The Detective and Mr. Dickens (29 page)

The Circle convened on the twenty-fifth day of March, 1851, at eight of the evening. Lord Edgeley had contrived to kidnap the young woman who had been discussed in our previous meeting and promptly convened the meeting of the Circle as he held her against her will in the basement of his city house near St. James Park. Twelve members accepted his invitation upon the assurance that she was but fifteen years of age, fresh from the country and exquisitely endowed with virgin charms as well. Full access to each of her different virginities was promised by the usual method of the drawing of lots. I was fortunate enough to draw her mouth and the number one. The girl was terrified but the continuous assaults upon her charms soon subdued her.

What followed was a meticulous account of the group rape of this kidnap victim by the assembled membership of the Dionysian Circle. Dickens, however, quickly pointed to the final paragraph:

The lot has fallen to me as the convener of the next meeting of the Circle. I have been instructed to procure the delicacies for the satisfaction of each of our various appetites and to appropriately plan and choreograph the entertainments of the evening. I have in mind a play, a play in which the members of the Circle are both audience and actors, a theatre of the lewd, with the actresses playing their roles and the male members of the Circle taking the stage as actors, a theatre of the real where the purely physical drama is not simulated but is actually performed for an audience, where art meets the fever of the hidden life. I must choose the proper location for my stage. There must be room for the audience and abundant light so that the actors’ motions can be closely observed. The Notting Hill Gate estate would be the best but the Kensington house would also serve quite well as would the rented apartments in Soho if they are still available. Those details shall be attended to after my cast is obtained and I have written my script.

With that prefiguration of the next meeting, the diary runs out.

“The names of some of the most powerful men of the realm are mentioned in this book,” Inspector Field observed.

“This is indeed a very exclusive and aristocratic circle of pleasure seekers, and the richness of their tastes in entertainment is matched only by the richness of their purses,” Dickens assented.

“’Tis a delicate group to deal with,” Field seemed almost hesitant.

“He means her to be the actress in his play. We must find her, before they do to her what they have done to all of these women before,” Dickens said, and slammed the small green leather book down on the desk. “Partlow, Paroissien, this Dionysian Circle of rakes, they seek women out, force them to play their parts, and when a woman refuses to follow the script, they bend her to their will. Ellen is innocent of that murder. That is clear to me. She was defending her honor, refusing to play their lewd part.”

Field glanced quickly at me, a look of rather strained tolerance on his face.

“Yes, we must find ’er,” Field finally assented, “but we must also be careful in ’ow we go about it. We are dealing with very powerful men. Our first charge must be to locate and place under twenty-four ’our watch each of Ashbee’s residences.”

Inspector Field deposited into the inner recesses of his capacious greatcoat the three small diaries. That done, I fully expected the order to break off our little experiment in housebreaking and withdraw, but one other avenue yet remained to be explored.

Field moved quickly across the secret library to the door in the back corner. “We must ’ave you open, we must,” he muttered. With that he reached into the mysterious recesses of his magical greatcoat and extracted a shiny object which resembled a teaspoon with the exception that half of its bowl was cut away and the remaining edge was triply notched. Inserting this into the keyhole of the locked door, he turned it slowly backward and forth until, with a tinny snap, the spring gave and the final secret of Lord Henry Ashbee’s house opened unto us. Field gave the door one small push with his massive forefinger and it swung silently open on well-oiled hinges to reveal…a pit of darkness.

What that pit of darkness turned out to be was an extremely narrow stairway descending into the bowels of Ashbee’s house. We needed Rogers and his trusty bull’s-eye, but Inspector Field chose not to summon him. Instead, he made for the desk, and pulled three candles and a box of Lucifers out of a small side drawer. “Saw ’em when I searched the desk,” he explained. “Wondered why one drawer was filled with candles.”

