The Detective and Mr. Dickens (30 page)

It was she who was on his mind. All the rest was merely social duty. I must confess that when I thought of Dickens possessing his Ellen Ternan, I envisioned a great man undone; a Lear perhaps, or an Agamemnon; a strong, powerful man reduced to nothing by
la belle dame sans merci
.

At the end of the rehearsal, as the cast, in high spirits, was breaking up, he took me aside, his co-conspirator.

“I must see the girl’s mother. She is in the custody of Inspector Field for questioning this night at Bow Street,” he said with that breathless excitement of the hunter in his voice. “I must observe her. That old whore is responsible for these attempts to debase her daughter; I am sure of it. Let us postpone our dinner. Let us take a cab to Bow Street directly. Let us hear the old bawd’s story for ourselves.”

He offered this agenda without the slightest doubt that I, as ever, would immediately assent, and that we two amateur detectives would hail a cab, and set off once again for another evening of underworld reality.

Thus, dear reader, you can only imagine how taken aback Dickens was when I declined his offer!

“I will not accompany you tonight.” Dickens’s eyebrows raised. “I am exhausted. I have barely slept in the last three days,” I lied. “Beyond that,” I continued in a weaseling way, “I am, temporarily, heartily sick of the sordidness of this affair, and, for this night at least, it is my desire to avoid hearing the protestations of that corrupt old whore. I need a respite from it, Charles. Tomorrow I will be a new man, your faithful bulldog, and we will walk out wherever you choose, but tonight I must decline.”

He shrugged, trying to hide his disappointment.

I must digress. I made feeble excuses because I could no longer stand the torments of my own fantasies. In truth, I did not accompany Charles to Bow Street because I had to see Irish Meg again.

Yet, I had no idea what I wanted to say. In no way had I been able to subdue my desire for her (yet no gentleman could allow himself to articulate such feelings for one of her debased station in life). Conversely, I had been totally unsuccessful in convincing myself to put her off. Rejecting her became a rejection of myself, of whatever potential for becoming a true novelist I entertained. I remembered Lemon’s favorite speech:
Banish Lemon, Banish Forster, Banish Dickens, Banish Field, but Banish Irish Meg Sheehey was something I could not do
.

The disappointment showed on Dickens’s face. He had come to take for granted that I would always consent to accompany him on whatever nocturnal adventure he chose. Yet, he was gracious: “You must come to
Household Words
tomorrow morning, and I will recount the old bawd’s story to you.”

“I’ll be there.” We shook hands resolutely upon it.

Despite my protestations of fatigue, I did not return to my empty flat. I set off at a brisk pace, hoping to collect my thoughts as I walked, toward Covent Garden.

The night air was damp and the streets were foggy. Ill-smelling winds blew off the Thames sending waste paper and biting clouds of dirt hurtling through the atmosphere. I had gotten so familiar with the West End streets from accompanying Dickens upon his night walks that I did not even have to think in my progress toward Covent Garden. The walk allowed me total preoccupation with my thoughts, yet when I arrived, I had made no progress whatsoever. I had learned to move with ease through the landscape of my outer world, but my inner world was like a labyrinth in which I felt irretrievably lost.

I felt confident that Irish Meg would be plying her trade in the vicinity of Covent Garden this night, either as an agent of Inspector Field or as a testament to her higher status due to Field’s sponsorship.

I took up a post in the deep black shadows of the mouth of a small mews opening into the wide back carriage court of the Covent Garden Theatre. Other whores strolled about. Horses coughed and stamped in the damp night air. Coachmen and postilions loitered about smoking and laughing to pass the time.
What if she has already enticed a rich customer
, the thought festered. A gnarled flowerwoman scuttled across the court, singing “Derry Derry Da, Derry Da, Derry Da,” in a mad wavering voice.

As I watched from the darkness, I could not help but think of how I was creating a kind of fiction. I had often felt I was a character in one of Dickens’s novels, but this night I was no longer Dickens’s character; I had become my own. Yet, I was still but a character in a fiction, not yet real.

