The Detective and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  “’Ere, sir?” she prompted me.

  My neck swivelled here and there, looking about, as her meaning suddenly pricked my consciousness of where we were, and how it must look. “No, yes, of course, let us go in,” I blurted out. “We can talk in the privacy of my rooms.”

  Even as I said it, I saw the door to my rooms closing behind Meggy and my other self; I saw Meggy and that dark self clasped in each other’s arms; I saw Meggy and myself in bed in my rooms, naked, primal, damned.

  We made the entrance to my building without being seen, and climbed the stairs undetected. The wooden door swung silently closed behind us and we were alone.

  Suddenly, standing facing her in the fading light of my sitting room, terror burned like a hot wire straight through me. What was I doing? I was a gentleman, and I had admitted a common woman of the streets into my private lodgings. I was already compromised. What a prig you are! some other voice croaked.

  “What is it I can do for you, Meg?” I asked. “Is it about the murder case? Have you been threatened?”

  “No sir, no. I needs to talk to someone. ’Bout me. That’s all.”

  “I am afraid I don’t understand. If you are in some kind of trouble, would it not be better to discuss it with Inspector Field?”

  “Inspector Field don’t care ’bout me.” The words virtually exploded from her. “In ’is book I’m just a street ’ore, an animal like all the other creetures ’ee pushes an’ pulls an’ dangles aloft for ’is amusement an’ uses for ’is purposes. ’Ee don’t care for me. ’Ee summons me to ’is rooms an’ ’as me. If ’ee knew I’d told you that ’ee’d ’ave me taken up, ’ee would. If I die ’ee’d just git summat else for ’is informer. Wouldn’t even remember my name in a fortnight.”

  Though she never raised her voice, there was a violent despair in her words, a desperation and bitterness that frightened me.

  “I don’t want to die that way,” her voice quickened. “Not in the streets. Not in a ’ole in the water. Not like Mister Dickens’s Nancy, beat to death. Not from the pox or consumption. I want to be a normal person, not a gin-soaked old ’ag. I needs ’elp to be so, to change. Please, I needs ’elp.”

  It was such an impassioned plea, so elegant in its way. She was so sure and clearsighted in her perception of her self, her world, her terrible future. For a woman of her class in our age in the city of London, there were so few alternatives. She was very perceptive about what her future would be if she remained on the streets.

  “But Meg,” I said, the uncertainty quavering in my voice, “why me?”

  “I comes to you because you’re a gentleman an I sees the way you look at me.”

  I stared at her.

  “You’re my only chance, Mister Collins,” she went on, warming to her performance. “You look at me different from all the others.”

  She is using all of her feminine wiles to entrap me. I considered my position, but I could not take my eyes from her breasts rising against the flimsy top of her dress. I remembered the first time I had seen Irish Meg, my immediate attraction, which I had, just as immediately, driven down into hiding in the underworld of myself.

  “What? How do I…” I stammered, then pulled up short.

  She perceived my confusion, and it gave her courage.

  “You want me, I can tell, but you also look at me like I was somebody, a ’ooman bein’, not just a thing to be bought an’ used an’ thrown out after. Not just a dirty street ’ore,” she spat that epithet. “I’m not that to you, am I, Mister Collins, am I?” She was not begging. Her question was more a challenge than a plea for approval.

  “No, Meg, of course not,” I said, looking levelly at her, and (to my own consternation) realizing that I meant it. Yet, I did not wholly mean it. I wanted her as a whore. I could not avoid the fact that her being so readily available was the genesis of my attraction for her.

  “I see ’ow you looks at me. You’re lookin’ at me that way now. Like you want me, but you don’t know what to do with me.”

  “Yes, I do look at you, think of you.” I realized that we were in a contest for control. Suddenly, that other room from the night before intruded itself upon my fantasy; a man alone with a woman in his lodgings, the door closed, it had ended in murder. What was Irish Meg doing in my rooms? Had she come to seduce, and then blackmail me? To murder and rob me? Was her accomplice, Tally Ho Thompson perhaps, waiting outside? What a nervous twit you are! I thought, trying to mock away my misgivings.

