“The soldier, sir.”
“Soldier?”
“The young rascal of a Scottish-regiment soldier who she met in market in December, Mr Collins. A corporal. Ten year older ’n Agnes he were, sir, with shifty little eyes and soft hands and a moustache like a greasy caterpillar what crawled up on his lip to die, sir. Besse, she seen our girl talking to ’im and got between ’em quick, you can imagine. But somehow she seen him again when she was out doin’ chores. She admitted to such before Christmas, when we found ’er cryin’ like a mooncalf in ’er room.”
“You mean…”
“Aye, sir. The silly, stupid child’s run away with that soldier as sure as Besse’s mum’s in the cold ground an’ her papa now too, most likely. Our little family’s all gone and scattered now.”
Lifting the valise, I clasped George on his shoulder as I headed for the door. “Nonsense, my dear man. She’ll be back. They always come back after their first love’s disappointment! Trust me on this, George. And if she doesn’t… well, we’ll hire someone to track her down and talk sense into her. I happen to know several detectives in private consultation. There’s nothing to worry about, George.”
“Aye, sir,” he said in a tone as grey as his complexion.
“I’ll be at the Saint James Hotel for a few more days. Please be so kind as to bring my mail there each day and to have the house all aired and ready by Saturday, with a meal planned for that evening—Mr Fechter and others may come for a stay.”
“Aye, sir.”
We descended the stairs together.
“Be of good cheer,” I said and patted him on the back a final time before stepping out to the waiting cab. “All shall turn out for the best in the end.”
“Aye, sir.”
ONE CAN ONLY imagine how difficult it was for Dickens, with his Staplehurst-shattered nerves worsening rather than improving, as he again plunged into an exhausting tour which required travel by rail almost every day. Katey had informed me through my brother that the day after his St James’s Hall readings on 5 January, Dickens had been too exhausted to get out of bed and take his usual cold shower-bath. Within a few days he had to do his final readings in Dublin and Belfast, and he decided to take Georgina and his daughter Mary with him to make it feel more like a festive occasion rather than a farewell. He was almost immediately confronted with a near-tragedy that took a terrible toll on his nerves.
Dickens, Dolby, Georgina, Mary, and the usual travelling entourage were returning from Belfast to catch the mail boat to Kingston when something went terribly wrong. They were riding in the first-class carriage immediately behind the engine when suddenly there was an incredible crash along the roof of their carriage and they looked outside just in time to see what appeared to be a huge, free-flying scythe of iron cutting through telegraph poles as if they were mere reeds.
“Down!” cried Dickens and everyone dived for the floor of the carriage. A fusillade of huge splinters, gravel, mud, stones, and water struck the windows on the side they had been riding. The carriage shuddered as if they had hit something solid and then there was a series of shocks so great that Dickens later admitted that he was sure they had once again derailed and were hurtling over an incomplete trestle.
The carriage came to a halt and the only sounds breaking the sudden silence were the steam-panting of the great engine and a few screams from the lower-class carriages. Dickens was the first to his feet and outside and immediately began talking quietly to the engineer as Dolby and other men with their wits about them gathered round.
The engineer, who (according to Dolby writing Forster) was far more agitated than Dickens, his hands shaking, explained that the metal tire on the huge driving-wheel had fractured—exploded—and sent its fragments flying into the air and scything through the telegraph poles. It had been the large section of that wheel that had crashed into the roof of Dickens’s carriage. “If it’d been a little larger,” said the engineer, “or travelling a little lower or faster, it would have cut down through the roof of your carriage for sure, doing to you poor passengers what its other parts did to those telegraph poles.”
Dickens had calmed Mary and Georgina and the other passengers that day—even Dolby admitted to being deeply shaken, and it took much to shake George Dolby—but the next evening, after the Inimitable had Murdered Nancy yet again, Dolby had to help the Chief off stage at the end of the evening.
