The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories

by Michael Sims

  Black and Green, you know Bark, lodging-house keeper and receiver of stolen goods?—O yes, Inspector Field.—Go to Bark’s next.

  Bark sleeps in an inner wooden hutch, near his street door. As we parley on the step with Bark’s Deputy, Bark growls in his bed. We enter, and Bark flies out of bed. Bark is a red villain and a wrathful, with a sanguine throat that looks very much as if it were expressly made for hanging, as he stretches it out, in pale defiance, over the half-door of his hutch. Bark’s parts of speech are of an awful sort—principally adjectives. I won’t, says Bark, have no adjective police and adjective strangers in my adjective premises! I won’t, by adjective and substantive! Give me my trousers, and I’ll send the whole adjective police to adjective and substantive! Give me, says Bark, my adjective trousers! I’ll put an adjective knife in the whole bileing of ‘em. I’ll punch their adjective heads. I’ll rip up their adjective substantives. Give me my adjective trousers! says Bark, and I’ll spile the bileing of ‘em!

  Now, Bark, what’s the use of this? Here’s Black and Green, Detective Sergeant, and Inspector Field. You know we will come in.—I know you won’t! says Bark. Somebody give me my adjective trousers! Bark’s trousers seem difficult to find. He calls for them as Hercules might for his club. Give me my adjective trousers! says Bark, and I’ll spile the bileing of ‘em! Inspector Field holds that it’s all one whether Bark likes the visit or don’t like it. He, Inspector Field, is an Inspector of the Detective Police, Detective Sergeant IS Detective Sergeant, Black and Green are constables in uniform. Don’t you be a fool, Bark, or you know it will be the worse for you.—I don’t care, says Bark. Give me my adjective trousers!

  At two o’clock in the morning, we descend into Bark’s low kitchen, leaving Bark to foam at the mouth above, and Imperturbable Black and Green to look at him. Bark’s kitchen is crammed full of thieves, holding a CONVERSAZIONE there by lamp-light. It is by far the most dangerous assembly we have seen yet. Stimulated by the ravings of Bark, above, their looks are sullen, but not a man speaks. We ascend again. Bark has got his trousers, and is in a state of madness in the passage with his back against a door that shuts off the upper staircase. We observe, in other respects, a ferocious individuality in Bark. Instead of “STOP THIEF!” on his linen, he prints “STOLEN FROM Bark’s!”

  Now, Bark, we are going up-stairs!—No, you ain’t!—YOU refuse admission to the Police, do you, Bark?—Yes, I do! I refuse it to all the adjective police, and to all the adjective substantives. If the adjective coves in the kitchen was men, they’d come up now, and do for you! Shut me that there door! says Bark, and suddenly we are enclosed in the passage. They’d come up and do for you! cries Bark, and waits. Not a sound in the kitchen! They’d come up and do for you! cries Bark again, and waits. Not a sound in the kitchen! We are shut up, half-a-dozen of us, in Bark’s house in the innermost recesses of the worst part of London, in the dead of the night—the house is crammed with notorious robbers and ruffians—and not a man stirs. No, Bark. They know the weight of the law, and they know Inspector Field and Co. too well.

  We leave bully Bark to subside at leisure out of his passion and his trousers, and, I dare say, to be inconveniently reminded of this little brush before long. Black and Green do ordinary duty here, and look serious.

  As to White, who waits on Holborn Hill to show the courts that are eaten out of Rotten Gray’s Inn, Lane, where other lodging-houses are, and where (in one blind alley) the Thieves’ Kitchen and Seminary for the teaching of the art to children is, the night has so worn away, being now

  almost at odds with morning, which is which,

  that they are quiet, and no light shines through the chinks in the shutters. As undistinctive Death will come here, one day, sleep comes now. The wicked cease from troubling sometimes, even in this life.

