Dickens didn’t know what to do. Put it all back, that first, yes, push the trunk under the bed, scramble to his feet, retrieve his hat at the last second, the spray of flagging laurel, and rush out her door. He closed it clumsily behind him, thought better of it, left it slightly open as he’d found it, and vaulted down the stairwell that now closed in on both sides. He spilled out her door into the street, disconcerted, and thankful the old women were turned away and didn’t see him. He was breathing fast, confused and upset. He’d entered the secret places of Eleanor’s life uninvited, but it was he who felt aggrieved. There was a man—a husband, surely—she hadn’t mentioned. And why should she? Dickens was nothing to her, less even than he was to Maria, who at least believed his acquaintance meaningful. He didn’t know why it mattered so. Why his heart, which moments ago had been buoyed, was now sinking to the bottom of the sea.
When he collected himself and turned to go, not ten steps from her door, he came flat against a flank of street urchins, striplings in their late teens, standing shoulder to shoulder, blocking his way. Maybe they’d spotted him on his walk and followed him! They had a roughness about them, the look of lads whose pockets were thick with other people’s money. The cleverest sort.
Their captain stepped forward. His three tattered coats, one atop the other, gave him away. He was the same one who’d accosted him at the back of his house but two weeks before.
“Good Lord! You again?”
The young ruffian held out his cupped hands and put on his best “Oliver” voice. “Please, sir. May we have some more?” His scrabby underlings chimed in, one at a time, then all at once, with their own cupped hands and a mocking chorus of, “More, more, more?”
Dickens was red in the face, collar tight, his lips dagger-thin. The captain cocked his head with a smirk, as if pleased they’d had the desired effect.
“I am not amused!” Dickens said, slapping his hat onto his head and sliding past them down the street at a swift clip.
When he turned onto the clock-tower square, he jolted at the sight of Miss Lovejoy walking toward home, a market basket over her arm, radiant and at ease, an innocent to his prying and snooping about. He lowered his head, praying she hadn’t spotted him, and took the nearest corner to disappear down Holborn Hill.
21
The mysterious Miss Lovejoy hounded his thoughts, and no amount of fast-walking could cure it. Dickens’ mood had plunged from hope to humiliation. He knew that every person was a fiery furnace of passions and attachments, unknown to every other. He had stepped too close and been burned. It was his own doing, but the red-hot pain of it seared all the way down.
When he was sure he’d put enough distance between himself and his petty crime, he began to suffer the sort of hunger stimulated by sneaking about with little expertise in the matter and nothing to show for it. In search of some comfort and a sturdy glass of port, he settled for a dining room stuffed into a little court out of Newgate Street. It was an old room he frequented often, heavy-paneled, dark, and dingy, just the place to hide from the world, with a fire crackling away no matter the season. It had old-fashioned food and tidy waiters with limp white neckcloths who were always glad to leave him in peace for the prospect of a twopence at the end of the meal, and even, occasionally, three. Dickens wanted to be alone to nurse his embarrassment.
Once the monotonous catalogue of roast beef, boiled pork, mutton chop, pigeon pie, and rump-steak pudding was discharged, he muttered his usual order, then snapped open the pages of The Times, intending to dine alone with his wounded pride, a chop, and an ale. When the waiter returned after he’d eaten to ask whether a pastry or cheese was wanted to top off his meal, Dickens dismissed him politely, only to find two ladies eyeing him over the daily news. They were well-to-do, judging from the chaos of ostrich feathers and taffeta bows on their bonnets, and no doubt twins, with identical pointy chins, marionette lines down the sides of their mouths, and mauve satin dresses with stiff puffed sleeves and high collars. They had the mean look of audacious gossipers.
“Excuse me, sir,” said the first sister. “Are you who we think you are?”
“Charles Dickens?” ventured the second, less convinced than her twin.
Dickens put on the air of a bumptious city clerk with hardly enough time to spare for his dinner and even less for them. He feigned a smile. “I’m flattered, ladies. I often get that. But I am not he.” He rattled his newspaper and disappeared behind it.
