Tom All-Alone's

by Lynn Shepherd

  ‘Ah,’ said Bucket with a smile, his fat forefinger again in evidence, ‘he’s all right. Before this day is done, he’ll be discharged with no stain on his character. You may take my word for that. I can tell you now that I no more believed it was George as done the deed as I believed you capable of it, but there was evidence against him, as there was against you, and that being the case I had no choice but to take him in under guard, while I concluded my investigation. But as things stand now I know the truth of it, and I will soon have all the proof I need for an arrest.’

  And with that Mr Bucket buttoned himself up and went quietly on his way towards the Strand, looking steadily before him as if he already had the face of his culprit before his eye.

  The house is hushed and still when Charles opens the door and pauses for a moment in the empty hall. It is so quiet he can hear the faint ticking of his uncle’s clock, and the sound of sheets cracking and whipping like sails in the yard at the back. Laundry, he thinks, abstractedly. Molly must have done the laundry. There is a visiting card on the hall-stand which he picks up without really looking at it, before climbing the stairs slowly one by one, aware, for the first time, how much his body aches and how much he wants a hot bath. But first he must look in on his uncle, and tell him what has passed.

  The drawing-room curtains are still half-closed, and Charles waits as his eyes adjust to the dim light, breathing in the scent of a wood fire burning low in the grate and the faint aroma of port from the glass at his uncle’s side. Maddox’s eyes are closed, his mouth slightly open, and his sombre and motionless face gives no hint of the dreams within. He must have fallen asleep in his chair, for his pillow has been carefully tucked behind his head, and a blanket drawn up over his lap. A lap where, as Charles now sees, the black cat is curled and sleeping, his ears twitching every now and then at the tiny crackles from the subsiding fire. Thunder has never sat with Maddox before, and Charles is smiling as he tiptoes over to the chair and bends to give the cat a quick caress before reaching to his uncle’s hand. But while the cat has warmed in the fire’s glow, the old man’s fingers are chill; and though Thunder stirs now and stretches at his master’s touch, Maddox lies rigid still, and does not wake.

  And as he sees this – and as his heart lurches to what it means – there’s a sudden catch in Charles’ throat that has him kneeling quickly by Maddox’s side and pushing the hair gently from his uncle’s brow – an echo – all unconscious – of what the old man used to do when he was a boy – little enough in itself, but a gauge of deep affection in an age uncomfortable with intimacy, and a family chary of love.

  ‘The doctor came but he says there’s little we can do but keep him warm, and trust to hope. And there is hope, Mr Charles, there is hope.’

  Stornaway is standing in the doorway, and although his words are brave there is a break in his voice. And as Charles reaches again for his uncle’s wrinkled hand, there is a new and different catch in his throat, and he can scarcely see for tears. Everything he’d wanted to say – everything he now so wants to share – Maddox will not hear it now. May never hear it. Charles told himself it could wait till tomorrow, but tomorrow is here, and it is too late.

  Stornaway comes slowly forward. ‘It came on so sudden – I thought at first it were just another of his turns. He’d been fretting about you, and I was trying to turn his mind to other things. I told him he had no cause to worry on your account – that you’d become a fine detective in your own right, and even the highest in the land were now knocking on your door—’

  ‘I’m sorry, Abel, I don’t understand—’

  Stornaway looks at him, ‘That card in the hall, Mr Charles, did you not see whose it was?’

  Charles wipes his hand across his eyes and puts his hand into his pocket. The card itself is over-embellished and a little pretentious, but otherwise hardly very remarkable. But the name – the name!

  It’s scarcely conceivable that two short words can conjure such a fever of contradictory ideas, but even in his first confusion Charles knows that this man must be – can only be – a son who bears his father’s name, for the man now venerated by some almost to idolatry died an outcast and a pariah almost thirty years before, his heart cut out and his body burned on a windswept Italian shore.

  Charles turns to Stornaway. ‘You showed my uncle this?’

