“Very good,” I said with a smile and a nod. “I need to be going.”
“Mr C. Dickens, the famous author, used that same iron instrooment a year ago when ’e was ’ere,” said Dradles.
I turned back. The fumes from the lime pit were causing tears to streak down my cheeks, but they did not seem to affect Dradles. “I beg your pardon?” I said.
Dradles smiled again. “’E used the same instrooment I give ’im as I give you, to stir the stew, as it were, sir,” he said. “But Mr C. Dickens, famous author, ’e brought a bigger dead dog, ’e did.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
On 29 October of that year, 1868, I dressed in my finest formal clothes and took a hired carriage to St Marylebone Parish Church to see Caroline G—— be married to Joseph Charles Clow.
The bride looked every bit of her thirty-eight years, and more. The groom looked even younger than his twenty-seven years. Someone just dropping into the church and spying the wedding ceremony without knowing the Happy Couple might have been forgiven for thinking that Caroline was the mother of the bride or groom.
The mother of the groom was there—a fat, stupid little gnome of a woman in an absurd maroon dress ten seasons out of style. She wept through the entire ceremony and brief reception after and had to be helped to her carriage after the Happy Couple had ridden off, not to an elaborate honeymoon but back to the tiny home they would later share again with his mother.
There were few other guests on either side. Not surprisingly, Mrs G——, Caroline’s mother-in-law, did not attend (although the old woman had been pining for her daughter-in-law to marry again). Another reason that Caroline’s former mother-in-law chose not to attend (if the old woman was sufficiently aware of events in her current state of addlement to be able to choose) became clear when I glanced at the marriage book: Caroline had invented a false name for her father—a certain “John Courtenay, gentleman.” This was part of an entire reinvention of herself, her family, and her past, even her first marriage, which I had agreed to support in any particulars (as her “previous employer of record”) if ever pressed to do so.
The temptation to reinvent oneself seemed contagious. I noticed that young Carrie, signing as a witness, had signed herself as “Elisabeth Harriette G——” on the marriage certificate, which was a reinvention of the spelling of her names. But perhaps the largest lie on the marriage certificate belonged to the groom, who signed his occupation simply as “gentleman.”
Well, if a plumber with permanent ground-in filth behind his ears and eternal grime under his fingernails was now an English gentleman, England had reached that wonderful socialist state that so many medical reformers had agitated so diligently to bring about.
I have to admit that the only person to look happy at this wedding was Carrie, who, either through the obliviousness of youth or sheer dedication to her mother, not only looked beautiful but acted as if she and we were all attending a joyous occasion. But when I say “we,” I mean just the tiny handful of people. There were two people on Joseph Clow’s side of the aisle: the weeping, crepe-draped mother and an unintroduced, unshaven man who might have been Clow’s brother or perhaps merely another plumber who had come hoping that there would be food after the service.
On Caroline’s side, there was only Carrie and Frank Beard, and me. Our group was so small that Beard had to be the second person to sign alongside Carrie as one of the two required witnesses. (Beard suggested that I sign, but my taste for the ironic absurd was not quite that well developed.)
Joseph Clow looked paralysed with fear and tension throughout the ceremony. Caroline’s smile was so broad and her face so flushed that I felt certain she would burst into tears and hysterics any second. Even the rector seemed to sense something odd about the proceedings and glanced up frequently from his missal, peering myopically out at the tiny gathering as if waiting for some word that it had all been a joke.
Throughout the ceremony I felt an odd numbness spreading through my body and brain. It may have been the extra dose of laudanum I had ingested to help me through the day, but I believe it was more a sense of true detachment. As the bride and groom repeated their final vows, I admit to looking at Caroline, standing so tensely upright in her ill-fitted and rather cheap-looking bridal gown, and remembering the precise touch and texture of every soft— now too soft—curve and bulge under that fabric. I felt no emotion throughout the proceedings except for a strange, spreading emptiness that had first come over me the past weeks when I arrived at Number 90 Gloucester Place to find no Caroline, no Carrie, and even my three servants often missing (with permission) because of an illness in Besse’s family. It was a large house to be so empty of human voices and sounds.
