The Dons and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  I never thought of braking until it was too late.

  At the foot of the hill the high road curved and entered a low stone bridge over the Cherwell, a lazy tributary of the Thames. It was called Magdalen Bridge because of its proximity to Magdalen College, the southernmost of the Oxford quadrangles.

  I entered the bend in the high road under full control, but I did not see the narrow bridge until it was too late. I tried to apply the stick brake, but I kicked it too hard, and the stick broke off its fragile mount on the bicycle frame and became caught in the spokes of the high front wheel. The result was a lurching, bobbling, side-twisting motion that turned the bicycle into the low stone wall that made up the side of the bridge. This, of course, brought a sudden stop to my downhill flight, which occasioned—as the simple physics of such an event would predict—the launching of my body up and over the handlebar and front wheel of the bicycle, and out and over the side of Magdalen Bridge. I became a projectile. Fortunately, I landed in water deep enough to cushion my fall, and save my back from breaking.

  The cold winter water certainly dashed my excitement. Two fishermen on the bank bundled in heavy coats barely gave notice to my airborne intrusion into their millpond world. Finally, one of them, who turned out to be a woman, prodded her husband, who had on high Wellingtons, to wade into the water and help me out. By the time this silent river salvage was accomplished and I was dragged, dripping, up onto the bank, Dickens had dismounted and somehow made his way down off the bridge to meet me on the riverbank.

  I was soaked to the skin, frozen and bruised, and what does Dickens do? He runs up, smiling like a baboon, tosses a coin and a “thank you” to the muffled fisherman who had helped me out, grabs me by the arm, and without so much as a by-your-leave, starts dragging me up the slippery bank of the roadway.

  “Wilkie, I’ve never seen anything like it,” he says. “You were thrown out into the water as if launched from a catapult. Amazing!”

  Amazing indeed! I thought. Amazing that I’m not dead following your lead, you…you…even my thoughts were left speechless.

  But Dickens, of course, babbled on: “It is getting late in the day, Wilkie. The Queen’s cavalcade will be starting soon. We must get you into some dry clothes and warn them of the danger.”

  “I am not getting back on that mechanical contraption.”

  “No, no,” Dickens reassured me. “I have hailed a passing hansom. It will deliver us to Dodgson’s rooms and we will have you in dry clothes in a trice.”

  I was beginning to shake and shudder from the cold. My coat was actually beginning to freeze in the late afternoon wind. I feared I would catch ague and die. And Dickens? All he could think of was getting on with his bloody detective game, which he was convinced was destined to be the saviour of Queen and Country.

  So, as ever, I followed him. I changed into dry clothes as quickly as I could. I tried to suppress the violent chattering of my teeth. I wrapped myself in an old greatcoat of Dodgson’s that we found in his rooms. And, as ever, totally against any judgment I may ever have possessed, I followed Dickens out in pursuit of Field and some resolution to this whole out-of-control affair.

  * * *

  *In Greek mythology, Daedalus builds wings of feathers and wax for him and his son Icarus to fly out of imprisonment. But, caught up in the freedom and exhilaration of flight, Icarus flies too near the sun, which melts the wax and sends him plummeting to his death. Collins has evidently mistaken the names in this reference or else has conflated Daedalus and Icarus into one.

  Queen Victoria’s Cavalcade

  December 14, 1853—Early Evening

  We found Field and Morse in the makeshift field headquarters set up in the Oxford Police Station. “We must stop the Queen’s cavalcade!” Dickens (with me in tow) burst in upon them just as they were putting on their coats.

  “Where ’ave you been?” Field growled. “We ’ave been lookin’ for you two the whole day. And Dodgson ’as disappeared as well.”

  “We were kidnapped to the forest,” I offered, then felt very stupid as they just stared at me in disbelief, as if Dickens and I were Hansel and Gretel.

  “Kidnapped?” Field gaped.

  “Forest?” Morse blinked.

  “Yes, yes, it is a long story,” Dickens tossed it away, “but we must warn the Queen.”

