February 2, 1852—evening
As the snow melted and the faked suicide of Doctor Rodrigo Vasconcellas the Sodomite sank in, and was widely speculated upon in the most outlandish ways in the Grub Street broadsides, the whole case of the Medusa Murders seemed to hang fire. Two, three, four days passed. I made my daily pilgrimage to the Household Words office, but Dickens was possessed of no new intelligence on the case. Beyond that, however, he seemed uncharacteristically calm about it, not the least bit impatient or concerned that Field was not more aggressively pursuing it. It struck me as curious at the time, but I thought little about it. He would work calmly away for hours upon his new novel or the editing of the magazine, not jumping up to pace the room, not frantic for Field’s summons, not the obsessive Dickens I had come to expect as this case had strengthened its hold upon him. Actually, I found not having to deal with this restless agitation rather restful and welcome. What I am sure of now, looking back, is that Dickens’s calm in those intervening days was counterfeited, all for my consumption. I am certain that he was in conspiracy with Field on another aspect of the case that they did not wish me privy to. It comes clear to me now that Field did not want my interference in this next dangerous gambit, and thus had instructed Dickens to keep me in the dark.
All those around me were drifting out of character, it seemed. Irish Meg was also acting strange. As I look back upon it now, my reaction was predictably comic and irrational, reflective of all of my insecurities of that confusing time. Meg certainly was as ardent as always in her sexual attentions to me, as saucy as ever in her struttings in her secret things before me, yet she was also somewhat preoccupied. It was as if she was not telling me something, holding something back, afraid to tell me something, instructed not to tell me something, or just plain lying to me. In the grips of my sexual insecurity and possessiveness, I convinced myself that she had involved herself with another man. She has grown impatient with all the interruptions and my absences on the case, I feared, and she has ventured out once again into the streets to seduce another. I have been detectiving too much with Dickens and Field, I speculated.
She had, indeed, been acting strangely, but I, too, needed to get a grip upon my own runaway imagination. Surely I am exaggerating all of this, I told myself, and on the spot resolved to talk to Meg about our domestic life at the very first opportunity. But then, on the fifth day after Doctor Vasconcellas’s supposed suicide, I returned to the flat in the evening…and she was gone.
I panicked. It was not a seemly thing to do, but I utterly broke down. I was sure she had left, ever a whore, run off with some whoremonger. I was, I realised, hopelessly in love with her, addicted to her.
Tossing all discretion to the winds, stammering like a lovesick schoolboy, I ran straight back to Dickens, begging his help, pleading for him to intercede with Inspector Field on my behalf to find her.
Dickens took it with such a preternatural calm that I should have been suspicious. If I had not been so muddled and upset, I surely would have thought his reaction strange. But it utterly escaped me as I struggled in the throes of my anxiety. Dickens could not imagine where she had gone, he assured me. “We must get Field to find her,” I implored. Finally he acquiesced, and the two of us set off for Bow Street.
It was as if Field knew that we were coming to see him that night. He was waiting in the outer room of the station house. He did not usher us directly into the bullpen as was his usual courtesy. Equally strange was his attentiveness to me. He hardly noticed Dickens’s presence when we arrived. It was “Mister Collins, ’ow good ta see yew,” and Rogers, not sullen at all as was his usual attitude, helped me out of my greatcoat and hung it on a peg. I was, however, too distracted to notice these solicitous departures from their usual habit of ignoring my presence. From the moment we entered the station house and I spied Field, I was upon him with my fears for Irish Meg’s disappearance. With a knowing glance Dickens’s way, he brought me up short.
“She ’as not disappeared, Mister Collins.” His crook’d forefinger scratched at the side of his eye preparatory to his hand moving, quite fatherly, around my shoulder. “She’s a good lass, that Meggy, she is,” he confided. “Now yew wouldn’t mind ’er comin’ back on duty for Inspector Field, would yew now?”
