Free The Detective and Mr. Dickens by William J. Palmer Page A

assistance ’as been greatly appreciated, sir,” Rogers spoke up.
    “Yes, indeed.” Field’s animation was genuine.
    “We would very much like to continue to follow this case, to give any assistance that we can, of course, but mainly for curiosity’s sake,” Dickens addressed Field cautiously. “You have drawn us right into the middle of one of your mysteries, and, I feel I speak for Mister Collins as well, I found the evening exciting and fascinating. Will you keep us informed? May we continue to observe your investigation at first hand?”
    Inspector Field smiled openly at Dickens and answered, without the slightest hesitation, “You’ve identified our murdered man. Meg says there are four others involved. Who knows, perhaps you can identify ’em too. It is my thinkin’ that these swells are from your part of town, rather than mine. Before this is done your ’elp may be even more useful than it ’as already been ’ere at the start.”
    With Field’s assurances that he would keep us informed, and, in fact, summon us at any crucial point in the case, we parted company.
    It was nearing two in the morning. As we walked back through those deserted streets, I began to understand Dickens’s great affection for them. He walked his beloved streets out of restlessness, but one could not help but see those streets’ potential for this kind of shocking reality which Field had guided us down into this night. I am convinced that those night streets were Dickens’s greatest inspiration.

Death Closing All around Me
    April 14, 1851
    If this were one of my novels, this chapter would not exist. It digresses. As a memoir, not a novel, however, I am bound to tell what happened when it happened. Historians and biographers may some day refer to this manuscript, probably to learn about him, not me.
    This particular date, April fourteenth, eighteen hundred fifty-one, proved one of the most important in Dickens’s personal history. Only one day after looking into the dead eyes of that murdered man, Dickens on this day was forced to confront an event which darkened his view of life. After the events of this day, he was never the same again, either in life or in fiction.
    I slept late the morning after our nocturnal adventure in the company of Inspector Field. I had business in the City, so I did not look in at the Household Words office that afternoon. Forster later told me that Dickens rose late at Wellington Street, and immediately called for a coach to take him to Malvern to visit his wife. The following day, the fourteenth, he returned early to the city but did not go to Wellington Street. Instead, he went to his city house in Devonshire Terrace. Mrs. Dickens was in Malvern, recuperating from one of her frequent undiagnosable illnesses, but the children were quartered in Devonshire Terrace in the care of a nurse and three trusted family servants. Forster looked in there late in the afternoon, and found Dickens in the nursery playing with the youngest, Dora Annie, who within the week had recovered from a stiff bout with the chicken pox. As Forster described it, she was skipping about the room and perching on her father’s lap like a bird newly freed from its cage. Dickens had spent the afternoon preparing the evening’s speech and playing with the children. He and Forster rode in a cab into town at six.
    I met Dickens as he was climbing out of the hansom outside The London Tavern at number five Bishopsgate Street. There was a crush of people at the door, those waiting to get in, plus the inevitable Grub Streeters who seemed to appear whenever it was publicized that Dickens would be in attendance at any public function. He looked tired, but he was jovial upon coming in. When his good friend Macready inquired after Mrs. Dickens’s health, I saw Dickens wink, and overheard him answer with an evil grin, “I fear my wife is once again in the early stages of her anti-Malthusian state.” It was an unkind thing to say about his