Oliver Twist Investigates

by G. M. Best

  She walked over to the bookcase and extracted a manuscript, which she passed to me. On opening it, I found that the script was entitled Is She His Wife? or, Something Singular! ‘Read the opening lines and you’ll see what I mean,’ she said.

  I did as she asked and began reading the text aloud. I now have a copy of it and so I can show you exactly what I read out:

  Lovetown: Another cup of tea, my dear? O Lord!

  Mrs Lovetown: I wish, Alfred, you would endeavour to assume a more cheerful appearance in your wife’s society. If you are perpetually yawning and complaining of ennui a few months after marriage, what am I to suppose you’ll become in a few years? It really is very odd of you.

  Lovetown: Not at all odd, my dear, not the least in the world; it would be a great deal odd if I were not.

  She grasped the manuscript back and I could see the deeply etched grief in her face.

  ‘Ostensibly, Mr Twist, this so-called character Lovetown has tired of his marriage because he has to live in the countryside rather than in London. I recognized what the audience did not. The speeches between Lovetown and his wife contained word for word some of the very things said between my husband and myself. When Mrs Lovetown says, “I could bear anything but this neglect,” she is expressing my grief and pain. When Mr Lovetown declares, “I could put up with anything rather than these constant altercations and little petty quarrels,” he is simply repeating what Charles had said to me on more than one occasion. In the play both husband and wife pretend to have an affair to arouse each other’s jealousy and rekindle their passion, but I knew Charles’s affair was real and not imagined. Mrs Lovetown tells her husband “Alfred! Alfred! How little did I think when I married you that I should be exposed to such wretchedness!” Replace the word “Alfred” with the word “Charles” and again you have my very words. My husband was presenting the breaking up of our marriage to the general public. Imagine how I felt, Mr Twist!’

  She thrust the manuscript back on to its shelf with disgust etched on her face.

  ‘And he was sharing our domestic tragedy not just with the public but also with Mary. Unlike me, she found the play most entertaining and immensely funny. All evening she kept looking at me and laughing at me. I left that theatre hating her in a way that I had never thought possible. Looking back I am still not clear what I hoped to achieve when, after we had returned from the theatre, I poured the powder into Mary’s bedtime drink. I think I wanted merely to give her back some of her own medicine and make her as sick as she had made me. I think I only wanted to end the laughter that had cut me to the quick. But if part of me wanted to make her as sick in the stomach as she had made me sick at heart, I have to confess that part of me wanted to kill her. That is probably why I put as much of her poisonous powder into the cup as I dared.

  ‘You know the outcome. Mary became desperately ill very quickly and died later the next day. I was stricken with remorse and her death led to consequences I had not foreseen. First, our mother collapsed with grief. Then my own guilt led my body to abort the very child I had hoped to save. Worst of all, Charles was totally distraught for weeks. He did not merely wallow in her loss, he nearly drowned in it. He insisted that nothing of hers should be thrown away. Even two years after her death I discovered him one night taking out her clothes so that he could caress them. He still carries around with him a lock of her hair and wears her ring on his finger as if she and not I were his wife. He has twice immortalized her in his novels, once as the character of Kate Nickleby and once as Little Nell. God help me, Mr Twist, but in her death Mary attained a perfection she never achieved in life.

  ‘I knew Charles was convinced that Mary’s death was not a natural one, but he was unable to prove it to anyone’s satisfaction. Not even to the doctor who attended her death. Either the doctor was incompetent or else the poison Mary purchased was subtle enough in its consequences to avert his medical suspicions. The doctor put down her death to heart failure. Fortunately for me Charles got it into his head that the source of the poison was some sweets, which we had purchased from a street-seller outside the theatre. I am not sure what I would have done had he accused me, but maybe it would have been better if he had. Although I have been pregnant for most of the time we have been married, Charles has never been the same to me since Mary’s death. He rarely takes me out, contrasting my lethargy with his energy, my slowness with his quickness, my low spirits with his love of life. On one occasion, impatient with the physical weakness my pregnancies have wrought, he pronounced this place was more like a hospital ward than a home. He might just as well have called it a prison.