We each in turn lit a candle, and, with Field in the lead, began our descent. As I took my first timorous step down into that dark stairwell behind the fearless Inspector and Dickens, my hand was shaking so badly that the light on the walls fluttered and flapped like public school boys at their morning exercises.

The stairway led downward beneath the house exactly twenty-two steps. We descended slowly, alert for man-traps which may have been rigged for intruders. At the bottom opened outwards an underground passageway, floored in stone with walls and ceiling of packed dirt buttressed by thick beams, rocks and heavy wooden planks. There was moisture on the rocks of the side walls, but the stone floor was dry. The tunnel appeared rather well engineered. It was a narrow passage, and barely high enough for a man to traverse without bending. Dickens had to stoop the whole way. We proceeded with our candles fluttering ever so slightly in the soft underground air currents.

The tunnel led from the house, beneath the back garden to the carriage house, a rather spacious (since Lord Ashbee had three coaches of different sizes and shapes) outbuilding which opened onto a tree-lined carriage path. A narrow stairway ascended to this carriage house. The underground passageway, however, continued on. When we reached this juncture, Field decided to ascend the steps, and inspect the carriage house.

It was an expansive functional building. Completely open within, its four roof support pillars effectively partitioned off the three carriage stalls (the stables were immediately adjacent). As we emerged from the stairwell, we first, before passing on to the open gravel carriage floor, were obliged to pass through the harness room which exuded a heavy musk of leather, saddle soap and neat’s-foot oil. Passing through that spider’s web of hanging reins, drying tack and harness of varying sizes and functions, we emerged on the carriage house floor. A racy black phaeton crouched in the area against the right wall. To our left, a more sedate private hansom sat patiently, an intimate closed carriage suitable for quiet evening rides through the suburban parks. The widest of the three stalls, in the center, was empty. Inspector Field went to one knee to examine the ruts in the gravel of this empty berth.

“A large and ’eavy coach rested ’ere,” Field decided. “When it was pulled out, it was much ’eavier still. We are lookin’ for a Brighton stage, I think, drawn by four ’orses, a vehicle suitable for long journeys.

“They departed from here then?” Dickens asked.

“So it seems,” Field answered. “Shut up so that no one could observe.”

“It was she, the Ternan girl, he was hiding,” Dickens’s voice was grim with the certainty of it.

Field nodded in agreement. His forefinger flicked at the side of his eye.

“Nothing else ’ere,” he finally declared. “We must follow that tunnel to its end.”

With that he turned decisively, marched to the head of the stairwell, Dickens and myself in close pursuit, and paused to relight his candle, before descending once again into the darkness.

The underground passage continued further to a terminus in another flight of narrow stairs. The door at the top of the steps contained an elaborate hinged peek-hole. The door was unlocked and gave entrance to a circular room (upon stepping outside through the building’s only door we found that it was a shuttered gazebo set in the midst of a heavily wooded, totally secluded forest glade). The room was furnished with rounded couches which fit precisely the contours of the walls, small tables to hold refreshments, and a large circular bed precisely in its center.

“A place for secret sport,” Field speculated, glancing at Dickens.

“The bed is almost like a stage,” Dickens rasped, “a place for performances to be viewed by an audience seated all around.”

“This special room, the underground passageway, it is a place specially built for arrivin’ and leavin’ without bein’ seen. Ashbee ’eld ’is more exotic affairs in this room,” Inspector Field ruminated aloud. “Milord certainly goes to great lengths to keep ’is peculiar lifestyle secret, don’t ’ee?” Field finished with a cynical chuckle that said ’
is secrets won’t be secret for long if I’ve got any say in it
.

“He’s an inhuman fiend,” Dickens spoke with slow intense heat. “He must be stopped.”