  Abel nods. ‘I wish to God I hae never done it, but how could I hae known he would take on so? All on a sudden he was shouting wildly about things long ago and then he gripped me by the arm and said a name I have nae heard from his lips for half a lifetime or more. The next thing I knew he had fallen back in his chair with no stir of life about him, just as you see him now.’

  ‘He said a name? What name?’

  Stornaway sighs and shakes his head. ‘He loved once, Mr Charles. Loved and lost. He never spoke of it, after they parted – not to me, and not to Fraser. But we knew, all the same. They met when we were in Northamptonshire working a case, but in the end she upped and married another. I never knew what became o’ her after that, or if he ever saw her again. But it was her name, Mr Charles – the last word he spoke to me was her name. It must hae been her – with the life he’s lived I know of nae other.’

  Charles looks at Stornaway, and then at the card in his hand, and wonders suddenly if he has another answer to that question, however extraordinary and unlikely it may seem. For he knows – as Stornaway may not – that the woman whose son has left this card was once as infamous as the man she married, the brilliant daughter of brilliant parents – an old woman now, if yet she lives, but celebrated once for her beauty, and her cloud of red-gold hair.

  ‘Mary,’ he says softly, half to himself, but as he glances up at Abel’s face he sees the old man’s eyes widen in sudden amazement, and realizes with an absolute clarity that whatever this card means – whatever demands are made of him, or questions asked – there is an unguessed secret that lies unseen, in the darkness and vacancy of his uncle’s cold repose.

  Acknowledgements

  These acknowledgements include details of the novel’s plot, so readers may want to wait to read them until the end.

  As any Dickens devotee will know, ‘Tom-All-Alone’s’ is not only the name of the notorious and disease-ridden slum described so vividly in Bleak House, but one of the titles Dickens originally considered giving to that book. I’ve always considered Bleak House to be without question Dickens’ masterpiece, and it is the first and most important of the three great mid-Victorian texts that inform my own novel.

  Bleak House was first published in instalments between March 1852 and September 1853, and is a wonderful, complex, and compelling work. It’s a gripping story, a powerful social commentary, and a panoramic portrait of contemporary London life. It also manages – single-handedly and almost in passing – to create a whole new literary genre: the detective mystery. For a writer who aspires to write ‘literary murders’ herself, it could hardly be richer territory to explore, and I hope that anyone who loves Dickens as much as I do will enjoy seeing how I have interleaved my own mystery with the characters and episodes of his novel, and used his chapter titles for events in my own, though each time with a new twist, and a rather different meaning. In doing this I have, of course, drawn extensively on Bleak House, and also on others of Dickens’ works, especially his Overland Tour to Bermondsey, the Sketches by Boz, which includes his account of Seven Dials, and On Duty with Inspector Field, a piece he wrote for the Household Words magazine about the real-life police inspector who may well have been the model for Mr Bucket.

  The second of my three great works is The Woman in White, written by Dickens’ friend Wilkie Collins, and published in 1860. Even if the relationship between this novel and my own is not made explicit until the closing chapters, the moment when Tom-All-Alone’s really came to life for me was when I realized that the time-scheme of Bleak House could be made to run parallel with Collins’ very precise chronology for The Woman in White, which culminates in Sir Percival
Glyde’s death in a fire in late November 1850. This allowed me to create a ‘space between’ these two great novels, where I could locate a new and independent story of my own, and explore some of the same nineteenth-century themes of secrecy, madness, power, and abuse, though with the benefit of twenty-first-century hindsight.

  Last but not least of my three is London Labour and the London Poor, by Henry Mayhew. This huge work was originally published in the form of sixty-three pioneering articles in the Morning Chronicle, which were then collected together in book form in 1851. London Labour and the London Poor is the closest thing we have to an oral history of the crowded, rowdy, filthy streets of the mid-Victorian city: Mayhew conducted hundreds of interviews with real people, and gives many of their words almost verbatim. The result is an account so immediate that it’s almost as if we’re walking those streets by his side, and eavesdropping on his conversations. In fact this is exactly what I do during some of the episodes of Tom-All-Alone’s, most notably the rat-killing, where I send young Charles Maddox to the Graham Arms on the very night when – with a little artistic licence – I imagine Mayhew himself might have been there.