  ‘Now that you know how I came to murder my sister, Mr Twist, do with the information what you wish. I am already in hell so it will make little difference to me. There are too many times when I feel I have not kept my husband after all. Even in death, I believe Mary won.’

  Mrs Dickens’s account moved me deeply. I felt she was receiving enough punishment for her actions without me adding to it. I therefore promised her I would say nothing to her husband and I kept my word. When I saw Dickens I told him what Bates had told me about the poisoning of Rose and Bill Sikes. I said Bates thought Mary’s death was natural and the result of no action by Nancy or any of Fagin’s gang. My father kept his counsel but he is a very astute man and I suspect he may then have begun to entertain greater suspicions about his wife’s role in Mary’s death. With his journalistic experience, it would not have been difficult to put the pieces of the jigsaw together. Certainly I know their marriage deteriorated further after my visit and whatever remaining affection he had for her was totally lost. I suspect Catherine Dickens was more than punished for her actions in removing her rival.

  17

  THE ARTFUL DODGER

  My investigations following the receipt of Fagin’s letter had revealed far more than I had ever hoped possible. In the process they had reshaped my whole understanding of the events of my childhood. I had confirmed that I was not the missing heir of Edwin Leeford. His son had been my friend Dick, who had so tragically died in the workhouse. I was no love child but a bastard born from the effective rape of Charles Dickens by the whore Nancy when both of these were little more than children themselves. Torn from my mother’s arms and consigned to a pauper’s existence, chance alone had reunited me with my real mother. Once I had been enticed into Fagin’s den only the birthmark on my back had saved me from a life of crime. Its uncovering had led to Nancy’s rediscovering the child for whom she had long grieved. Her love for me had led to her challenging Fagin and all around her to ensure I did not stay in the gutters of London and end my life on a hangman’s rope.

  It was Nancy who had conceived the plan of passing me off as the child of Agnes Fleming and therefore Edwin Leeford’s heir. In return for cash Mr and Mrs Bumble had proved willing accomplices in deceiving the naïve Edward Leeford, alias Monks, into believing that I rather than Dick was his half-brother. Mr Brownlow’s imagination had helped because he had wrongly assumed I was the very image of Agnes Fleming, although he had never met her and only had a poor portrait on which to base his judgement. Enlisting the help of my father, Charles Dickens, they had arranged the bungled burglary that would ensure my freedom from Fagin and the publication of my story. Dickens had also become the source of my income, permitting me to think it was Mr Brownlow who was my benefactor.

  And then matters had gone horribly wrong. Dickens’s wife had poisoned her sister, Mary Hogarth, because she was seeking to have an affair with Charles, but he thought that the murderer was a jealous Nancy. Seeking revenge, Dickens had betrayed Nancy to the men he knew would wreak vengeance on her if they knew she was communicating with gentry. Fagin, determined to regain full control of his gang, had informed on Nancy’s friend, the Artful Dodger, and ensured his arrest and subsequent transportation, but had sown the seed that the Dodger had been informed on by Nancy. He had then used Charley Bates to poison both Rose Maylie and Bill Sikes. The poisoning of Rose Maylie had simply been a pl
oy to enable my recapture. The poisoning of Bill Sikes was a more sinister attempt to eliminate Nancy’s lover, who was the man Fagin most feared.

  When Bill unexpectedly survived this attack, Fagin used Dickens’s information to persuade him that Nancy had become a police informant. In this way he hoped to remove both of them forever. Noah Claypole had witnessed the outcome of Bill’s fury at first hand. Though he had struck my mother, he had not killed her. The assumption that he was the murderer and his accidental death while fleeing the mob had permitted the real murderer of Nancy to escape justice.

