The Detective and Mr. Dickens Read online

  The Detective and Mr. Dickens

  Being an Account of the Macbeth Murders and the Strange Events Surrounding Them

  A Secret Victorian Journal

  Attributed to Wilkie Collins

  Discovered and Edited by

  William J. Palmer

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1990 by William J. Palmer

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition April 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-732-6

  Also by William J. Palmer

  The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens

  The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens

  The Don and Mr. Dickens

  This book is dedicated to

  William J.

  and

  Ellen Jane Palmer

  Editor’s Note

  This memoir, written in the style of a novel as befits its author, was recently discovered amongst the papers of Sir William Warrington, bequeathed to the University of North Anglia by the estate of Mr. George Warrington. Sir William, the renowned Lincoln’s Inn solicitor and, as he was to many famous persons during the latter half of the last century, counselor to Queen Victoria in the final decades of her reign, was Wilkie Collins’s personal solicitor from 1866 until Collins’s death in 1889. These papers have recently been opened to the research scrutiny of scholars. This manuscript is a discovery destined to add more than a mere footnote to literary history. The revelations contained in this document redefine the “myth” which, thanks to reticent and overprotective biographers*, has grown up around the life of England’s greatest novelist, Charles Dickens. This manuscript revises the accepted view of Dickens as eminent Victorian and presents a fierce chimera of a restless man pushing against the restraints of his place, his fame, his whole society. I wish to thank the University of North Anglia for permitting me to edit and publish this hitherto unpublished (and almost certainly suppressed) literary document.

  —William J. Palmer

  * * *

  *Principally John Forster, Dickens’s closest friend, colleague, first biographer and guardian of the holy flame, and Edgar Johnson, the dean of the twentieth-century Dickens biographers, whose fine and nearly definitive two-volume Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph studiously avoids dealing with the material contained in this memoir. Fred Kaplan, Dickens’s most recent biographer, in his eloquent Dickens: A Biography, rejects this earlier biographical overprotectiveness.

  Remembering

  June 14, 1870

  It seems only yesterday that we were young, and he would set aside his glass of port or burnt sherry, and, springing to his feet with a hungry gleam o’erspreading his countenance, say, “Young Wil, we need a walk. Come, let ‘the Inimitable’ show you his favorite streets.” He always gave himself that appellation in the same half-joking, half-serious tone. I didn’t like it. I found it vulgar. I’m sure he really believed it, though he wanted you to think it was a joke. From the earliest confidences of our lifelong friendship, I was always resentful of that arrogant appellation. With him in the field, writing novels has been twice as difficult because he is everywhere and you must, else you cannot call yourself a novelist, struggle to avoid imitating him.

  I was beardless then and twelve years younger than he. I was already in small, tight spectacles but his eyes were still clear and eagerly searching for new material in the world. Sitting in the Household Words offices in Wellington Street, Strand, or in the Garrick Club, the actor’s spot, he would say, “Come Wilkie, let’s see what’s abroad this fine English night.” We would put on our hats, and perhaps a scarf if the wind was up, or a greatcoat if it was getting on past Michaelmas Term, and together we would head out into the foggy night streets of London.

  He is dead, “the Inimitable,” how ironic. We will all imitate him in this. The funeral drones on. They will bury him in the Abbey. The faces of his family and friends, lined up in the pews like wax figures on the shelves of a candle shop, mourn him. The church is filled with friends, the curious, those whose business includes the death of a great man.

  About halfway back, alone in a small side pew, is a face I know, a face from our past when we used to walk the streets in search of adventure.

  Ah, the streets. For more than twenty years, beginning in ’forty-eight it has been my good fortune to share his night streets. He took me up after reading some articles on murder and shipwreck which I had published in the Daily News. I was so young, and trying to be a writer. I was quite fit then, and he told me he felt safer with me along. He was obsessed with the streets. He would gaze out the windows into the black night eager to escape the warm, safe confines of his well-appointed Household Words office where he often slept when his wife and children were down in the country (which they were more often than not). Imagine giving up warm rooms, brandy, the capacious chair and good fellowship of friends like Lemon and Forster and Leech at the Garrick Club to walk out among thieves and beggars and the fallen women who crowded the gaslit streetcorners offering their only portable, perishable property for sale to any stranger attracted to their wretchedness. It was as if he needed the streets to satisfy something in his restless personality, perhaps to convince himself that he was real, and not just some figment of his own overactive imagination.

  As for me, I went along willingly—no eagerly. It was an exciting time for me, an honor to be taken up by the writer who commanded the field. I would, however, be remiss not to admit that I could have been observed frequently and nervously glancing back over my shoulder as we strode boldly into some of the darkest, most labyrinthine pockets of damnation in that city of night. That familiar face in the mourning pew, halfway down the aisle, brings it all rushing back into my memory.

  “The Inimitable” is dead now, and soon the Vultures will descend upon his life and pick it to pieces. Things will be made known which have remained hidden and secret. Surely some clever young Grub Street hack will find out about Ellen sooner or later. But they’ll never learn the whole truth of it. Only I, and that solitary mourner halfway back, know the whole story, the real story.

