“Tonight is the night for Newgate.” I tried to calm her. “I must go.” She kissed me with the desperate passion of a woman sending her man off to war in the Low Countries.
In short minutes I was beavered, gloved, greatcoated, and muffled in two heavy wool scarves according to Field’s directions. As I made these common preparations for going out, Meggy, unable to sit, flitted about the room like a disoriented bird.
“Well…I am off,” I declared cheerfully, trying to break her panic, ease her skittish mind.
She rushed into my arms and crushed my lips with her kiss as if I were a condemned man being carted off to the gallows or the guillotine.
“Pleese tyke great care, Wilkie,” she breathed against my lips. “Newgate’s a ’orrible plice. None cares yoo’re gentlemuns there. They kills people for their shoes.”
I could feel her breasts heaving against my chest. She startled me. There were few things that Irish Meg feared, but there was fear in her voice, in her clinging arms, in her desperate kiss. I broke away from her, shaken, and fled, tossing an unconvincing “don’t worry” (or something garbled to that effect) back over my shoulder as I bolted for the stairs. For these people of the London streets, Newgate, the word, the idea, was a portrait of hell.
Sleepy Rob was dozing in the box parked against the kerbstone when I burst out of the building. I startled his horse, but Rob reacted at the speed of mud. His eyes rolled up out of their cradle in his elbow and he addressed my arrival with all of the animation of a slug: “Wheeeerrre tooooo, guvv?”
“Wellington Street, you know the place!” I shouted up while jumping in. I wanted to make good my escape before Irish Meg might appear for yet another desperate farewell. With surprising alacrity, probably more attributable to the heightened sentience of the horse than the driver, we were off.
Charles, who, obviously, had also been alerted by Rogers, was waiting on the doorstep at the Household Words offices. He, too, was bundled to the ears in greatcoat and scarves. While I had on my sporty short Oxonian beaver, he was topped by a full Tilbury hat. It was a raw January night. The streets were as empty as the Prince Regent’s head. The cold wind whipping off the river had driven the whole population of London indoors.
Before climbing in, Charles greeted Sleepy Rob with a sharp tap of his stick to the box. “You remember your instructions from two nights past?” Dickens addressed him as if giving an order rather than asking a question. The sluggish cabman must have nodded, or given some other slow indication of assent, because Dickens grunted, “Good, you shall be well paid.”
“It is a howler tonight, Wilkie,” he offered by way of greeting as he settled himself across from me and wound a mouldy cab blanket around his ankles. We two were a curious sight. Two gentlemen, muffled up in greatcoats and scarves like Turkish dervishes, our top hats pulled down over our ears and foreheads, huddling from the cold in a hansom cab, clattering across London in the dark of the moon on the rawest evening of the year.
Nine o’ the clock sounded from the black steeple of St. Dunstan’s as we trundled out of the Strand and into Fleet Street. Because there was no moon, it was as dark as the depths of Loch Ness. I remember looking out of the window as Sleepy Rob flogged us toward Newgate and remarking to Dickens on the blackness of the night. “It is as if we’ve descended into hell,” I said.
“No, Wilkie, we are not there yet,” Charles somberly disagreed, “but we soon will be.”
At first I thought his answer strange, but thinking back upon it now, I understand it well. I do not believe he meant Newgate alone. Perhaps he was contemplating what Newgate held in store for us that night, yet I do not feel that was his sole concern either. He had that particular sort of rapt look as we rumbled toward Newgate shut in against the swirling wind and driving sleet that signalled his novelist’s preoccupation with larger issues.
“I hate prisons, Wilkie.” He suddenly broke the silence of our rolling closet and startled me out of my own contemplative attempt to read his mind. “I fear this is going to be a long, dark night.”
It already is, I was tempted to retort, but I held my tongue and he, as suddenly as he had spoken, subsided into his meditative mood.
As I look back upon our ride across West London that bitter night, I feel I know what it was that so wrapped Dickens in thought. He, for some reason, mayhap some fright or fascination of his childhood, had always been fascinated by prisons. In his first full novel, he had cast Mister Pickwick into the Fleet, thus precipitating the only dark interlude in that otherwise sunny and hilarious book. In his second, Oliver Twist, he had actually dragged his readers into the condemned man’s cell to witness the guilty madness of Fagin, the corrupter of youth.