  “The very first night, I seen the way you looked at me,” she repeated more boldly, “an’ I said to myself ‘this one’s interested, ’ee is, this one’s all eyes ’ee is,’ an’ I couldn’t help but laugh. You want to buy me, don’t you? Try me? It’s easy. All it takes is coin. Or power, the kind that Field ’olds over me.” She said the last bitterly, and then repented mentioning his name. “Oh, sir, on your ’onner as a gentleman, you must never say that I spoke ’is name ’ere. ’Ee’d ’ave me taken up.”

  “Inspector Field? He uses you…in that way?”

  “’Ee does.” She said it boldly, with no reticence or guilt. “An’ I ain’t the only one. ’Is wife died, you know, couple of years ago, of a fever. ’Ee doted on ’er. ’Ee is very gentle with me when we’re in that way. Oh, God, ’ee must never know I said any of this.”

  “He will never know from me. I do not want to buy you, to have you that way.” Her eyes fixed upon mine, and flayed away all the hypocrisy of my surface life as a proper gentleman, accused me, charged me, sentenced me, and pardoned me, all in one fierce, riveting look.

  “Yes, I want you,” I heard myself confessing aloud. I could not believe that I was allowing my private dreams to see the light of reality. “I cannot deny it.”

  Her eyes never wavered from mine, but her face relaxed, lightened around the corners of the eyes and mouth, as if a cloud had suddenly passed across the face of the sun.

  “…yet I could never bring myself to buy you for an hour or a night,” I finished.

  “You can be anythin’ you want to be, do anythin’ you want,” she said, breaking her spellbinding silence. “You can think what you want to be, an’ then you can make your thoughts come alive. You could make yourself fall in love with me, Mister Collins, if you thought about it long enough.”

  She moved closer, her face tilted up to be kissed, her eyes mesmerizing me. Now, twenty years since Irish Meg looked at me in that way, I realize that what she was defining was the power of invention of the novelist, that I had been pursuing under the mentorship of Dickens. What Irish Meg was saying was, that a person (or a writer) need not be bound only to private dreams (or fictions), that he could venture out into the world, and invent a life in reality as well—invent a life, and then live it, a life born out of art. That is why Dickens goes out to walk the streets late at night, I realized. That is why Dickens so enjoys taking such risks in the real world. A writer could take a single image—a London fog or a moonlit woman in a white dress—and turn it into an elaborate fiction, then he could follow that fiction wherever it might take him.

  “Yes, we can be anything we want to be,” I agreed. “We can change, make ourselves better than we are.”

  “You can…because you’re a man. A woman ain’t that lucky. I’m a woman in a world where wimmin are nothin’, worse than nothin’ if they’re alone. Maybe in novels wimmin can change, be on their own, find jobs as governesses an’ the like, but it ain’t that way in real life on the streets.”

  “What is it, Meg? Tell what you want of me. I desire to help you.” I wanted to reach out to her, take her in my arms, but I could not move.

  “I wants to leave the streets, sir. I can read an’ write. I wants to work for a gentleman like yourself or Mister Dickens. Could you ’elp me, sir? I would do all your bidding. I would be off the streets an’ yours for only your private purposes.”

  Slowly, I began to feel the heat rising in my blood. Irish Meg stood before me, willing, petitioning, and I knew that I could simp
ly reach out and touch those dusky breasts rising to each voluptuous breath she drew. I knew that she would counterfeit love for me, employing all of the oft-rehearsed gestures and roles of an accomplished actress. How ironic that both Dickens and I should be captivated by such adept actresses. Some sentiment within my confused, divided self made me hang back, because I knew that I would possess only art, not life.

  Her eyes never wavered. They challenged me. It was as if her eyes were asking me out of a street-worn curiosity: “You know you ’ave me, my fine young gentleman, now just what is it you propose to do with me? Use me an’ pay me, as one pays a cabman for the convenience of ’is ’orse?”

  “You want me,” she said once again (yet there was a quiver of fearful desperation in her voice). “I can see it when you looks at me. You wants to love me. But can you? Could you love one ’oose bin a ’ore? Or do you just wants to own me?” She paused to draw a breath which drew my eyes to her rising breasts. “I wants ta be loved, I do. But men can’t love the likes o’ me. I’ve seen lies told in the name o’ love. I’ve seen hexploitation passed off as love. Love don’t come ta ’ores. Only the river comes. I’m runnin’ from the river. I don’t care ’ow it’s done. I just want to escape the streets before I die. That’s why I come ta you.”

