The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  Fred Bonney declared, ‘I must be there too. I am the boy’s guardian.’

  Rutherford and Dr Pearson exchanged looks. ‘You can be present, Mr Bonney, yes. Come, young Dickens!’

  I moved to the door with the outlaws and dear old Fred. People stood back to clear a way for us, as for two men on the way to the gallows. And then the two fabled bushrangers and Fred stood aside to let me out into the corridor. On this raw desert day, the hallway was cold.

  ‘Is there somewhere we can confer, Mr Bonney?’ asked Dr Pearson.

  ‘Yes,’ said Fred, resolute. ‘We can use my office by the kitchen.’

  He led the way to the back of the house and into his office with his pictures of Paakantji on the wall. On entering, the two bushrangers were taken by the magic and science of this.

  ‘How do you get these, Mr Bonney?’ Pearson asked.

  ‘It is just the impact of light on certain chemicals coated on a glass plate. Surely you’ve seen photographs before.’

  ‘It’s not your work, is it?’

  ‘Yes. I am a photographer. But it is only science. The science of light.’

  ‘It is more than that,’ insisted Pearson. ‘Let us all sit.’

  Fred took his seat behind his desk, Pearson pointed me to a chair across the room, and he and Charlie Rutherford sat together on a settee by the wall.

  ‘So,’ Charlie said, ‘what’s your name?’

  ‘My name is Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens,’ I said defiantly. ‘I am the son of Charles and Catherine Dickens.’

  ‘Tell them who your godfather is,’ Fred urged me.

  ‘My godfather is Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton, formerly Secretary of State for the Colonies and a very famed novelist,’ I replied.

  ‘You see, gentlemen,’ said Fred, ‘you are playing with fire. Princes and principalities and more will be ranged against any malign act you commit here.’

  ‘You misjudge us, Bonney,’ declared Rutherford, ‘as your type always does.’

  Pearson asked, ‘It is the world-revered author who is your father?’

  ‘Yes. I’m the youngest in the family.’

  ‘We thought you would have beams of light shining from your forehead,’ said Pearson.

  ‘As you see, apart from my father I’m an average English boy. And I was not even good at school.’

  The bushrangers looked at each other, frowning and, it seemed, a little bewildered.

  ‘Yet,’ interposed the ever-loyal Fred, ‘he is naturally gifted for the life of a colonial pastoralist. And I suggest you let him continue in it.’

  ‘You have already made that point twice, Mr Bonney,’ said Pearson.

  ‘We admire your father as reverently as any citizens in the world,’ declared Rutherford.

  ‘And it is our honour to greet you, Mr Dickens,’ Pearson assured me. ‘Bewildered as we are by the fact you chose to hide yourself from us as if we were Corsican banditti.’

  ‘What do you expect?’ Fred asked them. ‘After the newspapers have finished laying out your history of raids and depredations!’

  ‘Grossly exaggerated,’ insisted Rutherford.

  ‘What do you expect?’ Fred challenged them again.

  But instead of taking offence, Rutherford and Pearson seemed to be exchanging consultative glances.

  ‘It is my sad duty – and Mr Rutherford and I have concluded it to be a grievous duty we cannot step back from – to let you know that your eminent and esteemed father . . . has died,’ said Pearson with a type of fraternal mournfulness.

  I blinked, feeling panicked and bewildered. My skin prickled and I felt as if I were bursting out of a chrysalis, turning into a new, unwelcome kind of being.

  ‘We held up the pub in Mount Manara three days ago,’ said Pearson. ‘There was a gentleman there who’d come post-haste from Sydney to inspect a station and he had on him a Sydney Morning Herald only six days old.’

  Charlie Rutherford said, ‘It’s a new world, you see, young Dickens. There is now an undersea cable all the way to India, so they knew about the death almost as quick as folk in Britain. Then a steaming ship brought the news to Sydney, and our gent brought it to Mount Manara, and that’s how we learned the grievous fact.’

  ‘You are confusing us,’ Fred complained. ‘What exactly are you trying to say?’

  With a bowed head, Rutherford withdrew a sheet of newsprint from his breast pocket and slowly unfolded it. The page he held up had a heavy black border with the headline, ‘CHARLES DICKENS DIES IN KENT’. I was able to take in a further line, ‘Expires in His Daughter’s Arms at His Beloved Gad’s Hill Place’.

