The Mammoth Book of Dickensian Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley (ed)

  After all my labours on his behalf to clear him of suspicion! I thought it really past anything for-RanK Ingrattitude.

  You should Know too that Constable Trumpiter has proposed Marriage to Miss Bellman. We were all rather surprized but really it is much the best thing for her, even though he is so very common, as she is not likely ever to get a better offer. It is good for her she has such sharp eyes, she will need them when she must sew buttons on a poor Policemans uniform. And I daresay her plumpness will greatly diminish when she has to live on the sort of victuels a Policemans wage affords. May they be very happy together. I have no doubt they will be. But I had thought him a more discriminating person.

  When we had been confronted with this news Uncle Pyelott was very cheerful, as well he might be since now he will be spared the expence of Miss Bellman’s Keep, and said we should have a bottle of Madeera to celebrate. But there were none in the Sideboard and Aunt Pyelott asked if I might step out to the Wine Merchants which was still open. I was glad of any excuse to get out of the parlour, even on so dark an evening, for it was hard to conceal my Disdain at the imoderit way Miss Bellman was behaving with Constable Trumpiter.

  I was coming back and had not got above four or five yards from the Spirits Shop when who should have the effrontary to leap out before me but Spring-Heel’d Jack! My indignation Knew no bounds and as you Know I am Fearless when once my Temper is up. I brake the bottle of Madeera on a convenient wall and rushed at him with it, and the booby turned as if to run but I caught him and tript him up. The bottle did not cut him very badly because he wore some sort of oilskin, and he knocKed it from my hand as I was dragging his helment off, but I took off part of his ear anyway and got my Knees on his chest and so held him down pretty well as I renched the Mask off.

  Imagine my amazement, Tilda, when I ten you it was not the handsome man with the black whiskers at all! I recognised him for a shy dull fellow who had stood mute by the punch Bowl and wore a vulgar waistcoat that hardly danced with anybody. Which, as I remember because I asked at the time, was because he was only somebody’s clerk and not worth cultivating the acquaintance of.

  At the thought that such as he had dared to assault me, a gentlemans daughter, my very Blood boiled in my vanes. I rained Blows on him with my fists and pulled out his hair until he was screaming and weeping and emploring Mercy. He said it was only a joke and he meant no harm, and promised he would never do it any more. Only the thought that if he were taken by the Police it would all get into the papers made me decyst, and in any case he was making so much Noise someone might have come out to inquire what was the matter.

  I did him an Injury he will not soon forget and, rising, pitched the disgusting Mask into the canal. When I came back with the new bottle of Madeera he was dragging himself away on his hands and Knees and begun to whemper when he saw me, but I spurned to notice him and only kicked him once in passing for I had done with him.

  When I got back to Aunt Pyelott’s I was quite faint at the dreadfulness of everything and was obliged to retire to my chamber the rest of the evening.

  It has all spoilt the city for me rather and I have decided to quit London next week, instead of staying until summer. I return to Dotheboys Hall sadder, Tilda, but ever so much wiser. I shall not again soon – if ever indeed – lose my heart to perfidious Men.

  I remain

  Yours and cetrer

  Fanny Squeers

  The End of Little Nell

  Robert Barnard

  In 1839 Dickens resigned his editorship of Bentley’s Miscellany and planned to issue a cheaper weekly magazine, Master Humphrey’s Clock, to be filled almost entirely by his own writings. The magazine appeared in April 1840 and with it the first episode of The Old Curiosity Shop. This is the story of Little Nell and her grandfather, who owns an old antique shop. Nell looks after the shop and has no idea where her grandfather, who sleeps by day, goes at night. However, we learn that he has been borrowing money from the villainous Daniel Quilp, who believes the old man is a rich miser, though he had gambled that money away. When Quilp discovers this he takes possession of the shop, and Nell and her grandfather take to the road. Most of the rest of the novel tells of their adventures as they travel through town and country and meet an assortment of Dickensian characters, including Codlin and Short who run a travelling Punch and Judy show. Probably the most memorable scene in the story is when Little Nell dies. Dickens drew upon his own emotions following the death of his wife’s sister, Mary, and his description brought the whole of Britain – and much of America – to tears.

