May 9, 1851—evening
We rattled over the cobbled streets, and soon emerged onto the moonswept high-road. Tally Ho Thompson seemed unable to suppress the singular bemusement, which kept twisting his face into a quite remarkable series of Pickwickian smirks.
“Mister Thompson is ’ere purely in an advisory capacity,” Inspector Field announced some minutes after the ne’er-do-well had taken his place in the coach. “You will gain our entry into the ’ouse,” Field said, giving Thompson his marching orders, “and then you will do your best imitation of Lot’s biblical wife.” Field punctuated that last with a stab of his forefinger into Thompson’s greatcoat, and seemed quite pleased with his little metaphor. “You will not remove any negotiable objects from the premises.”
“In other words,” Thompson smirked, “make the crack, and turn to salt.”
“Ah, a quick study,” Field approved.
The coach bounced and lurched with each rut and curve in the high-road. The night was clear, and the moon was full and white. Light pooled like fog in the open spaces. It was not a very good night for housebreaking.
“An’ wot ’appens if we get caught, Cap’n? If the country sheriffs descend on us from Shooters ’Ill with pistols an’ blunderbusses? They don’t never go habroad without their barking persuaders. Wot will my hadvisory capacity be then, eh?” Thompson brought up the possibility calmly, fighting off his irrepressible grin of bemusement. He was clearly enjoying the discomfiture of Field at having to treat him as an equal.
Field’s forefinger came up for a familiar scratch at the side of his eye. “You are under my protection,” he assured Tally Ho Thompson.
“Sure I am, but just for fancy’s sake, ain’t it possible I’m present ’ere as a convenient way for all you gents to hedge your bets?”
With studied sarcasm, Field said: “Why, what, pray tell, can you mean?”
“I mean, Cap’n, you brought me along so that if you get caught breakin’ into this posh bloke’s digs, you can say it wos me, and you wos on my trail, and you come out sharp as nails, and I come out prime for a dance with Jack Ketch. That’s wot I mean.”
Field smiled a benevolent smile. “Why, Mister Thompson, you are too suspicious. You are on the right side of the law now.” Suddenly Field’s face went hard. “You are storin’ up favors in ’eaven, Thompson,” he said, as the forefinger scratched threateningly at the lower lip. “Don’t forget that I am the Father who bestows those favors.”
I was somewhat taken aback at Field’s blasphemous analogy, but the redoubtable Inspector just chuckled at his own extravagance. The coach pulled up in a back lane, sheltered from view of the Ashbee estate, and from the relentless moonlight, by an overhanging arch of ancient elm trees.
The moonlight filtered through the branches of the trees, as we five housebreakers, in faith to Field’s lead, traversed the forested park toward the Ashbee manse. Field led, with Thompson immediately behind; Dickens and I came next, with Rogers serving as our rearguard.
Thoughts of alarm and apprehension raced through my mind. I wondered if Field and Rogers were armed with pistols, or “barkers,” as Thompson called them. As we moved through the trees, I seemed surrounded by a tumult of sounds—the noises of scurrying animals, the wind, the moving branches of the trees overhead, the pounding of my own heart. I had to stop and take a deep breath to compose myself. When I stopped, Rogers coughed a short sharp signal, and the others paused also.
“What is it?” Field whispered back at his serjeant.
“Mister Collins is blowed,” Rogers whispered, with what I imagined to be a great relish. Indeed, he was right. I felt as if we had been rushing headlong. I later realized that it was the anxiety I was feeling, not the exercise, which had so winded me. We went on at a slower pace, until abruptly the forest park ended, and we reached the edge of the rolling lawns. We stopped inside the shadows of the treeline.
Tally Ho Thompson stepped forward. “When I get it open, I’ll show a glim. You come straight to the light. No ’esitation. Got it?” He took great pleasure in giving orders to Field and Rogers. “Well, gennulmen, and you, too, Inspector Field,” he said, his face convulsed with mischieviousness, “success to the crack.” He saluted us and was gone.
We waited. The house, white in the moonlight, loomed fifty metres away across an expanse of carefully manicured lawn. Surely we will be seen approaching the house, my nervous mind speculated. Surely we will make exemplary targets for the “barkers” when we attempt to cross that lawn.
I did not have long to brood on those threatening possibilities. Thompson’s light popped up almost immediately in the deep shadows of the verandah. Behind Dickens and Field, we started across that open moonlit expanse at a full run.
