The Mammoth Book of Dickensian Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley (ed)

  “Indeed, my dear, do try not to fret in your condition. We are here to set this all straight, are we not, Mr Fips? There were a great many young men who came forward claiming to be Augustus and they were all easy to dismiss. There was never one from Dundee. When Augustus did arrive back in Britain, incidentally on the same ship, the Clipper Schooner Cupid, as he had departed for Van Dieman’s Land, he told a simple story which it was not difficult to verify.

  “On arriving at the place that so many people describe as ‘The Back of Beyond’, Augustus was pleasantly surprised to find himself fairly swiftly reunited with his errant father, ‘Gus’, who owned a small mining venture and greeted him with open arms. Sadly ‘Gus’ was killed in a mining accident – we were shown the relevant newspaper cutting – and Augustus decided to make a brief trip to explore the wild deserts of the main continent of Australia.

  “Here, in a game of chance, he won a bag of what he suspected might be opals. He headed back to the friends that he had made in Van Dieman’s Land, intending to settle there for good, but he was shown the news of my search for him in a newly arrived copy of The Times. It seemed the sensible thing was to return to Britain to discover if he really was the missing Duke of Frame, and also have the putative opals properly assayed. He was, of course, successful in both his objectives, since the opals, wherever they originally came from, proved to be of the premier quality. This has all been verified to my complete satisfaction. How would he have had time to be conducting another whole life in Dundee?”

  “And yet,” said Mr Fips quietly, “the fact remains that ‘The Gentleperson’s Patented Ablutionary Device’ had been registered under the name of Lord Augustus Frame at the Dundee address and was delivered to him at The Great Exhibition, where he was seen to be present during its installation by countless attending staff, often, to everyone’s amusement, even covering his clothing with a workman’s smock when checking the mechanism, and where as the result of some tragic accident his body was later found (and some of his closest friends and relatives who were there at the time were able to witness that it was indeed that of His Lordship).”

  “Yes, and it was simply some horrid accident,” averred the putative Lady Mercy, trying to hold back her sobs. “The police surgeon told us that he had hit the back of his head – probably when he slipped on the soap. My dear friend Mrs Gamp who did the laying out – and is a professional nurse – said just the same.”

  “There will be an answer,” said the Dowager Lady Frame severely. “In the meantime I will not have my undoubted grand-daughter-in-law distressed at a delicate time by some hoyden from Dundee! Come, my dears. You have had an exhausting morning. What you both require is a new bonnet, or maybe a pelisse – where was it you said you had obtained your present elegant ensembles, a little place in Cheapside? How quaint! Perhaps we should pay them a visit.”

  Mould’s Discreet Mourning Warehouse was all of a flutter to find itself visited by not merely one, but two, duchesses. The Dowager Lady Frame, used to the professional insincerity of high fashion modistes, found the place somehow very homely and touching as the two angelic Mould daughters, and, in honour of this special occasion, their mother also, plied them with dainty cups of tea in their discreetly curtained-off rooms immediately adjoining the undertaker’s premises. Every so often, to be sure, one of the three of them would need to sally forth to “the front of shop” but otherwise it seemed more like a sympathetic afternoon call than a business transaction.

  As Mrs Mould, whose turn it was, rose to answer the tinkling bell that heralded one such sortie, the amazed voice of Mr Mould, the proprietor of all their endeavours, could be distinctly heard without.

  “Why, Mr Pecksniff, by all that’s wonderful, is it really you? We heard you were in foreign parts these days!”

  “Not Pa, surely!” cried his gentle offspring in the back room, almost dropping their tea cups in amazement as the door swung to behind the receding Mould Mama.

  The Dowager Lady Frame sat there in bemusement as the daughters Pecksniff and the daughters Mould gathered in a silent semicircle by the half open door and peered through the black velvet curtains.

  “No, not any more!” They heard Mr Pecksniffs stentorian tones as if it was only yesterday. “No, I am returned in honour. I am returned from the back of beyond in vengeance of my eldest child. I understand it was you who conducted the funeral of the late, perfidious Augustus Moddle, Sixteenth Duke of Frame. I come to clamour for the rights of this good and tragic lady who stands beside me, Amelia Moddle, his undoubted and only wife. (And she requires mourning raiment for herself and son at an economic price).”

