Dickens couldn’t breathe. He’d swallowed his own heart, which now lodged in his throat. With the tips of two fingers, he pinched the envelope from Topping’s grasp, as if it were a thing easily sullied by human hands. He waved it lightly under his nose, taking in the aroma of frankincense, vetivert, and rose. An abrupt melancholy swelled inside him, a bittersweet remembrance. Topping waited for some instruction, but Dickens couldn’t think what to say.
His reverie was broken by a horde of children—his own horde, in fact—careening down the hall, yelling and laughing, in pursuit of two galloping Newfoundlands. He stormed into the hallway to intercept them, but it was a game of round-and-round, up-and-down. The mob had already disappeared down the servants’ stairs. Dickens planted himself, shouting after them.
“Children! How am I expected to think, much less write?”
Still gripping the letter opener in one hand, the perfumed letter in the other, he was overcome by an odoriferous assault that trumped the frankincense, stifled the vetivert, and pummeled the rose. Topping looked down at a steaming pile of dog excrement pooling around his master’s shoe. Dickens saw it, too. “Well, this tops it all!”
A ferocious tongue-lashing gathered in his mouth, interrupted by a persistent striking of the door knocker downstairs. “What now?” he moaned, as Topping rushed off to answer it.
*
Fred Dickens stood in the open door nervously squishing his hat in his hand. He was Charles’ younger brother, specializing in the sort of speculative ventures that were the order and hum of the day. His were built on whim and folly, but upheld by an unrelenting optimism, inherited from their father. Fred was amiable and kind, but hapless.
“Has he read my letter, Topping?”
Topping seemed to look right through him, as if he weren’t there at all. Fred, it was well known, suspected this of everyone. “About my new scheme?”
“Is there a tree in yer scheme, sir?”
Fred turned to follow Topping’s gaze. An old Saxon wagon drawn by four horses stood at the front of the house. Two deliverymen finished unloading an evergreen tree taller than both of them put together. They were hauling it straight up the walk, its long quaking branches brushing the rails of the black iron gate.
“Tree for Mr. Dickens! All the way from Germany!”
*
Upstairs, Catherine had arrived on the scene, hoping to mollify the warring parties. But the smell choked her, too. She watched her husband balance on one leg to scrape the offense from the bottom of his shoe with the letter opener. A kerchief over her nose did double duty to mask her amusement.
“I’m so glad you find this funny, Cate.”
“Not funny so much as fitting.”
Dickens scowled and scraped. Topping appeared at the landing. “Sir. Yer brother Fred is downstairs—”
“Good Lord! Am I only some duck to be plucked for my relatives’ own purposes?”
“—and a very large tree, sir.”
“Oh, the tree!” said Catherine. “Tell them to put it in the front parlor, would you, Topping?”
Topping turned back down the stairs to do so.
“A tree?” demanded Dickens. “Inside the house?”
“A Christmas tree. From Germany.”
“Have we no trees in England?”
“The Queen and Prince Albert insist on it. It’s a new tradition.”
“Traditions are not new, Catherine. They are old. And we cannot afford the ones we have.”
Walter and Frank appeared behind their father in makeshift magicians’ capes, in rehearsal for their Christmas conjuring act to come. Walter wore his father’s top hat. Little Frank used a long candy stick for a wand. He pulled on his father’s pant leg.
“Fingers, Frank!” Dickens snapped.
“But Father,” said Walter, “Frank’s my assistant and we’ve learned to conjure a penny from a hat.”
“Well, you’ll have to conjure far more than a penny if we’re to continue to live in this manner!”
Catherine glowered at her husband but said nothing. He took it to be one of her punishing silences, nothing close to sympathy for his view, which made him cling stubbornly to his ground. He could match her muteness word for word. Every fiber of his being marshaled to the cause. Where she blushed furious red about the neck of her aubergine dress, he bulged blue at the temples.
Katey and Mamie, unaware of the impasse, pattered down the upper staircase and skidded to a stop in stockinged feet, flushed and giggling. They wore fine party dresses, the newest fashion no doubt, striped silk, sashes, and frippery, their hair in fresh ribbons and corkscrew curls. Even Mamie had discs of bold rouge on her fair white cheeks.
