Mr. Dickens and His Carol

by Samantha Silva

  “Please, Eleanor,” he whispered. “Let it not be you.”

  36

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Dickens woke with a start, at first not sure where he was or what he was hearing. He had dreamed he was home in his own bed, but it was Furnival’s still, dingy and colder. Bang! Bang! Bang! He pulled the blanket around his shoulders and stumbled toward the clatter at the door—eager pounding mixed with excitable shouting.

  “They’re ’ere, sir! Downstairs!” a familiar voice yelled.

  He swung the door open to find the desk clerk jumping out of his skin.

  “I swears it, sir. This very minute!”

  “Who do you mean?”

  “Them street boys. Demandin’ to talk to ya straightaway!”

  Dickens flung the blanket from his shoulders, coming to quick attention. “Holding my book for ransom, no doubt! I shall put a stop to it at once!”

  Without a thought to his own wrinkled clothes and disheveled hair, he pulled on his boots and pushed past the clerk, skittering down the stairs at top speed. He wanted his book back, that was sure, but, even more, some assurance Eleanor hadn’t taken it. Livid as he was, it was a relief to find all five ragged boys like a phalanx at the bottom of the stairs—this surely was proof enough—and their captain right out front, blocking his way. It was him against them.

  “Aha!” he pounced. “I knew it was you!”

  The clerk had followed him down and now stood on the last stair, eyes as big around as his spectacles. The captain took off his hat and flattened his hair with a lick of his hand.

  “Mornin’, sir—”

  “Dogging my step at every turn! Spying on me!”

  “Sorry?”

  “Don’t play innocent with me, you rapscallion, you. It’s one thing to pick my pocket, but to sink so low as to steal my story! And now to blackmail me for it? Is that your game?”

  The captain cocked his head and looked back to check whether one of his merry band had any clue. There was a round of shabby-coated shrugs. He turned back to Dickens. “’S not like that, sir. See, we’re not in the story-stealin’ business—”

  “I don’t believe you for one moment!” Dickens roared, grabbing the captain by the uppermost lapel of his three coats. “Where is my story?”

  With as much genteel restraint as he could muster, the captain separated his lapel from Dickens’ furious grasp. He flattened his hair one more time and cleared his throat. “We didn’t take yer story, sir. But we think we know where ya might find it.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Dickens, hands clapped to his shirtwaist, searching their faces. But they all looked away, avoiding his gaze. All except the captain, who didn’t blink. “The Folly, sir, in the little square not far from ’ere,” he said, pointing vaguely. “We can take you there.”

  Dickens pulled on his chin, tugged at a button on his shirt. Despite every part of him not wanting to believe the boy, he did. “I know it already,” he said, hanging his head.

  How often in his writing life he’d wanted to fight for what was rightly his. The more fame, the more fighting. He’d never shrunk from it, not once, and Forster was more of a bulldog than he, always out at the end of his leash, snarling for a brawl. But he didn’t have anyone now; he’d run everyone away. No one to shield him from this, whatever it was. Still, he had to know.

  He fastened his waistcoat like armor, and without saying anything slipped past the boys into the fog-thick morning, straight for the clock-tower square. He found a small mob crowding the stage door of the theater, nearly obscuring the sign out front, announcing to the world: AUDITION TODAY! A CHRISTMAS BOG: THE MUSICAL! BY CHAZ PICKENS.

  Dickens trudged closer, pushed into the throng of actors, singers, jugglers, and want-to-be’s, all determined to get inside. “Let me through!” he yelled.

  “Back o’ the line!” shouted a young actor, pushing back. “We were ’ere first.”

  “But I am the author!” Dickens shouted, at which they parted for him like the Red Sea.

  No sooner had he rushed inside than the ragged boys were right behind, shoving their way in. “Friends of the author!” their captain yelled, which seemed to do nicely as well.

