The Detective and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  “A signal,” Inspector Field was the first to interpret this sign penetrating the heavy fog. “That’s them, there.”

  The three of us scrambled down off the porch in the direction of that light, but before we had progressed to the garden gate, I heard, near upon us, the clatter of horses’ hooves. From the sound, it was a matched pair pulling a light coach, and moving at a controlled speed under tight rein. I saw the coach as it passed by on the glistening street, and was swallowed by the mist. I could hear, however, the coach scraping to a stop, near where the signal light had been extinguished. We could not get to the fugitives in time. Out of the fog came the snapping of the coachman’s whip, the flint-like cadence of the horses’ hooves picking up speed on the cobbled street, the terrible finality of the coach’s wheels rumbling out of our grasp. They were escaping.

  “They are getting away!” Dickens almost shrieked in a desperate voice. “He is taking her!”

  Ever analytic, Field tried to calm the distraught Dickens: “’Ee ’as kept this coach in reserve for ’is escape. My men are not in a position to stop ’im.” He stated our helplessness as the mere fact that it was. Dickens’s shoulders slumped. “Rogers, bring up the coach, quickly!” Field shouted into the fog. “We will pursue, and try to pick up their trail,” he said, turning to Dickens, “but the fog, this sharp night, will keep witnesses in. I don’t know.” He was offering little hope for our success.

  “No, he must not take her!” Dickens screamed out his frustration.

  We could hear the hollow echoes of the escape vehicle moving off.

  I had last seen Tally Ho Thompson as he applied the coup de gras to Lord Bowes at the conclusion of their mock duel. For some reason, he had not joined the pursuit of Ashbee into the main house. Where was he? My theory was that he was going through the pockets of the fallen combatants.

  The sounds of Ashbee’s coach grew fainter.

  It was at that moment that Thompson rode up out of the fog. He was sitting bareback upon a speckled grey coachhorse, his fingers entwined in the animal’s coarse mane. “I’ve ’ad better mounts than this,” he laughed, “on a carousel. Which way did they go?”

  “There,” Field pointed. “You can still ’ear ’em faintly. Stay back, but keep ’em in sight or ’earin’. We’ll catch up with you.”

  With no more than that, Thompson galloped off in pursuit.

  I stood staring after him, as the sounds of his mount’s hooves faded into the fog. How had Thompson known? I tell you the man was uncanny. Somehow he always seemed to know what was going to happen, and what to do when indeed it did. Furthermore, the man had the power of always popping up in exactly the right place, at the right time, properly equipped to do expressly what was required. I remember Field saying, sometime after it was all over, “What a detective Thompson would make, if only ’ee could keep ’is ’ands out of other peoples’ pockets.”

  Within short seconds, Rogers arrived, reins and whip in hand, himself atop the box of the black police post-chaise. I was not surprised, for I knew that Rogers would insert himself into the center of the action, in whatever way possible. Dickens, Field, and myself jumped into the coach, even as Rogers whipped our pair into the fog.

  “They are heading toward the river,” Dickens said in a quiet voice, as if he were having some sort of vision. Unlike the being who had spent the night thus far in such nervous agitation, he spoke with a reassuring calm. Only later was I able to understand why Dickens’s whole posture changed so dramatically, once we took up the pursuit. It was the streets. He was in his own element. “They are heading toward the river. He will attempt to disappear into that maze of narrow streets. We will find them. I know those streets.”

  “As do I,” Field reassured us. “Thompson will keep ’em in sight, and we shall bring ’em to bay.”

  Rogers whipped the horses along the railings of the park. Dickens stared grimly out into the fog.

  “They’ll stick to the ’eye-road to the Knightsbridge crossin’,” Field said, sounding quite certain, “then they’ll make for either Millbank or the Chelsea Embankment. Those are the places to ’ide, those are!”

  At a tap on the arm from Inspector Field, Rogers reined in at the Knightsbridge crossroad. A crossing sweep with a broom loitered outside the door of a public house. In an instant, like a vulture, Field was out of the coach and upon the lad.

  “A light coach drawn by a pair followed close by a ’orseman,” Field was shaking the terrified sweep by both shoulders, “when did they pass? Which way did they take?”

  “There,” pointed the frightened boy.

  “When?” Field demanded with a sharp shake.

