The Angel

by M. J. Trow

  ‘It’s his fault, isn’t it?’ Grand was trying to get in touch with his feminine side and see things from the distaff point of view. ‘He’s over-affectionate, perhaps, with his sister-in-law and leads her on. That annoys Catherine.’

  ‘Then Nell comes along and takes Georgy’s place.’ Batchelor moved the story on.

  ‘Which annoys Georgy. Hell, they might all have been in it together, taking turns to mix the potions that killed him.’

  ‘No, no, that wouldn’t work. Our problem is that we haven’t met Nell or Catherine yet. Two points of our rhomboid, or whatever you said it was, are missing. But the only woman we know for certain visited Gads Hill in the run up to Dickens’s death wasn’t a woman at all. It was Ernest Boulton.’

  ‘All right.’ Grand leaned back and focused as Batchelor took up his pen again. ‘The other dark side of Dickens’s life; the rouge and lipstick brigade.’

  ‘Dickens intended to put Stella into Edwin Drood, although for the life of me I can’t see how she’d fit. There could be a Landless connection, I suppose.’

  ‘Who knew about Stella?’ Grand asked.

  ‘Isaac Armitage – he’d met her at Gads Hill.’

  ‘Yes, but he thought she really was a woman. I mean, who knew about the cross-dressing?’

  ‘Wilkie Collins,’ Batchelor nodded, remembering. ‘He wished me luck and said I’d find the end of that road rather unexpected.’

  ‘He got that right!’ Grand chuckled.

  ‘But there’s nothing funny about Dickens,’ Batchelor reminded them both. ‘No skeleton of the unmentionable kind in his cupboard.’

  ‘No,’ Grand agreed. ‘I just think old Charles got a kick out of it all. “Latest woman in his life”, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Which might explain Canton Kitty’s too.’

  ‘Important if, as we believe, it was likely laudanum that killed him.’

  ‘It’s the notes I haven’t written that are hurting my head at the moment.’ Batchelor refilled their glasses.

  ‘Lord Arthur Clinton and Gabriel Verdon,’ Grand nodded.

  ‘Both of them die within three weeks of Dickens,’ Batchelor was piecing it together. ‘Clinton comes to see us trying to get Scotland Yard off his back on charges of immorality.’

  ‘And dies the next day of a disease that doesn’t kill you that quickly.’

  ‘According to Stella and Fanny,’ Batchelor took over, ‘poisoned by Chief Inspector Williamson, who is annoyed by the fact that Clinton’s money – or at least Clinton’s connections and social standing – will get him off the hook.’

  ‘Links between Dickens and Clinton?’ Grand’s eyes narrowed in the lingering smoke of his last cigar.

  ‘Stella,’ Batchelor said, scribbling it all down. ‘The friend of one; almost certainly the lover of the other.’

  ‘Coincidence?’ Grand had to raise it, but neither man believed in coincidence and neither therefore answered.

  ‘Gabriel Verdon.’ Batchelor committed the name to paper. ‘Long-serving editor at Chapman and Hall, Dickens’s publishers.’

  ‘Cause of death, though, James.’ Grand was shaking his head. ‘Totally different. Dickens, we’ve established, was probably poisoned, though short of digging the poor bastard up in the abbey, we’re never going to be able to prove that. Likely Clinton was too – same lack of proof and also, like Dickens, a family who don’t really want us to pry. If we’re looking at one killer for all of them, he’s sure changed his tune.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Batchelor sighed. The smoke, the brandy, the pieces of paper were all beginning to whirl in his brain, a mixture as heady and bewildering as anything that could be found at Canton Kitty’s. ‘I suggest we sleep on it. Then we need to talk to the ladies. Call it.’ He spun a penny in the air.

  ‘Tails,’ Grand said.

  ‘Sorry,’ Batchelor caught the coin and revealed it triumphantly. ‘It’s the dear old Queen, God bless her, I’m afraid. I’ll take the gorgeous, smouldering spitfire that is Nell Ternan. You can have frumpy old Catherine Dickens. Fair?’

  Frumpy old Catherine Dickens didn’t live in such splendour as Grand had seen at Gads Hill Place, but she wasn’t doing badly. Dickens had obviously stopped short of leaving her to starve in a garret; in fact, judging from her general build, she hadn’t been left to starve anywhere and, as if to prove the point, she immediately rang for tea and buns as soon as Grand had come into the room.

