“What a wonderful jest, Charley, just the sort of humorous waggery we’ve come to expect—”
“It is not waggery, Father.” Dickens fixed him with a dead-cold stare.
The shoulders of John Dickens’ coat sagged. His arms dropped heavily to his side. “But we’ve always relied upon one another, you and I.”
“Have we?”
“Of course.” He took a cautious step toward his son. “In fact, just now there’s a piddling sum that’s come due—”
“And have I not always given you whatever you asked? Handouts, loans, allowances. For years and years, without question.”
“And have I not always had every intention of discharging my pecuniary liabilities, despite the humiliation I’ve suffered—”
“Stop!” Dickens yelled, louder than he’d meant to. He drew close to his father, his eyes red-ringed with fatigue. He was done taking care of him. The piddling, niggling, trifling sums. Too many years of it, too little of being cared for back. He was beside himself with resentment, pig iron in a blast furnace, hard but brittle.
“Can you not see the humiliation I have suffered, being trapped in servitude to my own father’s debts and failures?”
His nostrils flaring, he held his father’s gaze as long as he could. John Dickens hung his head. He clutched his hat with quaking hands and cleared his gravel throat. “Why so near to Christmas would you elect to break your father’s heart?”
“I remember another Christmas, when I saw clearly that I would have to make my own way in the world, without my father.”
“Wh-whatever do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean. If you don’t recall it as vividly as I do, I should worry for your memory. Or your conscience.”
John Dickens stood very still, eyes rheumy and red-ringed, too. The lines down his cheeks seemed like crevasses. His whole face was a ruin. “But I am your father, Charley. Perhaps not a father to be proud of, but not one to be ashamed of, either.”
Dickens pressed his lips together, but said nothing. No longer able to bear the sight of the shrunken man before him, he stared at his own boots. John Dickens folded the newspaper with great care and placed it on the writing table, a last attempt at dignity. He shuffled to the door and paused, wrapping his knotty fingers around the knob. He turned to his son, tears skimming his eyes. “Never forget that I was always proud to call you my son.”
Dickens turned away, crossed a hand to his shoulder, and rested his chin there, until the door shut behind him. He closed his eyes to wait for his father’s clunking steps, the creak of uneven stairs. When the quiet returned, he took a gulp of air and walked to the window, leaning his forehead against it. Below, his father came into view, hobbling down a sliver of street into the thick fog of bare morning, smaller and less sure-footed than Dickens could ever recall.
There was so much hard feeling he wished would fall away.
31
The fog refused to let the city loose from its grip for two nights and three days. By day it was a foul, brown-colored fog that threw monstrous shadows on the craggy rooftops visible from Dickens’ rooms. It was just the right weather to power his quill. He laid three fires and burned through them all, down to nothing but silvery ash. He slept in fits and starts upright in a chair, ate a few crusts of bread and some cheese. When there was nothing left to burn in the hearth, he threw a wool blanket over his shoulders, put on a pair of fingerless gloves, and wrote even faster. From the moment his father left, he’d collected all his disappointment and anger, like kindling to fuel his own feu de misère—a bonfire of agonies. He wrote it all down, made it part of his tale. Turn it outward, that’s what he’d do, give it back to the world that gave it to him. If he couldn’t obliterate his memories, he would put them all to good use, find in them the fodder he needed to finish the book, and forever be done with the hangers-on and will-you-pays.
Page by page, the plot congealed. The longer he wrote, the more the sight of his father dimmed, Fred faded away, and even Eleanor became strange to him. He did use a dash of her, mixed with a dram of Maria, in the service of Belle—Scrooge’s own once-betrothed, who had trampled his feelings and turned his heart cruel. Dickens considered her demise by consumption. The murder of the unsuspecting distant cousin played like a violin, with poisoned ginger in the Christmas punch. The birth of a long, bitter lawsuit in its aftermath was tempered, as it must be to appease Forster, with a cheery holiday ball near the end. The requisite foil to his skinflint Scrooge he called Fezziwig, whom he made a happy, foppish man in a big Welsh wig dancing under a mistletoe. Mr. Cratchit would be spared for now, though Jacob Marley, he had not forgotten, was dead from the start.
