CHAPTER EIGHT

Gad’s Hill Place gave the strong impression of a gay, relaxed family retreat when I arrived there in mid-afternoon on the crisp early-autumn day after Inspector Field’s visit to my home. It was a Saturday, so the children and visitors were outside playing. I had to admit to myself that Gad’s Hill was the very model of a happy family’s beloved country home. Of course, Charles Dickens wanted Gad’s Hill to be the very model of a happy family’s beloved country home. In fact, Charles Dickens insisted that everyone within his circle do his or her part to maintain the image, fiction, and—I am certain that he hoped, despite the absence of the family’s mother, now banished, and despite tensions from within and without the family—the reality of a happy family’s beloved country home: nothing more complicated than a gay early-autumn retreat for the hardworking author and his worshipful, loving, and appreciative family and their friends.

At times, I confess, I felt like Candide to Charles Dickens’s Dr Pangloss.

Dickens’s daughter Kate was in the yard and approached me as I walked up the lane, sweating and mopping my neck and forehead with my handkerchief. It was, as I said, a crisp autumn day, but I had walked from the train station and was not used to the exercise. Also, in preparation for the meeting with Dickens, I had taken two glasses of my laudanum medicine much earlier in the day than I was used to doing, and while there were no negative effects from the medicine, I admit that the yard, the grass, the trees, the playing children, and Kate Macready Dickens Collins herself appeared to have a corona of golden glow around them.

“Hello, Wilkie,” cried Kate as she came closer and took my hand. “We have seen too little of you in recent days.”

“Hello, Katey. Is my brother here with you this weekend?”

“No, no. He was not feeling well and decided to stay at Clarence Terrace. I will rejoin him this evening.”

I nodded. “The Inimitable?”

“In his chalet, finishing up a bit of work on this year’s Christmas tale.”

“I didn’t know the chalet was ready for habitation,” I said.

“It is. All furnished as of last month. Father has been working there every day since then. He should be stopping any minute so that he can get his afternoon walk in. I’m sure he won’t mind if you interrupt him. It is a Saturday, after all. Shall I walk you through the tunnel?”

“That is a lovely idea,” I said.

We strolled across the lawn towards the road.

The chalet to which Kate was referring had been a gift the previous Christmas from the actor Charles Fechter. According to my brother, who was one of the guests who stayed from Christmas Eve 1864 until the fifth of January, it wasn’t the happiest of Christmases, not the least reason being that Dickens somehow had convinced himself that my brother, Charles, was dying rather than merely indisposed due to his frequent digestive problems. Of course, this may have been more wish than honest diagnosis on Dickens’s part; Katey’s marriage to Charles in 1860 had upset the author beyond the point of tears and quite to the point of distraction. Dickens felt that he had been abandoned in his time of need by an impatient daughter, and—indeed—that was precisely the case. Even my brother understood that Kate was not in love with him. She simply needed to escape Charles Dickens’s household after the upset brought about by her father’s banishment of their mother.

Kate—“Katey,” as so many of us called her—was not a great beauty, but of all the Dickens children, she was the only one who had inherited her father’s quickness, his wit, a more sardonic version of his sense of humour, his impatience with others, his speech patterns, and even many of his mannerisms. She had let my brother know, even as she was more or less proposing to him, that it would be a marriage of escape and convenience for her rather than one of love. Charles agreed.

So the cold, claustrophobically indoor Christmas of 1864 had been somewhat dour at the Dickens home at Gad’s Hill, certainly compared to the great family-and-guest festivals of previous years at Tavistock House, at least until Christmas Day morning, when Charles Fechter presented to the Inimitable… an entire Swiss chalet.

Fechter, who was a strange man himself, brooding, sallow, given to explosions of temper towards his wife and others (but never towards Dickens), announced after breakfast that the mysterious crates and boxes he had brought with him were a disassembled “miniature chalet,” although—as the group soon discovered—not so miniature after all. It was an actual full-sized chalet, quite large enough to live in should one choose to do so.

Energised, excited, Dickens immediately announced that all “strong and healthy bachelor guests”—by which he obviously meant to exclude my brother for more faults than not being a bachelor—should rush outside into the bitter cold to assemble his gift. But Dickens and his guests Marcus Stone (who was indeed a large and powerful man) and Henry Chorley and various male servants and gardeners and local handymen all summoned from their Christmas Days by the hearth found the fifty-eight boxes (there were ninety-four large, numbered pieces in all) more than they could manage. Fechter called for his French carpenter at the Lyceum to finish the job.

The chalet—which turned out to be so much more than the oversized dollhouse Dickens had anticipated when looking at the packing crates—now stood on the author’s extra property on the other side of the Rochester High Road. Shaded by tall cedars, it was a lovely gingerbread chalet of two storeys with a large, single ground-floor room and a first-floor room with a fretted balcony which one reached by an outside staircase.

Dickens took a great and boyish delight in his chalet, and when the ground thawed that spring, he had workmen dig a pedestrian tunnel under the road so that the author would be able to pass all the way from his house to the chalet without being observed, disturbed, or run down by some runaway pony cart. Kate had told me how Dickens had applauded like a child when the workmen broke through at the centre in their tunnel, and then brought everyone—guests, children, workmen, gawking neighbours, and idlers from the Sir John Falstaff Inn across the road—into the house for grog.

As we reached the tunnel and began the cool stroll through it, Kate asked, “What are you and Father doing on all these long, secretive nights, Wilkie? Even Charles does not seem to know.”

“What in heaven’s name are you talking about, Katey?”

She looked at me in the dim light. She had taken my arm and now she squeezed it. “You know what I mean, Wilkie. Please don’t be coy. Even with the press of finishing Our Mutual Friend and his other work, even with his current terror of rail travel, Father has been disappearing at least one night a week, sometimes twice a week, since that first secret adventure you and he shared in July. Georgina confirms this. He leaves in the evening, taking the slow train into London, and returns very, very late—as late as mid-morning the next day—and won’t tell Georgina or any of us a word about the reasons for these nocturnal prowls. And now this most recent trip to France and him returning after a sunstroke. We’ve all assumed, even Charles, that you have introduced Father to some new form of debauchery in London and that he may have tried it on his own in Paris and found it too much for his constitution.”

Beneath Kate’s bantering tone, I could hear the real concern.

Patting her arm, I said, “Well, you know that we gentlemen are honour bound to protect each other’s secrets, Katey… such as they are. And you, of all women, know that male writers are a mysterious species—we’re always out doing some odd research about the world here or there, day or night.”