  A bronzed and slightly crestfallen Mr Pecksniff sat with his teacup perched upon his knee as he faced the selection of affronted womenfolk gathered in Mrs Todger’s crowded parlour.

  The Dowager Lady Frame sat with the marriage lines of Amelia, Mrs Moddle, laid out before her, while she perused them with Mercy and Charity nee Pecksniff, who were seated on her either side.

  Mrs Amelia Moddle looked pale and tired but seemed a nice enough young woman, with smooth brown hair and a firmness of chin almost to compete with that of Mrs Charity Gander (who was apparently the child whose honour Mr Pecksniff had intended to avenge – distance, it seemed having kept him unaware of what fortune had seemed to offer his other daughter, Mercy).

  Kind Mrs Todgers, who had of course offered the travellers what accommodation she could, had placed Amelia in a chair beside her while she attempted to feed bread and milk to the exhausted little boy, Paulie, who was curled up on Amelia’s lap and whose likeness to Augustus spoke for itself. Mr Gander and Mr Jinkins and Tom Pinch were refilling and handing round the cups and plates.

  “But could you not see it, dear Pa?” said Cherry with practised sweetness, “That if these marriage lines of Amelia’s are authentic, and no one is saying that they are not, it would have been well nigh impossible for the Augustus that we know to be the Augustus named in this document. Our Augustus would still have been on board the Clipper Schooner Cupid on his way to Van Dieman’s Land, not already nest-building with her there. Could your husband not perhaps have been Augustus’s Papa, Amelia?”

  “No, my Gussie was a beautiful young man. I never even met his father; he never said anything about having one.”

  “Well, I am at a loss for words,” said the Dowager Lady Frame. “How on earth could Augustus have been in two, if not more, places at once?”

  The stunned silence which followed the suggestion of this disturbing notion was broken by the hearty ringing of Mrs Todgers’ doorbell, the sounds of the door being opened and the tramp of hearty feet.

  “Ah,” said a voice. “Just as I have dreamed of it. I’d know that wonderful aroma anywhere.”

  “What,” laughed a second voice. “Not cabbage a-boiling, surely?”

  “Why, bless you, no, son, the lady’s way with gravy!”

  The parlour door was thrust open and there stood Bailey, who had once been the doorman and boots to this very establishment, looking, for all the world, like a small golden sunburst. “You’re never going to believe who I’ve just met up with, a-wandering the street like a lost puppy looking for its home.

  A darkly grey-haired strangerer – bronzed and muscularer – stood, smiling, in the doorway.

  “Todgers!” gasped his lady wife and slumped all of a heap in her chair.

  “Ah, she always was such a sweetly pretty thing to me,” sighed the prodigal Todgers, gazing at the tiny, bubble of a miniature of Mrs Todgers in her youth that was tacked up over the kettle holder. “No, I may have behaved without honour, but I never could forget her way with gravy, not ever, worth coming all the way home from the back of beyond for that alone. But what is this that Mr Bailey here has been telling me about poor young Augustus? One does not wish to speak ill of the dead, but it doesn’t sound to me as though he has been dealing straight with any of us.”

  “You knew Augustus Moddle?”

  “I have been acquainted with th
ree Augustus Moddles. Which one do you wish to know about?”

  “Perhaps you would like to tell us about them in order of their age, for want of any other suitable way of sorting them. I take it they were not triplets?” sighed the Dowager Lady Frame resignedly.

  “Why, bless you, no, ma’am,” grinned Todgers. “They were father and sons. The first was ‘Gus’ Moddle, my oldest friend. Together we courted and married. I my dearest Mrs Todgers here, and he her friend from ladies’ boarding school, Elfrida FitzFrame. Alas, the foolishness of youth, we deserted them and set off adventuring to Van Dieman’s Land, ‘Gus’ leaving his infant namesake behind him.

