The Detective and Mr. Dickens (15 page)

I stared wide-eyed at Dickens. He was constructing the whole plot, chapter by chapter, right there in the middle of the gaslit street.

“No, that is how it happened, I’m certain,” he said.

With a lurch, he took off walking.

“Wilkie,” he said, with excitement in his voice, “we have almost reconstructed the night of the murder, but we must follow it to its violent end.”

His pace quickened. At Hyde Park Corner he hailed a passing hansom. “Take me to the embankment side of Blackfriar’s Bridge,” he ordered.

“Rawht, sir,” the cabman signified with an accompanying flick of his long whip to his business partner’s rump, which gave off a sharp click as if it were a form of terminal punctuation.

It had been a long and disturbing night. I had expected to proceed directly home to my warm bed, and now we were off once again on some wild flight of Dickens’s nocturnal imagination. As I often had before, I felt like some character in one of his novels.

I thought I knew what he was doing. He had become the murderer. He was imagining what this Paroissien might have been thinking. Imagining his hand clutching the murder weapon concealed beneath his cloak. Imagining his hatred for the lawyer sitting across from him.

When the cab bumped to a halt, he instructed the cabman to wait.

We walked to the head of the stairs which descended into the fast-moving black river. Dickens started down, but stopped as if he had decided that he had gone far enough.

“Wilkie,” his voice was sad, “we have retraced the steps of a murderer. We have witnessed what he witnessed, heard what he heard, and yet what do we know? How much of it do we really understand?”

“Very little I would think,” I spoke truthfully for myself. “We don’t know why he did it.”

“Precisely, but do you know what really bothers me?”

“What?”

“We never will understand because we cannot go inside of him, because we cannot write the truth of it. No one will really know why he committed the murder or what the true reality of London was in our time, because none of us, the writers, are allowed to use our words!”

The trip back to Wellington Street was accomplished with dispatch.

He climbed out of the cab in front of the
Household Words
offices. I decided to take the cab on to my digs. As it drew away, I looked back. He was standing alone on the curbstone, and two dark figures were materializing out of the shadows to intercept him before he went in.

“Is This a Dagger Which I See Before Me?”

May 1, 1851

I arrived at the Wellington Street offices at eleven the following morning. To my surprise, “the Inimitable” was still in his nightshirt. He was brewing a can of coffee on the hearth, which he had stoked to a hearty blaze.

“We stayed up half the night planning, Wilkie,” Dickens explained with enthusiasm. Field and Rogers had been waiting when he returned after midnight, and had listened eagerly to his report. Though bleary-eyed, he was excited: “We’re going to Covent Garden tonight, Wilkie, to identify them. That done,” he was positively trembling with the adventure of it, “we will install an elaborate spy network within the very theatre itself to gather the evidence against them.”

He passed me a steaming cup of coffee distractedly.

“Field is a genius,” he burbled on. “He has all his players ready, their roles written, and the curtain waiting to go up.”

“He must be,” I commented wryly, “if his drama is good enough to open
sans
rehearsal at Covent Garden.”

Dickens tipped me the sly wink of a co-conspirator.

“Just what is our role in our genius’s little drama?” I asked with more than a hint of sarcasm in my tone.

“He needs our help to get him and his witness into the theatre.”

“Meg? The prostitute?” My pulse suddenly quickened. She was a common harlot with a fondness for gin, yet the prospect of seeing her again made my blood rush. I cannot explain why. All I know is that since the night of our only meeting the woman had been in my mind, her surprised look as I gave her my scarf against the river wind haunting me like a fond memory from childhood.

“Yes, only she can identify the men who were present when Solicitor Partlow was murdered. But there is more.”

“How much more?”

“Field needs us to gather information. We are to mingle backstage with the cast and ask questions. I will arrange it with Macready.”

“Spies once again, is it?”

Dickens sensed my discomfort with our roles: “Yes, I suppose so. But Field is right. I am known there. They will trust us, and will think nothing of us asking questions which Field himself could never ask. In fact, we are even hoping, perhaps, to find the murder weapon there.” Field may not have been a genius but, in Dickens, he had recruited a highly enthusiastic ally.

