Dickens was tempted to throw in, when his eye caught a coterie of young women exiting the stage door. He put a hand on Macready’s shoulder. “No, no, old friend. I shan’t intrude.”
Macready followed his gaze. “Ah, I get your meaning,” he said, with a conspiratorial clap of his friend’s back. “Well, think of India.”
“I will, indeed. I promise.”
He watched his friend’s entourage fall in step behind him, the great actor leading them away with a monologue to the night. Dickens smiled and swiveled back to the passel of women clustered under a single gaslight wishing each other a fair night’s rest, with flushed cheeks and wisps of falling-down hair. It was strange to him, waiting for someone he didn’t know, but his heart pinged when she appeared at the back, velvet hood down, eyes clear and bright, glinting like stars on a country night.
There was something familiar about her, some faint memory of the just-so of her face. He couldn’t call it up until a slight turn of her chin made him remember. It was right here, at the Folly, not two years past. A light comic burletta. He sat four rows from center stage; she wore a pirate costume in blue bronze and sang a lovely ditty, straight from her heart. Even then, he couldn’t take his eyes away.
The women pulled away from each other in twos and threes. Dickens set out after the single velvet cloak gliding across the square in the direction of home.
“Hello, again,” he said matter-of-factly, falling in step beside her.
“Hello. Again.” She stopped abruptly and faced him. “Though before we take another step together, sir, may I ask, are we still pretending?”
“No!”
“Well, I remember last time that you were ‘pretending’ to walk me home.”
“But this time I quite intend it. Though I am pretending to have brought you a small gift of lavender.” He held up a tight fist, offering a faux-bouquet.
“Why a gift?” she asked, amused. “What have I done to deserve it?”
“Ah, you see, I felt you bestowed a great favor upon me night before last, and I bought a little bundle of lavender to thank you—”
“Well, then, where is it?”
“Mmm. Donated. But to a lesser cause, I assure you.”
Dickens caught a small upward curve of her lips, a near-smile, but he couldn’t be sure. The fickle rain had stopped but everything glistened around them, shiny puddles and oily cobblestones. The luster of her swept-up hair.
“I’ve seen you before,” he said, pointing back to the theater. “There, on that very stage. You were a singing pirate, I can see it now, with blue ribbons in your hair.”
“Oh, that was long ago.”
“Not so long. Why, I can still hear your lilting voice. You are an actress. I guessed as much.”
“A seamstress,” she said, resuming her trajectory for home. “It was only that one night, when the better actress was ill.”
“I saw her as well,” he said, striding beside her. “She was not better. She was bad. I remember nothing about her but her badness! You are an actress, no matter what you say. And I ought to know, having played a part or two myself in a theatrical here and there. Why, even now I am thinking of joining a troupe—”
“But you’re a novelist, Mr. Dickens.”
He slowed his step, taken aback. “You know me?”
She turned to meet his eyes. “Everyone knows you. Are you not Charles Dickens, the greatest living writer in all the English language?”
“Only living?”
She swallowed a laugh, half biting her lip.
“And only the English language?”
At last she succumbed, with a laugh that started at the crinkling corners of her eyes, sounding its mirthful notes to the far end of the square. He was bewitched by the unrestrained joy of it. But a few steps more and they were already stopped at her door.
“In truth,” he said, surprised by his own serious turn, “the writing comes not as easily as it did once. And in darker moments, I fear might never come again.”
She studied his face. Not just his eyes, but his cheeks, chin, forehead—all the parts put together. He wondered what she saw. On good days he thought himself a man on the outskirts of middle age, still possessed of a fine, youthful vigor. On bad, his own wrinkles in the mirror repelled him, crooked lines and creases that bore the history of his years.
“That is too great a tragedy to consider,” she said. “The writing will come again, and must.”
“In fact, the night we met, I wrote into the small hours, as I hadn’t in ages.” He paused, coming to an awareness himself. A smile took hold of his face. “Why, it was as if … I’d found my muse!”
She smiled easily this time, flattered. “If only it were a living.”
“And yet, the greater one’s living, it seems, the less one truly lives.”
