The Mammoth Book of Dickensian Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley (ed)

  “I knew it!” she said. “I knew that Clarence could not be my child. Oh Edward, disgusting father of a disgusting son!”

  It was a bright, cloud scudding, spring afternoon. Daffodils nodded in the balmy breeze, the wet grass sparkled in the sunlight and small birds hopped and twittered among the froth of jewel green that sought to cover the naked branches. It was the sort of afternoon when lambs should gambol among primrose-scattered meadows: what better day then, for the distinguished clan of Chuzzlewit to dine and frolic “a la begere” at the idyllic setting of Shepherd’s Bush?

  They were all there, young and old – a little uncertain maybe of the precise costume required for this event, as there was an odd mixture of small shepherdesses with flower-decked bonnets who were racing around with crooks in determined pursuit of little boys resplendent in feathered hats and Lincoln green.

  Some of the adults were relaxing among the hampers of broken meats from their excellent repast, and a few of them had retreated to the comfort of the several barouches which were drawn up on the turf, but most of them were gathered in a wide circle around the focus of the day – a large green-striped and flower-bedecked balloon which bobbed on its tethers like an eager pony, the ropes held in place by a burley posse of top-hatted retainers as the blushing, young patrons of the day picked their way across the turf, mounted the neat set of flower swathed steps and were handed down into the balloon basket by the waiting, green-uniformed, elaborately mustachioed balloonist.

  The newly-weds, Augustus Moddle and his blushing bride, Mercy Chuzzlewit, nee Pecksniff, who had doffed her widow’s greys for a delightful ensemble of china blue, smiled and waved shyly as the ropes were loosened and with a friendly creaking from the basket, the balloon started its steady ascent to the dappled sky.

  “Oh, what an occasion of joy! Who would have thought it after so many years!” cried a bony matron, dressed in violent and most unbecoming green, who was standing at the very forefront of the guests and dabbing her eyes with a neat lace handkerchief that she had taken from a small basket at her wrist. “Why, this has been so like the days of my youth when Mr Todgers was courting me, and his friend Gus Moddle (that was Augustus’s Papa) was courting my dearest girlhood companion, Elfrida Fitz ‘F’ at The Flora Tea Gardens in Bayswater Road. Everyone would be dressed like Robin Hood and go flitting among the glades – so conducive to romance! There would be concerts and fireworks and everything that you purchased, from the porter to champagne, was of the very apogee of quality. Such happy days! Oh, I am quite overcome.”

  “But let us hope that today’s nuptials prove to be of a more enduring nature than those of our good Mrs ‘T’, eh, Jin-kins!” quipped a somewhat loudly dressed gentleman not far behind her, sotto voce, to the man standing at his left

  “Don’t you even think to mock dear Mrs Todgers or make comments on the potential endurance of the noble institution of matrimony when you were content to abandon that good woman’s nurturing haven for the sake of a house full of furniture, Gander!” whispered his lady wife with quiet menace from beside him on the right. By way of emphasizing her statement, Mrs Charity Gander, nee Pecksniff, a youngish, sharp-chinned lady in pastel green, gave him a swift and well-aimed dig in the ribs.

  “No, no – indeed my love,” choked the loudly dressed gentleman. “I was merely venturing to hope that this time young Augustus would conduct himself with a little more commitment than he did of yore. His loss, I assure you, has been entirely to my gain.”

  Mrs Gander quelled him with a look, which implied that she certainly didn’t consider that it had been to hers.

  “Come, come now,” whispered their friend Jinkins hurriedly. “Bygones should be bygones. There is nothing to condemn in a fellow for being realistic about life. I am sure that poor Augustus has always tried to behave with honour throughout – it is simply that he never had much grasp on reality. Too noble by half.”

  “Well, he seems grasping enough now!” was Gander’s swift riposte – ever the one for a good joke, was Gander, even if it meant bruised ribs. “Which ‘Nobility’ is it that he is after these days? The Lord Knowzwat? Ha?”

  “No, no, The Lord No Zoo!” countered Jinkins with alacrity.

