The Detective and Mr. Dickens (2 page)

“’Ee ’onored me with ’is friendship,” Field was gravely saying.

“He honored us all.”

The awkward silence ebbed back in.

The desire not to mourn alone built within me. It didn’t seem right to just shake hands, throw off a meaningless “So nice to see you again” fare-thee-well, and then go our separate ways. I think Field felt the same attraction for my company. We lingered in the awkward silence of the street.

“Let’s have a wake,” a voice, which turned out to be my own, said. It was an inspiration that could have come from only one source. I felt his presence as palpably as if he were standing there in the street. “We’ll have a pint in his memory.” I was positively grinning, as if Dickens were elbowing me in the ribs at the hilarity of the idea.

Field smiled again—twice in mere minutes. That was more than he normally budgeted for a month. “Least we can do, two old campaigners, lift a glass to a departed chum.”

We found a quiet table in the window of The Merry Thistle. Field stood his stick in the corner. It was a straight one, thin and shiny black with a fierce knob on the top. I’d seen him use it as if it was an extension of his body.

Our pints arrived, plus a small portion of Irish whiskey. “It’s been a strong day, so we might as well ’ave strong drink,” he said.

“To ‘the Inimitable,’” I toasted. Violently he threw off his glass, then chased it with a generous draught of bitter. I sipped mine. The whiskey seemed to loosen and relax him.

“Remember the Mannings? That’s where I first met ’im…and you, when we ’ung ’em. The Mannings were my case.”

“Yes, how could I forget a night and morning like that?”

“As long as I live I’ll never forget the way ’ee looked at me that first time, as if I was a scarf or a bowler ’at or a pair of gloves in a store window. ’Ee ’ad this look on ’is face and this gleam in ’is eye that seemed to ask, I could almost ’ear it, ‘Will ’ee fit? Is this my man? Is ’ee well made? Will ’ee hold up and wear well? Is ’ee in style?’”

“It’s the way
you
look at people when
you’re
sizing them up. It is your look that says, ‘I’ll have you in my custody soon, no doubt.’”

“I suppose it is.”

“If he hadn’t met you, he surely would have invented someone like you.”

“’Ee did invent someone like me. Bucket indeed!”

“You never liked that name, did you?”

“A silly name for a detective. I told ’im as much, and ’ee just laughed. ‘Ah,’ ’ee said then, and ’is eyes told me ’ee was jokin’, ‘but not a bad name for a receptacle for the garbage of society.’ All I could do was shake my ’ead. ‘Bucket indeed!’ was all I could say. Then ’ee laughed, and clapped me on the back, and said, ‘You’re a good friend, Field. Bucket’s just a jumble of words on a page.’” Field was a great mimic. His imitation caught the playful tenor of Dickens’s voice. ‘
Inimitable’ indeed!

The waiter brought two more small glasses of the Tolla-more Dew.

“I’ll never forget ’ow, months later, ’ee just walked in one night off the streets. Just walked in and said ‘Owdeedo’ as if we wuz expectin’ ’im, looked ’round as if waitin’ for someone to kiss ’is ring or ’is sleeve or ’is arse, for God’s sake.”

Field’s animated telling had me laughing then. Despite the day, the death, it couldn’t be helped.

“I busied myself with my pipe while ’ee looked ’round,” Field went on, “takin’ everythin’ in, in that detective’s way ’ee ’ad. I think you were right behind ’im, a stout drippin’ young fellow, ’oldin’ a waterlogged bumber, and wearin’ fogged spectacles.”

“The blind leading the blind.” We were both smiling in the memory.

“Finally ’ee spotted me, and marched right over with ’is hand outstretched sayin’, ‘Field old man, ’ow are you?’ as if we’d been friends for years. Everyone in the station ’ouse recognized ’im immediately. They were significantly impressed. For weeks after, I was really quite a ’ero, ’eld some what in awe for my ’eye connections. ‘Field old man’ indeed. That’s ’ow it all began Collins. You remember it, don’t you?”

“Field old man,” I tried to imitate the voice, but I couldn’t do it nearly as well. “I don’t remember if I was there that first time, but I can hear him saying it nonetheless.”

“Do you ever see ’er?” he inquired.

“Quite often,” I answered. “She stayed near him to the end.”

He nodded.

I saw my opportunity. “What went on in the chapel at St. Mark’s that night?” I said, mustering the courage to ask. “Why did you let her go without even so much as an inquiry?”