When the wedding was over, there was no food or reception to speak of—merely a brief and uncomfortable milling-about in the chilly courtyard of the parish church. Then the new bride and groom left in an open carriage—it was too cold a day for an open carriage and it had begun to rain, but the couple had obviously been unable to spend the extra amount for a closed carriage. The image of the happy couple headed off to bliss was spoiled a bit when Frank Beard offered to use his carriage to drop Carrie and Joseph Clow’s mother at the same home for which the newlyweds had just left. (It had seemed important to Caroline that Carrie spend the first few weeks of her mother’s married life in that crowded, spartan little house, although the girl would still be working as a governess from time to time and soon would move back to live with me at Gloucester Place.)
Finally, after the rector had retreated back inside his dark church in true confusion, there was only the other plumber (I had decided that he was no relation to Joseph) and me left standing in the chilly late-October wind in front of the church. I tipped my hat to the hungry man and walked all the way to my brother Charley’s home in South Audley Street.
Charley’s health had improved somewhat as the hot summer ended, and by mid-September he and Katey were spending most of their time at their London home rather than at Gad’s Hill Place. Charles was also working on various illustration jobs when he could, although the stomach pains and general disability struck often.
Still, I was surprised to find him not at home on that Thursday, 29 October, when I knocked at their door. Katey was home and she greeted me in their small and rather dark parlour. She knew of Caroline’s wedding and asked me to tell her “all the marvellous high points.” She offered me some brandy—which I happily accepted; my nose, cheeks, and hands were red with the autumn cold—and I received the distinct impression that she had been drinking before I arrived.
At any rate, I told her “all the marvellous high points,” but I expanded the definition of “high points” from the wedding ceremony to my entire history with Mrs Caroline G——. The tale is shocking, of course, to bourgeois sensibilities, but I had long known that Kate suffered from few of her father’s middle-class illusions. If the many rumours and reports were to be believed, Katey had long since taken a lover—or several lovers—to make up for my brother’s lack of ardour (or inability to express it). This was a woman of the world, sipping brandy so close to me in the dark and shuttered little parlour with its tiny coal fire offering most of the dim light we had, and I found myself telling her details of my history with Caroline that I had told almost no one, including her father.
And, as I spoke, I realised that there was another reason—beyond my need to unburden myself at long last—why I was telling Kate Dickens these things.
Reluctantly, secretly, painfully, I had come to agree with her insensitive father’s prediction that my brother would not be so long for this world. It was true that Charley’s affliction, while sometimes lessening, continued to grow worse in the overall scheme of things. It now felt probable, even to me (his loyal and loving brother), that Charles might be dead in a year or two, and this ageing (she was twenty-eight) but still-attractive woman would be a widow.
Katey showed her own indiscretion by saying, “You would be surprised what Father has had
to say about Mrs G——’s marriage.”
“Tell me,” I said and leaned closer.
She poured us each another brandy but shook her head. “It might hurt your feelings.”
“Nonsense. Nothing your father could say would hurt my feelings. He and I have been friends and confidants for far too long. Pray tell me. What did he say about today’s ceremony?”
“Well, he did not say anything to me, of course. But I happened to overhear him say to Aunt Georgina… ‘Wilkie’s affairs defy all prediction. For anything one knows, the whole matrimonial pretence may be a lie of that woman’s, intended to make him marry her, and—contrary to her expectations—breaking down at last.’ ”
I sat stunned. I was hurt. And amazed. Could it be true? Could even the wedding have been another of Caroline’s ploys to trap me into marriage? Was she hoping that I would feel such loss that I would come after her even into Joseph Clow’s household, defying and denying all marriage bonds, and beg her to come back to me… to marry me? My skin rippled with something like revulsion.
