The Detective and Mr. Dickens Read Free Page A

it the whole scheme may be hammered.”
    Wills seemed interested.
    Forster scoffed. “Sounds like the scheme for some profane novel!” he barked. “ Adventures of a Fly on the Wall of a Gentleman’s Brothel.”
    “Ah, are you conversant with that species of literature, old man?” Dickens teased him. Little did we know that there already was such a shadow as Dickens had described in London, and we would meet him for the first time that very night.
    We supped in a private room at the Piazza Coffee House, Covent Garden, just a bit after eleven p.m., on smoked chops with boiled potatoes, a steaming cauliflower with cheese melted atop it, and a delicate plum pudding. We smoked cigars as we walked over Hungerford Bridge to Horsemonger Lane Gaol, the site of the executions. The closer we approached the actual scene of the evening’s entertainment, the more subdued Dickens became. It was almost as if he were having second thoughts about all the elaborate arrangements for the celebration of such an inhumane event. But he was never one to back away from experience or reality, and we pressed on, though not the jolly troupe we had been earlier.
    We went first to inspect our perch on the rooftop. The landlord had dragged every available stick of furniture out for the accommodation of his influential (not to mention highpaying—he had charged Dickens two guineas for each of us) guests. Below, at the closed end of the street, built against the front gate of the gaol, stood the gallows. The gibbet posts and the crossbar shown silver grey in the cold moonlight, and cast skeletal shadows against the white stone of the high gaolhouse wall. The crowd had already gathered in the street, and the wardens of the gaol and a detachment of Metropolitan Protectives had thrown up barriers around the sinister scaffolding to keep the crush of people some small distance from the gallows itself.
    Dickens’s plan had been for us to walk down amongst the spectators to observe their behavior, and, perhaps, even collect their opinions of the event. But none of our party seemed immediately so inclined. That gallows, ghostly in the moonlight, sobered us. We sat in the landlord’s chairs and finished our cigars. Only Leech showed any inclination toward activity. His hands were already moving across the first tabula rasa of his sketchbook.
    The crowd below grew increasingly restless. Sounds of impatience and anger and laughter and obscene flirtation floated up. The street was flooded with humanity, and it was still five hours until dawn. Leech’s pencils flew over his pages.
    “Let us descend into this inferno,” Dickens said, finally breaking in on our private rooftop reveries. “We didn’t come here to sit brooding over our cigars like a tribe of tired old voyeurs.”
    “Ah, by all means,” Forster piped up, sarcastically.
    “Maybe we can wangle an interview with Jack Ketch.” *
    Dickens ignored him. We descended the tenement staircase, but at the street door to Horsemonger Lane we were stopped momentarily by a crush of bodies moving in a slow stream. It was an unruly crowd. There were constables in blue uniforms everywhere, each carrying a bright bull’s-eye. * Even as we were pushing our way out of the door, a young woman, carrying a basket, slipped to her knees or was pushed in the street. Before she could right herself, the crowd came on and trampled over her like some blind Juggernaut. She would have died but for a young bobbie who rushed in swinging his bull’s-eye like Samson’s jawbone through the unfeeling crowd to where the poor girl lay stunned on the grimy stones. She was dazed and breathless, but, aside from a few rising bruises, seemed to have no serious injuries. Her basket was gone forever, crushed, then carried off like shattered jetsam on the human tide. It was a warning to beware the ugly wave that could engulf us and batter us into shipwrecked splinters. We made our way toward the gallows, which rose above the crowd like