I did not know how to answer. I was too tossed by the frantic workings of my own mind to really understand what he was saying. I looked to Dickens for help. None was forthcoming. He merely grinned, somewhat sheepishly, and shrugged. I looked back to Field who was smiling as solicitously as a coffin merchant. Rogers stood beside him, smug as a cat who had just dined on a pigeon. It was a strange, passive kind of torture they were inflicting upon me.
They were waiting for my answer. But what was the question? Something about Meggy working for Field.
I certainly did not know how to answer. What I did know was that I could never presume to answer for Irish Meg. Stupidly, I stared at the lot of them, uncomprehending.
It became awkward after a moment.
“Why don’tchew come in,” Field ushered me toward the bullpen. “I wants yew ta meet some’un.” He opened the door and stepped aside, motioning politely for me to enter before him. I was looking back over my shoulder at the assembled company as I passed through the door, thus I did not see her immediately. They were all acting so strange, so smug. It puzzled me. But their behaviour was nothing compared to the shock I experienced when I turned my head back before me as I walked into the room.
The fire was blazing in the hearth as always. The easy chairs were pulled up to the heat as always. The gin bottle sat on the small table as always. Rude snoring sounds came from the holding cages as always. But in the midst of all that everyday reality stood this apparition, this goddess of beauty and wealth. She stood before the hearth, the firelight flickering behind her, in a rich blue day gown with a white lace bodice that reached up like a churchman’s collar to encircle her neck. Her rich dark hair was coiffed in a mob of wild ringlets, which cascaded around her face, caught the orange glow, and blazed out as the light from the fire behind burned through it. A diamond pendant shone against the white skin of her throat. Her dark eyes flashed above the slashes of pink that were her cheekbones and the fiery circle of red that was her mouth. It was, of course, Irish Meg, my fire-woman, standing there, once again, before that very Bow Street blaze where I had first laid eyes upon her. My heart leapt in relief, in surprise, in love, in an irrational jumble of emotions quite beyond any talent I might possess to describe.
“Meggy!” I cried out, and ran into her arms.
“Oh Wilkie, I loves yew.” She crushed me in her desperate embrace. “But I ’ad ta git out o’ those rooms. I owes Fieldsy this much, don’t I? Pleese let me do this.”
Still I was confused. She looked once again like the fine lady that Dickens had, as a joke, dressed her up as for the Queen’s performance of Not So Bad As We Seem* the previous April. Holding her closely, I caught a stiff movement off over her shoulder. Tally Ho Thompson, dressed as the Irish gentleman on horseback whom I had seen through Field’s monocular five days before, was rising from one of the overstuffed wing chairs.
I stepped one step back from her embrace, resting my hands on the white lace of her shoulders. The firelight played in her dark Medusa curls. The fire of her power over me burned in her eyes. She was my belle dame sans merci and I her hapless, hopeless knight, utterly confused by this violent collision between love and independence within the charmed circle of our arms.
“Meggy, what are you doing here?” I stammered. “Dressed like, like…this. My God, you are so beautiful.” I pulled her back into the protection of my arms as if I could hide her beauty from all the others bent to prey upon it.
“Fieldsy said yew’d niver let me do it, Wilkie. ’Ee said I couldn’t tell yew ’til ’twas all done.”
“He swore me to that same secrecy,” Dickens interceded on her behalf like some Lincoln’s Inn solicitor.
“Do what? Tell me what?” I felt as if they were spinning me in some dizzying game of blindman’s buff.
“I’m ta be an Irish hairuss,” Meg stepped back and curtsied, quite proud of herself. “Miss Megan Theresa Gilbride come up ta see London.”
“An I’m ’er neer-do-well rake o’ a brother ’Arry”—Thompson stepped up beside her and bent in an actor’s bow—“rider o’ fast ’orses an’ fixed on gamblin’ away ’is ’ole in’eritance. I ben schoolin’ Meggy on the brogues the actors at Covent Garden spout.”
“What?” I looked from one to the other of them as if they were mad.