  My voice, my words, yet I knew not what I was saying. She had carried me away as if on a tide. “Yes, I want you,” I said. “I want you as all the others want you, yet I cannot buy you. Ours is an attraction of bodies, yet we are still beings with hearts. You are here because your heart still retains some shred of its humanity; your heart can still hope for some real life despite all the falseness which has imprisoned it.”

  As the words tumbled from me, her eyes widened as if surprised, like that night on the river when I gave her my scarf. I could not pull my eyes from hers.

  “Can’t buy me?” she seemed puzzled.

  “No,” I said, though I wanted to.

  “Why not? Anyone kin buy me.”

  Now, the desperation was in my voice. For some reason, it was suddenly important that I make her understand. “Do you think that all men are incapable of love?” I did not wait for an answer, but rushed headlong on. “Do you believe that all men simply want to buy and own women? If you believe that, then there can be no love because you will not allow it.”

  When she spoke again, her words came slowly as if she was on an unfamiliar stage playing an unrehearsed part.

  “A girl can’t be poor in London an’ stay clean,” she said quietly. “You can’t live by that dirty river nor walk those dirty streets without gettin’ dirty yourself.” Her eyes came up, and reasserted their hold upon me. “But maybe, I thought, if you try, if you can find ’elp, you might wash the dust off, or some of it.”

  I could stand her intense gaze no longer. I had to turn away, to walk to the window, to light the lamp on my writing desk, yet not to light it, to somehow collect myself there in the gathering darkness. I returned down the room to stand before her. Her closeness made the fire blaze up within me once again. Yet, I had thought of something to say. And she had thought of something to do which eased the shadowed gravity of our discomfort.

  She smiled…an open innocent nervous smile that a farm lass in Devon might bestow upon her awkward beau. Her self-conscious smile, for an instant, made me feel that indeed I could love her.

  “Mister Dickens and myself, we know a woman,” I began. I had regained my gentleman’s formality, my pretentious superiority. I felt a great power over her, yet the heated attraction of my other self gave that power the lie. “We know a woman who…”

  “Is she a bawd? A rich folks’ bawd?” she asked, and I felt I detected (but perhaps I only imagined) a faint undertone of disappointment in her voice.

  “A bawd? Miss Coutts?” I was at a loss. Laughter beyond my control began welling up in my throat, and burst forth in a half-strangulated chuckle.

  “Wot the ’ell’s so funny?” Meggy demanded, planting her hands firmly on her hips, her Irish eyes flashing.

  “Oh, no, nothing,” I answered. “She does keep a house full of prostitutes, but somehow I feel that Miss Coutts would be somewhat at a loss if she knew she was being characterized as a bawd.”

  “I know that name,” Meg was serious, “an’ I’ve ’eard of that ’ouse. It’s Miss Burdett-Coutts of the stone bank at Trafalgar Square, ain’t it? We calls it the ’ouse for runaway ’ores.”

  “Yes, that is the place. We could get you into that house. Is that what you had in mind?”

  “I don’t think so,” Irish Meg seemed genuinely confused. “I don’t know right now what I ’ad in mind.” Her voice sank to barely a whisper: “I ’ad you in mind, that’s all.”

  Then it was her turn to flee, to gather herself. She crossed to the window where the last light was fading behind the wispy curtains.

  “I don’t want savin’,” Meg moved toward me, not much more than a voice in the shadows, “all I wants is to survive, to live like a reg’lar ’ooman bein’. That’s all.”

  There was a silent pause but, when she began again, her soft voice was within reach of my arms. I could almost feel her seductive breathing.

  “I thought maybe with a man like you…a man who looks at me that way…who wants me for wot I am, not for wot ’ee can make me be. That’s it. Still a ’ore but a legal ’ore like all those fancy married tarts with their prams in ’Eyde Park.”

  “What do you mean?” I understood her proposal perfectly but, as a stall, I pretended incomprehension.

