The Dons and Mr. Dickens Read online

  To the east along that narrow dirt road was an equally narrow stone bridge that made a low arch over the river Thames. Where, in London, the Thames was wide and dirty and deep, flowing with a lethal urgency towards the sea, up here the Thames was but a meandering stream no more than two boats wide flowing lazily between grassy banks. Soon Rob had our horses hitched and we set off along that very road and over that very bridge towards the town.

  “Livery man ’ee said the police station is at the bottom of St. Aldate’s just before the Folly Bridge, Mr. Collins, sir,” Rob shouted down from the box. “Can you direct me there, sir?”

  “Indeed I can,” I shouted triumphantly, feeling somewhat like a seasoned explorer ushering two tenderfoots into the bush.

  “I’ll bet you can,” Dickens chuckled. “Probably spent some time there, I’d wager, consequences of some of your student escapades?”

  “I’ll have you know,” I took up his mocking tone, “I’ve never spent a moment in the Oxford jail. Our chaps always ran much too fast for the constables to catch us.”

  We had opened the coach’s shutters as soon as we got it off the train, and as we entered the city, there was a great deal to catch our attention. It was half ten in the morning and the narrow cobblestoned streets were thick with people both on foot and on wheels. Workmen were unloading goods from handcarts. Students on bicycles, their black academic robes trailing out behind them, coasted past us on both sides. Bumpkins were carrying crates of vegetables and meats into the marketplace.

  “That’s the Haymarket, the next one,” I shouted up to Rob, “turn right there. St. Aldate’s is at the top of the hill by the Carfax Tower, the tall square tower.”

  “I sees it, sir,” Rob clucked either to me or to his horse.

  “My Lord, Wilkie, will you look at that,” Dickens pointed.

  I turned to see a man’s cream-trousered legs rotating by our window as if suspended in mid-air.

  “What is it?” I stuck my head out the window to see.

  “Extraordinary!” Dickens, whose head was out the opposite window, exclaimed.

  It was a cyclist on a huge high bicycle, riding along above the throng. His back wheel was tiny but his front wheel was enormous, in circumference reaching at least eight feet above the ground. He sat perched atop that huge wheel lumbering along like an Indian Rajah atop an elephant. We learned later that this particular type of bicycle was called a “penny-farthing.”

  I looked about me as we proceeded up the Haymarket hill and realized that we were drawing quite a few stares from the passersby.

  “Everyone is looking at us, Charles,” I informed him. “They’re stopping and staring. It is that coffin on the roof.”

  “Oh, Wilkie, don’t be so stuffy,” Dickens scoffed at my undue concern for public opinion. “How else are we going to put a name on Field’s corpse? He knows, and you know, how at sea Field would be with all of these University poms. Who cares what the common people think?”

  Put that way, I guess I shouldn’t have cared, but I must admit that I did. I did not enjoy being stared at as if I was some attraction in a raree show.

  We crested the Carfax, and turned down into St. Aldate’s.

  “There is Christ Church,” I pointed the walls of the college out to Dickens. “It is Henry the Eighth’s college, High Anglican. That’s the Tom Tower,” I pointed excitedly, “where Old Dodo, I mean Dodgson, lives.”

  “Straight on,” I called up to Sleepy Rob as we rumbled down towards Folly Bridge. I rather enjoyed giving other people orders rather than just being the one receiving them all the time.

  The police station was right where we were told it would be. We left Sleepy Rob with the cab and the corpse, and went inside to reconnoitre.

  “Good day,” Dickens addressed a fat, mutton-chopped police serjeant behind a wide desk, who was worrying over a number of little piles of stacked papers spread out before him like chips on a gaming table.

  “Good day to you, sir,” the man looked up, somewhat annoyed, from his paperwork. But when he saw two full-fledged London gentlemen standing before him, his look changed to surprise, then to curiosity, then to interrogation, which is exactly how he decided to proceed. “What would it be then, gentlemen? You don’t look as if you are from Oxford.”

  “We are not, sir.” Dickens gave him his most radiant smile and handed him one of the small white calling cards which he infrequently used to make sure that people recognized him. “We are just up from London and we have a bit of a problem.”