  Inside, Dickens stormed down the tunnel-like backstage hall. All the doors looked the same. He opened each one willy-nilly, anything with a knob. But no Eleanor, not anyone at all. At last, he barged into the room with the tumbled wings, swords, and bits of scenery. Still, no sign of her.

  Suddenly he was aware of voices not far away. “What’s my motivation fer killin’ the cousin?” he heard someone ask. Inching closer, Dickens found himself standing in the wings with a clear view of an actor standing alone, center stage, under a gaslight, a few pages in hand—a sloppy white mop of a wig perched on his head.

  “He seems hardly to deserve it,” said the actor.

  Dickens had heard enough. He bolted from the wings onto the stage and ripped the pages from the actor’s hand. Slicing the air with them, he turned to the stage manager, seven rows back in the lower gallery. “What is the meaning of this?”

  The stage manager’s mouth drew open, but he seemed unable to speak.

  “And who is this ‘Chaz Pickens’?” Dickens rapped the pages with the back of his knuckles.

  Another actor, next up for a turn on the stage, held up his copy of the audition sides and made a sour face. “He’s no Charles Dickens, that’s fer sure!”

  Dickens scowled and grunted. He crossed his arms, awaiting an answer.

  The stage manager, in full panic, seemed to cast his eyes about until they settled on a poor old man hunched over his broom, sweeping the gallery floor. “There!” he said, pointing. “He is the author!”

  “The sweeper?”

  “Yes! Mr. Pickens. A genius with a pen!”

  The sweeper, who seemed the sort of man so rarely noticed at all, waved vaguely in Dickens’ direction, playing along.

  Dickens stomped his foot. “This isn’t genius! It’s plagiarism! The fruit of my pilfered manuscript!” He flipped through the three pages. “And in less than one day?”

  “Only the one scene, sir, and we haven’t quite worked out the music,” the stage manager explained, “but it is the Christmas rush, you know—”

  “It must have been someone who’s plotted this all along. I demand to know who gave you my book!”

  The stage manager was on his feet, arms akimbo.

  “Was it … Miss Lovejoy?” Dickens asked, unable to bear the sound of her betrayal on his own lips.

  “No, no! I don’t know a Lovejoy. You’ve got it all wrong,” said the stage manager, stepping sideways toward the aisle, no doubt plotting his escape.

  “Which part of this dodgery have I misunderstood?”

  “I wouldn’t call it d-d-dodgery,” stuttered the manager, frozen in the aisle, ready to flee.

  Dickens stomped his foot again, impatient, when he spotted the purple velvet cloak flaring past the open door at the upper end of the gallery. “There’s the thief!” he shouted, leaping from the stage. The manager ducked and cowered as he passed; all other eyes followed Dickens’ raging flight up the aisle.

  He arrived at the threshold just as Eleanor reached for the outer door. “Running away, are we?”

  Eleanor stopped and turned, unyielding. “Yes. For I cannot bear your accusations one minute more.”

  “You would deny that you have wholly deceived me?”

  “No,” she said, with a subtle shake of her head.

  “And for your own purposes?”

  “Yes. But not the purpose you think.”

  Dickens threw back his head, trying to conceive of some way, any way, he could have misconstrued this course of events. But Forster’s voice thundered in his head. He stepped closer, facing her squarely. The pages shook in his hand. “I think I am a fool. To have allowed you into my heart. To have thought you the one person who wanted nothing from me.”

  Dickens closed his eyes, trying to shut out the pain. He cou
ldn’t stand the sight of her, of himself, of any of it. Eleanor, face full of regret, lifted her trembling hand from inside her cloak and reached her long, delicate fingers toward his face, stopping just shy of his cheek, when suddenly, from inside the theater—

  “’Ere’s the one who done it!” a voice yelled from the stage.

  Dickens opened his eyes and glanced back and forth from Eleanor to the gallery door, torn. He detected concern in her countenance, but didn’t know whether it was for her well-being or his. If he walked away she would flee.

