It was a summary of earnings from Dickens’s readings, and looking at it made the scarab scuttle behind my right eye and brought a band of excruciating headache pain tightening around my forehead. It was through just such rising agony that I read the following in Dolby’s tight, ledger-columned script:
Charles Dickens’s paid readings over the past years had totalled 423, including 111 given while Arthur Smith was the Inimitable’s manager, 70 under Thomas Headland, and 242 under Dolby. It seemed that Dickens had never kept precise records of his profits under Smith and Headland, but this spring he estimated them at about £12,000. Under Dolby, those profits had reached almost £33,000. This gave a total of some £45,000—an average of more than £100 per reading—and, according to the note from Dickens appended, represented almost half of his entire current estate’s value, estimated at about £93,000.
Ninety-three thousand pounds. All last year and this, because of my personal investment in the theatrical production of Black and White, my excessive loans to Fechter, the constant upkeep on the grand house on Gloucester Place (and the attendant salaries for the two servants and frequent cook there), my generous payments to Martha R—, and especially the constant need to purchase large quantities of both opium and morphia for personal medicinal reasons, I had been struggling financially. As I had written to Frederick Lehmann the year before (when that good friend had offered to lend me money)—“I shall pay the Arts. Damn the Arts!”
BECAUSE IT WAS BAD WEATHER, I was taking a cab home from Wellington Street that afternoon when I saw Dickens’s daughter Mary walking along the Strand in the rain. I immediately had the driver stop the cab, ran to her side, and discovered that she was walking alone and unprotected in the rain (returning to the Milner Gibson house after a luncheon downtown) because she had been unable to hail a cab. Helping her into my coach, I rapped on the ceiling with my cane and called up to the driver, “Five Hyde Park Place, driver, across from the Marble Arch.”
As Mamie dripped onto the upholstery—I had offered two clean handkerchiefs for her to dry her face and hands at the very least—and as I saw her reddened eyes, I realised that she had been crying. We talked as the cab moved slowly north through traffic and while she mopped at herself. The rain on the roof of the cab had a particularly insistent sound that afternoon.
“You are so kind,” began the distraught young woman (although, at the advanced age of thirty-two, she was hardly still a young woman). “You have always been so kind to our family, Wilkie.”
“As I shall always be,” I muttered. “After having received unlimited kindness from the family over the years.” The driver above us in the rain was shouting and cracking his whip not at his own poor horse but at some dray waggon driver who had crossed in front of him.
Mamie did not seem to be listening to me. Handing back my now-sodden handkerchiefs, she sighed and said, “I went to the Queen’s Ball the other night, you know, and had ever so much fun! It was so gay! Father was to have been my escort, but at the last minute he was unable to go…”
“Not because of his health, I hope,” I said.
“Yes, sadly, yes. He says that his foot—and these are his words, so you must forgive me—is a mere bag of pain. He can barely hobble to his desk to write each day.”
“I am dismayed to hear that, Mamie.”
“Yes, yes, we all are. The day before the Queen’s Ball, Father had a visitor—a very young girl with literary aspirations, someone Lord Lytton had recommended visit Father and sent over—and while Father was explaining to her the enjoyment he was having in writing this Drood book for serialisation, this upstart of a girl had the temerity to ask, ‘But suppose you died before all the book was written?’ ”
“Outrageous,” I muttered.
“Yes, yes. Well, Father—you know sometimes in a conversation he smiles but how his gaze suddenly becomes focused on something very far away—he said, ‘Ah-h! That has occurred to me at times.’ And the girl became flustered.…”
“As well she should have been,” I said.
“Yes, yes… but when Father saw that he had embarrassed her, he spoke very softly in his kindest voice and said to her, ‘One can only work on, you know—work while it is day.’ ”
“Very true,” I said. “All of us writers feel the same on this issue.”
Mamie began fussing with her bonnet, setting her wet hair and sagging curls to rights, and I had a moment to contemplate the rather sad future for both of Dickens’s daughters. Katey was married to a very sick young man and was currently a social outcast both because of her father’s separation from her mother and because of Kate’s own flirtations and behaviour. Her tongue had always been too sharp for either Society’s ear or that of most men who might have been marriage partners. Mamie was less intelligent than Kate, but her sometimes frenzied efforts towards social acceptance were always carried out at the fringes of society, usually within a maelstrom of malicious gossip, again because of her father’s political attitudes, her sister’s behaviour, and her own spinsterhood. Mamie’s last serious marriage possibility had been Percy Fitzgerald, but—as Katey had said last New Year’s Eve—Percy had settled on that “simpering charmer” and forgone his last opportunity of marrying into the Dickens fold.
“We shall be so glad to be back in Gad’s Hill Place,” Mamie said suddenly as she finished flouncing her wilted skirts and setting damp bodice lace to a semblance of propriety.
“Oh, you’re leaving the Milner Gibson house so soon? I was under the impression that Charles had leased it for a longer period.”
“Only until the first of June. Father is very impatient to get back to Gad’s Hill for the summer. He wants us to be there with the house all opened up and happy and us all settled by the second or third of June. He shall have very little reason to come into town then, for the rest of the summer, you know. The rail travel is so hard on Father these days, Wilkie. Also, it will be easier for Ellen to visit there than it has been here in the city.”
I blinked at this and then took off my spectacles to wipe them on one of the soggy handkerchiefs in order to hide my reaction.
“Miss Ternan still visits there?” I said offhandedly.
“Oh, yes, Ellen has been a regular visitor over the past few years—certainly your brother or Katey has told you that, Wilkie! Come to think of it, it’s odd that you haven’t been a guest there during the periods that Ellen has come to stay. But then—you are so busy!”
“Yes,” I said.
So Ellen Ternan was still a frequent guest at Gad’s Hill. This was a surprise. I was sure that Dickens had sworn his daughters into secrecy on this—another reason for Society to shun all of them—but that light-headed Mamie had forgotten. (Or assumed that I was still such a close friend of her father’s that he would have told me.)
I realised at that moment that none of us—none of Dickens’s friends or family or even his biographers in some future era such as yours, Dear Reader—would ever know the real story of his strange relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan. Had they actually buried a child in France, as I had surmised after overhearing that one snippet of conversation between them at Peckham Station? Were they now living merely as brother and sister, their passion—should they ever have acted on it in the first place—put behind them forever? Or had that passion resumed in a new form, edging towards being made public—perhaps a very scandalous divorce and second marriage for the ageing novelist? Would Charles Dickens ever find that happiness with a woman that had seemed to elude him throughout his passionate, naive, romance-haunted life?