality.

  “What happened?” I asked through the blood streaming from my poor nose.

  Bathgate, insensate, stared wide-eyed up at me from the floor.

  “I pulled him through the doorway,” Dickens voice was somewhat subdued, as if even he was temporarily shocked at the audacity of what he had just done. “He tried to right himself and fire the pistol at me, but the chair hit him, knocked him sideways, and he missed”—and Dickens looked first at me and then at Dodgson in a curious sort of disbelief—“Thank God.”

  Dodgson actually laughed. “Thank G-G-God, indeed!”

  I pressed my thumb and forefinger hard together against the bridge of my nose to stop the blood and stared in disbelief at the two of them. Dickens had joined Dodgson in a volley of cathartic laughter. They both seemed to think it was all very funny, but I was the one with the bloodied nose.

  Murder in His Eyes

  December 14, 1853—Mid-Afternoon

  Bathgate just lay there on the floor, knocked senseless by Dodgson’s, I must admit, ingenious and precisely calculated device. We dismantled that lethal contraption and bound Bathgate hand and foot with the rope that had served us so well. He began to come around as we were doing this, and by the time we were finished rather thoroughly tying him up, he was sitting up and glaring evilly at Dickens.

  “Why did you and Squonce drug us and bring us here?” Dickens asked in an utterly flat voice, unthreatening, as if he were ordering a muffin in a baker’s shop.

  Bathgate never uttered a word. He just glared hatefully up at Dickens with murder in his eyes.

  “Why did you want us out of the way? Why did you lock us in here? What is going on?” Dickens politely rephrased his question.

  Utter silence. No answer. Bathgate remained obstinate. It was clear that he was going to be of no aid to us. Then Dickens did something the likes of which I have never seen him do before or since. He looked down at the sulking, glowering Bathgate and slowly shook his head. Then Dickens raised his hand and smashed him brutally hard right in the face with his open palm.

  The trussed-up man howled at the shock and pain of this sudden act of violence. But Dickens did not stop at that. When Bathgate howled, Dickens swung his heavy hand again and slapped him hard on the side of his face. But Dickens still did not stop. Taking one step back, he thudded a sharp kick right into the tied-up legs of our murderous Don. The defiance drained from Bathgate’s face. His initial howl of surprise and anger at Dickens’s unforeseen attack gave way to a low moan of pain from the savage blows that Dickens rained down upon him. Never uttering a word, Dickens hit him again and then again, kicked him twice more, once hard in the buttocks, once sharp and cutting in the stomach. The man was sobbing, begging for his life when Dickens finally stopped.

  Dodgson and I stared, eyes wide, mouths agape. We were witness to a sudden eruption of brutal, uncivilized violence and cruelty from a man whom we both thought we knew and understood.

  “Oh please, please,” Bathgate moaned pitifully. “Please don’t. No more.”

  Now it was Dickens who had murder in his eyes. He stood over Bathgate, glaring down at him. He raised Bathgate’s pistol, which had been in his other hand the whole time he had been beating and kicking the poor helpless man, and leveled it right at Bathgate’s red and stinging face.

  Murder glared hard and cold out of Dickens’s eyes, as cold as the steel of the pistol. Terror bloomed in Bathgate’s tortured eyes.

  “Now,” Dickens paused as he moved the gun so that the barrel was no more than an inch from Bathgate’s battered face.

  “Charles, don’t!” I heard myself involuntarily cry at the horror of what he was doing.

  “Be quiet, Wilkie,” Dickens cut me off in a sharp, curt whisper. “Stay out of this.”

  “Please don’t kill me,” the cowering Don begged.

  “Now,” Dickens began again, “what is happening in Oxford that made you lock us up here to keep us out of the way?

  Now Bathgate could not wait to answer. He was in love with Dickens’s question. He leapt to embrace it.

  “They are going to send an explosive message to the Queen,” the words came in a rush, trying to stave off any further blows from Dickens’s hand or foot, trying to outrace the bullet that was aimed right at his head.

  “Oh my God.” Dodgson exhaled beside me as if he had just been kicked in the solar plexus.

  “How?” Dickens poked him in the forehead with the revolver. “Where? When?”

  “Today it is,” Bathgate’s voice trembled. “This evening when she tours the boathouses. The explosion will not hurt her. They’re going to blow up one of the boathouses near her, to catch her attention, so the people and the Parliament will listen to our denunciation of this madness of Empire, this Turkish war.”

  Again, Dickens poked the snivelling Don in the face with the barrel of the pistol: “Who?”

  “Wherry, the others—we’ve been planning it for months. Our statements are all written and ready to distribute.”

  “You fool,” Dickens snapped at him, while at the same time throwing that ugly revolver across the room as if it were some distasteful piece of dung that had somehow materialized in his hand, “you do not threaten the Queen. The people love her more than anything English. She is England. No one would ever listen to you if you threaten the Queen.”