Katey handed him a piece of paper. “Here’s the list of all the rest of our Christmas wishes, Papa. And in ten minutes’ time Mamie and I shall give waltzing lessons in the drawing room. A penny a dance!”
Dickens looked from one child to the next, all staring at him with great expectation, seemingly bottomless, that he had no idea how to satisfy. His usual playfulness had evanesced. What few drops remained of his patience simmered to a boil. “My own flesh and blood, and all you think of every minute of every day is yourselves, and what you will get! Not what you already have! Never how much even a single meal would mean to the starving children of India!”
The children stared at him, stupefied. They were accustomed to his occasional outbursts, but they looked at him as if this were an attack on Christmas itself. Walter took off his father’s hat and looked at the floor. Little Frank sucked on his candy and sniffled; Mamie bit her lower lip. Even Timberdoodle dog-sighed, and Sniffery hung his head. Catherine glared at her husband in a way that ice might admire.
“I shall now go out,” Dickens said, with no moves left.
Topping, short of breath, had returned again to the landing. “Sir, your brother Fred? Downstairs?”
“I shall now go out the back!” Dickens extended a stiff arm to Walter. “Hat, please.”
Walter surrendered the hat without looking up, his small shoulders rising and falling beneath his cape. Dickens stomped down the servants’ stairs, leaving his family in his wake. Katey folded her arms defiantly across her silk-sashed waist.
“I’ve never understood how, if I should eat all the food on my plate and lick it clean, that would possibly help the starving children of India.”
Mamie’s shoulders dropped when the back door opened and shut with a thud. Walter started to sob. Catherine pulled him close, trying to contain her own rising ire.
*
No sooner was Dickens out the door—creeping like a thief out of his own house—when he flinched at a figure rising from behind a hedge. Fearing it would be Fred, he found instead a street urchin in three tattered coats with a thin curtain of bristle on his upper lip, his palms cupped in front of him.
“Alms for the poor, Mr. Dickens?”
He didn’t recognize the young ruffian, who seemed quite familiar with him. “You’ve been lying in wait for me?”
“Never mind, sir, ’aven’t waited too long.”
“Do I know you?”
“Don’t believe you’ve ’ad the pleasure, sir. But I knows you.” He pulled a wrinkled piece of paper from his pocket, straightened it on his dirty trousers, and handed it to Dickens, who recognized his own discarded autograph for Jacob Marley.
“Where did you get this?” Dickens demanded.
“Never mind.” The captain of the ruffians clipped the paper from Dickens’ hand. “It’s mine now.”
Flustered, Dickens took whatever pence he had in his pocket and pressed them into the youth’s moth-eaten glove. “There. I don’t know what you want, but it’s all I have.”
The captain did a rough tabulation of the coins, tightened his fingers around them, and looked up with a crooked smile, his own greasy cogwheels spinning at industrial speed. “It’ll do fer now, sir.”
Unnerved, Dickens fled into the darkening night with long, determined steps.
12
The chambers at 58 Lincoln’s Inn Fields were well known as a magic cavern, the hub of London literary life, a refuge for writers, major and minor, where they were assured of firelight, wine-light, friend-light, and the burly-shouldered, beneficent, but forceful care of John Forster, Esquire. His rooms were the best rooms—part private club, part library—with the most beautiful editions of books covering every inch of wall, even in the bathroom. There were engravings, paintings, easy chairs, and thick carpets. The house smelled of leather, old books, and boiled beef.
Dickens skulked outside a long-paned window, peering into the dining room, where the high and talented literati of the day assembled around gleaming white plates and bright silver. Forster sat at the helm, blocking his view. Dickens leaned to the right of a boxwood to catch sight of Thackeray and the Carlyles, to the left of the drapes to spy Trollope and his wife. Wilkie Collins, the youngest darling of the group, sat at the far end, dabbing politely at the corners of his mouth as Thackeray stabbed the air with a fork.