  I wanted to stand and fight the proposition, but with the words ‘Gad’s Hill Place’ quivering in my brain, I lost all power and plummeted to the floor. I have fled, I thought in the instant I fell, a counterfeit world.

  I came to with the taste of acrid brandy being poured past my lips, which took my breath and set me coughing. I saw Fred’s concerned face, and the brandy bottle he was holding, and Rutherford still standing there with the black-bordered page of newspaper. Dr Pearson was kneeling by me, his fingers on the side of my throat.

  ‘Well,’ said Pearson, ‘we did wonder if we should forget it and let you discover in time. But that seemed to smack of bloody cruelty.’

  ‘The ignorance that is not bliss,’ supplied Rutherford. ‘I am sorry, young’un. I am sorry for all of us, but for you above all.’

  ‘A terrible business,’ agreed Fred as he and Pearson helped me back on my feet and into the chair. ‘May I be the first, Plorn, to offer my sincerest condolences. If the world has suffered a grievous loss, I cannot imagine the depth of your own grief.’

  ‘But it can’t be true,’ I told him in a panic of loss. ‘It is a lie they are trying to put in place, God knows why.’

  At that I heard Rutherford whimper with genuine grief and I thought that maybe he believed the black-edged lie himself rather than being its perpetrator. Dr Pearson whispered in my ear, ‘I would give my life at this moment to make it untrue.’

  ‘You can’t believe it’s a fact, Mr Bonney?’ I appealed to Fred.

  ‘It is the Sydney Morning Herald,’ Fred assured me, as if that organ was the closest thing to divine writ.

  ‘Of course, we will depart immediately, Mr Bonney,’ said Pearson. ‘We will not prey on a house of grief. We will take from the store only what we need, since it is a long ride between provedores in this Western Division.’

  Still taken up with the question of veracity and the reliability of his word, Rutherford was reading from the printed page now.

  It is not only the Bengal Gazette and a number of other Northern Indian organs that announce the sad news, but they quote directly from cables that include the very report of The Times of London, and indeed further accounts of the modest ceremony of the interment in Westminster Abbey of the greatest British storyteller since Shakespeare. We are therefore left with no options of denial and feel bound to announce to the population of New South Wales that this death of a man of irreplaceable spirit is now certain, and that we should mourn it as other children of the English language from Toronto to New York, from Africa to East Bengal mourn it, and even as it is mourned at the court of the French emperor and that of the Czars . . .

  He looked up for confirmation that his breaking the news had been well intentioned and was not fatuous.

  Miss Georgina Hogarth, aunt to the Dickens’ children and faithful housekeeper of Gad’s Hill Place, declared that Dickens, on the day of his collapse, Wednesday 8 June, had been at the office of All the Year Round magazine, in Wellington Street, 41 Long Acre, Covent Garden, but was at Gad’s Hill near Rochester, Kent, by the middle of the day. Miss Hogarth reports that he rested and had a cigar and then went to work in the small chalet in the grounds of his house, returning to the house in the late afternoon to write letters in the study. He entered the dining room at 6 o’clock looking unwell. Miss Hogarth asked him if he felt ill and he replied, ‘Yes, very ill. I have been very
ill for the last hour.’ On her saying she would send for a doctor, he declared that after dinner he needed to go to London. He complained of toothache and held his face, and asked that the dining room window be closed, which she complied with. When she suggested that he lie down, he declared, ‘Yes, on the ground’.

  ‘These four words were to be the last uttered by that great engine of invention. With them, he resigned from our lives and collapsed to the floor.’

  ‘I know that floor,’ I wanted to yell. The parquetry. All the paintings on the wall, the long sideboard. The big domed mirror rising amongst them. The fluted legs of the dinner table. And all the gleaming fine-cut cruets of a successful life. But the man sinking to the floor would not be unstopping them again.

  My grief became a well now. It was my grief, no longer carried by the bushrangers as an item of plunder. It had lodged mercilessly in me. I began to sob. In fact, I would find from my later reading of the report that he had lived, barely conscious, another day.

  ‘Oh Jesus Christ, sorry, laddie,’ said Rutherford above me, as Dr Pearson kneaded my shoulder in sympathy.