  “’Ere’s yer thief!” the voice said again. Dickens couldn’t resist the commotion inside. He stepped back into the gallery, standing at the far end of the aisle with a clear view of the stage. There, donning helmets and armor themselves, the gang of boys surrounded a cowering figure, swords drawn. He couldn’t make out who it was, but the captain’s sword glinted at a man’s neck, as two others held him down.

  “This is ’im,” the captain shouted. “The one that took yer story. We saw ’im comin’ outta Furnival’s early this morning with it under his arm, I swears.”

  Dickens took a heavy step down the aisle, then another, another, as if pushing against a fierce wind. Resistance, inside and out. If not Eleanor, if not these ragged boys, then who would deceive him so? When he neared the stage, the captain stepped aside, still clutching the man’s snuff-colored coat. And there, hunkered and quavering, was John Dickens, watching his son walk toward him.

  The captain pulled the crumpled old man to standing and let the sword fall to his side. Dickens stopped, unable to take another step. It was impossible to look away. Here, in the great palace of the suspension of disbelief, was a shattering truth right in front of him.

  “I can explain, son,” said his father in a small, creaking voice.

  “Do not,” Dickens whispered.

  John Dickens hung his head, gripping his hat in his liver-spotted hands. His quiver of words had fallen away. His skin was the color of his coat, all pale, naked shame. The stage manager, the sweeper, the actors all watched without a single twitch of a muscle. Even the ragged boys slipped off their helmets and held them to their chests, heads bowed.

  Dickens’ eyes flashed sorrow, despair, disdain, but he had nothing to say. He rubbed his forehead and turned to walk slowly up the cant of the aisle, like steps on a high mountain, each one harder than the last. When he crossed the threshold where Eleanor stood watching, he could hardly muster the strength to say, “Forgive me.”

  At which he took his heavy heart and pushed outside into a city shrouded in grief.

  37

  Warren’s Blacking Warehouse stood, just barely, at 30 Hungerford Stairs, where it seemed to tumble and lean into the blackness of the broody Thames. Dickens stood before it, clutching the collar of his shirt tight around his throat. He had come straight here, shot like an arrow tracing its arc to his own beginnings. It must have been afternoon, but it felt like night. It was always night at Hungerford Stairs. It had been all his life.

  He stared at the warehouse’s falling roof, into its jagged broken windows, like glass teeth, watched rats scurry in and out. His breath made rolling white plumes in the sudden cold—as if the factory itself had changed the weather. His own eyes were black sockets, brow heavy and weary of the world, which now found its center, the darkest center of his own being, right here at a place that should never have been.

  Lost in a spiral of self-pity, he wasn’t aware of Eleanor’s presence until she stepped beside him without a word. He couldn’t bear to look at her.

  “You told me my past would catch me soon enough,” he said at last, staring at his boots.

  “I remember.”

  “Seeing him there, cowering on the stage, he looked so small to me, and scared—the way he looked the day, that day—” His voice faltered. It was as if speaking it aloud made the moment real again, alive in the unbearable present.

  “What day?” Eleanor asked.

  The words stuck in his throat, trapping long-buried demons. “I was just eleven. It was nearly Christmas. My father came and took me out of school, and told me it would be my last day there, because the next day … he would enter Marshalsea.”

  “Many people have gone to debtors’ prison,” she said, lowering the hood of her cloak.

  “But took their families with them.” Dickens searched the sky for some logic to it. “My brothers and sister, my mother. He took all of them, every one. I begged him to take me with him. But I alone was to secure their release. By working here.”

  He nodded toward the decaying warehouse looming over them, over everything. He pointed to a third-floor window. “I sat in that very window, week after week—a mere boy—working ten hours a day putting labels on pots of boot polish for six shillings a week. Eating one stale pastry a day and nothing else, frantic to save enough money to rescue him. But I felt thrown away, all alone in the world.”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat as he plumbed hard for the words to explain. It was a rotted well inside him, and undisturbed for so long. He wiped his nose on his sleeve, then plunged his cold hands into his pockets.

