The Detective and Mr. Dickens (31 page)

Irish Meg, much the smaller of the two, was stunned, able to rise only to one knee.

Scarlet Bess, blood streaming from her raked breasts, fell upon her, pummelling with both fists.

It was then that Thompson and myself made the mistake of stepping in.

We first attempted to pull Bess off of the seemingly dazed and defenseless Irish Meg. No sooner had we disentangled the two, than Irish Meg leapt to her feet and, in complete control of her physical powers yet carried away by blind rage and pain, vaulted onto Tally Ho Thompson’s back. Feeling this mad beast clawing at him from behind, and afraid for his sight, my ally Thompson immediately abandoned his hold upon Scarlet Bess, and swung sharply away in the attempt to throw his tormentor from her position of dominance astride his back. In so doing, however, he left me at the mercy of his raging mistress. In but a moment, I found myself outmanned. Bess was a full head taller, and every bit as strong as I.

I attempted to maintain my hold on her arm, but she swung me around as a bargeman swings his bowline. I held on tenaciously, but the violent centrifugal force spun us both to the ground. She landed heavily atop me in a most indecorous manner. The fact of the matter is that as we tumbled both of her arms surrounded my head and crushed it to her naked chest. As a consequence, I was pummelled about the ears by the unrestrained mounds of her wildly swinging breasts.

Thompson was faring no better. Unable to shake off the enraged Meg clinging to his back and clawing blindly at his face, he was dancing as if on fire. Slapping frantically behind him with one hand at the white flesh of his tormentor’s bare
derriere
, and desperately fending off with his other her attempts to claw out his eyes, he resembled a berserk windmill.

Ultimately, the blind violence of these initial grapples gave way to a brief surcease. All four of us wrestled out of each other’s grasps, and struggled to our feet. Scarlet Bess glared down at me from what seemed a quite imposing height. Letting loose a volley of curses, the two enraged whores renewed their hostilities. For some reason they had forgotten their hatred for each other, and made Thompson and myself the fresh objects of their rage.

Bess charged down upon me. I backed away, raising my hands in an attempt to placate her. Moving close upon me, she stopped abruptly, and, giving a slight feint with her hands, which caused me to raise my arms to ward off the expected blow, she suddenly kicked out with her right foot, landing an excruciatingly sharp blow to a most vulnerable area of my lower abdomen. Her kick doubled me over with pain, and I felt my knees buckling irretrievably beneath me. I collapsed to the ground with an instinctive movement in which my knees sought my chest as a means of protecting my already bruised vulnerability. At last, Scarlet Bess did not hesitate to kick me once again sharply and ignominiously in the backside.

As I looked up from my humiliating position amongst the paving stones, I saw Thompson sparring with Irish Meg a few feet away. He was attempting to hold her off with a series of sharp pushes to her shoulders. Yet, even as he seemed to be gaining a toehold against Meg’s mad rushes, unbeknownst to him Scarlet Bess was descending fiercely upon him from his blind side.

The force of her rush carried all three to the ground in a heap of flailing arms, kicking legs and scandalously cursing female tongues. I righted myself, and hobbled to Thompson’s aid. The two women were atop him. For some unexplainable reason, Thompson was laughing maniacally. I bent to pull Irish Meg off, sharp pains shooting upward all the way to my chest as I did so, when the whole fiasco took an unpredicted turn.

The police arrived.

Two constables of the Protectives, in their black hats and brass-buttoned black coats, rushed in through the crowd with their truncheons drawn in preparation for the worst specimen in street violence, public mayhem and murder. What they found was two half-naked whores purposefully assaulting two rather badly disheveled gentlemen.

“Halt!” shouted the larger, plumper of the two constables, brandishing his truncheon. We stopped our fighting, and faced the two constables.

“Cover thyselves, women!” the thin, long-faced constable, staring wide-eyed at Meg and Bess in all their fleshly glory, ordered haltingly.

“With what, you bloody poof?” Irish Meg spat back as she stood, wearing nothing below her waist, save her short stockings and pumps.