  “The Queen’s tour of the city ’as already begun ’alf an ’our ago,” Field informed us. “We were just going out to see ’er pass up St. Aldate’s from the Folly Bridge. ’Olmes gave us ’er route.”

  “She will never get to here.” Dickens protested. “They are going to blow up one of the boathouses as she passes in front of it.”

  “Good God!” Field grasped the urgency in Dickens’s voice. “We must warn ’Olmes. The Queen will be approaching the boathouses at any moment.”

  Wrestling themselves into their greatcoats, Field and Morse led us out through the police station and into the street. It was only now that I noticed that lower St. Aldate’s was beginning to fill up with people. A line of gawkers stood on the curbstones, with more arriving every moment. The word had spread through the town, and the mob was forming in expectation of the Queen passing.

  “She’s in an open carriage, she is,” a street vendor held forth.

  “She’s wavin’ to everyone as she goes along,” another man, speaking with authority, announced. “I saw ’er in the ’Eye Street as she passed by.”

  “This way,” Morse urged us, and sprinted off to the left down St. Aldate’s towards Folly Bridge.

  We ran after him, and in what seemed only about ten strides, he took a sharp turning to the left into a copse of trees. I recognized the area from my earlier spying on Ellen Ternan from the bridge. The path Morse led us down was narrow and treacherous, its floor man-trapped with roots and ruts. Merciless branches whipped at our faces.

  Thank God that it was a narrow copse of trees. We emerged from its gloom fairly quickly onto the wide expanse of wooden boat docks which fronted the boathouses of the Oxford crews.

  The docks were lined with people. Each of the college boat crews had mustered in the full regalia of white jerseys, flannel trousers, and peaked wool caps in their school colours. They had ranged their rowing shells on trestles in front of each boathouse for the Queen to view as she passed. In the fading light of day, all of these young men standing to attention by their fragile boats with their oars planted on the ground in straight rows pointing to the sky were quite impressive. Indeed, they resembled small companies of soldiers waiting in formation to be reviewed. It was a colourful wintertime salute to the rowing joys of summer.

  This view of pomp and pageantry momentarily stopped us in our tracks. At just that moment, as we stood staring at the ranged legions of oarsmen, the royal procession turned the corner off the stone bridge over the canal at the opposite end of the docks and began its stately progress in our direction.

  The high front doors of all the boathouses were open for the purpose of displaying the shells. A single shuttered boathouse was located in the middle of that row of whitewashed buildings. It was the very one that Barnet had indicated was abandoned.

  “There,” Dickens pointed, “that is the one they are going to blow up.”

  “We must stop this blasted procession before the Queen gets too near,” Field shouted, even as he took off running for the carriages that were just turning on to the docks and proceeding towards us.

  The white horses drawing the carriages pranced and tossed their heads to the music as if they were a hurdy-gurdy come to life. The four musicians, huddled in the lead carriage against the wind, played their brass trumpets with all the gusto they could muster. The Queen was in the third carriage, waving graciously at the gawkers and the rowers lined up in front of the boathouses. The route of the procession took her straight across the docks and around the front of the copse of trees on the river side, then up onto Folly Bridge, from whence she and her entourage would proceed on up St. Aldate’s and back into the city
of Oxford proper.

  The four of us, Field in the lead, Dickens close behind, Morse and I bringing up the rear, raced across the docks. About halfway there, following Field’s lead, we started waving our arms frantically in the air and shouting for the carriages to stop.

  But the procession was too far away to hear us or heed us. Just then, however, a singular apparition in velvet lapels, bowler hat, and dark ebony walking stick stepped out of a group of jerseyed rower boys and, waving his stick, motioned for us to stop, directed us out of the thoroughfare.

  “Field, what on earth is it?” Holmes of the Home Office confronted our leader. “Why are you making such a fuss?”

  “They are going to blow up the boat’ouse! That closed one there! As the Queen is passing.” Field shouted into his face with the strained urgency of a man fearful that a member of his own family was about to perish.