  Wilkie Collins

  (1824–1889)

  “The diary of Anne Rodway” is a transitional story in the genre. It captures the period in which detective stories were still emerging from earlier forms of fiction. Although it would be a few more years before the first professional female detective, Rodway unquestionably launches an investigation on her own in this often sad story. She does so, despite her fears and lack of experience, by drawing upon her considerable supply of what the Victorians called pluck. Rodway is an amateur who appears in no other story; and like a number of other nineteenth-century characters, she takes up detection to solve a mystery in which she herself is entangled. Although Collins wasn’t yet writing a full-fledged detective story, he had already mastered the pacing and suspense that would make him famous.

  The story came before Collins’s acclaimed novels such as The Woman in White and The Moonstone. It was first published in 1856, under the title “Brother Owen’s Story of Anne Rodway (Taken from Her Diary),” in the July 19 and 26 issues of Household Words, as part of an interconnected series. In the manner of The Decameron or its literary descendant The Canterbury Tales, characters in the series take turns recounting stories. From this cycle came such popular Collins tales as “The Biter Bit” and “Mad Monkton.” In 1859 the series was reprinted in a three-volume edition of Collins’s collection The Queen of Hearts, published by Hurst & Blackett.

  Charles Dickens had launched the two-pence weekly Household Words six years earlier, with the official mission “to show to all, that in all familiar things, even in those which are repellant on the surface, there is Romance enough, if we will find it out.” Its two-column format was unrelieved by illustrations. In his professional as well as his personal life, Dickens sought ever greater control, and when the magazine’s publishers, Bradbury & Evans, disagreed with him about his proposed publication of an unfair public letter justifying his separation from his wife, Catherine, after many years of marriage, Dickens departed in a huff. In 1859 he shut down Household Words and incorporated it into his own new periodical, All the Year Round. Wilkie Collins’s stories and serialized novels appeared in the pages of both. “Anne Rodway” was published the year he joined the staff of Household Words.

  By the time of his death, William Wilkie Collins was considered the king of sensation novelists. He published thirty novels and sixty-plus stories and fourteen plays—and somehow squeezed in more than a hundred essays and articles. The son of William Collins, an acclaimed painter in the pastoral style of John Constable, he received the middle name Wilkie in honor of another artist, the Scottish history painter David Wilkie, his godfather. Naturally the young Wilkie Collins tried painting; he even exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1849. The first novel he wrote, Iolani, could not find a home and sat around unpublished for the next 150 years; his first published book was a biography of his father. Then he met Dickens in 1851—they were introduced by yet another painter, the memorably named Augustus Egg—and their lives became ever more entwined. He and Dickens were not only colleagues but close friends and occasional collaborators. Together they traveled Europe and, back home in England, performed in amateur theatricals, including a production of Collins’s play The Frozen Deep, which had been inspired by an idea from Dickens. Collins’s younger brother even married Dickens’s daughter.

  Anne Rodway’s diary—a form of narration that would become Wilkie Collins’s trademark with the publication of The Woman in White in 1860 and The Moonstone in 1868—demonstrates the author’s sympathy for female characters and also for the poor, even the drug-addicted poor. His account in The Moonstone of the delusory effects of opium grew out of his personal experience. He became addicted to laudanum to lessen the pain of his “rheumatic gout,” a form of arthritis, and even wrote of his own paranoid hallucinations, including the existence of a “ghost Wilkie” who at times shadowed his every move. Collins’s sympathy for the unconventional also emerged from his own bohemian life. He never married. Instead he lived for a decade with a widow, and when she married someone else, he began a romance with another woman, who bore his three children. When the widow returned to him, he didn’t break off his new romance but instead continued b
oth for almost two decades. Not a hypocrite, Collins was slow to judge others, in life and in fiction.

  The Diary of Anne Rodway

  … March 3d, 1840. A long letter today from Robert, which surprised and vexed me so that I have been sadly behindhand with my work ever since. He writes in worse spirits than last time, and absolutely declares that he is poorer even than when he went to America, and that he has made up his mind to come home to London.

  How happy I should be at this news, if he only returned to me a prosperous man! As it is, though I love him dearly, I cannot look forward to the meeting him again, disappointed and broken down, and poorer than ever, without a feeling almost of dread for both of us. I was twenty-six last birthday and he was thirty-three, and there seems less chance now than ever of our being married. It is all I can do to keep myself by my needle; and his prospects, since he failed in the small stationery business three years ago, are worse, if possible, than mine.

