“That’s different!” said Dickens, snagging the hat from her hand. “However foolish it was, I … admired you.”
“He admires you! And if he follows you, it’s only because your stories have meant a great deal to him. Why, all the boys and girls talk your fun in the streets. He’s only as they are.”
“Then let him second your story. Tell him I demand to speak to him!”
“He does not speak.”
“No, of course he wouldn’t, would he? For then he’d have to tell me the truth about you.”
Eleanor set her jaw, giving no ground.
“Perhaps he would write it for me,” Dickens snarled.
“He doesn’t write. He draws.”
Dickens fumbled for the sketch from his pocket and waved it in her face. “Yes! He has drawn me as a ghost in a graveyard!”
She grabbed the drawing from his hand, scoffing. “A fair likeness, I think. Look at you! You’ve scared him out of his wits! Timothy is but a boy!”
Dickens wanted to snap back, but hearing “Timothy” stopped him short. He looked at the sullied hat in his hand and shook his head, as if to jiggle his own thinking free.
“Timothy? He is your Timothy Lovejoy?”
“Named for his father,” she said in a whisper, “who died when he was small.”
Dickens turned the hat like a wheel. His mind went round and round, too, up to the ceiling and down to the bed. He rubbed his head to take it in, but it wasn’t his head, not his own hair, it was the wig she’d given him. Suddenly conscious of his appearance, he peeled away the muttonchops and pulled the headpiece off in one gesture. From where he stood, he could see the boy’s shoes quaking with fear.
“I—I don’t know what to say.” He put a splayed hand on his matted head of hair. “This is quite a shock.”
Eleanor glowered at him, eyes like cast iron. Dickens understood, berated himself for suspecting the boy. He had let jealousy get in the way of clear thinking. What a fool he’d been to be threatened by a child. Once again, his own imagination had betrayed him.
“I didn’t mean to scare the boy.”
Eleanor crossed her arms over her chest like a shield. “He doesn’t speak, but he hears. You could say something to reassure him that you mean him no harm.”
Dickens pulled on an earlobe and knit his brows. “I’m not, I think, just now … very good with children.”
Eleanor angled her head toward the bed, insistent. Dickens moved to the other side of it and crouched down, where he could see the full length of the boy, shuddering under the bed beside the old leather trunk, hands covering his ears, but his eyes as wide as two pound coins. He took off his glasses, pulled the eyebrows away, and came face-to-face with the frightened boy, trying hard to think what to say.
“Timothy, you are … a very fast runner.” He stood abruptly, duty discharged.
Eleanor narrowed her eyes.
“Perhaps I should go,” he said. “I’ve not been myself, these last days. I scared away my own family, and now I’ve scared away yours.” He lowered his chin. “Forgive me for behaving badly.”
He searched her eyes, desperately wanting some sort of reassurance himself. But there was none there. It was irredeemable, driving a young boy away from his own father’s grave. Forgiveness was too much to ask. He started for the door, but turned when his hand reached the knob. “Timothy hurt his ankle, I think. Might I look in on him? Perhaps tomorrow?”
Eleanor crossed her arms at her waist and pinched the elbows of her gray muslin sleeves. Dickens had not seen her angry before, and he was struck by the raw power in it, the fierce line of her jaw, the blue fire in her eyes. He waited, wanted for it to pass, to be subsumed by her goodness. He hoped.
Finally, she looked at him. And without any hint of forgiveness, any inkling of ceding ground, she nodded.
32
Even a grown man can be an orphan.
The bald wig was wadded up and stuffed deep in Dickens’ pocket, but he felt older than his years, older than he ever had before, irreparably alone, with no one left to blame. He wandered into the small hours of the night with a ponderous gait, treading the way his feet knew to go when his heart was too heavy to care. His own melancholy mapped his route. He wasn’t surprised, then, to find himself outside Bumble’s Toy Shop in the sad gas-glow of near-morning. His reflection in the paned window was a fright even to him—hollowed eyes and sunken cheeks, lips tapered to a sharp frown. But past his own image, behind the glass, an exuberance of toys came into soft focus. The little Théâtre Française, the one Katey had admired, stood proudly between two articulated boy puppets on wooden sticks and a pull-horse made of papier-mâché and coarse wool, with leather ears and saddle, black-button eyes, and a real horsehair tail.