“I told you so,” said the second sister to the first. “The real Mr. Dickens is much better-looking!”
He lowered the paper again to glower at the women, when something pulled his gaze to the dirty window. A single weathered pane framed the face of a young woman who shaded her brow with a hand as she pressed her face against the watery glass to search the room. It was Eleanor Lovejoy herself! He didn’t know whether to hide or run, debated the merits of both in his head over the course of three seconds, and finally leapt from his chair. He tossed aside The Times, grabbed his hat, and marched straight outside to meet his fate, whatever it was. If, as he suspected, she had found him out and trailed him here, he was sure he could explain somehow.
He was only steps ahead of the waiter, bringing his bill.
“Mr. Dickens!” the waiter called after him.
The twin busybodies, hearing his true name, looked at each other with matching scowls. But Dickens was already out the door, pushing toward Eleanor’s side.
“Miss Lovejoy?”
She turned toward the sound of his voice. They were square to each other, as close as they’d ever been. He’d never seen her like this, in the full light of day. The hood of her cloak was down. Loose curls the color of deep autumn graced the sides of her face. Today her eyes were bachelor-button-blue, right to the edge of violet, clear and alive. White florets spiraled away from the dark centers, like clouds reflected from the sky. She was more beautiful, more vivid, each time they met. The little crowded court, all the world, ebbed around her.
“Mr. Dickens! I’m so glad to have found you.”
This took some considerable rethinking on his part. “You were looking for me?”
“Yes, I followed you here. You see, I found a posy of laurel dropped at my doorstep and caught sight of you in the street, and assumed—”
“Oh, the laurel.” He didn’t know how to excuse the series of circumstances that had led him to be in her room. “You see, I did bring you laurel, but not finding you home, well, it so happened, your door was—”
“Never mind,” she said, dismissing any need for explanation. “I lost track of you in the street, but I’ve found you now.”
Dickens turned his hat in his hand, taking in this turn of events. Instead of horror at his own behavior, he now felt grateful he’d dropped the laurel outside her place, no doubt when he was accosted by the gang of street boys near her door. But there was also a keen satisfaction knowing she had sought him out. Perhaps he was wrong about the husband. A married woman might take offense at a gesture of flowers of any kind, and certainly wouldn’t pursue a man who’d brought them. Timothy Lovejoy might be a brother, an uncle, a father, a grandfather. He might be anyone. Who had loved her enough to leave her his collection of novels. Why, he should simply ask her, if he could do so without revealing his own regretful sleuthing in her room. The question was working its way from his mind to his lips when the waiter appeared, waving a piece of paper.
“Sir! Your bill!”
“Oh, of course,” he said, fumbling in his pocket for change. He deposited a coin in the waiter’s hand.
The waiter looked at the coin and found it wanting. He stood there, hand out, sure there would be more.
“That’s all, thank you,” said Dickens, eager to return his attention to Miss Lovejoy.
“Quite sure, sir?”
“Quite!” he barked.
The waiter rolled his eyes, straightened his neckerchief, and went back inside.
“The world enters in, doesn’t it, when one
least wants it,” he said to her, exasperated.
“And when we want it the most?” she asked. “What does the world do then?”
Dickens tilted his head to consider her. She had a way of getting to the heart of things, right past gibbering small talk. There was a ready intimacy between them he didn’t understand. They had exchanged so few words in their brief acquaintance, but each one carried weight and purpose. If she would forgo pleasantries, so, too, would he.
“Will you walk with me? Somewhere quieter than this.”
Eleanor nodded her assent, a small, reassuring lift of her eyes. Even her forehead, the tendrils dancing across it, seemed to say yes. But when he held out his elbow, she stopped to consider it, suddenly shy. He was willing to wait, as long as necessary, when another voice called out to him. It was Topping, ruffled and out of breath, flagging a piece of paper and pushing through the crowd. He took off his bowler hat and wiped his forehead. His flop of red hair was matted like a helmet.
