“No, sir,” George said solemnly. His dark-eyed stare seemed to bore into me. He did not blink. “That note isn’t what it seems, sir.”
“It’s not?” I put the last of my clean linen in the valise and snapped it shut.
“No, sir. They ain’t no t’other opportunity, Mr Collins. Who’d hire a lazy, clumsy child like our Agnes? That’s not right, sir. Not right at all.”
“Then what does this mean?” I asked, giving him back the note.
“The soldier, sir.”
“Soldier?”
“The young rascal of a Scottish-regiment soldier who she met in market in December, Mr Collins. A corporal. Ten year older ’n Agnes he were, sir, with shifty little eyes and soft hands and a moustache like a greasy caterpillar what crawled up on his lip to die, sir. Besse, she seen our girl talking to ’im and got between ’em quick, you can imagine. But somehow she seen him again when she was out doin’ chores. She admitted to such before Christmas, when we found ’er cryin’ like a mooncalf in ’er room.”
“You mean…”
“Aye, sir. The silly, stupid child’s run away with that soldier as sure as Besse’s mum’s in the cold ground an’ her papa now too, most likely. Our little family’s all gone and scattered now.”
Lifting the valise, I clasped George on his shoulder as I headed for the door. “Nonsense, my dear man. She’ll be back. They always come back after their first love’s disappointment! Trust me on this, George. And if she doesn’t… well, we’ll hire someone to track her down and talk sense into her. I happen to know several detectives in private consultation. There’s nothing to worry about, George.”
“Aye, sir,” he said in a tone as grey as his complexion.
“I’ll be at the Saint James Hotel for a few more days. Please be so kind as to bring my mail there each day and to have the house all aired and ready by Saturday, with a meal planned for that evening—Mr Fechter and others may come for a stay.”
“Aye, sir.”
We descended the stairs together.
“Be of good cheer,” I said and patted him on the back a final time before stepping out to the waiting cab. “All shall turn out for the best in the end.”
“Aye, sir.”
ONE CAN ONLY imagine how difficult it was for Dickens, with his Staplehurst-shattered nerves worsening rather than improving, as he again plunged into an exhausting tour which required travel by rail almost every day. Katey had informed me through my brother that the day after his St James’s Hall readings on 5 January, Dickens had been too exhausted to get out of bed and take his usual cold shower-bath. Within a few days he had to do his final readings in Dublin and Belfast, and he decided to take Georgina and his daughter Mary with him to make it feel more like a festive occasion rather than a farewell. He was almost immediately confronted with a near-tragedy that took a terrible toll on his nerves.
Dickens, Dolby, Georgina, Mary, and the usual travelling entourage were returning from Belfast to catch the mail boat to Kingston when something went terribly wrong. They were riding in the first-class carriage immediately behind the engine when suddenly there was an incredible crash along the roof of their carriage and they looked outside just in time to see what appeared to be a huge, free-flying scythe of iron cutting through telegraph poles as if they were mere reeds.
“Down!” cried Dickens and everyone dived for the floor of the carriage. A fusillade of huge splinters, gravel, mud, stones, and water struck the windows on the side they had been riding. The carriage shuddered as if they had hit something solid and then there was a series of shocks so great that Dickens later admitted that he was sure they had once again derailed and were hurtling over an incomplete trestle.
The carriage came to a halt and the only sounds breaking the sudden silence were the steam-panting of the great engine and a few screams from the lower-class carriages. Dickens was the first to his feet and outside and immediately began talking quietly to the engineer as Dolby and other men with their wits about them gathered round.
The engineer, who (according to Dolby writing Forster) was far more agitated than Dickens, his hands shaking, explained that the metal tire on the huge driving-wheel had fractured—exploded—and sent its fragments flying into the air and scything through the telegraph poles. It had been the large section of that wheel that had crashed into the roof of Dickens’s carriage. “If it’d been a little larger,” said the engineer, “or travelling a little lower or faster, it would have cut down through the roof of your carriage for sure, doing to you poor passengers what its other parts did to those telegraph poles.”
Dickens had calmed Mary and Georgina and the other passengers that day—even Dolby admitted to being deeply shaken, and it took much to shake George Dolby—but the next evening, after the Inimitable had Murdered Nancy yet again, Dolby had to help the Chief off stage at the end of the evening.
Dickens had arranged his schedule to read in Cheltenham just so that his dear and ageing friend Macready might hear the Murder. Afterwards, the failing seventy-five-year-old came backstage, shakily leaning on Dolby’s arm, and was unable to speak until he had two glasses of champagne. The old man was so emotional after seeing the Murder that Dickens tried to make light of it, but Macready would have none of that. A hint of his old stage fury returning in that ruined voice, he bellowed out, “No, Dickens—er—er—I will NOT—er—er—have it—er—put aside. In my—er—best times—er—you remember them, my dear boy—er—gone, gone! — no!” And here the bellow became a roar. “It comes to this—er—TWO MACBETHS!”
This last was so loud and so emotional that Dickens and Dolby could do nothing but stare at the old actor who had made Macbeth his signature role and who was more proud of nothing else, not even his wife and lovely grown daughter. And he seemed to be saying that in terms of pure horror and emotion, Dickens’s Murder of Nancy had been the equivalent—in acting as well as in effect—of the best of his best Macbeths.
Then the old giant stood there glaring at Dolby as if the manager (who had not said a word) had contradicted him. And then Macready simply… went away. His body was still there, the third glass of champagne still in his hand, the great jaw and profile both still jutting upwards and outwards in defiance, but Macready himself was gone, leaving behind, as Dickens later told Dolby and Forster, only a clever, pale optical illusion of himself.
In Clifton, the Murder brought about what Dickens gleefully called a contagion of fainting. “I should think we had from a dozen to twenty ladies borne out, stiff and rigid, at various times. It became quite ridiculous.” The Inimitable loved it.
In Bath, it was Dickens who seemed close to fainting, as the place literally haunted him. “The place looks to me like a cemetery which the Dead have succeeded in rising and taking,” he told Dolby. “Having built streets out of their old gravestones, they wander about scantily trying to ‘look alive.’ A dead failure.”
Percy Fitzgerald let slip to me in February that after Georgina and Mary returned to Gad’s Hill, Ellen Ternan was with Dickens again. Or so I surmised (Percy would never be so indiscreet as to say it outright). But Fitzgerald was getting married, at long last, and when he breathlessly told this to Dickens at the station, the writer said, “I must tell this to the one who is with me.” The one who is with me… Dickens hardly would have used this circumlocution to describe Dolby or his lighting or gas man. Was Ellen staying in the same hotel as Dickens, but as a sister now, rather than a lover? One can only imagine the added torments this gave to the Inimitable.
I say “added torments” quite deliberately, since there was no doubt now that it was more than bad health that was tormenting Charles Dickens. Despite his gleeful reports about dozens of women fainting, the Murder of Nancy was obviously taking a terrible toll on his psyche as well as his body. Everyone I spoke to—Fitzgerald, Forster, Wills, everyone—agreed that the Inimitable’s letters were filled with the Murder and nothing but the Murder. He was reading it at least four times a week, mixed in with his usual most popular readings, and he seemed obsessed not just with turning each hall in which he read into a Theatre of Terror, but in feeling Bill Sikes’s guilt at the murders.