August 11, 1852—Evening
“Meggy? Miss Ternan? What is it? What is wrong?” I could see in their faces that my hopes for a quiet evening were dashed.
“Oh, Wilkie, you’ve got to help her.” Irish Meg opened her argument like a chancery solicitor. “Nellie is beside herself.”
How could I not see that? The annoyed question sparked in my mind. Why did she bring Nellie here? Why didn’t they go to Dickens? He is her guardian. These questions flooded through me and drowned my enthusiasm for this whole affair.
“Of course, of course, Meggy, I will help. Please, Miss Ternan, do not cry. Tell me what is the matter.”
Some hypocrite had taken possession of my tongue and was toadying shamelessly to these two women in utter disregard for my desire to simply recline upon the settee (which they had usurped) and doze off.
“Wilkie, it is very hard for her to tell.” Irish Meg spoke as if Miss Ternan had no voice of her own. “She is very—”
“Meggy!” I cut her off, unable to conceal my impatience. “Let her speak. Let her tell me what is wrong.”
Meg shot one of her withering looks at me, but did not proceed. Instead, she returned to comforting Nellie with an arm around her shoulder and her lips whispering in her ear.
“Miss Ternan,” I finally said in a quite even and controlled voice, “I am very sorry if I have been sharp, but it has been such a long and shocking day, and you and Meggy caught me by surprise. Please forgive me. I wish only to be of help. Please, tell me what is wrong and what I can do.”
She slowly raised her eyes to mine. They were filled with pain and fear. I was afraid that she was about to burst into tears again. But I was wrong. Somehow, she found her voice, though her words were fragmented and shaken.
“It…it…it is Eliza Lane…who was…oh lord…who was…murdered.” That last terrible word drove her to bury her face in her hands once again.
But Meggy, who had her firmly by the shoulders, purred in her ear, “It is all right Nellie, it is all right. You can tell him. He will understand and help us, he will.”
Thus bolstered, Miss Ternan raised her frightened eyes and, haltingly, attempted once again to speak.
“I saw her…the poor murdered girl…I was with her that afternoon. Oh, Mr. Collins…I’m so afraid they will think I killed her.”
With that frightened admission she again buried her head in Irish Meg’s shoulder, which was already wet with her tears.
Meggy’s and my eyes met. She must have seen the plea for help in mine because she gave me a quick nod and, in a gentle, almost motherly voice, coaxed Nellie back.
“You must tell him all of it, Nellie,” Meg cajoled. “He is the only one who can help us. Trust me, he will help. He is a good man.”
What my Meg said about me made me forget all of my fatigue and annoyance.
“Yes, tell me Nellie,” I responded to Meg’s challenge. “I am totally at your service.”
“It’s the…the scarf I fear,” her voice shook.
My eyes darted to Meggy’s, questioning.
“Tell him about the scarf,” Meggy whispered in her ear.
“Meggy said it was a bright green scarf,” Miss Ternan took up her narrative, seeming to steady a bit, “that killed Eliza.” She stopped briefly for breath, but did not break down. “I fear it is my scarf that killed her.”
“Yours? But how?” I suddenly felt terribly out of my depth.
“She took it away with her that afternoon.” Nellie seemed almost mesmerized by the narrative she felt compelled to spin out. “I gave it to her…as a present. She admired it, and she seemed so lost and unhappy, and then Meggy told me she was…choked with it.”
“But why were you together that afternoon?” I asked.
“That is the hard part to tell,” Meggy interceded. “It is sick and not Nellie’s fault.”
“What is it? You must tell me.” I turned my attention back to Miss Ternan. “Did she threaten you? Try to blackmail you?”
“No, no, worse.” Miss Ternan seemed once again on the verge of breaking down at the enormity of it.
“She tried to make love to her.” Irish Meg usurped Nellie’s voice once again. “That is why it’s so hard for her to tell it.”
Meggy’s trying to make it easier seemed to spark her own courage. Immediately Nellie found her voice, and it was stronger and more detached, as if she were telling a story in which she and the murdered woman were mere characters.
“She has been bothering me for weeks,” she began. “Touching me, hugging me—once she kissed me on the mouth. She said she saw me onstage in the play dressed as a man. She has asked me to go with her and the others, Marie I think, though Marie has never done any of this to me.”
“Done what to you?” I was taken utterly by surprise at the direction in which this conversation had turned.