Dickens had arranged his schedule to read in Cheltenham just so that his dear and ageing friend Macready might hear the Murder. Afterwards, the failing seventy-five-year-old came backstage, shakily leaning on Dolby’s arm, and was unable to speak until he had two glasses of champagne. The old man was so emotional after seeing the Murder that Dickens tried to make light of it, but Macready would have none of that. A hint of his old stage fury returning in that ruined voice, he bellowed out, “No, Dickens—er—er—I will NOT—er—er—have it—er—put aside. In my—er—best times—er—you remember them, my dear boy—er—gone, gone!—no!” And here the bellow became a roar. “It comes to this—er—TWO MACBETHS!”
This last was so loud and so emotional that Dickens and Dolby could do nothing but stare at the old actor who had made Macbeth his signature role and who was more proud of nothing else, not even his wife and lovely grown daughter. And he seemed to be saying that in terms of pure horror and emotion, Dickens’s Murder of Nancy had been the equivalent—in acting as well as in effect—of the best of his best Macbeths.
Then the old giant stood there glaring at Dolby as if the manager (who had not said a word) had contradicted him. And then Macready simply… went away. His body was still there, the third glass of champagne still in his hand, the great jaw and profile both still jutting upwards and outwards in defiance, but Macready himself was gone, leaving behind, as Dickens later told Dolby and Forster, only a clever, pale optical illusion of himself.
In Clifton, the Murder brought about what Dickens gleefully called a contagion of fainting. “I should think we had from a dozen to twenty ladies borne out, stiff and rigid, at various times. It became quite ridiculous.” The Inimitable loved it.
In Bath, it was Dickens who seemed close to fainting, as the place literally haunted him. “The place looks to me like a cemetery which the Dead have succeeded in rising and taking,” he told Dolby. “Having built streets out of their old gravestones, they wander about scantily trying to ‘look alive.’ A dead failure.”
Percy Fitzgerald let slip to me in February that after Georgina and Mary returned to Gad’s Hill, Ellen Ternan was with Dickens again. Or so I surmised (Percy would never be so indiscreet as to say it outright). But Fitzgerald was getting married, at long last, and when he breathlessly told this to Dickens at the station, the writer said, “I must tell this to the one who is with me.” The one who is with me… Dickens hardly would have used this circumlocution to describe Dolby or his lighting or gas man. Was Ellen staying in the same hotel as Dickens, but as a sister now, rather than a lover? One can only imagine the added torments this gave to the Inimitable.
I say “added torments” quite deliberately, since there was no doubt now that it was more than bad health that was tormenting Charles Dickens. Despite his gleeful reports about dozens of women fainting, the Murder of Nancy was obviously taking a terrible toll on his psyche as well as his body. Everyone I spoke to—Fitzgerald, Forster, Wills, everyone—agreed that the Inimitable’s letters were filled with the Murder and nothing but the Murder. He was reading it at least four times a week, mixed in with his usual most popular readings, and he seemed obsessed not just with turning each hall in which he read into a Theatre of Terror, but in feeling Bill Sikes’s guilt at the murders.
“I am murdering Nancy.…”
“My preparations for a certain murder…”
“I think often of my fellow criminals.…”
“I commit the murder again, and again, and again.…”
“I have a vague sensation of being ‘wanted’ as I walk about the streets.…”
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“I imbue my hands once again with innocent blood.…”
“I still have a great deal of murdering ahead of me and little time in which to do it.…”
All these phrases and more poured out to those of us left behind in London. Dolby wrote Forster that Dickens could no longer abide staying in the town or city where he had done the reading, long-planned railway schedules had to be changed, tickets exchanged, new fees paid out, so that the exhausted Inimitable, barely capable of walking to the station, could flee the city that night, like a wanted man.
“People look at me differently after I have Murdered Nancy,” Dickens told the vacant-headed Wills during one of his stops in London. “They fear me, I believe. They leave a distance in the room… not one of shyness towards someone famous, but rather the distance of fear and, perhaps, loathing or disgust.”
Another time, Dolby told Forster that he came backstage after a performance to say that the carriage was waiting for departure to the station, only to find that Dickens had been washing his hands for fifteen minutes or more. “I cannot get the blood off, Dolby,” said the exhausted writer, looking up with haunted eyes. “It stays beneath my nails and in the skin.”
