“Which brings us neatly to my point. You are clearly worried. I suspect it is about this novel that you have been working on of late. I was wondering why you have brought me to this unfamiliar Lime-house region, away from our usual London haunts, where we might bump into friends and colleagues.”
Dickens sighed. “Unfamiliar? My godfather, old Christopher Huffman, sold oars, masts, and ships’ gear just round the corner from here in Church Row. It was in old Huffman’s house there that my father once placed me on the table and told me to sing to the assembled company-to show me off. No, Charley, this place is not so remote for me. Over twenty years ago, I used some of this very area as background”-he waved his hand to encompass the surroundings-”as description in my book Dombey and Son.”
Charles Collins was silent for a moment.
“But you are worried,” he pressed.
Dickens compressed his lips for a moment and then nodded slowly. “You are discerning, Charley. Yes. I am worried.”
“About the new book?”
Again, his father-in-law nodded.
“Care to tell me what the book is about?”
“I have a character who has been left a fortune provided that he marries a girl. I’ve called the girl Bella. Bella Wilfer. My character, I’ve called him John, has been out of England for fourteen years. Now, while the fortune is attractive, John has decided to return to London under an assumed name to assess the situation. If John doesn’t marry Bella, then a man called Boffin stands to inherit the fortune. John gets a job as Boffins secretary. John becomes the mutual friend of Boffin and the Wilfers. In fact, I have titled my draft Our Mutual Friend. The upshot is that John and Bella fall in love, and John declares his real identity and inherits the money.”
Charles Collins pulled a face. “It sounds like a romantic comedy of deceit with a happy ending.”
Dickens scowled and shook his head. “No, that’s just it. It seems to lack spontaneity. It’s become a sordid tale of deceit and money. It’s full of pessimism. I seem to hear the words of that confounded woman Mrs. Lewes-George Eliot-whatever her name really is, who said that I scarcely ever pass from the humorous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transient in my unreality as… Oh, damnation!” He cut himself short. “She’s right. It reads like a dry treatise on morals, not a story.”
“Well, I have noticed that you have been growing increasingly pessimistic with life in general,” observed his son-in-law seriously.
“The story is too dry and dusty,” went on Dickens, ignoring the observation’. “I need to insert some drama, some excitement, some mystery-”
The door of the snug suddenly burst open, and a middle-age woman stood nervously on the threshold. She was a roundfaced lady who was, in fact, the proprietess of the tavern.
“Lud!” she exclaimed in agitation. “Mr. Dickens, sir, I am all of a tremble.”
The two men rose immediately for, indeed, the lady was suiting the words to the action and stood trembling in consternation before them.
Dickens came forward and took the landlady by the arm. “Calm yourself, Miss Mary.” His voice held a reassuring quality. “Come, still your nerves with a glass of port and tell us what ails you.”
“Port, sir? Gawd, no, sir.” ‘Tis gin that I would be having if drink be needed at all. But it can wait, Mr. Dickens, sir. “ ‘Tis advice I do be needing. Advice and assistance.”
Dickens regarded her patiently. “Pray, what then puts you so out of spirits? We will do our best to help.”
“A body, sir. A body. Washed up against our very walls.”
The tavern walls were built on the rivers edge, and those dark, choppy waters of the Thames could often be heard slapping at the bricks of the precariously balanced building.
Charley Collins grimaced. “Nothing unusual in that, Miss Mary,” he pointed out, adopting his father-in-law’s manner of addressing the landlady. In fact, every drinking man along the waterfront knew the landlady of the Grapes simply as Miss Mary. “Dwelling along the waterfront here, you have surely grown used to bodies being washed up?”
It was true that the Thames threw up the dead and dying every day. Suicides were commonplace; there were gentlemen facing ruin in various forms who took a leap from a bridge as a way out and the poor unable to cope with the heavy oppression of penury. Among the latter sort were a high percentage of unfortunate young women, unable to endure the profession that was their only alternative to starvation. Often there were unwanted children. And there were bodies of those who had met their ends by the hands of others for gain, jealousy, and all manner of motives. The flotsam and jetsam of all human misery and degradation floated along the dark, sulky river. Indeed, there were also unsavory stories of watermen, “river finders,” who plied their trade on the river, taking drunks from the riverside taverns to drown them in the Thames, though not before emptying their pockets of anything valuable, or to sell their corpses for medical dissection. Death and the river were not mutually exclusive. In fact, many along the riverbanks were called dredgers, dredging coal or valuables lost overboard from the ships that pushed their way along the river to the London docks.
“I would send for a constable at once, Miss Mary,” advised Dickens, about to be reseated.
Whereupon the lady let out a curious wailing sound that returned him to a standing position with some alacrity. “I would be doing that, but it be young Fred who be fishing out the body, and the peelers is just as like to say ‘e robbed the corpse. Now, if you were there to see fair play… they’d respect a man like you, Mr. Dickens.”
“If I recall a’right, Fred is your nephew?”
“Me own poor departed sisters son, gawdelpus.”
Dickens smiled skeptically. “What makes you think the police would believe that this corpse had been robbed?”
The landlady blinked and then realized what he meant. She looked defensive. “ ‘E only looked to see if there were anything to identify ‘im, Mr. Dickens. The corpse, that is. Fred, I mean,” she ended in confusion.
Dickens raised a cynical eyebrow. “I presume that there was no means of identification… nor any valuables on him?”
“Bert ain’t no dredger, Mr. Dickens. ‘E’s a lighterman. Makes a good living, an’ all.” There was a note of indignation in her voice.
Dredgers found almost all the bodies of persons who had been drowned and would seek to obtain rewards for the recovery of the bodies or make money through the fees obtained by bearing witness at inquests. But no recovered body and no corpse handed to the coroner would ever have anything of value on it. Dredgers would see to that.
“I am curious, Miss Mary,” interrupted Charley Collins, “why do you think that a policeman, seeing this body, might want to accuse anyone of robbing it? Plenty of corpses are washed up without anything on them and often without means of-identification.”
His father-in-law looked approvingly at him. “A good point. Come, Miss Mary, the question is deserving of an answer.”
“The man is well dressed, Mr. Dickens, and Freddie… well, ‘e thinks… that is, Fred thinks that ‘e was done in, begging your pardon.”
“Done in? Murdered?” asked Collins.
“Back of ‘is skull bashed, in, sez Fred.”
“And why would the constabulary think Fred might be involved?
Miss Mary sniffed awkwardly. “Well, ‘e did three months in chokey last year. Po’lis ‘ave long memories.”
Collins frowned. “Chokey?”
“Prison,” explained Dickens. “I believe the derivation is from the Hindustani chauki. Well, Miss Mary, Mr. Collins and I will come and take a look at the corpse. Don’t worry. Fred will have nothing to fear if he is honest with us.”
They followed her from the snug. The tavern building had a dropsical appearance and had long settled down into a state of hale infirmity. In its whole construction it had not a straight floor and hardly a straight line; but it had outlasted, and clearly would yet outlast, many a bettertrimmed building, many a sprucer public house. Externally it was a narrow lopsided wooden jumble of corpulent windows heaped one upon the other as one might heap as many toppling oranges, with a crazy wooden veranda impending over the water, indeed the whole house, inclusive of the complaining flagstaff on the roof, impended over the water, but seemed to have got into the condition of a fainthearted diver who has paused so long on the brink that he will never go in at all.