  “Inspector, Inspector, it is quite safe here,” Holmes reassured Field in a patronizing voice that brought a glare into Field’s eye and anger into his voice.

  “Safe? You fool!” Field spat at the little man with the walking stick. “They are going to blow up that whole building. Can’t you see? They are trying to murder the Queen!”

  Field wrenched himself away desperately. The carriages were drawing closer. In but a few moments they would be abreast of the abandoned boathouse.

  “There is no need to stop the procession,” Holmes shouted in Field’s wake. But Field never heard him. He had taken off running once again, straight towards the Queen’s carriage. However, Field did not reach the Queen to warn her of her danger.

  Holmes of the Home Office waved his walking stick once in a sweeping circle in the air. It was clearly some sort of signal. In answer, three burly men, dressed as college rowers, intercepted Field’s headlong dash before he had come close enough to the carriages to capture anyone’s attention. They blocked him, tackled him viciously, wrestled him to the ground, and dragged him into the crowd behind a range of shells. They were still fighting to subdue him when we, now following Holmes’s lead, came up to them.

  “Inspector Field, Inspector Field, calm yourself,” Holmes shouted as Field angrily writhed in the clutches of Holmes’s three thugs. “The Queen is quite safe.”

  Field, still clasped tight by the three men, stopped his struggling, stared disbelieving at Holmes.

  “We have searched all of the boathouses, including that one,” Holmes, smiling annoyingly, explained. “We found no explosives.”

  “But, but,” Dickens stammered, “we have new information that they are trying to blow up the Queen.” All of our eyes followed the Queen’s carriage as it moved slowly past, the Queen waving to everyone as she went.

  Field stopped struggling. Dickens and I watched in horror as the Queen’s carriage glided slowly along the docks and passed in front of the abandoned boathouse.

  And nothing happened.

  The abandoned boathouse did not explode, sending its substance like lethal shrapnel slashing across the docks. The Queen’s carriage was not tossed into the air by the concussion. The Queen was not injured or killed. The carriage simply rolled slowly past and away, with the Queen waving to her subjects all the while.

  “Let him go,” Holmes ordered his three henchmen, who stepped warily away from Field.

  Field brushed himself off and seemed none the worse for wear. In fact, he seemed more relieved than angry at the indignities that had been inflicted upon his person.

  “Thank God the Queen is safe.” Field voiced all of our relief.

  “The Queen has always been safe, and always will be,” Holmes smugly declared. “If I have anything to say about it. And that is not the Queen,” Holmes said the last rather quietly, darting a quick look over his shoulder to ensure that no outsider would hear what he said.

  “Not the Queen?” Dickens stared at Holmes in disbelief. “Not the Queen?”

  “Do you think I would risk the life of Her Majesty in an open carriage when we know that there are assassins about?” Holmes did not say it unkindly; rather, he said it as if it were a simple fact, easily understood, indisputable. “That is not the Queen. It is an actress who sometimes doubles for the Queen, a counterfeit Queen, if you will. The real Queen Victoria is well guarded and resting in the warm confines of Blenheim Palace.”

  “Not the Queen.” Field was still having trouble fixing this concept as we all watched the counterfeit Queen’s carriage disappear around the corner of the woods in the direction of Folly Bridge.

  “You ’ave known all along, then, that the Queen is in danger, and that is why you employed this actress?” Field was trying to justify this whole turn of events in his mind.

  “Inspector Field,” Holmes was making his best effort not to sound patronizing to this older, more experienced hand, “the Queen is always in danger. It is my duty to provide for her security. To seek out threats to her person and stop them before they ever occur. It is my decision whether the Queen or our actress friend there shall be the one to appear in public. Mind you, most often it is the Queen. But sometimes, when circumstances…well, you understand.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” Field shook his head slowly, doubtfully, as if his firm confidence in reality had been shaken.

  ’Ee’s the One

  December 14, 1853—Evening

  Dusk had fallen. As we made our way back towards the police station it had become quite dark indeed, one of those winter nightfalls where even the gas lamps on the street corners find themselves startled by its suddenness.

