Dickens was lost. Time had abandoned him, all sense of when and where. The fog seemed alive, grabbing at a trouser leg, whirling about his shoulders. He wanted to outrun it, but each direction looked like every other, and his feet were made of lead. The muck on the embankment clutched at his boots; the murky air lay heavy on his lungs. He strained for each breath; his heart pulsed in his neck. There was no one about, no signpost, nothing to show him the way.
He quivered like the thin needle of a compass trying to find true north.
Dickens closed his eyes, three quick puffs of breath and a long inhale. Air in, air out. Just as he’d done as a boy when he sensed the world too strongly, or needed it too much. There was a knowing beyond thinking, beneath words. If he could only quiet his mind, reach for the little voice inside him—an inner-minder who somehow grasped what he did not. So, tucking his chin to his chest, he softened his breathing and listened for it. Air in, air out. And when he thought he heard a whisper from his smaller, wiser self, he tried again and finally willed his feet to walk.
16
When one’s whereabouts are hard come by, a city is an impression of itself, a kaleidoscope of not-quite-right things, a variegated jumble of place and memory, all that is and once was. Dickens passed through it like a man with mechanical feet: heel, arch, toe, repeat. It was enough to deliver him safely across Southwark Bridge, where St. Paul’s great dome, with its shimmering gold cross, dodged in and out of view, bouncing like a bauble on a high cloud shelf. He thought he knew Cheapside when he came upon it, but only from the waist down, its upper reaches swallowed by a thick froth of air. But when the rough walls of Newgate Prison appeared, Dickens moved along it, hand over hand, and felt his bearings take hold.
Fear became familiarity. The intersection at Old Bailey Street was right where it ought to be, and the row of tottering houses beyond, all the same. He rounded the corner for Snow Hill and there it was, the portal to the coachyard of the Saracens Head Inn, where he and Forster had first dined together, years ago. It was reassuring to find it still guarded by two stone heads looking down on him from either side of the gateway. Had they always been frowning? Dickens couldn’t recall. But the inn was its old self in every other way, content to sit at the top of the yard with the painted COFFEE ROOM faintly legible over an old long window. He was on a well-worn path now, his body knew what to do: pause here for the omnibuses clomping westward; stand clear of the cabriolets going east. Pass the pork man, the hatter, the draper, the Old Bell Tap. Head west for Holborn, but stop shy where the road narrows, take the snicket down the hill, cross two alleys, and come at last to the threshold of one’s own past.
It was a minor no-name square, hardly a square at all, at the juncture of three insignificant roads. But it had been his universe once, the near-circumference of all that mattered. The dense vapor blurred its far reaches, made black silhouettes of its rooftops, but he knew it all by heart. Over there would be the stage door of the small jewel box of a theater where he’d first acted, down that street the chophouse where he liked to dine, and in the square’s very center—he could just make it out—a stalwart brick clock tower he had once relied on for the time, that had long ago ceased to keep it.
The square had no pretensions, no ambitions to be grand, and, when better courts came to be, had fallen into disregard, but for a thick slap of paint now and then on a door here and there. But the fog hugged the little square dearly, and wrapped him, too, with welcome arms. He had long ago outgrown it, the circle of his world growing ever larger from those early days, but looking on it, he could breathe again. His heart let go some anchor.
Of course his feet would lead him here. Feet had memory, too.
He set his sights on the stage door of the Folly, straight across, where his friend Macready was known to be giving his Hamlet, having recently been banished from Drury Lane upon tepid reviews. The two had traded letters for months, sometimes twice in a day, made plans and canceled them, called upon each other at home but been missed. The exchange of the borrowed waistcoat had been executed discreetly by their grooms, no questions asked. Dickens had never thanked him in person, despite the debacle of the Beadnell reunion, and here was his chance to make good. Muffled voices wafted on the air. Theatergoers streamed into the square and shuttled away, squeezing into cabs, sardining into an omnibus, fighting over umbrellas. The timing was perfect. A glimpse of his old friend was reason enough to have come all this way.