But at the center of it all was the prize of the lot. A dollhouse with four open floors, in the German style with a blue slate roof, sat on a high table bathed in the glow of pink dawn behind him, which shot its little paned windows through with the glorious light of new morning. Dickens pressed his face against the glass to take in every detail. There was an attic nursery, with a painted crib and cupboard, a Punch and Judy theater, a full-masted wooden sailboat, and a rolling toy sheep. Three floors below was a busy kitchen with checkerboard tile and pointed lace curtains. But the true jewel of the house, like its own heart center, was a fine drawing room with vined wallpaper, a Turkish rug, a Biedermeier desk, and striped taffeta tacked at the top of its windows for drapes. A tall Christmas tree with ornaments graced the middle of the room, around which the little family of bisque dolls, each no bigger than the palm of his hand, stood: the master and mistress of the house, three children, a baby, two dogs, and a Doreen of their own.
Dickens lowered his head with a shallow sigh. He wondered whether his children were asleep in their Scottish beds under downy quilts, dreaming of their Christmas wishes. He imagined Catherine sleeping peacefully, their newborn in a rocking cradle beside her. He’d had no word from her; Topping surely would have found him if there had been. And he had nothing of worth to report to her in turn. He was no better than when she’d left, in fact worse—a tumbled down version of himself, whom he hardly recognized at all. Catherine had been right about him, but he didn’t know how to fix it. And he couldn’t return home, or ask them to come back, until he did. All he could think to do was weave back into the skein of streets in hopes of untangling himself.
But all the roads, even the little ones, smelled of Christmas. Markets at every turn, like dense evergreen forests of holly, laurel, and fir, springing up in front of him, blocking his way. Each one doing its best to mark the advent of the great, irrepressible annual fact. Dickens soon found himself following his nose and the clatter of wheels on all sides. He fell into the stream of carts and wagons pouring into Covent Garden, where hawkers and hucksters croaked hoarsely, tuning their voices for the long day’s performance ahead. “Mackereel all alive, fine silver mackereel, six a shillin’,” and “Mizzletoe, penny a pinch!”
The four coffee-sellers he liked best were all there, oilcloth-covered spring barrows in separate corners of the piazza, two with tables, two with trestle and board, the one who cut his coffee with chicory, the other who used saccharine root, the man with the best ham sandwich, the woman with the sweetest cake. Wanting some small taste of human fellowship, even if he didn’t deserve any at all, Dickens chose the shiny green truck with polished cans of hot coffee and tea mounted with brass plates. He took his coffee in a mug, wrapped his long fingers around it for warmth, and was suddenly aware of the whisper of a light cold wind on his neck and visible patches of blue sky above.
Even the fog was rethinking itself.
When the early coachmen crowded under a balustraded gallery, Dickens shouldered in among them to watch a plucky magician in polka-dotted lederhosen, braces, a ballet blouse, and yellow tights, all topped with a starry blue velvet cape. A portable table, draped in red satin, displayed all manner of apparatus: a pack of cards, sticks and string balls, a w
and, linking rings, three thimbles, a knotted silk kerchief, and a top hat, which soon found its way to the conjurer’s head. His diminutive assistant, with a little crutch under his arm—possibly to spur compassion when the hat was passed for the nobbings—shifted props and kept things moving. The bleary-eyed drivers, sucking their morning coffees, seemed dazzled by a simple sautez-le-coup with the cards.
Dickens knew the deception well, but he smiled nonetheless, not for the brilliance of its execution—it was on the sloppy end of magic tricks—but for the truth at the bottom of every illusion, every fiction, every lie: our own great desire to believe.
33
“And my, oh, my, if you could have seen me turn the watches into tea caddies and burn handkerchiefs without hurting them—you would never forget it as long as you live!” Dickens stood on a plain wooden stool in Eleanor’s lodging wearing the lederhosen, blouse, and star-spangly blue cape he’d purchased from the magician at Covent Garden, who had parted happily with all of it when a punishing rain interrupted the proceedings and his peevish assistant promptly quit. Before he’d wanted to write, Dickens wanted to act, but before that to be a conjurer, which he’d practiced since he was a boy himself, on whomever he could find to watch. He fancied himself an unparalleled necromancer, and had been delighted when Jane Carlyle, after the Christmas party last year, said that he was the best she’d ever seen, and acknowledged having paid to see many. He could make playing cards burst into flame, transport a watch into the middle of a loaf of bread, and cook a steaming-hot plum pudding in a gentleman’s top hat. Forster was often his accomplice in the early days. It had started when the two eager conspirators purchased the entire stock of a magician’s supply store that was going out of business and put on amateur shows at home and at parties. Adults were astonished, but children, any children, were the best audience by far.
