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.”
She looked at me in the gloom of the tunnel and her eyes seemed luminous and dissatisfied.
“And you also know,” I continued, my voice so soft that it was almost absorbed by the bricks overhead and under our feet, “that your father would never do anything to dishonour himself or your family. You must know that, Katey.”
“Hmmm,” said Kate. Dishonouring himself and his family was precisely what Kate Macready Dickens Collins honestly believed her father had already done in the affair of the banishment of her mother and his pursuit of Ellen Ternan. “Here,” she said, freeing her arm. “The light at the end of the tunnel, Wilkie. I shall leave you to it. And to him.”
MY DEAR WILKIE! Come in, come in! I was just thinking about you. Welcome to my eyrie. Step in, dear friend.”
Dickens had jumped up from his small writing table and heartily shaken my hand as I’d stopped at the open door of his upstairs room. I confess that I had not been sure how he would greet me after the relative silence and separation of the past two months. His warmth surprised me and made me feel all that much more the traitor and spy.
“I am just jotting down revisions to the last line or two of this year’s Christmas story,” he said with enthusiasm. “A thing called ‘Cheap Jack’ that I assure you, my dear Wilkie, will be a great hit with the readers. Very popular, is my prediction. Perhaps my best since ‘The Bells.’ The idea occurred to me in France. I shall finish in a minute and then I am yours for the afternoon and evening, my friend.”
“By all means,” I said and stepped back as Dickens returned to his table and quill, striking out with great flourishes and writing between the lines and in the margins. He reminded me of an energetic conductor in front of an attentive and obedient orchestra of words. I could almost hear the notes as his quill rose, swung, dipped, scratched, lifted, and swept down again.
I admired the view from Dickens’s “eyrie” and had to admit that it was wonderful. The chalet, standing between two tall, shading cedars that stirred now in the wind, had many windows that looked out over fields of ripened corn, forests, and more fields, and even allowed glimpses of the Thames, with the white movement of sails there. From the roof of Gad’s Hill Place across the road, I knew, one could easily see London in the distance, but from the chalet the view was more bucolic, with the distant river, a glimpse of the spire of Rochester Cathedral, and the yellowing and rustling fields of corn. Traffic was light today on the Rochester Road. Dickens had outfitted his eyrie with a bright brass telescope on a wooden tripod, and I could imagine him pondering the moon at night and the ladies in their yachts on the Thames on warm summer days. Where there were no windows, there were mirrors. I counted five mirrors. Dickens loved mirrors. Every bedroom in his Tavistock House and now at Gad’s Hill Place had always sported multiple mirrors and there were mirrors in hallways and foyers and a large one in his study. The effect up here in his chalet was to make one feel rather as if he were standing on an open platform—a child’s house in a tall tree, minus all walls—with sunlight and blue sky and foliage and yellow fields and far views reflected everywhere. The breezes that passed freely through the open windows carried the scent of foliage and flowers, of the fields beyond, of the smoke from someone burning leaves or weeds from a field nearby, and even the salt tang smell of the sea.
I could not help but think how totally opposite this world of Charles Dickens was from our night expedition to Opium Sal’s den and then the unmitigated nightmare of Undertown. All of that darkness seemed to be fading like the bad dream it had been. The daylight and clean scent of this world were real—as glowing and pulsing as it seemed through the pulse of my medicinal laudanum. I could not see how that reeking darkness of the catacombs and sewers, nor even the slums above, could co-exist with this clean reality.
“There,” cried Dickens. “Done. For now.” He blotted his last page and set it with others in a leather portfolio. He rose and took his favourite blackthorn walking stick from its place in a corner. “I’ve not had my walk today. Shall we away, my dear Wilkie?”