The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White)

by Lynn Shepherd

  Charles turns to him, his face aghast. “What was the girl’s name? The mother?”

  Bucket eyes him a moment, then nods. “So you understand, now, do you? I wondered how long it would take for you to marry it all together. You see, now, why I am in hopes that this bruised and wounded girl may yet find love in the bosom of her own proper family. For your guess is right, my lad, and your case is solved against all expectation. The name of Hester’s mother was Honoria. Honoria Chadwick.”

  Half an hour later Charles is walking the short step back to Buckingham Street. The thin sun is warming his back and despite all he has witnessed, and all he has undergone, for the first time in weeks his mind is at rest. He parted with Bucket at the top of the steps, where the Inspector turned to him and took him by the hand. “If you ever see your way to returning to the Detective, then you have only—”

  Charles smiled but shook his head. “It is a kind offer, but I think not. And now I must get back to the house. My uncle will be missing me.”

  “Give him my compliments, my lad. And my best respects. And Charles—” he said, as he made to go, “a piece of advice. Given in a spirit of kindliness. You may take it, or not, as you think fit. But if I were in your place, I would make peace with my father. And once that is done, go with him to see your mother. I know what you are a-feared of, but not all asylums are as wretched as Jarvis’s. You may take my word on that.”

  Charles studied him, then nodded, and started to turn away, before recollecting something and turning back. “And the trooper? You don’t still believe—”

  “Ah,” said Bucket with a smile, his fat forefinger again in evidence. “He’s all right. Before this day is done, he’ll be discharged with no stain on his character. You may take my word for that. I can tell you now that I no more believed it was George as done the deed, as I believed you capable of it, but there was evidence against him, as there was against you, and that being the case I had no choice but to take him in under guard, while I concluded my investigation. But as things stand now I know the truth of it, and I will soon have all the proof I need for an arrest.”

  And with that Mr Bucket buttoned himself up and went quietly on his way towards the Strand, looking steadily before him as if he already had the face of his culprit before his eye.

  The house is hushed and still when Charles opens the door and pauses for a moment in the empty hall. The danger that darkened this place has lifted, and all is at peace. It’s so quiet he can hear the faint ticking of his uncle’s clock, and the sound of sheets cracking and whipping like sails in the yard at the back. Laundry, he thinks, abstractedly. Molly must have done the laundry. There is a visiting card on the hall-stand which he picks up without really looking at it, before climbing the stairs slowly, aware, for the first time, how much his body aches and how much he wants a hot bath. But first he must look in on his uncle, and tell him what has passed.

  The drawing-room curtains are still half-closed, and Charles waits as his eyes adjust to the dim light, breathing in the scent of a wood fire burning low in the grate and the faint aroma of port from the glass at his uncle’s side. Maddox’s eyes are closed and his mouth slightly open, and his sombre and motionless face gives no hint of the dreams within. He must have fallen asleep in his chair, for his pillow has been carefully tucked behind his head, and a blanket drawn up over his lap. A lap where, as Charles now sees, the black cat is curled and sleeping, his ears twitching every now and then at the tiny crackles from the subsiding fire. Thunder has never sat with Maddox before, and Charles is smiling as he tiptoes over to the chair and bends to give the cat a quick caress before reaching to his uncle’s hand. But while the cat has warmed in the fire’s glow, the old man’s fingers are chill; and though Thunder stirs now and stretches at his master’s touch, Maddox lies rigid still, and does not wake.

  And as he sees this—and as his heart lurches to what it means—there’s a sudden catch in Charles’s throat that has him kneeling quickly by Maddox’s side and pushing the hair gently from his uncle’s brow—an echo—all unconscious—of what the old man used to do when he was a boy—little enough in itself, but a gauge of deep affection in an age uncomfortable with intimacy, and a family chary of love.

  “The doctor came but he says there’s little we can do but keep him warm, and trust to hope. And there is hope, Mr Charles, there is hope.”

  Stornaway is standing in the doorway, and although his words are brave there is a break in his voice. And as Charles reaches again for his uncle’s wrinkled hand there is a new and different catch in his throat, and he can scarcely see for tears. Everything he’d wanted to say—everything he so wants to share—Maddox will not hear it now. May never hear it. Charles told himself it could wait till tomorrow, but tomorrow is here, and it is too late.

  Stornaway comes slowly forward. “It came on so sudden—I thought at first it were just another of his turns. He’d been fretting about you, and I was trying to turn his mind to other things. I told him he had no cause to worry on your account—that you’d become a fine detective in your own right, and even the highest in the land were now knocking on your door—”

  “I’m sorry Abel, I don’t understand—”

  Stornaway looks at him. “That card in the hall, Mr Charles, did you not see whose it was?” Charles wipes his hand across his eyes and puts his hand into his pocket. The card itself is over-embellished and a little pretentious, but otherwise hardly very remarkable, but the name—the name!

