I burned them in the fireplace.
CHAPTER TWELVE
In December of 1865, Inspector Field reported to me, using hulking Detective Hatchery as his messenger, that Dickens’s “patient,” Ellen Ternan, felt well enough not only to attend a Christmas ball hosted by the brother of her sister’s soon-to-be husband, Anthony Trollope, but was sufficiently recovered from her June injuries at Staplehurst to dance at this party.
With scarlet geraniums in her hair.
By Christmas of that year, Inspector Field was actively complaining to me that he was providing me far more information than I was giving him. It was true. Although Dickens had invited me out to Gad’s Hill several times in the autumn and although he and I had dined in the city and attended various functions together all through that season of his slow recovery from the Staplehurst disaster, we never truly discussed the topic of Drood. It was as if Dickens were somehow aware that I had entered into a covenant of betrayal with the scheming Inspector Field. And yet, if that were true, why would the Inimitable continue to invite me to his home, write me newsy letters, and meet me for dinner at some of our favourite London haunts?
At any rate, Inspector Field had informed me only the week after I had repeated Dickens’s tale of his meeting with Drood, almost word for word, that the writer had lied to me.
If this was true, I realised, then there was no tributary to the buried river of the sort Dickens had described to me. No tunnel leading to another river, no underground rookeries filled with hundreds of the poor driven underground, no Egyptian temple along the banks of this unfound subterranean Nile. Either Dickens had lied to me to protect the real route to Drood’s lair or he had made up the entire encounter.
Inspector Field was not pleased. Obviously he and his men had spent hours or entire nights and days exploring the catacombs and caverns and sewers down there… all to no avail. At this rate, he let me know during our infrequent and sullen meetings, he would never apprehend Drood and would die of old age before pleasing his former superiors at the Metropolitan Police headquarters to the degree that they would reinstate his pension and rehabilitate his good name.
Nonetheless, Field continued to share information with me through the winter. During those autumn months after finishing work on Our Mutual Friend and presumably while having the pleasure of watching its final instalments appear in All the Year Round, Dickens had leased a house for himself in London at 6 Southwick Place, near Hyde Park. There was little mystery in this; he had rented a similar house just around the corner from this one two years before so as to have a convenient place in Tyburnia for his London social engagements, and this new place near Hyde Park was meant to allow his daughter Mamie to come into town whenever she wished for her own society needs (such as they were, since Society seemed to be shunning both Katey and Mamie to a great degree at that time).
So there was no mystery to the lease of a house near Hyde Park. But—as Inspector Field would indicate some weeks later with a wink and a touch of his nose with his corpulent finger—there was significantly more mystery involved in Dickens’s lease of two small homes in the village of Slough: one called Elizabeth Cottage in the High Street, and another one on Church Street only a quarter of a mile away. Although this revelation still lay in the future as the Christmas holiday arrived, I would later learn through Inspector Field that Dickens leased both of these properties under the name of Tringham—Charles Tringham for the Elizabeth Cottage and John Tringham for the house on Church Street.
For a while, Inspector Field would later inform me, the Church Street home lay empty, but then it was occupied by a certain Mrs Ternan and her daughter Ellen.
“We don’t know why Mr Dickens used the name of Tringham,” Inspector Field would say after the New Year as we walked around Dorset Square near my home. “It doesn’t seem important, on the surface, you see, but in our business it always helps if we understand why someone chooses certain aliases under which to do his dirty work.”
Ignoring the “dirty work” allusion, I said, “There’s a tobacconist’s shop on Wellington Street near the offices where Dickens and I work on All the Year Round. The owner, well known to both Dickens and me, is a certain Mary Tringham.”
“Ahh,” said Inspector Field.
“But I do not believe that is the source of the name,” I added.
“No?”
“No,” I said. “Do you happen to know, Inspector, a certain story published in 1839 by Thomas Hood?”
“I don’t believe I do,” the inspector said sourly.
“It’s about village gossip,” I said. “And there’s a bit of a poem in it…
“… learning whatever there was to learn
In the prattling, tattling village of Tringham.”
“Ahhh,” said Inspector Field again, but with more conviction this time. “Well, Mr Dickens… or Mr Tringham, if he prefers… goes to great lengths to hide his presence in Slough.”
“How is that?” I said.
“He dates his letters from Eton, telling his friends that he was merely walking in the Park there,” said Inspector Field. “And he walks miles across back fields from Slough to the Eton railway station, as if he chose to be noticed—if he were noticed at all—waiting for the train to London there rather than in Slough.”
I stopped on our walk and asked, “How do you know what Mr Dickens tells his friends in his private letters, Inspector? Have you been steaming open his mail or interrogating his friends?”
Inspector Field only smiled.
But all of these revelations, Dear Reader, would come about by the spring of 1866, and I must return us now to that bizarrely memorable Christmas of 1865.
WHEN DICKENS INVITED ME up to Gad’s Hill Place for Christmas Day, suggesting in his note that I stay through New Year’s, I accepted at once. “The Butler and the Butler’s Mother shall understand,” he wrote in the same note, referring to Harriet (whom we called Carrie ever more frequently as she matured) and her mother, Caroline, in his usual bantering way. I am not sure Caroline and Carrie did fully understand or appreciate my absence that week, but that was of little concern to me.
As I took the short train ride to Chatham, I held the Christmas Issue of All the Year Round in my hands—the one I’d just contributed to and helped put out and the one that held Dickens’s Christmas story “Cheap Jack” in it—and I thought about the warp and woof of the Inimitable’s fiction these days.
Perhaps it takes a novelist (or some Future Literary Critic such as yourself, Dear Reader) to see what lies behind the words of another novelist’s fiction.
I shall start with Dickens’s most recent Christmas tale:
Cheap Jack, the eponymous hero of the Inimitable’s little fable and a common name in our time for the travelling salesman who moved from village to village with his inexpensive wares, was written about a man whose wife was no longer with him, whose child was dead, and who—for professional reasons—must hide his feelings from the world. Dickens’s character was “King of the Cheap Jacks” and happened to be taking a paternal interest in a young girl with “a pretty face and bright, dark hair.” Was this a twisted self-portrait by the author? Was the young girl Ellen Ternan?
Dickens being Dickens, of course, the girl with the pretty face and bright, dark hair also happens to be deaf and dumb. What would a Dickens Christmas tale be without pathos and bathos?