The Detective and Mr. Dickens (16 page)

“I have no spur/To prick the sides of my intent, but only/Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself…” Macbeth paced the stage.

Dickens, too, was restless. He kept glancing at the curtain behind which Field and Meg were secreted. I, too, was curious. However, my thoughts were upon the emotions of Irish Meg. I wanted to say something to her, I know not what, before she returned to the night streets, where I could never, honestly, pursue her.

“False face must hide what the false heart doth know.”

Dickens moved away from me. But, to my surprise, he did not approach the curtain where our co-conspirators stood concealed. Instead, he crossed the wings to a wooden stairway which led up to some enclosed dressing cubicles used by the female actors. At the foot of those stairs stood a young woman with her hand to her face. She seemed just an actress silently rehearsing her part. I followed after Dickens out of curiosity. I don’t think Dickens even realized that I was behind him. When we drew near to the young actress, it became clear that she was weeping, the hand to her face an unsuccessful attempt to hide her tears.

When she took her hand away, the young lady proved quite young indeed. She could not have been older than fifteen years. It was strange to encounter one so young in such a distinguished theatre company. Her face was childlike, yet she was also a woman. Her full figure, even in the loose servant’s costume in which she was attired, betrayed her deceptive maturity. Her hair was a shiny shade of light brown, with dancing gold highlights becoming visible whenever the slightest ray of light reflected off of it. But the dominant, most compelling, aspect of her appearance was her eyes. They were large and round and brown and so innocent, that one wanted to protect her without her even being threatened. But when Dickens first looked into those eyes, they were brimming with tears, and she seemed very threatened indeed. No wonder, then, that he fell in love the first moment he saw her.

“Look like th’ innocent flower,/But be the serpent under’t…” Lady Macbeth had taken the stage to converse with Macready.

“Excuse me, Miss, but might I be of some assistance?” Dickens did not hesitate. A handkerchief had materialized out of his sleeve. She took it, and buried her face in it. Her shoulders shook with her sobs.

“Please, young lady, nothing can be so frightening. Please tell me what is wrong. I would like very much to help.” I had never heard Dickens speak in a voice so gentle and concerned.

The young actress’s sobs slowly subsided. She wiped the tears from her cheeks, and daintily blew her nose, then looked up at Dickens with those doe eyes. For Dickens, the mystery of Partlow’s murder and all else—me, Inspector Field,
Macbeth
—was forgotten.

“Oh sir, I am so ashamed. Why would they force me to do this so suddenly?” Her voice still quaked as she spoke.

Dickens reached out his hands toward her shoulders to calm her, but quickly drew them back as if thinking better of the idea.

“Is this a dagger which I see before me,/The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee!” Macready’s great voice rent the charged air.

“Who is forcing you to do what?” Dickens asked quietly.

“Only tonight, after the play had begun, and my mother was already onstage, he brought me this new costume. He ordered me to play the whole scene with both hands at my sides, as if I was too dumbstruck by the appearance of Lady Macbeth to notice my own indecency.”

“Indecency?” Dickens said it with a slight catch in his voice.

My eyes followed Dickens’s eyes as they tried to solve the mystery of her costume, which she was holding bunched at the neck with that hand not occupied with Dickens’s handkerchief. With the silent eloquence that only a natural actress could accomplish, she let both of her hands fall to her sides. The coarse brown peasant’s smock fell open. Its neck hole had been slashed downward and the front was almost completely undone to her waist. She stood there helplessly, tears brimming in her eyes, her white shoulders and the tops of her breasts almost fully revealed.

“Yes, I see,” Dickens delicately averted his eyes which, of course, caused me to avert my own. When I turned back, the young woman had turned her back to us, buried her head in the rising stairs, and recommenced her sobbing.

“A dagger of the mind,” Macready’s soliloquy continued onstage, “a false creation,/Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?”

Dickens ascertained, after a brief questioning, that her role in the play was that of a wanton serving girl interrupted in the midst of a nocturnal assignation by Lady Macbeth, as that murderous worthy stalks the battlements, wringing her hands. The young actress’s role was to suddenly start up out of the darkness in the company of a half-dressed young man, and, having startled everyone, flee in disarray from the stage.

“The manager, sir, he says no one knows what I’m doing there in the middle of that dark night unless I wear my blouse all undone, sir. It is indecent, sir, and I feel like a harlot. He says if I do not wear this new costume, and allow the light to fall on my open laces, that he will serve me notice, sir, and my mother also. Oh sir, I do not know what to do.”

We found out later that the girl’s mother was a professional actress initiating her daughter into her profession by cadging a minor role in the plays in which she contracted to perform, and that, at the very moment, she was onstage in the part of none other than Lady Macbeth. This opportunity at Covent Garden was the daughter’s first major theatre role.

“Oh sir, this play has been running for four weeks. Why must he suddenly change my costume? It is such a small part.” She was an actress, but I do not feel that she was experienced enough or talented enough to feign the childlike innocence which she had fallen into before Dickens.

“Mister Paroissien, the stage manager, made this change?” I could sense Dickens’s mind churning for the solution.

‘‘Yes sir, the manager,” she said, a small spark of hope flashing in her voice. “You know him, sir?”

“Oh yes, I know him allright,” Dickens answered, grimly remembering why he had come to this theatre this night.

“Sleep no more!/Macbeth does murder sleep!”

The two stood looking at each other in silence. She was truly a vision of innocence and beauty in that scanty costume. I am not surprised that Charles was drawn to her. There was a magnetic intensity in her eyes. That look, as if words were no longer necessary, sealed my friend Charles’s doom. That look was the beginning and the end, and bound them forever like Paulo and Francesca.

