The Murder of Patience Brooke (32 page)

Sam caught up with him. He had seen for himself that dreadful fall. ‘Accident?’

‘I do not think so. He knew it was all over. I saw his face and that terrible smile.’ He shuddered. ‘I do not want to see. I wrote about it. I described Carker’s death and I can imagine what he looks like now. The train must have gone over him.’

‘I think it did. Well, I shall have to deal with the authorities. We were seen chasing him. The police will come soon. I must speak to them, and send messages to London and Crewe Hall.’

‘’Tis better as it is,’ said Dickens.

‘I think so, too.’

They went back along the platform and Sam went to speak to the stationmaster. Four porters took away the body on a board; a sheet of rough canvas had been thrown over the mangled thing to cover it from the stares of frightened passengers who crowded on both platforms, peering at the line where the bloodied body had lain, crushed beyond recognition. They were curious, too, but had trains to catch, and so they reluctantly dragged themselves away when the whistles sounded. The Liverpool train left at last, leaving the platform empty but for a few loiterers, hoping to see something more, and the London train departed, too. The station was quiet now, and Dickens saw the wooden board carried away into the stationmaster’s office, out of sight. He felt relief and pity, wondering again what had made that young man into what he was. He had been generously and kindly treated, educated expensively, and loved by a beautiful girl and he had gone wrong. Yet Scrap who had nothing and no one, as far as he could tell, would certainly go right.

The authorities dealt with, and satisfied that the superintendent from London had hunted his quarry to Crewe Station, and that the criminal had fallen in his attempt to escape, and that the superintendent and Mr Dickens would return for the inquest, Dickens and Jones were free to return to London on the last express which they caught just in time, which saved them a night in the station hotel. The stationmaster’s wife had given them hot tea and good sandwiches, so there was no need for bear pie or sand cakes.

They stared out at the dark which enveloped the speeding train. Somewhere across the black fields Lady Amelia Crewe would be getting the news that Edmund Crewe was dead and would trouble them no more.

‘Justice?’ asked Sam. ‘Did we get justice for Patience as we promised?’

‘I think we did, and for the living, which is just as important. It is better for Patience’s daughter that he is dead. And for Mrs Blackledge and little Rose. There will be no sensational murder trial to wound any of them. Better for the Home, too, and for the girls, and for Jenny and Louisa. Better for Sir Hungerford who is, I think, as his aunt said, an honourable man. And Patience will be buried where her daughter can visit her grave and know her in a way. Lady Amelia will see to that.’

‘And Edmund Crewe?’

‘Doomed, I think. And he destroyed himself when he murdered Patience, if he had not done so before.’

‘What made him, I wonder?’ asked Sam. ‘He had so much to make him envied: good looks, wealthy benefactors, the Crewe name, a woman who loved him, at first, at any rate, a lovely child, yet he threw it all away. What a waste. When I think –’ Sam’s lips tightened in anger. Dickens knew he was thinking of Edith, who had wanted to live.

‘The song tells us –
bereft of my parents, bereft of my home
– I suppose he felt cheated. When the nurse sang it, did he feel, even then, that he was slighted, excluded?’

‘But he was not, was he? They gave him everything,’ Sam pointed out, reasonably.

‘But it was not enough. Edmund, the bastard – perhaps that was it. Edmund in
King Lear
–
why bastard, wherefore base?
he asks,
and why brand they us with base?
Perhaps, the bitterness corroded his soul so that whatever was done for him was never sufficient to erase that early sense of dispossession. Perhaps the nurse meant to be cruel. Childhood leaves its indelible mark. I know that. And, I think sometimes, Sam, that there is in us all an impulse of self-destruction, but it is held in check by our responsibilities, our sense of duty to others and ourselves. Even Edmund in
King Lear
says he means to do some good at the end. You know, Crewe raised his hand to me at the last moment – perhaps his last act was the only good he has ever done – to die and release us all as well as himself.’

Sam thought a while in silence. ‘You may be right, I do not know. I find it hard to believe in any good in him after what we have seen. Little girls – there’s no excuse for that.’

‘No, you are right.’ Dickens thought about the little, forgotten girl in that rank garden.

‘But the worst is over, as you have said, and it is better for all those left behind. And though I said I would see him hang, I never do want it really.’

Dickens looked at what remained of his hat. Sam Weller came into the carriage. ‘Ta’nt a werry good ’un to look at, an’ afore the brim went, it was a werry handsome tile. Hows’ever it’s lighter without it, and every hole lets in some air.’

Sam laughed. ‘At least you got it back. I don’t know where mine went – I was fond of that hat. I like Sam Weller, he makes me laugh.’

‘I like him, too, though I have a fancy that David Copperfield will be my favourite child.’