Now he was holding forth at his flamboyant best, but it was no use. Timothy sat at the table alone; Eleanor wasn’t there. He had let Dickens in reluctantly, and returned straight to his post, chin resting in one hand, the other clutching a stump of pencil, which he rubbed busily across the paper. His eyes were cast down, focused on his sketch and nothing else.
Dickens was undeterred. “Why, I once transformed a bran box into a guinea pig, pulled a plum pudding from an empty pan, and sent coins flying through the air, without benefit of human hands!”
Timothy shot him a brief but skeptical glance.
“Ah, I detect an unbeliever in our midst.” Dickens held out a gold sovereign in the palm of his white-gloved hand. He waved a thin wand over it and closed his eyes while chanting, “Albri-kira-mumma-tousha-cocus-co-shiver-de-freek!” He repeated the incantation twice, opening his right eye enough to catch Timothy watching out of his left. With one last circle of his wand, he shouted, “Presto-quick-begone!”
Timothy gasped. The coin had disappeared from the gloved hand, not a trace of it anywhere, while the other hand, fingers unfurled one by one, was empty, too! Dickens had his attention now. He stepped off the stool toward Timothy, even as the boy leaned away.
“Wherever could it have gone?” Dickens asked, opening both his hands again for proof, with not a thing up either sleeve. He swept his hand lightly near the boy’s ear with enough ostentation to make his point, and produced the coin with a flourish. It gleamed in the palm of his hand like a treasure. Timothy looked at it in disbelief.
“Go on,” Dickens said. “It’s real.”
Timothy took the coin from Dickens’ palm. It glinted gold in his lead-marked fingers. He turned it over twice, as if he’d never held anything so dear.
“It ought to be yours, I think.”
Timothy shook his head.
“After all, that’s where I found it,” he said, pointing to the boy’s ear. “And there’s no one else here to claim it but you.” He knelt, eye to eye, and gently closed the boy’s fingers over the coin. “I promised your mother I’d look in on you.”
Timothy tilted his head, dubious. The same way his mother had done the night before.
“I don’t blame her for not being here. After my inexcusable behavior. But really, I feel sure she’d approve of my checking on that ankle of yours.”
Timothy cast his eyes down, crossed his ankles, and tucked his dirty brogans under the chair.
“Just the one,” said Dickens. “Very gently, I promise you.”
The boy scratched his uneven shrub of brown hair, put down his pencil, and turned his small frame to face his visitor. It seemed to take all his bravery. Dickens admired how he lifted the afflicted leg a few inches off the floor, his foot dangling from a swollen ankle, without making a face. Dickens took the boy’s floppy shoe in his hand and slipped it off, as gently as he could. It was weather-beaten, with yawning seams and no laces, too big for the tiny, sockless foot inside. Timothy gripped the edges of his chair as Dickens moved his ankle ever so slightly to one side, then the other, trying to keep the boy’s mind on anything else.
“You know, I have a daughter who doesn’t speak. Well, not much, anyway. Mamie is her name. I call her my ‘Mild Glo’ster,’ named after the cheese, her favorite. And also for her shyness. Have you ever tasted a Gloucester?”
Timothy shrugged a shoulder. It seemed enough of a yes that Dickens carried on. “But nobody’s fooled by her not saying much. Mamie’s a deep thinker.”
Rolling the ankle gently, he kept his gaze on the boy’s smudged, freckled face and found him listening closely, not wincing at all. “Well, I don’t think it broken. Should heal on its own.” He set the boy’s foot on the floor. Timothy tucked it back under the chair, and tugged at a loose thread on his sweater. He was pulling back into himself, no doubt. Why, he might never have been to a doctor, and here he was, having to trust a man who’d menaced him through the streets of London, chased him all the way home. Dickens surveyed his fresh store of magical tricks, but nothing was just the right medicine. Instead, he stood and retrieved the assistant’s crutch, and held it out for Timothy’s approval.
