The Detective and Mr. Dickens by William J. Palmer Read Free Book Online

hand, the harlot suddenly clawed at the laces of her bodice. “No, hit’s this you want,” the creature crooned obscenely, as the top of her dress dropped to her waist. In the same motion, she pressed her body hard against Field’s chest.
    With a swift punitive decisiveness, Field slapped her hard.
    The creature recoiled away from him, the whiteness of her exposed breasts undulating in the saffron light of the fogbound gaslamp.
    He dragged her into the shadows of a wall some yards away from us. “It’s Thompson I want, you little ’ore!” His voice was raised, slightly out of control. The disembodied murmuring of their lowered voices floated toward us out of the darkness.
    The woman’s actions convinced both Dickens and myself that she was capable of any conceivable lewdness for the purposes of her criminal lover’s preservation. We agreed, as Lord Tennyson had said it in the violent rhythms of his great masterpiece, that she was indeed “Nature red in tooth and claw.” And yet, recollecting that scene later, we could not but feel pity and even responsibility for this woman and so many more like her who come up to London looking for a life and find instead only degradation. Our society, then and no less now, seems able to view women in only two widely separate ways, as respectable matrons or as whores. There should be some middle ground, some synthesis (as that curious German exile, Marx, who haunted the British Museum, might put it) of these opposing and limiting views of women. But in eighteen hundred fifty-one there were thousands of Scarlet Besses in London proper, and more arriving every day.
    Field’s handling of this whole indelicate situation bespoke his mastery over this fallen world. He was rough with her because he understood her motives, but he never lost control of his temper, never tried to hurt her. It was as if he could identify with her hopeless plight. We learned later that Field was a bachelor who lived alone in Great Russell Street near the British Museum. Another time, he actually said in reference to a criminal bearing the odd name of John Butt: “’Ee’s not so different from me, I from ’im. I found ’im because I know ’ow ’ee thinks.” Having obtained what information he needed, Field and his prisoner emerged from the darkness. He dismissed her under our streetlamp, and the London night swallowed her up in an instant.
    With Rogers and his bull’s-eye once again in the lead, we retraced our steps to the Bow Street station house. The fog had not relinquished its grip on the city. Beneath another lone streetlamp, Field paused to light a cigar. Quietly he apologized for the woman’s shocking behavior. He stated that he had obtained and would obtain more information from the woman, which would guarantee that Tally Ho Thompson would be run to ground. And then, he said a rather strange thing.
    “The women of these rookeries are the ’ardest to deal with,” Field said, “the ’ardest by a stretch. There’s much more to them than the men. The men are often slow an’ ’ard an’ don’t ’ave no ’ooman feelin’s, live like animals. But the women still seem to believe in love, ’old on to that chance. Too bad. They learn ta lie, steal, do anythin’ for love. ’Ats ’ow the men turn ’em into ’ores.”
    We bid Inspector Field “goodnight” at the station house door. He protested that Rogers should light us back to our lodgings, but Dickens steadfastly refused that courtesy. “These are my streets. I walk them every night,” Dickens insisted. Field only chuckled at that bit of braggadocio as if thinking, They are my streets, an ’ I could teach you much about ’em . Dickens extracted a promise that, when on some future evening some particularly interesting case or bit of detective work arose, Field would summon him to another evening of observation.

We Are Off!
    April 12, 1851
    One week later to the day, I was working late with Dickens in the Wellington Street