Great adventures were planned for the period when this group visited Gad’s Hill Place (with the bachelorly overflow staying in the best rooms of the Falstaff Inn across the road), but the Fieldses’ first stop was London, and Dickens promptly took rooms at the St James Hotel in Piccadilly—the same hostelry where I had spent so much money on harbouring and feeding Fechter the previous January—just so that he could be close to the hotel on Hanover Square where the Fieldses were staying.
I had disguised myself in a broad-brimmed hat and dark summer cape-coat and followed them all from the hotels and then later from Gad’s Hill Place. I had purchased a sailor’s spyglass and hired my own cab (its driver and horse as nondescript as my disguise-clothing). All those days of detective work and the act of being in disguise and following someone invariably reminded me of poor, dead Inspector Field.
During the first days of their stay in London, the Fieldses & Co. were more or less launched into the pages of Dickens’s novels; after brisk hikes alongside the Thames (as if to prove that he was as young and healthy as ever), the Inimitable showed them the rooms in Furnival Inn where he had started work on The Pickwick Papers, showed them the room at the Temple where Pip had lived in Great Expectations, and acted out Magwitch stumbling on the very darkened staircase where the scene had been set.
Travelling along behind them in the cab or on foot, I could see Dickens pointing out this old house or that narrow alley where his various characters had lived or died and I remembered a similar tour with him more than a decade earlier when I had been his friend.
I was not invited on their expedition during the day and night of 9 June, the Anniversary—although Dolby was invited to join Fields and Eytinge on the nighttime part of the adventure—but I was there waiting near the Fieldses’ hotel when their carriages set out. Their first out-of-town stop that warm Wednesday afternoon was Cooling Churchyard.
This, of course, is the rural churchyard with its lozenge-shaped graves that Dickens had described so well in the opening of Great Expectations (a disappointment of a book, if one were to ask me). And as I watched through my trusty spyglass from some hundred yards away, I was amazed to see Dickens re-creating the same macabre churchyard-pantomime dinner with which he had entertained Ellen Ternan and her mother and me so long ago in the churchyard at Rochester Cathedral.
There was the same type of flat gravestone selected and used as a dinner table; the same transformation of Charles Dickens, Writer, into Charlie Dickens, Waiter; the same use of a wall as a bar for the gentlemen’s drinks; the same use of crystal and white linen and perfectly roasted squab lifted from hampers in the back of their carriages and delivered by the writer-waiter with the towel over one arm.
Even the nearby marshes and smell of the salt sea were the same, although this stretch of coastal marsh was more desolate and isolated than the Rochester graveyard.
Why was Dickens doing this again with his American friends? Even through the slightly shaky circle of the spyglass, I could tell that James Fields was a bit put off by this forced merrymaking in the midst of a boneyard. The ladies looked actively shocked and ate very little.
Only Eytinge, the illustrator, could be seen to be laughing and joining in the graveyard-theatre gaiety with Dickens, and that is most likely because he had enjoyed three glasses of wine even before the squab was served.
Was this some statement that Dickens, the mortal man, was making in the face of the imminent paralysis or death predicted by Beard and his other doctors?
Or was the scarab in his brain finally driving Dickens mad?
THAT NIGHT, the ladies and most of the other guests were left behind as Dickens took James Fields, a still-inebriated Sol Eytinge, and a very sober George Dolby into the Great Oven of London. (But he did not leave me behind, despite the lack of any invitation—when they left their cab, I followed stealthily on foot.) They paused briefly at a police station on Ratcliffe Highway to pick up a detective policeman who would be their bodyguard for the night’s explorations. I needed no such bodyguard: Detective Hatchery’s pistol was in the oversized pocket of my dark summer cape-coat.
What must have been so exotic, even terrifying, to Boston-born Fields was now, after more than two years of regularly traversing these streets with Hatchery, familiar almost to the point of comfort for me.
Almost.
Thunderstorms were brewing, lightning rippled all around the pitched, leaning roofs above the narrow lanes, thunder rumbled like constant cannon-fire around a besieged city, but it refused to rain. It only grew hotter and darker. Nerves were on edge everywhere in London, but down here in this suppurating pit of the hopeless poor, this nightmare-market of husbandless women, parentless children, Chinese and Lascar and Hindoo thugs and German and American sailor-murderers on the run from their ships, there was a madness in the air almost as visible as the electrical blue flames that played around the tilted weather vanes and leaped between the iron support cables that ran down like rusted mooring lines from buildings that had long since forgotten how to stand upright on their own.
The tour that Dickens and his police detective were giving the two Americans and Dolby was essentially the same as the ones that Inspector Field and Hatchery had shown the Inimitable and me so long ago: the poorest slums of Whitechapel, Shadwell, Wapping, and New Court off Bluegate Fields; penny lodging houses outside of which drunken mothers insensibly held filthy infants (I watched from a dark distance as Dickens seized one of these children out of its drunken mother’s arms and bore the babe into the lodging house himself); lock-ups filled with thugs and lost children; basement tenements where scores and hundreds of London’s huddled outcasts slept in filth and straw within the constant miasmic stench from the river. The tidal mud this hot night seemed to be made up completely of horse dung, cattle guts, chickens’ viscera, the carcasses of dead dogs, cats, and the occasional hog or horse, and acres upon acres of human excrement. The streets were filled with idle men carrying knives and even more dangerous idle women carrying disease.
Charles Dickens’s beloved Babylon. His very own Great Oven.
In one of his lesser novels (I believe it was the plotting disaster he titled Little Dorrit), Dickens had compared the homeless children who skittered and scattered beneath the arches of Covent Garden to rats and warned that someday these rats, always gnawing at the foundations of the city and society that chose to ignore them, might “bring down the English Empire.” His outrage was real, as was his compassion. This night of 9 June, as I watched through my little telescope from half-a-block distant, I saw Dickens take up a scabbed and filthy child who looked to be dressed in strips of rags. It appeared that James Fields and Dolby were dabbing their eyes while Eytinge watched with a drunken illustrator’s disinterested gaze.
Because it was summer—or as hot as summer—the doors of tenements were open, the windows thrown up, and clusters and mobs of men and women were out in filthy courtyards and no less filthy streets. Even though it was the middle of the work week, most of the men (and not a few of the women) were drunk. Several times these groups would lurch towards Dickens’s party only to back away when the police detective with them flashed his bright bullseye lantern at the thugs and showed his club and uniform.
For the first time, I began to be nervous about my own safety. Although my cheap cape and broad-brimmed hat hid my features and allowed me to mix with most of these mobs, some men took note of me and followed along, calling drunkenly for me to stand them to a drink. I hurried on behind the Dickens party. While they tended to keep to the centre of the street where it was lightest, I crept along in the darkest shadows under porches, tattered awnings, and the leaning buildings themselves.