  “Problem?” The desk serjeant screwed up his face as if someone was twisting the top of his head with a pair of forceps, and painfully decoded the card as if it were lined with Egyptian hieroglyphics. Whatever translation he accomplished, it made no impression whatsoever. He did not recognize Dickens’s name at all. Obviously not a reader! I found it somewhat amusing.

  “Do you have a constable named Morse here?” Dickens asked.

  “Young Reggie, you mean? Why, what sort of a problem could young Reggie be? ’Ee’s a fine young constable.” The desk serjeant immediately went on the defensive to protect one of his own.

  “No. No,” Dickens laughed. “Young Morse is not the problem at all. We were referred to him by Chief Inspector William Field of the Metropolitan Protectives of London.”

  “Chief Inspector?” The desk serjeant seemed duly impressed.

  I was somewhat impressed myself, never having heard the word “Chief” appended to friend Field’s title before. I gave Dickens a questioning look.

  He tipped me a wink when the serjeant was not looking.

  “Referred?” The desk serjeant seemed committed to offering only these single-word questions.

  “Yes,” Dickens smiled benignly. “Chief Inspector Field suggested we contact Constable Morse to assist us on a matter of murder.”

  “Murder!” Dickens’s ambush achieved its desired effect. The man leapt up out of his chair. “Murder, you say?”

  “Yes,” Dickens remained as calm as if they were discussing butterflies, “we have the corpse right outside the door in our cab.”

  “Murder…in Oxford?”

  “No, no,” Dickens reassured him. “The man was murdered in London.”

  “Man murdered…corpse outside.” What had been a rather burly and officious public servant was reduced in mere moments to a babbling idiot, utterly overcome by the weight of surprises that had dropped so precipitously upon him. He sank back down into his chair.

  “Murder?” Our serjeant repeated for the third time.

  “Yes, that is it,” Dickens calmed him. “A murder was committed in London, but we have reason to believe that the murdered man is a citizen of Oxford.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course,” the serjeant was still quite puzzled by it all, “of course you do.”

  Finally, the serjeant rapped his desk with his knuckles and stood back up: “A matter of murder! Beglory! That young Reggie surely is a go-getter, that he is. Now”—and he paused to think exactly what his course of action would be—“you gentlemen wait ’ere and I’ll send someone to scare young Reggie up.”

  “Excellent!” Dickens favoured him with a radiant smile.

  Our thick serjeant went away into the bowels of the building, and Dickens and I took seats on a wooden bench against a bare wall. The Oxford Police Station was nothing if not functional.

  “I hope our young Reggie is a bit quicker than this Oxford policeman,” Dickens whispered to me in the course of our wait.

  Our doltish serjeant finally returned empty-handed.

  “Reggie Morse is not on duty today,” he explained with an excess of boring formality. “I’ve sent someone to fetch him. It will be a time.”

  “Yes. Very good.” Dickens continued to flatter this idiot. “Might we bring the murder victim in out of the street and establish the corpse somewhere where it might be identified if and when that time comes?”

  “Right. Probably should ’ave don
e that before,” the man headed for the door. “The surgeon’s room. The surgeon’s room. That’s the place. We’ll put ’im in there. ’Asn’t been used in two years, though. Pretty dusty,” the man spoke over his shoulder as we proceeded out to Sleepy Rob’s cab.

  “That is perfectly all right,” Dickens gaily assured our major domo, then turned to me and whispered, “I don’t think our dead man will mind the dust.”

  The surgeon’s room of the Oxford Station was every bit as spartan and functional as the front reception. It was a tiny, narrow room, furnished with nothing more than a bare wooden dissecting table and two gas lamps mounted on the walls. Sleepy Rob and our serjeant carried the coffin in and deposited it on the surgeon’s table. That done, none of us felt the need to linger.

  Back in the front reception, Dickens informed the desk serjeant that we were going out to find another man whom we hoped might help us to identify the body and that we would immediately return with him. We hoped, by that time, young Constable Morse would have put in an appearance.

  Though this was a tremendous weight of information for our desk serjeant to carry, he seemed to bear up under it pretty well. Thus, we took our leave and Rob drove us back up St. Aldate’s to the gate of Christ Church College of the University of Oxford.