Three gaslamps in a line down the middle of the court struggled against the blackness of the sky, and the shifting clouds of fog. The haloed light dropped bright cones of illumination to the bases of the posts upon which they were mounted. Only the aimless whores and the loitering servants moved in and out of these tiny islands of artificial light. I stepped for a moment out of the shadows, and consulted my new gold repeater. Back in the shelter of the dark, I calculated that
Macbeth
was still in the fourth act.

And then she was there.

I had glanced away for but a brief moment and somehow she had materialized beneath the center lamppost. She leaned, with her back to the post, as if that narrow cone of light was her enchanted circle. She wore her usual exceedingly low-cut gown. The whiteness of the tops of her breasts reflected like a pool upon which the tigerish beauty of her face floated. The gaslight caught her hair and set it aflame. She posed, motionless, the stuff of men’s dark dreams. My eyes were drawn to her as a ship to the Lodestone Rock, or a sailor to a siren’s song.

Things never work out in reality the way one envisions them in dreams. I started forward out of the shadows of my place of concealment to greet her. However, as I moved toward her in the fog, she straightened and greeted a figure emerging from the backstage door of the theatre. I recognized Tally Ho Thompson as he sauntered languidly into Meg’s lamp light, and lit a cigar by means of a Lucifer struck upon the post.

Since I wished to speak to Meg alone, I quickly withdrew once again into the shadows. I remembered that Thompson’s character died violently in Act Three; thus, his evening’s work was completed. They engaged in quite natural-looking conversation. I wondered if they were both still on duty for Inspector Field. The only hint of intimacy occurred when she reached for Thompson’s cigar, took it from his hand, and drew deeply upon it. They both laughed as she exhaled a large puff of grey smoke.

Impatient, I abandon my safe shadows, and once again started for Meg’s charmed circle of light. My intention was to lure her away from her conversation with Thompson by means of some pretext. Before I had advanced more than five steps, the whole composition of the scene changed.

A tall buxom woman suddenly stepped out of the shadows to stand glaring at the two of them. She pointed at Thompson, and began to scream in short violent bursts.

“Oi’ve ’eerd yee’re han hactor on stage. ’At makes yew too good for the likes o’ me, don’ it now?”

The heads of both Thompson and Irish Meg snapped around to look at the screaming woman. I stopped in my tracks, half in shadow, half out.

“Or mebbe yew like yee’re fine uptown ’ores better, his that hit?” The woman, her face livid, spat her accusing question at Thompson.

“Bess, wot’s wrong?” Thompson tried to placate this flaming virago. “I’m workin’ for Fieldsy. I ’aven’t been able to drop in at Rats’ Castle because I’m on a job for Fieldsy. Hit was this or Newgate, you see.”

“Yee belong in Newgate for talkin’ to the likes o’ this slut.”

Irish Meg recoiled at the insult, but quickly recovered. “You dirty ’ore,” Meg hissed back, “you smell of the scum of the river where yee’ll end up, floatin’ with the other dust.”

At that, in blind jealousy and rage, Scarlet Bess, screaming vile words, which I cannot reproduce even in this private memoir, advanced upon Irish Meg, as one might imagine the Yorkshire Ripper vaulting out of the mist upon his unsuspecting victim.

There was madness, but there was also something exotic and strangely comic about her headlong charge. Thompson took a placating stance in front of Irish Meg, both hands upraised. Scarlet Bess launched herself at him from a yard or two away, and the speed of her charge took them both to the ground, where she proceeded to flail wildly at his head and shoulders with both her small fists.

I stood, mouth agape, a motionless spectator.

Thompson, wrestling her roughly across his body, extricated himself from her fists.

Meggy, inadvisedly, grabbed handfuls of Scarlet Bess’s blazing hair, and dragged that virago across the stones away from Tally Ho Thompson, who righted himself, displaying the most inexplicable reaction that I could imagine.

He arose laughing, gasping out great shouts of hilarity, as the two whores rolled on the ground, pummelling each other and tearing at each other’s hair. Curiously, Thompson made no motion to intervene. He simply stepped back, and watched them fight.

Irish Meg got in the first yanks and chops, but Scarlet Bess was much taller and stronger, and, when she righted herself after Meg’s initial mastery from behind, proved more than a formidable foe. When she got to her feet, and turned to fight, her face was so twisted with pain and jealousy and rage, that she looked like one of the damned in Scarlatti’s disturbing illustrations of Hall’s English translation of Dante’s
Inferno
.