“They are our bait”—Field spun me around once more—“our last chance ta bring Palmer out. There is no real plan. Thompson ’as set up a race with ’im, will gamble with ’im. Meggy will try ta seduce ’im, weaken ’im with liquor. All in ’opes ’ee will say or do somethin’, anythin’ which will give us a leg up on this case.”
“Bait? Seduce?” I was burbling like a village idiot.
“You see, Wilkie”—Dickens tried to pacify me—“we knew you would not take it well.” He was actually making a small joke of it. The others grinned tentatively, waiting for my reaction.
“Not take it well,” I huffed. “How dare you? She could be killed. Meggy”—I took her hand, begging now—“this is not a game. This could be dangerous.”
“Tally ’O will be there. Yew will be close by.” She was determined to go through with it; I could tell by the set of her voice. “I’ve ’andled men in rougher ’ouses than some posh ridin’ club in ’Ampstead.” She laughed weakly, turning to the others for support.
“She will niver be out o’ Thompson’s sight.” Field tried to calm me with his organisation. “Yew an’ Dickens will be right on the premises yerselfes the day o’ the race.”
“Good God! He’s killed two women already.” It was a last spasm of resistance on my part. They outnumbered me. Meggy wanted to do it, to prove something—God knows what!—to herself, perhaps to me, that I didn’t own her, that I couldn’t keep her closed up in my Soho rooms with no employment other than our domestic entertainments. As I look back upon it now, that was the sum of it for her. She was proclaiming one of Burton’s territorial imperatives, a woman letting her man know what her boundaries (and his) were. But, at the time, all I could see was the danger of it; all I could feel was the fear that I might lose her. She was an addiction I clung to like an opium smoker to his pipe.
“It’s jus’ for one night.” Field knew already that he had won. Now he was only palliating me. “I wants ta see if our Doctor Palmer is on the lookout for new money in the way o’ a wife.”
“Tally ’O’s an actor now. Yew two go onstage in Mister Dickens’s plays.” Meg was beaming at the fun of it. “Now’s my chance ta be an actress too.”
“The play’s the thing, eh mate?” Thompson clapped me on the shoulder and I recoiled from his presumptuous familiarity. “We thought o’ my Bess, but she don’t keep ’er ’ead the way Meggy does, an’t the actress Meggy is, don’t play the rich bitch near as well.”
Meggy beamed at his compliments, looked at me doelike then mischievous. Give it up, luv. Let me ’ave me fun, she was telling me with her eyes and the coy pursing of her mouth. She knew I would do whatever she asked. I do not know why they all even bothered. Wilkie Collins, convenient doormat, ever ready to follow his masters and do their mad, heedless bidding. I vowed that someday I would rebel against my role as pawn in the risky gambits of Dickens and Field, but, alas, this was clearly not that day.
“All is in readiness, Wilkie.” Dickens, in his enthusiasm for their outlandish plan, had nonchalantly cast aside the main issue, that of Irish Meg’s participation. “I have imposed upon young Jekyll to invite us to view the match race. Spectators can double back upon the course in their carriages.”
“An’ I ’ave reserved rooms for meself, me sister, an’ me ’orse at the ’Ounds Club the night afore the race.” Thompson was veritably brimming with the whimsy of it. “’At’s when we makes our run at Palmer.”
“An’ Rogers an’ I shall stay close, we will,” Field assured me.
They were all mad. It was a contagion that Thompson spread like some plague carrier spitting death across Europe. My consternation, my skepticism, must have shown in my face because they all looked at me as if I were a ghost at the banquet table, putting a damper on their fun.
“I admit,” Field went on the defensive, tried to answer the skepticism he had read in my mien, “that I ’old little ’ope that Palmer will break down an’ confess or lead us ta the poison or ’and over any new evidence on which we can bring ’im ta justice. But we ’ave no witnesses”—this was, indeed, an argument of desperation—“an’ I am determined ta follow through, ta try ta entrap ’im, ta lead ’im ta contemplate yet another murder for gain. If ’ee is greedy, we can git ’im.”