We put in a cursory day at the
Household Words
office and I left Dickens at five to prepare for the adventures of the evening. I dined alone at a public house—meat pie, French potatoes, and a hearty tankard of ale—then returned to my flat to dress for the theatre. Our roles were those of the gentlemen swells paying a visit backstage. I hired a cab, collected Dickens at Wellington Street, and we arrived at Covent Garden shortly after seven. The curtain was scheduled to rise at seven-thirty.

We descended into the usual flood of humanity which coursed around Covent Garden on play nights. The cobbled thoroughfares beneath the towering stone walls of the theatre were choked with stalls and tents and handcarts and trestles for the offering of goods to the crowd. The coaches of the rich lined up as Lords and Ladies, Merchants and Matrons, Milliners, Serving Girls, Clerks, and Apprentices passed by. The theatre was one of the few places where all of the classes of London society gathered to partake of the same entertainment. Though the street was dense with people, there was no jostling or bumping, no strong sense that the pickpockets were about. It was a leisurely shopping crowd taking in the evening’s sights and sounds and smells before entering the theatre for the night’s formal entertainment (very different from a crowd of the sort that might gather for a public hanging at Horsemonger Lane Gaol). Small groups gathered around street buskers who danced or sang or fiddled or juggled or made grotesque faces at the curious. Inspector Field suddenly materialized from behind a huge pot of bright yellow country flowers.

“Gentlemen,” he greeted us, his darting eyes scanning the crowd to see if our meeting was in any way observed. Satisfied, he drew us, with a silent flex of his forefinger, behind the huge pot of yellow flowers, and announced, “Rogers and our witness are ready. We will await your signal from directly hopposite the stage door,” and with that he disappeared as abruptly as he had materialized.

“Well,” Dickens said to me.

“Indeed,” I said to him.

With that, we struck out in the direction of the stage door.

We had taken no more than a few steps when a young Fleet Street man, notepad at the ready (Gads, they seemed to be everywhere he went in those days), accosted us.

“Mister Dickens, isn’t it? Oh yes, I would recognize you anywhere, Mister Dickens.” The young man never paused. “Could you give
Putnam’s Morning Express
a few words concerning Mister Macready’s
Macbeth
?” The interview was underway as if he had harpooned Dickens and was reeling in his catch.

“I haven’t seen it yet!” Dickens tried to push past him.

“No matter, you are here, you must be eager to see it, yes, eager to see it,” and he scribbled that last phrase on his notepad. I followed closely, screening Dickens off from further pursuit from the young Fleet Streeter who had just conducted a successful interview with himself. We gained the stage door without further incident.

Dickens tapped politely with his cane. The door guard opened it cautiously. Aged, bespectacled, stooped and droopily mustachioed, he was about to launch into his set speech about no one being allowed backstage within ten minutes of curtain when Dickens cut him off: “Good evening Mister Spilka. I trust you remember me. I am Charles Dickens, and I believe that Mister Macready left explicit directions concerning my admittance.” Dickens delivered his speech with charm and great familiarity, and it worked with the immediate success that Ali Baba’s “Open Sesame” had upon the cave of the forty thieves.

According to plan, we entered the backstage area to reconnoitre before signaling for Field and Irish Meg to come forward. It was twenty-five minutes after seven. The backstage was chaotic. Every member of the company seemed running hither and thither, half-dressed. Scenery—huge stretches of painted cloth, and bulkier objects such as trees, great rocks made of wood and paper, castle battlements—was going up and down on ropes as if controlled by some gigantic puppeteer. Workmen were furiously fanning smoke onto the stage from smudge pots to create the ghostly mist of the battlefield. All around us, actors were pacing, posing, making gestures.

I observed the gleam enter Dickens’s countenance as soon as we passed through the stage door. It always appeared whenever he got around actors.

Three soldiers immediately before us flourished their swords in the air. Later, Inspector Field would apprise us of his interest in these “prop swords.”