Heel, arch, toe, repeat. Dickens took his first steps with an airy lightness in his chest, an emperor returning from exile, hailed by the most lowly speck of soot. Even the soup-air seemed to part for his progress, cutting a narrow path as wide as his shoulders. And then he heard it. Over his head, the old clock tower rang like a tremolo inside him. It stilled him, made the smallest atom of his being clip to attention. He craned his neck to glance up at the tower, which seemed to look down on him, too, with its bright moon face. It was revived, as was he. Someone cared about the little square after all. How many years it had been since he’d relished the tower’s fine clanging sound: so right and true. Such old friends they were, he thought, and glad for each other’s presence.
The second chime bounced around the square like a game of rolling-ball, the third celebrated his arrival, the fourth was a tonic for his soul. By the ninth chime, he knew it must be midnight. He had lost track of hours and miles, but the last play-watchers were drifting away. He’d best hurry to catch Macready, who would be in his dressing room and, whether jubilant or despairing—for he was his own best and worst critic—surely grateful for the visit. But the clock’s face held him transfixed.
The twelfth chime sounded, shuddering through the square and down to the soles of his feet. He surrendered to it, forgetting why he’d come, only able to pull himself away when the ringing faded to a hum and returned him to the imminent world. Macready, the Folly, old friends, bygone dramas. He should hurry, or he’d miss him. But the pulling away was like taffy. His torso turned in advance of his head, his feet ahead of his gaze. He didn’t see her, or she, him. She must have shot across the square while he wasn’t looking, maybe been obscured by the clock tower itself. He had cut her off and was now near to toppling a young woman in a deep purple cloak, the color of midnight itself. He caught himself in the nick of time. She stepped back with a gasp.
“I’m so sorry!” he said. “I didn’t see you coming.”
The woman looked up from beneath her velvet hood. Her face seemed lit from within, a pale pearl glow. She had gentle eyes, some sort of blue—unless the night was playing tricks—and glimmering, without one whit of terror at the prospect of being run down. He was struck by her simple beauty.
“How clumsy of me,” he added, tipping his hat.
“No, no. It was I,” the woman said, less afraid than amused.
He pointed to the tower above them, muttering an excuse. “You see, the clock, well, my own clock recently met an untimely end. And whenever I hear one chime, I’m reminded of…”
“Your lost clock?” she asked.
“No,” he said, with sudden clarity. “Lost time.”
He hadn’t meant to be so blunt, but the answer had arrived on his lips straight from his heart with no thinking in between. She had a clear, calm radiance that invited the truth with no wish to judge it. The young woman studied his dark shining eyes, and appeared touched by his candor.
“Yet isn’t there also, in that very chime, the chance to begin again?”
“Begin again,” he said, admiring the thought of it. “Yes.”
Her smile illuminated the darkness itself. “Well, then,” she said, lowering her gaze. “Good night.”
She started past him, headed straight for the farthest corner of the haphazard square. He watched her go, purple cloak sweeping gracefully behind. It had its own wind, he thought, made its own weather. The brume seemed to twirl away as she walked, as if it favored her, too. The fog was lifting all at once.
A voice from behind shattered the mom
ent’s magic.
“Why, it was at this very theater, not so many Christmases ago, that he first called me his ‘sweetling pigsney.’”
Dickens turned to find, as he feared, Maria Beadnell parading across the square, followed by a gaggle of fur-coated friends with matching bouncing plumage about their necks. He could hardly believe his eyes.
“And I’m told he walks these streets still,” she driveled on, “no doubt haunted by the ghost of our love…”
Dickens cringed at the sound of her tittering laugh, still repelled by his own misjudgment at meeting her. Maria was headed straight for him, but they’d not yet locked eyes. In a panic, he spun around and tripled his step toward the stranger in the purple cloak, who was crossing through the dim mouth of a narrow street barely large enough for a cart to go through it. She startled to find him falling in beside her, walking briskly.
“Do not be alarmed. I am only pretending to walk you home.”
“Then I shall pretend not to be alarmed,” she said, looking straight ahead.