  “But how was Bathgate so certain that the boathouse would blow up?” Dickens posed that question to the whole group—Field, Morse, Dickens, me, and Holmes—as we proceeded up St. Aldate’s in the plummeting darkness.

  No one ever got the chance to answer it.

  Out of the dark from the direction of Christ Church and the Bulldog rushed Tally Ho Thompson, an uncharacteristic look of panic on his face.

  “They ’ave taken Miss Ternan,” he rushed up to us. “I went to ’er rooms and she is gone. The door was open and there were signs of a toss-up. I went to the Bulldog and no one was there. I fear she ’as been taken by someone.”

  It was Dickens’s turn to panic then. He turned so white that even in the darkness he looked like one of Scrooge’s ghosts.

  “They are on to ’er,” Inspector Field spoke grimly. “They know she is a spy and they ’ave kidnapped ’er just as they kidnapped you.”

  “Who has?” Dickens voice was as thin as paper.

  “This conspiracy of Dons,” Holmes of the Home Office honoured us with his pronounced opinion.

  “But there are none of them left,” Morse piped in.

  “What do you mean?” Holmes said it in a voice that clearly indicated his impatience with anyone who dared to challenge one of his pronouncements.

  “Well,” it was clear that Morse was carefully thinking this out as he went, “two are dead. Barnet is taken up. Bathgate is tied up in the hills. And that only leaves…”

  “Squonce. It leaves Squonce.” Dickens’s voice was desperate.

  “Yes. Squonce is at the bottom of this,” Field agreed somewhat tentatively, his confidence still a bit shaken, perhaps, in view of Holmes’s cavalier tampering with Queen Victoria’s identity.

  “We must go back to their rooms at Balliol,” Dickens proposed. “Perhaps he has her there,” his voice could not hide his vain hope, “or perhaps he has left some clue as to where he has taken her,” and his voice grew even thinner with despair.

  “Yes, it is worth a try,” Field humoured him.

  Dickens set off at a run up St. Aldate’s and the rest of us had no choice but to follow. Up the hill and then down through the Haymarket to St. Giles we went at forced march, no mean feat in the heavy winter dark without all of the gas lamps yet lit. In a trice, we arrived at Wherry Squonce’s rooms and found his door standing wide open. Squonce was lying flat on his back on his parlour floor with his eyes wide open and a carving knife driven deep into th
e centre of his chest.

  “Blimey, ’ee’s murdered too.” Tally Ho Thompson stated the painfully obvious for all of us.

  We were gathered in a shocked mob just inside the doorway to his parlour. All of us, even Field, were getting too large a dose of death in this case.

  We all circled the body, looking down at the wide-eyed corpse.

  “There is no sign of a struggle in this room.” Field’s voice was low and grim. He went to one knee beside the body, felt the corpse’s face, bent the corpse’s arms at the elbow. “This ’as just been done.” Field was in a world of his own. “’Ee is still warm and ’ee ’as not yet begun to stiffen.”

  “But who killed him?” Holmes of the Home Office posed the question that was on all of our tongues.

  “Someone ’ee knew and trusted,” Field obliged with a partial, less than satisfactory, answer. “Someone who surprised ’im with this knife, who was very close to ’im when ’ee plunged it into ’is ’art.”

  “But who?” Dickens’s voice was little more than a desperate howl. “And where is Ellen? Oh God!”

  “One of the other Dons?” Holmes asked Field.

  “Which one?” Morse asked Field.

  “Where have they taken Ellen?” Dickens asked Field.

  It was as if Field, all of a sudden, was the all-knowing, the omniscient, the god of this fallen world.

  “And where is the nitroglycerine?” Field asked himself.

  “What do you mean?” Holmes interjected, all of his attention suddenly drawn to Field’s line of reasoning. “What about the explosive?” But Holmes did not wait for Inspector Field to answer. His own reasoning overran his own question. “Oh my God!” he exclaimed. “The explosive has not been found, could still be used. But how and where?”