  ‘Having a nibble of something at this hour always sets you up, I feel, don’t you?’ she smiled, and settled herself comfortably back in the overstuffed armchair.

  Grand wasn’t sure which meal or snack this could possibly represent, but he knew that this was potentially a sticky sort of interview to conduct, so if she needed sugar, she should have sugar. He hadn’t decided, even now when he was sitting on her itchy horsehair sofa in her drawing room, waiting to drink her tea, how to refer to Dickens. Your husband? Your former husband? The artist formerly known as Mr Dickens? They all sounded wrong.

  ‘Mr Grand,’ the woman said, suddenly, from the depths of her chair. ‘You have a look of a rabbit in thrall to a stoat. Please don’t concern yourself when it comes to referring to Charles. Mr Dickens will do as well as anything else.’

  Grand was stunned and had to make a special effort to close his mouth.

  ‘I have been living apart from my husband now for over twelve years, Mr Grand; the feeling of loss and grief has never left me. In common with all who loved him, I mourn his death, of course I do. But more, I mourn for my lost hopes.’ She smiled, a shy, small smile. ‘Although I knew it was fruitless, every morning, as I awoke and dressed and ate, walked, went about my daily tasks, I could hope that today might be the day that he came back to me.’ She looked down at her hands, folded calmly in her well-upholstered lap. ‘Foolish, I know. But it was my private foolishness.’ She looked up at him, suddenly, her eyes sharp. ‘It has kept me alive, Mr Grand. That, and my children.’

  Grand had had the impression that the children had sided with Dickens, and this placed him squarely on the horns of another dilemma. So far, this interview was not going terribly well.

  ‘I know that the Press and even dear Georgy choose to give the impression that the children spurn me, but they do nothing of the sort, Mr Grand. Dear Charlie came with me, of course, but the others visit, when they can. I may not have been the best housekeeper in the world, Mr Grand and I suppose it could be laid at my door that we had far too many children, but …’ her smile this time was mischievous, ‘I think you are man of the world enough, Mr Grand, to know that these things do take two. But sadly, my intellect is not equal to that of dear Charles and so, I had to go.’

  Grand cleared his throat. It really was time he contributed to this conversation. ‘I understand that he—’

  ‘My word, yes!’ Catherine Dickens rocked back and forth, her hands slapping her knees. ‘Like a weasel. With any woman in sight when he was younger; then, latterly, just that absolute strumpet, Ellen Ternan. No better than she should be, of course. Actress.’ All was delivered in a quiet, no-nonsense tone; she might just as well have been ordering the weekly vegetables.

  Grand was flustered. That hadn’t been what he had intended to ask at all. Although now he was pressed to remember what he had been going to ask.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mrs Dickens said, contritely. ‘I am teasing you, Mr Grand. I see so few people and they have such … ideas of me, the ones that come. They expect me to behave like one of Charles’s heroines, the stupid ones, the ones that don’t get their man. He did put a lot of his life into his books, the lamb, even …’

  ‘Even?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ She opened her eyes wide and looked like an elderly child, all innocence.

  ‘You said, “even”.’

  ‘Did I?’ She looked up as the door eased open and an elderly maid came into the room, pushing a laden trolley. ‘Tea and buns, how lovely.’ The maid laid everything out in front of her mistress and left the r
oom, all without speaking a word. ‘Nice woman,’ Catherine Dickens said. ‘Been with me since … before. Couldn’t stand Georgy, one of the few people who doesn’t like her. She really is very likeable, my sister. Have you met her?’

  ‘I have,’ Grand said.

  ‘And you found her charming, of course.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘What a gentleman you are indeed, Mr Grand. But remind me again why you are here.’

  ‘I am an enquiry agent, Mrs Dickens,’ Grand decided to bite the bullet on the mode of address. ‘My colleague and I are investigating the death of your … Mr Dickens.’

  The woman laughed again, but quietly. ‘Not my Mr Dickens, though, surely. You are investigating the death of the famous author, the spellbinding performer, the womanizer, the liar, the …’ She took a sip of tea. ‘Excuse me, Mr Grand,’ she said, dabbing at the corner of her mouth with a napkin. ‘I don’t always take things so well, as you might realize.’

