That autumn was a warm one, and Dickens and I carried out our collaboration on No Thoroughfare primarily in his lovely little Swiss chalet. Dickens had turned his long writing table up on the first floor there into a sort of partners desk—with two leg wells—and we put in long hours of scribbling together with only the hum of bees and the corresponding hum of the occasional comment or question passing between us to disturb the comfortable autumn silence.
Back near the end of August, Dickens had sent me a note that typified the easy give-and-take of ideas and narrative that would mark our work on this project:
I have a general idea which I hope will supply the kind of interest we want. Let us arrange to culminate in a wintry flight and pursuit across the Alps, under lonely circumstances, and against warnings. Let us get into all the horrors and dangers of such an adventure under the most terrific circumstances, either escaping from or trying to overtake (the latter I think) some one, on escaping from or overtaking whom the love, prosperity, and Nemesis of the story depend. There we can get ghostly interest, picturesque interest, breathless interest of time and circumstance, and force the design up to any powerful climax we please. If you will keep this in your mind, as I will in mine, urging the story towards it as we go along, we shall get a very Avalanche of power out of it, and thunder it down on the readers’ heads.
Even by late September we had no Avalanche yet and Dickens could only report that “I am jogging at the pace of a wheelbarrow propelled by a Greenwich Pensioner” and “Like you I am working with a snail-like slowness…,” but the work together at Gad’s Hill accelerated both the pace of our separate and co-mingled narratives and raised our levels of enthusiasm.
By 5 October I was back at my mother’s cottage, enjoying good meals and a feeling that the end of our joint endeavour was in sight, while Dickens was sending the following note:
I have brought on Marguerite to the rescue, and I have so left it as that Vendale—to spare her—says it was an accident in the storm, and nothing more. By the way, Obenreizer has received a cut from Vendale, made with his own dagger. This in case you want him with a scar. If you don’t, no matter. I have no doubt my Proof of the Mountain adventure will be full of mistakes, as my MS. is not very legible. But you will see what it means. The Dénouement I see pretty much as you see it—without further glimpses as yet. The Obenreizer question I will consider (q’ry Suicide?). I have made Marguerite wholly devoted to her lover. Whenever you may give me notice of your being ready, we will appoint to meet here to wind up.
I wonder, Dear Reader, what importance these working notes between two such professional authors might have a century and more hence? Very little, I would suppose, but given Dickens’s fame, even in my lifetime, perhaps even these hastily scribbled and cryptic missives might be of some interest to some minor scholar one day. Could we say the same of the notes I sent Dickens? Alas, we shall never know, since Dickens still regularly burned all correspondence sent to him, continuing—as it were—the ongoing conflagration that he first began in the autumn of 1860.
It was that same 5 October, the first Saturday of the new month, that I returned home to Number 90 Gloucester Place—having not written or cabled Caroline ahead of time that I would be returning—only to arrive late, to find most of the new home’s rooms unlit, and to discover Caroline having dinner with a strange man in the kitchen.
I confess to being startled, if not angered. Caroline smiled at me from her place at the table—the servants were gone that night—although I saw the blush begin at her neckline and work its way up behind her ears and then around to her cheeks.
“What is this?” I asked the man. “Who are you?”
He was a thin, sallow, short, unimpressive little weasel of a man, his jacket of the most common moleskin. Everything about him was common. He rose and began to answer me, but before he could speak, I said, “Wait, I know you.… I hired you a month ago. Clow, isn’t it? Or something like that. You’re the plumber.”
“Joseph Clow, sir,” he said, his voice all whine and adenoids. “And yes you did, sir. We’ve just finished the last of the upstairs plumbing today, and your housekeeper, Mrs G—, graciously extended me an invitation to take dinner here, sir.”
I gave my “housekeeper” a withering look, but she merely smiled back at me. Such insolence! I had just borrowed and spent a staggering £800 to buy this insolent baggage one of the finest mansions near Portman Square, and here she was arranging an assignation with a common workman behind my back in my own home!
“Very good,” I said, giving a smile that communicated I shall deal with you later to Caroline. “I just dropped by to pick up some fresh linen. I shall be off to my club.”
“Your housekeeper prepares an excellent spotted dick,” said this person. Had I detected any insolence or sarcasm, I believe I would have struck him, but his comment seemed innocent.
“Mr Clow’s father is a distiller and he has part-interest in the business,” said Caroline, brazen to the end. “He brought a very fine sherry to help celebrate the completion.”
I nodded and went upstairs. I did not lack for linen in my portmanteau. I had come back to renew the laudanum from my large jug. Filling my travel flask and drinking down two large glassfuls, I went to my dresser, felt around in the lower drawer beneath my linens, and found the loaded pistol that Hatchery had given me so long ago.
Who would blame me if I shot both Caroline and her skinny, moustached, grimy plumber of a lover? The man had probably been in my bed in my new home even before I had—or at least it was certain he had hoped to.
Then again, I realised, to the world at large, Caroline G— was indeed my housekeeper, not my wife. I was certainly justified in shooting Joseph Clow as an intruder, but few juries or judges would see the justification of my shooting a gentleman caller who had agreed to have dinner in the servants’ kitchen with my housekeeper. Even the accursed sherry might be put into evidence by an eager prosecutor.
Smiling grimly, I set the pistol away, gathered up a valise of clothing merely for the show of it, made sure my flask was topped off, and went out the front way to spend the night at my club. I did not go to the back of the house to look in again at Caroline—who had looked flushed and lovely in the candlelight, despite her advanced age of being in her thirties—or at her weasel-plumber of a prospective lover and husband.
By the time I reached my club, I was whistling and in a good mood. I could see even then how I could use Mr Joseph Clow to my own advantage.
DICKENS AND I completed No Thoroughfare in late October, weeks later than we had anticipated. I was in charge of reprint rights and dealt with Frederick Chapman in the negotiations, but in the end George Smith of Smith and Elder made a better offer and I immediately transferred the rights to him.
Dickens and I both saw the theatrical potential in No Thoroughfare and because, in those days, any thief with a stage and a few actors could steal literary material simply by adapting it first, we decided to steal a march on any potential thieves and adapt it ourselves. Dickens—in a hurry to wind up his affairs so that he could depart for America—rattled off a rough scenario to our actor-impresario mutual friend Fechter and gave me the responsibility of doing the hard work of adaptation after he, Dickens, had left the country.