Lord Ashbee’s secret life had, indeed, been unearthed, but the man himself, and the girl Ellen Ternan, had flown. That house had given up all its secrets. Now, if those secrets could be properly decoded, they could lead us to the nobleman-rake and the actress-murderess who was either his prisoner, or his willing whore. We made our way back through the woods to our secreted coach. To our great surprise, another coach had pulled up beside ours. Constable Rogers and Tally Ho Thompson leaned against this second coach, smoking and whispering to another black-coated, stiff-hatted constable. The Ashbee butler, still blissfully unconscious, lay cuffed to a wheel on the ground.

“Well, Gatewood,” Field barked. “Well, where are they? Where did the coach go?”

The man, Constable Gatewood, faced Inspector Field with the look of a man facing the guillotine. “We lost ’im, sir,” he admitted.

A look of inexpressible loss and despair tore at Dickens’s eyes, drew his lips backward in a painful gasp of fear.

“We was blocked by a wagon driven by one of ’is ’irelings.” Gatewood described it, though no one but me seemed to be listening. “On the ’eye-road into London. We searched but we could not pick up the trail.”

“We’ll pick up the trail, don’t you worry,” Field said, patting the purloined notebooks in his greatcoat pocket.

*
In Steven Marcus’s
The Other Victorians
, Henry Ashbee is identified as the biggest collector of pornography in nineteenth-century England. This came to light after Ashbee’s death when his estate was being inventoried. Marcus even speculates that Ashbee is the author of
My Secret Life
, the 4000-page sexual autobiography of a prominent Victorian gentleman. None of the Dickens biographies examine the possibility that these two very different kinds of mid-Victorian writers knew of each other or could possibly have influenced each other. The greatest novelist and the greatest pornographer of the Victorian age in close proximity could point to a mode of influence no Dickens scholar has yet explored.

Not So Good As We Seem

May 10, 1851—evening

This memoir now begins to move apace. Events tumbled so rapidly upon one another, that neither Dickens nor myself had time for cool deliberation upon our roles in the drama. Dickens’s responsibilities, to
Household Words
, to his play in rehearsal for the Queen’s benefit, to his family, pressed upon him while, simultaneously, Inspector Field pressed the hunt for the young woman, who was, I greatly suspected, the one responsibility which, for Dickens, overshadowed all of the others.

As for me, thoughts of Irish Meg preyed upon my mind. She was not at my flat when I returned from our little adventure in house burglary. She had let herself out, leaving no message. I had great difficulty sleeping that night. She danced in my waking dreams, threatening to expose every flaw in my hypocritical “gentleman’s” disguise.

Tossing upon that barren bed across that long night, I realized that both Dickens and myself were pursuing our darker selves, in the forms of these elusive women. Both Dickens and myself were attempting to prove our courage (I as lover? he as protector?). We were attempting to express those inexpressible desires, which our very age refused to acknowledge as even existing. The revelations offered up by Milord’s secret library had been shocking and profound. They tortured my faculties that long and sleepless night. How different in our longings after our Ellens and our Meggys were Dickens and myself from Ashbee? How different in wanting to act out exalted romantic fantasies, or stage much darker dramas?

I did not come to my senses until the lights went up on our makeshift stage in the music room at Devonshire House that evening. The rehearsal of
Not So Bad As We Seem
went well. Dickens conducted it briskly. He acted his scenes with a grim intent, as if he felt some relief at being able to lose himself in his other stage selves: the demanding stage manager, the actor, the character in Bulwar’s play, a Lord of the Realm caught in somewhat embarrassing circumstances. Yet, he moved through the rehearsal without his usual humor, his quick and cutting wit. It was as if he were suppressing a restless agitation of the soul which longed for some resolution.

Forster was his usual dour self, sleepwalking through his part. Mark Lemon did his usual cutting up (falling to his knees and pleading in the terms of Falstaff’s “Banish” speech when he forgot or misremembered his lines). Dickens, however, seemed oddly unaffected, aloof from all the little nuances which make life on the stage a worthwhile lark. It was as if we were all apparitions in one of his dreams, and he was waiting for the moment when he would awaken from us, and reenter the real world.