  “Allow me!” hissed Charity with a savage flourish of her shawl, “to sweep the cobwebs from such a venerable stab at wit. Augustus presumes to The Lordship of Frame, of The House of Frame of Frame-Adby near Sheffield – as even the smallest street urchin would know since it is everywhere in the news, and he is but one of a hundred who are laying claim to it – completely ridiculous!”

  Suddenly this shower of verbal vindictiveness was halted by the spectacular swish of a totally material shower of sand as the balloonist set about attempting to gain serious height by jettisoning the contents of one of the sand bags. The massed Chuzzlewits broke into excited “Oohs” and “Aahs” and a delighted clapping of hands as the brisk west wind peppered a fair dose of it into the crowd and beyond the edges of the mooring circle.

  A lachrymose, but beaming, Mrs Todgers turned round to address the threesome, seemingly oblivious to their busy bickering. “Ah Cherry, my love,” she exclaimed, “What joy you must be feeling. All that is missing to make this a perfect day is the presence of your dear Papa. How tragic that he should have been advised to go abroad for the good of his health before this happy outcome!”

  “Was it his health, then?” laughed Jinkins gently. “Why I understood poor Mr Pecksniff was gone away to Van Die-man’s Land to avoid his creditors.”

  “Not at all!” bridled Charity ferociously. “He is gone to take up the splendid, architectural, business challenges of a new land.”

  “And we all hope that he will fare rather better than dear Charity’s cousin Martin did with the projected town of Eden in America,” sniggered her husband Gander loyally.

  “Well, he snapped back on his feet swiftly enough, did he not?” responded Charity, with a smart stamp on Gander’s unwary foot, by way of emphasis.

  There were more cheers as another gout of sand sprayed across the congregation, to fall almost on the easterly edge of the gathering, where the barouches were drawn up in a semicircle. Mr Tom Pinch, youthfully bald as an egg, was sitting on the step of one of these, surrounded by an excited assortment of small relatives who were busy insisting that dear “Uncle Dumpty” should make them all paper birds of various shapes and sizes, so that they could see whose bird would fly best – if at all. Inside the barouche, both of them heavily pregnant and resting, were the mothers of the said children, his sister Ruth Westlock and their closest friend Mary Chuzzlewit, neé Graham.

  Tom Pinch looked up to the fast dwindling silhouette of the balloon with a worried smile. “Let’s hope young Augustus doesn’t decide to do jump ship this time; that would be a very long fall,” he observed to himself.

  High in the rising basket, Augustus had no thought of looking down on the dwindling assembly. He only had eyes for “She who had been Another’s” but was now entirely his own. Truly his soul, as well as their bodies, was up among the clouds. Captain Bailey, the green-uniformed balloonist, had placed at their disposal a weighted, linen-backed map, which he deftly unfolded in coordination with their flight path. Merry seemed ecstatic, all excited smiles and delighted pointing out of landmarks below them as the westerly wind steadily took them towards the City of London. Every time she pointed something out, the sunlight glowed and shimmered through the largest opal betrothal ring that any one England had ever seen, even on the hand of the youthful Queen Victoria (and her partiality for large opals was scarcely a secret). Augustus breathed a sigh of unalloyed bliss.

  “Oh, do look down there, Augustus, dearest,” trilled Merry, almost with the exuberance of the Merry he had first met so long ago. “Look down on the right – that glitter in that piece of parkland! Dear Bailey says that that is Hyde Park and all those struts and girders and cart tracks among the trees are where they are putting up the crystal pavilion that cousin Martin is helping Mr Paxton to make f
or Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition!”

  Augustus looked down among the swirls of fluffy cloud and picked out the familiar shapes of the basin in Kensington Gardens and the Serpentine in Hyde Park gleaming like polished steel set in the green sward beneath them. “But the trees! Those wonderful trees – surely they are not to be sacrificed for the sake of a season’s entertainment!” he cried, bereft at the thought of any loss of England’s verdure. He had seen too much of pink desert in his other life even to pluck a single blade of grass.

  The green uniformed balloonist nodded sagely and twirled his ginger moustache in shrewd reassurance.

  “No, no, Augustus, dear Bailey tells me that they are going to save all the trees by building the glass pavilion over them. Is that not wonderful?” rejoiced Merry, at what might be her cousin Martin’s ingenious solution.