  ‘So it has happened?’ I asked Fred.

  ‘I would say so,’ he replied mournfully.

  ‘We’ll ride away now, Mr Bonney,’ offered Dr Pearson again. ‘I do ask your word of honour that you will not send your men on our track.’

  ‘I will give you my word. As for honour . . .’

  ‘Good enough,’ said Rutherford, as if not wanting to hear the rest of the sentence.

  ‘Spare a kind thought for us when we are hanged,’ suggested Dr Pearson. ‘And I may still take a few horses. I’m trying to be square with you.’

  33

  The Starlight gang vanished from the environs of Momba homestead within an hour, having released all captives to return to their dwellings. Dr Pearson and Fred Bonney explained to them that my father was reported to be dead and they were not going ahead with their planned robbery.

  Still, on reflection, I could not believe the guvnor was gone. I believed in the sincerity of the report; I mean, as far as it had been read to me by Rutherford. I possessed the printed report of it and took it to my room. But I did not read it at first. I thought that if I delayed, another cable would come along the undersea wire and news of it would travel then from Bengal to Australia, and the tale would be reversed, my father being declared healthy. There had been some mention of interment in the Abbey, but it might have grown purely from the mistaken assumption of his death.

  During the night, however, I could not prevent myself reading the rest, and I felt a panicked impulse to scurry to Alfred in Corona, though in that vastness scurrying was not a choice.

  ‘Alfred,’ I said. ‘Story’s over.’

  By the giant act of expiring, my father would in time reduce him, surely, to simple grief.

  I read more of the black-bordered page.

  I found that Dr Steele had ordered the sofa be brought into the dining room over by the window that looked out to the field behind the house, the field that produced a few acres of hay and many days of delightful sport. As the patient was lifted onto it, Steel believed my father was past help. Katie and Mamie were summoned by telegram and arrived about midnight. Mama wasn’t summoned at all, it seemed. My two sisters and Aunt Georgie sat with him all through the night, placing hot bricks at his feet. Charley arrived from town by morning. I yearned to have arrived myself. I believed, despite my inelegant vocabulary, that I would have had the words to awaken him, and besides, he would want to awaken and ask me how was Australia? Dr Frank Beard, his old friend, came in answer to a telegram from Aunt Georgie and declared there had been a brain haemorrhage.

  Father died, according to this account, at six o’clock in the evening. Henry came down from Cambridge, beside himself since he had been told by a porter on Rochester Station. The guvnor’s sister, Aunt Letitia, came too. Mamie took a lock from Father’s head. The girls had red geraniums, the guvnor’s favourite flowers, and blue lobelias, brought in from the beds at the front of the house and arranged around the body. The next morning, said the Herald per favour of The Times, Katie went up to London to let Mama know the sad news.

  The Queen sent Mama a telegram. John Millais, Katie’s good friend, came to draw the guvnor’s face in death and a sculptor took a cast. George Dolby, the guvnor’s tour manager, also came, bleary with grief.

  Had the young Irish friend of Father’s been there at any stage, I wondered. We children received a mention in the report, even me. But Miss Ternan was never mentioned, being – if she was there – more than a guest yet not counted amongst them. Beyond the death itself there was nothing left for the plain grocery of the human emotions, little items such as jealousy. If I hated her, it was because she lived and he didn’t, and his time being finite she may have somehow received more of his true nature than Alfred and I did. More than a child could.

  Some four days later, his body was transported for interment at Westminster Abbey. Pa’s useless brother Alfred’s son, Edmund, had been in one of the three coaches that followed the body. The guvnor often said he wanted to be buried in the old churchyard at Shorne, the village just down the road from Higham, with lozenge-shaped little limestone markers for the graves of infants. The cathedral at Rochester had made a bid for his coffined body, though, and now the Abbey did too, and of course the Abbey won.

  As Father had decreed, there were not many mourners. His body had come up early in the morning from Higham to Charing Cross, along with his mourners – Katie, Mamie, Charley and Henry were there – on the same train. He was always on that line, back and forth. And now he was travelling it dead. It couldn’t be! The resurrection of Christ was easier to believe in than the death of Charles Dickens. Aunt Georgie travelled with him, Wilkie Collins, Pa’s brother Alfred, Katie’s husband, Aunt Letitia, Frank Beard and John Forster had also attended. Who else? George Sala, who worked at the magazine. Fred Ouvry, who had given me a lawyerly talking-to before I left home. Had the girl been there too, in the coaches? At the Abbey? The newspaper article did not mention her. Mama was not mentioned. Had he gone to the trouble, the guvnor, of saying she shouldn’t be?