  “Worse still, once we were on board the clipper that was taking us to our destination, I discovered that ‘Gus’ was in fact fleeing with his new love and they were ‘married’ by the captain on board ship. To my shame I acted as best man to him (for a second time) because I knew yet another small Moddle was on its way. He was born in Van Dieman’s Land and we always jokingly called him Gussie Fitz Gus. He was always a wayward lad, the very image of his papa. He left home when he was about fifteen, after his poor mother died. I do not know what became of him.

  “About six years ago now, I think it would be, the Augustus Moddle that must be known to all of you, arrived from England and put in an appearance at his father’s mine – again, a son the very model of my friend. There was an accident, my friend Gus died and young Augustus ran off to Australia for a bit and returned with nothing but a bag of pebbles that he had won in a game of cards. I thought they might be opals. Then we saw a story in The Times about the missing Duke of Frame. It was clear to me that this must be Augustus. I lent him the money for his return to Britain so that he could try his luck with the peerage and the opals. I told him of a place to stay – I even gave him the key.

  “He promised that he would keep in touch and let me know of what reception I might get if I were to come back home. He wrote to tell me of his happy news and sent me the money to return – and now I hear of all this tragedy.”

  “So there have been two Augustus Moddles on the loose in Britain, Gussie and Augustus,” sighed the Dowager Lady Frame. “Which one did what, and which of them died?”

  “And which one did not – and, more importantly, where is he? Strikes me he could be a very loose cannon,” said Gander worriedly.

  “So I think I must have married the younger one, that I indeed knew as Gussie, who was born out of true wedlock in Van Dieman’s Land,” said Mrs Amelia Moddle sadly. “And that unfortunate marmalade heiress was heartily duped by him.”

  “I do not think you need to repine for her too much,” observed Mr Bailey with hearty jollity. “Indeed we found her pretty sanguine about her late ‘husband’s’ possible demise when she asked Mr Tom here, and Mr Martin and Mr John and me to tell her all the circumstances of his accident. Did she not, Mr Tom? A very gallant young lady – not the sort who would let herself be cast down by the possibility of having been misused by a wastrel – if that turned out to be the case. She has even suggested that I cheer her by taking her and her secretary on one of my ‘Flights of Fancy’ over London should her stay here be prolonged.”

  All the ladies glared at both Bailey and Tom for fraternising with the enemy.

  “However, it would seem that she will not need to be detained in these parts for very long,” observed Charity Gander with relish. “My sister Mercy has clearly married the Augustus Moddle that was born in Salisbury, and so she really is Lady Frame after all.”

  “But why ever did Lord Frame help set up ‘The Gentle-person’s Patented Portable Ablutionary Device’ at the Great Exhibition, if he had not invented it?” remarked a bewildered Mr Pecksniff from his cramped position in the chair by the window.

  “Well, I should think you would understand, if anyone did!” Tom Pinch was about to say, but then the light suddenly dawned on him and the scales fell from his eyes as they had when he first realised the real truth of his patron, Mr Pecksniff’s, perfidious nature all those years ago.

  “You know,” he said out loud, “I don’t think our Augustus, the Sixteenth Duke, did. I think he went to the Crystal Palace to find out what was going on, and who was taking his name in vain. One Lord Frame was Gussie, leaping about in his workman’s smock and the other was Augustus, sporting dear Merry’s beautiful braces. Was it an accident? Who has survived? Gussie could cover up his deceit and his crime, but equally, there would be nothing to stop a swift swap of dress if our Augustus was finding being a landed lord too great a strain, which would not surprise me in the least, I am afraid. He could jump ship and start all over again somewhere else.”

  “There always was a violent side to poor Augustus – I know it to my cost!” sighed Jinkins. “If he has lost his marbles, I hope he isn’t lurking somewhere around here.”

  “Well,” said Todgers quietly, “I gave him a key to the cellar that’s under here. It has always remained my property – used to be my little bolt-hole you know. Maybe you fellows wouldn’t mind coming along with me to have a look. I wouldn’t like to think of my dear Mrs Todgers living over a powder keg.”

