August 12, 1852—Noon
Neither Dickens nor I was prepared for the surprise witness lying in wait at Bow Street Station. We burst into the bullpen full of our dilemma and were brought up as short as two taunted guard dogs snapped back at the end of their tethers. Sitting uncomfortably in a straight-backed wooden chair before the cold hearth under the obvious interrogation of Inspector Field and Serjeant Rogers was Mrs. Peggy Ternan, the despicable mother of Dickens’s tender fugitive. We gaped at her in astonishment. Peggy Ternan was tall and wide-shouldered, even when sitting down. This stature best explained the power she was capable of exerting as an actress on the stage. Even though she was a woman of almost fifty years, and rather heavily rouged, you could still see her daughter Ellen’s beauty in her face. They shared the same wide forehead and intelligent expanse between the eyes culminating in those clean high cheekbones. Yet this older woman, the mother, was hardened and marked by years of corruption and a life of deceit. From the tight sour look she shot at us, it was clear that she was not voluntarily enjoying the company of our detective colleagues.
“Aha! Charles and Wilkie”—Field mimicked politeness and formality—“you both remember Miss Ternan’s bawd of a mother.”
“I’m an actress,” the witch shot back in her haughtiest stage elocution, “and have been all of my life.”
“You are an old whore, and a bawd who sold her own daughter,* and I’m goin’ to make you for a blackmailer if you don’t tell me the honest truth right now!”
Field, standing right over her, was screaming down into her painted face in the throes of his most dramatic wrath. That noxious woman was not the only stage actor in the room.
“You have been writin’ threatenin’ letters to Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts, haven’t you?” Field pressed on. “We knows it wos you who wos harassin’ her because you’re the only one who knew wot to write. We can hang you for threatenin’ respectable people, we can. Just like we hang thieves and housebreakers, we can,” Field finished his harangue in a voice full of hard, quiet menace.
“I…I…I did not write the notes,” the hag, visibly shaken by Field’s angry assault, stammered. “He made me tell him what to write. They knew that the Coutts woman…of the bank…had bags of money.”
Serjeant Rogers was busily noting everything down.
“Who is ‘he’? How did he, whoever he is, force you? Did he say he knew Miss Coutts? Did he say he knew your daughter? Where did you meet him?” Field battered her unmercifully with questions until she buried her face in her handkerchief, her chest heaving, in the finest of stage hysterics.
Utterly undaunted by her theatrics, Field clamped down upon a fistful of her hair and roughly pulled her head up out of her hands. Her eyes were perfectly clear, and her cheeks were dry.
“Don’t play your false lying games with me, you old whore,” Field spat into her face, still holding tightly his handful of her hair. “Answer me. Who forced you, and where?”
“They came to my rooms, more than a fortnight, two fortnights, ago, in the spring.”
“They? Who is they?”
“There were three of them, two men and a woman.”
“Who were they?”
“That is it. I do not know.”
“Wot! If you lie to me, woman…” Field’s voice was heavy with threat.
“I had only been back in London a short time. I had gotten a small part in Drury Lane’s School for Scandal, not what I was used to at all, but I had not worked in the city for more than a year and they forget you very quickly in London. Honestly, I had not gone near Nellie. I stayed away from her as you told me.”
“We don’t care about any of that!” Field rudely interrupted her. “Tell us about the threatening letters.”
“I did not write any letters. I did not even know about any letters until you started waving them in my face when I came out of the theatre this evening.”
“Get on with it, woman,” Field barked, his patience rapidly ebbing.
Dickens and I looked on with a kind of mesmerized horror.
Rogers, seemingly oblivious of the heightening violence in the exchanges between his master and the woman, simply kept scribbling every word on his notepad.
“It was a warm night. They must have followed me up from the street because when I got out my key to let myself into my rooms, they were on me right away.”
She paused to take breath, but Field stared down at her as if looking for an excuse to strike her. Instead, he gave one sharp tap to the back of her wooden chair with his forefinger.
“There was a regular gang of them. Two men and a woman. The man with the mustache did all the talking, the others hung back. ‘Here, let us help you in, missus,’ he said, and he plucked my keys right out of my hand.”
“He had a mustache, you are sure,” Field interrupted.
“Bushy handlebar mustache,” she confirmed. “Oh, he was a charmer, he was, a tall man with deep blue eyes and the most beautiful bright blue ring I have ever seen. He held it right up to my face while he talked to me. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.”