“I see what your part calls for and its reason,” Dickens said, breaking the silence of that mesmerizing look.

The young woman’s face, full of expectancy, streaked with tears, fell.

“But,” Dickens went on, and that writer’s gleam came into his eye, “I also think I know a way to suggest sexuality, without being at all indecent. You must trust me. I am an expert at such matters.”

When his head swivelled in search of Paroissien, I knew that he was going to intercede for this child-woman, like that knight errant out of
Eliduc
.

“O Banquo, Banquo,/Our royal master’s murder’d!”

“Wilkie,” he ordered, as if I were his faithful squire, “stay with her. This will only take a moment.”

To my great surprise, within short minutes he returned with Paroissien in tow. I could only imagine what Inspector Field, observing this conversation from behind his arras yet unable to overhear, must have been imagining. He told us later that, when he saw Dickens confronting Paroissien, he cursed himself for ever considering the cooperation of amateur detectives.

“Poor girl is terrified of appearing indecent,” Dickens was saying as they came up. “I know the scene. I helped Macready compose it. There is a stylish and suggestive way to play her small part.”

When the stage manager and the young actress faced each other, the girl lowered her eyes as if cowed in his presence.

“Now, what is the problem?” Paroissien did not raise his voice and the inquiry was not made unkindly, yet the young woman’s eyes, when she raised her face to answer, were terror-stricken.

“It is the blouse, sir. It is indecent. I cannot just stand there with my hands at my sides and let the whole audience stare at me.”

“Let’s briefly put on manly readiness,” Macready’s voice seemed to taunt us from the stage.

Paroissien’s lips compressed into a tight line.

“If I might make a suggestion?” Dickens, who had been simply waiting for the appropriate moment to intrude, did so. “If the scene is altered ever so slightly, if she is but allowed to use her hands in an expressive way, the comic sexuality can be suggested, while at the same time avoiding the tasteless immodesty of such a sensational costume.” Dickens delivered his little speech in his most diplomatic and accommodating voice.

There was something in Paroissien’s eyes, in the tension on the muscles of his neck, that gave me the sudden intuition that he was enraged. Yet, on the surface, he never lost his equanimity. “I am, of course,” he said, “open to suggestion, especially from such an eminent friend of the theatre, if that suggestion is reasonable.”

“Oh, most reasonable, most reasonable.” Dickens, who, with his acute talent for reading people’s emotions, had, I’m certain, detected the rage smoldering beneath the stage manager’s facade of politeness, assured him.

“What is it, then?” Pariossien could barely conceal his anger.

“Why don’t you do it this way,” Dickens’s voice changed to one of command and intimidation. Beneath what seemed to be a straightforward narration of how the girl could play the scene was the clear threat that if this advice was not taken, further steps would be. “In seconds, your stage seamstress could sew some laces into that smock. When the serving girl pops up out of the darkness, her dress will indeed be all unlaced. The light will catch a brief glimpse of her white skin and the fact that she has been surprised in the midst of a sexual encounter will be immediately apparent. But then, she will guiltily begin to lace herself up as Lady Macbeth addresses her in distraction.
Voila!
The necessary hint of sexuality is present, and” he turned back to the girl, “your time on stage is spent in the protection of your modesty.”

Paroissien did not say anything right off. Perhaps he was struggling to keep from strangling Dickens on the spot.

“It wouldn’t be natural,” Dickens pressed him. “No woman, even the most debased, would just stand there with herself all
unlaced
, and make no attempt to cover up.”

Paroissien buckled. “Yes, of course, I do see your point, more natural, yes, let us try it that way,” he said, nodding to the young actress. Without another word, he turned on his heel, and returned to his post in the front wings.

“Oh, thank you, sir, thank you,” she said, beaming at Dickens before scurrying off to find the seamstress, for her scene was fast approaching.

“Naught’s had, all’s spent./Where our desire is got without content…” Lady Macbeth commented from the stage as her daughter fled.

Dickens led me back to our prior vantage point in the wings. Lady Macbeth, the young actress’s mother, was not known to Charles or myself by name, though Dickens expressed a vague memory of having seen her onstage before. When the famous sleepwalking scene commenced, Dickens focused his concentration fiercely upon the stage. When the girl jumped to her feet out of the black shadows into the white-hot moonlight, he was the only person in the whole theatre who was not startled. His eyes burned with excitement as she played her tiny role just as he had scripted it, and fled into the darkness at the far side of the stage.

“Out, damned spot! out, I say!” Lady Macbeth delivered her lines.

“Would it not be to our advantage if the blood were still on their hands?” a voice inquired, startling us from immediately behind. It was Field. I glanced around quickly to see if we were being observed. Paroissien was well in front of us at the edge of the stage.

“Yes, that would certainly simplify things,” Dickens smiled.

“Listen. I don’t have much time. Meg and I will slip out at the first opportunity. Our work is done.” (I am afraid that a man as perceptive as Inspector Field could not miss the disappointment in my face. Could he imagine that, in my secret mind, I had hoped for an opportunity to converse with Irish Meg?) “Banquo and Macduff are the other two. Even with the wigs and the powder, Meg is sure. Could you find out their names, perhaps engage them in conversation?” With that, he was gone, sliding like a piece of the scenery back behind his arras.

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.”

We never saw Field and his witness make their exit. Macready’s voice held every eye and heart and mind in that theatre in its thrall.

“
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.”

Field and Irish Meg must have slipped out of the stage door sometime during the emotion and confusion of the final scene. When I finally realized that they were gone, I felt as if I had lost her forever.