The Detective and Mr. Dickens (5 page)

We shook hands heartily. Needless to say I was stunned at the unerring accuracy of his memory.

His eyes took on a mischievous glint: “You don’t seem to be wearin’ your elegant pocketwatch this evenin’. It must be a ’eavy trinket to carry around everyday?”

“Interesting you should ask,” I said, as I walked, unsuspecting, into his trap. “I seem to have lost it. About a month ago, it just disappeared. I awoke one morning, and as I dressed I realized that I had misplaced it somewhere. Strange, never did turn up.”

“Been out the evenin’ before?” Field inquired sharply.

Dickens stood with an aggravating grin of amusement on his face.

“Why, yes?” My answer was really a question.
What business is it of yours, Mister Policeman?

“Where to, if I might inquire?”

“Why, I had attended an excellent
George Barnwell
at Drury Lane.”

“Crush in the aisles and exitways to the street on the way out?”

“Of course, as always. It was a well-attended play.”

With a sharp movement, Inspector Field administered a light, comradely tap to my chest with the forefinger of his right hand and declared, “Not lost or misplaced, Wilkie. Picked off right there in the crowd at the theatre. The Doncaster Swell Mob was workin’ the West End about that time. We actually nabbed two of ’em outside Covent Garden Opera ’Ouse but all of the others got away. I’ll wager the rest of this month’s wages your watch is for sale right now in a fence’s store in Calais or Edinburgh or Dublin.”

I stood mouth agape in amazement. Not only had the man remembered me, my watch, and my person from a single meeting fifteen months before, but he had just convinced me with utter certainty to the time and place when my watch was stolen, and of its probable thief.

“Good show, Field,” Dickens smiled broadly.

“You remember Rogers,” Field addressed Dickens, presenting the constable who had been standing silently by his side throughout my interrogation.

“Of course, of course,” Dickens said, shaking hands jovially.

I had no recollection of Rogers being with Field at the hanging in Horsemonger Lane, yet Dickens and he were shaking hands like old friends. Then it dawned on me. This wasn’t the first time he had visited this station house, as he had led me to believe.

Dickens and I were graciously tendered the two remaining easy chairs before the fire, and Field supplied us each with a steaming cup of ferocious black coffee brewed in a hanging pot on the hearth. We sat warming by that fire for more than an hour while Dickens plied Field with questions. That worthy talked earnestly of his work, described the cases he was pursuing at the moment. It was the intellectual exercises that Field performed on the track of a criminal that Dickens wanted to understand.

Myself and most of the rest of London would be allowed to share Dickens’s interest in the subject over the course of that year. By midsummer, Dickens’s series of articles on the Metropolitan Protectives would begin appearing in
Household Words
. The third of those articles, titled “The Science of Detecting,” would be a composite account of Dickens’s conversations with Field that very night. Another, titled “A Night At the Station house,” would describe the premises and procedures of the Bow Street Station. But, as we sat by that cozy fire, those articles were still some five months in the future. For Dickens’s part, it was no secret that he was pumping Field for information, and, on Field’s own part, it was clear that he was willingly allowing himself to be pumped. I don’t think Field ever envisioned how famous he would become when Dickens put his pen to work later that year in the
Household Words
articles, and then still later when Dickens used Field as the template for the first full-fledged professional detective in English fiction.

“Inspector Field.” The desk constable opened the door and interrupted our congenial host. “She’s entered Rats’ Castle no more than ten minutes past. Looks to be spendin’ the night.”

“Thank you, Bush.” Field sent the Constable back to his post.

“What is it?” Dickens inquired.

“A break in a case we are presently pursuin’. A woman we want to talk with ’as been spotted enterin’ one of ’er regular ’aunts.”

Whether it was the fire of curiosity in Dickens’s eye or Dickens’s almost extra-sensory ability to transfer his own thoughts into the minds of others, Field immediately proffered the invitation which Dickens craved.

“Gentlemen, would you be interested in accompanyin’ us? It is a raw night, but you might find this interestin’.”

“On the contrary, it is a fine night!” Dickens laughed, as he literally bounded to his coat and hat and walking stick.