Only the crunch of the grass beneath the quick pad of our feet marred the marble silence of the moment. We reached the shelter of the verandah, and flattened ourselves against the wall of the house. My eyes were riveted upon Dickens and Field. Neither seemed the least bit ill at ease. As I think back upon it, both would probably have made excellent cracksmen or highwaymen, if they had not already taken up law-abiding professions. As for me, there could have been no worse cracksman in all of England. My imagination burned with images of alarm and flight and capture and public humiliation, if not death or wounding.
Yet all was perfectly quiet and serene.
“Child’s play,” an elfin voice chuckled out of the darkness. “No bars. Small matter of pickin’ one quite undistinguished lock, an’ we are in, gennulmen and public servants.”
Thompson was waiting for us, calmly smoking in the darkness. The beacon light he had struck was nothing else but a Lucifer off of which he lit the stub of his cigar. “I’ve already been inside,” he whispered. “No sign of anybody on this side of the ’ouse. Step lightly, though. You never know when they are goin’ to step out of the woodwork.” With a flourish he ushered us through an open door and a set of flimsy curtains into Ashbee’s house. Field ordered Rogers to remain at our point of entry as a rearguard and lookout.
We stole in through a large sitting room with rugs covering the floors. Away from the windows and the moonlight, all was dark as pitch. We were forced to proceed slowly, feeling our way across that room populated with heavy malicious furniture. I barked my shin sharply upon a small table, but I did not cry out, though I cursed inwardly.
Thompson led us to the door of the room. “It opens onto the main entrance ’all of the ’ouse,” he whispered. With that, he withdrew as if to say, “I’ve done my part, gents, now we’ll see ’ow game you are.”
“I know where we are. I can find the way from here,” Dickens assured Inspector Field in a whisper.
What am I doing here in someone else’s house in the middle of the night with these two madmen, was the unsettling thought which rooted itself in my frightened consciousness. Nevertheless, I was there, and those two seemed bent upon proceeding with this insane misadventure. It had been a terribly unsettling day for me—first Irish Meg, and now, my first felony.
We moved slowly across the foyer, boots scraping softly on the marble floor.
“Very quiet now,” Field imprecated in a fierce whisper. “No stumblin’ up against each other.” He motioned for Dickens to take the lead down into a black tunnel, the long passageway off of which opened the rooms through which Ashbee had conducted us that afternoon. The library, if my memory served, stood at the very end of this passage. “The library,” Field directed Dickens. “Both of you remarked it. We’ll start there.”
At the end of the hallway, Field stepped in front of Dickens, and tried the door to the library. It opened silently, and we plunged into the sort of deep blackness that exists only in windowless rooms. For a long moment, the three of us simply stood still in the silent dark immediately inside the library door. Field was probably trying to decide whether or not to strike a light. I heard a quiet movement in front of me. My eyes had not yet accustomed themselves to the impenetrable darkness. I presumed it was Field on the move.
“The picture you remarked,” he whispered with some urgency. “Where?”
Neither Dickens nor I knew whom he was addressing. You could not see a thing. Consequently, we both answered almost in unison.
“Straight in from the door at eye-level,” Dickens answered.
“There,” I pointed stupidly, realizing, even as I did so, that Field could not see my upraised arm.
I heard Field moving again—a Lucifer struck—tiny halo of light casting monstrous shadows on the wall of books—light moves to the solitary picture hung amongst the shelves—light circles the picture—Field’s hand touches the picture, moves tentatively around its edges, finally grasps the frame and pulls—picture, much to Dickens’s and my surprise, tilts sideways like a lever—then something occurred for which none of us were prepared.
The whole wall began to move, and artificial light spilled into the room in which we stood. A gasp of surprise accompanied by a “Wot the bloody ’ell!” and a “Ooo in ’ell har…?” greeted us as the wall pulled back to reveal a quite large book-strewn room, and an equally large startled footman staring at us. He was sitting on a large overstuffed settee, with a large oversized book on his knee. We had, evidently, surprised him in the perusal of this book.
Surprised him indeed! When he leapt to his feet, the book dropping to the oriental rug, his trousers were seen to be bunched around his ankles and his sexual member stood rampant in the grasp of his large right hand.