Large tracts of Barnaby Rudge employ Newgate as their setting. It would certainly not be untoward to inquire why all his life Dickens would display such a morbid fascination for prisons, why the image and portent of the prison would cast its shadow over almost every one of his novels to come. He had put Pickwick, and Fagin, and poor brain-battered Barnaby in prison, but until this night had he ever been there, really been there, himself? Perhaps that was what he was thinking, perhaps not.
Sleepy Rob reined in, Dickens and I turned out, and, muffled against the wind and sleet, presented ourselves to the turnkey on the Newgate lock.
Sleepy Rob had his directions. Three nights before, after leaving Field and Rogers at the Lord Gordon Arms, Dickens had, essentially, put our somnolent friend on a retainer. I had overheard Dickens engage Sleepy Rob. “You have done well for us tonight,” Dickens complimented the doltish cabman. “I will need you again. Here is coin to insure that for the next fortnight you shall, in the evenings, always be available to us, Mister Collins and myself. Your post will be directly outside Mister Collins’ door. You will drive us where we wish to go and wait for us while our business proceeds.” Sleepy Rob looked at him with the incomprehension of idiocy and slowly nodded his head in the affirmative as he took Dickens’s money.
As had been the case three nights before, we carried authority to enter Newgate to visit from Inspector Field. Greeted by a pair of yellowing eyes, we duly passed this document through the tiny grille. The turnkey admitted us without hesitation; our names and Inspector Field’s signature were on the document. After a cursory inspection—the man reached out and adjusted my scarf so that he could better see my face, and, reaching up to the much taller Dickens, did the same, giving him but the slightest of glances—the turnkey scuttled quickly back into his cubicle out of the wind and sleet that pelted down upon the gallow’s courtyard. I was forced to follow into the tiny guardhouse.
“We don’t know where to go,” I protested. “The prisoner has obtained a room.”
“At’s number one ’undred an’ five, north corridor,” the turnkey offered, clearly harbouring no intention whatsoever of leaving the shelter of his lock and confronting the bitter winter night in order to guide us to our destination within the labyrinth of the prison proper.
“And how might we find one hundred and five, north corridor?” The man was stretching my patience, but Field had specifically ordered that it would be in the plan’s best interest if I gave the turnkey on the gate ample opportunity to become familiar with my face, voice, mannerisms, and temper. It was, indeed, all part of the plan.
The reluctant turnkey, hugging himself as a way of keeping all the warmth of his closet in custody, gave me directions—enter the door immediately across the gallows yard, follow the corridor to the second intersecting passageway and turn north—and then repeated, as if to add insult to disinterest, “’At’s one ’undred an’ five, north corridor, guv.”
Without thanking him, I stalked out, collected Dickens from the black shelter of the wall, and, at the helm, beat across the gallows yard against the buffeting wind. Unhooking the heavy rope fastener of the door, I followed as Dickens cast himself into the darkness within.
“One hundred and five, north corridor?” I spoke into a void of blackness.
�
�Wait, Wilkie,” Dickens ghostly voice was soft and coming from somewhere to the left. “I can’t see a blessed thing.” Where we stood in the throat of that corridor there were not even shadows, for there was no light whatsoever to feed them. It was black as pitch and silent as a cloister. The only sound was a quick rustle, not unlike the sweep of a tiny broom, as a rat skittered along the facing of the stone wall.
In short moments, our eyes grew somewhat accustomed to the black, but there was no way that we could see any numbers upon any cell doors. We could hardly see the dark outlines of the doors themselves. We felt our way along the mouldy walls until we found the second intersection of hallways, and took what we hoped was our turn to the north, though, God knows, in that abyss of blackness how anyone could maintain a sense of direction. After making that turn, small snatches of flickering light seemed to escape from beneath and around some of the doors only to be consumed by the darkness of the gaol corridor.
“We’ll never find it in this light,” Dickens muttered, more to himself than to me. “We must find a guide.”