To London, to Bristol, to Torquay, to Bath—Dickens knew the hotels and stations and halls and even the faces in the audiences by heart by now—and then to London again in preparation to go on to Scotland. But now Dickens’s left foot was so swollen that Frank Beard absolutely forbade the Scotland tour, which was postponed briefly. But five days later, Dickens was travelling again, despite urgent pleas not to from Georgina, his daughters, his son Charley, and friends such as Fitzgerald and Wills and Forster.
I DECIDED TO go to Edinburgh to see Dickens Murder Nancy. And, possibly, to see the Murder murder Charles Dickens.
I felt almost certain now that Dickens was attempting suicide by reading tour, but my earlier anger at the idea had faded somewhat. Yes, this would leave Dickens with his fame and with his burial in Westminster Abbey, argued one part of my mind, but at least the man would be dead. But some suicides fail, I reminded myself with satisfaction. The ball rattles around in the skull, carving tunnels through the brain, but the would-be suicide does not die, merely remains a drooling idiot the rest of his life. Or the woman hangs herself, but the rope does not break her neck and someone cuts her down, but too late to prevent all that loss of circulation of blood to her brain. For the rest of her life she has a scar on her throat, an ugly twist to her neck, and a vacant stare.
Suicide by reading tour, I told myself, might misfire in the same delightful way.
I had arrived earlier and taken a room, so Dickens was surprised and pleased to see me waiting at the station.
“You look well, my dear Wilkie,” he cried. “Healthy. Have you been out on one of your rented yachts in a late-February gale?”
“You look wonderful yourself, Charles,” I said.
Dickens looked terrible—much older and greyer, the hair all but gone from the top of his head, the few greying strands combed over, and even his beard appeared sparse and ill-kempt. His eyes were red-rimmed and there were purple hollows beneath them. His cheeks were gaunt. His breath was rank. He limped like a Crimean war veteran with a wooden leg.
I knew that I looked little better. Frank Beard had been forced to increase the number of morphia injections—always administered precisely at ten PM—from two or three a week to nightly. He had taught me how to fill the syringe and how to inject myself (not so difficult or onerous a project as it sounds) and had left a huge bottle of morphine for me. I doubled the nightly dose at the same time I was doubling the amount of laudanum I was taking during the day.
This led to increased productivity both day and night. When Dickens asked what I was working on, I told him truthfully that Fechter had all but moved in with me at Number 90 Gloucester Place and we were working long hours each day on our play, Black and White. I told him that I had an idea for another novel, one based on certain odd aspects of English marriage laws, that I would almost certainly commence work upon once the play premiered in late March.
Dickens clapped me on the back and promised to be at the premiere with his entire family. I wondered then if he would be alive a month from then, in late March.
What I did not tell Dickens was that each night now, after a brief morphine sleep, I awoke by one or two AM and dictated my dreams to the Other Wilkie. Our collaborative book on Ancient Egyptian Ritual of the Gods of the Black Lands now boasted more than a thousand handwritten pages.
That night in Edinburgh, Dickens performed the Murder brilliantly. I admit to having chills myself. The room was not overheated, as it may have been in Clifton, but still a dozen or so women fainted.
Afterwards, Dickens spent some time with members of the audience before staggering off to his dressing room, and once there he told Dolby and me again that he had noticed that people were strangely reluctant to come up and speak to him or stand in his presence after the performance. “They sense my murderous instincts,” he said with a rueful laugh.
It was here that Dickens handed Dolby a list of the remaining readings and Dolby made the nearly fatal (in terms of employment) mistake of politely suggesting that the Murder might be left off the programme for the smaller towns, merely reserved for major cities.
“Look, Chief—look carefully through the towns you have given me and see if you note anything peculiar about them.”
“No. What?”
“Well, out of four readings a week you have put down three Murders.”