  Not that I mind so much for myself; women, in all ways of life, and especially in my dressmaking way, learn, I think, to be more patient than men. What I dread is Robert’s despondency, and the hard struggle he will have in this cruel city to get his bread, let alone making money enough to marry me. So little as poor people want to set up in house keeping and be happy together, it seems hard that they can’t get it when they are honest and hearty, and willing to work. The clergyman said in his sermon last Sunday evening that all things were ordered for the best, and we are all put into the stations in life that are properest for us. I suppose he was right, being a very clever gentleman who fills the church to crowding; but I think I should have understood him better if I had not been very hungry at the time, in consequence of my own station in life being nothing but plain needlewoman.

  March 4th. Mary Mallinson came down to my room to take a cup of tea with me. I read her bits of Robert’s letter, to show her that, if she has her troubles, I have mine too; but I could not succeed in cheering her. She says she is born to misfortune, and that, as long back as she can remember, she has never had the least morsel of luck to be thankful for. I told her to go and look in my glass, and to say if she had nothing to be thankful for then; for Mary is a very pretty girl, and would look still prettier if she could be more cheerful and dress neater. However, my compliment did no good. She rattled her spoon impatiently in her tea-cup, and said, “If I was only as good a hand at needle-work as you are, Anne, I would change faces with the ugliest girl in London.” “Not you!” says I, laughing. She looked at me for a moment, and shook her head, and was out of the room before I could get up and stop her. She always runs off in that way when she is going to cry, having a kind of pride about letting other people see her in tears.

  March 5th. A fright about Mary. I had not seen her all day, as she does not work at the same place where I do; and in the evening she never came down to have tea with me, or sent me word to go to her; so, just before I went to bed, I ran upstairs to say good-night.

  She did not answer when I knocked; and when I stepped softly in the room I saw her in bed, asleep, with her work not half done, lying about the room in the untidiest way. There was nothing remarkable in that, and I was just going away on tiptoe, when a tiny bottle and wine-glass on the chair by her bedside caught my eye. I thought she was ill and had been taking physic, and looked at the bottle. It was marked in large letters, “Laudanum—Poison.”

  My heart gave a jump as if it was going to fly out of me. I laid hold of her with both hands, and shook her with all my might. She was sleeping heavily, and woke slowly, as it seemed to me—but still she did wake. I tried to pull her out of bed, having heard that people ought to be always walked up and down when they have taken laudanum but she resisted, and pushed me away violently.

  “Anne!” says she, in a fright. “For gracious sake, what’s come to you! Are you out of your senses?”

  “Oh, Mary! Mary!” says I, holding up the bottle before her, “if I hadn’t come in when I did—” And I laid hold of her to shake her again.

  She looked puzzled at me for a moment—then smiled (the first time I had seen her do so for many a long day)—then put her arms round my neck.

  “Don’t be frightened about me, Anne,” she says; “I am not worth it, and there is no need.”

  “No need!” says I, out of breath—“no need, when the bottle has got Poison marked on it!”

  “Poison, dear, if you take it all,” says Mary, looking at me very tenderly, “and a night’s rest if you only take a little.”

  I watched her for a moment, doubtful whether I ought to believe what she said or to alarm the house. But there was no sleepiness now in her eyes, and nothing drowsy in her voice; and she sat up in bed quite easily, without anything to support her.

  “You have given me a dreadful fright, Mary,” says I, sitting down by her in the chair, and beginning by this time to feel rather faint after being startled so.

  She jumped out of bed to get me a drop of water, and kissed me, and said how sorry she was, and how undeserving of so much interest being taken in her. At the same time, she tried to possess herself of the laudanum bottle which I still kept cuddled up tight in my own hands.

  “No,” says I. “You have got into a low-spirited, despairing way. I won’t trust you with it.”

  “I am afraid I can’t do without it,” says Mary, in her usual quiet, hopeless voice. “What with work that I can’t get through as I ought, and troubles that I can’t help thinking of, sleep won’t come to me unless I take a few drops out of that bottle. Don’t keep it away from me, Anne; it’s the only thing in the world that makes me forget myself.”