  It’s scarcely conceivable that two short words can conjure such a fever of contradictory ideas, but even in his first confusion Charles knows that this man must be—can only be—a son who bears his father’s name, for the man now venerated by some almost to idolatry died an outcast and a pariah almost thirty years before, his heart cut out, and his body burned on an Italian shore.

  Charles turns to Stornaway. “You showed my uncle this?”

  Abel nods. “I wish to God I hae never done it, but how could I hae known he would take on so? All on a sudden he was shouting wildly about things long ago and then he gripped me by the arm and said a name I have nae heard from his lips for half a lifetime or more, and the next thing I knew he had fallen back in his chair with no stir of life about him, just as you see him now.”

  “He said a name? What name?”

  Stornaway sighs and shakes his head. “He loved once, Mr Charles. Loved and lost. He never spoke of it, after they parted—not to me, and not to Fraser. But we knew, all the same. They met when we were in Northamptonshire working a case, but in the end she upped and married another. I never knew what became o’ her after that, or if he ever saw her again. But it was her name, Mr Charles—the last word he spoke to me was her name. It must hae been her—with the life he’s lived I know of nae other.”

  Charles looks at Stornaway, and then at the card in his hand, and wonders suddenly if he has another answer to that question, however extraordinary and unlikely it may seem. For he knows—as Stornaway may not—that the woman whose son has left this card was once as infamous as the man she married, the brilliant daughter of brilliant parents—an old woman now, if yet she lives, but celebrated once for her beauty, and her cloud of red-gold hair.

  “Mary,” he says softly, half to himself, but as he glances up at Abel’s face he sees the old man’s eyes widen in sudden amazement, and realises with an absolute clarity that whatever this card means—whatever demands are made of him, or questions asked—there is an unguessed secret that lies unseen, in the darkness and vacancy of his uncle’s cold repose.

  FINIS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  These acknowledgments include details of the novel’s plot, so readers may want to wait to read them until the end.

  As any Dickens devotee will know, The Solitary House is one of the titles he originally considered giving to Bleak House. I’ve always considered that to be without question Dickens’s masterpiece, and it is the first and most important of the three great mid-Victorian texts that inform my
own novel.

  Bleak House was first published in instalments between March 1852 and September 1853, and is a wonderful, complex, and compelling work. It’s a gripping story, a powerful social commentary, and a panoramic portrait of contemporary London life. It also manages—single-handedly and almost in passing—to create a whole new literary genre: the detective mystery. For a writer who aspires to write “literary murders” herself, it could hardly be richer territory to explore, and I hope that anyone who loves Dickens as much as I do will enjoy seeing how I have interleaved my own mystery with the characters and episodes of his novel, and used his chapter titles for events in my own, though each time with a new twist, and a rather different meaning. In doing this I have, of course, drawn extensively on Bleak House, and also on others of Dickens’s works, especially his Overland Tour to Bermondsey, the Sketches by Boz, which includes his account of Seven Dials, and On Duty with Inspector Field, a piece he wrote for the Household Words magazine about the real-life police inspector who may well have been the model for Mr Bucket.

  The second of my three great works is The Woman in White, written by Dickens’s friend Wilkie Collins, and published in 1860. Even if the relationship between this novel and my own is not made explicit until the closing chapters, the moment when The Solitary House really came to life for me was when I realised that the time-scheme of Bleak House could be made to run parallel with Collins’s very precise chronology for The Woman in White, which culminates in Sir Percival Glyde’s death in a fire in late November 1850. This allowed me to create a ‘space between’ these two great novels, where I could locate a new and independent story of my own, and explore some of the same nineteenth-century themes of secrecy, madness, power, and abuse, though with the benefit of twenty-first-century hindsight.

  Last but not least of my three is London Labour and the London Poor, by Henry Mayhew. This huge work was originally published in the form of sixty-three pioneering articles in the Morning Chronicle, which were then collected together in book form in 1851. London Labour and the London Poor is the closest thing we have to an oral history of the crowded, rowdy, filthy streets of the mid-Victorian city: Mayhew conducted hundreds of interviews with real people, and gives many of their words almost verbatim. The result is an account so immediate that it’s almost as if we’re walking those streets by his side, and eavesdropping on his conversations. In fact this is exactly what I do during some of the episodes of The Solitary House, most notably the rat-killing, where I send young Charles Maddox to the Graham Arms on the very night when—with a little artistic licence—I imagine Mayhew himself might have been there.