I must admit that my first impulse was to laughter. I am sure that Dickens and Field were equally surprised. My eyes darted from the hulking man with the drooping moustache, standing there so in flagrante, to the book discarded on the floor, to the bottle of Scots whiskey next to the book. We had evidently surprised this worthy in the act of amusing himself in the private perusal of one of his master’s books.
This footman, whom we later assumed to be the sole remaining caretaker of the premises, was clearly startled. Yet, he kept his wits about him. He was not so startled that he was unable to reach to a nearby deal table, from whence a loaded pistol leapt into his quivering hand. To our great good fortune, he also maintained the presence of mind to only point it in our direction, not to immediately fire it wildly at us. The man, indeed, made a bizarre, quite laughable, figure standing there with a look of panic on his face, his trousers bunched around his ankles, and both hands on a duelling pistol which was jumping and jerking like a Punch and Judy puppet.
“Now.” It was Inspector Field’s voice. “Be calm with that,” he spoke soothingly. “This is not what it seems to be. We mean you no ’arm. Please do not shoot. We are not ’ousebreakers. No bloodshed is necessary ’ere. I am Inspector Field of the Metropolitan Protectives.”
“Hin huh pig’s heye, you har,” the moustachioed man barked as the pistol quivered precariously. Its barrel, as it bounced from Field to Dickens to myself, seemed as large and black as the new Hammersmith railway tunnel.
“Now, don’t shoot. It’s true. We are the detectives authorized to investigate Lord Ashbee’s ’ouse,” Field cajoled the man, whose half-naked state was becoming somewhat of a greater embarrassment with each passing moment.
“Master don’t like no one hin ’is room,” the man said, waving the cocked pistol wildly.
“Why don’t you escort us out, then?” Inspector Field suggested.
With one hand, the man stooped, and pulled his trousers up. With a snap, he got one of his braces over a shoulder.
“Just escort us out, and no ’arm will be done.” Somehow Field had talked himself into a negotiating position with this dolt. “Your master need never know that we got in without your knowledge, or that we found you in ’is private room.”
The burly footman thought long and hard on that. It looked as if his deliberations were causing him great pain about the lips and eyebrows.
“Don’t nobody move.” He kept the gun pointed at us as he edged toward the door. “Cuntstables har hown the heye-road. They’ll do you!”
From this gibberish, I deduced that he meant to lock us in, and summon the local authorities to arrest us. Field darted a glance at Dickens and myself, which I found very reassuring. He seemed to be saying, “Don’t worry; all that this can be now is an embarrassment.” I almost felt as if I were the one who had been caught with my pants down.
Ashbee’s servant circled around us, the firearm still shaking in his hands, as if he were afflicted with some palsy. “Don’t ye move a whit,” he ordered, without conviction, as he edged toward the doorway. Field slowly nodded his head in acquiescence.
As the man with the pistol slowly backed through the doorway, his eyebrows suddenly shot up, his eyes went wide, he uttered a low, gutteral grunt, and proceeded to collapse face forward onto the oriental carpet. The pistol dropped from his hand as he fell, and bounced weakly to the side on the ornate rug. Dickens, Field, and myself stared stupidly at our fallen antagonist. Tally Ho Thompson, the source of our sudden deliverance, stepped grinning through the doorway thwacking a black gutta percha equalizer against the meat of his palm.
“Just a slight tap in the right spot behind the ear does surely relax one, wouldn’t you say, gents? ’Ee’ll just ’ave a good ’eadache in the mornin’,” he assured us with a puckish wink.
“’Ee must not be loose in the mornin’ to warn ’is master,” Field was thinking aloud, nothing more. “The man knows who we are, and if Ashbee finds out we’ve been ’ere, ’ee’ll be all the more skitterish. We must take this idiot into custody. Thompson, fetch Rogers.”
Before Thompson left, he turned to Field and said, “I’ve checked the whole ’ouse. ’Ee” (nodding to the unconscious man) “must be the only one ’ere.”
“Well,” Dickens said to Field, as we all turned our attention to Ashbee’s secret library, “what do you make of this?”
Ah, dear reader, how do I tell this part? There were surprises in that secret room much more startling than a frightened footman caught perusing his master’s books. This memoir shall never be published in our time; thus, I should not hesitate to write candidly of what we found; and yet, by habit and instinct, I do hesitate: our age shrinks from the sort of realism which Henry Ashbee had collected there in his secret library. I was repelled by it, yet strongly attracted, let us say “fascinated,” by what we found therein. It was much like my own fascination for Meggy Sheehey. I could not admit to it, yet neither could I deny it.