Field and Rogers secreted truncheons in the inner pockets of their greatcoats, and Rogers took a large bull’s-eye down off its shelf. He tested the light once to make sure, and then led us out into a cold, heavy fog.

“The one we are after is a master thief, ’eyewayman and ’ousebreaker named Tally Ho Thompson,” Field explained. “’E got ’is name from ’is fancy ’orsemanship when ’ee was workin’ the roads up ’round Shooter’s ’Ill. ’Ee’s been in and out of our grasp three times in recent weeks, and now ’ee seems to ’ave disappeared off the face of the earth. But ’ee’s a reg’lar rogue with the ladies, and one of ’is favorites, one Scarlet Bess, ’as just checked into Rats’ Castle for the night. If we press ’er ’ard, mayhap she’ll tell where ’ee is. I doubt it. She’s an old ’and. Not easily tricked is Scarlet Bess Nisbet.”

Somewhere above us and to the right, in the grey blanket of fog, a church clock struck eleven.

“Saint Giles Church,” Field informed us with a certainty which the darkness of the night, the thickness of the fog, and the labyrinthine confusion of the streets immediately called into question.
How can he know that’s Saint Giles
, I scoffed.

“Aye, Saint Giles,” Rogers, swinging his bull’s-eye, agreed, “we’re almost to the rookery. Look sharp!”

Though one could barely see, the streets seemed narrower, more tortuous. Turning and stopping and turning again, we ascended small inclines, and then edged gingerly downhill, always moving relentlessly to our left as if the world had started to list in that direction. Suddenly, jabbing back with his bull’s-eye, Rogers brought us to a halt.

Only then did we get the opportunity to savour the particular attractions of the neighborhood. Sickening smells hung in the air of the labyrinthine cavern formed by the narrow streets and twisting alleyways of the rookery. The creaking sounds of houses getting ready to tumble down moaned softly in the foggy night.

A voice attached to a shambling rat-like creature materialized out of the fog, and addressed Rogers and Inspector Field. “She’s in there, guv, she is,” it said, and it stuck out its filthy hand.

“You’ve earned it tonight, Mike Slater,” Field said, filling that emaciated claw with a brown coin. The man’s rodent face, startled in the light of the bull’s-eye, opened into a toothless death’s-head grin.

“’Ook it, Mike,” Rogers ordered our informant, and the man scurried back to his hole.

“I must warn you Mister Dickens, Mister Collins,” Field’s voice was almost fatherly, “you may see and ’ear things ’ere which will disgust you or frighten you or cause you to look with despair on the reality of man’s fallen state. This is an ugly, evil place peopled with thieves, murderers, prostitutes, and the worst coves in the city of London. The men are animals, and the women are perversions of all that is chaste and respectable. We must go amongst these women. They will make lewd overtures and propositions. They may even take liberties in order to influence us. You may find this encounter ’eyely offensive.”

“Let us push on. Reality is something from which no writer should ever shrink,” Dickens asserted gamely. I personally wondered whether we were in for a rather heavier dose of reality than ordered, as had been the case at the Manning hanging.

Rogers led the way with his bull’s-eye.

“Close up now, gentlemen,” Field ordered. “Keep together. We are going down. ’Eads!”

We stopped as we descended a flight of rickety steps into a black, foul-smelling underworld. At the bottom of this filthy cistern, Rogers kicked in a locked door. We entered a dim, close cellar lit by a smoky fire and a few random candles set in waxen pools on dirty tables. The cellar was full of dangerous-looking people, chiefly young men in various conditions of raggedness. There were also women present.

When Inspector Field stepped through the doorway, the whole company went silent.

“’Ow are you tonight, lads? I’ve brought some company to see you tonight, ladies. Rats’ Castle is indeed busy this evenin’.” Field was not laughing as he moved between the tables. His sharp eyes noted every grimace of guilt and hate and fear on the face of every cringing felon in the room.

Though they were upwards of thirty and he but one, they cowered before him, laughed at his jokes, answered when he spoke.