William Makepeace Thackeray was a year older than Dickens, not quite yet a household name, but on a steady course and with equal aspirations. He stood six-foot-three, and even sitting down used up the space around him like a hulking giant. He was famed for his sharp tongue and cutting wit, to no one’s greater benefit than his own. Dickens knew already theirs would always be a race for top spot. They had been polite in print, but this was another thing. He leaned closer to the glass to catch Thackeray’s arrows and slings, for it was fulminating or nothing with this crowd. But he heard only gabble and muffled puffs of hot air. Desperate, he pressed his ear hard to the window.
“I should think us all sick to death of these endless social-problem novels with an earnest purpose!” said Thackeray, bayonetting his beef.
“Mary!” Forster shouted to his jittery housemaid. “Mr. Thackeray has no carrots!”
In fact, Thackeray had lots of carrots.
“He is Mr. Popular Sentiment,” said Anthony Trollope, piling on.
“Mary! Butter for Trollope’s flounder!” Forster plunked his knife so loudly on his plate it rattled the window. Dickens clutched his ear, still relieved any strike against “Boz” was an incursion on Forster’s own soul. He was grateful to have so intimate a defender.
Ignoring Forster’s outburst, the unflappable party continued eating.
“And clean plates all around!” he insisted.
Mary did as she was told, picked up their plates—guests mid-bite—and scuttled into the pantry.
*
Dickens was sure the unmistakable sound of bone china meeting hard floor would be noted by all. Mary had found him lurking near the larder, and panicked, dropping everything. He held a finger to his lips with an apology in his eyes, and bent down to pick up the bits and shards. He relied on Mary having a long-standing tender spot for him, interrupted briefly when Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop died and she could not forgive him killing her off. Some years ago, with the aid of Mamie and the elder Thackeray daughter, Mary had taught herself to read—in little moments between dusting and scrubbing, after grate-sweeping, or just before the needlework—so that she could read Dickens. It was Mamie who’d told him so.
“Never mind, sir,” Mary whispered, stooping to collect the broken pieces into her apron lap.
Dickens stood and peeked through the door. He had a clear view of Wilkie Collins, who wore a bounteous black satin cravat, his usual, like a spillway over his fine white shirt and black coat. “I love Charles, as we all do,” he said, “but the public want scandal and impropriety, not gushing displays of the heart!”
“Still, one must admit,” said Thomas Carlyle, “the lower classes eat … him … up.”
“The better for all of you,” Jane Carlyle threw in. “Even those who’ve never read a novel read Dickens.”
“He who runs reads Dickens!” said Thackeray, inciting an uproar of catty laughter.
Dickens gritted his teeth, reassured only somewhat by the sight of Forster ripping his dinner roll into twos and fourths. He was having none of it.
Mary stood behind Dickens at the door, balancing clean plates in one hand and a tureen of stewed carrots in the other.
“Tell Forster I’m here?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But not the others.”
Mary nodded, looking terrified by the assignment. He put an encouraging hand on her shoulder. “It’s only acting. I know you have it in you.”
She blinked and pushed through to the dining room, where she set down the tureen long enough to deliver the fresh plates. Dickens watched her take up the tureen and walk slowly, deliberately, to Thackeray’s left, where she began piling carrots on his plate, while looking straight at Forster, jerking her head toward the kitchen.
“Mary, why are you twitching so?” Forster asked.
“It’s the kitchen, sir.”
“Is it on fire?”
Mary shook her head.
“Then do not bother me with it!”
He turned back to his guests, preparing to launch his own fusillade in Dickens’ defense. But Mary hovered, resolute. “Perhaps a small fire, sir.”
*
“I see you are entertaining the literary lights of London!”
Despite being discovered in Forster’s own kitchen standing in a sea of crunchy china, Dickens was miffed.
“You refused my invitation!” Forster said in his defense.
“And a good thing, too! Just listen to them cutting me down and slicing me up!”
“They do have Dickens-on-the-brain, I’m afraid. For you are the ‘Inimitable Boz,’ and I daresay they cannot bear it.”
