August 12, 1852—Evening
“My God, it is Collar!” Dickens found both his voice and that reckless power of mastery over threatening situations which had momentarily abandoned him in his distress over his beloved Ellen’s plight. He moved purposefully to the door as that relentless pounding persisted. Without hesitation, but to all of our horror, he opened it.
The door opening inward caught Collar’s man, Serjeant Mussbabble, in midpound. That worthy tumbled comically into the room as if toppled off a perch. Behind him, framed in the doorway, stood Collar, glaring at the lot of us.
“Inspector Collar, come in.” Dickens greeted him jovially, as if this angry policeman was a late arrival at a dinner party. “Come in. This is indeed fortuitous. I am so glad that you are here. We were just talking about you.”
Dickens was nattering on so rapidly that Inspector Collar had no opportunity to reply. He stared wide-eyed at Dickens with the same amazement which had turned all of us to statues.
“Miss Ternan has just this evening arrived back in the city and we have been trying to decide whether to come talk to you about this whole unfortunate affair tonight or to wait until morning.”
Dickens was smiling warmly at the overmatched policeman, who still had not uttered a word.
“It seems you have solved our dilemma for us. Come in, come in please. This is Miss Ellen Ternan.” And he ushered Collar right to Nellie’s side.
As if on cue, she looked pitiably up at him with tears streaming down her face.
Collar drew himself up on tiptoe. “Miss Ellen Ternan, you are under arrest for murder,” he blurted out, but with none of the violent authority that Field would have put into it. In fact, Collar seemed almost intimidated either by Dickens’s equanimity or by Nellie’s torrent of tears.
Of course, Collar’s blunt, gruffly spoken charge sent Ellen Ternan into further paroxysms of sobs.
“Really, Inspector Collar, that is a bit harsh, is it not?” Dickens was still smiling as if this were all some trivial parlor game, charades or hide the handkerchief. “You said that you merely wished to talk to Miss Ternan about the murder. You gave us no sense of such great urgency. Is there some reason for such a serious charge?”
Collar looked like a volcano about to erupt. He spewed forth his charges in a garbled explosion of words: “You’ve been hidin’ her. You’ve known where she was all the time. You’ve all been lyin’ to me. I’ll not be fooled with.”
“Please, please, Inspector Collar”—Dickens never changed his hospitable manner and smiling equanimity—“nothing of the sort.”
“Nothin’ of the sort, nothin’ of the sort,” the policeman sputtered like a boiler on the verge of bursting. “Everything of the sort!”
And Collar would not be pacified.
Dickens spun out the story we had concocted in the cab, but Collar refused to be swayed by this latest fiction which Dickens spun out so adeptly on the spot.
“I’ll tell you wot I think.” Collar, who as Dickens spoke managed to somewhat compose himself, still glared at Dickens as if seriously contemplating arresting him as well (and probably all the rest of us) for harboring the tender fugitive. “I think you’ve all been hidin’ her, that she’s been in this hole-in-the-wall of a shootin’ gallery all of the time.”
“Oh, Inspector Collar”—and now it was Dickens’s turn to be chagrined—“that is a serious charge and simply not true.”
“True or not true,” Collar backed down from Dickens’s stern chagrin, “we are takin’ Miss Ternan tonight. This is a murder case”—he raised himself up against the gravity of it and stuck out his chest as a mark of his own importance—“and she must be remanded to the custody of the bailiffs.”
With a nod to Mussbabble, Collar ordered Nellie taken up.
Dickens never ceased to amaze me. He could create characters on the spot and then play out their parts in the scene as if the whole world were no more than a novel that existed inside his own active imagination. Even as Collar’s Constable was stepping forward to take Nellie in hand, Dickens was smiling once again and graciously entering into negotiations with Collar. Realizing the inevitable, he chose to hide his pain and fears for his Ellen’s well-being and attempt to make the best of a certain setback. “Must Miss Ternan be taken up tonight? It is so late.”
As were all the rest of us, Inspector Collar seemed momentarily unmanned by Dickens’s concern.
“Miss Ternan will present herself in the morning,” Charles pressed. “I will take full responsibility for her appearance. Surely you cannot think she will flee if I am her sponsor.”
“I knows my duty.” Collar’s words rasped like cutlery being drawn across stone. “She’ll be in the holdin’ rooms at St. James’s tonight and she’ll go before the magistrate in the mornin’.”
Dickens’s face fell. I think it was only then that he realized that the man was not going to listen, that he could not write this particular chapter in the Dickens style but would have to settle for Collar’s inferior version. He turned to his Ellen and, when their eyes met, the pleading in his caused the tears to rush forth once more in hers.
After a moment of silent suspension in time, Dickens turned back to Collar, his features under perfect control, his voice steady: “May I have a moment, Inspector, alone with Miss Ternan? To prepare her.”
“Let her go.” Collar nodded to his familiar. “One minute,” he cautioned Dickens, “then we take her away.”
It was one of the longest, tensest minutes of my memory.
Dickens retired to the back of the dim shooting gallery with Nellie.
Collar and his swarthy constable stood waiting with faces of stone by the door.
Even Broken Bert’s parrot seemed momentarily awed and was uncharacteristically silent as those two old inseparables lurked in the shadows on one side of the cold hearth.
Captain Hawkins stood leaning against the hearthstone with shadows bisecting his smooth-shaven head and a bemused look upon his face, as if this were all just a Sherwood Forest game and he was just waiting for Dickens to give the signal so that he could spring into action like some latter-day Little John and rescue us all from the terrible pall that Collar’s intrusion had cast over the dingy premises.
As for me, I stood frozen in the viperous gaze of Irish Meg. She looked at me with utter disgust, as if I were the arresting officer, as if I were the informer who had led Collar and his man to the shooting gallery and had given Nellie up to them.
It was one of the most uncomfortable minutes of my life, but it finally ended when Dickens returned, leading Nellie, her tears dried, her countenance resigned to being taken away by those two glowering policemen.
And take her away they did, without another word from either side.
Dickens followed them out into the street, but Collar packed the girl into his black post-chaise with little ceremony and drove off.
When Dickens returned, it was as if his whole demeanor had caved in upon itself. Where he had been urbane, conciliatory, hospitable, and even jocular with Collar, he was now anxious, worried, helpless, and guilty in our presence.
“There is nothing more we can do tonight,” he finally announced after a long moment of all of us looking to him for guidance and him looking into the blackness of the cold hearth and thinking on it. “I think he believed enough of our story that there will be no repercussions upon you and Bert, Captain. I think the best thing we can do is go home now,” he said, turning to Irish Meg and me. “It has been a hellish day, Wilkie. Damn, he must have followed us from Bow Street. We should have been more careful.”
Out in the street, with Irish Meg already handed into Sleepy Rob’s cab, Dickens took me lightly by the elbow for one last word.
“You take the cab, Wilkie. I need to walk all of this off tonight. I will see you in the morning early. There is so much that needs to be done.” And then he paused for just a moment, thinking, my elbow still in custody. “It is all topsy-turvy, Wilkie,” he finally said, letting me go, “but as novelists it is our task to make it all work out.”
“Tell that to Irish Meg!” I replied over my shoulder as I climbed into the cab. We left him standing there in the feeble gaslight, all alone, bearing the full weight of the whole affair.