She looked into his eyes. He felt it all the way to his soul, any gulf between them disappearing. Something about the sympathetic fairness of her face made him speak the truth, even where he wasn’t yet sure of it himself. The truth of Furnival’s, his reason for being there, for being left alone to find his way. How much he wanted to let go the embellishments of life as Charles Dickens, and find what it was just to write again.
There was a quiet moment between them, thinking their own thoughts.
“Well, good night, Mr. Dickens,” she said at last.
“But I know a wonderful chophouse…”
She hesitated, a hand on her door. “Perhaps another time.”
“May I at least, I mean, since you know my name, may I know yours? Miss—”
“Lovejoy. Eleanor Lovejoy.”
“Miss Eleanor Lovejoy.” Dickens clasped his hands and thanked the sky. “What a marvelous name!”
“For a muse?”
It was his turn to consider her. She had the natural honesty of a wild rose, all briary thorns and pink satin petals.
“No,” he said, with a theatrical bow and a tip of his hat. “For you.”
Eleanor Lovejoy dipped her chin and curtsied. And then, without another word or glance, she stepped inside, pulling the door closed behind her.
20
The next morning, Dickens sat at Saracens Head Inn gobbling his breakfast as if he hadn’t eaten a good meal in days—one plate of beef, another of shrimp, a hot kidney pudding, coffee, and claret—gesturing with his fork between bites and quaffs, as he described minute details of his new-old life at Furnival’s Inn. Forster, who had no appetite at all, watched with wonder. He’d seen it before, and took it as a good sign. When his friend was onto a new story in a promising way, his hunger for all things was boundless.
Forster gingerly asked the question most on his mind. “How’s it coming, then, the Christmas book?”
“I’m feeling my way,” Dickens said, wiping his mouth with a generous napkin tucked in at his collar.
“You’ve a solid start?”
“More a middle.”
“So a muddle,” Forster concluded, nicking a piece of fatty meat from the plate.
“Certainly no ghosts, sprites, or goblins, but worthy enough without one.”
“Pages, Boz, we need pages.”
“Soon enough, I assure you.”
“I assure you that Chapman and Hall breathe down my neck on a daily basis,” said Forster, popping the beef in his mouth.
Dickens forked a final bite and chewed on it awhile. Forster need not be his concern. Not now. This was all on him. “Keep them at bay a little longer,” he said. “I’ll finish the book, settle the score, and be done with the lot of them.” He gulped the last of the claret and set his glass firmly on the table, eyes glinting. “Perhaps even done with the life of the pen!”
Forster rolled his eyes and spit out a piece of gristle.
“Macready sails to India in the new year. He’s taking a troupe.”
“Boz. The point of Furnival’s was to write without distraction.”
“Well, perhaps one,” he said, pulling his napkin from his collar. “A
most inspiring young woman.”
“Oh, good Lord. Who is she?” demanded Forster, being the weary but watchful guardian of his friend’s time, talent, and heart.
“I hardly know anything about her. Yet fear I cannot write another word until I do.”
“Do what?”
Dickens folded his napkin and placed it neatly on the table. He looked at Forster, wistful. “Know everything about her.”
*
In a postprandial burst of energy, Dickens said good-bye to Forster, and set off north toward Furnival’s, but soon found himself at Clerkenwell instead, at a small flower market. On a whim he bought a fistful of laurel, thinking he’d offered Miss Lovejoy a false token the night before and wanted to make good on it. He knew he should be writing instead, but what was the use when she occupied every turn in his mind? So he launched into the trapezium of shabby thoroughfares, courts within courts, sorry alleys, and little lanes that would lead him from there to her lodging house.
This was the land of coffee stalls and old-clothesmen, catchpenny broadsides, ballad singers, and lamplighters, sellers of stationery, songs, and last dying speeches. Dickens dodged the beggars and crossing sweepers, narrowly missing a bucket of slop emptied from a window over his head. “Git yer matches! Razors! Scissors and thread!” yelled the Irish costers working their shallow baskets. But as he was neither buying nor giving, they gave him a wide berth.