“That was about all you weren’t in on durin’ that case, I’d say. I let ’er go because I’d taken a likin’ to ’im, and I saw from the beginnin’ ’ow valuable ’ee could be to me. ’Ee ’as been exactly that valuable over the years. You know of much of that.”

Indeed I do
, I thought.
Indeed I do
.

We two old soldiers spent the greater part of that afternoon in that warm pub. The waiter brought us pints of beer. We remembered it all. It was a fitting wake.

As we were leaving, Field, adjusting his sharp hat and picking up his murderous stick, looked at me and said: “’Ee was the most creative detective I ever knew. ’Ee would ’ave worn well in my line.”

That conversation with Inspector Field set me thinking of the sort of memorial that I, a writer of novels, might make to my dead friend. I went home that day, and started a new commonplace book, but not one of the usual sort. I began writing a record of events that had happened more than twenty years before, a record of the man only I, Inspector Field, and, of course, his beloved Ellen, knew.

At the Raree-Show

Nov. 12-13, 1849

Dickens first met Inspector Field at a public hanging. It was an event of great notoriety, the execution of the murderess Sylvia Manning and her sniveling husband.
*

It was a foggy November, fog everywhere, fog invading one’s very pores. Charles was working on
David Copperfield
, at a pace which left all of us in awe. I was one of Dickens’s “new-found friends,” as that petulant boor, Forster, would say to Dickens. “Your new-found friend, young Wilkie, is a ubiquitous presence lately, is he not?”—followed by some fragmentary remark about “clinging vines” generally turning out to be “climbers.” I never have, through all the years, gotten on well with Forster. He and I were often in each other’s company and always civil, but it was no secret that neither was comfortable in the presence of the other. Dickens was attached to each of us for different reasons. Forster was his closest advisor and confidant. I was his court jester and dining companion; he liked me with him when we walked out at night because I was young and stout. What lurking robber was going to accost a tall man with a powerful stride accompanied by a wide-shouldered, thick-wristed bulldog?

As we walked, he noticed everything, pointed out the smallest details, the light on the water, sinister bills posted on dirty walls, shadowy wretches slouching into dark byways, or sleeping in doorways. He was constantly making writing plans. “I can use this place,” he would say, as we looked out over the Thames from the railing on London Bridge. Or, “That sound, mark it, it’s perfect!” he would exclaim, as a posh coach, its velvet curtains drawn tight, clattered past, and was swallowed by the fog, only to leave its receding sound lingering in the air. None of our night walks were ever planned. The night of the Manning hanging, however, was different.

Leech, his illustrator, suggested it. It was to be a historical moment in the annals of London crime and
Punch
had commissioned Leech to capture this triumph of British justice, morality, and barbarism. Leech invited Dickens to accompany him to the hanging, and Charles, in turn, invited me.

“Leech will be at his sketchbook the whole time,” he insisted. “You must come, Wilkie, I’ll need support in this.”

As usual, he was manifestly right.

Though the expedition had been Leech’s idea, once underway, it became Dickens’s project. He made all the arrangements, like some playwright blocking out the movements of his actors. He reserved space for our dinner, and rented space on a rooftop overlooking the gallows so that our view would be unobstructed.

“Young Wil,” he said excitedly, “it is going to be a night we will all remember.”
Night indeed!
In all his planning, he only overlooked one small detail: sleep! When I had the temerity to point out that his schedule demanded we remain awake all night, he snorted once, then chuckled slyly. “I’ll wager it is not the first time you’ve watched the sun rise, Wilkie, in rather unwholesome circumstances.”

The hanging was to be carried out at dawn on November thirteenth, but our plan was to spend the night at the site of the command performance. Both Forster and William Wills, a man Dickens had met at the
Daily News
, joined our party that evening. At Dickens’s urging, we all muffled up, and walked out to dinner. On the way, Dickens engaged Forster and Wills in animated conversation concerning a plan for a new periodical, a weekly, that he wanted to start up. Leech and I walked silently behind, he carrying a small carpetbag containing his sketchbooks and the utensils of his trade.