  The Abbey bell tolled and the dean and canons were waiting inside the main door as the coffin and the mourners arrived. They processed up the nave and the doors were closed behind him. Even the organ was muted. No funeral oration was given, no choir sang. The guvnor had wanted it that way.

  The Herald had the grace to quote Longfellow, who said, ‘Dickens was so full of life that it did not seem possible he could die. I never knew an author’s death to cause such general mourning. It is no exaggeration to say that this whole country is stricken with grief.’

  And this the Americans, whom the guvnor had accused of too much spitting and boasting!

  I did not easily recover from the idea that casual friends like Dr Beard and the guvnor’s nephew and George Sala had been at the guvnor’s interment. I envied all who had been allowed to attend, while still believing the guvnor was alive.

  Even before a letter from Aunt Georgie arrived confirming the fall, a Wilcannia policeman came riding into Momba with a summons from the colonial government of New South Wales. The governor, the Parliament, the people of the state were to mourn the death of our father in Sydney, and Alfred and I were called on to be central to that. They knew of the death and it seemed dreadful to me that they did. And that to powers and potentates and people, it was a settled fact.

  A civic reception to mark Father’s death was held at the Commercial in Wilcannia, before Alfred and I set out on our pilgrims’ route to Sydney. When he and I met in a private little room there, he seized me fiercely and began to hack and choke with tears himself and said, ‘It’s terrible. No letter from anyone that we love to tell us, Plorn, old son. I want, in my hands, a letter from Aunt Georgie or Mama before I believe it fully.’

  His grief was an extraordinary thing to see, and I have to say that I felt somehow it came from exactly the same well of bitterness a
s all his earlier complaints about the dear old guvnor. As I held him, I could see that we were more equal men than we had ever been. Even on the simple physical level I was nearly as tall as him, and he looked to me like a trim little man, with his sway-backed straightness, his head raised in a way you often saw in men of medium height, a cock sparrow look, ready for the tall of the world to do their worst.

  We were under a duty, however, to compose ourselves and go to meet the citizens of the Darling River in that very same parlour or ballroom where I’d heard Connie Desailly and Hayward sing together. I was shocked by this fierce display, by the scale of it, in Alfred. It was a given that English people faced the death of loved ones with restraint and whispers and resignation. All the etiquette books said so, the ones we studied at Wimbledon and Rochester. Italians railed at God, demanded a resurrection, and refused to be consoled. But it occurred to me that something Alfred got from the guvnor himself was more along the Italian lines than the British. The large gestures of grief for my sister Dora were the guvnor’s. And when I met Alfred in Wilcannia, he wept with a passion for a solid quarter-hour, and I was the comforter. No ordinary writhing, his, and at last I had to ask him to try to settle for Father’s sake.

  He did, and we went into the ballroom, where speeches were made by the mayor of Wilcannia, and readings were given from the death of Little Nell, by the local theatrical company. ‘She seemed a creature fresh from the hand of God, and waiting for the breath of life; not one who had lived and suffered death. So shall we know the angels in their majesty, after death’ was beautifully delivered by a woman from the Wilcannia school. Then a bank clerk read a section of The Tale of Two Cities, in which Charles Darnay is preparing for death, and Sydney Carton would redeem him as Christ redeemed us all in the believed-in long term. This performer strove for relevance by means of volume.

  I realised, though, that these good people had done their best to find and rehearse death scenes in Father’s books. And then, without my knowing it, Connie Desailly was there on the stage, beyond the banks of flowers. ‘Connie Desailly,’ I told Alfred in a whisper, in case he had forgotten. She recited a poem by Alfred Tennyson, Alfred’s godfather, and he watched her intently and, I believe, with a form of consolation. It was beautifully odd, a girl reciting ‘Morte d’Arthur’. ‘So saying, from the ruined shrine he stept/And in the moon athwart the place of tombs/Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men . . .’