“Beg pardon, sir. I’ve been looking for you all morning.”
“Good Lord, Topping. How did you find me?”
“It’s one of yer places, sir. You often come here.”
“Well, what is it you want? Can you not see I am otherwise engaged?”
“But they won’t deliver without your promise to pay, sir. Four turkeys—”
“I’ve not ordered any turkeys.”
“For the missus, sir. And a goose!”
At the mention of his wife, Dickens mellowed like an old port wine; the tiny muscles around his eyes relaxed, his shoulders dropped an inch. “Is she home?” he whispered, with a subtle upturn of hope in his voice.
“Oh, no, sir. Far from it. The turkeys are to board a coach for Scotland. And the goose!” Topping produced a bill of sale and a sharpened pencil.
Dickens’ terrible mood rebounded, his shoulders clenched at his back. He grabbed the bill and ground his teeth. “I trust they’re not traveling first-class,” he said, spraying spittle as he scratched his name and handed it back. Eleanor, beside him, seemed to blink back a smile.
“Anything else, sir?” asked Topping, as if he missed his master’s presence but would never say so, not straight out.
“There was nothing in the first place!” Dickens was altogether losing patience. He had a great fondness for his groom, but these interruptions were maddening. He didn’t know what he wanted, except to be left in peace.
Topping scratched his head and stood his ground, shifting from one foot to the other.
“What is it, Topping?”
“The tree, sir. The one in the parlor. Wot should I do with it?”
“I don’t care. Do whatever you like. Just don’t let the dogs piss on it!”
“Very good, sir,” he said, somehow pleased to be of any service at all.
Dickens watched Topping fall into the stream of people wending their way back toward Newgate, his flaming hair disappearing under his hat. He heaved a frustrated sigh and shook his head. It wasn’t Topping he was mad at, or Catherine. But what, then? His mood bubbled and jumped, in small spurts, first calm, then furious, then remorseful, now bristling with his own self-importance, then feeling himself no better than a worm. He turned back to Eleanor, who had never left his purview, surprised to find her looking up at him under a thick curtain of black lashes, with a benevolent generosity in her eyes.
“Your family. Are they away?” she asked, breaking his stare.
“Indefinitely, I’m afraid.”
“Is it lonely for you?”
The question pierced him like an arrow. “At times, yes. But it’s my own doing.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That I’m so awful a man to chase his own family away?”
“Yes, perhaps. Or so misunderstood.”
This hit him like a wall. It was peculiar what she understood, with keen precision, without knowing him at all. That he wanted to be seen, cherished, and cared for, without demands, without the necessity of fixing everything—understood for who he was when he meant well and did what he could. He bowed his head and rubbed the top of it. His abiding aloneness long preceded Catherine’s leaving, even the marriage itself. He wondered sometimes how deep it resided. Whenever he got close enough to see it clearly, he dizzied and recoiled. But he couldn’t escape it. No matter how full his house, his dining table, his days, there it was again, the sense of being singular and separate from the world. But now he was tired of it all, his own responsibilities, everyone else’s expectations. When he raised his chin to face her, he found himself looking through a sheen of his own near-tears.
“So you see, I have no one to keep me company but you.”
Eleanor worried her fingerless, crocheted gloves, as if struggling for an answer. He understood. If there was no husband, she was a single woman, and he a married man. Any sensible person might think it a calamity in the making. And yet he found in her a kindred soul, and couldn’t help himself. She turned her gaze away, revealing the bare white canvas of her slender neck, the pristine line of her jaw. He wished he were a painter with palette and brushes in hand, because words were inadequate to tell the form of her brow, how light flowed over the surface of her cheek, the delicate indent right below it, the subtle bloom of her lips. He’d been too forward again, but the temperate air and her loveliness had emboldened him.
