The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  We consumed our banquet and closed out the evening with cigars magically produced out of some capacious pocket hidden beneath Charles’s flash waistcoat.* Our chairs pulled up to the Shooting Gallery’s flaming hearth, our stomachs glorying in their heavy tribute, the soft smoke of our cigars wrapping itself around our tongues, we were a contented lot. By ten of the clock, we had tucked Tally Ho Thompson in under the protection of Captain Hawkins and Serjeant Moody; Field was in the act of dispatching Serjeant Rogers to the Bow Street Station to collect the intelligence of the evening; and Dickens and I were attempting to flag a hansom cab when Field suddenly stopped us in mid-wave.

  “Mister Dickens, Mister Collins, might you join me in the Lord Gordon for a Dog’s Nose* or a mulled wine?” It sounded more on the order of an order than an invitation. “I needs ta talk ta yew in private, I do.”

  Rogers glared, hesitated, but one heavy-browed look from Field sent him off in the direction of Bow Street. The three of us remaining crowded into a passing hansom and were settled in Miss Katie’s snuggery within ten minutes. We decided upon some of Barclay’s Best,* neither Dickens nor myself wanting, after such a long day and heavy meal, to risk the headachey dangers of a Dog’s Nose of gin. We watched at the bar as Miss Katie drew it from the pull marked with an anchor out of her shiny new beer engine, which possessed no less than five pulls like shipboard belaying pins. Settled at one of her oak tables with our mugs of porter, Dickens, his enthusiasm ever unflagged, pressed our host: “What is it, Field? What have you in store for us now?”

  “There is really nothin’ more we kin do right now,” Field assured Dickens with a nod to me as an afterthought, “except, of course, lay the groundwork for our next move.”

  “What do you mean ‘nothing more to do’?” Dickens was terrified by the prospect of perhaps having to spend an evening at home reading a book by the fire rather than running about in the wind and the rain, or in prisons and pestilent slums risking life and limb trying to track down murderers.

  “I wants all o’ this, our findin’ Dick Dunn, yer interview with Doctor Vasconcellas, I wants it all ta sink in upon our principals for a day or so. I wants ’em ta worry an’ fret a bit. Or mebbe feel they are safe. I want ta wait, ta let things settle. ’Oo knows, mebbe one o’ ’em’ll git nervous an’ tip ’is ’and,” and, with a scratch of his crook’d forefinger to the side of his eye, he gave us a quick wink. Little did we know as we talked that such was not to be our luxury, that events were even then in the making which would put such a leisurely stalking of our Medusa murderer quite out of the question.

  “So…what is our next move?” I think I brought a bit more rationality and patience to the posing of my question than Dickens had thus far been able to muster in posing any of his.

  “I wants yew two ta go back on duty for Inspector Field, spies once again.”

  “Capital!” Dickens exclaimed with an unbridled glee, which I did not share. All he could see was the adventure, while all I could see was the hardship and danger. I think Dickens was in love with the very ideas of housebreaking and spying and deceiving and chasing around after murderers. It had almost gotten him killed once,* but that did not seem to deter him in the least.

  “In spite o’ the incriminatin’ evidence ’round Dick Dunn an’ the Spainiard at Bart’s, I still think that our Doctor Palmer is at the ’eart o’ this. We must talk ta ’im.”

  “We?” I glanced from Field to Dickens, then back to Field.

  “Yew two move in this swell’s circles. Yew kin find out where ’ee is, ask Macready per’aps, or find out ’oo ’ee ’angs with, wot racin’ club ’ee frequents, that’s wot the Spainiard said, wosn’t it?” He took a brief pause simply to mark the predictable enthusiasm in Dickens’s face, then sped on. “If we find out where ’ee ’is, then yew can visit ’im for me, as yew did Ashbee, make ’is acquaintance, measure the man.” It was quite a speech for Inspector Field, but it had its calculated effect. Dickens was ready to head out into the field right then and there.

  It was at that moment that Serjeant Rogers rushed in.

  “A runner has come,” he announced, then paused. No one likes to bear bad news.

