The Detective and Mr. Dickens (17 page)

Even as the “BRAVO’s” were growing to a crescendo, Dickens was dispatching old Spilka to the public house across the way for champagne. The effervescent bottles arrived before the numerous curtain calls and final bows of the principals were taken. Dickens arranged the bottles on a makeshift trestle just off the wings, while old Spilka gathered as many odd drinking receptacles as he could find, and when the players came off the stage, pulling off their wigs and false beards, loosening their stays, unstrapping their swords, elated at the enthusiasm of the audience still applauding in the stalls even though the gas was coming up, there stood Dickens with a champagne bottle in one hand and his cup upraised in a toast to the company. It was the kind of flourish which Dickens gloried in.

“Never has a company of
Macbeth
fretted its hour upon the stage with more accomplished sound and fury. Fellow actors, I salute you,” he said, and he toasted them, one and all, with a sweep of his arm. “Please join me in a small impromptu toast to the finest acting company in London.” With that invitation, they descended upon the champagne with the same rabid appetite with which the inhabitants of Saint Antoine would descend upon that broken cask of wine eight years later in
A Tale of Two Cities
. Macready, still in full make-up, joined Dickens, pumping his hand. Macready raised his mailed arm, and every member of the company paused to listen.

Macready proclaimed: “The Inimitable.” All of the members of the company in unison echoed Dickens’s favorite appellation. “An actor. One of us,” Macready intoned solemnly before drinking off his toast.

As that crowd of actors raised their glasses, emptied them, then raised them once again, Dickens leaned close to me, and directed my attention to our friend Paroissien standing scowling in the wings, without a glass in his hand. “Seems we have a Methodistical presence to frown upon the proceedings,” Dickens quipped, as he moved away from me in the direction of Macduff and Banquo, who stood drinking from the same bottle, passing it back and forth with two of the three weird sisters. Dickens opened his remarks with compliments upon their executions of their roles, and soon was engaged in easy conversation with Field’s two unsuspecting suspects. Macduff was a fairly tall (about Dickens’s height) but spare man, who had padded his body for his warlike role, while Banquo was a man of much more ample girth and broad shoulders, who looked and carried himself like a soldier.

I shook hands with Macready, who, in the exuberation of the moment, engaged me in some uncharacteristic raillery. “Young Wilkie,” he said knitting those burly brows in mock sternness, “when will you be presenting us with a play that we can perform?” I must smile as I think of it now, because five years later, after the first public performance of
The Frozen Deep
, Macready, in retirement then, would be the first to congratulate me with the gruff admission that “a modern part like that could tempt me to take the stage once again.”

When my attention returned to detached observation of the festivities, I noticed that Paroissien, the stage manager, had disappeared, and that Dickens had broken off his jovial conversation with Macduff and Banquo, and was standing by himself, indecisively, as if momentarily suspended on the brink of some precipitous act. He was gazing across the room at the young woman in the serving girl’s blouse. Even as he stared at her from that distance, her face came up and their eyes met. They held each other’s gaze for a long moment, and then Dickens moved decisively.

For some inexplicable reason, I felt compelled to follow. I joined the two of them in time to overhear their fateful introductions.

“My name is Charles Dickens.”

There was a slight flutter in his voice as he said it.

Her eyes were wide with excitement as she looked up into his.

“I am Ellen Ternan.”
*

*
There is some confusion amongst Dickens scholars as to the appearance in Dickens’s life of Miss Ellen Ternan. According to the researches of Ada Nisbet and Edgar Johnson, Dickens did not meet Miss Ternan until five years later, in 1856. Professor Robert Altman, however, in his monograph,
The Mystery of Ellen Ternan
, asserts that Dickens met Miss Ternan as much as five years earlier, and supports that contention by comparing the stage productions in which Mrs. Ternan and her daughter appeared between 1852 and 1856 with the plays which Dickens himself attended during those years. Professor Altman’s comparisons show that during that time period Dickens never missed a theatrical production in which Miss Ternan performed. In fact, during that period Dickens developed the habit of returning to see some of these performances two, three, and, in the instance of the 1854
George Barnwell
at the Covent Garden theatre, four documented times. It is, therefore, quite possible that the romantic backstage meeting of Dickens and Miss Ternan in 1856 was staged for the purpose of intentionally starting a string of events which would eventually thrust their long-standing relationship out into the open, thus giving Dickens the seeming motivation to separate from his afflicted wife, Kate. In other words, when Dickens finally decided that he wanted to go public with his affair with Miss Ternan, he re-orchestrated their dramatic meeting of five years earlier.