Within a few brief moments it was perfectly clear why Lord Ashbee chose to keep his library a secret. All the books collected there dwelt upon but one subject: ‘Lust’ in every conceivable perversion, in every possible locale, social class and human relationship. That library portrayed ‘Lust’ as the new Leviathan of our century, which would replace Hobbes’s ruling passion of self-interest with the more bestial urges of man’s sexuality.
You must pardon my bluntness, dear reader. I simply cannot, due possibly to lack of invention, conceive of any more tactful, less brutish, manner to describe the contents of Lord Henry Ashbee’s secret library. Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman indeed! His books were the memoirs, both true and clearly fictitious, of Victorian rakes, sodomists, pederasts, flagellants, ravishers, and supposed gentlemen indulging in every possible sexual perversion known to man or beast alike. Those books—illustrated, hand-copied, privately printed, mass-produced, bound in every size, every folio variation, stiff of cover as well as soft—those books were all there, some yellowed with centuries of age, some as new as the Parliamentary Blue Books or the green monthly numbers of Dickens’s latest novel. There was no denying their existence, and yet, to my own utter amazement, I felt the impulse, the temptation, to deny them, to transform that infamous collection of books into something else, a collection about boats, or horses, or gentlemen’s fashion. Yet, I cannot transform this reality. It is a text which cannot be undermined.
Like the outer library, the walls of this secret library were lined with shelves filled with books. But the books were not of uniform sizes bound in the standard gilt and leathers of our day, and did not form themselves into ordered symmetrical groups upon the shelves. No, these shelves were a chaos of sizes, shapes, colors, books stacked, leaned, upright, on their backs, on their sides, upside down, books coverless, spineless, books old, books brand new, books opulently bound, books tawdry in dog-eared disarray, books that were not even books, but only loose manuscript pages piled and strewn about like leaves. Other books lay in piles, some ten or fifteen volumes high, all about on the floor.
The only furniture in the room was the large settee and deal lamp table, and a quite oversized writing desk commanding the center of the room, and surrounded by the piles of books on the floor. The wide expanse of desktop was strewn with bound volumes pressed open, and loose manuscript pages scribbled upon in what seemed a hurried, perhaps fevered, hand.
Dickens and I moved immediately to the shelves, and silently studied the lascivious titles of the volumes strewn so negligently about.
“Look at this,” Dickens pushed a volume at me. “My God, Wilkie, these hacks are stealing my characters for their dirty little novels.”
The title of the book was The Amorous Adventures of Sir Mulberry Hawke.
Other titles caught my eye as I scanned those shelves: Eveline: The Amorous Adventures of a Victorian Lady, Twemlow’s Fetishes, The Birch in the Boudoir, Sub-Umbra or Sport Among the She-Noodles, Lady Pokingham, The Sultan’s Pleasure Chamber, A Man with a Maid, A Season Amongst The Haycocks and La Rose d ’Amour or the Convent of Lust. The titles themselves were enough to bring a blush to the cheek of one perusing them.
Glancing over, I noticed Dickens reading fixedly in one of those volumes, so I, too, procured one from an immediate shelf in order to comprehend more fully the subject matter of this provocative collection. The book which came to my hand was rather cynically titled They All Do It, and consisted of a narrative of the events of an amorous weekend at the country estate of His Scots Lordship, Sir James Dil-Dough. If you choose, though I do not advise it, you may read along with me a brief excerpt:
The ladies were now also divested of everything, till the complete party were in a state of buff, excepting the pretty boots and stockings, which I always think look far sweeter than naked legs and feet.
The interest centred in the engagement between Bertha and Charles, as the others were all anxious to see the working of his fine prick in her splendid cunt. He was in a very rampant state of anticipation, so she laid him at full length on his back on a soft springy sofa, then stretching across his legs she first bent down her head to kiss and lubricate the fine prick with her mouth, then placing herself right over him gradually sheathed his grand instrument within her longing cunt, pressing down upon him, with her lips glued to his, as she seemed to enjoy the sense of possessing it all. I motioned to her bottom with my finger, and Fanny, understanding my ideas, at once mounted up behind her mistress and brought the head of her well-cold-creamed dildoe to the charge against her brown-wrinkled bottom-hole, at the same time clasping her hands round Bertha, one hand feeling Charlie’s fine prick, whilst the fingers of her other were tickling the fine clitoris of our mistress of ceremonies. It was a delightful tableau, and it awfully excited us all when they at once plunged into a course of most delicious fucking.