  However, all my investigations had brought me no nearer discovering who had murdered Nancy. It was my father, Dickens, who now took over the search for the truth, using all the many people he knew as well as his considerable skills. The one key figure we had not spoken to was Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger and it was just possible he might be able to shed light on who would have had cause to kill her. Using his foreign connections, Dickens discovered that the Dodger had made the most of his opportunities when sentenced to transportation and had become a wealthy farmer with large estates to his name in Australia.

  I was all set to embark on a journey across the world but that proved unnecessary. His informants told Dickens that Dawkins had returned to England under an assumed name. However, this made finding him appear an impossibility to both Dickens and me. It was Harry Maylie who tenaciously continued the effort to discover his whereabouts, instituting as many inquiries as he could through the network of police informants. I suspect Rose was behind Harry’s determination to finally solve the mystery of Nancy’s murder. She had always felt a degree of guilt at her and Brownlow’s failure to protect her.

  A few months after my meeting with Mrs Dickens Harry arrived, hot and breathless at my house, clutching a letter addressed to me. It had been handed into his office while he was out. The person who had left it had told Harry’s clerk to tell him it was from the Dodger. The clerk’s description of the man was not particularly good. Harry said he could recall only that the man was fashionably dressed, that he was bow-legged and small in stature, and that his face contained a rather snub nose and small eyes. However, this was sufficiently close to my memory of the Dodger to excite me and I eagerly opened the envelope. Inside was the following short message written in an untidy scrawl:

  I thought I had put behind me the days when I was known as the Artful Dodger, so it came as something of a shock to discover so many people suddenly seeking to find me. Your friends in high places are persistent buggers and I fear it is only a matter of time before they discover my identity, so I am asking you to call them off. Returned convicts, however reformed, are not welcome back and you know the penalty I will face if I am caught. I have no desire to end my life on a hangman’s rope. I don’t know the reason for you seeking me, but, for old times sake and the good of my neck, I am prepared to meet you at midnight on London Bridge. Come alone and unarmed or, believe me, you will never see or hear from me again.

  Harry tried to dissuade me from going alone, but I refused to listen. I had come too far to turn my back on what might be my last chance of resolving my mother’s murder.

  When I left my home the weather was not auspicious. It was a dark night, and bitter cold. The bleak east wind brought with it stinging particles from marsh and moor and fen. As the church clocks chimed, I stood near the centre of the bridge. At that hour and place there were few people around and those hurried past me in the mist, keen not to get too close to a stranger. It was so quiet I could hear the rippling of the water against the barges. The river was swollen and the tide was running down very strong. The natural gloom of night made not only the air black but the water black and the surrounding buildings black. It was virtually impossible to see the jumble of old smoke-stained warehouses on either bank, let alone the dense mass of roofs and gables beyond them. The shadows were only a deeper shade of black amid the blackness. Only the tower of old Saint Saviour’s church and the spire of Saint Magnus were visible above the mist.

  The sight reminded me of what Dickens had written all those years ago. I was standing on the very spot where Nancy had met Mr Brownlow and Rose Maylie and I suspected the Dodger’s choice of venue was not accidental. I stared at the sluggishly flowing water and my imagination summoned strange and fantastic forms from the dark shadows. The rushing water seemed to convey the sounds of gurgling and drowning and the occasional dip of oars and their rattling in the rullocks from some passing boat sounded like the ghostly rattlings of iron chains. My foolish fancy took flight and I sensed that I was being watched by water rats of human growth and that they were waiting for the crushing blow to my skull that would send me tumbling unconscious into their midst.

  A voice in my ear interrupted these ridiculous reflections and summoned me to follow it. I turned and a small figure dressed in black emerged from the mist, beckoning towards some steps that led downwards. I followed as directed and found myself going down two flights of stairs. The stone wall on my left ended in an ornamental pilaster facing towards the Thames. Standing with his back to it was my guide. In one hand he held a gun. With the other he pulled away from his head the scarf that concealed his features. It was indeed Jack Dawkins. The snub nose, flat brow and sharp, ugly-looking eyes were unchanged, although his hair was grizzled and his face lined more than I had expected for someone scarce older than me. He looked an old man.