A blind Virgil to lead us further down into these depths, that wry thought taunted my already over-anxious mind. If I hadn’t thought it a hundred times already since our first being included in the machinations of Inspector Field, I had certainly been thinking it adamantly since the first moment of our entry into that infernal dark hole: We are gentlemen, not policemen! We should not be doing this. By all that’s holy, we should not be Here! But I knew that my secret thoughts and misgivings would make no impression whatsoever upon Charles, even if I was able to muster the courage to express them. “Oh Wilkie, where is your sense of adventure?” he would surely say with a heedless laugh.
A brief thought of Meggy darted across my mind. Back in our Soho flats she would be waiting, pacing like a caged cat, fretting about my safety. It was somehow comforting to think that she was thinking of me.
We felt our way along the corridor until we found a chamber door that showed some promise. A dim light emanated from the chinks at its sides and bottom. Somewhat more aggressive murmurings seemed to be hissing from within. Charles’s sharp knock on that door, unannounced to me, caught me utterly by surprise, straightened me up in alarum, made the very hair on my head tingle with the sudden threat. When the door quickly opened, momentarily blinding us with a flood of dim lamplight, I had even more reason for alarum.
Immediately, that door was filled with a veritable mountain of a man, covered with hair from the top of his head to the neighbourhood of his knees. Coursing through my body was the instantaneous horror that savages in the American wilderness must experience when suddenly confronted by one of their great grizzly bears. But this apparition was man, not bear. The resemblance stood in his matted hair, his tangled beard, and the raggedness of his torn and tattered wool coat and leggings.
“Ooze at?” the thing growled out the door of its den. “Wot yew want?”
“We need your assistance, my good man.” I could tell by the moment’s hesitation and the slight waver of uncertainty in his voice that even the generally fearless (or heedless) Dickens was somewhat taken aback by this creature confronting us in the doorway.
“‘Moy gude mon,’ moy bloody arse! Yew fagging quimsby,” the grizzly in the doorway snarled, assuming what seemed to me a stance of imminent attack. But Charles did not turn tail and run as I so wanted to, and, for some reason, his temerity prevented me from fleeing as well.
“We need help in finding number one hundred and five, north corridor.” Dickens, speaking quickly and sharply, momentarily subdued the brute. “We will pay,” Charles hastily added. That stipulation proved the saving grace.
At the mention of coin, that hairy devil in the doorway stepped backward into the light, which revealed his face breaking into an avaricious grin. His mouth opened in that instinctive reflex of approval, and showed him to be an utterly toothless bear indeed, and somehow, despite his intimidating size, no longer the threat he had initially seemed.
“’Oww much?” he cajoled through that toothless grin. But before Dickens could answer, a much more intelligible voice from within cut off our combative colloquy with Ursa Major.
“Bring ’em in, Jemmy,” that laughing voice ordered, “they’re mates o’ mine.”
The thing backed further out of the doorway and, in the exaggerated mimicking of a minuet dancer’s bow (made even more incongruous by its sudden appearance in a place such as this), and with a disgusting widening of that toothless grin, beckoned us to enter.
I must admit that I had no inclination to dive into that particular Newgate chamber of potential horrors; quite the contrary, my inclination was to flee. Dickens, however, without the slightest hesitation, swept right into the room, actually clapping that toothless, hairy creature on the shoulder in passing. I, of course, had no choice but to follow. When I think back upon it, upon all of those years of our friendship of the night streets, the one recurring memory that pushes itself to the front of my consciousness is of being forced to enter the most infernal dens of that dark city against both my better judgement and my will simply because Dickens, that madman, went first and I had no choice—as a man, as a friend, as a would-be novelist—but to follow.
Perhaps Charles had recognised that laughing voice, and perhaps that recognition had contributed to his intrepidity, but I, in my trepidation and disorientation, certainly had not. Thus, when I finally and unwillingly followed Charles into that room, you can imagine my astonishment to come face-to-face with the very object of our quest sitting at a rough table with guttering candles on its corners playing at cards. It was, indeed, none other than Tally Ho Thompson himself, in the flesh, smirking at the looks of anxiety and relief on our faces and tipping a wink to his cohorts at the discomfiture of the two swells who had come stumbling in search of him. They were playing at a game of “sharps,” and seemed disinclined to divert their attention from their cards for formal introductions, so Dickens and I simply nodded genially all around.