What a singular piece of writing, and what a singular use of language! I had never read a passage quite like that. Yet there it was in my hand; that scurrilous passage actually existed and there were hundreds, nay, thousands more collected there in that secret room. I returned that book to its shelf as if it were hot. Dickens, evidently possessing a greater tolerance than I for the debased use of language displayed in these books, was still reading with obvious interest. Inspector Field was not. In fact, he displayed no interest in the books whatsoever. He was prowling the room, moving the furniture, and turning things over as if they were rocks, and something might crawl out from beneath them.*
Suddenly he dove to one knee on the rug, and plucked a ball of pinkish fluff from out of the thick pile. Reaching inside his coat with his other hand, he extracted from some inner pocket a similar rag of fabric pinned to a paper card. Rising to his feet, he moved quickly to the light. Dickens joined me in staring at Inspector Field.
“She ’as been ’ere,” Field declared.
“Miss Ternan? Are you certain?” Dickens asked excitedly.
“’Er red dress lay on that chair in Paroissien’s room, and she sat on the couch in that same dress.” He held the two tiny pieces of fabric fluff triumphantly up before Dickens’s nose. “They’re a perfect match!”
“I see,” Dickens answered with a thorough lack of enthusiasm. “You have matched whatever you have found here on this floor to that which you found on the chair in the dead man’s room, have you not?”
“Indeed I ’ave. By George, you are learnin’, sir, to keep your eyes open and read the world. Wot a good detective you could be, sir.”
Dickens and Field stood together, looking hard around the room for a long moment.
“Well?” Field addressed Dickens as a mentor would his student.
“The key to his and her whereabouts is in this room, if we can only find it and interpret it properly,” Dickens answered.
“That’s it!” Field assented.
“But where would he take the girl, and why, and for what purpose?” It was my voice suddenly come to life. “He was not involved in either of the murders. He does not need to protect himself.”
“Or does he?” Dickens leapt upon my questions. “Is there yet some other secret hidden within this room in which both Ashbee and Miss Ternan are involved?”
“Or, perhaps, not even ’idden,” Field said, joining in our wild speculations, “perhaps just sittin’ ’ere before us in plain sight.”
Taking that cue, we joined Field in his prowling of the room. Dickens soon discovered a door, set two steps downward, in a dark back corner among the shelves. Field tried it once but it was locked from without, so he temporarily abandoned the effort with a shrug: “Could be ’is private entrance and exit. Could go to the basement. Could go anywhere.”
We prowled along each row of shelves, and stepped over each pile of books upon the floor, but there seemed no order to their arrangement. Ultimately, it was only natural that we converge upon Ashbee’s writing desk. Spread out on its top were the pages, some piled neatly in an obvious order, others strewn about at random, of a handwritten manuscript.
Atop one of the ordered piles was an almost blank leaf with the manuscript’s title scrawled across it: My Secret Life: Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman.
Of a sudden I remembered what Ashbee had said earlier in the day, “I too am a writer, but what I write is very different from your work.” The title he had given us earlier was really only the subtitle of his magnum opus.
“It is Ashbee’s manuscript,” Dickens informed Field. “I’ll wager it is all written in his own hand, because it is too private to trust to the prying eyes of a secretary. I will also wager that, when finished, it will deserve its place among the others of its type upon these shelves.”
“’Ee is a writer of scurrilous books, then.” Field puzzled over it. “That could be a thing to wish kept ’idden.”
“No,” Dickens disagreed, “being the writer of this text is not what he wishes to hide, but being the man who has lived this text, now that is a secret he could not well allow to be revealed.”
Dickens gathered a handful of the loose leaves spread across the desk, and began to read. Inspector Field followed suit. Not wishing to seem unobservant, I did so as well.
“Extraordinary,” Dickens exclaimed after finishing only a few pages. “Extraordinary,” he repeated a few more pages along. “It will never be published,” Dickens finally put it down after some ten minutes of feverish reading, “but the man can write, and write well. He almost makes his own perversion seem palatable. These pages are nothing more than detailed diaries of his own sexual exploits. It appears that our friend Ashbee is an obsessive rake with a twisted literary bent.”