  The cellarage at Todgers’ was approachable only by a little back door and a rusty grating, and the inhabitants of Todgers’ had always assumed that it was the freehold property of someone else, and it was reported to be full of untold wealth – though whether in gold or silver, buts of wine or, indeed casks of gunpowder, no one had ever been sure, but in fact when Mr Todgers finally put in his key, the ancient lock turned with an easy click and everyone feared the worst. There was a distinct smell of bruised oranges down in the cellar under Todgers’, and also of stale sacking from all the stored knick-knacks of the Todgers’ misspent youth that loomed in bales therein.

  And something moved in the darkness at the back.

  “Augustus – is that you my boy?” said Mr Todgers gently.

  “Who sir, me sir? Why no!” came a querulous sing-song voice. “No, I am a lord. The Lord No Zoo. The joke’s on everyone’s lips these days, you know.”

  The knowledge of a duty well performed can be satisfying and vengeance can be sweet. Snug in the safety of the dower-house, the elderly Lady Frame can watch and smile as the great mansion on the hill echoes again with life and laughter as droves of impecunious Chuzzlewits throng in to benefit from the industrious refurbishments of their eminent cousin Seth Pecksniff (aided by his wife Amelia), and offer their support to their tiny grandson Harry, The Seventeenth Duke.

  Up in the attics of Frame, lovingly contrived with every comfort and security, by the said Seth, there resides the sad figure referred to by those who know of his existence, as “Poor Gussie”. Mostly he is a mild, lachrymose being; sometimes he plays the flute. He does not recognise anyone, not kind Lady Mercy, or her sister-in law Amelia who nurses him so gently, nor even Miss McMielleur, the marmalade heiress from Dundee who took the trouble to fly all the way to visit him at Frame in a balloon piloted by the gallant Bailey (whose hair and moustache gleamed as brightly as any of her oranges from Seville).

  Poor Gussie is terrified of baths; his greatest fear in life, it seems, is of slipping on the soap. But at other times he is given to wild rages about a long lost brother who tried to steal his heritage away and who deserved all he got.

  No, Gussie is not the sort of house guest that Frame would like to admit to harbouring – but Gussie is from being the first of that kind in Frame’s long history. No, it seems, that in the era of the young Seventeenth Duke Harry, his charming mother, dear Lady Mercy, must be prepared to extend the bounties of the great heritage of Frame to the Lord knows who.

  The Bartered Child

  Charles Todd

  No sooner had Dickens completed Martin Chuzzlewit than he was gripped by an idea for a new story, one that had been struggling to be written for some while but the right vehicle had not presented itself. A visit to a new charity school in Saffron Hillin Camden, near to Dickens’s childhood haunts and apparently the very site where Dickens had set Fagin’s d
en, filled Dickens with horror at the state and prospects of the wretched children he saw. He believed it was society’s duty to help these children and the idea of a benevolent change in heart by those who could help, coalesced into the first of his Christmas books, the immortal A Christmas Carol. It was written at white-heat pace in a little under six weeks and published on 19 December 1843. It was rapturously received by the public and has remained arguably Dickens’s best-known and most widely read book. With it Dickens effectively created the spirit of Christmas.

  We all know the story of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge who, one Christmas Eve, is visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future whereby he discovers what impact he can have upon people. At the end he determines to change and make good. So, just what kind of character does he become? The following story looks at Scrooge ten years later.

  The story also touches briefly on Dickens’s next book, Dombey and Son, about which more shortly.

  Charles Todd is the alias used by the mother-son writing team Caroline and Charles Todd. They are the authors of the award-winning Inspector Rutledge series, set in England in the aftermath of the First World War, which began with A Test of Wills (1996).

  He stopped in front of his door, glancing over his shoulder at the man loitering at the corner of the street. When he turned back to lift the latch, he felt his heart turn over. Marley’s face glared back at him from the knocker.

  And then it was gone.

  Scrooge stood there, his eyes closed, remembering. It had been ten years since that dreadful Christmas Eve. He’d done his best to live up to the visitations he’d received. And he’d never told anyone about them. He still wasn’t sure where they had come from, but most certainly he knew why they had come. A warning.

  Pride had always been his downfall. Never greed. Money was the measure of his worth, and the more he had, the greater his pride. Only Marley had understood that. What had he done – after all this time – for Marley to come again? Where had he taken a wrong turning? What had he neglected? How had he failed?