With grizzly Jem reclaiming his seat at the makeshift card table, the game was enthusiastically resumed, giving Dickens and myself a brief interlude in which to study the inmates of this jolly cell. Next to Jem sat an extremely high forehead sloping into an extremely long nose overhanging an extremely sparse mustache. He looked a comical rat. “Yewrr draw Shylock,” hulking Jem addressed this creature as the game progressed. I do not think that was the man’s given Christian name, but rather a racial epithet, yet, since he was called by no other over the course of the game, it must have been acceptable to him and all. Across the table from the bear and the rat sat the giraffe. This creature was addressed as Rory as the game became heated. He had flat and dull red hair, listless vacant eyes, an emaciated torso and limbs, and the longest, thinnest neck of anyone ever placed upon this earth. Finally, across the table from these others with his back against the stone cell wall sat Tally Ho Thompson himself like some sort of jolly zookeeper holding court amidst his creatures.
There was something courtly, gentlemanlike, about Thompson, even in these squalid surroundings. I have always marveled at his protean ability to shift shape and adjust temper according to his surroundings while never losing that maddening grin of amusement no matter how threatening the neighbourhood or intimidating the circumstances. Armed with his ironic grin, which intimated that he did not really care about anything—whether he won or lost, succeeded or failed, loved or lusted, lived or died—Thompson floated through life as if it were the world’s task to buoy him up and carry him along and deposit him at his destination without his being in any way responsible for the transaction. Thompson was a man who exerted startling control over his world without exerting the slightest effort toward that end.
Tipping us a laughing wink, Thompson played the decisive card upon his animal friends and declared “Sharps to yew, mates!” even as he was bending forward to collect his meager winnings. The other three looked at him with the dull incomprehension of their subspecies and threw down their cards in wha
t looked to be a well-practised disgust. Offering a teasing excuse—“These gents ’ave come all the way from Swellstown just ta see me, mates”—and a seductive challenge—“Ye’ll git yer chance ta win it back afore the night ’as blown itself out”—Thompson sprang to his feet and slid lithely out from behind the table.
“So ye want to see one hundred an’ five, north corridor, do ye?” he addressed us with that mischievous grin dancing around the corners of his mouth. “Well, it sure ain’t my idee o’ suitable bachelor digs. It’s Rats’ Castle damp an’ church steeple cold an’ ’Ampstead ’Eeath quiet an’ dark. Thank God for the rats, they raise the quality o’ the neighbour’ood.” With that pronouncement, he led us out of their gaming room, along the dark corridor some indeterminate distance, and into a black cistern of musty smells and rustling sounds.
He groped his way across the barely six feet of chamber—honestly, the cell was little bigger than a grave—and fumbled into dim light a candle guttered into a tiny hollow in the windowless stone wall. As the candlelight quickly dispersed across the cell to where Dickens and I stood in the doorway, it revealed the most squalid, rotting, smoke-stained, watermarked and polluted of accommodations. The air in one hundred and five, north corridor, seemed heavy enough and close enough to suffocate us. The walls were blackened with soot, and covered with obscene, desperate, perhaps insane tracings, garbled words and mad pictures all run into each other like wall drawings in some caveman’s Bedlam. The floor was bare except for a dingy, unmade bed manacled into the darkest corner of that narrow closet. Thompson had no chair to offer us, no table to seat us around, no fire to warm us. He simply stood there beside that guttering candle with that maddening grin crooked on his face like a crack in a mirror.
It utterly baffled me, how in the most squalid or threatening or oppressive of circumstances, Tally Ho Thompson never lost his equilibrium, always was able to muster up that insane cheerfulness and unconcern, which seemed to trumpet to the world, “It’s all the same ta me, mates; oy’ve seen worse an’ will agin an’ this ain’t so bad.” The grin was his way of disarming others, deceiving them into thinking that he was just another bumpkin who would be an easy mark.
The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens Page 7