The auction came to an end. Only a few voyeurs who had not participated in the bidding loitered in the room when the lights went up. One, the drunken M.P. from Devon, sat on the floor with his back against the wall, snoring loudly. All the others had withdrawn with their prizes to the private bedrooms in the upper reaches of the house. I felt somewhat embarrassed, either because of the light coming up and taking away my anonymity, or, strangely, because I was empty-handed, as if some judgement on my manhood might be handed down. Dickens, however, was on the watch. When Lady Godiva re-entered from behind the scarlet curtain, he approached her straightaway. She received us quizzically, as if expecting to deal with some complaint.
“Gentlemen,” she said, not recognizing Dickens, “were you unable to fit any of the ladies of my house to your liking?” She paused, and then, cocking her head as she studied us, continued, “Or was there something special you required?”
“No, not at all,” Dickens assured her. “We are not here to partake of the excellent entertainments of your house.”
“You are not?” Her look positively overflowed with disdain.
When Dickens introduced himself, and then me, her recognition overcame her suspicion and she visibly relaxed toward us.
“Am I and my girls to appear in your next novel, sir?” she laughed.
“One can never know,” Dickens said, taking up her playful tone, “perhaps in some form. I fear my audience would be quite unable to take you all neat.”
“No, you don’t write that kind of books, do you sir? I’ve looked into one or two of yours, and they are decidedly not that kind.”
“We are here in search of information,” Dickens said, rather sharply changing the subject, “and I hoped that you could help us.”
She was immediately suspicious. But Dickens was well prepared to deal with her reticence. Reaching out, he took her right hand in both of his own, saying, “It could be quite profitable for both of us.”
As she drew her hand from his grasp, it closed around the dull yellow shine of a gold sovereign.
“Yes, I am sure it can be,” she said, her suspicion superseded by her greed. “Would you gentlemen care to join me in my private salon?”
Settled there, Dickens revealed the true reason for our visit to Lady Godiva’s House of Gentlemen’s Entertainments.
“A fortnight ago a group of revellers came to your house. Lawyer Partlow, who was subsequently murdered and cast into the Thames that very night, after leaving your premises, was a member of that group. Is there anything you can tell us about them?”
“I read about that murder. I’ve been expecting the police. You’re a surprise.”
“Yes, well,” Dickens was improvising, “Partlow was of interest to me.”
“I remember that party well.” She leaned conspiratorially toward us. “They are all pretty reg’lar attendants upon my girls, especially Lord Ashbee. He attends here several nights each week.”
I was somewhat surprised at her openness. She seemed to feel no responsibility to protect in any way the reputations of her regular clients.
“Ashbee?” Dickens sounded somewhat startled.
“Yes, he brought them in, drunk. Theatre people. The kind who only come here when someone like Ashbee or Partlow is paying.”
“How many were there in the party?”
“Five, I would say,” she answered, after some consideration. “Three bought women, but afterwards they all sat together in the casino playing cards and drinking champagne. Five, I am sure of it.” She paused to reflect. “Strange, now that I think of it, one left for a time. Struck me because I was talking to Lord Ashbee and Solicitor Partlow when this one got up and left. He was someone important backstage at Covent Garden. The other two were railing him about something. He walked right out the door. Later, he was back, in the company of the others.”
“Do you remember how long he was gone?”
She shook her head in the negative.
“He may have just needed air,” the woman offered. “They were all quite drunk.”
“Yes. Of course,” Dickens agreed. “Can you remember anything else?”
“They left about two or three in the morning, quite loud and very, very drunk. Henry Ashbee did not leave with them.”
“Where did he go?” he finally asked.
“Nowhere.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“He did not leave at all that night. You see, Mister Dickens, I entertained him myself. It is a courtesy I extend to special customers. It involves out of the ordinary entertainments.”
“Such as the smoking of opium?”
She raised her eyebrows at his question. “Perhaps.”
“I understand.”
“Mister Dickens, I would be happy to entertain you and Mister Collins in such a manner this evening. A number of my employees of different types are now free. It is a courtesy I extend only to special customers.”
“Yes. Of course. I do quite understand.” Dickens’s face was flushed. He was, perhaps, beginning to feel the same overwhelming need to escape which had infected me back in that smoky darkness during that obscene performance. “But we must go now. You have been very helpful indeed,” he saluted her with a hypocritical smile and another golden handshake.
With that, we fled like housebreakers from an alarum. The casino was filled as we made our exit. The men, just come from the beds of their whores, crowded around the tables. The Mayfair streets were deserted (all the street whores having retired to the dark reaches of Hyde Park, knowing that the gentlemen leaving the fancy houses of Mayfair at this hour would be sated, and show no interest in them) as we contemplated in silence all that we had experienced that night.
“Paroissien, that is his name!” Dickens broke our silent march.
“Whose name?” I inquired.
“Why, the stage manager, of course. At Covent Garden.
I have been trying to remember his name ever since that fat pander described him. He is the one who left and then returned that night. Why did he leave?”
“For any number of reasons,” I must have seemed incredibly dull then, “all of which we have already rehearsed.”