“I mean you no harm. I am merely fleeing my past,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder in hopes Maria had not followed him.
A few doors from where she’d turned, not thirty feet from the square, the woman stopped at a brick-terraced lodging, low and thin as two fingers. It was a poor, slant-roofed house, nestled in a maze of little courts and alleys where costermongers lived and itinerant traders took rooms. This was the sort of London where rich and poor might mingle in near proximity, if worlds apart.
“Flee all you like,” she said, turning to face him. “Your past is quicker than you are and will catch you soon enough.”
Dickens cocked his head to wonder at her bit of wisdom, spoken with crystalline confidence, when he was distracted by more voices jangling behind them. From where he stood he could make out Maria’s back end being safely delivered into the belly of a hansom cab with the help of two coachmen who pushed her in. Her cackling lingered in the square until the door shut her definitively inside.
“I am saved,” he said with heavy relief.
“Then I’ve served you well.”
“Indeed. You cannot know what misery you’ve spared me.” He removed his hat and bowed his head. “I am grateful.”
“And I am home,” she said, putting her hand on the door’s rusted iron knob.
“You live here?”
“And work there,” she said, pointing back at the theater, a sliver of its stage door visible beyond the clock tower.
“Hmm. I like the efficiency of it.”
She opened the door into a pitch-black hall leading to a narrow staircase that dipped hard to the left. “Well, thank you … for pretending.”
Before he could utter another word, form a sound or even a thought, the door closed quietly between them. He hesitated, hoping he hadn’t frightened her, and stepped back to look at the window above. He scratched his chin, chuckled to himself, returned his topper to his head, and waited for a candle to be lit inside, that he might be assured of her safety, as she’d assured his. When a gentle glow blossomed above, he walked on into the night in another direction altogether, with renewed vigor and miles still left inside him.
17
Dickens wandered into the checkered streets mumbling to himself, eyebrows dancing, replaying the conversation—her parts, his parts—embellishing here and there, what he might have said had he his wits more about him, or she a hundred steps farther to go. He’d forgotten about Macready altogether, the dread of Maria Beadnell, the frustrations of starting a book he didn’t want to write. For the first time all night he felt his feet firmly beneath him, as if gravity now worked in his favor.
When next he looked up, his inner-minder had carried him just shy of Leather Lane, straight to Furnival’s Inn, as known to him as the knuckle of his right thumb. Once the town mansion of the Lords Furnival, it had long ago tumbled to a more humble purpose as coffeehouse and hotel, where a gentleman might still get a good dinner at a fair price, even if his fellow diners were now less than fashionable. But Dickens loved its withering stucco and worm-eaten wood beams. It had been his first true lodgings, at a smart rent, when he was just beginning his writing life. In three simple rooms at No. 13 Furnival’s Inn, he’d found the place of his own becoming. He hadn’t thought of it in so long, not until Catherine mentioned it, their first Christmas, those early days. And here he was again, all these years later, looking at it like it was an old friend who’d gone missing for years, only to be stumbled upon happily in the street.
“Begin again,” the young woman had said to him. It rang in his ears, as sure as the old clock tower had chimed over his head. This, too, was his past, but the fondest part of it. Whether instinct or luck had led him here, it would be a terrible waste of coincidence to turn away.
*
The sleepy desk clerk, awakened by a zealous pounding on the door well after midnight, was a thin young man with porcupine hair and a zigzag nose. He had kind button eyes too close together, thick spectacles, a food-stained waistcoat, and a misbuttoned shirt. Dickens stood before him, about to sign his name to the register, when he saw an engraved plaque hanging on the wall: CHARLES DICKENS SLEPT HERE.
“I trust this will be strictly confidential,” Dickens said in a whisper.
“What’s that, sir?” asked the clerk.
“My stay.”
“Oh, the comin’s and goin’s of our ‘clientele’ are no business o’ mine.”
Why, the clerk didn’t know him. The young man appeared blind as a bat, and possibly no smarter than a doorknob, but it was a rare event for Dickens not to be recognized at all. Even his less-than-devoted readers seemed to know him on sight. Some part of him took offense, but another took heart. His whereabouts and what-doings, he decided, should be nobody’s business but his.