Stricken, all I could choke out to Kate Dickens was “Your father is a very wise man.”
Surprisingly—thrillingly—she reached out and squeezed my hand.
Over a third brandy, I heard myself whining to Katey some words that, much later and in a much different context, I would share almost verbatim with Charley himself.
“Kate… do not be too harsh on me. Between my illness and the death of my mother and my loneliness, it has been a terrible year. Seeing Caroline married today, while being strangely satisfying in one respect, was also oddly disturbing. She has, after all, been part of my life for more than fourteen years and part of my household for more than ten. I think, my dear Katey, that a man in my situation is to be pitied. I am not… I have not been for a long time… I am not accustomed to living alone. I’ve been accustomed to having a kind woman there to talk with me, as you are now, Kate… and to take care of me and perhaps to spoil me a bit from time to time. All men enjoy that, but perhaps I more than most. It is difficult for a woman, a wife, such as yourself, to know what it is like for a man to be used always to seeing a pretty creature in his home… someone always nicely dressed, someone always about the room or hovering nearby, bringing a form of light and warmth to an old bachelor’s life… and then, suddenly, for no reason of one’s own, to be left alone as I am now, to be left… out in the cold and the dark.”
Katey was staring at me very intensely. She seemed to have leaned closer to me as I was explaining all this. Her knee under her long green silken dress was only inches from my own. I had the sudden urge to kneel on the floor, throw my head into her lap, and to weep like a child. I was certain at that instant that she would have put her arms around me, would have patted me on my back and head, perhaps even raised my tear-streaked face to her breast.
Instead, I sat there but leaned even closer. “Charley is very ill,” I whispered.
“Yes.” The single syllable seemed to hold no special sadness, only agreement.
“I have also been ill, but my recuperation is assured. My illness is a transient thing. Even now it does not interfere with my faculties or my… needs.”
She looked at me with what I thought was something like a thrilled expectancy.
I then said, softly but urgently, “Kate, I suppose you could not marry a man who had…”
“No, I could not,” Kate said decisively. She stood.
Reeling in confusion, I stood as well.
Kate called for her maid-servant to bring my coat and stick and hat. I was out on the cold stoop before I could think of anything to say. Even then I could not speak. The door closed with a slam.
I was half a block away, leaning into the cold wind, rain blowing into my face, when I saw Charley on the sidewalk opposite. He hailed me, but I pretended that I had not seen or heard him and ran on quickly, my hand holding the brim of my hat and my forearm hiding my face.
Two blocks farther I hailed a hansom cab and had it take me to Bolsover Street.
Martha R——, with no servants there at that time, opened the door herself. Her unguarded expression showed her true pleasure at seeing me.
That night I impregnated her with our first child.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
In November, Dickens previewed his murder in front of an intimate audience of a hundred of his closest friends.
For more than a year now, the Inimitable had been negotiating with Chappell and Company for yet another reading tour—what he called his “farewell series of readings.” Chappell had suggested seventy-five readings, but Dickens—whose illness, weakness, and list of other ailments were increasing almost daily—insisted on a hundred readings for a round sum of £8,000.
His oldest friend, Forster, who had always opposed reading tours for the very real reason that they kept Dickens from writing novels and always left him exhausted, weak, and ill, told the Inimitable flatly that if the author attempted one hundred readings now, in his current condition, it would kill him. Frank Beard and the other doctors whom Dickens had seen more frequently in the past year, fully agreed with Forster. Even Dolby, whose continued presence in Dickens’s life depended totally upon these tours, felt it was a bad idea to enter into one now and a terrible idea to attempt one hundred separate readings.
And no one in Dickens’s circle of family, old friends, physicians, and trusted advisors thought that he should include the Nancy Murder as part of his farewell tour. Some, like Wills and Dolby, simply thought it was far too sensationalist for such an honoured and revered author. Most others, like Beard, Percy Fitzgerald, Forster—and me—were all but certain it would kill him.