She descended upon Irish Meg like some rabid animal, clawing, tearing, flailing her fists madly. Meg was not prepared for so fierce an onslaught, and was driven to the ground. She did, however, manage to grasp her attacker about the legs, and drag her down to the paving stones as well.

I advanced upon the two women rolling about on the ground. Each was struggling to regain her feet. As Scarlet Bess got to her knees, Irish Meg lunged up, and managed a rather stiff handful of the front of Bess’s gown. The whole top of the larger woman’s dress came away in Meg’s hand and, when released, fluttered in tatters at Scarlet Bess’s waist. The result was the complete exposure of Scarlet Bess’s more than impressive breasts. Thompson’s eyes went wide, and an angelic grin spread across his face. I, once again, felt anchored in my boots, knowing not what to do.

Instinctively (out of a momentary modesty), Scarlet Bess hugged herself, all arms and elbows, in the attempt to cover the rolling milky expanse of her exposed breasts. With Bess’s arms thus involved, Irish Meg seized the opportunity to scramble to her feet, and, standing over the other, drew back and hit her in the face with her closed fist.

Scarlet Bess reeled backward, her arms splaying out as if she were being mounted on a cross. She shook her head once, twice, and then, much to Meg’s surprise, struggled to her feet, bare breasts gloriously unattended, to once again square off. Now her face was no longer twisted in jealousy and hate, but had gone cold and murderous. She advanced upon Irish Meg, claws crook’d before her, fangs bared.

Meg, wisely, decided to retreat. She turned to run, but was not quick enough. With a wild dive, Scarlet Bess grasped two handfuls of the back of Irish Meg’s skirts and dragged her to the ground.

In a frantic effort to escape the mad virago’s grasp, Meg attempted to crawl away on her hands and knees, but succeeded only in causing the whole bottom portion of her gown to tear away. Since, as befits her profession, she typically wore few, if any, fitted underclothes (and this being an “if any” evening), there she was crawling away across the stones gloriously naked from the waist down. I must admit that an irresistible heat began to gather in my body as I observed these two women, their clothes in such total disarray. A crowd began to gather, coachmen, postilions, the other whores. No one seemed in the least inclined to intervene.

Cockney yells of “The big ’un ’ull taker ’er!” and “The Irish wench fights for her life!” and “A bob says hits the one with the bouncin’ bubs!” and “tuppence on that bare white arse!” They were actually placing wagers on the outcome of this catfight.

I looked at Tally Ho Thompson.

He grinned back stupidly at me.

“We must do something!” I shouted above the din of the crowd. “This is barbaric.”

“What ho, barbaric!” he pushed through the crowd to my side.

“We must stop them,” I persisted. “They’ll kill each other.”

“No such chance,” Thompson talked through his ever-present smug grin. “Wenches only kill their men and their ’usbands.”

He seemed quite proud of this observation. My amazed silence evidently persuaded him to continue to wax philosophical.

“There can’t be,” he continued, “no better show than two mad ’ores in a good fight. Hit ’as ev’rything! Sex. Violence. Flesh. Blood. Where else can you see a broad white arse like that ’un” (as Irish Meg careened by on her hands and knees) “stickin’ out with its owner payin’ no attention to hit (or to yew)? This is just where it really gits good,” he protested, “when they start pullin’ each other’s bubs, an’ slappin’ each other’s bums, an’ tearin’ out great swatches of ’air.”

I glared at him in disbelief. I considered shaking that stupid unconcerned grin off his face. He must have caught the displeasure in my look, because he quickly changed his careless stance.

“Seems a shame we’re goin’ to ’ave to step in,” he admitted grudgingly, “but I guess we will.”

At that very moment, Irish Meg lunged at Scarlet Bess’s face with the probable intention of clawing out her eyes. She missed her mark but her sharp nails raked down across her adversary’s neck and bared breasts, leaving long reddening welts which turned almost immediately to scarlet lines of blood. Driven to madness by the sight of her own bleeding breasts, Bess struck out at Meg with a downward chop of her closed fist which caught that worthy on the side of the neck and drove her with great force into the cobbled ground.