  “I shall never forget,” he said, voice cracking as if he were still that young boy, “that Christmas Eve, just before the iron doors of Marshalsea Prison closed between my father and me. He held me close to him, and we cried, both of us, swearing loyalty and undying affection. But I knew somewhere deep inside … that he had broken my heart forever.”

  Eleanor lowered her eyes.

  “It’s been my dark secret all these years. Of that moment between my father and me, until now, no word has ever passed my lips. Nor his, I’m sure.”

  “Of course not, Charles.”

  “What kind of man would leave his son?”

  “A lost man,” she said.

  He wiped his sniffling nose again and half nodded.

  “But can you not see,” she said, “that in that moment, his heart was broken as well?”

  Dickens squeezed his eyes shut, trying to see what she did. He shook his head.

  “For the second saddest thing in the world after a child who’s been abandoned,” said Eleanor, “is the parent who abandons him.”

  Dickens glanced at the Thames, a dark, unstoppable current. Life rolling over him and away, shifting the dross at the bottom, remaking the banks, but always, always receding for the mudlarks, who dredged for its ruined leavings. He was powerless against it.

  “Perhaps I’m the one who’s lost,” he said.

  “We are all lost, all broken,” said Eleanor. “Trying desperately to be whole again.”

  He nodded and shook his head, both at once. It was true, and sad. But unspeakable, even now.

  She let his silence stand. Watched him cross a hand to his shoulder and rest his chin there. Waited while he stared again at his muddy boots. When he met her gaze, finally, he couldn’t think what else to say.

  “Why didn’t you ask for your book back?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged.

  “Perhaps it wasn’t the Christmas book you meant to write after all.”

  His shoulders caved toward each other in surrender, defeat. “I have no other Christmas book within me.”

  She nodded, her voice quiet as a prayer. “But every book you’ve ever written is a book about Christmas. About the feeling we must have for one another, without which we are lost.”

  Eleanor stepped closer. Their faces were at near angles, her mouth by his ear, voice thin and trembling, each word an effort.

  “When my husband died, your books were all he left us, all he had. Yet I think them the very thing that saved me, and my son.”

  Dickens gripped the back of his neck. A tear ran down the length of his nose and fell to the ground. He wiped his face roughly.

  “I read them aloud to cheer him, each of your stories, again and again. And found from the very first page of the very first book the strangest sensation that I did know you, and that you knew me, and Timothy, too. All of
us. No matter our faults, our weaknesses, our station in life. That you felt the greatest tenderness for us.”

  Dickens looked into her eyes, shining with tears of their own.

  “And your books made me think of my own family, and our Christmases past. How we had no money, yet felt rich as kings. We danced and made merry into the wee hours,” she continued, eyes lighting at the memory. “All the worries of the year seemed to vanish with the first snow, for then we’d gather ’round the hearth and tell stories, all ending happily…” Her voice caught in her throat—a melancholy so powerful she had to pause to let it pass. “And the colder it was, the nearer we were to each other, and to the truth of Christmas. The truth of your books … That despite what is cold and dark in the world, perhaps it is a loving place after all.”

  They were both sniffling now, lost in their own memories, and each other’s. She wiped her tears with the palm of her thin crocheted glove; he, with the sleeve of his shirt. One sighed and then smiled; the other whimpered and laughed. Moonlight cut through the fog to dance on the tips of the river’s whitecapped waves. It made a circle of light on the spot where they stood. They turned their faces to the sky, where a few stars burst through to assure them they were not alone.

  “If I could believe,” he said, “standing here, that I’m that writer still—”

  “You were that writer long ago, even here; and that very boy, the writer you became.”

  “A boy who loved Christmas, with all his heart.”

  She stepped to his side, gazing upon his past with him. “Then let the specter of your memory be the spark of your imagination.”

  He turned to her wondrous eyes, where lived the moon and the stars and forgiveness and hope.

  “Perhaps I could try…”

  Part III

  38