They were quiet then, each thinking of Edmund Crewe and Patience, and where it all began when they had driven through the night to Urania Cottage just over a week ago. Sam did not know, he thought, whether Crewe meant to do some good by his last act. He was a policeman, not a writer like his dear friend, and he could not help feeling somehow dissatisfied. Perhaps when the inquests were over and the dead buried, he would feel that the case could be closed. He closed his eyes.

Dickens saw his frown. He did not know, he thought. Perhaps he had imagined the meaning of that last smile; perhaps Crewe was bad through and through – he’d abused children, as Sam had reminded him. His last act did not redeem his crimes. Still, Crewe was dead, whatever meaning there was in his fall. And the dead would be buried and the living could get on with their lives, and make the best of them, he hoped, including himself and Sam in that company.

The train thundered on, the night rolling by. They could see a starlit sky, and the empty vastness above and beyond them. They thought of the mystery of it all, and, finding a kind of peace in each other’s presence, slept.

The inquests were over; the law had given its verdicts on the deaths of Patience, Blackledge and Edmund Crewe, and the unknown little girl they had found. The documents were sealed with red wax and stored away in black boxes, and the newspapers finished their speculations. Mrs Blackledge and Rose started a new life, Patience’s daughter learned to walk, and Francis Fidge, as Dickens had foretold, lay at peace in the quiet churchyard of St Mark’s. Jenny Ding went back to her lessons, but Louisa Mapp did not stay at Urania Cottage. Who would support her mother and sister? she had asked angrily. Dickens had no answer. Superintendent Jones felt better and turned his mind to other cases, though Patience somehow stayed in that part of his mind where Edith was.

And Charles Dickens went on with
David Copperfield
. Some days he waited for him to come, staring at the blank piece of paper on his desk, but most days David was there, and, later there would be Dora and Jip who would turn out to be an irritant to David, always in the way when he wanted to kiss Dora, though Dickens would not tell Eleanor and Tom Brim that – he would only say that Jip could never be Poll’s equal. And, yet, poor Jip. Dickens would relent and show him faithful to the end, dying with Dora. The Brims would like that.

On a spring day when the early sun promised warmth, four people took the express train to Crewe and a fly was hired to take them to a quiet country churchyard not far from the great house. Dickens and Jones, Mrs Morson and Davey came to turn the last page of the story of Patience Brooke.

The gravestone was simple, just of grey stone, with a short inscription:

To the memory of

Patience Lee

Wife and Mother.

There were fresh spring flowers on the green mound. Superintendent Jones and Charles Dickens looked at the words – justice, they thought, had been done.

In February
1849
, Charles Dickens began
David Copperfield
. The first number was published by Bradbury and Evans on
1
st May
1849
.

Dickens married Catherine Hogarth in
1836
; by
1849
they had eight children, the baby, Henry Fielding Dickens, was born on
16
th January. Henry Fielding was the most successful of Dickens’s children – he became a judge. Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens was born in
1845
and Francis Jeffrey Dickens in
1844
. Charley, the eldest son (b.
1837
) went to Eton in
1850
; Katey (b.
1839
) married Charles, the younger brother of Wilkie Collins, and Mamie (b.
1838
) 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, though there is no evidence of anything other than a purely professional relationship between Dickens and Mrs Morson. Isabella Gordon and Anna-Maria Sesini were dismissed from the Home in November
1849
for misconduct.

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

Elizabeth Dickens, Dickens’s paternal grandmother, and her husband, William Dickens, worked as housekeeper and steward for the Crewe family at Crewe Hall in Cheshire. Sir Hungerford Crewe inherited Crewe Hall and the Crewe family estates in
1837
. The characters of Lady Amelia and Edmund Crewe, and the story of his mother are inventions.

Charles Barrow, Dickens’s maternal grandfather, was Chief Conductor of Moneys in Town, for the Navy Pay Office. In
1810
he was found guilty of embezzlement and absconded to the Isle of Man.

The actor, William Macready, was a close friend of Dickens. He was godfather to Kate Macready Dickens, the second daughter of Charles Dickens. Dickens was godfather to Macready’s son, Henry. Dickens admired Macready’s acting, particularly the Shakespearean roles for which Macready was acclaimed.

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 a little to Inspector Field, particularly his authority over the criminals he and Dickens encounter. A police constable named Rogers appears in the anecdote
On Duty with Inspector Field
. 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, the first of the cases investigated by Dickens and Jones, I have imagined what might have happened if Dickens had been given the opportunity to investigate a murder.

J.C. Briggs taught English for many years in Hong Kong and Lancashire. She now lives in a cottage in Cumbria with her husband who is an artist.
The Murder of Patience Brooke
is the first of the cases for Charles Dickens and Superintendent Jones.

First published in 2014

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