Dickens pushed the door open a crack to have another painful glimpse. He frowned at the sight of his nearest rival, with wavy hair, abundant brows, and a penchant for taking up so much space. “I’m in a terrible way, Forster. And now Thackeray, sitting in my chair.”
Forster stepped beside him, sneaking a look himself. “Thackeray could never replace you in my esteem, nor my affections.”
Dickens joggled his head with enough of a smile to express sheepish gratitude. He peered out again. “How’s it going, then?”
“The dinner?”
“The novel! Vanity Fair.”
They both looked out at Thackeray, tugging at his brows.
“He’s a writer,” said Forster with a shrug.
Dickens turned to him, desperate. “Walk with me?”
*
Having made a hasty excuse to leave his own dinner party after the oyster patties but before the apple tart, Forster now puffed at Dickens’ heel, purple in the face just keeping up. Dickens took double-length strides, going nowhere in particular, but full steam ahead.
“I have thoughts of the Regent’s Canal, the razor upstairs, the chemist down the street … of murdering Chapman and Hall!”
Forster stopped, hands on his knees, gasping for breath. Dickens turned to him. “What’s wrong with me, John? I’m restless and repressed. I sit, but cannot write. Lie down, but cannot sleep. My children aggravate me. I loathe my father. And Catherine, who should be convalescing, thinks of nothing but Christmas and the piffling party.”
“The Christmas party?” asked Forster, seeming glad at last to hear mention of his favorite social event of the year.
“She decorates without prejudice, while I suffer visions of the poorhouse!”
“Is it as awful as all that?”
Dickens knew there was no such thing as pity in his friend, unless he could breach his thinking ramparts straight to the quick of his feeling heart.
“Oh, mine is a bleak house, I assure you.”
Forster mopped his forehead with a kerchief. “What’s to be done with you, Boz?”
Dickens stepped closer and pulled the pink perfumed letter from his pocket. It was still sealed with glossy gilt wax. “It’s from … Maria Beadnell,” he said in a hopeful whisper. “I couldn’t bear to open it. She might be ill. Or dead.”
For
ster snatched the letter and sniffed it, repulsed. “If dead, she’d be hard-pressed to write.”
Dickens gnawed at the hairs on his knuckle while he watched Forster break the seal and read the letter, dispensing with it as quickly as he could.
“She longs to see you.”
“Oh! How the floodgates of my past are open. Those pale blue gloves, that raspberry-colored dress, the charming tendency of her eyebrows to somewhat join together…”
Forster raised one brow high.
“Maria was my first attachment … my muse.”
“Who made mincemeat of your heart!”
“I know. I have never since been able to hear her name without a start. And yet, the stimulant of unrequited love did lift me up into this writing life.”
Forster grunted and started walking again. Dickens knew him to be a devout single man who could never forgive the injury enacted by a young Maria Beadnell on his closest friend. They had bonded over the cruel memory of it one night with the help of a full bottle of French brandy. Forster spoke so vividly of her heartlessness, it was as if it had happened to him.
Dickens was quick to his side, threading his right arm through Forster’s left. He slowed his own step and tried one more appeal. “I don’t know where to turn, John. I am vacant of thought and words. The blank page has made me its sworn enemy. Where am I to find my muse now?”
“Perhaps with time, Catherine will be your muse again.”
“Oh, dear friend. The love between husband and wife bears the weight of awful responsibilities. What begins as modest inspiration ends … in deepest debt.”
“Then let debt be your muse!”
Dickens stopped and turned the letter in his hand. “Even now, when I’m in low spirits, a sense comes crushing upon me of some illumination lost. If I could see Maria once—”
“I do not approve.”
“It could lead me to write again.”
John Forster’s face gnarled like a knot on a tree. Dickens had him in a bind, plain and simple. “Very well. I shall arrange it.”
Dickens threw both arms around him, nearly lifting his pork-bellied friend off the ground. Forster blushed and stiffened, but Dickens knew he was putty on the inside. It was a scene often repeated between them: resistance, surrender, affection. This was their own round-and-round. The years had made it so.
Mr. Dickens and His Carol Page 5