Further, Dickens scholars disagree as to whether Ellen Ternan was nineteen or twenty years old when she and Dickens allegedly first met in 1856. However, Stanford Whitmore, who agrees with Altman that Dickens met the young actress much earlier, argues that she was only sixteen years old in 1852 when Dickens had developed a correspondence with her family employing a code name.

Collins’s manuscript supports that theory that Dickens met her in her fifteenth year, served as her guardian for almost five years, and then, when she was of age, allowed her to surface and their connection to become public when he could no longer tolerate life with his wife. This scenario, for example, explains the episode of the bracelet in 1857 which precipitated the separation of Charles and Kate Dickens. Scholars have always taken this episode on face value, yet it is too obvious a blunder, especially for a man of the meticulous attention to detail and obsession for organization of Charles Dickens. How then did it happen? If Dickens had maintained a relationship, of whatever nature, with the girl for five years prior to the bracelet episode in 1857, then perhaps he intentionally orchestrated that episode to bring the situation out into the open. He wanted Kate to cut the cord of marriage.

Finally, the obviousness and the attention-drawing quality of the oft-documented public displays associated with the Ellen Ternan legend of 1856-57—the backstage meeting, the bracelet episode, the notice in the
Times
, the highly publicized feud with Thackeray—can all be read as an elaborate smokescreen thrown up by Dickens the novelist to camouflage Ellen’s past, her residence in Miss Coutts’s Urania Cottage. Thackeray may very well have been a part of the whole plot with Dickens and Collins since he certainly, as evidenced by his feelings for Jane Brookfield, would be sympathetic to such an extramarital relationship. This Collins manuscript proves the capability of Dickens to turn his own life into an elaborate fiction, to plot and structure his and Ellen’s real life as if it were one of his novels: life (1851) becomes art (1856-57) to serve life.

Inspector Field, Playwright, or, “Baiting the Trap”

May 4, 1851—evening

Following that evening of
Macbeth
at Covent Garden, where so much had transpired both on and off the case, Dickens seemed to rally and return to his vocations and avocations with a renewed enthusiasm. Before the sudden death of little Dora, Dickens had been tyrannically rehearsing his amateur troupe for a benefit performance of Bulwar Lytton’s new comedy,
Not So Bad As We Seem
. The Duke of Devonshire had graciously offered his residence, Devonshire House, in Picadilly, as the site of its opening benefit performance before Her Majesty and the Court. Rehearsals had only commenced, when first Dickens’s father, and then his younger child, had died so suddenly. With Dickens unable to continue, the date for the performance before the Queen had been tentatively reset for May twenty-second in hopes that, after a time of mourning, Dickens might feel inclined to take up the reins, and resume his seat on the box as both manager and actor. Now, to the joy and relief of all, that seemed to be exactly his intention.

He ordered rehearsals to resume on May third in Devonshire House (the Duke having hospitably offered his manse, not only for the benefit performance itself, but for the getting up of the whole production). I had a small part in the piece, that of valet to Lord Wilmot, which was Charles’s lead role. Douglas Jerrold had another of the major roles, as did Augustus Egg. Wills had declined a part, in fact the part which was given to me, because he felt it might distract him from his duties at the
Household Words
office. Forster, in a masterful bit of casting, played a dour and inflexible Magistrate. Though much caught up in the rush of the rehearsals, neither Dickens nor myself had forgotten about Inspector Field’s murder investigation, which we had left backstage at Covent Garden Theatre. I was sure that the murder case was not all that Dickens had left backstage at Covent Garden.

