Something about the rows of geraniums we were walking between as we approached Charley and the basket cart bothered me. In fact, they made my heart pound faster and my skin go cold. I became aware that Dickens had been talking to me.
“… I took him on the emergency train straight to Charing Cross Hotel immediately after the crash,” he was saying. “I have paid two nurses to be with him so that he is not alone night or day. I would very much appreciate if you could look in on him this evening, my dear Wilkie, to give him my compliments and let him know that as soon as I am able to come into town again—most probably tomorrow—I will look in on him myself. If the nurses tell you that his injuries have worsened in any way, I would take it as a personal favour if you would send a messenger out to Gad’s Hill with the information as soon as possible.”
“Of course, Charles,” I said. I dimly realised that he must have been talking about the young man he had helped extricate from the wreckage at Staplehurst and then had personally put up in the hotel at Charing Cross. A young man named Dickenson. Edmond or Edward Dickenson, I seemed to recall. A rather extraordinary coincidence when one thinks about it.
As we came down the drive and away from the scarlet geraniums, the sense of panic left me as quickly and curiously as it had arrived.
The cart was small but Dickens insisted on squeezing into it with Charley and me as the young man urged the pony out to Gravesend and then on to the Rochester Road towards Higham Station. We had enough time.
At first Dickens was at ease, chatting with me about small publishing details at All the Year Round, but as the pony and cart picked up speed, moving along with carriages on the road—the Higham Station almost within sight—I saw the writer’s face, still sun darkened from his time in France, grow first paler and then the colour of lead. Beads of perspiration stood out on his temples and cheeks.
“Please slow down a bit, Charley. And cease swaying the cart from side to side. It is very distracting.”
“Yes, Father.” Charley pulled on the reins until the pony was no longer trotting.
I saw Dickens’s lips become thinner and thinner until they were little more than a bloodless slash. “Slower, Charley. For heaven’s sake, less speed.”
“Yes, Father.” Charley, in his twenties, looked as apprehensive as a boy when he glanced towards his father, who was now clutching the side of the basket cart with both hands and leaning unnecessarily to his right.
“Slower, please!” cried Dickens. The cart was now moving at a slow walking pace, certainly not at the steady four-miles-per-hour stride that Dickens could—and did—keep up for twelve and sixteen and twenty miles per day.
“We shall miss the train…” began Charley, glancing forward at the distant steeples and depot tower, then back to his watch.
“Stop! Let me out,” commanded Dickens. His face was now as grey as the pony’s tail. He staggered out of the cart and quickly shook my hand. “I shall walk back. It is a nice day for walking. Have a safe trip and please do send a communication to me this evening if young Mr Dickenson needs anything at all.”
“I shall, Charles. And I shall see you again soon.”
My last sight of Dickens from the back seemed to be of a much older man, not striding with his usual confident and extraordinary pace at all, but almost feeling his way along the side of the road, leaning heavily on his walking cane as he headed back towards Gad’s Hill.
CHAPTER THREE
Cannibalism.
As I rode the train to Charing Cross Station I thought about that odd, barbaric word and reality—cannibalism—and how it had already affected Charles Dickens’s life. (I had no idea at that time how terribly—and soon—it would affect mine.)
There had always been something in Charles Dickens’s make-up that reacted especially strongly to the idea of cannibalism and of being consumed in any manner. During the time of his public separation from Catherine and the scandal that he had done the most to publicise and bring about—although he would never recognise that fact—the writer had said to me more than once, “They’re eating me alive, Wilkie. My enemies, the Hogarths, and the misinformed public who wish to believe the worst are devouring me a limb at a time.”
Many had been the time in the past decade when Dickens would invite me to join him on a trip to London’s Zoological Gardens—a place in which he always took great delight—but as much as he loved the hippopotamus family and aviaries and lions’ den, it was the reptile house feeding time that was the central purpose and destination for his visit. Dickens would not miss it and hurried me so that we would never be late. They fed the reptiles, most specifically the snakes, a diet of mice and larger rats and the spectacle seemed to mesmerise Dickens (who, a mesmerist himself, absolutely refused to allow anyone to mesmerise him). He would stand transfixed. Several times—riding somewhere together, waiting for a play to begin, even when sitting in his parlour at home—Dickens would remind me of how, frequently, two snakes would begin devouring the same rat at exactly the same time until the head and tail and hindquarters of the rodent were invisible in the snakes’ gullets, while the struggling rat was still alive, hind and forelegs scrabbling in the air even as the powerful jaws advanced on them.
Only a few months before the Staplehurst accident, Dickens had confided in me that he was seeing the legs of furniture in his house—his bathtub, the serpentine table and chair legs in various rooms, even the heavy cords for the drapes—as snakes slowly consuming the tabletops and draperies and tub. “When I am not looking, the house is devouring itself, my dear Wilkie,” he’d said to me over rum punch. He also told me that often at a banquet—most frequently a banquet in his honour—he would look down the long table and see his peers and friends and colleagues filling their faces with veal or mutton or chicken, and for a moment, just for a single, terrible second, he would imagine that the utensils lifted to those mouths were wriggling appendages. But not of mice or rats, he said—of men. He said that he found the frequent illusion… unsettling.
But it was actual cannibalism—or at least the rumour of it—that had changed the course of Charles Dickens’s life eleven years ago.
In October of 1854, all of England was shocked to read Dr John Rae’s report on what he had discovered during his search for the missing Franklin Expedition.
If you have never heard of the Franklin Expedition, Dear Reader from my future century, I need to tell you only that it was an attempt by Sir John Franklin and 129 men in 1845 to explore the northern Arctic in two ships provided by the Royal Navy’s Discovery Service—HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. They set sail in May of 1845. Their primary orders were to force the North-West Passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific north of our colony in Canada—England was always dreaming of new and shorter trade routes to the Far East—and Franklin, an older man, was a seasoned explorer. There was every possible expectation of success. The two ships were last seen in Baffin Bay in the late summer of 1845. After three or four years of no word from the expedition, even the Royal Navy became concerned and various rescue expeditions were organised. But the two ships, to this day, have not been found.
Both Parliament and Lady Franklin offered huge rewards. Search parties, not just British but from America and other nations, criss-crossed the Arctic searching for Franklin and his men. Or at the very least for some sign of their fate. Lady Franklin was outspoken in her belief that her husband and the crews were still alive, and few in government or in the Navy wished to contradict her, even when so many Englishmen had given up all hope.