He put a hand to the fur lapel of his long frock coat, where his heart was. “I shall be a perfect gentleman,” he pledged. “No threat whatsoever to your reputation. On my good word.”
When no answer came, he followed her gaze. The high-collared busybodies from the dining room were marching outside, matching capes puffing behind them. They stopped some twenty feet away, but glowered at Dickens, whispering back and forth.
“It seems your reputation is the one in some peril, Mr. Dickens,” said Eleanor with a crinkle of her eyes.
The women swaggered straight for him.
“Indeed, I’m not a man, I’m an exhibit!”
In the blink of an eye, the first twin pulled a pair of scissors from her purse, charged forth, and snipped a clump of fur from his collar.
“What on earth?” he shouted.
“I may not like your books,” she said, brandishing her fistful of fur, “but I am a collector nonetheless!”
The lady turned on her heel with her nose in the air, while her sister lifted her heavy skirts, raised a black laced boot, and kicked his shin with a patent toe as hard as she could. Eleanor gasped. Dickens grimaced and clutched his leg.
“Good Lord, madam!”
“That is for our dear, sweet Little Nell!” she said, wagging a finger in his face. “Who did not deserve to die!”
The sisters marched away, victorious. Dickens hopped on one leg, wincing.
“Are you all right?” asked Eleanor, somewhere between concern and amusement.
“Well! I’ve been mauled by my readers before, but never so maimed as this.”
Eleanor shook her head, trying not to chortle outright. “I’m sorry. It’s only that I remember feeling the same, when I read every number of Curiosity Shop, and then came to it, and didn’t know, couldn’t believe, that you would kill off poor Little Nell. But I never dreamed of kicking you.”
“Well, I’m grateful for that, at least,” he said, regaining his footing. “But how shall I escape all the others?”
22
In a small room backstage at the Folly, squeezed and cluttered with tumbled angel wings, swords, crowns, hats, helmets, and odd bits of painted scenery, Dickens sat at a dressing table before a trifold mirror, staring at himself. This was Eleanor’s theater, her domain, her costumer’s room, and here he was, surrendering his welfare to her best instincts. She had struck on an idea after witnessing the twin ladies’ frontal assault, followed by listening to him bemoan the slings and arrows of life as Charles Dickens. Giving no clue at all, she instructed, even dared him to follow her, ask no questions, and simply trust her.
“What do you see?” she asked, t
hrowing the heavy curtains open to let in the light.
The brass mirror dared him to look. It stood confidently on four sturdy peg feet, and despite a hairline crack in the middle part, its folding wings were beveled and cloudless. But it was she who filled the reflection, standing behind him in a gray wool dress. The window poured a halo around her, making her eyes into moonstones now, shimmering feldspar, translucent pale blue, then lavender, then another color altogether, or no color at all. Only clarity. He found it hard to look away.
“What do you see in you?” she repeated, arching a brow.
Dickens flapped his mouth shut, cleared his throat, and obeyed. Turning to his own reflection in the glass, he furrowed his forehead, winced, pouted, and frowned, trying on faces, testing his own feelings. A mirror had always been, for him, a working tool—the place he often found his characters, their attributes, tics, and nuances. How low could a man’s brow go? How wide a smile? Was the head all pushed to one side, the ears pinned back, or the cheeks puffed out like a blowfish? Where did a mood sit on a poor man’s face that had known too much sun, where delicacy on a young girl’s who’d seen none?
It was an accepted rule of his house that he wasn’t to be disturbed when at work in his study, unless the children were ill. Then he would carry the afflicted child to his sofa to be doted on and watch him work. He wasn’t aware, until Mamie told him, how often he would leap from his chair and rush to the gilt mirror that hung beside their little portraits, contorting his face in all directions, sometimes talking to himself rapidly in a low voice, then back to his desk. Up and down, up and down, writing frantically while the features were fresh in his mind. He inhabited the creatures of his pen in every detail, and they lived in him.
But now a dreary version of himself gazed back.
Mr. Dickens and His Carol Page 10