The clusters of tenements and rows of lodging houses looked cramped and unhappy, with dwarf doors and squeezed windows, broken shutters, if shutters at all, and more paper and rags than glass in them. There was a barber in one front parlor, a herring vendor in another, a cobbler visible through an opening out back. A few rickety balconies leaned hard on thin wood columns as if on crutches, which threatened to drop at any moment. People stood on them anyway, in shirtsleeves, yelling across to each other about the strangeness of the warm weather. Another two feet and they could have reached out and touched.
But something changed when he turned onto Miss Lovejoy’s street, at the end opposite the clock-tower square. In the dove-gray light of day, a neater row of lodging houses sat end to end, more sweetly kept, with one or two crude signs painted on brick: LODGINGS FOR TRAVELLERS, 3D. A NIGHT. BOILING WATER ALWAYS READY. The frenetic whir of life settled to a murmur, as soft as the blowing of a kiss. It was wrong to have come, to act out his compulsion to try to find her. But a calm came over him, a feeling of rightness in wanting to thank her.
He stepped up to her tiny slice of a house, which was barely there at all, but with a quiet dignity. Straightening his waistcoat, he looked one direction, then the other, half expecting Maria Beadnell to pounce. A few old women regarded him with pity or puzzlement, like he might be a man who’d lost his way. Disregarding them, he clapped the rusted iron ring three times against the old plank door and waited. When no one came, he knocked again and put his ear to it, but heard nothing. He rapped his knuckles more vigorously; the door surprised him when it fell open a few inches on its own. When he put his face to the darkened crack, it yielded easily, letting him peer inside.
“Miss Lovejoy?” he called up the stairs.
No answer. A single door at the top of the stairway stood ajar, letting out a ribbon of mellow daylight. Perhaps she was resting, or busy at some task and hadn’t heard him. He knew he should turn away, but his curiosity was aroused. If she wasn’t home, he might leave the laurel for her and a note to say he’d paid a visit and how sorry he was to have missed her. But that would require her to read, and he didn’t even know that about her. Surely something in the room would tell him. The mere thought that he ought to investigate made him feel like a spy, but his intentions were pure, he told himself, and something in that beam of light beckoned to him.
He glanced behind to make sure no one was watching, stepped in, and tiptoed up the uneven staircase, one creaking step at a time, holding the laurel as if lighting his way. When he reached the top, he considered the half-open door. It stood ajar in a particular way, almost friendly, with nothing forbidding about it at all.
“Hello? Miss Lovejoy?”
No answer. Not a sound from inside. With the push of one finger, the door squawked open on rusted hinges, an invitation in itself.
He stepped inside the spare single room. Two square windows faced him, like eyes keeping watch, with lace panels for eyelids. The floor was scrubbed clean, pictures of saints graced a near wall. There was a bedstead with a patchwork quilt, a plain square pine table with two plainer chairs, and a dresser for cups and plates. Near the small hearth sat a single tufted armchair, pale green with low turned legs, the finest piece, of so few things, even if worn to the horsehair stuffing. He removed his hat out of respect, having written often of rooms just like this, whose humbleness called to some tender place inside him.
He stepped to the back of the armchair, thinking it her chair, ran his hand across the velvet nap, thought he felt the whisper of her presence. The hearth was no higher than his knee, with a small grate, iron basket, and a few lumps of coal burning down to nothing. He supposed she’d just been here, sitting in her chair, no doubt, the best seat in the room. He closed his eyes to image it forth: Miss Lovejoy brushing her hair, or combing it, or embroidering an antimacassar, no—he saw her reading a book.
A woman who worked in the theater might be so many things, literate or not. Dickens knew from his early acting days that putting on a play for the stage was a helter-skelter conspiracy of actors, managers, stagehands, scene-painters, wardrobe women, musicians, and carpenters banding together whether they could read or not. Now that the monopoly of Drury Lane and Covent Garden theaters had ended, the most successful stages moved easily between the great tragedies and the lowest burlesque, usually in the same night. The laborers behind the wings looked more and more like the throngs in the seats. They liked love and murder best, thought most tragedies too long, would have preferred Macbeth with just witches and fighting, and Hamlet with only a ghost and the death at the end. Reading was not required of those who loved or served the theater, just an affinity for human foibles, fancies, and farce.