“Not at all,” he argued in a calculating voice. “We haven’t rehearsed the most important and obvious one of all.”
“We haven’t?”
“He left to procure the murder weapon. He left Godiva’s House, took a cab to Covent Garden, and secreted Macbeth’s handsword on his person.”
I stared wide-eyed at Dickens. He was constructing the whole plot, chapter by chapter, right there in the middle of the gaslit street.
“No, that is how it happened, I’m certain,” he said.
With a lurch, he took off walking.
“Wilkie,” he said, with excitement in his voice, “we have almost reconstructed the night of the murder, but we must follow it to its violent end.”
His pace quickened. At Hyde Park Corner he hailed a passing hansom. “Take me to the embankment side of Blackfriar’s Bridge,” he ordered.
“Rawht, sir,” the cabman signified with an accompanying flick of his long whip to his business partner’s rump, which gave off a sharp click as if it were a form of terminal punctuation.
It had been a long and disturbing night. I had expected to proceed directly home to my warm bed, and now we were off once again on some wild flight of Dickens’s nocturnal imagination. As I often had before, I felt like some character in one of his novels.
I thought I knew what he was doing. He had become the murderer. He was imagining what this Paroissien might have been thinking. Imagining his hand clutching the murder weapon concealed beneath his cloak. Imagining his hatred for the lawyer sitting across from him.
When the cab bumped to a halt, he instructed the cabman to wait.
We walked to the head of the stairs which descended into the fast-moving black river. Dickens started down, but stopped as if he had decided that he had gone far enough.
“Wilkie,” his voice w
as sad, “we have retraced the steps of a murderer. We have witnessed what he witnessed, heard what he heard, and yet what do we know? How much of it do we really understand?”
“Very little I would think,” I spoke truthfully for myself. “We don’t know why he did it.”
“Precisely, but do you know what really bothers me?”
“What?”
“We never will understand because we cannot go inside of him, because we cannot write the truth of it. No one will really know why he committed the murder or what the true reality of London was in our time, because none of us, the writers, are allowed to use our words!”
The trip back to Wellington Street was accomplished with dispatch.
He climbed out of the cab in front of the Household Words offices. I decided to take the cab on to my digs. As it drew away, I looked back. He was standing alone on the curbstone, and two dark figures were materializing out of the shadows to intercept him before he went in.
“Is This a Dagger Which I See Before Me?”
May 1, 1851
I arrived at the Wellington Street offices at eleven the following morning. To my surprise, “the Inimitable” was still in his nightshirt. He was brewing a can of coffee on the hearth, which he had stoked to a hearty blaze.
“We stayed up half the night planning, Wilkie,” Dickens explained with enthusiasm. Field and Rogers had been waiting when he returned after midnight, and had listened eagerly to his report. Though bleary-eyed, he was excited: “We’re going to Covent Garden tonight, Wilkie, to identify them. That done,” he was positively trembling with the adventure of it, “we will install an elaborate spy network within the very theatre itself to gather the evidence against them.”
He passed me a steaming cup of coffee distractedly.
“Field is a genius,” he burbled on. “He has all his players ready, their roles written, and the curtain waiting to go up.”
“He must be,” I commented wryly, “if his drama is good enough to open sans rehearsal at Covent Garden.”
Dickens tipped me the sly wink of a co-conspirator.
“Just what is our role in our genius’s little drama?” I asked with more than a hint of sarcasm in my tone.
“He needs our help to get him and his witness into the theatre.”
“Meg? The prostitute?” My pulse suddenly quickened. She was a common harlot with a fondness for gin, yet the prospect of seeing her again made my blood rush. I cannot explain why. All I know is that since the night of our only meeting the woman had been in my mind, her surprised look as I gave her my scarf against the river wind haunting me like a fond memory from childhood.
“Yes, only she can identify the men who were present when Solicitor Partlow was murdered. But there is more.”
“How much more?”
“Field needs us to gather information. We are to mingle backstage with the cast and ask questions. I will arrange it with Macready.”
“Spies once again, is it?”
Dickens sensed my discomfort with our roles: “Yes, I suppose so. But Field is right. I am known there. They will trust us, and will think nothing of us asking questions which Field himself could never ask. In fact, we are even hoping, perhaps, to find the murder weapon there.” Field may not have been a genius but, in Dickens, he had recruited a highly enthusiastic ally.
We put in a cursory day at the Household Words office and I left Dickens at five to prepare for the adventures of the evening. I dined alone at a public house—meat pie, French potatoes, and a hearty tankard of ale—then returned to my flat to dress for the theatre. Our roles were those of the gentlemen swells paying a visit backstage. I hired a cab, collected Dickens at Wellington Street, and we arrived at Covent Garden shortly after seven. The curtain was scheduled to rise at seven-thirty.