“Talked of love, this other love, tried to lure me. Eliza only did it when we were alone, but she was always in Marie’s company. I had decided they were lovers.”
“Who is this Marie?” I turned to my Meggy for help.
“Marie de Brevecoeur, the Frenchwoman who dresses like a man.” Meggy taunted my flawed memory. “I’ve told you about her before.”
“What did this Lane woman say to you?” I turned back to Nellie Ternan.
“She was at our rooms that afternoon. That was the first time she threatened me.”
“Threatened you!” my voice betrayed my alarm.
“Yes,” Nellie went on, “for weeks she had made her perverse advances and I had rebuffed them, but yesterday she threatened me with exposure over the Ashbee affair. She seemed to know all about it.”
“Good lord! How?”
“I don’t know. She knew everything. She said: ‘You were raped by a man. You know what men can do.’”
At that, the tears once again welled up in her eyes and I thought we were going to lose her, but she steadied herself.
“She said: ‘You know what men can do, and will. Women are different. Have you ever been with a woman?’ And she started touching me again, caressing my arms, moving very close to me, whispering, luring.”
She seemed utterly lost in her story, speaking in a low, frightened rasp.
“‘Have you ever been with a woman?’ Eliza Lane said. ‘We do things men cannot do. If you let me do them to you, you would understand.’”
“You say that she tried to blackmail you into this unnatural love?” I pursued that telltale revelation.
“Yes, she knew all about the Lord Ashbee horror.” And the poor thing sank once again into Irish Meg’s arms, sobbing.
I waited a moment until her fragile emotions subsided, and then addressed her as tenderly as I could: “How did you reply to her blackmail demands?”
“She told her to go stuff it, she did!” Irish Meg cut in.
I silenced her with a grim scowl. Let the woman tell her own story, I glared.
“I told her that I couldn’t pay her, that I had no money,” Miss Ternan said, and roused herself to continue her narrative. “But that was when she said that it wasn’t money she wanted. ‘What I want,’ she said, ‘is to see you naked.’ That is when I fled into my bedroom, and locked the door against her. I did not come out until I was sure that she was gone. She took my green scarf away with her. Oh God, and now she is killed with it!”
“It is…it is…it is monstrous,” I finally found the proper word.
Irish Meg’s face broke into a scoffing grin. “Not so monstrous,” she corrected me, “as some of the things your London gentlemen will pay any street whore to do.”
“What did you do?” I changed the subject. “After she had gone?”
“I made myself a cup of tea,” Nellie answered, as if it were the most natural thing on earth to do. “Neither Bobbie—that’s the name Barbara Smith goes by with us—nor Marian were at home, and I drank my tea and fell asleep, from the shock of it, I suppose. I didn’t wake up until Bobbie came in at six and we had to get ready to go to the society meeting.” Nellie was speaking very quickly now, in a rush. “Then we went to the meeting. I was terrified that Eliza Lane would be there. I didn’t think I could face her, but she wasn’t there. Then she came in, and screamed at us. All I wanted was to run away.”
I thought a moment. The three of us sat quietly staring at each other, hoping that some solution might arise out of all of our shared confusion. Finally, it came to me.
“But you went home that night, did you not? Surely Miss Smith and Miss Evans were there, can attest to your being in for the evening well before the time of the murder.”
“But Wilkie, that is the problem.” Irish Meg interceded once again as the tears welled up in Nellie Ternan’s eyes.
“What do you mean? I don’t understand.”
“I was with Charles,” Miss Ternan burst out in a voice of utter despair.
“She loves him, Wilkie, can’t you see?” The tone of Meg’s voice pleaded for understanding.
“What do you mean? I don’t see at all.” I was talking at Miss Ternan but, again, it was Meg who answered.
“She spent the night with him, Wilkie,” Meg insisted, speaking meticulously as one would to a slow-witted child. “Don’t you see? When Liza Lane wos murdered, Nellie and Mr. Dickens wos together.”
“I did not go home from the meeting,” Nellie Ternan whispered. “I was with him that whole night. In the St. George Hotel.”
It must have been my face, the pure astonishment, which triggered Irish Meg’s impatience.
“Good Gawd, Wilkie, don’t you hear wot she’s sayin’? Do we have to paint you a pitcher?”
I could hardly believe it. Images of her and Charles in bed at the St. George, Laocoönian images, coiled in my mind. Nellie and Charles in bed together…in defiance of all propriety, all class and custom, all of the unwritten laws of the gentleman in Victorian society.