Miss Lovejoy was one of those, he was sure. But could she read a note of thanks if he left one?
Dickens looked at the tired bunch of laurel in his fist. He was a trespasser, to be sure, though he meant well, he told himself, simply wanting to leave her a token, some small thanks for having awakened him to Furnival’s Inn and his old writing life. He reached in his pocket for a mem-slip, finding only a small stub of pencil. Perhaps there would be something he could write on somewhere, an old scrap or a playbill from the theater. But the tidy room had only the barest necessities, nothing superfluous at all. It was then he saw a humpbacked half trunk peeking out from under the bed. Not a foot tall and a little more wide, its tawny leather was scuffed and faded, like an old hide stretched over a skeleton of wood slats and tin. It called to him, like an answer to everything.
He took five steps toward it, and in that span talked himself into and out of the thing he wanted to do. But he couldn’t resist. Kneeling, he set his hat on the floor, the laurel bunch on top. He reached under the bed for the leather handle at each side of the trunk and pulled it toward him. It looked bigger in his hands, more important, like a treasure chest, a box of relics, a collection of her most precious things. He blew a soft breath across its fine layer of dust, revealing its patina beneath, the telltale luster that comes from the touch of human hands year after year. The trunk wasn’t heavy, but it was too full to close all the way. It had a broken cast-iron latch that begged him to throw it open, to bare what was in it. Drops of sweat dotted his upper lip, his heart doubled its beat. The deed was only half done, he told himself, there was still a way out. He could put the trunk back, retrace his steps, simply leave the laurel—no, take the laurel—and go.
Resolved to do the right thing and restore the trunk to its rightful place, Dickens pressed his fingers lightly against it, not wanting to disturb it any more than he had. But a gentle p
ush dislodged a flimsy old magazine that slipped onto the floor. Dickens picked it up and turned it over. The seafoam-green cover was faded and dog-eared, but he knew it at once. It was Cruikshank’s illustrated cover of Rose Maylie and Oliver from the last monthly number of Twist. It catapulted him back to those days. Good old Cruikshank, he thought to himself—though the man couldn’t draw a pretty woman to save himself and his boys looked like miniature men, nothing like children at all. A notorious inebriate, Cruikshank soon after became a fanatical, teetotaling Ebenezer, against moderation of any sort. Dickens had replaced him at once. Still, kneeling there, he had only affection for the man and the story he held in his hand.
Now there was no stopping. He pulled the trunk all the way out and flung open its lid to find it brimming with monthly numbers, all his! Each collection was tied neatly with red satin ribbon—the Sketches by Boz, the Curiosity Shops, Master Humphrey’s Clock, Barnaby Rudge. Only the Twists had come loose from their stack.
He picked up the bound Pickwicks from near the top. The care with which they’d been aligned, edge to edge—each flimsy cover married to the next—flattered him greatly. Even the soft, slack ribbons had the look of having been loosed a hundred times and refastened into meticulous bows. These were beloved things to her, his stories. He was cherished by Miss Lovejoy, that was clear, and his heart lifted to know that whatever feeling she kindled in him was at least mutual.
Voices! A scuffle downstairs. Outside, loud, and coming closer. Had he left the door open? He couldn’t remember. Dickens snapped his head to look over his shoulder, every hair bristling. He held perfectly still, sure he’d be caught in the act, but the ruckus soon passed. Taking it as a sign that his luck was about to expire, he rushed to set the numbers back in the trunk and leaned over to close it, when the gilded edge of a bound book glinted at the bottom. He dug down for it, holding the volume in his hand, the familiar red calf and gilt over marbled boards, the six-paneled spine with a beaded band and scrolling foliate borders. This was the prize of the lot. For a woman of Eleanor’s means, such as he believed them to be, a book like this was a treasure indeed. Dickens held his Nicholas Nickleby and imagined it in her fine, nimble hands. He turned the cover, as she would have, to the elegant endpapers inside. And there it was. In a rough but purposeful hand, its true owner’s name: Timothy Lovejoy.
Mr. Dickens and His Carol Page 9
