Dickens did not appear to be listening as he knelt to pat Sultan’s neck, the other three dogs leaping and roiling around him in spasms of jealousy. “Sultan has swallowed Mary’s Mrs Bouncer Pomeranian only once and did have the good grace to spit her out when commanded to, but all of the kittens in the neighbourhood—especially the new batch born to the pussy who lives in the shed behind the Falstaff Inn—have mysteriously gone missing since Sultan arrived.”
Sultan eyed me with an eager gaze clearly showing his willingness to eat me if the opportunity presented itself.
“And despite his loyalty, companionship, courage, and amusing traits,” concluded Dickens, “I fear that our friend Sultan may have to be put down someday and that I shall be the one who has to do it.”
I TOOK THE train back to London, but rather than walk home to Melcombe Place, I took a cab to 33 Bolsover Street. There Miss Martha R—, who was registered with the landlord there as Mrs Martha Dawson, met me at the rear and separate door to her small apartment that consisted of a tiny sleeping room and a slightly larger sitting room with rudimentary cooking facilities. I was arriving hours later than I had promised, but she had been listening for my step on the stairs.
“I made chops and kept the supper warm,” she said as she closed the door behind me. “If you want to eat now. Or I could re-warm them later.”
“Yes,” I said. “Re-warm them later.”
Now, Dear Reader from my distant future, I can almost—not quite, but almost—imagine a time such as yours when memoirists or even novelists do not draw a discreet curtain over the personal events that might follow here, the, let us say, intimate moments between a man and a woman. I hope your age is not so debauched that you speak and write without restraint about such totally private moments, but if you search for such shameless exposures here, you shall be disappointed.
I can say that if you were to somehow see a photograph of Miss Martha R—, you might not be kind enough to see the beauty I find in her every time I am near her. To the mere eye, or camera lens (and Martha told me that she had a photograph taken of her, paid for by her parents, when she turned nineteen more than a year ago), Martha R— is a short, somewhat stern-looking woman with a narrow face, almost Negroid lips, severely parted straight hair (to the point she seems bald along the crown of her head), deep-set eyes, and a nose and complexion that might have had her in the fields picking cotton in the American South.
There is nothing in a photograph of Martha R— that could show her energy and eagerness and sensuality and physical generosity and adventurousness. Many women—I live with one most of the time—can simulate and broadcast physical sensuality to men in public, can dress for it and paint themselves for it and bat their eyelashes for it, even while they feel little or none of it. I believe they do so out of sheer habit. A few women, such as young Martha R—, sincerely embody such a passionate nature. Finding a woman like that amidst the herd of half-feeling, half-caring, half-responding females in our society of 1860s England was not so much like finding a diamond in the rough as it was like finding a warm, responsive body amidst the cold, dead forms on slabs in the Paris Morgue that Dickens had so enjoyed taking me to.
SOME HOURS LATER, at the little table she cleared off for our meals, by candlelight, we ate the dried chops—Martha was not yet a good cook and would never become one—and moved the cold and desiccated vegetables around with our forks. Martha had somehow chosen and paid for a bottle of wine. It was quite as terrible as the food.
I took her hand.
“My dear,” I said, “tomorrow you must pack your clothes in the early morning and take the eleven fifteen train to Yarmouth. There you must get your old job at the hotel back or, failing that, obtain a similar one. No later than tomorrow night you must visit your parents and brother in Winterton and tell them you are well and happy—that you used your savings for a little holiday in Brighton.”
To her credit, Martha did not whimper or simper. But she bit at her lip as she said, “Mr Collins, my love, have I done something to offend you? Is it the dinner?”
I laughed despite my fatigue and pain from the rising rheumatical gout in my eyes and limbs. “No, no, my dear. It’s simply that there’s a detective sniffing around and we must not give him reason to blackmail me—or you or your family, my dear. We must part for a short time until he tires of this game.”
“A policeman!” said Martha. She was imperturbable, but she was still a serving-class provincial. The police, especially London police, held terror for her kind.
I smiled again to allay her fears. “Not at all. No longer a policeman, Martha my dear. Merely a self-employed detective of the sordid sort hired by ageing lords to follow their young wives when they go out to do charity work. Nothing to worry about.”
“But must we part?” She looked around the room and I could tell that she was consigning the drab furniture and dreary prints on the walls to memory as surely as would some member of a royal family about to be banished from her ancestral castle.
“Only for a short time,” I said again, patting her hand. “I will deal with this detective and then we will make our plans anew. In fact, this very suite of rooms shall continue being let in the name of Mrs Dawson, in the certainty of your returning soon. Would you like that?”
“I should like that very much, Mr… Dawson. Can you spend the night tonight? This last night for a while?”
“Not tonight, my dearest. The gout is heavy on me tonight. I need to get home to take my medicine.”
“Oh, I wish you would leave a bottle of your medicine here, my love, so that it could alleviate your pain while I alleviate your other tensions and anxieties!” She squeezed my hand hard enough to send pain up my aching arm. There were tears in her eyes now, and I knew that they were for me and not due to her exile. Martha R— had a sympathetic soul.
“The eleven fifteen train,” I said, setting bills and coins totalling six pounds on the top of the dresser as I rose and pulled on my coat. “Make sure that you leave nothing behind here, my dearest. Travel safely and I shall be in contact with you soon.”
FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD Harriet was asleep in her room, but Caroline was still awake when I arrived home at 9 Melcombe Place.
“Are you hungry?” she asked. “We had veal and I kept some for you.”
“No, only some wine, perhaps,” I said. “I’ve had the worst time with the gout today.” I went to the kitchen, unlocked my private cupboard with the key from my waistcoat, drank down three glasses of laudanum, and returned to Caroline in the dining room, where she had filled two glasses with a good Madeira. The taste of Martha’s wretched wine was still on my mouth and I sought to banish it.
“How was your day with Dickens?” she asked. “I did not expect you to stay so late.”
“You know how insistent he can be when he invites one to dinner,” I said. “He will not take no as an answer.”
“I do not really know that, actually,” said Caroline. “All of my meals with Mr Dickens have been with you and either at our home or in a private room at a restaurant. He has never insisted to me that I stay late at his table.”
I did not dispute the fact. I could feel the laudanum beginning to work on the pulsating pain of my terrible headache. The medicine gave me the odd feeling of bobbing up and down, as if the dining room table and chair were a small boat caught in the wake of a larger ship.
“Did you have a pleasant day of conversation with him?” pressed Caroline. She was wearing a red silk dressing gown a bit too flamboyant to be of the highest taste. The embroidered gold flowers on it seemed to throb and pulse in my vision.