  “Forget yourself!” says I. “You have no right to talk in that way, at your age. There’s something horrible in the notion of a girl of eighteen sleeping with a bottle of laudanum by her bedside every night. We all of us have our troubles. Haven’t I got mine?”

  “You can do twice the work I can, twice as well as me,” says Mary. “You are never scolded and rated at for awkwardness with your needle, and I always am. You can pay for your room every week, and I am three weeks in debt for mine.”

  “A little more practice,” says I, “and a little more courage, and you will soon do better. You have got all your life before you—”

  “I wish I was at the end of it,” says she, breaking in. “I am alone in the world, and my life’s no good to me.”

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself for saying so,” says I. “Haven’t you got me for a friend? Didn’t I take a fancy to you when first you left your step-mother and came to lodge in this house? And haven’t I been sisters with you ever since? Suppose you are alone in the world, am I much better off? I’m an orphan like you. I’ve almost as many things in pawn as you; and, if your pockets are empty, mine have only got ninepence in them, to last me for all the rest of the week.”

  “Your father and mother were honest people,” says Mary, obstinately. “My mother ran away from home, and died in a hospital. My father was always drunk, and always beating me. My step-mother is as good as dead, for all she cares about me. My only brother is thousands of miles away in foreign parts, and never writes to me, and never helps me with a farthing. My sweetheart—”

  She stopped, and the red flew into her face. I knew, if she went on that way, she would only get to the saddest part of her sad story, and give both herself and me unnecessary pain.

  “My sweetheart is too poor to marry me, Mary,” I said, “so I’m not so much to be envied even there. But let’s give over disputing which is worst off. Lie down in bed, and let me tuck you up. I’ll put a stitch or two into that work of yours while you go to sleep.”

  Instead of doing what I told her, she burst out crying (being very like a child in some of her ways), and hugged me so tight round the neck that she quite hurt me. I let her go on till she had worn herself out, and was obliged to lie down. Even then, her last few words before she dropped off to sleep were such as I was half sorry, half frightened to hear.

  “I won’t pla
gue you long, Anne,” she said. “I haven’t courage to go out of the world as you seem to fear I shall; but I began my life wretchedly, and wretchedly I am sentenced to end it.”

  It was of no use lecturing her again, for she closed her eyes.

  I tucked her up as neatly as I could, and put her petticoat over her, for the bedclothes were scanty, and her hands felt cold. She looked so pretty and delicate as she fell asleep that it quite made my heart ache to see her, after such talk as we had held together. I just waited long enough to be quite sure that she was in the land of dreams, then emptied the horrible laudanum bottle into the grate, took up her half-done work, and, going out softly, left her for that night.

  March 6th. Sent off a long letter to Robert, begging and entreating him not to be so down-hearted, and not to leave America without making another effort. I told him I could bear any trial except the wretchedness of seeing him come back a helpless, broken-down man, trying uselessly to begin life again when too old for a change.

  It was not till after I had posted my own letter, and read over part of Robert’s again, that the suspicion suddenly floated across me, for the first time, that he might have sailed for England immediately after writing to me. There were expressions in the letter which seemed to indicate that he had some such headlong project in his mind. And yet, surely, if it were so, I ought to have noticed them at the first reading. I can only hope I am wrong in my present interpretation of much of what he has written to me—hope it earnestly for both our sakes.

  This has been a doleful day for me. I have been uneasy about Robert and uneasy about Mary. My mind is haunted by those last words of hers: “I began my life wretchedly, and wretchedly I am sentenced to end it.” Her usual melancholy way of talking never produced the same impression on me that I feel now. Perhaps the discovery of the laudanum-bottle is the cause of this. I would give many a hard day’s work to know what to do for Mary’s good. My heart warmed to her when we first met in the same lodging-house two years ago, and, although I am not one of the over-affectionate sort myself, I feel as if I could go to the world’s end to serve that girl. Yet, strange to say, if I was asked why I was so fond of her, I don’t think I should know how to answer the question.