Only now was it all coming clear to me. Unless she could prove her whereabouts, she would be taken up for murder, but the one person who could prove her whereabouts could not afford to do so. If Dickens stood up for her, his reputation as a gentleman, his marriage, his position as a leader in society, his charity work, perhaps even his career as England’s favorite writer, would be destroyed. Failing to prove her whereabouts that evening could cost Ellen her life, but proving them honestly would most certainly, in another sense, cost Dickens his.
“We, she, Nellie, was afraid to stay at her flat for fear that the Protectives, that other one, would come and take her away,” Irish Meg explained. “So I told her she could stay here for the night.”
“Collar?”
“Yes, him.”
“When he speaks to Bobbie Smith or Marian Evans, they must tell him that I did not come in that night; then he will suspect me and he will come for me.” And, once again, she burst into tears.
“Good lord, Miss Ternan”—I fear my exasperation shone through in the roughness of my voice—“you must stop your uncontrolled tears or they shall make you ill.”
Irish Meg shot an angry look in my direction.
Her look annoyed me. Had I no voice in any of this? I glared back at Meggy in rebellion, but she was too busy comforting Miss Ternan to notice.
“Wot shall we do, Wilkie?” Meg finally looked up from her ministrations.
I had a quite reasonable answer awaiting her: “We shall all go to bed and get a good night’s sleep,” I declared. “There is nothing to be done about any of this tonight.”
For once Meg agreed. At my direction, she guided Nellie Ternan off to our bedroom, where, I presumed, she would tuck her in and, somehow, lullaby her off to sleep before her body was utterly drained of all liquid.
Alone! I felt great joy and relief in my sudden solitude. Not even bothering to undress, I arranged my greatcoat over my exhausted form reclining on the settee when, to my chagrin, Irish Meg glided like a hectoring ghost from the sleeping room to once again prevent me from enfolding myself in the beckoning arms of Morpheus.
“Oh, Wilkie, thank you, you are a brick. She has been sobbin’ ever since I told her of the murder this afternoon. She is sure that she’s goin’ to Newgate to be hung.”
Oh God save me, I thought. I feared that Meg wanted to talk, when all I wanted was to sleep.
“But she is so different now that you’ve talked to her,” Meg babbled on.
I pulled the greatcoat up close around my neck, shifted my body to the most comfortable position on that short velvet settee, and attempted to counterfeit sleep, but Meg continued animatedly like some market-day gossip.
“Oh, Wilkie, I’m so scared of all this. Some of these women are so strange.”
“How are they so strange, Meggy?” I said with an obvious lack of enthusiasm.
“They’s so different from wot I’m used to.”
“How’s that?” I turned over and tried to bury my head under a small pillow, but Meggy snatched it away.
“Like that time Liza Lane asked me if men ever hired me to make love to other women, and Miss Evans, Nellie’s housemate, she came to one meetin’ sportin’ a big brown lump on the side of her face, and she moved into Mr. Chapman’s house but then came back to live with Nellie and Bobbie Smith at Macklin Street. I got my suspicions about some of these ladies, Wilkie.”
“But they are not your problem.”
“I know that, but Fieldsy makes them my problem. I’m his spy. I probably always will be. Oh, Wilkie, I don’t want everyone I meet to always think me a whore.”
“They don’t, Meggy. I don’t. I love you.” It was all I could do to keep my eyes open.
“I wants to be respectable, Wilkie, be educated like them, work for a livin’ respectable. Oh, Wilkie, you’re the only one I can talk to.”
Lucky me! I silently mourned.
“You’ve been so good with her, Wilkie. This afternoon, all she could do wos bury her head in my shoulder and cry. She is always so quiet, so apart, almost invisible you know, at our meetin’s, but tonight with you, she seemed to be findin’ her voice.”
That is fine, I thought, but just how can you be so sure that she didn’t kill her? She has killed before.* How can you be so sure that she was with Dickens? Simply because she says so? But I was only whistling in the wind. I knew that it was only too possible that she and Dickens had spent the night together, that Charles was her alibi, God help him. That was the last sinister thought I remembered before I plummeted into sleep.
*In the affair of “the Macbeth Murders” as narrated in Collins’s first memoir, commercially titled The Detective and Mr. Dickens, Ellen Ternan, after being drugged and raped by the stage manager Paroissien, killed her attacker with a pair of household shears.