As he passed among them, a large woman in a black dress laced loosely across her breasts, bolder than the others, rose to joke with Field. She pointed a finger at Dickens and myself. “Ye’ve brought us some juicy gentlemen, ’aven’t ye Inspector, sir?” the harlot taunted.

He smiled benignly, but with a quick sideways movement clasped the arm of another young woman.

“Ah, Scarlet Bess, I thought that was you. You’re the one I’ve come to see tonight.”

When he made his swift move and pulled the woman to her feet in the center of that crowd of ruffians, they could easily have overpowered him. But no one resisted his movement with Scarlet Bess in tow across the room. All present in Rats’ Castle were relieved that Inspector Field hadn’t come for them.

Bess struggled, but in Field’s firm grasp she was quickly subdued.

“Hi’e done nothink,” she protested. “Lamme go. You canna take
me
. Hi’ve done nothink.”

Field ignored her whining cries.

“Please, please doan let ’im take me,” she pleaded to the others as Field led her up to where we waited, with our backs to the door.

At closer view, Scarlet Bess proved a surprisingly handsome as well as exotic speciman, albeit dirty and rough. Her hair was long and brown and splashed in an unruly cascade about her face and neck. Her eyes, also brown and large, were somewhat reddened by drink. A sullen look of hate and fear twisted her full mouth. I hesitate to describe her appearance in more detail, but, heeding the dictum of Dickens my mentor that a true writer should not shrink from reality, I must go on. The one aspect of her appearance which could not be overlooked were the two capacious mounds straining at the laces of her bodice.

Field seemed to have her and the whole room, down to the scuttling rats, under his control. Yet, her calm was only momentary. In one last desperate spasm, she fell to her knees, clutching at Field’s legs and pleading for his mercy. Field remained unmoved by her histrionics. Twisting up hard on her wrist, he yanked her to her feet and thrust her through the opening left by the absence of the door which Rogers had shattered off its pegs.

I am sure that Dickens was as relieved as I to escape that pit of cutthroats. The taciturn Rogers, giving one final flash of his bull’s-eye across the restless surface of the room as a warning for its occupants to stay put, formed our rearguard.

Field, with his prize, led us up out of that underworld to a narrow back street which ultimately surfaced into a wider thoroughfare. There, he pulled up beneath the hazy light of a solitary streetlamp and confronted the woman.

“It’s Thompson I want, not you Bess,” Field said, facing her, still keeping firm hold of her wrist. “Where is your cove? Tell me and you’re free to ’ook it.”

“’Aven’t seen ’im in a fortnight.” Her voice was strange as she answered, no longer angry or desperate, but seductive. “You’ve taken me afore, Mister Field. ’Ee’s not my cove no more. What is it
you
want?”

“It’s Thompson I want,” Field repeated calmly.

With her free hand, the harlot suddenly clawed at the laces of her bodice. “No, hit’s this you want,” the creature crooned obscenely, as the top of her dress dropped to her waist. In the same motion, she pressed her body hard against Field’s chest.

With a swift punitive decisiveness, Field slapped her hard.

The creature recoiled away from him, the whiteness of her exposed breasts undulating in the saffron light of the fogbound gaslamp.

He dragged her into the shadows of a wall some yards away from us. “It’s Thompson I want, you little ’ore!” His voice was raised, slightly out of control. The disembodied murmuring of their lowered voices floated toward us out of the darkness.

The woman’s actions convinced both Dickens and myself that she was capable of any conceivable lewdness for the purposes of her criminal lover’s preservation. We agreed, as Lord Tennyson had said it in the violent rhythms of his great masterpiece, that she was indeed “Nature red in tooth and claw.” And yet, recollecting that scene later, we could not but feel pity and even responsibility for this woman and so many more like her who come up to London looking for a life and find instead only degradation. Our society, then and no less now, seems able to view women in only two widely separate ways, as respectable matrons or as whores. There should be some middle ground, some synthesis (as that curious German exile, Marx, who haunted the British Museum, might put it) of these opposing and limiting views of women. But in eighteen hundred fifty-one there were thousands of Scarlet Besses in London proper, and more arriving every day.