Death at Hungerford Stairs (34 page)

Sam turned away – he had fulfilled his duty by being there, but he did not want to see to what end he had brought her. The horror of the crime almost faded from his mind when he looked upon the howling mob. The pity and horror, Dickens had said about the execution of the Mannings. He pitied her then and her victims, and poor Victor whom he had never known, but whose death had brought this. With these churning thoughts, he walked away, sick at heart.

In Paris, the hat shop was closed. Madame Regnier and Madame Manette had gone to the country for a little holiday. Apparently, Madame Manette was expecting her first child – it was well to be careful, Madame Rigaud had told her neighbour. The shop would open again in a few weeks. The girl would serve at the counter, and Madame Manette would sew quietly in the back room where the canary sang and Frou curled up by the fire. The child, a boy, was born in April. Spring, not winter. It was an easy birth.

In New York, Michel Blandois read an account of the hanging. He wondered if he might have prevented it all. He thought of a woman with soft curling brown hair framing her thin face and dreaming grey eyes that without spectacles could awake desire. He had loved her once. He thought of a winter's day by the sea and a child playing, running in and out of the water, his face glowing with life. He thought of how he had left him to talk to a Frenchman he knew, and how, when he had gone back to the shore, the laughing boy had gone, swept away by the drag of the tide. She had not forgiven him.

In the little apartment Michel lived with his new wife – she did not know that he was already married. It did not matter, Michel thought. His first wife would never know. The past was in France; the future was here in America, an empty slate on which he could write any version of his life that he wanted. The child cried and his mother hushed him, wrapping the beautifully embroidered shawl round him. He wished now he had not kept it. He had told Louisa that it had been his mother's – she had liked that. She was pretty with her short hair – when they needed money, she had sold her long black hair and now she looked like an attractive boy. Michel did not like it, but she said it would grow and she would be his Louisa again. She brought the child to him.

‘He needs a name, Michel. He must be baptised soon. What shall we call him?'

‘Victor,' he said.

In England, quicklime, white like crystallised snow, strewed the unmarked grave in the ground of Newgate. It was thought that quicklime would hasten the decomposition of the bodies, that it would eat the flesh and bones, and even the poor, twisted heart that had loved Victor. True snow fell softly on the grave where Victor lay, covering the pitiful, tattered flowers which would rot in the months to come, never to be replaced; it fell on the quiet grave wherein lay Mrs Hart and Robin, and it fell now on the grave of Jemmy and Nose, softening the harshness of the dark earth. Dickens and Jones stood there looking at the mounds of earth after the funerals for which Dickens and Sam had paid – not for these victims an unmarked pauper's grave, not for them the number scrawled in chalk on the cheap coffin which would split as it was lowered, not for them the crowded earthen vault. There would be a headstone for each pair, one inscribed with the names Jemmy Kidd and Joe Joram. Nose was all the name that poor disfigured face had possessed so Dickens had christened him, thereby blessing him with a name and a mother. Minnie Joram could be glimpsed by the reader of
David Copperfield
, dancing a little child in her arms, while another little fellow, Joe Joram, clung to her apron – a good mother. It was all he could do for that unknown, abandoned child. Someone, sometime, would pass by and wonder who they were, two boys in one grave – and pity, even if for a moment.

‘
Their little lives, rounded with a sleep – sleep that shuts up sorrow's eye
.' There was comfort in Shakespeare's words, thought Sam, listening to the half-murmured phrases which were Dickens's epitaph for the dead. They walked away from the graveyard. Sam went home to the warmth of Norfolk Street and Elizabeth.

Dickens stood outside the door of number one Devonshire Terrace and looked up at one bright star shining, and thought of a story in which a child looked upon the star as on the home he was to go to. I hope it may be true, he thought as he opened the door to a tremendous rampaging and ravaging on the stairs down which several boys appeared to be tumbling all at once. Catherine stood at the top of the stairs, smiling down at the confusion of boys, Henry in her arms, and holding back Sydney who was longing to fling himself after the others. Georgina was at the bottom of the stairs, just in time to catch the plump and unpoetical Alfred Tennyson, aged four. Home. Magic word. He had come a long way from Hungerford Stairs.

In November 1849, Charles Dickens was writing
David Copperfield
. In the novel, young David is sent to work at the bottle factory owned by Murdstone and Grinby. As a twelve-year-old boy Dickens had worked at Warren's blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs; he never forgot the misery and humiliation of those days: ‘Until old Hungerford Market was pulled down, until old Hungerford Stairs were destroyed, I never had the courage to go back to the place where my servitude began. I never saw it. I could not endure to go near it.'

Dickens married Catherine Hogarth in 1836; by 1849 they had eight children, the baby, Henry Fielding Dickens, being ten months old. Henry Fielding was the most successful of Dickens's children – he became a judge. Charley, the eldest son, did go to Eton in 1850; Sydney, whom Dickens presciently named ‘Ocean Spectre', did go to sea. He died in 1872 and was buried at sea. Katey married Charles, the younger brother of Wilkie Collins, and Mamie stayed with her father until his death in 1870.

Dickens established the Home for Fallen Women with Angela Burdett-Coutts in 1847. He said that Georgiana Morson was the best matron he ever employed. Isabella Gordon and Anna-Maria Sesini were dismissed from the Home in 1849 for misconduct. I have imagined their subsequent history.

John Forster, Dickens's close friend, wrote the first biography of Dickens, and Mark Lemon, another close friend, was editor of
Punch
magazine.

Dickens met Edgar Allen Poe in 1842, and the French poet Lamartine in 1844 and 1847.

The periodical
Household Words
came out in March 1850. It was in this magazine that Dickens wrote his articles on the London police, including the anecdote
On Duty with
Inspector Field.
The character of Superintendent Sam Jones of Bow Street is fictional, though his character does owe something to Inspector Field, particularly his authority over the criminals he and Dickens encounter. There is no evidence that Dickens was ever involved in a murder case, but he was interested in crime, and a recent biographer observed that he had a secret desire to be a detective. In this novel, and in the first of the Dickens and Jones mysteries,
The Murder of Patience Brooke
, I have imagined what might have happened if Dickens had been given the opportunity to investigate a murder.

J.C. B
RIGGS
taught English for many years in Hong Kong and Lancashire and now lives in Cumbria.
Death at Hungerford Stairs
is the second of the cases for Charles Dickens and Superintendent Jones.

First published in 2015

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