Season of Darkness

by Cora Harrison

  Mrs Dawson was still quietly bedded down on the sofa in her parlour when the front door knocker gave a sharp tat-tat. Sesina had the door open before a second knock could be sounded.

  ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ she said with a quick bob at Mr Dickens and then another at Mr Collins. Mr Dickens stepped in across the threshold immediately, but Mr Collins stayed for a moment, looking over his shoulder at the river. There were a few rays of sunshine this afternoon and they sparked a glint from the gold rim of his spectacles.

  ‘And how is Sesina today?’ Had a nice friendly way with him.

  ‘Very well, thank you, sir.’ She made another bob in his direction, but looked closely at Mr Dickens. Got a job of work for you to do, my man.

  Good thing that he couldn’t see into her mind. She had to choke back a giggle at the thought. He wouldn’t, of course. That was the thing about these gentlemen, and ladies, too. They listened to the words that servants said to them. Never stopped and wondered what was behind them. She gave a quick glance over her shoulder. Not a sign of Mrs D. Fast asleep and snoring. Rapidly she pulled out the calling card from her pocket and held it out to Mr Dickens. He took it from her quickly, like an eel pounces on a worm.

  My mother had to get me away from him. She couldn’t keep me. He’d have killed me too. If he doesn’t pay me to keep my mouth shut I’ll go down to that school. One more …

  He read it over, a couple of times, probably. Sesina studied his face. Getting on a bit, Mr Dickens, aren’t you? Getting a bit pouchy under the eyes. Eyebrows a bit bushy too. His wife should trim them for him. Mr Collins, now, he had nice soft skin. Pity he had to wear glasses. Still they made his eyes nice and large.

  ‘School!’ So he cottoned on to that one. No fool whatever you liked to say about him. That was the word that had stuck in her own mind, too. Not talking to her, of course. Oh no! Handing her his hat, but looking at Mr Collins.

  ‘Where did you find it, Sesina?’ That was Mr Collins. Nice face, nice mouth, ever so soft-looking. ‘Down a well!’ Just like his sarcasm. Even his jokes had a bit of an edge to them. She would love to have said smartly, Bottom of the river, sir but she needed him.

  ‘I found a loose brick in the chimney, sir. It was tucked in behind that.’ She said the words to both of them and Mr Collins gave her one of his sweet little smiles.

  ‘Strange girl! Why didn’t she hide them all in the same place?’ Mr Dickens said the words half to himself, but half to Sesina and she responded immediately.

  ‘I was thinking about that, sir. I reckon that she was afraid of them being found. One on its own wouldn’t make much sense, would it, sir?’ Very polite, very deferential.

  ‘Well done. Very good reasoning.’ Looked at her with approval. Should have been a schoolmaster. Would have suited him. Wouldn’t have made as much money, though. Not like what he got for writing the books. Wouldn’t have so much influence, either. He’d serve her purpose better as he was. The great Mr Dickens. She dropped a quick bob. No harm in keeping him sweet.

  ‘Well, Sesina,’ he said. ‘I’m still trying to look into the matter of Isabella’s death. I want to find out who might have murdered her. To see if there was anyone who might have had a reason. I’d have thought Isabella would have enough sense to look out for herself, that she wouldn’t have gone with any strange character. What do you think? You’d have known her better than any of us. Was she meeting a man for some purpose?’

  ‘We were wondering if she knew something about someone,’ said Mr Collins. ‘Enough to make them give her a present to keep quiet. What do you think, Sesina?’

  You might be right, sir. I was wondering about that, too.’ No harm in giving them a bit of help. Had to hand it to them, though. The police would think that a girl like Isabella would only meet a man for one reason. Mr Dickens, though, he knew Isabella; knew that she was clever, and no innocent.

  ‘We were talking with the lodgers on the top floor, Sesina.’ He had decided to take her into his confidence and she couldn’t help feeling a bit flattered. ‘Apparently,’ he went on, studying her with those sharp eyes of his, ‘apparently, Isabella told them what she remembered of a workhouse. They thought that it might be Greenwich. Would you know if she ever did go there, Sesina?’