  * * *

  *Here Wilkie can only be referring to his and Dickens’s dangerous chase, over the tops of the cars of the Dover Mail, in pursuit of Angela Burdett-Coutts and her kidnapper in their previous case of “The Feminist Phantom” (published as The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens).

  *Oxford is fondly referred to in all the guidebooks as “the City of Dreaming Spires” in acknowledgment of its impressive skyline of church and college chapel spires set in the sunlight of the Cumner Hills.

  Old Dodo

  November 26, 1853—Midday

  As we passed through the tunnel beneath the Tom Tower which was the entrance to the Christ Church quadrangle, a tall, severe-faced man in a bowler hat dressed all in heavy winter tweed and sporting around his neck the identical bright blue cravat that graced the neck of our nameless corpse hailed us from a small side room in the stone wall. “Gentlemun, gud mornin’,” he halted us with a Scottish burr whose rough edges had been anglicized to the point that we could actually understand him. “Wud kin we do for you gentlemuns this mornin’?”

  Every Oxford quadrangle* had one of these thugs guarding the gate, the porter, who screened all who presumed to enter the confines of the college. These annoying gatekeepers are, I suppose, a throwback to the medieval days of the Town-Gown riots, when the peasant townsmen would storm the student domiciles with scythes and pitchforks looking for blood.

  “Good morning,” Dickens greeted this Scotsman jovially and handed over another of his calling cards, evidently undeterred by the singular lack of effect his previous gambit had worked upon the decidedly unliterary policeman. “We are just up from London this morning on the train to talk with, ah…Wilkie?”

  “Mr. Charles Dodgson, please,” I answered promptly on cue, as if I were Dickens’s puppet.

  “Yes, Mr. Dodgson, who is a tutor of Mathematics here, I believe,” Dickens explained it all as the porter read his calling card.

  “Charles Dickens, Novelist. Gude Laird awmighty! Wif un may wuz raidin’ the new Blake ’Ouse unly yestiddy.” Obviously, this time Dickens’s calling card had produced the proper effect.

  “Why yes, how nice, you have read my work.” Dickens fell quite comfortably into his humble recognized author role. “I hope you and your wife enjoyed it?”

  “Oh yes, sir,” our fawning porter confided, “not hay fortnight goes by the wife doesna bring ’ome one o’ yer liddle green mags.”*

  “Yes. Splendid.” Dickens was smiling and pumping the man’s hand. Charles loved to bask in the admiration of his reading public.

  “Might we go up to Mr. Dodgson’s rooms,” I interrupted their little game of mutual admiration. “He is an old friend and I know where it is.”

  “Of coarse, of coarse, toike thet stairsteps oer theer,” and he pointed us towards a narrow portal in the massive stone wall. “’Ee’s in, I’m sairtin’. Hi ’aven’t sane ’im cum hout this mairn.”

  But this tweedy Cerberus was not going to let his prize go so easily, not without investing Dickens with some invaluable local knowledge. “That young Dodgson,” the porter still held Dickens’s hand in his grip, “’ee’s a gude un, ye ken. Mathamatics, a noombers squiggler, ye ken. Very smairt and a gude Christian man, ’ee saimes. Lives at the top o’ this very gate tower, raight hup those steps,” and he left go of Dickens’s hand to point. “’Ee’ll be the next Don, we all thaink, the youngest one aever.”

  As quickly as Dickens could disentangle himself, we fled through that indicated doorway and climbed the narrow, winding stone steps up into Tom Tower. About every fifteen steps, a corridor with heavy wooden walls would open out of the stone stairwell. We passed by three of these before we reached the top, where I knew Dodgson’s room to be. It had no number or plate or identification of any kind on the door, only a delicate iron knocker in the figure of a geometrician’s compass. I tapped this eccentric knocker three times against its anvil and it emitted a barely audible scratching sound.

  Nonetheless, in a short moment, the dark wooden door swung inwardly open and my old University friend stood before us, still in his sleeping clothes though it was getting on towards noon. I think he recognized me right off upon opening the door, even though it had been almost three years; but Dickens gave him pause.