“Go on, wot did he say?” Field had calmed.
“He opened the door and they all came right in. It was dark, so he told me to light the lamps. ‘You’re Mrs. Ternan,’ he said, ‘the murderer’s mother.’ The others stayed back, by the door, but he stood right up close, and that is when I noticed his blue ring. He held it right up next to his face when he talked.”
“Wot did he ask?” Field’s voice was cajoling, almost soothing, as he coaxed her story out.
“He asked me all about my Ellen, and where she was, and what she had done, and how she had gotten there, and I think I told him everything. It was very strange, as if I was in some sort of trance, but I remember everything, his ring, his questions about Ellen, the women by the door.”
“Women?” Field leapt at this slip of her tongue.
“There was a woman, a large woman with broad shoulders. She stood by the door.”
“But you said women?” Field pressed.
“I did?” the old wench seemed genuinely puzzled. “I did not mean to. There was a woman with the men, I think. I’m sure that was a woman, but I did not get a very good look at all of them. The man with the ring was standing between us.”
“And then wot?” Field’s voice was seductive.
It was obvious to Dickens and me that Field’s witness was wearing down.
“The last thing he asked me was how she got into Miss Coutts’s house for whores and why she wasn’t brought to the bar for murder, and I told him I did not know, but thought it was all done by Mr. Dickens and you, sir, who warned me to stay clear of her and move on.”
“And that wos it!” Field shouted again, so startling her with his suddenness that she raised her hands in front of her face in fear that he might strike her. “You used my name to this stranger in this business. I ought to throw you into Newgate for that alone and let you rot out the rest of your wretched life.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” The old hag seemed visibly shaken. “But I did not know what I was doing, as if I had no choice and had to tell him everything he asked.”
All the while Dickens had been listening intently, but at this the forefinger of his right hand leapt to his lips in a sharp instinctive gesture of recognition. From the look on his face, I was sure that he was about to intrude upon Field’s interrogation of the hag, but he didn’t. He waited, listening, as Field continued badgering the woman.
“So wot did he do then, woman? After you told him that I wos on the case?”
“He looked at me hard and told me not to say a word to either you or Mr. Dickens. Then he gave me two half crowns, and the whole lot of them left. That was it, all of it. I haven’t seen them since.”
Field glared silently down at her.
She looked up for a moment, waiting for him to scream at her again, but he did not, and she could not hold his murderous gaze. She turned her eyes like a trapped animal first to Dickens and then to me. Finding no sympathy in our faces, however, she ducked her head and became intent upon her nervous fingers working the folds of her handkerchief in her lap.
“Rogers, get her out of here.” Field finally turned away in disgust, as if she were one of those foul river smells that wafted through the window whenever a whisper of a breeze taunted the stagnant air. “Make her sign the statement you have taken, then turn her out,” he ordered.
Rogers leapt to do his bidding.
No sooner had the door closed upon her than Dickens was crossing the room to Inspector Field.
“The blue ring,” Dickens said, talking almost to himself as if thinking aloud. “She kept mentioning it, as if it was fixed in her mind’s eye.”
“So?” Field stared quizzically. “All women likes baubles.”
“No.” Dickens was still musing on it, caught in a deductive dialogue with himself. “No, I have studied this. He was using the ring upon her. I think this man is a mesmerist.”*
*As recounted in The Detective and Mr. Dickens, it was Field’s speculation that Peggy Ternan the mother was intent upon selling her fifteen-year-old daughter Ellen’s virginity to the highest bidder.
*According to Dickens’s most recent biographer, Peter Ackroyd in Dickens (1990), Dickens was somewhat of an authority on “mesmerism.” As early as 1838, he had attended mesmeric sessions conducted by John Elliotson, a professor of clinical medicine at University College Hospital in London. After attending four such sessions, Dickens wrote: “I am a believer. I became so against all my preconceived opinions and impressions.” Later, when Elliotson lost his position at the hospital due to the “sensational” aspects of his researches, Dickens supported him financially and made him the Dickens family doctor. Elliotson’s particular technique was to cast his subjects into a deep trance and then provoke them to acts of extraordinary behavior by means of what he called “animal magnetism.” It is also documented that Elliotson actually taught Dickens the art of mesmerism, at which Dickens became rather adept. Ackroyd’s commentary on this is especially telling in the context of Collins’s memoir of events fourteen years later: “Of course all this was connected, too, with nineteenth century ideas of power and dominance—particularly the male over the female…” (244).