We descended into the usual flood of humanity which coursed around Covent Garden on play nights. The cobbled thoroughfares beneath the towering stone walls of the theatre were choked with stalls and tents and handcarts and trestles for the offering of goods to the crowd. The coaches of the rich lined up as Lords and Ladies, Merchants and Matrons, Milliners, Serving Girls, Clerks, and Apprentices passed by. The theatre was one of the few places where all of the classes of London society gathered to partake of the same entertainment. Though the street was dense with people, there was no jostling or bumping, no strong sense that the pickpockets were about. It was a leisurely shopping crowd taking in the evening’s sights and sounds and smells before entering the theatre for the night’s formal entertainment (very different from a crowd of the sort that might gather for a public hanging at Horsemonger Lane Gaol). Small groups gathered around street buskers who danced or sang or fiddled or juggled or made grotesque faces at the curious. Inspector Field suddenly materialized from behind a huge pot of bright yellow country flowers.
“Gentlemen,” he greeted us, his darting eyes scanning the crowd to see if our meeting was in any way observed. Satisfied, he drew us, with a silent flex of his forefinger, behind the huge pot of yellow flowers, and announced, “Rogers and our witness are ready. We will await your signal from directly hopposite the stage door,” and with that he disappeared as abruptly as he had materialized.
“Well,” Dickens said to me.
“Indeed,” I said to him.
With that, we struck out in the direction of the stage door.
We had taken no more than a few steps when a young Fleet Street man, notepad at the ready (Gads, they seemed to be everywhere he went in those days), accosted us.
“Mister Dickens, isn’t it? Oh yes, I would recognize you anywhere, Mister Dickens.” The young man never paused. “Could you give Putnam’s Morning Express a few words concerning Mister Macready’s Macbeth?” The interview was underway as if he had harpooned Dickens and was reeling in his catch.
“I haven’t seen it yet!” Dickens tried to push past him.
“No matter, you are here, you must be eager to see it, yes, eager to see it,” and he scribbled that last phrase on his notepad. I followed closely, screening Dickens off from further pursuit from the young Fleet Streeter who had just conducted a successful interview with himself. We gained the stage door without further incident.
Dickens tapped politely with his cane. The door guard opened it cautiously. Aged, bespectacled, stooped and droopily mustachioed, he was about to launch into his set speech about no one being allowed backstage within ten minutes of curtain when Dickens cut him off: “Good evening Mister Spilka. I trust you remember me. I am Charles Dickens, and I believe that Mister Macready left explicit directions concerning my admittance.” Dickens delivered his speech with charm and great familiarity, and it worked with the immediate success that Ali Baba’s “Open Sesame” had upon the cave of the forty thieves.
According to plan, we entered the backstage area to reconnoitre before signaling for Field and Irish Meg to come forward. It was twenty-five minutes after seven. The backstage was chaotic. Every member of the company seemed running hither and thither, half-dressed. Scenery—huge stretches of painted cloth, and bulkier objects such as trees, great rocks made of wood and paper, castle battlements—was going up and down on ropes as if controlled by some gigantic puppeteer. Workmen were furiously fanning smoke onto the stage from smudge pots to create the ghostly mist of the battlefield. All around us, actors were pacing, posing, making gestures.
I observed the gleam enter Dickens’s countenance as soon as we passed through the stage door. It always appeared whenever he got around actors.
Three soldiers immediately before us flourished their swords in the air. Later, Inspector Field would apprise us of his interest in these “prop swords.”
“Not props at all!” Dickens would quickly disabuse him of that misconception. “The real thing. Fencing classes conducted twice weekly in the morning onstage. Fight master requires attendance of all, both principals and cast actors.”
As Dickens stood gawking at the chaotic flurry of activity, a wiry cleanshaven man with jet black hair and pi
ercing dark eyes (whom Dickens recognized, and whom immediately acknowledged Dickens with a tight smile and hurried nod), moved through that chaos biting off short sharp orders.
This was Pariossien.
We were only brief minutes from the curtain. Dickens was carefully surveying the whole backstage area, slowly executing a three hundred and sixty degree turn on the balls of his feet.
“There,” he whispered, pointing with his walking stick at a rather dark corner where a heavy stage curtain hung in front of what appeared to be an unornamented brick wall. “There,” Dickens hissed, “the perfect place.”
With that, he turned abruptly on his heel and marched directly to old man Spilka at the stage door. Field and Irish Meg must have been waiting just outside, because they materialized immediately upon the door being opened. Spilka stared wide-eyed at Meg’s vulgar harlot’s dress, but, at a glance from Dickens, looked the other way. In the confusion before the curtain, no one noticed them enter. Dickens secreted them behind the aforementioned curtain.
The three weird sisters, their hair grotesquely tangled about their faces, large artificial wens and warts raised on their foreheads and chins, black lines of charcoal stick slashing out of their eyes and down across their cheeks, stood primping before us in the wings. Martial sound effects and the metallic clashings of an approaching storm rose moodily from the far side of the stage. The three witches scurried out and took their places. Paroissien, the stage manager, raised his arm and pointed with one finger. Ah, the power of the man! Every eye was upon him. A drum began a quiet measured beat. Paroissien dropped his arm, and the curtain rose to the eerie chant of the three weird sisters rising out of the hanging smoke.
The Detective and Mr. Dickens Page 11