I remember afterwards how I inquired of Dickens what he meant by the repetition of that term “extraordinary” as he read Ashbee’s manuscript.
“I said that?” he seemed surprised at my question.
“Yes,” I assured him.
“I could not stop reading. It was as if his narrative, his succession of sexual atrocities, drove me forward from one page to the next. As I read, I could not help but feel that the man behind those words, the man doing all of those things to those women whom he seduced or bought or simply forced, could well be me or you, Wilkie.”
“The man is a pig!” Field pronounced, as the critical evaluation of his reading of the manuscript. “Tha’s all this tells us. We need some facts, not these fictions.”
Inwardly, I had to chuckle at Field’s self-righteousness, given what Irish Meg had let slip about the Inspector’s own sexual proclivities. But he shall never see this, so my joke shall remain my own.
We seemed at a temporary impasse as we stood around that large desk, fingering the loose pages of Ashbee’s scurrilous manuscript. Dickens, always the curious one, began to fiddle with a quaint mechanical contraption which sat upon the cluttered desk. This common species of machine is often displayed for sale in the ruder street fairs of Petticoat Lane or St. Giles Circus. It was a model of a young girl on a swing, her skirts raised, being rudely accosted by a quite erect bear standing on its hind legs. Dickens seemed bent on making it work, but the comical machine seemed to be broken. He wound it tightly, but it refused to perform. He attempted to pick it up for a closer examination, and found it anchored to the desktop. He was about to abandon his interest when, accidentally pressing upon the bear’s head, he was startled by the sudden swinging open of a concealed panel in the side of Ashbee’s desk. Indeed, that small door popped open so sharply that it administered a firm slap to the fronts of Dickens’s legs. That panel concealed a secret compartment. All Inspector Field could do was laugh, and shake his head at the continuous good fortune of Dickens, the amateur detective.
Secreted within this hiding place were three diary-size books bound in green leather. Field pounced eagerly upon them. “Perhaps these are the facts we ’ave been lookin’ for.”
The first and second of these volumes seemed nothing more than address books, listing names and places of residence. From a quick perusal of the first, the three of us decided that it was a listing of prominent procurers, bawds, whoremasters and houses of licentious entertainment. Many of the names and locations were familiar to Inspector Field, but he read with relish new names and addresses toward which his sharp hat and intimidating forefinger might point. What also surprised, however, was that this first book contained names of quite prominent London gentlemen, whom Dickens recognized right off.
“Brother rakes?” Field speculated.
The second small volume contained only the names and places of residence of women, more than two hundred, some only noted by first names, some carrying full names, some given full names plus titles or place of occupation or professional practice. Again, some very prominent and recognizable names were included therein. We all surmised the nature of this list; it could be none other than the ubiquitous Ashbee’s many conquests. Field displayed little interest in this listing, while Dickens chuckled rather merrily at some of the more prominent names. Later, he would remark that it was like reading Valmont’s account book in La Clos’s lascivious novel.
The third miniature volume was a true diary, and it was this one which gained and held our attention. Each entry was a narrative description of a meeting of a group called the Dionysian Circle. Each entry was dated and included the names of each of the members in attendance. The number of participants varied from five or six to as many as fifteen gentlemen, and some very prominent gentlemen indeed, their places of occupation stretching from the Houses of Parliament to Lincoln’s Inn to the City to the richest estates in the suburbs of London. The purpose of their meetings was presented quite straightforwardly and graphically. Their society was an organization founded for the sole purpose of staging and participating in the most elaborate sexual orgies imaginable.
“We must take these and study them,” Field had found his facts. “Every name, every place of residence ’ere, is a link to Ashbee and the girl’s whereabouts.”
Dickens’s nose was buried in the third diary. “Extraordinary,” he muttered once again, “positively extraordinary!” It was unlike Charles. He was not given to flights of fulsome hyperbole. “Look at this!” He veritably leapt at us with his discovery. “Read it. It is the key.”
Field took the book from Dickens and began reading where directed. “There,” Dickens said, “that is what they plan for Ellen.” In his excitement he forgot the formal mode of address he had previously used whenever he referred to Miss Ternan in conversation.
Following a long description of the initiation of two supposedly virgin sisters into the rites of the Circle, and the orgy which expanded out of that brutal ceremony at the penultimate meeting, appeared this passage, the final entry in the diary:
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.