  Now the cloud swirled again as they sped along Mayfair, and soon Captain Bailey pointed out Covent Garden Market just visible on their left, The Strand below with the slate grey river on their right, then fast along what must be Fleet Street until the moment Augustus had been hoping for. Indeed, Bailey had surpassed himself in navigation, for there was the massive Dome of St Paul’s Cathedral right ahead of them, vast and sanctifying. Joyfully Augustus reached inside his paletot jacket to the place above his heart and drew out a small beribboned package tied in with a single hothouse flower. This time everything must be perfect. He held it out to Merry, his love, his own.

  There was a sudden lurch as the wind shifted brusquely round to the North, the bloom was snatched from his hand and spiralled its way down to land on a half completed coffin in Mould the undertaker’s yard, just off Cheapside, from whence the bemused workman retrieved it and stuck it in a fold of his paper carpenter’s hat.

  The new Mrs Mercy Moddle saw her husband’s face fall and was quick to react. “Oh, that was so sensitive, so romantic, Augustus, dear.” She unwrapped the delicate pink scarf as light as thistledown.

  “You wore one like that the night I first saw you.”

  “Oh, I know I did, and you remembered.” She blushed. “The present I have for you is not anything so sweetly thought of, but it was made with all my love.” She held out her own small package, where, neatly wrapped in tissue, lay a pair of Gentleman’s braces worked by her own hand. “You see, I stitched in an air balloon just above each front fastening – dear Bailey had informed me of this secret surprise just as I was completing them.”

  “And look where we’ve just a-come to!” gasped the uniformed balloonist in question wiping back a manly tear. “Now that is what I calls a coincidence!” There among the house tops that stretched away on every side of them, the long familiar path of its shadow stretching away northeast of them, stood the friendly Monument with every hair erect upon his golden head, and somewhere close below it all three of them knew there nestled the elusive place of their first meeting.

  “Mrs Todger’s Commercial Boarding House!” they laughed in delighted unison.

  Tom Pinch and his brother-in-law John Westlock were waiting, by prior appointment, in the cool of the early morning by the small bridge-house next to the Serpentine and were enjoying the antics of the ducks, who even at that primeval hour seemed to be on the alert for the prospect of possible feeding, and had dispatched a quacking scouting party who were fast approaching from the resting place of the main duck-posse, alongside the small, three-masted man-of-war, which, flag bedecked, was becalmed there for the duration of Prince Albert’s great exhibition.

  “Comical, aren’t they?” observed their best friend Martin Chuzzlewit, as he strode towards them both over the bridge. “It is those fifty thousand packed lunches that visitors insist on bringing with them every day. No one likes the food from the Tea Rooms. It reached crisis point with the pigeons inside, you know – bird droppings everywhere, all over the prime exhibits. Her Majesty was desperate; she takes it so personally, every detail.” He gave a brief laugh. “But Wellington, The Iron Duke, came to the rescue, of course. Sparrow-hawks, he recommended. Sparrow-hawks. So now we have them swooping around all night and scarce a pigeon in sight. Poor Bailey is very unhappy about it; all his caged birds become nearly hysterical.”

  “Frustrating for the poor hawks as well, I should imagine,” observed Tom as Martin conducted them back over the bridge towards the magnificence of Paxton’s crystal extravaganza, which he in his own small way had helped to expedite.

  “So he is Bailey, here, not Captain Bailey?” observed John Westlock, who was not quite awake yet, but liked to get things right.

  “Yes. He is ‘Captain’ Bailey when he conducts his ‘Flights of Fancy’, otherwise he is Bailey of ‘Sweedlepipe and Bailey’s Bird Emporium’. They have a most charming display of caged song birds which hang along some of the aisles and I find Bailey is here to tend them around this time on most mornings. Would I be right in thinking that Young Tomkin kept your household awake all night again John? You seem a trifle enervated, if I may say so. Martin Minor has a fine pair of lungs too – but at least it gets me up in time. We have to start early here – you never know when the Royals will make visit and they are apt to come here before the crowds flock in at nine – the Queen likes to see any new exhibits that have arrived and things still trickle in every day even now. She, and sometimes the Prince, too, will call by quite informally – no bodyguard at all – though we do have our own police and detectives posted here, including my cousin Chevy Slyme, but they are very underused, there has been no trouble at all so far.”

