Stevenson said little of what he had done over the years, but gave Dickens to understand that the bosun was not the only man who had died at his hands. He had learned the technique of strangulation favoured by the murderous Thugs prior to their suppression. Twelve months earlier, he had finally worked his passage back to London. Whatever crimes he had committed, they were too serious for it to be possible for him, even after such a lapse of time, to dare to assert his true identity. When he learned, with much astonishment, of his sister’s celebrity, it made him all the more determined not to bring dishonour upon her by revealing that he was still alive. Although Dickens protested fiercely, the old man was adamant. Elizabeth might have been heartbroken by his supposed demise, but at least she entertained nothing but good thoughts of him. He could not contemplate shattering her faith in his decency.
The privations of a misspent life meant that he fell sick with increasing frequency. On one occasion he collapsed in Covent Garden and a nurse had assisted him. He gathered from her that his heart was fading. A relapse might occur at any time, with fatal consequences.
Thus he had decided to make one last journey to the North. Not to see his sister, that was impossible, but someone whose memory he had cherished for more than thirty years. He had always worshipped Clarissa, but had been too shy to make his admiration known to her. Now it became a matter of obsession for him to look upon her one last time before he died.
After journeying north to Knutsford, he quickly discovered that the woman he had for so long adored was kept virtually as a prisoner in her own home by an avaricious and violent husband. A husband, moreover, of whom he had heard tell during his years in India. Pettigrew had, after a drinking bout, raped a servant girl. Although his superiors did their utmost to hush up the scandal, the story became well-known and Pettigrew was forced not only to leave the sub-continent but also to resign his commission. Stevenson resolved that he would at least do one last good thing in his life. He would free her from the brute.
It took a little while to pluck up the courage to talk to her. He kept watch on the house and eventually hit upon the idea of asking her to meet him. She had not kept the assignation behind the Lord Eldon on the day he sent her the message, but the next evening, terrified lest her absence be discovered by her husband, she dared to venture out. His faith in her innate bravery had been vindicated. Stevenson said that, once she had recovered from the shock of meeting a man she had believed was long dead, she had begged him not to do anything rash. But his mind was made up.
He had lured Pettigrew out of Canute Villa the previous evening by the simple expedient of a scrawled note saying I know the truth about your time in India. The stratagem succeeded. Stevenson had confronted his enemy, but on his account the Major lashed out at him. Illness had ravaged Stevenson’s body, but the urge to save Clarissa had given him the strength to overcome Pettigew and slowly squeeze the life out of him.
“You must come forward,” Dickens insisted. “An innocent man is under arrest for the crime. Besides that, your sister and Clarissa must know the truth!”
The ailing tramp shook his head. He had lost all his strength now and Dickens had to bend forward to catch what he said.
“No. You swore you would keep the secret, Mr Dickens. And you must.”
“But…”
The old man raised a knobbly hand. “No. I shall not leave Knutsford, Mr Dickens, never fear. Soon they will find me here, dead, and in my coat they will discover… this.”
He withdrew from inside his coat a thick, knotted cord.
“You see that stain? It is Pettigrew’s blood, Mr Dickens, from when I pulled it so tightly around his throat…”
Suddenly he made a strange rasping noise and slumped to the ground, still clutching, at the moment of his death, the means of murder.
Dickens insisted that Elizabeth accompany him to Canute Villa the next morning. It was his impression that there was a faint touch of colour in the widow’s cheeks. Her voice sounded stronger and her carriage seemed more erect.
“I hear that Bowden has been released from custody,” she said. “I have already said to Alice that I am willing to take him back in service. I was distraught when my… my late husband gave him notice.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “Is there any doubt that this tramp whose body was found on the Moor is the murderer?”
“None.” Dickens held Clarissa’s gaze. “It has been a dreadful business. And yet – perhaps some good has come of it.”
Clarissa gave the slightest nod. There was a distant look in her eyes and Dickens was sure that she was thinking about the man who had loved her without acknowledgment, let alone hope, for so many years, and how he given her the most precious gift of all. Her freedom.
“How sad,” Elizabeth said, “that a man should become so depraved that he should commit a mortal crime for no rational cause.”
“Who knows what his reasons may have been, my dear Scheherezade?” Dickens said. “Clarissa has given him her forgiveness and so must we.”
Elizabeth nodded. “Poor man. To die, unloved.”
Dickens cast a glance at Clarissa and said, so softly that only she could hear, “Perhaps not unloved at the very end.”
ROSEHIP SUMMER by Roz Southey
It was thirty years and more ago. I remember it as the hottest of years. The valley was ripe with summer; rowan berries flamed in the hedges, heather set fire to the mountain-sides. In the overgrown hedges on either side of the lanes, rosehips flared, inviting the children to go picking. Six pence a pound you could earn from the firm that made rosehip syrup and there was eager competition to collect the most.
All the children picked rosehips except me. I stayed in, because mam told me it would do me good to get out, and because Janey was so good at picking. From my room upstairs, illicitly using our dead father’s binoculars, I could watch her striding across the fields, milk cans swinging; in front of her rabbits stiffened, then went bounding away.
Janey and me competed for who could annoy mam the most. We infuriated her by thwarting her prejudices; girls should look good, boys should be stoical. Janey hunted out odd socks and holed cardigans; I moaned and said the sun made me ill, or that my tummy felt queasy. Mam shouted, and the more she shouted, the more we taunted her. Janey was best and usually won, to my annoyance and her triumph. I felt she somehow had an unfair advantage, that she knew things I didn’t, and wasn’t letting on. I tried to get them out of her but couldn’t. Janey never told me anything she didn’t have to – we hated each other. But we hated mam more.
That was all right, because she hated us too. We reminded her too much of dad.
As Janey crossed the fields, she carried a huge walking stick. Fred Hudson, who saw her pass, said later he’d had a laugh – she was so small that when she went behind the hedge, all he could see was the top of the walking stick, bobbing up and down. Only when she reached the gap in the hedge could he see her properly – a skinny child, over-burdened with the stick and with milk cans heavy with rosehips.
Annie Graham saw her maybe half an hour later; Janey was scrambling across a wall, sending a scatter of stones down to the ground. Annie came straight down to mam’s to complain. “Bloody kids, breaking down the wall like that. What if the sheep get out? No sense, kids these days.” Mam set her lips hard and waited till Annie was gone before screaming at me and sending me to my room. I went, both exultant and angry. Exultant because we’d infuriated mam again, annoyed because it was Janey who’d done it not me.