The two constables were struck dumb by her outburst. With the most comical looks on their faces they stared first at us, then at the crowd. One of the whores from the crowd of on-lookers retrieved Meg’s tattered skirt and tossed it over the heads of the two Protectives to her. Without ceremony, before everyone, she wriggled into it. In the meantime, Bess was hugging the tatters of her bodice around her wounded breasts.

The fat constable looked at the thin constable. The thin, lantern-jawed constable shrugged helplessly. Without even attempting to gather any explanations, the two constables, brandishing their truncheons to cut a path through the harmlessly curious crowd, marched all four of us off to—where else?—Bow Street Station.

Proceeding at a brisk march under the prodding of constables Lomas and Hovde, as I later ascertained their names, we arrived at Bow Street with little delay. So quickly, indeed, that I barely had opportunity to marshal my wits, and consider how I was going to explain myself to Dickens and Field, whom I knew would be there, though hardly expecting my arrival in custody.

There was little need for concern on my part, however. When the four of us entered the station, Rogers was on the desk. When our two dutiful escorts began to announce us, Rogers, with a smug look of triumph on his insufferable face, abruptly arose and disappeared into the bullpen. Inspector Field and Charles returned with him immediately to confront the four of us lined up in our various degrees of disarray.

Field looked at Dickens.

Dickens looked at Field.

They both looked at that super-efficient monster, Serjeant Rogers.

And, in a moment, they all three burst into uproarious laughter.

Thompson, whose insolent grin had never been subdued throughout any of these proceedings, was, to my amazement, laughing right along with them.

At this turn of events, Meg and Bess, glancing toward each other as if for permission, began to emit small giggles.

I alone found the situation no laughing matter. The unmentionable pain inflicted by Scarlet Bess’s kick was just beginning to subside. I knew I would be sore for days. I was thoroughly embarrassed at having been arrested in such low company. And now my closest friend and patron was laughing at my discomfiture. Worst of all, I was forced to observe the satisfaction that puppet, Rogers, was taking in my humiliation.

“Why Wilkie, I thought you were returning to your rooms for a quiet evening with a book and a glass of sherry,” Dickens taunted.

“You seem to ’ave become tangled up in one of London’s nighttime adventures, Mister Collins,” Inspector Field added.

“I was but an innocent stander-by when this whole misunderstanding occurred,” I protested much too soberly for their giddy mood.

At that, Meg burst out with a mocking laugh and a garbled comment of derision that sounded like “insentmybloody-whitearseewas!”

Field dismissed Constables Lomas and Hovde with a “well ’andled, men,” which seemed to satisfy their curiosity as to their superior’s strange reaction to their prisoners. Then Field quickly reinstituted the businesslike atmosphere of the stationhouse which had been usurped by the intrusion of this French farce.

“Thompson,” Field barked, without ever raising his voice, “explain the situation to your meddlesome mistress. Make it clear I’ll brook no more interference from ’er. Then send ’er ’ome.”

“Meg, sit on that bench!” he ordered
sotto voce
with a quick stab of his decisive forefinger.

Thompson took the thoroughly intimidated Scarlet Bess aside.

“Mister Collins,” Inspector Field said, turning lastly to me, “no doubt you will wish to join Mister Dickens and myself. We were just about to dive down into a most interestin’ document.”

I followed him and Dickens sheepishly through the door to the bullpen. As I was leaving that front room of the stationhouse I could not help, like Lot’s wife, but glance backward at my fellow partners in crime. Thompson and Scarlet Bess were kissing tenderly in the far corner. Irish Meg, her head lowered, sat like an abandoned waif on a bench against the front wall.

Inside the door, Field stopped as if having a second thought. I was the last of us through the door, and when he turned to address me, I felt like one of his criminals about to be accused. But his face broke into a mischievous grin, and he said, “Mister Collins, would you please ask your accomplice, Mister Thompson, to step in with us?”