He pointed to the plaque to test his theory. “Dickens slept here, did he?”
The young clerk looked straight at him, with no hint of recognition at all. “So they says. Turned ’is old rooms into a museum. Left everythin’ just as ’e did. So they says.” He leaned in with a wink-wink. “It’s a sideline. Two pence an ’ead just to see it.”
“Popular attraction, is it?”
“Oh, not anymore, sir,” said the clerk.
Dickens scowled. But the clerk lit up with an idea of his own. “In fact, if you was interested in number thirteen, and didn’t mind the occasional—and I mean ‘occasional’—visitor, there might even be a discount to ya…” He leaned over the register, squinting hard only to see that his new customer had written nothing. “Sorry, sir, but ya ’ave to sign yer name, or we don’t know who ya are.”
Dickens hesitated, the quill in his hand poised over the register. If not Dickens, who would he be? Until now he’d been famed for his onomastic finesse—a knack for inventing names that epitomized his characters, breathed life into them. His pockets might teem with jotted-down cues from the street, words he liked, even sounds. Public lists, obituaries—his own correspondence—were a vast trove of raw material. But most came from thin air, the outer wings of his imagination, fully-formed on his lips, where all the joy was in the saying: Quilp, Buzfuz, Crimple, Grimwig, Lillyvick, Swiveller, Squeers, and Gamp. Names that sparkled and cracked, hummed and hissed. It was more than verbal dexterity, a stage trick, a pun. A made-up name could hold a truth, even if he didn’t know what truth it yet was.
And then it came to him. The invitation from the temperance society that had angered him so. Yes, of course. That was it! Five minutes at Furnival’s and he’d already had an idea. He dipped the pen and wrote in the register, pleased with himself, even making a show of it. He slid it toward the clerk, who read deliberately, a finger under each name.
“Ebenezer … Scrooge?”
“Scrooge it is,” he said with a satisfied twist of his fist. “Says it all, I think.”
“All right, then,” said the clerk, seeming curious a man could so admire his own name after having it all these years. “Never m
et a Scrooge.”
“Well, you’ve met one now.”
*
Dickens took off his hat with near-reverence as he stepped inside No. 13, at the top of the rickety stairs. The clerk used his candle to fire up the cloudy oil lamp on the mantel. It was enough to scatter light across the snug box of a room, with two smaller rooms on its flanks. Dickens recognized the Turkish carpet in the middle of the floor and the two balloon-back chairs in gold velvet—the “mister” now lacking one arm, and the “missus” a few button eyes. But he was most glad to see his old birch writing desk, with its turned legs, two drawers with brass pulls, and a wooden lip around three sides, no taller than a five-pound note. It was the first piece of furniture he’d ever bought, from an old countinghouse near Cornhill whose partners had died within a week of each other, though still, apparently, intending to turn a profit. Dickens had given their poor, set-upon clerk everything in his pocket, and hired a cab to deliver it.
He slid his hand across the dull grain of the old table, its nicks and burn marks, round spots of yellowed wax. He knew them all. This was where his “Boz” was born, so many of the Sketches that worked their way into readers’ homes and hearts; then Pickwick, which catapulted him to the literary firmament. Twenty monthly numbers, fourteen guineas apiece—what a fortune for him then. Enough to marry, have a child, move house. He was a blithe up-and-comer who thought nothing of leaving it behind, this desk, now seeming small and precious, when it once was vast, his entire future spread before him.
“Y’admire him, sir? Dickens?” asked the clerk over his shoulder, squatting to light a fire in the hearth.
“I did once.”
Dickens sat in the table’s ladder-back chair, feeling each chink of its spine. He smiled when it creaked and tilted like old times, having one leg shorter than the other three. He fished out a blank mem-slip from his pocket, folded it in fourths, and put it under the feeble leg, pleased his old trick still worked. Behind him, the clerk pulled a coat sleeve over his fist and rubbed away the grime on a windowpane.
Mr. Dickens and His Carol Page 7