  I talked just now about looking at the nineteenth century from a twenty-first-century perspective, and there’s another obvious reference point for Tom-All-Alone’s which famously took a similar approach, though set some seventeen years later. John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman has long been one of my favourite modern novels, and when a close friend casually observed to me that there was ‘room for a French Lieutenant’s Woman for this generation’, I realized at once that this could indeed be one of my ambitions for Tom. Much of my novel was already written by then, and it seemed a wonderful coincidence that I had already named my young hero Charles after his great-uncle, and made him an amateur scientist, even if in a different field from that Charles Smithson in Fowles’ novel. It’s Fowles who is the ‘celebrated novelist’ I refer to in Chapter 17, and readers who knows his book well will spot a very young Ernestina Freeman walking with her nurse in Hyde Park, and the deliberate echoes of Sarah Woodruff in my own ‘Sarah’.

  Anyone who has visited Sir John Soane’s Museum in London will recognize his extraordinary collection in my depiction of Tulkinghorn’s underground gallery, though Tulkinghorn’s more infamous items are his, and his alone. I have taken one or two architectural liberties, but the museum is essentially as I describe it, and in 1850 this real collection had already been amassed in Soane’s real house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the same square where Dickens sets his lawyer’s fictional chambers. Dickens himself says nothing of Tulkinghorn having such a collection, of course, but nor does anything in Bleak House preclude it. In fact one of the great delights, for me, in writing this book was the chance it gave me to add new layers to a character like Tulkinghorn, from the secrets of his private museum to the even more horrifying secrets of his private history.

  I would like to thank Timothy Duke, Chester Herald at the College of Arms, for his kind help with some of the finer points of English heraldry, and Jan Turner, Deputy Librarian at the Royal Geographical Society’s Foyle Reading Room, for her assistance with the history of the Society, and with Baron von Müller in particular. Most of the speech I give him was indeed his own, and formed part of an address he delivered to the Society in March 1850 (though everything else is my own invention). There seems to be no trace of him thereafter, so it may be that his belief in unicorns was indeed his professional downfall, though not, needless to say, at the hands of one ‘Charles Maddox’! James Duncan is another real historical figure, though having him and his drawings in the British Museum is also my invention.

  I read a number of books about London in the 1850s as part of the research for this novel, including Jerry White’s fascinating London in the Nineteenth Century, Catherine Arnold’s Necropolis: London and its Dead, and The Victorian Underworld by Donald Thomas. Books like this also helped point me to useful primary material, as did the excellent website www.victorianlondon.org.

  As for Robert Mann, I owe a debt of gratitude to Mei Trow’s book Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer for providing a new suspect in the Ripper killings who was old enough to have started his murderous career as early as 1850, and who might – just possibly – have been prevented from any further atrocities until the 1880s by the vigilance of a man like Inspector Bucket.

  Finally I would like to thank my husband Simon, my ‘first reader’, and my excellent agent, Ben Mason of FoxMason, whose input was absolutely invaluable as the novel took shape. I would also like to thank my two wonderful editors, Krystyna Green of Constable & Robinson, and Kate Miciak of Random House, for everything they did to make this book as good as it could be.

  About the Author

  Lynn Shepherd studied English at Oxford, before working in the City and then in PR. She’s been a freelance copywriter for over ten years, and has also published an academic work on the ‘Father of the English novel’, Samuel Richardson. She lives near Oxford with her husband and two cats.

  Also by Lynn Shepherd

  Murder at Mansfield Park

  Copyright

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

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  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Corsair, an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2012

  Copyright © Lynn Shepherd 2012

  The right of Lynn Shepherd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988

  An extract from The French Lieutenant’s Woman © 1969 J. R. Fowles Ltd, reprinted by permission of Aitken Alexander Associates Ltd

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978–1–78033–171–3