  And he knows more than I. He knows how it was all settled. Perhaps if I approach him, he will tell me what sort of gentleman’s agreement he and Dickens arrived at which gave “the Inimitable” the focus of his last twenty years.

  He sees me looking at him from my pallbearer’s chair sideways to the aisle up next to the ornamented, brass-handled casket. I want to lean around the corner of the catafalque and wave to him. But that would be out of place here and now. We exchange grave nods, but our eyes hold on each other, and I know that he is remembering exactly as I am. Without warning, he tips me a quick sly wink, and I have to suddenly cover my mouth with my black-gloved hand, and pretend to cough, in order to hide from the mourning multitudes an irresistable grin. By heaven, we had some times together, the three of us.

  My familiar friend is a burly, balding man. He looks different without his hat. Whenever London’s guilty (and are not we all?) saw that hat approaching, they tried to escape its relentless jurisdiction. I remember it as a flat square brown hat that could slice right through a crowd. His shoulders are wide,
and his neck thick, yet he isn’t hulking. He stands below six feet, and his face, though proportioned to that powerful neck, is not overwide. His eyebrows are dark black and strong, but it is his keen eyes which rule. Nothing escapes those eyes; they move like pickpockets, dipping deep into every soul without anyone ever realizing until they have passed on. His sharp hat and sharp eyes can cut to the heart of the matter as deftly as might Lord Jarvis Hillis-Millar, the Queen’s Surgeon-General.

  But now, across the funeral congregation, those clear eyes are misty. He is a man I never could have imagined shedding tears. Yet he is on that verge. We are both, perhaps, getting old.

  It has probably been a year since I have last seen him, my familiar friend. “The Inimitable” hadn’t much time (or strength) for the streets in recent years. I had ceased accompanying him on his fierce night walks years ago. God only knows when the last time was, that Charles and this familiar friend had been together. Yet our friend was there, sizing up the crowd, catching my eye, tipping his ironic wink which said to me: Do you remember the heat of the chase? The pleasure of the game? He raised his forefinger, crooked in that familiar way, as if just lifted out of the trigger housing of a pistol, to scratch softly at the side of his eye, as Deacon Hornback’s voice rose to some crescendo of elegiac nonsense.

  That forefinger, yes! It was his most powerful weapon. He had a tendency toward tapping people familiarly on the chest with that forefinger as he questioned them. He had the abrupt habit of suddenly punching his forefinger over his left shoulder and spitting, “Now hook it,” when terminating a conversation with some vagrant or street boy or powdered whore. But his forefinger was always the most intimidating when pointed directly at his target like the barrel of a gun. With his sharp hat, his sharp eyes, and his exceedingly sharp forefinger, my familiar friend had gained quite a reputation for cutting to the bone of reality, cutting across the whole fabric of society, cutting through all the appearances which clothe the truth.

  My familiar friend, alone at the funeral, was one of “the Inimitable’s” closest associates, though few—not Forster, nor Wills, nor Dolby, nor any of the members of the family—would recognize him. He was “the Inimitable’s” one firm friend of his beloved streets. Ah yes, they were colleagues indeed. My familiar friend was Detective Inspector Field, of the Metropolitan Protectives, Bow Street Station.

  Field, his sharp brown hat restored to his head, was standing outside the door of the Abbey when I emerged, waiting to take me into custody. The street in front was flooded with people, horses, cabs, and the inevitable street vendors who were the first profiteers on Charles’s death. There would be many more to follow. When I finally made it to his side, he had already been recognized and accosted by another denizen of the madding crowd, an eager young newspaper reporter intent on probing his presence at the funeral of the great man.

  “’Ee and I were acquaintances and colleagues. I greatly admired the man.” Field scratched the side of his eye with his forefinger.

  “Colleagues?” the young man probed.

  “No, no, not a’tall,” Field assured him. “Just an acquaintance I greatly admired. Now please, do you mind? An old friend.”

  Field shouldered his way through the crowd to my side.

  “Field, how good to see you, how good indeed.”

  He caught the true enthusiasm in my voice and smiled.

  We both suddenly remembered where we were and our faces fell.

  “A bad business this,” he finally said gruffly, nodding toward the emptied church. “I’d rather ’ave met up with you and ’im any other place on earth.”

  “I agree. I agree,” I agreed, stupidly.

  “We did ’ave some strange journeys, put on some intricate little performances, the two writer swells from the West End and their detective friend, didn’t we?” He gently broke the awkward silence with three affectionate taps of his forefinger to my cravat.

  “We certainly did,” I nodded. “He had no better friend than you.”

  Dickens was there in both of our minds, in black waistcoat and black silk scarf, walking briskly beside me, perhaps smoking a cigar, as we hastened to follow Field’s Juggernaut pace down the dark maze of streets, into some pestilent London rookery.

  “’Ee ’onored me with ’is friendship,” Field was gravely saying.

  “He honored us all.”

  The awkward silence ebbed back in.

  The desire not to mourn alone built within me. It didn’t seem right to just shake hands, throw off a meaningless “So nice to see you again” fare-thee-well, and then go our separate ways. I think Field felt the same attraction for my company. We lingered in the awkward silence of the street.

