Superficially fascinating or not, Kate Dickens had fallen in love with him and when Yates refused to notice the infatuation, despite the young man’s frequent visits to Tavistock House and then to Gad’s Hill Place and despite Katey’s obvious flirtations—obvious to everyone, including Charles Dickens and me—the headstrong young woman (she had just turned twenty) proposed to my Charley.
A few months before the wedding, after a visit to Gad’s Hill, where Katey’s redirected matrimonial attentions were again obvious to everyone, I wrote to my mother, “… Charley is still trying hard to talk himself into believing he ought to be married.”
Years later, after my younger brother’s death from the constant stomach ulcers that had proved cancerous, I did ask Kate why she had pulled him into marriage. “I had to get away from that house,” she replied. “I had to get away from my father.”
Dickens did not hide his disapproval of the match. Despite that, Katey was his favourite child and he could not deny her anything, even this folly of a marriage.
On 17 July, 1860, St Mary’s Church in Higham—the church’s steeple would be visible from the writing room in Dickens’s chalet when the latter structure was assembled five years later—was almost buried in white flowers. The lower-class neighbours had created floral arches that showed the way to the church. The night before, the villagers had fired off guns in honour of the nuptials, but a cranky and concerned Charles Dickens had come out onto the lawn of Gad’s Hill in his nightshirt, shotgun in his hands, and said only, “What the devil is all that about?”
A special train had been laid on to bring wedding guests down from London. I remember chatting with Thomas Beard, the understated gentleman who had served as Charles Dickens’s best man two decades earlier. Beard had the odd distinction of being the only person at Kate’s wedding who had also been at the wedding of the bride’s father, although in one brief, ad hoc toast, Dickens himself spoke ironically—almost bitterly, I thought—of “a similar ceremony performed in a metropolitan edifice some four and twenty years ago.”
Kate’s mother, Catherine, was not in attendance, of course. Nor was Elizabeth Dickens, the Inimitable’s elderly but still-surviving mother. Georgina Hogarth was the only member of the bride’s mother’s side of the family present. Few seemed to notice the absences.
After the wedding ceremony, the mob of guests returned to Gad’s Hill for a huge wedding breakfast. Again, everything on and around the table was decorated with white flowers. The wedding breakfast, while sumptuous, took only an hour. The host had promised everyone that there would be no speeches and there were none. I noticed that the bride and groom sat down at the table for a moment, then disappeared while the guests played games on the lawn. My mother, who sanctioned the match no more than did Charles Dickens, needed constant attendance that morning. When Charley and Kate reappeared, dressed for travel, the bride wore black. Katey broke down and cried bitterly on her father’s shoulder. Charley’s face grew more and more pale until I was afraid he was going to faint.
Mother and I gathered with the other thirty or so guests on the gravel path to kiss the newlyweds, shake hands all around, and to throw old shoes. After the carriage had departed, Mother announced that she was not feeling well. I left her seated in the shade just long enough to go inform Dickens of our departure, but could find him nowhere on the lawn amidst the young people playing nor in the parlour downstairs nor in the billiards room or study.
I saw Mamie coming downstairs, went up to Katey’s bedroom— what had been Katey’s bedroom until that morning—and found Dickens on his knees on the floor, his face buried in his daughter’s wedding gown. The Inimitable was sobbing like a child. He looked up at me, his face streaming with tears, perhaps seeing only my silhouette in the doorway and perhaps thinking me still to be his daughter Mamie, and he cried out in a broken voice—“But for me, Katey would not have left home!”
I said nothing. I turned, went downstairs and out onto the lawn, fetched my mother, and called for the carriage to take us back to the station and thence to London.
CHARLES AND KATEY were to have no children. The rumour spread—perhaps started by Dickens, but also perchance from Katey herself—that the marriage had never been consummated. It certainly was true that by the summer of Dickens’s railway accident in 1865, Katey was an unhappy and flirtatious woman, obviously searching for a lover. There were many men around who would not have shown scruples at making love to a married woman, had it not been for the ferocity and constant vigilance of her father.
Charley’s chronic illnesses and stomach aches also became a problem within the Dickens household. I was sure they were only ulcers, and when my brother, Charles, finally died of stomach cancer in 1873, it was only slight consolation that Charles Dickens had preceded him in death.
Dickens said sharply to me that odd autumn of 1865—“Your brother brings a death’s head to my table every breakfast here, Wilkie.” It was obvious to all that Dickens was certain that Charley was dying and that he—the Inimitable, never acknowledging his own illnesses nor allowing for even the possibility of his own death—thought that Charley should get it over with sooner rather than later.
AND SO WE RETURN, Dear Reader, to the dismal state of my own health that winter of 1865–66.
My father had suffered from rheumatism that had concentrated itself behind his left eye, making it all but impossible for him to paint in his final years. My rheumatical gout inevitably migrated to my right eye, all but blinding me and causing me to squint out of my left eye as I wrote. The pain moved into my arm and hand to the point that I had to shift the quill from my right hand to my left to get a dip of ink.
Eventually I would be unable to write at all and would dictate some of my future books from the couch where I lay, but only after training my young secretary—first Harriet but then someone infinitely more ominous—to ignore my screams of pain and to listen only for the dictated sentences between the cries of agony.
I have mentioned that laudanum was my one relief from the pain. I may also have mentioned that it was traditional to take three to five drops of the liquid opium in a glass of wine, but by this time—the winter of 1865–66—I required two to three glasses of the medicine to allow me to work or sleep.
There were the drawbacks I mentioned. The feelings of always being followed and persecuted. The hallucinations. (At first I had assumed the woman with the green skin and tusks for teeth was such an hallucination; but then, after she assaulted me on the stairs in the dark, I awoke several times with deep scratches on my neck.)
One night I was working in my study—writing my novel Armadale—when I realised that a man was sitting in a chair only inches to my left. He was also writing. The man was my Doppelgänger. Or rather, he was I—wearing the same clothes, holding the same pen, turning towards me with the same dull but shocked expression which I must have been presenting to him.
He reached for my blank page.
I could not let him write my book. I could not let that page, my page, become his.
We scuffled. Chairs were knocked over. A lamp was dashed out. In the darkness, I pushed him away and stumbled out into the hall and off to my bedroom.
In the morning I went into my study and found the wall, sections of the window and sill, one corner of the expensive Persian carpet, my chair, its cushion, and two shelves of books absolutely dalmatianed with spattered ink. Six more pages of my novel had been written in a hand that was almost, but not quite, my own.