When the clock tower in the square struck midnight on the third day, he laid down his pen, pleased with his progress. The writing had cured him, he was sure. No need to rehash or revisit anything in the past. The mere chime of a silly old clock need not remind him of Eleanor or anyone else. It marked the end of a day and the start of a new one, that was all. And with only one chapter left to go, a reward for his hard work was in order. And so Dickens ventured out in full disguise, in search of a late supper.
The square was shrouded in the same sooty, choking fog that had grabbed on to the city days before and wouldn’t let go. The air was thick and wet; it smelled of burning coal, horse dung, and roast chestnuts. Dickens started across, his will strong; he could taste the pork chop already. But each step whittled his will away, like the sharp blade of a knife. By the time he reached the tower itself, he couldn’t taste the chop at all. The Folly broke through the veil of fog like an apparition. It seemed so close, just beyond where he ought to turn. The last theater patrons were climbing into cabs, the rest scurried for the Strand. A few jobbing actors lingered by the stage door. Macready might be long gone. Would it do any harm to anyone if he simply waited to see whether Eleanor emerged? One final piece of proof. A nail in her coffin.
Dickens skulked in a darkened alcove with a clear view of the stage door. His calculus was plain: if she didn’t appear, there could be no shred of doubt that Macready was right, and Forster more right than he. She had lured him to the theater and pretended to work there, but only as it suited her sinister needs.
When a janitor came out to turn down the gas lamp, the theater fell into darkness, and Dickens with it. Feeling a fool to have detoured at all, he was about to step from the shadows when the stage door cracked open and Eleanor stepped out, all alone. Furtively, he watched her pad across the square. She was headed, no doubt, straight for home.
Dickens followed her without a thought. He told himself he wasn’t spying, simply seeing her safely to her door, but this new development did have the added benefit of proving that Forster had falsely accused her and Macready had simply been wrong. He knew Forster meant to protect him, and Macready had had other things on his mind. Both could be forgiven. But his hope was that Eleanor worked and lived where she’d said, thus hiding nothing from him. It would exonerate her, and even if he was wrongfully prying once again, surely that was a cause for good.
She turned down her narrow street. He was forty steps behind, he judged, trying to keep her in view through the miasma. Each step closer to her lodgings was an argument for her innocence. He thought of trying to catch up to her, toss it off to coincidence, ask after her well-being, wish her good night. But when he turned the corner himself, his heart fluttered and sank. Eleanor had passed the door of her own thin house without even a sideways glance. Whatever her business, its urgency drove her on, first around one corner, then another, down two alleys, across a mews. Dickens kept his distance, and only once ducked into the nook of a building when she looked over her shoulder, then pulled up the hood of her cloak as if to hide her face, which shone like a lighthouse beacon. He watched her scurry down a stone-staired snicket that led to a lower street. Wherever this path was taking her, there was no doubt she knew it well.
When Dickens stepped back into the street to follow her, footsteps rustled behin
d him; it was hard to tell in the dense muffling smog. When he stopped, they stopped. Or did they? Perhaps the stealth of spying had fueled his imagination, and they were his own footsteps echoing back to him in the brick-lined street. He clocked three warehouses, a pin, a needle, one cutlery, before he stopped again to look back. The fog seemed to wrap its furry fingers around him, strangling his vision and blurring the night.
Creeping down the snicket himself, he never let his eyes lose the hem of the purple mantle sweeping behind her. But the hem was all he had. The fog enveloped her, too, as if protecting her from him, giving her cover. It was a great effort to stay close enough without being detected. His heart raced, his feet hurried. He no longer knew where he was, every direction obscured. When he stopped to listen for her footsteps, he couldn’t tell whether they were ahead or behind him, or even there at all.