  ‘I think you deal with your unusual situation with considerable fortitude,’ Grand said politely, and as he spoke he realized, to his surprise, that he meant it.

  ‘Why, thank you, Mr Grand. That is very kind.’ She took an enormous bite of sugared bun and gave it her full attention for a moment. ‘I find that people do tend to side with Charles. He was no prize, you know, not back in the old days, or indeed now … when I say now, of course, I mean recently. The constant tapping – tap, tap, tap – always three times on anything he passed. And vain! Oh, Mr Grand, I could tell you such stories! He combed his hair hundreds of times a day. Even when my poor dear sister was dying – he based his Little Nell on her, you know – even then, as he loomed like some ghoul over her last breaths, he was still combing his hair. I don’t believe he even realized he was doing it, in the end.’

  ‘We understand that there may be … women …’

  ‘Women, yes, Mr Grand, in the past, as I said, certainly many women. But of late, just Ellen. He has kept her for years in far more comfort than I enjoy. Ever since he began to see some success, he has kept several premises for … writing … in, and so it has always been easy for him to disappear for days on end, with everyone assuming he is somewhere else; somewhere he should be, that is.’

  Grand was beginning to see a pattern to the woman’s speech. She wasn’t telling him everything – of that he was certain. When she lied, or left something unsaid, there was a little muscle that jumped and kicked in the corner of her left eye. It was jumping and kicking now.

  ‘I understand that you called in a detective, to watch your husband.’

  ‘It did become necessary,’ she said. ‘It was when I found the bracelet, you know.’

  ‘The bracelet?’ Grand didn’t know there was any jewellery in the case.

  ‘Yes. I thought it was a present for me, but then I saw the legend inscribed on the clasp.’ The muscle wasn’t twitching now, but her eyes filled with tears. ‘I had heard no words of love from dear Charles in such a long while that I knew at once it was meant for another. I cared then, Mr Grand. Please, don’t get me wrong,’ and she held up a sugary hand, ‘I care still. But then it was raw. Plorn was only six. I myself was only forty-three. I hoped even then for more children …’ She looked stricken again and comforted herself with a bun. ‘So I engaged a man, a policeman …’

  ‘Inspector Field?’

  ‘I believe that is his name.’

  ‘And do you still hear from him?’

  ‘I have engaged him, from time to time. I don’t wish to be rude, Mr Grand,’ she said, suddenly leaning forward and topping up his cup, ‘but could you tell me quite why you came to see me? Charles and I have not exchanged a word for many years. I’m not sure …’

  Grand was caught on the hop. He wanted to get information by stealth, but this woman had made so much of the running he wasn’t sure whether he had even asked her anything. ‘I suppose I just wanted to know if Mr Dickens had any enemies,’ he blurted out.

  ‘Enemies?’ she chortled. ‘Everyone loved Charles, of course they did. Everyone.’ Her face darkened and she looked truly malevolent, sugar-dusted as she was. ‘I loved him. I love him still.’

  There seemed little else to say. Grand got up and put his cup and saucer back on the trolley. ‘Thank you for your candour, Mrs Dickens,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to have troubled you.’

  ‘No trouble at all,’ she trilled and watched him go. When his hand was on the doorknob, she spoke again. ‘But, Mr Grand?’

  He turned. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Just because everyone loved him, doesn’t mean that many of us didn’t also want to see him dead.’ She smiled. ‘Goodbye.’

  As soon as he rang the bell, James Batchelor understood. The Nunhead sun flashed on the brass plate alongside the door and it explained that odd slip of the tongue that John Forster had made when he was listing Dickens’s properties. ‘Win,’ he had said, and turned it into the meaningless ‘Win or lose’. Yet, here it was – Windsor Lodge. And he understood something else too; as soon as the door opened, he smelled something – attar of roses.

  ‘Not today.’ The attractive chestnut-haired woman who had just opened the door was already closing it.

  Batchelor hated jamming his foot in the door, especially as it carried with it a certain amount of pain, but it was an essential part of the armoury of the private detective and he used it now. ‘Miss Ternan?’ he raised his hat. ‘Miss Ellen Ternan?’

  She blinked for a moment. ‘Are you the Press?’ she asked. Her eyes were a clear, sparkling blue. Her day dress was deepest black with a little purple trim on the cuffs. Full mourning, Batchelor observed, and yet …

  ‘No, madam,’ he said and passed her his card. ‘My colleague and I are looking into the death of Mr Charles Dickens.’