  “Oney a littul toime. Don’t ’urt me. I’se done nothink,” the boy begged.

  Field removed his fists from the crossing sweep’s ragged shoulders. At a run he returned to the coach. As he jumped aboard, he turned back to the poor creature cowering in the rain. “Wot’s your name, boy?” he called.

  “Jo it is,” the frightened boy answered. “Jo is all.”

  “I’ll remember you, Jo,” Field shouted as Rogers laid on with the whip and the coach moved off. At the time, I remember wondering if Field’s words were a promise of reward, or a threat to that cowering wretch.

  Similar scenes were enacted as we traversed the London streets. Later, Field confided that through that whole tracking of the fugitives in that thick fog, he was all the time afraid that they would make some abrupt turn-off, or some doubling back, and both Thompson and we would lose them. But Lord Ashbee never thought to employ such artful devices.

  With a hand to the driver’s arm, Field would order Rogers to rein in. Field then would climb down and accost the first available passerby, or pound on an inn door with his truncheon, or roust drunken men or painted women out of the shadows of dark doorways. God knows how he threatened these poor souls. We would sit in the coach, and watch him converse violently with them, until, invariably, his informant would raise an arm and point. Field had some uncanny gift for divining which ones had seen or heard the coach and the pursuing horseman. We were close on their trail.

  Yet, we were nearing the river. This was the area where, indeed, the pursuit would grow quite tricky. The streets narrowed significantly. The possible turn-offs capable of swallowing a solitary coach multiplied. The fog and the rain had abated not a whit. If Ashbee had led us a fool’s chase in order to turn about and run for the safety of Soho or the West End, then we had to be doubly careful not to lose him in this dark maze into which he had lured us. We could smell the river close before us. The houses rose high on each side. The fog closed about us like a shroud.

  “Let us alight and walk,” Dickens suggested. “We will have a better chance of encountering some sign.”

  To our surprise, Inspector Field unhesitatingly agreed.

  Rogers pulled the coach to the curbstone, tied the horses to a lamp-post, and all four of us stepped down.

  “Stay together,” Field directed. “Remember, ’ee ’as a gun.”

  We proceeded slowly down that street through the fog. We could hear the river rushing between pilings and against its banks close before us.

  “Did you ’ear a ’orse ride up, just now?” Field held a slinking, ragged, river character hard by the collar.

  “’Oi did, guv, a’ead there,” the man put himself on point, like some waterlogged retriever. Field unceremoniously cast him off.

  We moved in a file along the moldy faces of the buildings. Millbank at night was like the dark side of the moon.

  “’Ullo mates. Nice evenin’, wot?” Tally Ho Thompson stepped out of the shadows of a recessed doorway.

  I honestly feel that Dickens wanted to strangle the fool on the spot.

  Milord Run to Ground

  May 11, 1851—nearing midnight

  “Where are they, Thompson?” Inspector Field demanded. “Were you able to keep up?”

  “Is Jack Ketch the Lord’s puppeteer?” Thompson laughed.

  I felt Dickens
tense beside me. Thompson was maddening.

  “Where are they, you idiot!” Dickens spat, only to be answered by an artificial cough which I must believe was Thompson’s way of camouflaging the laughter that seemed always bubbling up within him.

  “’Ee took ’er into a public ’ouse down the way. I know the place. ’Tis a ’ouse of ’ores. I think ’ee’s gettin’ the girl into some clothes.” He gave his report in a conspiratorial whisper. “The coach is waitin’ there,” he said, pointing, but nothing could be seen through the fog.

  “We must get closer,” Field looked to Thompson.

  “Follow me,” Thompson obliged.

  We crept no more than ten yards before he pulled us up short.

  “We can see the coach from ’ere,” Thompson again pointed.

  “We don’t want to go closer,” Inspector Field agreed.

  Even as these words were exchanged, two figures, one tall, one slighter, both muffled and hooded, the taller in a greatcoat, the woman in a long cloak, materialized out of the fog, and moved toward the waiting coach.

  “’Alt!” Field shouted, and he and Dickens took off at a run with Serjeant Rogers in close pursuit.

  The two fugitives stopped in the middle of the street as if obeying Inspector Field’s sharp order.

  “’Alt for the Protectives!” Field shouted.