  I talked just now about looking at the nineteenth century from a twenty-first-century perspective, and there’s another obvious reference point for The Solitary House which famously took a similar approach, though set some seventeen years later. John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman has long been one of my favourite modern novels, and when a close friend casually observed to me that there was “room for a French Lieutenant’s Woman for this generation,” I realised at once that this could indeed be one of my ambitions for The Solitary House. Much of my novel was already written by then, and it seemed a wonderful coincidence that I had already named my young hero Charles after his great-uncle, and made him an amateur scientist, even if in a different field from that of Charles Smithson in Fowles’s novel. It’s Fowles who is the “celebrated novelist” I refer to in chapter 17, and readers who know his book well will spot a very young Ernestina Freeman walking with her nurse in Hyde Park, and the deliberate echoes of Sarah Woodruff in my own “Sarah.”

  Anyone who has visited Sir John Soane’s Museum in London will recognise his extraordinary collection in my depiction of Tulkinghorn’s underground gallery of artefacts, though Tulkinghorn’s more infamous items are his and his alone. Although I’ve taken one or two architectural liberties, the museum is essentially as I describe it, and in 1850 this real collection had already been amassed in Soane’s real house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the same square where Dickens sets his lawyer’s fictional chambers. Dickens himself says nothing of Tulkinghorn having such a collection, of course, but neither does anything in Bleak House preclude it. In fact one of the great delights, for me, in writing this book was the chance it gave me to add new layers to a character like Tulkinghorn, from the secrets of his private museum to the even more horrifying secrets of his private history.

  I would like to thank Timothy Duke, Chester Herald at the College of Arms, for his kind help with some of the finer points of English heraldry, and Jan Turner, Deputy Librarian at the Royal Geographical Society’s Foyle Reading Room, for her assistance with the history of the Society, and with Baron von Müller in particular. The speech I give him was indeed his own, and formed part of an address he gave to the Society in March 1850 (though everything else is my own invention). There seems to be no trace of him thereafter, so it may be that his belief in unicorns was indeed his professional downfall, though not, needless to say, at the hands of one “Charles Maddox”! James Duncan is another real historical figure, though having both him and his drawings in the British Museum is also my invention.

  I read a number of books about London in the 1850s as part of the research for this novel, including Jerry White’s fascinating London in the Nineteenth Century, Catharine Arnold’s Necropolis: London and Its Dead, and The Victorian Underworld by Donald Thomas. Books like this also helped point me to useful primary material, as did the excellent website www.victorianlondon.org.

  As for Robert Mann, I owe a debt of gratitude to Mei Trow’s book Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer for providing a new suspect in the Ripper killings who was old enough to have started his murderous career as early as 1850, and who might—just possibly—have been prevented from any further atrocities until the 1880s by the vigilance of a man like Inspector Bucket.

  Finally I would like to thank my husband, Simon, my “first reader,” and my excellent agent, Ben Mason of FoxMason, whose input was absolutely invaluable as the novel took shape. I would also like to thank my two wonderful editors, Krystyna Green of Constable & Robinson and Kate Miciak of Random House, for everything they did to make this book as good as it could be.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LYNN SHEPHERD is the author of the award-winning Murder at Mansfield Park. She studied English at Oxford and was a professional copywriter for over a decade. She is currently at work on her next novel of historical suspense, A Treacherous Likeness, which Delacorte will publish in 2013.

  www.lynn-shepherd.com

  BLEAK HOUSE

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bleak House was first published in monthly parts from March 1852 to September 1853 and appeared in volume form late in 1853. This edition contains the author’s final revisions as incorporated into the Charles Dickens Edition of 1868.

  Bantam Classic edition published March 1983

  Bantam Classic reissue published October 1992

  Bantam Classic reissue / November 2006

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-553-90306-5

  www.bantamdell.com

  v3.1_r1

  Contents

  Master - Table of Contents

  Bleak House by Charles Dickens

  Copyright

  Preface to the Charles Dickens Edition

  Preface to the First Edition

  (I)*

  1. In Chancery

  2. In Fashion

  3. A Progress

  4. Telescopic Philan
thropy

  (II)

  5. A Morning Adventure

  6. Quite at Home

  7. The Ghost’s Walk

  (III)

  8. Covering a Multitude of Sins

  9. Signs and Tokens

  10. The Law-Writer

  (IV)

  11. Our Dear Brother

  12. On the Watch

  13. Esther’s Narrative

  (V)

  14. Deportment

  15. Bell Yard

  16. Tom-all-Alone’s

  (VI)

  17. Esther’s Narrative

  18. Lady Dedlock

  19. Moving On

  (VII)

  20. A New Lodger

  21. The Smallweed Family

  22. Mr. Bucket

  (VIII)

  23. Esther’s Narrative

  24. An Appeal Case

  25. Mrs. Snagsby Sees It All

  (IX)

  26. Sharpshooters

  27. More Old Soldiers Than One

  28. The Ironmaster

  29. The Young Man

  (X)

  30. Esther’s Narrative

  31. Nurse and Patient

  32. The Appointed Time

  (XI)

  33. Interlopers

  34. A Turn of the Screw

  35. Esther’s Narrative

  (XII)