  “Dodo,” I greeted him with a smile, “do you remember your old literary chum?”

  “Of c-c-course, Wilkie,” my salutation drew his attention away from his puzzling over the lurking presence of Dickens behind me, “I c-c-could never forget you. C-c-come in. C-c-come in, please. Ah, those were such c-c-carefree t-t-times.”

  The first thing anyone noticed about Charles Dodgson was his stammer. However, wonder of wonders, he did not seem to notice it at all. He spoke in a soft, quiet voice, the voice of a contemplative man, a thinker. He seemed genuinely pleased to see me in his somewhat distracted way. He ushered us politely in, but I sensed he was quite curious to find out who the tall bearded man accompanying me was…and why?

  “Dodo, this is my friend Charles Dickens.”

  That brought him up utterly short and sent him into a rather comical stammer as he tried to collect his wits in light of the morning’s second and even larger surprise.

  “Why, why, why…” He tried to take it all in, his eyes darting back and forth from me to Dickens and Dickens to me. “Why, Wilkie, your literary c-c-connection certainly has risen a bit since your days here in Oxford.”

  “Mr. Dodgson, I am very pleased to meet you.” Charles extended his hand for a shake. “Wilkie has told me all about you.”

  “Of c-c-course, he has,” Dodgson replied in that quiet scholar’s voice of his, “but the question is ‘why?’” and he laughed, somewhat awkwardly I thought, at his own little self-effacing joke.

  And Dickens laughed. This exchange of surprised introductions had halted us in the foyer of his rooms. Realizing this, Dodgson ushered us into his inner sanctum.

  Dodgson’s rooms were then, and in my memory always had been, the very curious habitat of a rare and rather strange bird. The walls of his main sitting room were half-straight, dark medieval oak, and half curved, out of stone, conforming to the circular tower’s convex outer wall. The ceiling was high and beamed, constructed of that same solid dark oak. The room itself was unbelievably cluttered. Not only was it overflowing with books lining shelves all the way to the ceiling, piled in precarious columns as high as a man on the floor, and strewn all over the furniture, but it contained all sorts of curious mechanical devices of iron and wood and brass.

  Despite all the dark wood, it was not a dark room. Set into the curvature of the stone outer wall were two huge leaded windows, which let in a goodly amount of daylight. In front of one of these windows, before a section of the
leaded glass that could be tilted open upon the night sky, stood a large telescope which, I presume, Dodgson employed in his Copernican studies. He was a hobbyist at heart and ever since I had known him he had always been intent upon spending his time away from mathematics and the college in the pursuit of unusual intellectual avocations. Poetry had been one of them. It looked as if now he had turned his attentions to the stars.

  Against one wall on a small table sat a wooden contraption composed of three mahogany boxes with small hinged doors in their sides and brass cylinders protruding from their fronts, stopped with glass stoppers that looked like eyes.

  “What on earth is that, Charlie?” I asked him, my curiosity getting the better of me, as he cleared piles of books off his chairs so that we could sit down.

  “It is c-c-called a magic lantern, Wilkie. There’s a small g-g-gas lamp inside each box and optical lenses inside each of those brass pipes. You put pieces of different c-c-colored stained g-g-glass inside the boxes and rotate them in between the light and the lenses and it throws magical c-c-colours on a blank wall.”

  “I would like to see that some time.” Dickens feigned interest in this silly thing, I am sure. “It must be beautiful.”

  “Oh it is, it is,” Dodgson assured him. “I must g-g-get you some tea, some tea,” he said in his distracted, yet flustered, quiet scholar’s voice. With that, he bustled off into the inner rooms of his lair, leaving us alone to take in the other wonders cluttering up his sitting room.

  In the very centre of the room, in what looked to be a place of honour right in front of a small plush settee, which, unlike every other piece of furniture in the room, did not have books piled up upon it, sat another curious machine. Mounted on a wooden tripod, it consisted of another wooden box, with a larger round glass lens inset like an eye in its front, and wearing a long piece of black cloth on its back like a woman’s mourning dress.

  “What do you suppose that is?” I whispered to Dickens.

  “I haven’t the slightest,” he shrugged back to me.