  Time seemed to stop pursuant to Field’s order. That waterside street seemed transformed into a still tableau—the two hooded figures in the middle of the way; the detective, the novelist, and the detective’s man running as if in slowed motion; the waiting coach tethered near the ghostly buildings; the stones glistening black with rain.

  Thompson and I advanced more cautiously. Almost immediately, time sped up, o’erstepped itself, careened out of control.

  Pistol shot!

  Rogers, running before me, tumbled headlong into the street.

  Dickens and Field dropped to the ground in front of the fallen serjeant.

  When we looked up, the two hooded figures—Ashbee and the girl—were gone, swallowed by the fog.

  To our right, a large hulking man was climbing down from the box of Ashbee’s coach. Reaching the ground, he charged directly at the backs of Dickens and Inspector Field, who were in the act of regaining their feet.

  Beside me there was a sudden blur of movement. It was—who else?—Thompson, darting forward, picking up speed, launching himself into a headlong dive, sailing through the air, and slamming into the midsection of Ashbee’s servant, knocking the man, like a nine-pin, to the ground.

  I bent to Serjeant Rogers. “My leg,” he gasped. “I think I’m bloody shot!” As I remember it now, his incredulity seems nothing less than hilarious, but, at the time, it was no joke.

  “Serjeant Rogers, wot is it?” Field’s concern wavered in his voice.

  “After ’im, sir. After ’im right now.” One had to admire the man’s dedication to duty. “It’s only me leg. Ain’t nothin’ to mind.”

  With that, Field and Dickens were up and running in the direction in which the hooded fugitives had fled.

  “Stay with him, Wilkie, until help arrives,” Dickens yelled back.

  Much of the rest of my description of the ensuing events of that evening has been reconstructed from later conversations with the principals, who were in action while I was forced to stay back, and attend to the fallen Serjeant Rogers, who, it was determined later, had been slightly grazed across the forehead by the bullet, but had bumped his knee in the fall.

  When I looked up from my charge, Dickens and Field had already disappeared. Only ten yards away, Thompson and Ashbee’s oversized lout of a coachman were rolling around in the muddy street. Thompson seemed to be getting the worst of the exchange. Ashbee’s servant was sitting atop him with both hands clasped to Thompson’s throat. Without even thinking, I ran to Thompson’s aid and kicked Ashbee’s servant in the middle of the back with all the strength I could muster. I must have caught him flush in the kidney, because he straightened up, and howled in pain. Taking his hands from Thompson’s throat, and lunging them to the sudden pain in his back, he gave Thompson an opening. With an upward lunge, Thompson threw off the lout, and regained his feet. The hulking servant knelt on the cobblestones, bent double and holding his back. Thompson hesitated not a moment. Launching himself into a ballet dancer’s whirl, he gathered speed, and kicked the kneeling sod full in the face with his right boot. The man toppled like a French king, and lay still on the street.

  I returned to Rogers. With a wave of acknowledgement to me, Tally Ho Thompson set off at a run after Dickens and Inspector Field. Within a matter of minutes, my charge, who had been but momentarily stunned, was up, and ready to return to the fray. I left him in the care of a newly-arrived constable, and followed upon the trail of my companions.

  Ashbee, meanwhile, was dragging Ellen Ternan by the wrist through the narrow fog-bound streets. He could hear the running footfalls of Inspector Field and Dickens gaining upon him. The girl slowed him down. The pistol’s only ball had been expended.

  I can only imagine what thoughts raced through Dickens’s mind as he ran after that villain and the woman for whom he had imagined this passionate, irrational love. Dickens had that ability, present in all great novelists, to get so caught up in an event, or the fictional creation of an event, that the self is forgotten. As he ran in pursuit of his mistress and her tormentor, Dickens probably was seeing his romantic dream of playing St. George almost within his grasp.

  Ashbee jettisoned the girl at the mouth of a narrow alleyway between two stone buildings. She collapsed and lay sobbing in the street. Her hooded cape spread open around her like a dark pool of blood. She wore a lurid scarlet dress, and her bloodless white face, above that bright red slash against that black circular pool, must have looked like one of Turner’s violent miniatures.

  Inspector Field ignored her. With barely a sidelong glance, he ran past her in pursuit of Ashbee, down that black slit of an alleyway.