  “Let’s have a wake,” a voice, which turned out to be my own, said. It was an inspiration that could have come from only one source. I felt his presence as palpably as if he were standing there in the street. “We’ll have a pint in his memory.” I was positively grinning, as if Dickens were elbowing me in the ribs at the hilarity of the idea.

  Field smiled again—twice in mere minutes. That was more than he normally budgeted for a month. “Least we can do, two old campaigners, lift a glass to a departed chum.”

  We found a quiet table in the window of The Merry Thistle. Field stood his stick in the corner. It was a straight one, thin and shiny black with a fierce knob on the top. I’d seen him use it as if it was an extension of his body.

  Our pints arrived, plus a small portion of Irish whiskey. “It’s been a strong day, so we might as well ’ave strong drink,” he said.

  “To ‘the Inimitable,’” I toasted. Violently he threw off his glass, then chased it with a generous draught of bitter. I sipped mine. The whiskey seemed to loosen and relax him.

  “Remember the Mannings? That’s where I first met ’im…and you, when we ’ung ’em. The Mannings were my case.”

  “Yes, how could I forget a night and morning like that?”

  “As long as I live I’ll never forget the way ’ee looked at me that first time, as if I was a scarf or a bowler ’at or a pair of gloves in a store window. ’Ee ’ad this look on ’is face and this gleam in ’is eye that seemed to ask, I could almost ’ear it, ‘Will ’ee fit? Is this my man? Is ’ee well made? Will ’ee hold up and wear well? Is ’ee in style?’”

  “It’s the way you look at people when you’re sizing them up. It is your look that says, ‘I’ll have you in my custody soon, no doubt.’”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “If he hadn’t met you, he surely would have invented someone like you.”

  “’Ee did invent someone like me. Bucket indeed!”

  “You never liked that name, did you?”

  “A silly name for a detective. I told ’im as much, and ’ee just laughed. ‘Ah,’ ’ee said then, and ’is eyes told me ’ee was jokin’, ‘but not a bad name for a receptacle for the garbage of society.’ All I could do was shake my ’ead. ‘Bucket indeed!’ was all I could say. Then ’ee laughed, and clapped me on the back, and said, ‘You’re a good friend, Field. Bucket’s just a jumble of words on a page.’” Field was a great mimic. His imitation caught the playful tenor of Dickens’s voice. ‘Inimitable’ indeed!

  The waiter brought two more small glasses of the Tolla-more Dew.

  “I’ll never forget ’ow, months later, ’ee just walked in one night off the streets. Just walked in and said ‘Owdeedo’ as if we wuz expectin’ ’im, looked ’round as if waitin’ for someone to kiss ’is ring or ’is sleeve or ’is arse, for God’s sake.”

  Field’s animated telling had me laughing then. Despite the day, the death, it couldn’t be helped.

  “I busied myself with my pipe while ’ee looked ’round,” Field went on, “takin’ everythin’ in, in that detective’s way ’ee ’ad. I think you were right behind ’im, a stout drippin’ young fellow, ’oldin’ a waterlogged bumber, and wearin’ fogged spectacles.”

  “The blind leading the blind.” We were both smiling in the memory.

>   “Finally ’ee spotted me, and marched right over with ’is hand outstretched sayin’, ‘Field old man, ’ow are you?’ as if we’d been friends for years. Everyone in the station ’ouse recognized ’im immediately. They were significantly impressed. For weeks after, I was really quite a ’ero, ’eld some what in awe for my ’eye connections. ‘Field old man’ indeed. That’s ’ow it all began Collins. You remember it, don’t you?”

  “Field old man,” I tried to imitate the voice, but I couldn’t do it nearly as well. “I don’t remember if I was there that first time, but I can hear him saying it nonetheless.”

  “Do you ever see ’er?” he inquired.

  “Quite often,” I answered. “She stayed near him to the end.”

  He nodded.

  I saw my opportunity. “What went on in the chapel at St. Mark’s that night?” I said, mustering the courage to ask. “Why did you let her go without even so much as an inquiry?”

  “That was about all you weren’t in on durin’ that case, I’d say. I let ’er go because I’d taken a likin’ to ’im, and I saw from the beginnin’ ’ow valuable ’ee could be to me. ’Ee ’as been exactly that valuable over the years. You know of much of that.”

  Indeed I do, I thought. Indeed I do.

  We two old soldiers spent the greater part of that afternoon in that warm pub. The waiter brought us pints of beer. We remembered it all. It was a fitting wake.

  As we were leaving, Field, adjusting his sharp hat and picking up his murderous stick, looked at me and said: “’Ee was the most creative detective I ever knew. ’Ee would ’ave worn well in my line.”

  That conversation with Inspector Field set me thinking of the sort of memorial that I, a writer of novels, might make to my dead friend. I went home that day, and started a new commonplace book, but not one of the usual sort. I began writing a record of events that had happened more than twenty years before, a record of the man only I, Inspector Field, and, of course, his beloved Ellen, knew.