Dickens perversely saw the coming exhaustion of travel and performance, not to mention the mental anguish of travelling on railways every day, as (he told Dolby) “a relief to my mind.”
No one understood Dickens’s attitude in this except me. I knew that Charles Dickens was a sort of male succubus—he not only brought hundreds and thousands of people under his personal mesmeric, magnetic control at these readings, but he sucked the energy out of them as he did so. Without this need and ability, I was sure, Dickens would have died of his ailments years ago. He was a vampire and needed public occasions and audiences from which to drain the energy he needed to stagger on another day.
So he and Chappell agreed on his terms of one hundred readings in exchange for £8,000. The Inimitable’s American Tour—which, he had confessed to me, had brought him to the verge of total prostration—had been scheduled for eighty readings but, in the end, reduced to seventy-six because of a few cancellations. It was Katey who had told me (long before our 29 October meeting) that Dickens’s labours in America had brought in total receipts of $228,000 against expenses in that country—mostly travelling, rental of halls, hotels, and a 5 percent commission to the American agents of Ticknor and Fields—of not quite $39,000. Dickens’s preliminary expenses in England had been £614, and, of course, there had been Dolby’s commission of £3,000.
This suggests that Dickens’s profits from the American readings in 1867–68 should have amounted to a small fortune—a serious fortune for any of us in the writing trade—but he had chosen to do his tour only three years after the Americans’ Civil War had ended. That war had lowered the value of the dollar everywhere, and by early summer of 1868, the American currency had yet to go back to its earlier and more normal exchange value. Katey had explained to me that if her father had simply invested his American Tour earnings in securities in that country and waited for the dollar to regain its old level, his profits would have been almost £38,000. Instead, he had paid a 40 percent tariff for converting his dollars to gold at the time. “My profit,” he had bragged to his daughter, “was within a hundred or so of twenty thousand pounds.”
Impressive, but not reflective of the travel, labour, exhaustion, and diminishment of his authorial vigour that the tour had demanded.
So perhaps his current deal with Chappell was, after all, as much about
simple greed as it was about his theoretical vampiric needs.
Or perhaps he was attempting suicide by reading tour.
I admit, Dear Reader, that this final possibility not only occurred to me and made sense to me, but confused me. At this point, I wanted to be the one to kill Charles Dickens. But perhaps it would be tidier if I merely helped him commit suicide this way.
DICKENS HAD BEGUN his tour in his favourite venue of St James’s Hall in London back on 6 October, but without the Murder as part of it. He knew that there would be a necessary hiatus in his travels and readings—the national general election was to be held in November, and he would have to set aside his tour during that campaign if for no other reason than the fact that there would be no suitable public halls or theatres to rent while the politicians were on the rampage. (It was no secret that the Inimitable supported Gladstone and the Liberal Party, but more—his closer friends knew—because he had always detested Disraeli than for any great hopes he had in the Liberals’ carrying out the sort of reform that he, Dickens, had always advocated in his fiction, non-fiction, and public advocacy.)
But even the easier, Murder-less October readings—London, Liverpool, Manchester, London again, Brighton, London—took a great toll on him.
In early October, Dolby had told me of the Chief’s high spirits and joy at renewing his readings, but two weeks into the actual tour and Dolby was admitting that his beloved boss was not sleeping on the road, suffered terrible bouts of melancholy, and was terrified every time he boarded a railway carriage. The slightest bump or swerve, according to Dolby, would cause the Chief to cry out in terror for his life.
More to Frank Beard’s concern, Dickens’s left foot was swelling again—always a sign of more serious troubles—and his old problems of kidney pain and bleeding bowels had returned more fiercely than ever.
Even more telling, perhaps, were the reports through Katey via my brother that Dickens was weeping frequently and was on occasion almost inconsolable during these early travels. It was true that Dickens had suffered enough personal losses during the summer and early autumn.