  “Wot is it, man?” Patience was never one of Inspector Field’s virtues.

  “Dick Dunn’s been found dead…hand Tally Ho Thompson has flown!”

  * * *

  *In the parlance of Victorian England, a “flash waistcoat” was a vest matched to a suit, which, however, was lined in a brightly colored silk that would “flash” in the eyes of the beholder when the waistcoat was unbuttoned.

  *The English equivalent of an American “boilermaker,” a shot of straight gin followed by a pint of bitter.

  *“Barclay’s Best” was a dark, sweet porter made by the Barclay Brewery whose commercial sign was an anchor.

  *In Collins’s first memoir, Lord Henry Ashbee had actually discharged a pistol at Dickens at close range, but the charge had failed and Dickens escaped with nothing more than a bruised throat.

  The Scene of the Crime

  January 18, 1852—nearing midnight

  The runner’s message to Bow Street that Serjeant Rogers relayed to us at the Lord Gordon Arms was from a surveillance constable. It requested Inspector Field’s immediate presence at the Covent Garden Theatre.

  “There is only one thing could be worse than the death o’ our major witness,” Field complained as we four strode toward Covent Garden through the murky fog that had lowered itself over the streets during our brief sojourn in the public house. He paused a moment for the effect he knew such a pronouncement would produce, then continued with a touch of bitter resignation, “If Thompson, our only other witness, though an unsound one, ’ad anything ta do with it!”

  Constable Timko was waiting for us outside the stage door at Covent Garden. Poor Dick Dunn was waiting for us within, on his back in the centre of the bare gaslit stage, his eyes white and wide, staring up at a hanging flat of Falstaff and Prince Hal’s tavern haunt, with a fencing foil, perhaps the very one that either he or Thompson had used that very afternoon, quivering up out of his heart.

  “Wot ’appened ’ere, Timko?” Inspector Field was grim.

  “We don’t know ’ow ’ee got in, sir,” the wary constable, knowing that he had severely bungled his duty of surveillance, answered in a voice burdened with the heavy weight of contrition, “but we saw ’im run out,” the last added in hope that it might provide some reason for absolution.

  “Yew saw ’oo run out?” Field asked the question because he knew he must, but it was clear that he already knew and dreaded the answer.

  “Tally ’O Thompson, Sir…the escaped murderer, Sir,” the dim constable answered brightly. “’Twas ’im all right, Sir. Both me an’ Hutter is sure on it. I carries the flyer right ’ere in my inside uniform pocket, Sir.”

  “Well, ’at’s jus’ aces,” Field scowled at the poor writhing man. He must, however, have been impatient to get on with his investigation of the crime scene because, despite the sarcasm in his voice, he chose to forgo any immediate public humiliation or professional punishment or even disgusted tongue-lashing of his inept constable. “Did yew note the time that Thompson run out?” Field’s forefinger quivered slightly next to his eye as if he were having trouble preventing it from poking out at the stammering Constable Timko.

  “Uh, no…no Sir…we, Hutter an’ me, Sir…we didn’t think ta mark the time, Sir. But it wos after the play wos ended an’ the theatre closed.”

  Field turned his back quickly on the constable and walked two steps away, muttering into his hand something that sounded like “bluddydimwittedfool! “Turning back to his underling, he ordered Timko, in a clipped voice, to guard the street door. He punctuated that order with a sharp jab of his ferocious forefinger.

  When the constable was gone, it took Field but a breath to reach out and grasp control, which his anger at the constable’s ineptitude had momentarily loosed. He moved to Rogers’s side and looked down at Dunn’s
corpse. The sword stuck up out of the red circle of blood on his chest like an arrow from a bull’s-eye. Dickens and I ranged ourselves on the opposite side of the body, also looking down.

  “Our witness ta wotever ’tis we’re inta is dead.” Field was addressing everyone and no one, perhaps wishing that the corpse would respond, “An’ that idiot Thompson seems intent upon buildin’ a better case against ’imself!”