Three full days passed before Field once again summoned us. It was early evening, and rehearsal was drawing to a close at Devonshire House, when the taciturn Rogers materialized in the doorway. He saluted Dickens respectfully, and delivered Field’s summons to Bow Street Station. Dickens drew that rehearsal to a precipitate close, and we soon joined Field in the bullpen.

First off, Inspector Field sat us down before the fire to give us a full report. Teasing, he began: “I’ve been keepin’ an eye on you two, I ’ave” (eyes a-twinkle) “and Rogers tells me you’ve been rehearsin’ a play the last two nights. Well, I’m proud to say, I’ve been workin’ on my own little play these three days past, since our night at Covent Garden.”

But Field did not choose to elaborate on his theatrical metaphor. Instead, he announced the results of our little Covent Garden fishing expedition. “Meggy spotted all three of ’em, she did. Your Mister Paroissien, the stage manager, was the primary object, to be sure. With absolute certainty, ’ee is the man who stabbed Solicitor Partlow. The gatherin’ of the proper evidence is all that delays ’is takin’ up.”

“What evidence need be gathered?” I pressed him. “Isn’t Irish Meg’s identification enough?”

Field turned to me with the look one would give a small child who doesn’t understand the intricacies of an adult game. “Lincoln’s Inn lawyers make a ’abit of destroyin’ the testimonies of girls like Meggy.” Field spoke slowly. “She is not a person in a court of law. She is not ’ooman. She ’as no moral right to testify. For the lawyers and the ’onorable judges, she does not exist. She is no more than a low-class common criminal, a piece of garbage off the streets, a perversion of ’oomanity who sells ’erself every night to whoever can pay ’er modest price. No, we cannot take your Mister Paroissien to the dock on Meggy’s word alone. We need corroboration from some more ‘respectable’ members of society.” Field delivered this speech with a moral indignation and contempt for “Lincoln’s Inn lawyers” that bespoke a strong sympathy for Meg and those women like her, and indeed all members, whether male or female, of her disenfranchised class of the streets.

“‘Respectable’?” Dickens echoed.

“Yes,” Field grinned evilly at us, “from the two respectable gentlemen who helped Paroissien murder the esteemed ’oremongerin’ Solicitor Partlow.”

For some reason, my pulse began to race, and the firelit world of the stationhouse began to blur and waver crazily before my eyes, as Field spoke of Irish Meg. My blood was up in indignation, but I held my tongue, not wishing to reveal my weakness for the woman to Dickens and Field. I could no more deny her identity as a human being than I could ignore that devil inside myself which longed desperately to see her again.

“She picked out the other two as well,” Field said, continuing with his report. “Banquo and Macduff,” he laughed, using their character names. “Minor actors whom Partlow seems to ’ave regularly patronized. Banquo is a Mister Kenley Jones Fielding, and Macduff answers to the name of Martin Price. Both are middle-aged drunkards and ’orechasers whose propensities for the seekin’ out of every possible vice match up well with our reports of Solicitor Partlow. Meggy and I ’ad to wait until they removed their wigs, but then she was quite positive in ’er identification.”

“But how do you propose to entice or force these two to offer evidence against Paroissien, to confess to their part in the murder?” Dickens asked.

“Ah,” Field said, “why ‘the play’s the thing.’”

Dickens looked at me:
What ho! A detective who quotes Shakespeare
?

Inspector Field was a natural storyteller.

“That night, after leavin’ Covent Garden Theatre, after payin’ Meggy for ’er trouble, Rogers and myself retired to our usual place down the ’all in The Lord Gordon Arms.

“‘Mister Rogers,’ says I after we’re comfortably seated with our steamin’ cups of burnt gin, ‘we’ve got to draw ’em out. We’ve got to trap ’em before we can properly threaten ’em.’