  “I’d ’oped that you’d keep me. Not to marry, I didn’t mean that, though it sounded that way. Wouldn’t ’ope for that. But dress me, an’ teach me to fit into your gentleman’s company. I’d do what you pleased to escape the streets.”

  Her’s was a blatant offer of her wares, if I was man enough to buy. My protective coloration, the formality and stiffness of the proper Victorian gentleman, instinctively (and quite pompously) groused to my defense: “Why, I can’t imagine…”

  “Can you imagine livin’ out every dark dream of what you ever wanted to do with a woman? Wot if I says to you that not touchin’ me now is a lie? Wot if I says to you that your whole life is a lie? Listen to me,” she said, and her hand touched my chest, “I can make it real.”

  She must have sensed the disarray, which my silence signalled. Gently, she taunted me toward action. “You want to be like ’im, don’t you?” she whispered from the shadows. “Mister Dickens wouldn’t be afraid to touch me…to fuck me. ’Ee’d do what ’ee wanted, then, somehow, ’ee’d write about it. I sees the way ’ee looks at me too. Like I’m some spessman under glass in some museum for study.”

  As I write this, as I look back upon that pivotal moment in my life, I cannot help but think of how many times in his books Dickens arranged just such situations, where the lower classes, the poor, the criminal element, bump up against and confront the upper classes, gentlemen and gentlewomen. His scenes are much less passionate, his language less accurate, less vulgar, less real, yet they are this same scene.

  Darkness had completely filled the room. We were but the voices of two shadows. I had to touch her, to verify her reality, no…my reality. I gathered her into my arms as one pulls a quilt close on a bitter night. I felt her softness, her warmth. Her hands like smooth fabric caressed my face. Her arms glided around by neck, closing out all the world.

  We kissed.

  A first kiss, like a feint, then a hard long kiss that neither wished ever to end. We gasped for breath. Her body moved urgently against mine. Our lips searched out each other once again.

  Three sharp knocks sounded, like an axe biting into the wood of the door.

  I recoiled from Meg, as if those startling sounds were nails being driven into a cross of guilt, upon which I suddenly found myself hung.

  Three more knuckle raps fell upon my flimsy door.

  “Who’s there?” I called out. “One moment.”

  “It is Charles, Wilkie, with Inspector Field.”
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  “Oh, God, ’ee must not find me ’ere,” Irish Meg begged in a whisper.

  “One moment, Charles,” I repeated.

  I pushed her into my bedroom and closed the door. My mind was racing. Since I had come in only a short time before, all that I needed to go out, my hat, gloves, walking stick, were conveniently deposited on a chair in my sitting room. There would be no necessity for me going back into my bedroom, for opening the bedroom door behind which Meg was secreted.

  I opened the door without further hesitation, and Inspector Field entered, followed by Dickens.

  “Charles,” I said, counterfeiting acute surprise, “I just left you no more than thirty minutes past. What has happened?”

  Dickens never got the opportunity to respond to my inquiry.

  “We ’ave no time to lose, Mister Collins,” Inspector Field gruffly informed me. “We must pursue them, before we lose the trail. Will you accompany us? Now?”

  “Why…of course,” I said, looking at Dickens. He was grinning with eagerness. “Pursue whom? What trail?”

  I must admit that, in the excitement of their bursting in, I actually forgot that Meg was concealed in the next room. My heated desire to have her, fanned to such a wild flame in our embrace of only moments before, had subsided into cold ash.

  “Your questions will be answered on the way,” Inspector Field assured me. “Are you ready? Let us go.”

  As we exited my rooms, Field hesitated a brief instant on the threshold, turned back before closing the door.

  “Strange,” he said, as we descended the stairs.

  “What is it?” I inquired.

  “There was a smell of scent in your parlor.” He had that searching look on his face of a man trying to remember an old comrade’s name.

  “Woman who cleans up,” I replied, surprising myself at the facility with which the lie leapt to my lips, “must drench herself in it.” I felt certain that that lie kept Irish Meg out of it, but with a sharper like Field, one can never be sure. He let the subject drop easily enough. Irish Meg, I am sure, made her own way out of my rooms, and, to my knowledge, never stole a thing.