  Robert Barnard, who has been called the “Jane Austen of mystery writers”, is an expert in English literature, having taught it and written about it in the years before he turned to crime fiction. He is a noted expert in the works of Charles Dickens, having written Imagery and Theme in the Novels of Dickens (1974). He is equally an expert on the Bronte sisters, having recently co-authored A Bronte Encyclopedia (2007). He has written several historical mysteries under the alias Bernard Bastable, including a series in which Mozart lives on into old age, which began with Dead, Mr Mozart (1995). Several of Barnard’s mysteries focus on children and the dilemmas of childhood and books like Little Victims (1983), Out of the Blackout (1985), The Masters of the House (1994) and The Bones in the Attic (2001) explore many of the same issues as Dickens’s novels. But Barnard is also a little mischievous at times and in the following story gives us an insight into the true nature of Little Nell.

  They were all poor country people in the church, for the castle in which the old family had died, was an empty ruin, and there were none but humble folks for seven miles around. They would gather round her in the porch, before and after the service; young children would cluster at her skirts; and aged men and women forsake their gossips, to give her a kindly greeting. None of them, young or old, thought of passing the child without a friendly word; the humblest and rudest had good wishes to bestow.

  Right! That’s enough of that garbage. Though I’ve a lot more of it up my sleeve before “Little Nell” can be allowed to die. The great British public can’t get enough of such sentimental twaddle, and they shall get it a-plenty. When the book is finished I shall offer it to Mrs Norton, or Mrs Gore, and if it’s not in their line I’ll load it off on to Charles Dickens, who is certainly a low fellow, but he does a nice line in weepies himself. He’ll take it on, put his name to it, earn a tidy sum.

  I have to say I sometimes enjoy writing about Nell myself, but that’s probably because I enjoy re-creating myself in a totally false image. I think the image assumed its final perfect form for the pervy schoolmaster we met early in our travels – though I’d done the sweet ingenue quite often while serving in the Shop. Oh! that schoolmaster! What a twerp! All one ever got out of him was solicitude, tears and references to his favourite pupil who died back in the old village. You’d think people would have got suspicious of a schoolteacher who built his emotional life around a bright pupil who was dead. Particularly a bright boy pupil. But not everyone has my sophistication in these matters.

  My re-creation of myself in the syrupy-sweet image of “Little Nell” began when the gaming houses and casinos of London started to get wise to grandad’s and my little scam. That scam involving my taking three or four years off my age and being always taken to gambling dens by Kit Nubble – a dim spark if ever I saw one. Grandfather always went on his own, so no one ever associated us, and I could wander round the tables where he was playing and then sign him the details of what was in their hands. When they did get wise to us every establishment in London was circularized with our details, which was mighty unfair, and meant we had to take to the road and find out-of-town establishments where we could ply our trade without detection. We kept moving, because if one person keeps winning the big boys soon get suspicious. Sometimes we tried a bit of begging, but that was mainly for laughs. My grandfather has a great sense of humour.

  Mind you, I don’t like the road, not as I like London, where I always feel
at home. You see some really odd types on the road. Take Mrs (a courtesy title, I wouldn’t mind betting) Jarley, her of the waxworks – musty mummies trailed around the country in a procession of carts and caravans, and presenting a very cut-price version of Mme Tussaud’s classy show in Baker Street. Mrs Jarley really took a shine to me, and it didn’t take me long to guess that she was of the Sapphic persuasion.

  “Such a sweet child,” she would say, patting me on the thighs, the arms, and any joint that took her fancy. “She reminds me of the dear young queen.”

  The dear young queen strikes me as having a mental age of about twelve, and looks like the chinless wonders who inflict their feebleness on the Household Cavalry and any regiment with colourful gear to camp around in. I did not take kindly to the comparison.