  Again the blink and perhaps – or had Batchelor imagined it – a hint of a blush. ‘What has that to do with me?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, to begin with, Mr Dickens pays rent on this house – or, at least, he used to.’ It wasn’t like James Batchelor to be so blunt. First the foot in the door, now the rude assumption. He’d be accusing the woman of murder next. But that was precisely the point, wasn’t it? For all James Batchelor knew, he was looking now at a cold-blooded, blue-eyed murderer.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ she said, and once he was in the passageway she checked the road in both directions before closing the door.

  Windsor Lodge was nowhere near as palatial as Gads Hill, but it was large, light and airy. There was the inevitable piano in the drawing room, aspidistras in the corners and paintings and photographs everywhere. But none, Batchelor noted with his trained detective’s eye, of Charles Dickens.

  ‘Are you Grand or Batchelor?’ Ellen Ternan asked, looking at the card in her hand.

  ‘I am Batchelor, Miss Ternan.’ He took the soft chair she offered him.

  ‘Ternan.’ She stressed the last syllable. ‘It’s pronounced Ternan.’

  ‘I see,’ Batchelor smiled. Kept women were vain by the nature of their calling. By definition, they felt themselves superior to at least one other woman in the world – in this case, Catherine Dickens. ‘You were a little hard to find,’ he said.

  Something close to a smile flitted across Nell’s face. ‘Charles would have it so,’ she said. ‘We found solace when we could. He called me his magic circle of one. We nearly died together even if we couldn’t live together.’

  ‘You did?’ Batchelor frowned. Could the whole thing be a mare’s nest, a suicide pact gone wrong?

  ‘The railway accident at Staplehurst, Mr Batchelor. Back in sixty-five. Do you remember it?’

  James Batchelor had been a boy reporter then on the Telegraph. He had not yet met Grand and was up to his journalist’s neck in the Haymarket stranglings. A train crash had barely registered.

  ‘It was five years exactly,’ Nell went on, ‘to the very day that he died. He was heroic, Mr Batchelor. Saved my life as well as those of several passengers. Of course, he had to play it down to avoid the scanda
l of my presence.’

  ‘Was it such a scandal?’ Batchelor felt bound to ask. ‘Wilkie Collins.’

  ‘Dear Wilkie.’ She laughed, and the sound was odd in the stillness of Windsor Lodge. ‘Such a degenerate, but he adored Charles. We all did.’

  ‘Even Mrs Dickens?’ Batchelor thought it time to mention the other woman to the Other Woman.

  Nell’s face fell. She got up and crossed to the window, looking out over the long lawn that ran behind the house. ‘What do you want to know?’ she asked.

  ‘Everything,’ he said, simply.

  ‘How do I know,’ she turned to him, ‘that what I am about to divulge will not appear in some lurid yellow press tomorrow and be sniggered about in salons and public houses alike?’

  ‘You have my word, Miss Ternan,’ Batchelor said, taking care to stress it correctly.

  Nell looked at him. The face was boyish, the eyes honest and steady. He was younger than her by a year or two, but they breathed the same air, walked the same streets. And here they were, from their different perspectives, talking about the same man. She swallowed hard and took a chance.

  ‘I come from a theatrical family, Mr Batchelor. Charles first saw me on stage when I was eighteen. He was forty-five. It wasn’t love at first sight; I suppose I grew on him, with time. He of course, was the great writer … or so I thought. We became intimate, although I know he agonized long and hard over what to do about Catherine. He confided in a few select friends. John Forster advised caution. Wilkie Collins said, “Follow your heart, Charles”. William Thackeray … in fact, I don’t believe I can remember what Thackeray said, but then, who can? Charles and Catherine separated in the May of 1858. I was shunted around, discreetly, to Broadstairs, Slough, various French and Italian resorts. Oh, it was wonderful …’ She smiled at the memory of it, then she sighed. ‘But I was not Mrs Dickens. Nor, it transpires, will I ever be.’

  ‘You went to the funeral?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Widow’s weeds, although I was not, strictly speaking, a widow. Veils are all-disguising, aren’t they? And George Dolby was so kind. But, Mr Batchelor, I really don’t understand. Dr Beard said that the cause of death was a brain haemorrhage, a stroke. Why are you looking into it?’