  With that, Dickens turned and walked away from his victim, his hand shaking, his anger subsiding, I feel, into a shocked disbelief at his own behaviour.

  “My God, I am getting to be just like Field,” I heard Dickens whisper more to himself than to anyone else in the room.

  Dodgson ministered to the wounded Bathgate, gave him a long squeeze of wine from the skin.

  “We must get into Oxford and warn them,” Dickens turned back to Dodgson and me.

  “What about him?” Dodgson queried, a nurse inquiring about a patient.

  “We will lock him in here as he locked us in,” Dickens’s voice hardened once again. “Morse can send someone for him once all this is resolved.”

  “I will stay with him until he is recovered,” Dodgson asserted to Dickens in a voice that
brooked no objection. “You t-t-two are much more experienced at this d-d-derring-d-d-do than I. You g-g-go ahead. T-t-take his horse. I will make my way on foot into Oxford when I am assured that this man is c-c-comfortable.”

  “Do not untie him,” Dickens voice was grim with warning. “He is not hurt. If you untie him, he will overpower you, perhaps kill you. Do not untie him.”

  Dodgson assured Dickens that he realized the danger of the situation: “I will lock him in and follow after you. G-g-go, you must warn them.”

  “Come, Wilkie,” Dickens was already out the door and I hastened to follow. Outside, I got my first view of our place of imprisonment. The stone cottage with its thatched roof seemed to be deep in a very thick, grey wood. The sky was dim and muddy through the sparse winter foliage, but I got the sense that we were up rather high. It was an altogether desolate locale that greeted me, but I did not have more than a moment to contemplate it. Dickens was already mounting Bathgate’s horse.

  “Here, Wilkie,” and he extended his hand, “climb up behind and we shall see if we can find our way out of here.”

  I just stared at him. I had never liked horses. They were too big and unwieldy (though this particular one seemed one of the smaller of the breeds).

  “Good God, Wilkie, climb up,” Dickens barked in exasperation. “We don’t have all day. There is a plot against the Queen!”

  Against all my better judgment, I took his hand and scrambled up behind.

  Modern versus Classical Transportation

  December 14, 1853—Late Afternoon

  The beast that Dickens forced me to mount was balky. Bathgate’s horse was clearly unaccustomed to carrying two rather well-fed Victorian gentlemen as compared to one lean Anarchist. I fell off the rearward end of the horse before the cottage where we had been imprisoned was even out of sight. A squirrel or some other small woodland creature darted across the path and the horse shied to the right, causing me to be jettisoned to the left, where I landed with a thud on the, I must admit, rather soft forest floor.

  “Charles, this is ridiculous,” I protested from the ground. “The animal is not big enough for two of us.”

  “Nonsense, Wilkie. You just have to hold on to me. Arms around my waist. Now climb back on. We do not have time for this.”

  “I could be seriously hurt falling off that brute,” I pressed my complaint as I struggled to my feet.

  But Dickens would hear none of it: “Climb back on Wilkie, for God’s sake. We must hurry back to Oxford. For Queen and Country.”

  Put in those terms, I really had no choice.

  “It is a pity, though,” Dickens joked after I had climbed up behind him once again, “that we cannot just put out our little red flag and have Rob gallop up in his growler to transport us.”

  A pity indeed, I thought, but did not say.

  I managed not to fall off again until we reached civilization. As the horse became more accustomed to carrying the two of us, Dickens gradually gave him his head, and soon we were racing through that forest at what I felt was a breakneck pace, but which Dickens dismissed as just “a steady canter.”

  In my desperation to hold on, I had no idea how far we had galloped when we crested a small rise in the forest lane and emerged out of the trees into a fairly wide country road. With the trees behind us, I realized that we were up at the top of the Cumner Hills. And when Dickens reined in the horse and pointed, I could see the spires of Oxford rising out of the trees in the distance.

  “There it is, Wilkie, and this road must take us to it.”

  With a wider passage, Dickens felt he could go even faster. It seemed to me as if we were racing down that road completely out of control. I held on to Dickens for dear life. We galloped on for what seemed an eternity until we came around a sharp turning and a large stone manor house loomed up directly in front of us.

  Startled perhaps by this sudden sign of civilization, Dickens reined in a bit abruptly. This brought our horse to a sudden stop, which caused that worthy to rear up on its hind legs. The result of our horse’s gambit was to cause me to slide inelegantly down off its lathered rump and land, with an indecorous thump, on my own posterior in the roadway.

  “Oh, sorry, Wilkie,” Dickens apologized, walking the horse around me in a tight circle. “I should not have pulled him in so hard. Are you hurt?”

  “No, I am not hurt,” I scrambled to my feet and brushed myself off, “but I am not getting back on that horse. Twice is quite enough for me. You go on without me and save the precious Queen.”

  Dickens heard me out and was about to press his arguments as to why I should climb back up behind him yet again when something else caught his eye.

  “There, Wilkie,” he pointed. “There is the solution to our dilemma.”