  “Her Majesty seems very neglectful of her duties as head of the Church of England,” I said. “Sad that one so young shuns the proper Sunday observance.”

  “I had no idea,” said Mrs Jarley, stopping her patting.

  “Ah – London knows,” I said. “And London keeps it to itself.”

  There’s nothing like a bit of Metropolitan insider knowledge to make provincials feel inferior. And if you haven’t got any insider knowledge, make it up.

  I enjoyed my time with the waxworks display. I enjoyed presenting myself as a child barely into double figures. I enjoyed luring people into the tatty display by highly inflated claims of what it contained. I enjoyed most of all slipping off in the night to various rustic gambling hells to ply our trade and hone our skills. The Jarley routine of moving from one place to another made this last pleasure easier to procure. One or two visits to the local low place and we were on the road to another source of income. Grandfather was over the moon, and kept his winnings about his person. He never knew exactly how much he had won, so when I was putting him to bed drunk in the early hours I could abstract a bit for my own use.

  Needless to say I put a rather different gloss on these activities in the manuscript I was preparing to hawk to Mrs Norton or that vulgar, jumped-up newspaper reporter Mr Dickens.

  This pleasant life changed when we met up again with Codlin and Short. We had made their acquaintance a few months earlier, somewhere near Birmingham. You won’t be surprised to hear they were an odd couple. I had no problem with them because I was used to the phenomenon from our London circles: the pair of men, usually middle-aged, who squabbled and competed and bad-mouthed each other to outsiders but who really were as close-knit as a nut and a bolt. And Codlin was definitely the nut. He was always insisting that he was my real friend, not Short, and I never quite realized what his motives in doing this were – whether he had plans for some scam or other that required a young, virginal, stupendously innocent creature. Or was he hoping to get tips on my grandfather’s unrivalled techniques in card-play, the tables, horse-racing and cock-fighting?

  We were on the way to Stratford-on-Avon, and Mrs Jarley was stroking my hair and telling me what a wonderful Shakespearean actress I would make in a few years – instancing Cordelia, Miranda and Celia, and I guessed these were innocent, slightly wet creatures, without an ounce of spunk.

  “You have an aura,” she was saying, “a heavenly atmosphere that envelopes you, so that you would be an ideal embodiment—”

  My mind strayed from this fulsome garbage and I saw, further along up the main street of the small town we were passing through, two peak-capped figures gazing into a shop window. Peelers. Members of that elite body of men recruited by Sir Robert Peel when he was Home Secretary, to reduce crime in the cities by their unique combination of brains and brawn. I don’t think! Just look at how much, or little, they get paid and guess how likely it is that the job will attract the elite.

  I was just thinking the set of the two backs bending forward to survey the wares exhibited in the window reminded me of people I knew when they turned round as they heard the approach of hoofs and wheels.

  Codlin and Short!

  As we passed them by I raised my hand, and was rewarded by a double wave, very enthusiastic, in return. They began walking vigorously along beside us, only slowly getting left behind.

  Fortunately we stopped at a public house on the edge of the town. Well, not fortunately – inevitably. We stop in nearly every town, so that Mrs Jarley can lubricate her coster-woman’s voice and her travelling hands. When she had steamed off to get her gin and water, grandfather brought me my shrub, with double rum to taste, and he went to mingle with the local mugs while I waited for the precious pair to catch us up.

  “Well, you have landed on your feet!” came a voice from the caravan doorway. Actually I was still recumbent on Mrs Jarley’s well-padded couch, but I knew what he meant.

  “We’d heard about the two new members of the company, and we guessed it had to be you and grandad. Mrs Jarley taken a fancy to you, has she?” asked Short.

  “Actually I am extremely useful to the Museum management,” I said demurely. “I’ve brought hundreds through the door.”

  “Didn’t answer my question, did she, Codlin?” said Short, grinning.

  “Don’t be so personal, Short. A girl’s got a right to her secrets, hasn’t she, my darling?”