I turned quickly back to the duty room, quite willing to take orders from Inspector Field now that I had gotten a brief taste of the criminal life. I motioned to Thompson who was still standing against the wall with Scarlet Bess, and waited for him in the doorway. Strangely, we had become comrades in crime, and a new ease of association and communication had developed between us, the gentleman-writer and the highwayman-actor. As he moved to join me in the doorway, he guided Scarlet Bess to the bench, and sat her down next to Irish Meg, who had been sitting there forlornly the whole time. When we left the room to join Dickens and Field by the hearth, the two women were deposited next to each other in apparent peace.

Dickens was already seated when we arrived, a small sheaf of papers resting on his crossed knees. Field was standing with his back to the fire, warming himself.

“Mister Dickens and myself were just beginnin’ to examine the testimonies of Missus Peggy Ternan, the mother of our suspicioned murderess, when you gentlemen arrived so cleverly. What did occasion your arrival in custody, might I ask?” Field’s insatiable curiosity had certainly gotten the better of his discretionary impulses.

“The two ’ores got in a ’air-puller,” Thompson answered without the slightest hesitation. “Over me, I suppose,” he added with the insolence that always governed his facial expression.

“Oh, two ’ores in love, is it now?” Field mocked him. “Fightin’ over a grand gentleman like yourself?”

“That’s it, guv,” Thompson remained totally unbowed.

Field, seeing that he could not intimidate Thompson, glanced quickly to me. For some reason, whether out of continuing curiosity or spite, he decided to pursue the subject in this new quarter. “And you, Mister Collins, ’ow were you mistaken for a member of this ring of criminals?”

I laughed nervously. “I happened to be passing by at the very moment the two women fell upon one another,” I said, trying to control the tremor in my voice. “It was barbarous. Thompson and I were merely trying to pull them apart when the constables mistook us for participants in the riot.”

“Yes, of course,” Field, realizing that he was going to get no worthwhile entertainment from either of us, said dourly.

“You know ’ow it is, sir. ’Ores in love, you know,” Thompson got in one last taunt at his master.

“Sit down, Thompson,” Inspector Field ordered. “I want you to ’ear what Mister Dickens is about to read. I still may be able to use you in this affair.”

It was then that Dickens said a strange thing, which, as I look back upon it, may have been directed toward my ears only. “A harlot in love,” he said it in a soft, contemplative tone. “Have you gentlemen ever considered a harlot capable of love? Have you ever considered a harlot human?”

The Bawd’s Testimony

May 10, 1851—mid-evening

If there was one skill for which Dickens had a marvelous facility, it was his continuing ability to read (and I am sure, write) shorthand or “law scribble” as the clerks and reporters in Chancery Lane had called it for centuries. It had been fifteen years since Dickens had been one of their number, yet he had not forgotten one single cipher. In the hour that followed my embarrassing arrival at Bow Street, Dickens read us aloud a dialogue narrative out of a Protectives constable’s transcript, a narrative of venality and degradation and falsehood that made the savageries of Mister Lyell’s prehistoric animal packs pale by comparison.

Field had conducted the interrogation of Mrs. Peggy Ternan, but he called Rogers in and charged us all to listen to Dickens’s reading, to evaluate the information dragged out of the creature, and to ready any suggestions as to our next move in the case.

“We might’s well ’ave everyone ’ere for this,” Field interjected just before Dickens was about to step off with his reading. “Rogers,” he ordered, “bring in Irish Meg. She’s in this up to ’er bubs. If Thompson’s tall lass is still out there, send ’er ’ome.”

The door opened. I caught a glimpse of Meg and Bess sitting like sisters on the bench. Meg was ushered in, but I dared not look at her. I wondered if all the others in the room had noticed my agitation in her presence, and were secretly laughing at me behind their hands.

“This testermoney is the old bawd’s own words as best we could get ’em down,” Field said, introducing the entertainment. “She is bein’ ’eld in custody, as is the butler we surprised in Lord Ashbee’s private library. They’ll not ’ave the oppertunity to warn any of our principals in this case. Mister Dickens ’as kindly consented to read ’em out for us, my voice bein’ summat tired from ’agglin’ with the old ’ore all day.”