“Not props at all!” Dickens would quickly disabuse him of that misconception. “The real thing. Fencing classes conducted twice weekly in the morning onstage. Fight master requires attendance of all, both principals and cast actors.”

As Dickens stood gawking at the chaotic flurry of activity, a wiry cleanshaven man with jet black hair and piercing dark eyes (whom Dickens recognized, and whom immediately acknowledged Dickens with a tight smile and hurried nod), moved through that chaos biting off short sharp orders.

This was Pariossien.

We were only brief minutes from the curtain. Dickens was carefully surveying the whole backstage area, slowly executing a three hundred and sixty degree turn on the balls of his feet.

“There,” he whispered, pointing with his walking stick at a rather dark corner where a heavy stage curtain hung in front of what appeared to be an unornamented brick wall. “There,” Dickens hissed, “the perfect place.”

With that, he turned abruptly on his heel and marched directly to old man Spilka at the stage door. Field and Irish Meg must have been waiting just outside, because they materialized immediately upon the door being opened. Spilka stared wide-eyed at Meg’s vulgar harlot’s dress, but, at a glance from Dickens, looked the other way. In the confusion before the curtain, no one noticed them enter. Dickens secreted them behind the aforementioned curtain.

The three weird sisters, their hair grotesquely tangled about their faces, large artificial wens and warts raised on their foreheads and chins, black lines of charcoal stick slashing out of their eyes and down across their cheeks, stood primping before us in the wings. Martial sound effects and the metallic clashings of an approaching storm rose moodily from the far side of the stage. The three witches scurried out and took their places. Paroissien, the stage manager, raised his arm and pointed with one finger. Ah, the power of the man! Every eye was upon him. A drum began a quiet measured beat. Paroissien dropped his arm, and the curtain rose to the eerie chant of the three weird sisters rising out of the hanging smoke.

With a slight tug on my sleeve, Dickens pulled me behind the curtain where Field and Irish Meg had secreted themselves. Meg was leaning back against the brick wall, visibly shaken, as if she had, indeed, as Macbeth would later in the evening, seen a ghost. I considered taking her hand and saying something comforting.

“He’s our man, the stage manager,” Field whispered excitedly to Dickens. “She pointed him out straight off.”

Field didn’t hesitate in giving Dickens direction: “Leave us. Your presence is too conspicuous. Now we must identify the two others. When that is done we will leave by the way we came. Leave us.”

The play was well underway. We stood in the wings and watched the light play through the smoke on the armor of sword-carrying men. The metallic thunder crashed.

“Hallo Charles, Wilkie,” a gruff voice suddenly whispered beside us in the darkness of the wings. It was Macready, all bushy eyebrows and wide scowling mouth. “Can’t talk now. Have to palaver with the witches.”

He turned to his dresser, a weaselly little man named Freddy Leavis, for a final check of his makeup and costume. Another actor joined Macready. The witches on stage chanted their devil’s litany. A drum sounded, and Macbeth and Banquo swept solemnly onstage.

Macready was truly a commanding presence. When he stationed himself at center stage, every eye locked upon him. His voice shook the theatre, or seemed to. When he walked to the front of the stage, he controlled every eye and ear and imagination in the house.

“If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me…” From beneath his deep brows Macready’s eyes burned down into the darkness.

I glanced sideways at Dickens. He was not looking at the stage.

“Time and the hour runs through the roughest day,” Macready solemnly intoned.

Dickens’s back was turned to the stage. His whole attention was on the curtain behind which Field and Irish Meg were secreted. I watched as Field moved out from behind that curtain and circulated about the backstage area. He talked to no one, yet observed everything. After a complete circuit, he returned to his concealment. His presence went unnoticed. What had been unregulated chaos before the curtain rose had subsided into quiet order. Actors came and went with subdued concentration. Paroissien, the object of Field’s greatest interest, stood in the wings close to the stage with a sheaf of papers in one hand and a look of fierce concentration on his dark face. Every two or three minutes, as a scene was about to change or an entrance was to be made or some offstage effect was to be sounded, he gave sharp pointed signals, wordlessly, with his prepossessing forefinger.