  “This is all most kind of you, Chuzzlewit,” said John, “since you must be so confoundedly busy all the time.”

  “Most grateful!” added Tom with great enthusiasm (he seemed to be coping rather better with the restricted sleeping patterns imposed on the burgeoning Westlock family by his small namesake).

  “Nonsense fellows, what are friends for – opportunity of a lifetime!” Martin responded, all bonhomie.

  The three of them had by now reached the entrance to The Crystal Palace, and the doormen, on seeing Martin, waved them through.

  Tom, who had not visited the Great Exhibition before (though John had) was completely awestruck by the sight: it seemed to him that they must be in some palace that had been landed in front of Aladdin by a genie. When he managed to regain his focus on reality, he started to take in the columns painted in vertical stripes of blue, white and yellow, contrasting with a multitude of red, curtains and canopies and painted signs which had an almost overpowering effect when combined with the profusion of flowers and palms and the much-vaunted, protected elm trees which flourished in the hot-house atmosphere – no wonder the pigeons had felt themselves in heaven.

  But Martin was bustling them along, determined they must see everything: the famous glass fountain, the fabled organ – Tom must see the organ but was given hardly a moment to take it in.

  There were a great many statues, many of them of young ladies where the skilful carving of their drapery left little of their underlying anatomy to the imagination. The unmarried Tom blushed and was relieved to find, conspicuously displayed, two telling representations of Mr Dickens’s popular characters Little Nell and Oliver Twist.

  “Ah, by ‘Hughes Ball of Boston’, what a wonderful name,” observed John Westlock, who always tried to read the inscriptions if Martin would give them the time.

  “I have no idea what Mr Dickens has to say of them,” observed Martin. “I had not heard that he is particularly taken by the exhibition, all told.”

  Yes, Martin was full of stories – would they believe the near disaster that had been the opening ceremony, when even Lord Granville who was in charge of the Royal Commission was obliged to take up a broom at the last minute to clear detritus from the Royal dais? Not to mention the “Mysterious Chinaman” – now his was the choicest tale of all, Martin averred. China, it seemed, had inscrutably refused to send an exhibit, but some kind of a display was cobbled together with contributions from various private British collections. However, im
agine the bewilderment of the organizing committee, not to mention the Queen and Prince Albert, when at the opening ceremony, just as the Hallelujah Chorus rang out, a Chinaman dressed in magnificent robes burst through the crowd and prostrated himself in front of the throne. “A diplomatic nightmare. No one knew what to do with the fellow,” laughed Martin. “They ended up placing him between the Archbishop of Canterbury and The Duke of Wellington and he marched right through the whole building in a threesome with them. The crowd were delighted, but here is the jest – he was the captain of a Chinese junk moored out on the river for the tourist trade! Would you believe it? They call him ‘The Lord No Zoo’, these days, you know.”

  “How intriguing!” Tom said.

  “Most original,” said the weary John. “No doubt he has made a mint from it”.

  They hurried on. Tom made a determined halt for breath in front of the Indian exhibit which was a feast of splendour, from a gold-and-silver throne to a whole stuffed elephant complete with howdah, not to mention the fabled but strangely disappointing Koh-I-Noor diamond, worth a king’s ransom, and newly acquired by Britain at the end of the Sikh Wars. It was displayed in a most unprepossessing six-foot-high sort of birdcage. “Yes, they were hoping to make it glitter by using gas jets, you see the nozzles there,” explained Martin. “Someone will be along to light them shortly, I expect. It doesn’t work very effectively.”

  “What a shame,” said John. “But you even have gas laid on here? Amazing!”

  “Yes, indeed. Now I know what I must show you, John. It arrived just the other day, but I expect they will have installed it by now. It is one of those wonders where one is amazed that anyone ever imagined that there could be a need to invent it. The place is full of oddities, particularly from America, but this one is British – from Dundee, I think. It’s called ‘The Gentleperson’s Patented Portable Ablutionary Device’.”