It was a long speech for Field, the apologia of a man brought to the end of his tether. Ridiculous as it may seem, I felt sorry for him.
“I’m ridin’ this road ta its end,” Thompson unexpectedly declared—serious, for God’s sake!—his jaw set, his heedless jokester’s grin nowhere to be found, “a’cause she wos a good lass.” None of us had ever experienced this grim, vengeful version of Tally Ho Thompson before.
“What?” I was startled by Thompson’s intensity.
“Who?” Meggy’s hands went to her hips like a governess about to punish her charge.
“Just what do you mean by that?” Dickens was bursting with curiosity.
“She wos a good lass.” Thompson shrugged. “Palmer’s wife.”
“Wot do yew know about Palmer’s wife?” Field glared at him. “Yew said yew only took ’er ridin’ once or twice.”
Dickens looked at me, raising his eyebrows and rolling his eyes in one of those “well that’s odd” looks. It was me who had, for the sheer contrariness of it, speculated that there was more to Thompson’s involvement with the late Missus Palmer than merely the horse riding.
Thompson closed up like a Portsmouth clam, but Inspector Field was having none of that.
“Jus’ wot are yew sayin’, Thompson?” Field had that murderous look of the night streets upon him again. This is no longer a game, that look announced. Field did not like his familiars withholding anything from their master. Suddenly that powerful right hand leapt out and clasped the lapel of Thompson’s foppish red riding coat. “Tell it, all o’ it, yew ’ear, or I’ll clap yew back inta Newgate so fast the streets won’t even know yer gone.”
“She wos a good lass. I liked ’er.” Thompson hesitated.
Field let go of the front of Thompson’s coat, but, with a scratch of his crook’d forefinger to the side of his eye, ordered our somewhat rattled highwayman to “go on with it, the ’ole tale.”
Thompson stretched his hesitation with a quick guilty glance at Meg.
Field was exhibiting miraculous patience. I expected him, at any moment, to lunge for his knobbed stick and begin beating the confession out of Thompson.
Myself, Meg, Dickens, that stupid Rogers, we all stared wide-eyed at Tally Ho Thompson, waiting like greedy gossips in the tea-tent on Market Day.
The veins in Field’s neck began to bulge and I think Thompson realised that he had no choice but to confess.
“She said ’er ’usband ’ated ’er. Said ’ee didn’t even live with ’er, loved ’is ’orses more,” Thompson began in apologia. “I felt sorry for the lass. We ’ad this one time together, ’at wos all.”
“Yew slept with ’er!” Irish Meg was all shocked propriety and matronly rage. It was really quite comical, considering.
“Yew mussn’t tell Bess.” Now Thompson was the desperate man pleading for understanding. “I felt sorry for ’er. ’Er ’ole family wos in the country an’ they thought Palmer a good match despite the stiff dowry. Business people at Henley they are. An’ ’ee beat ’er, she said that. She wanted some’un jus’ ta prove she wos alive. We went ta a ’otel on ’Eyde Park. I’d niver been ta ’er ’ouse,” he said that last as if he thought that Field might still suspect him of murdering her. “I only slept with ’er that once. ’At’s why I niver went back ta ride with ’er. ’Twas not the play kept me away. Yew see…I luvs Bess, in my way.”
Tally Ho Thompson was, indeed, a marvel. For all of his talent, his looseness, his maddening heedless view of the world and life as some comical careening game, there was this powerful instinctive rightness about him. Dickens and I have more than once laughed as we referred to our highwayman, actor, womaniser, thief of a friend as one of the truly “honest” men of our acquaintance, a sort of Robin Hood “honesty” that always seems to do the right thing no matter how at odds with conventional thinking it may be.
*Collins’s first memoir (or secret journal) ends with this scene of Dickens’s amateur performance of Bulwer-Lytton’s play before the Queen. As a joke on Collins, Dickens had dressed Irish Meg, Scarlet Bess, and Tally Ho Thompson up as gentlefolk and seated them in the midst of the Queen and her court.