  “I cannot believe that Thompson killed this man,” Dickens took up Field’s reverie.

  “Nor I,” the Inspector averred.

  Rogers looked at me and I at him. It was clear that neither he nor I shared the certainty of our colleagues. He rolled his eyes. It was all I could to do suppress a grin. The man did have his moments I must admit.

  “If he did not kill the two women in the first place, then there is no reason for him to kill Dunn now,” Dickens pursued. “’Tis not his style.”

  I glanced at Rogers to see if he, too, was fighting off the shaken certainty in Thompson’s innocence that was assaulting me.

  “In fact”—Field knocked a final nail into his conviction—“Thompson needed Dickie Dunn alive. ’Ee wos the only one could prove that Thompson got lured ta the murder scene. No, Thompson could not kill Dickie Dunn, but ’ee could try ta scare the rest o’ the truth out o’ the little weasel. Only problem was, little Dickie wos dead when Tally ’O got ’ere ta work on ’im.”

  “So Thompson finds the body, takes a fright, and flees,” Dickens took up Field’s hypothetical narrative.

  “At’s it,” Field concurs. “If Thompson could sneak in ’ere past Timko an’ ’Utter, someone else could as well.”

  “With those two hon duty, the whole cast huv the play might huv come in here han rehearsed han those two would huv missed hit,” Rogers commented with sincere disdain. His effect, however, was to make all of us laugh. His comment broke the tension of the moment, but we all quickly realised that we were standing there laughing over a corpse. With that grim reminder staring up at us, we quickly regained our death decorum.

  Field and Rogers bent to examine the body. They fretted over it for long minutes, but found nothing out of the ordinary to argue against the rather clear facts that someone had walked up close to the unarmed man and stuck that fencing foil through his heart. As they worked at the body, Dickens stood strangely silent above them. He was looking around the stage, into the darkened wings, up at the chaos of flats hanging ready to be lowered into place for each change of scene.

  “What is it, Charles?” I, finally, observing his pensive stillness for long moments, moved to his side and asked.

  “It is nothing, Wilkie. No, it is this death that has once again raised its pitiful face. This poor man. He did not know that in the next moment he would be dead. Look around. Look up there, Wilkie. That must have been what he saw at the last instant of his life.”

  My eyes followed Dickens’s gaze upward. Hanging directly above the corpse was a painted background flat of the back wall of the Boar’s Head Tavern where Falstaff and Poins and the other highwaymen of Shakespeare’s play drank and caroused and plotted and gamed with prince Hal.* The flat, in that magical three-dimensional style of theatre artists, recreated a sloping, raftered ceiling, a dirty wooden back wall, and a small section of oaken bar (probably to be connected to a real bar to be placed against it). Standing against the dingy wall to one side was an ancient clock.

  My eyes, in concert with Dickens’s prompt, looked down into Dick Dunn’s dead eyes, then jolted back to the painted panel hanging above. When I looked back at Charles, he, too, was looking intently up.

  “It is as if in death he is looking up at that clock,” Dickens said in a near whisper.

  My eyes careened from Dickens’s eyes to Dunn’s to the face of that painted clock upon that painted wall silent in suspension above us. The hands of that clock, frozen in time, stood together as one, straight up, midnight. Dickens stood as if paralysed, his gaze riveted upon the expressive face of that clock. I realized that he was doing it again, moving into the dimension of that dying man, feeling what he was feeling, his panic, his despair, seeing what his eyes were seeing in their final moments of sight. If I were prone to believe in melodramatic omens, that ominous image of time run out would have been one. Yet, that painted theatre flat held no particular meaning, carried no symbolic message of time or threat, was in no way a warning. Strange how our minds imbue the furnishings of our world with meaning. The ghostly fancy of my thoughts danced over that scene: Perhaps the revelers in the Boar’s Head of two centuries gone were the gaping witnesses to the murder of this hapless latter-day Poins. If only they could direct Field to the murderer, bear witness in the dock.