“We’ll call it
The Shadow,”
Dickens insisted to Forster and this Wills person, who seemed the real target of his arguments. “To bind it all together will be the ubiquity of its conductor, a mysterious personality called the Shadow, who may go into any place by sunlight, moonlight, starlight, firelight, candlelight, gaslight—who may be in the theatre, in the palace, the House of Commons, the prisons, the churches, the railroad, in the sea, in every dirty byway and crumbling tenement and pestilent alley of every rookery and rats’ castle of this great verminous sinkhole of London. I want him to loom as a fanciful thing, so that everybody, from the Queen to the most destitute crossing sweep, will be wondering, ‘What will the Shadow say about this? Is the Shadow here? Does the Shadow know?’ I have not breathed this idea to anyone, but I have a lively hope that it
is
an idea, and that out of it the whole scheme may be hammered.”

Wills seemed interested.

Forster scoffed. “Sounds like the scheme for some profane novel!” he barked. “
Adventures of a Fly on the Wall of a Gentleman’s Brothel.”

“Ah, are you conversant with that species of literature, old man?” Dickens teased him. Little did we know that there already was such a shadow as Dickens had described in London, and we would meet him for the first time that very night.

We supped in a private room at the Piazza Coffee House, Covent Garden, just a bit after eleven p.m., on smoked chops with boiled potatoes, a steaming cauliflower with cheese melted atop it, and a delicate plum pudding. We smoked cigars as we walked over Hungerford Bridge to Horsemonger Lane Gaol, the site of the executions. The closer we approached the actual scene of the evening’s entertainment, the more subdued Dickens became. It was almost as if he were having second thoughts about all the elaborate arrangements for the celebration of such an inhumane event. But he was never one to back away from experience or reality, and we pressed on, though not the jolly troupe we had been earlier.

We went first to inspect our perch on the rooftop. The landlord had dragged every available stick of furniture out for the accommodation of his influential (not to mention highpaying—he had charged Dickens two guineas for each of us) guests. Below, at the closed end of the street, built against the front gate of the gaol, stood the gallows. The gibbet posts and the crossbar shown silver grey in the cold moonlight, and cast skeletal shadows against the white stone of the high gaolhouse wall. The crowd had already gathered in the street, and the wardens of the gaol and a detachment of Metropolitan Protectives had thrown up barriers around the sinister scaffolding to keep the crush of people some small distance from the gallows itself.

Dickens’s plan had been for us to walk down amongst the spectators to observe their behavior, and, perhaps, even collect their opinions of the event. But none of our party seemed immediately so inclined. That gallows, ghostly in the moonlight, sobered us. We sat in the landlord’s chairs and finished our cigars. Only Leech showed any inclination toward activity. His hands were already moving across the first
tabula rasa
of his sketchbook.

The crowd below grew increasingly restless. Sounds of impatience and anger and laughter and obscene flirtation floated up. The street was flooded with humanity, and it was still five hours until dawn. Leech’s pencils flew over his pages.

“Let us descend into this inferno,” Dickens said, finally breaking in on our private rooftop reveries. “We didn’t come here to sit brooding over our cigars like a tribe of tired old voyeurs.”

“Ah, by all means,” Forster piped up, sarcastically.

“Maybe we can wangle an interview with Jack Ketch.”
*

Dickens ignored him. We descended the tenement staircase, but at the street door to Horsemonger Lane we were stopped momentarily by a crush of bodies moving in a slow stream. It was an unruly crowd. There were constables in blue uniforms everywhere, each carrying a bright bull’s-eye.
*
Even as we were pushing our way out of the door, a young woman, carrying a basket, slipped to her knees or was pushed in the street. Before she could right herself, the crowd came on and trampled over her like some blind Juggernaut. She would have died but for a young bobbie who rushed in swinging his bull’s-eye like Samson’s jawbone through the unfeeling crowd to where the poor girl lay stunned on the grimy stones. She was dazed and breathless, but, aside from a few rising bruises, seemed to have no serious injuries. Her basket was gone forever, crushed, then carried off like shattered jetsam on the human tide. It was a warning to beware the ugly wave that could engulf us and batter us into shipwrecked splinters. We made our way toward the gallows, which rose above the crowd like some perverted altar. More than once, I was forced to shove an uncouth ruffian out of our way, who would turn with a murderous glare and his hand rising to strike. But each immediately noticed that we were gentlemen, and backed away snarling, but unwilling to risk attacking us. Leech disappeared almost immediately upon our entering the street. He was sketching madly. Foul language floated in the air. Dirty clots of people had staked out their territories for viewing the proceedings. All were drinking openly, and howls were raised from time to time, which could remind one only of that place where such disturbing sounds were commonplace—Bedlam.
*