When the dampened sound of an iron gate groaned open somewhere in front of him, he tiptoed toward it, feeling his way like a blind man. He found it twenty steps ahead—rusted finials, one side of the gate pulling away from its crumbling brick post and rotted hinges. He slipped through the narrow cleft where the cobbles under his feet became gravel and dirt, then mounds of raw earth. Somewhere in the soupy air a shovel hit dirt—gouge-burrow-heave—again and again. He stumbled on a flat sandstone slab sitting crooked in the ground. He put his hand on what must be a grave marker, with carved letters, worn away by time and weather. There were ten others near it that seemed to float in the brume—old obelisks, crosses, and busts, some toppled in the sunken earth that had given way to the decay of long-buried coffins below. Dickens moved from one to the next, from carved skulls, snakes, and cherubs to shattered urns covered in moss and dead leaves, worn away, desolate, and neglected. And only white blankness beyond.
Suddenly the gate creaked behind him. Dickens flinched and drew a quick gulp of air, trying to silence his own hammering heart. He had lost Eleanor. Lost all sense of which way was which. But he trudged on to find decrepit headstones giving way to closelying heaps of earth, coffin-shaped, with rotted wood tablets, cairns of rough stone, or initials traced in pebbles and shells to mark the poorer graves. There was no church that he could see. Poor graveyards like this were born of the Great Fire, when dead bodies took up the sockets where a church once stood. And sometimes bodies on top of those.
When he spied Eleanor again she was standing, statue-still, ten times the distance between his nose and his outstretched arm. Dickens ducked behind a barrel-trunked tree not a second before she peered out past the hem of her hood, looking right and left, as if she, too, felt followed. He removed his hat and pressed his back to the mottled bark of the ancient, leafless plane tree. Through the very spectacles she’d given him, he watched her kneel before a slab-of-wood footboard. The fog lifted and swirled around the cloak that settled in folds at her feet. She lowered her hood and bowed her head in a silent prayer, then leaned close to touch her lips to the simple marker. He waited while she lingered there, shoulders huddled over the ground. When she stood, it was an effort, slow and deliberate, to pull herself away. She raised her hood, refastened the cloak at her neck, and turned back the way she’d come.
Dickens sucked in his breath, flat against the tree, waiting for her to pass. A swish of her skirts, the moan of the rusty gate. He exhaled relief; then strangeness all around. Even the grave digger’s spade had stopped. Only the dead were left, and ghastly silence. He stepped to the footboard and knelt, as she had, laying his hat on the ground beside him. The marker was homemade, rough and uneven, the work of loving hands and a sorry heart. A dried laurel bouquet rested against it, the very one he’d bought her days before. Under it, in letters carved by a dull knife, the name of the poor grave’s inhabitant: TIMOTHY LOVEJOY.
Dickens ran his fingers along the crude lettering, confused. What could it mean—her Timothy Lovejoy, dead and buried? Was this the man Forster had accused of conspiring against him, lying cold in the ground?
A chill ran from his neck to his toes. He pushed himself to standing, searching the air for an answer, but the fog closed in on his lungs, suffocating him. The tufted mounds all around seemed to undulate, as if they would devour him whole, pull him into a grave of his own. He had an instinct to flee, but didn’t know which way. Dickens hugged his arms to his chest, pale as death, and swallowed hard. He shut his eyes to steel himself, lifted one leaden foot, stepping backward, then the other. Two more steps in the sodden earth, when he stumbled over a figure in the dark!
“Who is it?” Dickens yelled, grabbing at its clothes. It was a boy, he could tell by the sprig of an arm, the puny wrist now gripped in his hand. He was small and wiry but determined as a fisting cur, struggling to escape. A spare patch of moonlight swept over his brown eyes and thick lashes. It was the small ragged boy from the doorway in Covent Garden, who’d darted into the crowd when he approached.
“It was you! You followed me here!” He fought to keep hold of the slippery boy. “I know you!”
The boy writhed and grunted.
“Tell me who you are!” Dickens demanded.
The boy shook his head, trying to wriggle his wrist free. An open sketchbook dropped from his hand. He lunged for it, slipping from his captor’s grasp. Dickens grabbed his shin, tripping him, at the same time reaching to snatch the book away. But the boy clutched at it fiercely, straining and pulling, a stronger will than his own. A single page tore away in Dickens’ hand. The ragamuffin grabbed Dickens’ hat from the ground, clambered to standing, and bolted into the fog, hurdling over gravestones, quick as a rabbit pursued by a fox.