  ‘Yes, she did, sir. On her day off. She went there and she discovered that she had been left there by her mother, left temporary like, that’s what she told me. She was going to go again.’ That was enough information for them, thought Sesina. No point in distracting them over some nonsense, in spinning a fairy story out of it, like one of those stupid books that lady visitors would read to little nippers in the workhouse.

  And then the bell rang. Even up here in the hall, they could hear the jangling very clearly. Sesina raised her eyes to the wires that ran above the picture rail in the hall. She could see the two men looking up, also. Six wires, parlour, dining room, first floor, second floor, third floor. This was the second floor. Making a great old racket, he was. Even woke up Mrs Dawson. She came staggering out, her cap askew, her lips ready to say something unladylike, but she spotted the two men just in time.

  ‘Sesina, dear, why don’t you answer the bell? Don’t you hear Mr Cartwright ring? Good afternoon, Mr Dickens, Mr Collins.’ A nice little bob to them. Old hypocrite.

  ‘Just going, Mrs Dawson. He’s just rung this very minute.’

  What does he want? Not like him to ring at this hour in the afternoon. In a great hurry, too. Not waiting. Door thrown open. Banged against the wall. Heavy footsteps on the stairs. Thundering down. Going at quite a pace, too. Actually running. She’d never seen him run before. Past the lawyer’s door. He’d skid on that rug if he didn’t slow down a bit and now down the next flight of stairs, swinging from the newel and thundering down on the steps. He was in the hallway in a second with a face as black as night.

  ‘Mrs Dawson, may I ask who cleaned my room today?’ He had the voice of a brute and the face of a brute, hands clenched like he was just stopping himself from punching someone. Gave Mrs D. a fright. Looking at him with her mouth open.

  ‘It was Sesina, Mr Cartwright. Sesina, you cleaned the second floor, didn’t you?’ As if she had fifty servants, and couldn’t remember what each one had to do.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Dawson.’ Sesina looked innocently at the housekeeper and hoped that no one could hear her heart pounding. This man could kill, had killed, perhaps.

  ‘What seems to be the problem, Mr Cartwright?’ Mr Dickens, cool as a breeze, very good at that kind of voice.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Mr Dickens. Didn’t observe you in the stress of the moment. Your servant, Mr Collins!’ The brute made a sort of a bow to both of them. ‘I’m very distressed and upset. My desk, a little portable desk, something left to me by my late mother, it has been damaged, the lock has been broken. Goodness knows what has been stolen. I demand to search that girl’s room.’

  ‘I didn’t touch the writing desk, except for to dust.’ Sesina spoke as loudly as she could.

  ‘Did you steal anything from Mr Cartwright’s room, Sesina?’ Dickens asked her. None of his business, but somehow she had a feeling that he was on her side.

  ‘No, sir, no, Mr Dickens. I never! Didn’t take nothing from that room. Nothing but dust and ashes and what was in the slop pail.’ And even nastier than usual. Must have been taking medicine. Anyway, she was pleased to hear how well her voice sounded in that tall hallway. Nice and loud and very sure of herself. A good conscience, that’s what she had. A good conscience is the most valuable possession that anyone can have. The parson in the prison chapel used to preach that and he had right on his side, she thought. She tried to make herself tall, and stand there, stately-like, and look everyone in the eye.

  ‘I want to search that room of hers. I demand to search it.’ He was sticking to it. And now he was probably wondering if she had seen that receipt for twenty pounds. If she was on to his dealings with this Tom Gorman or Tom Goulding or whatever that name was on the bottom of the receipt?


  ‘Wouldn’t it be more usual to send for the police?’ Mr Dickens’ voice was very cool. Sesina felt her mouth go dry. Whose side was he on, anyway? Goodness only knew what the police would fasten on you.

  ‘No, no, I don’t want anything to do with the police. Just want to search that girl’s room and make sure that she hasn’t stolen anything from my desk. There was a ten-pound note inside one of the drawers.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Sesina boldly. There were beads of sweat on the man’s forehead. Didn’t want the police. Well, well, well, wasn’t that interesting? She looked virtuously at Mr Dickens. ‘It would be very unpleasant for Mrs Dawson to have the police in the house after all that she’s gone through, sir,’ she explained in her softest voice. ‘I wouldn’t cause her any trouble for the world. If Mr Cartwright wants to search my room, he’s welcome to do it. I’d like to have this matter cleared up.’