  Dickens, of course, stopped to inquire of Miss Ternan’s condition. No, that is the sort of stuffy Victorian writing that a Mister Trollope or a Mister Thackeray might be satisfied to offer. I was not there, but I know that Charles flung himself to his knees, took her head tenderly into his hands, kissed her fevered cheeks, gathered her tightly into his arms.

  The girl herself had no cognition of what emotions Dickens was feeling. Drugged, cold, wet, brutalized, she was more than disoriented. She was no longer human or sentient. Her eyes looked up into his, with the blank stare of some West Indies zombie, all self blotted out by the strange rites of men into which she had been lured. Dickens cradled her in his arms.

  “Ellen, Ellen…my love,” he murmured, and he bent to kiss her.

  It is here that events begin to trample one upon another. Time becomes a palimpsest—the movements of Field, Dickens, Ashbee, the girl all seem to pile up in layers. Violence overlays rescue, danger supercedes love.

  After passing by the fallen girl, Field slowed as he entered the darkness of the alley. He proceeded, blind, yet alert in all of his other senses. The running footfalls of Ashbee no longer echoed in the fog before him. Either the man was gone or the man was waiting up ahead in ambuscade. He is still here, Field must have thought. I cannot envision Field feeling any fear at the threat of this encounter. It offered the climax of all of his art, the moment when, finally, the detective comes face to face with his other self, his dark side, whom his whole investigation has been intent upon calling up.

  In the alley, Field moved, step by silent step, listening. A rat scuttling along the wall to his left. The wind hissing beneath the overhang of the roofs above. The soft scratch of a shutter against the stone. The scrape of a toe across a stone stair. A wooden creak. A sharp breath drawn in. The pound of a man’s heart. His own? His prey’s?

  Dickens’s kiss seemed to awaken the girl from her drug-induced stupor. “Ellen, you are safe. I have you now,” Dickens breathed into her fear-widened eyes.

 
The girl’s face twisted into a horrible scream, but all that came out was a hoarse plea: “No more, please no more.” Pain and fear clawed at her face. Dickens’s kiss, the gentle pressure of his arms, offered no solace.

  Inspector Field sensed him there, in the darkness, the briefest of moments before Ashbee leapt. Ashbee attacked Field from above, launching himself from a small porch, four stone steps above the level of the alley. Somehow, by some instinctive sense learned in a lifetime of risk, Field knew to put up his arms and drop to his knees to absorb the attack. Nevertheless, Ashbee knocked Field upon his face on the stones of the alleyway.

  Ashbee gripped a heavy curbing stone in both of his hands as he sprawled across Field’s back. He had hoped to crush his pursuer’s head with one blow even as he completed his downward leap. But Field’s instinctive ducking to the ground had caused the attacker to miss with his well-planned blow. The stone, however, was still grasped tight in his hands, and his victim still lay, momentarily stunned, beneath him. Ashbee raised the heavy stone to dash it down. Again, Field’s uncanny impulse for self-preservation asserted itself. He rolled sharply away. That sudden move saved Field’s life, for that heavy stone would surely have crushed his skull. He rolled suddenly enough to save his head, but the blow pounded down upon his shoulder drawing forth a cry of pain.

  At that anguished cry, Dickens’s concentration upon the stricken girl was broken. He knew it was Field. It was not so much a recognition of Field’s sound, as a knowing that Field was hurt and in trouble. Gently, Dickens lay the girl’s head down upon her cloak, jumped to his feet and plunged heedlessly into the black alley.

  Ashbee was not done. He rose to his feet, both hands still grasping the murderous stone. He loomed over his crippled pursuer. Once again, he raised the stone with both hands over his head to crush out Field’s life.

  To Dickens, they were but shadows against the deeper dark of the night. A monstrous shadow looming above a small pool of shadow. Running full tilt, gathering all the power his body could muster, Dickens drove low into the backs of that looming shadow’s knees. In the silence of that black alley, Dickens imagined that he could hear the crack of bones splitting and the rip of sinews tearing. Ashbee was driven, face forward, to the cobbled ground. His murderous stone careened harmlessly out into the darkness, to crash against the base of the building. Dickens landed atop him and rolled away. But Milord Ashbee did not rise. He thrashed once, then twice, then lay still, his legs splayed out at a grotesque angle.