Dickens looked at the hastily drawn sketch in his hand. He could just make out the figure of an old man in a dismal graveyard, surrounded by leaning, irregular markers, a pale bald head with white swatches of hair, and muttonchops on a ghostly face with wild, sunken eyes. It was the frightening specter of a bitter, crazed old man.
The thin whine of the rusted gate startled him. He folded the sketch roughly and slipped it into his pocket, retracing his steps out of the graveyard, back onto the street, chasing the faint patter of boots on cobblestone, and a street boy, breathing hard. The boy was small and quick, but no match for Dickens’ own long legs.
“Give me back my hat, you thief!” he yelled.
The boy climbed to the top of the snicket, and stopped to stuff the sketchbook into the belt of his pants. His lungs fanned like bellows. Dickens scaled the stairs by twos, closing in, when the boy started off again, scudding into a dark alleyway just ahead. This wasn’t the way he’d come. The streets were empty; he’d lost his bearings. There was nothing to do but keep his quarry in sight, follow the sound of his steps, anything to catch him. Dickens was soon back on his heels, gaining ground, when the waif saw him bearing down and put on more speed. This boy would be hard to catch, Dickens thought, redoubling his own effort.
The boy ducked into another alley, racing to the next crossing. But when he turned back to look for his pursuer he stumbled over a pile of garbage in the narrow passage. He clawed, slipping and sliding, through the rotten food and oily paper, dropped the hat, and picked it up again, crawling back to his feet. When Dickens rounded the corner, he saw him stalled under a gas lamp in the next street up, grabbing at his ankle, hopping on one foot. He sprinted toward the boy, who watched in horror.
“I’ll get you, you little scapegrace!”
He was three fathoms away when a carriage appeared from nowhere, horses rearing and snorting, nearly trampling the boy as he skittered under their raised hooves pawing at the fog. Dickens couldn’t see him until the carriage passed. The boy was limping as fast as he could, scampering past the Folly and on to the clock-tower square. He was headed for the little street straight across. It was Eleanor’s street; there could be no doubt of it. Dickens doubled his pace to take the corner himself. The ragged boy stood, frantic, jiggling the doorknob of the lodging house.
Dickens growled at him. “Stop!”
The boy’s chest heaved in sharp, short breaths.
He kicked the door three times with his good leg and surely all the strength he had left, at last opening it. With his pursuer just steps away, he slipped inside and slammed it hard behind him.
Dickens banged on the door, rattling the knob, yelling at full decibels. “Let me in! Let me in at once, you wretched, good-for-nothing guttersnipe!”
He pounded harder; the door held firm. He drew back his own leg to kick it, when the door screaked open. Eleanor stood on the other side of it like a pillar. Dickens pushed past her in a rage, flying up the narrow staircase and through the open door of her room. He didn’t see the boy anywhere, but spun around to find Eleanor right behind him, holding his top hat, eyes blazing.
“So! I’ve found you out at last! Where is he?”
“Hiding from you!”
Dickens followed her gaze to the bedstead. The worn heels of the boy’s brogans peeked out from the end. “And well he should hide! I caught him in the shadows, spying on me!” He stepped closer, inches from her face. “But you know that already, of course. That decrepit graveyard is your meeting place.”
Eleanor stood her ground, unafraid. “You followed me to the graveyard?”
“The boy followed me! He’s one of those street urchins, is he not? The ones who accosted me coming out of this very house.”
“You’ve been in my house?”
“And a good thing it is, too. Or I would not have uncovered this sinister plot! You. Pretending to work at the theater!”
“Yet you think nothing of spying on me?”
“Are you their ‘Fagin,’ is that it? A kidsman running your own band of boys who filch and steal for you? Hat snatchers, pocket pickers, sneak thieves! You’ve had them stalking my every move!”
Eleanor stepped toward him, and held out his hat with a stiff arm. She spoke slowly, lips quivering with anger. “It is you who haunt our doorstep! I cannot but turn around and there you are!”
Mr. Dickens and His Carol Page 14