  His had been the first face I had come to know when I had fled to London, a frightened and lonely boy of nine. And he had rescued me with an offer of friendship. I recalled how easily he had deceived me and how much he had entertained me on that first long journey to Fagin’s lair. We had crossed from the Angel Islington into St John’s Street, and then headed down Rosebery Avenue, which is marked at its beginning by Sadler’s Wells. We next moved through Exmouth Street and Coppice Row towards Saffron Hill. And all along the streets had got narrower and muddier and the air more foul and putrid.

  But nothing had tamed his high spirits. He had kept me entertained with a constant round of stories and with witty comments made about the places and people we passed. Covered ways and yards, which here and there diverged from the main street, disclosed drunken men and women wallowing in filth, and these hopeless souls had become the object of much of his clever mirth. The sight of great, ill-looking fellows emerging from some public houses had ensured that I clung still more tightly to his company till we reached the bottom of the hill and he pushed me through the doorway of the house near Field Lane, where my education was to truly begin.

  But the light-hearted boy in the ill-fitting clothes, which reached nearly to his heels, and the large hat which threatened to fall off every moment, was gone. Before me was the hardened face of a criminal whose life had moved beyond the amusement of youth to the cynicism of adulthood. His eyes stared with a fierceness that recalled Bill Sikes rather than the Dodger. His mouth was hard and his lips turned back in a scowl that made me tremble. There was no hint of friendliness and clearly deep resentment at having to meet me again. But who could blame him? Now he saw me as his persecutor and, looking at the anger and bitterness of his gaze, I am not ashamed to say that I feared his would be the last face I would see before he ended my days. The river is a great consumer of bodies and I knew mine could easily become just one more swollen and disfigured mass in its watery embrace.

  ‘If I had known what your arrival would cause to happen to Fagin and the rest of us, Oliver, I’d nivver have spoken to you the first time we met.’

  ‘Please believe me, Jack, when I say I had no wish to harm any of you then and I’ve no wish to harm you now. The past is the past and, if you have made a new life for yourself, I am pleased for you.’

  He smiled and laughed. It was the same sound I remembered so well from when he and Charley engaged in their games. ‘My God, you’re still the damn little prig you ever were, Oliver. I can only hope the outcome of our second meeting will be a happier one, but you’ll understand my caution. Fagin taught us to sea
rch each other well, Oliver. You won’t mind if I frisk you.’ I nodded my assent. He grasped me by the shoulder and made me spread-eagle myself against the wall. I felt as if I was being stalled up – a phrase pickpockets use when they are setting up a man to be frisked and rifled. Finding me to be unarmed, he visibly relaxed and gestured to indicate that I should sit down on the dank steps. I obeyed and he then settled himself by my side so that there was no chance our whispered conversation being overheard.

  ‘Ay, Oliver,’ he confided, ‘things have changed since we last met. I’ve made a new life for myself. The crossing to Australia in what was little better than a coffin ship introduced me to some experiences I’d rather forget. There were about thirty of us lads on board and we were kept in the same conditions as the men. Some of the convicts targeted one or two of us for their sexual gratification, even going so far as to give them female names. I felt fortunate that I was an ugly sod. The crew did nothing to protect us but whipping convicts for other activities was almost the only source of amusement to some of the sailors. The cats they used were each six feet long, made out of the log-line of a ship of five hundred tons’ burden. Nine over-end knots were in each tail and the nine tails whipped at each end with wax-end. With this they gave half-minute lashes because a quicker lashing would have resulted in certain death. Some of my fellow convicts appeared immune to its punishment. I saw one rub his shredded back against the mast till he squeezed congealed blood out of it just to show his contempt. He was given a further twenty-five lashes for that.