  “And does Grandad get hundreds through the door too?” asked Short. “Or does he suggest a quick game of vingt-et-un, and line his pockets that way? His sort of swindle is not so different from Jarley’s kind, when you come down to it.”

  Codlin nodded.

  “Morally speaking I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, Short.”

  “I’m not used to hearing you moralize,” I said. “I suppose it’s the new job, is it?”

  “Oh, the new job! No, my darling, Sir Robert’s successor doesn’t pay us to moralize. He pays us to catch criminals. Or failing that to keep track of them.” Short paused. “It’s a real police state he’s created, but we’re the last people who can talk about that. We get messages and send messages, and that means some little placeman in Westminster can put pins in his wall-map of England and show where all the big criminals and most of the small ones as well are at any moment.”

  “Which is why we’re happy to have caught up with you again,” said Codlin.

  “But why? We’re not big criminals.”

  “You’re middle-ranking. And the gambling industry has a lot of good friends in this government, thanks to their readiness to grease the right palms. So we’re just telling you: there are stories going round linking a widespread gambling scam to a certain travelling display of ageing waxworks. Get me? And if you or your revered grandfather slips us a ten quid note and renews it every time our paths cross, we’ll keep you informed and tip you the wink when it’s time to move on.”

  “Wouldn’t Sir Robert, or his successor, be angry if he found out?”

  “Livid – if he found out. But if he wants to stamp out corruption in the nation’s police force he’d better start paying us what we’re worth.” He wagged a finger in my face. “Until then he’ll find that the work never gets done.”

  “We’re public guardians bold and daring,” sang Short, in a quavering baritone: “When danger looms we’re never there.”

  “But if we see a helpless woman, or little boys who do no harm,” took up Codlin, “we run ’em in, we run ’em in – I say, is that your revered Grandaddy I see coming towards us?”

  It was, and when he heard what the pair were offering he stumped up. Always good to have friends in high places. We decamped quietly from the waxworks display that evening, taking a quite different route from them, and leaving Mrs Jarley with nowhere to put her hands.

  The places we stopped at, on all of which we left our mark, I will not mention in detail, but we rarely stopped long enough to need a warning from Codlin and Short. We were on to a very good thing. Our lives changed, however, when we happened on the village to which the schoolmaster whom we had encountered early on in our travels had moved. Here he was, large as life and just as dispiriting. He was still mourning the bright young pupil he
had had years before, and still polishing the young hypocrite’s halo every day of his life. A right little teacher’s pet that limb of Satan must have been! It occurred to us that this was the sort of place we could well settle down in.

  Well, as soon as the idea occurred to us, we wrote to Codlin and Short. We explained that there were several towns within walking distance, as well as several lucrative hell-holes. We had made a series of nocturnal excursions after the village was asleep (at about 8.30, in order to save candles), and we really felt the place would answer, at least for a year or two. We heard back from them that they could think of no reason why it shouldn’t, and they would keep us informed as to anything they heard of that could be construed as a threat. And so things went on for three or four months.

  Then I got bored.

  I suppose we should have expected that. The night excursions still held a charm, but the daytime was terrible – catching up on sleep and enduring shiver-making visits from the school-teacher or from his equally unappetizing friend The Bachelor – a local notable of similar habits and notions (my impersonation of infantile goodness and sweetness confirmed all his preconceptions about the non-carnal nature of the English female). I was tired of them all. I wanted London, I wanted stir, glamour, rich pickings. I was even nostalgic about Dan Quilp, one of our London friends, who had managed to evict grandfather from the Old Curiosity Shop: beneath his ugly, dwarfish exterior there lurked a diabolical energy, both criminal and sexual. He radiated an indiscriminate hunger and love of wreaking havoc. I understood why women were both repelled and thrilled by him. I wanted to get a share in that electricity, match myself with him. I hadn’t been so excited since those lovely years when I was the only girl member of Fagin’s gang.

  I always remember the ending of Codlin and Short’s letter, when we had written to them to broach the problem. It read:

  “Why doesn’t she die?”