“I was lucky enough to procure this from a man only a little taller than you, who assured me he was quite done with it. He offered me the additional benefit of a magician’s saw, so I’ve cut it down to fit just right, I think.” Dickens watched Timothy consider the crutch. “Only for a few days, while your ankle heals.”
The boy stood, with some effort, on his good foot. He fit the crutch awkwardly under his arm and hopped a step or two. He looked back at Dickens for encouragement, the way a small child does who’s just learning to walk.
“You’ll be running races in no time.” Dickens willed a smile for the boy’s benefit, but how slight he seemed, more air than substance, not tethered to the world enough. He’d seen it at the ragged schools, where there were rough-and-tumble boys, throwing headlong into daily battle with hulls so hard, nothing could crack them. Then there were boys who hung back, at the edges of everything, wide-and glassy-eyed, too hungry to say so, too timid to fight. He guessed Timothy to be nine or ten, but no bigger than a seven-year-old. There was a shy sweetness about him, despite the bravura, or necessity, of wearing a man’s clothes, perhaps his own father’s. Dickens felt genuinely for the boy, and guilt for whatever pain he’d caused. At least the boy had a mother, who could provide some small measure of protection, or love. At least he had Eleanor.
Timothy managed one turn of the room, but even that seemed to tire him.
“Perhaps you should rest. Plenty of time to practice later.” Dickens helped the boy to his chair and laid the crutch against a wall. He thought he should go. He was an unwelcome intruder in their lives. Still, he was not accustomed to leaving children alone to fend for themselves. Timothy was just a boy. Dickens didn’t know where Eleanor was, but without her, the room seemed cold and bare.
He threw the last lumps of coal he could find on what was left of the fire and poked at it, trying to coax a little more flame, some modicum of warmth. He took the threadbare quilt from the bed and spread it on the floor near the hearth, t
hen offered his elbow to Timothy, who leaned on it to limp closer. The boy lay down and curled into himself, like a snail in its shell, arms tight to his little chest, bone-tired and shivering. He was asleep within seconds.
Dickens removed his own wool coat with satin lining and fur lapels and laid it over the boy, tucking it in at the sides, careful not to wake him. It was then that a simple locket on a brass chain slipped from inside Timothy’s shirt and fell open on the floor. He picked it up between his fingers to close it, but couldn’t resist a glimpse at the oval frame on one side holding a tiny, detailed pencil sketch of a younger Eleanor—a serious girl who gazed kindly at the world with hopeful eyes. In the other side, a lock of her hair under glass.
“What a lucky boy you are,” he whispered, “to be loved by such a one as she.”
Dickens closed the locket and tucked it back inside the boy’s collar. Timothy puffed a sigh and fell deeper into sleep. His exhaustion was palpable. Dickens wanted to put his hand on the boy’s hair; to touch it, smooth it, the way he did with his own children as a way of giving them comfort, and getting some, too. But he felt unworthy of the tender touch between parent and child, and didn’t dare disturb him. He sighed himself, long and sad.
“I will haunt your doorstep no more.”
34
Never mind necessity, melancholy is the mother of invention.
Dickens sat at his wobbly writing table at Furnival’s, dispatched and forgotten by the world, but full of words to say so. He was dog-tired, with a blanket around his shoulders, a thick stack of pages, and an inkpot bled nearly dry. He had written straight through the rest of the day and well into night, when he found himself at a natural stopping place, an apt end to his brooding tale. He paused to stare into the hearth, where his own fire had burned to nothing, and found there the final words of his Christmas book.
When he crossed the final t, there was a quiet knock at the door. He wasn’t sure of the time, but the clock tower had long ago declared midnight. It must be very late indeed, and none but the clerk, his father, and Forster knew him to be here. Expecting one of the three, and surprised to find himself even hoping so, he took up his pages and opened the door. But he found Eleanor Lovejoy instead. Her hood shadowed her face, giving him no clue to her state of mind. Ire or indifference, he imagined both. Still, his heart swelled in his ribs, pushed at the buttons of his waistcoat. He opened his mouth to welcome her, but had a sudden feeling of having used up all the words he knew.
Mr. Dickens and His Carol Page 15