  ‘Well, in that case, I think that Mrs Dawson should be present, should be the one to handle the girl’s clothing and belongings. I’m sure that you agree with me about that, ma’am, don’t you.’ He didn’t give her time to answer, just held the door to the back stairs open, ushered her in, gave a curt nod to Mr Cartwright and then followed them. Of course he took it for granted that he would form one of the party. Imagine Mr Dickens not having his finger in every pie!

  Mr Collins, however, didn’t go. He sat down on the bottom step and patted the space beside him invitingly. He had a nice little smile on his face.

  ‘What did you find, Sesina?’ he whispered.

  TWELVE

  Wilkie Collins, Basil:

  The cry for mercy was on her lips, but the instant our eyes met, it died away in long, low, hysterical moanings. Her cheeks were ghastly, her features were rigid, her eyes glared like an idiot’s; guilt and terror had made her hideous to look upon already.

  ‘I didn’t like the look that fellow gave that little girl, Dick. I hope that she’s safe in the house with him. That housekeeper wouldn’t be much help, I think. Always smells of gin, to me. I’m a bit worried about Sesina. Hope that she’s got a key and can lock her door at night.’

  Dickens shook some ash from his cigar over the side of the steamboat and watched the glowing embers fall down into the water for a moment before he replied. ‘I might have a word with my American friend about his lodger. You’re right, Wilkie. A sullen fellow, that schoolmaster, isn’t he? With an uncontrollable temper, I’d say, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Reminds me a bit of Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist. I looked at him sideways when I said that. We would both have very clearly in our minds what Bill Sykes did to a girl. At that very moment, the steamboat was passing Jacob’s Island and the well-dressed passengers on the boat looked silently across at the scene that Dickens had described so chillingly in his book: ‘dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations, every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage: all these ornament the banks of Jacob’s Island.’ Dickens looked too and there was a brooding aspect to his dark-featured face. It was a minute before he spoke, and by then the steamer had chugged past the sight of those crazy, tumbledown houses.

  ‘Yes, he was a nasty, sullen, bad-tempered brute of a fellow, too, wasn’t he?’ he said thoughtfully.

  I was usually amused when Dickens spoke of one of his characters as a real person, but now I was too worried about little Sesina to tease him about it.

  ‘This business needs to be straightened out, Dick, and the truth about it needs to be known,’ I said emphatically. Dickens was usually the vigorous one of the pair of us, but now I felt roused and troubled about the girl, responsible for her, somehow. Such a little thing. Would hardly come up to my chest. Never met a girl so small.

  ‘And Cartwright does come from Yorkshire,’ I added.

  ‘My dear Wilkie, my much esteemed friend, might I just suggest – just suggest, mind you – that there may be some perfectly respectable men from Yorkshire.’ Dickens said the words lightly, but his face wore a troubled look. He tossed the butt-end of his cigar into the Thames and we both watched the small glowing tip curve through the foggy air and then disappear from sight.

  ‘He doesn’t even have a Yorkshire accent. That shows, doesn’t it, that he probably went there to work in one of those schools,’ I argued. ‘Isabella’s words were “beat my poor little brother to death”. He came back down to London because of a scandal.’

  ‘If Isabella had a brother, and we can’t be sure of that,’ said Dickens. ‘She never mentioned a brother to me, but that’s not surprising, you know, Wilkie. I’ve noticed that. Families don’t mean much to these girls. But if she did have a brother, then why in Heaven’s name should he be up in Yorkshire? And at a boarding school? One of those disgraceful schools where there are no holidays, little food and little or no education? What took him there? Someone had to pay something to keep him there in the first place. Mostly, as far as I could find out, the boys in those schools were unfortunates whose parents were not married or where the mother was a widow who had married again and her second husband wanted to get rid of the boy. Doesn’t make sense to me, Wilkie. I know that girl’s background. Isabella was on the streets, in prison, on the streets, and in prison again. Was there when I met her first. How did she come to have a brother in a boarding school in Yorkshire?’

  ‘Perhaps we’ll find out when we get to Greenwich,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Now tell me, did Sesina confess to opening and searching Mr Cartwright’s desk? She did, didn’t she?’ He was watching me with a smile on his lips and I had to smile back.