“What of it?” snapped Dickens. “What on earth is your point?” I believe he had forgotten that I was in the room. As the ancient Macready had, I stood straight and silent with a glass of warming champagne in my hand.
“Simply this, Chief,” Dolby said softly. “The success of your farewell tour is certain, assured in every way, so far as human probability is concerned… no matter which selections you choose to read from. It therefore does not make a bit of difference which of the works you read from. This Sikes and Nancy reading is taking a terrible toll on you, Chief. I can see it. Others can see it. You yourself can see it and feel it. Why not save it for the big cities—or set it aside altogether for the rest of the tour?”
Dickens swivelled in his chair, away from the mirror in which he had been removing the modest amount of makeup he wore during readings. The only time I had ever seen his expression this furious was when he was play-acting at being Bill Sikes. “Have you finished, sir?”
“I have said all I felt on that matter,” Dolby said flatly but firmly.
Dickens leapt up, taking the plate that had held a few oysters and slamming down the handle of his knife upon it. It shattered into half a dozen pieces. “Dolby! D—— n you! Your d—— ned infernal caution will be your ruin—and mine!—one of these days!”
“Perhaps so, Chief,” said Dolby. The bear of a man was flushing bright red and I could swear I saw tears in his eyes. But his voice remained soft and firm. “In this case, though, I hope you will do me the justice to say that the infernal caution is being exercised in your own interest.”
Stunned, still holding my glass of champagne, I realised that this was the only time in my long association with Charles Dickens that I had ever heard him raise his voice to another man (other than in playacting). Even when he had so hurt my feelings that night at Vérey’s, his voice was always soft, almost gentle. The effect of Dickens visibly and audibly angry, in reality rather than performance, was more terrible than I could have imagined.
Dickens stood in silence. I remained frozen at the back of the room, forgotten by both principals in this unique dialogue. Dolby went to put the tour list on his writing case, turning away as if sparing his Chief his injured countenance. When he turned back, he saw what I had been seeing.
Dickens was weeping silently.
Dolby froze and before he could move a muscle, Dickens had—inevitably, characteristically—moved forward to embrace the bigger man with what appeared to be
absolute affection. “Forgive me, Dolby,” he choked out. “I did not mean it. I am tired. We are all tired. And I know you are right. We will discuss this calmly in the morning.”
But in the morning—I was there at breakfast—Dickens left the Murder in all three readings and added one.
By the time I returned to London, I had observed or heard all of the following facts:
Dickens had been discharging blood, blaming his old problem of piles, but Dolby was less certain that this was the only reason for constant bloody diarrhoea.
The Inimitable’s left foot and leg were swollen again to the point that he needed to be helped to the cab and then into the railway carriage. The only time he appeared to walk normally was when he was going onto or off the stage.
He was melancholy, he admitted, beyond all words to describe it.
In Chester, Dickens was dizzy and confessed that he was suffering a mild paralysis. When a doctor was summoned, he told the man that he was “giddy, with a tendency to go backwards and to turn around.” Dolby later told me that when Dickens had tried to place a small object on a table, he had ended up awkwardly pushing the entire small table forward, almost toppling it.
Dickens told of a strangeness in his left hand and arm and explained that to use that hand—say, to set down an object or to pick it up—he had to look at it carefully and actively will it to do as he wished.
Dickens told me that last morning in Edinburgh—laughing as he said it—that he no longer felt secure lifting his own hands to his head, especially his rebellious left hand, and soon might have to hire someone to comb his few remaining hairs before he went out in public.
After Chester, however, he went on to read in Blackburn and then at Bolton, Murdering Nancy as he went.
By 22 April, Dickens had broken down. But I get ahead of myself, Dear Reader.
IT WAS SOMETIME AFTER I RETURNED from Edinburgh that I received a letter. It was from Caroline. There was no pathos or bathos in her note—she wrote almost unemotionally, as if cataloguing the behaviour of sparrows in her garden—but she informed me that in the six months of their marriage, her husband, Joseph, was failing to earn a living for them, that they lived off crumbs from his mother (actually from his father’s small estate, doled out grudgingly), and that he beat her.