  The haunted quality of that empty stage, of Dickens staring as if in a trance up at that stopped clock, of those two men bending over that still, dark form, of those wide, dead eyes staring up, sent a shudder of dread through my whole being. All I could feel was an overpowering need to close those empty eyes, break that sinister time-stopped spell.

  Field and Rogers rose from the body, finished with their ministrations.

  Without even thinking, I bent to one knee and, with my right hand, closed those terrible, empty eyes.

  “There is nothin’ more for us ’ere,” Field broke our morbid silence, and I shuddered once again as if hearing those ghostly tipplers of the Boar’s Head Tavern laughing at the grim joke time had played on their drinking companion Poins.

  As we left the theatre, the fog was draped like a dingy yellow curtain over the West End. And Tally Ho Thompson, shape-shifting actor that he was, had disappeared behind it.

  * * *

  *The reference is to Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, the play being performed at the time of these murders by Macready’s Covent Garden Theatre Company, and in which first Thompson, and then Dunn, played the role of Poins.

  “Stir the Gentleman Up!”

  January 23, 1852—late morning

  Four days passed uneventfully. Waiting to be summoned by Inspector Field, Dickens and I finished mounds of work at the Household Words office. We were certain that all manner of detective machinations were underway during that period of maddening and interminable calm. We, we presumed and resented, were simply not privy to them. Doubtless, we reasoned, Field felt the mundane workaday advancement of his procedures too pedestrian for our attention.

  Yet, as day piled up upon day and no summons back into the case arrived, Dickens became first morose, then nervous, and finally combative. One moment he would be sitting working at his desk and the next he would be up and pacing like one of Burton’s tigers in a cage. In the evenings, he would beg me to eat pub dinners in the office on the chance that Field’s summons would come. On two of the four nights, I acquiesced. I spent long evenings in speculative conversation upon the case with an increasingly impatient Dickens. On the other two nights, I offered lame excuses and fled Wellington Street for the more seductive offices of Irish Meg.

  Yet, I felt regret those nights at leaving Charles alone to brood over the case. There was something about it that fascinated him, which drew him like a moth to a flame. He insisted that it was the offices of friendship owed to Thompson that compelled us to work on our highwayman’s behalf. But, observing Dickens’s growing obsession, I came to believe that there was more to it than those bonds of friendship. The second night of waiting, I had the temerity and meanness to play devil’s advocate, to raise doubts about Thompson that no one else seemed willing to raise.

  “How do you know he did not kill Dick Dunn?” I astounded Dickens. I truly think that he had never considered the possibility. One of the things that always amazed and drew me to Dickens was his innocence and hope in human nature. He walked his London world with an almost total lack of cynicism remarkable in a man of forty years of his experience and human insight. I found his naïveté incredible, at times laughable. “For that matter, how do we know he did not kill those two women? He could have been having a love affair with the wife, his riding pupil
.” I was beginning to amaze myself with the lasciviousness of my dirty little mind, but I pressed this gambit: “How do you know? Good God, Charles! Thompson was a highwayman, a housebreaker, a thief. How can you know he is not guilty?”

  “I just know,” Dickens answered, taking it all very seriously. “He is our friend, our charge. We must believe in him and help him. Thompson would never do something like that no matter how desperate he got. Murder is not his style”—Dickens smiled—“and style is everything.”

  “Style?”

  “Most certainly. How you live your life. The way you order your world. The way you choose to look. How you write. Everyone has his own style, and Thompson’s is not murderous.”

  It all sounded like gibberish to me, but I will be the first to admit that I was often incapable of keeping pace with the fierce stridings of Dickens’s mind. He plunged into ideas and motives as aggressively as he plunged into the streets of London on his fierce night walks. He was, indeed, a restless chimera of a man. Perhaps these journals, these “recollections in tranquillity” as our poet laureate Mister Wordsworth wrote, are my attempts to understand him. Whatever was my reaction, however, Dickens steadfastly insisted upon Thompson’s innocence and relentlessly kept up to the responsibilities of his friendship. But I still doubted whether it was all that simple, whether Dickens fully understood the motives of his own mind.