  ‘Well, yes. She didn’t take anything, though.’

  ‘No, I thought that she didn’t.’ He nodded with satisfaction. Dickens liked to be right. ‘She looked quite placid about having her room searched,’ he said. ‘If she had stolen anything, she’d have made a great fuss about protesting her innocence. Since she hadn’t, she didn’t bother wasting time and energy. But I thought that you’d get it out of her, though. She’s taken a fancy to you.’ Dickens took out another cigar, examined it and then put it away. He was always very strict with himself about the number of cigars that he smoked and the amount of wine that he consumed.

  ‘Well, she did see something,’ I admitted. ‘He kept an envelope full of receipts and there was one for £20 to someone. “Tom”, she thought. And then something beginning with the letter G and an R perhaps somewhere in the middle of the word. Could be “Gordon”, couldn’t it? Well, that’s what I thought. Sesina said that the paper was very dirty, just as though it had been handled by someone with dirty hands.’

  ‘Seems unlikely.’ Dickens crossed his legs, admired the shine on his boots and poked a piece of orange skin with the point of his umbrella until it was lost from sight beneath the seat.

  ‘Unlikely?’ I queried. I felt a bit annoyed that he had dismissed this interesting story with two words. Perhaps he was annoyed that Sesina confided in me rather than in him.

  ‘Well, who was this Tom Gordon? Isabella’s father? Not likely. Her brother? Even more unlikely. Why should her brother pay Mr Cartwright? Sesina probably made up the whole thing.’

  ‘Why should she?’

  ‘To make herself seem important.’

  ‘Can’t see that it made her particularly important. I had to coax her to get it out of her.’

  Dickens laughed. ‘My dear Wilkie, if you knew these girls as well as I do, you’d know that they lie in the way that someone like you and I tell the truth – automatically. They lie for the sake of it. And they are up to every trick in the book.’

  ‘Poor things,’ I said. As a boy I had once had a dog who had lived, and starved, on the streets of Marylebone until I insisted on taking him in. Even in his old age, when he was fat as butter and spoilt by the entire household, he never quite trusted anyone near his plate. He would push it into a far corner and as he ate, a low growl would rumble from time to time. My father had painted a picture of him when he was lean and hungry, standing
over his plate, growling and baring his teeth, but no one had wanted to buy it. Not something that people want on their walls, he had said and had given me the picture. I never had that courage to tell him that I had burnt it secretly, years later, at the bottom of our garden, when he and my mother had gone to visit friends. I could not bear to see how thin and frightened my poor Rover had looked then.

  ‘Greenwich,’ I said, pointing at the distant hill rising like a green cone with its observatory crowning the steep hill.

  The workhouse was down at ground level near to the river. A huge building, three storeys high, its roofs dotted with immensely tall chimneys. I wondered why it had to look so gloomy and decided it was the immensity of it that made it look inhuman. One part for men, one for women, one for children, a hospital for the sick and a school where a busy murmur, too muted and too monotone to be likened to bees, seeped out through the windows.

  ‘Isabella could read and write well when she came to us,’ observed Dickens and I noted a sadness in his voice. He looked around him, surveying the whole building with a rapid glance and then led me unerringly towards the office where a large, immensely fat lady almost fainted at the sight of the great Mr Dickens.

  ‘Oh, Mr Dickens, oh, Mr Dickens, I have every one of your books! Oh my goodness, if only I had known that you would be here today, in this blessed office, oh, my goodness, Mr Dickens, to think of you walking in that door, just like any human being. Excuse me, Mr Dickens, I must pinch myself!’ She gave a little giggle and I flinched at the idea of those rolls of flesh being pinched and oozing forth an oily fat, but she was running on with her flow of words, punctuated by nothing but commas. ‘And looking like your picture, that woodcut, very severe, I imagine your head, all full of those Pickwicks and little Oliver and Rose and little Dombey and just to think of hearing your voice here in this place, this gloomy old place, you’d be used to having tea with the Queen, you’d be at home in Buckingham Palace, I’m sure and reading to her, I’m sure I’ve heard that you read aloud beautifully and all of your books standing on my shelf and if only I had them here!’