  My eyes followed his outstretched forefinger, but he was simply pointing to the high stone house across the road whose presence in the first place had caused him to rein in and throw me off.

  “Here, this will do.” Dickens rode over to the front door of the house and dismounted.

  I followed and, for the first time, noticed that one of those high-wheeled contraptions, that I later learned was called a penny-farthing, was leaning against the wall of the stone building.

  “It is a bicycle,” I stupidly stated the obvious.

  “Yes, and you can ride it while I ride the horse,” it all seemed so simple to Dickens.

  I, of course, protested, but to no avail. Dickens would have none of it. He saw this gangly machine of wheels and gears and chains and pedals as the heaven-sent answer to our dilemma. He goaded me into mounting it and gave me my initiatory push down the road before remounting his horse.

  “It is not far into Oxford, Wilkie,” he shouted as I tottered away from him, trying to balance the two mismatched wheels and steer the contraption along the ruts in the road. “Just keep it upright and follow me.”

  That was all he needed to say. I immediately tipped that bicycle over sideways and fell off it into the dirt.

  Showing considerable patience (for him), Dickens dismounted again and helped me to my feet, all the time coaxing me back onto that rolling machine. “You can do this, Wilkie. It is merely a matter of balance.” Then he paused for a moment as if getting a spark of inspiration. “Or would you rather ride the horse and let me try my hand at this thing?”

  I would rather have been cut up in little pieces by the mad barber of Fleet Street and cooked in a pie! There was not the slightest chance in the world that I was going to climb back on that creature. Dickens’s sly suggestion, for all intents and purposes, ended the discussion. This time I stayed on that contraption longer. In fact, I rode that bicycle without incident all the way to the high road.

  When we came out onto that wide thoroughfare, Dickens shouted, “Stop, Wilkie!” That was quite easy for him to say, but much more complicated for me to do. I had no idea either where it was located or how to operate the bicycle’s braking mechanism. By the time I realized that it somehow involved a metal rod mounted near the central point of the high front wheel to be operated by the rider’s foot, it was too late. I had already sailed past Dickens, and was headed straight for a thick wooden post at the side of the high road. I managed to avoid crashing head-on into that post, but my alternative was a bushy hedge that divided the high road from a partially cleared farmer’s field.

  “Oh Wilkie, you are getting the worst of it.” Dickens was all sympathy and concern as he leapt off his horse and helped to extricate me from that prickly hedge. “But we are getting close now. Look here.”

  He pointed to the signpost planted next to the high road that I had so narrowly missed. The post had three cross-pieces roughly nailed to its top. The uppermost slat, pointing back in the direction whence we had come, had “LONDON” scrawled upon it in some hardy black paint. The other two slats, pointing in our direction, read first “HEADINGTON,” then “OXFORD.”

  “I do not know what Headington is,” Dickens studied the signs, “but this is the way to
Oxford and we shall be there soon.”

  With that, he leapt back onto his horse and exhorted me: “Climb back on it, Wilkie. I think you have mastered it now. There will be no more mishaps. We will be in Oxford to warn the Queen in no time. What a story this will be back in London, eh Wilkie? Riding to the rescue of the Queen, Her Majesty herself.”

  Unenthusiastically, I remounted my iron steed and pedalled assiduously after the captain of my malleable fate. The town of Headington was four buildings decaying at the side of the high road. Two local bumpkins sipping pints at a garden table at a public house watched us go by, then returned to their beer without the slightest glimmer of curiosity. Just two silly London gentlemen, they must have thought, if they were capable of thought.

  Just outside this Headington hamlet, the high road suddenly dropped off as if we had gone over a cliff. Without warning, we crested a low hump in the road and began to pick up speed at an alarming rate going down. After only seconds, the wheels on my bicycle were racing and I felt as if I was flying into thin air.

  Terror was the first emotion to flash in my mind. My God, I thought, if I fall off this thing at this speed, I shall be killed or maimed!

  But then a strange thing happened.

  The bicycle sped faster.

  I bent forward over the handlebar, clutching on for dear life, trying to hold the huge front wheel to a steady line on the high road.

  Then, suddenly, an overwhelming feeling of exhilaration washed over me, cleansing me of all my fear, infusing me with a curious confidence. Dickens was right. I had, indeed, mastered the machine.

  I was riding on the wind.

  I was free and alive and controlling my destiny at a speed I had never even imagined approaching before.

  I looked to my left and Dickens on his horse and I on my wonderful machine were neck and neck racing down that high hill. Leaning hard into the wind, the cold air rushing over me as the wheels whirled and picked up more and yet more speed, I felt what a bird must feel, a feeling of soaring liberation cut loose from the earth, racing on the wind. I never wanted that downhill plummet to end. I felt like Daedalus, finally understanding the power of his wings, and glorying in their speed. I no longer feared my fall.* The sheer speed and joy of that downhill flight took over my being as I sped past Dickens. In triumph, I dashed away from him towards the bottom of that steep hill, which I could see racing up to meet me.