Even as I walked away from Tavistock House, however, I sensed I was in the wrong chimney again – or, rather, I was in the right one, but couldn’t get it clean. In any case, I had to wait until Mr Dickens had made his investigations.
What he discovered cleaned it well enough to lay before the detective pigman. I still couldn’t tell Mr Dickens the whole story, not wanting him to think any ill of Little Alice, so I went alone to the Metropolitan Police. I carried a letter from him so they would take notice of me, and presented my story to the sharp young sergeant called Williamson, who had been looking into the case.
You can never tell in this life. The Swell Mob had had nothing to do with Alice’s death after all.
Bob Cheery put up a good performance, when Sergeant Williamson came to arrest him with a police wagon and uniformed constable.
“Gentlemen, I did not kill Alice Dear,” he told them with dignity. “I was protecting her from the villains she used to work with. They are the ones you want. When I saw Alice on the Sunday before her death, she was intending to tell you –” meaning the policemen “– where the Swell Mob could be found. I had at last persuaded her that was God’s wish.”
Bob Cheery had never been on God’s side, however, for all his splendid words. With Mr Dickens’ evidence, together with missing parish register pages and certificates found in Bob’s home, he was arrested, not only for Alice’s murder but for Mr Toodle’s as well. Sergeant Williamson explained to me that when Bob had become inquisitive about the Toodle – Dear case on Alice’s behalf he had found the missing evidence in Toodle’s office, and been threatening Toodle with disclosure in return for money. They must have fallen out and, with Toodle about to expose his wickedness, Bob killed him. Unfortunately for him, Alice had realized what he had done, so he had to kill her too.
This explanation troubled me. I had one advantage over Sergeant Williamson. I had known Alice, and knew her wings did not always work. How, I asked myself, had she acquired so many long-tails to produce to Micah on that Monday morning? From Bob Cheery, I answered myself, when she had met him the evening before. She had been trying Bob’s own trick of demanding money for her silence. But why had those banknotes turned out to be faked? And that led me to have another talk with Sergeant Williamson.
Cheery denied it all, but the evidence was found in the Doctors’ Commons in the form of the will Mr Toodle had drawn up – in Bob’s favour. It turned out to be a forgery, something Bob was rather good at. Not too bad at faking banknotes either. It turned out he’d been producing them for some time. The Sergeant and I decided that Alice had taken them to Micah to change, found out they were false and stormed back to see Bob at Doctors’ Commons. Bob convinced her he would bring the true money to her on the Tuesday evening, but to the Tabard rather than her home so that her father didn’t see how much money he was handing over.
All tied up very nicely. So why was it I still felt I’d come down the wrong chimney, like I did once when I was a climbing boy? After all, I now knew why Alice had been afraid for her life last November. It wasn’t, as I had thought, that she was afraid Joe would seek her out and kill her for leaving him. It was because she knew Cheery had killed Toodle for the inheritance money. She only came back to demand money for herself because he’d told her earlier that when Toodle died her father and she would get the money. Instead, Cheery laughed at her and told her he had it all. She threatened to split on the fact that he’d killed Toodle, and he made the mistake of paying her in faked notes. Once she knew that, all was clear to her. And she lost her life, because instead of running away, she went back to face Cheery.
I knew all this. What I didn’t know was what the Swell Mob had been hiding from me.
There we all were, them sitting at the same table at the Tabard, but me with them this time. That was a favour. I even got my beer paid for. Even Dolly thanked me. I decided the reason must be something to do with Joe, and I thought I knew what it was.
“You came here that Tuesday evening, didn’t you, Joe? That’s what you wouldn’t tell me.”
They all looked at each other, and then Joe said, a bit too eagerly. “Yes, that’s it, Tom. I came here to meet her, and she was dead already. I knew who’d done it of course, but I had to scarper quick.”
He was lying. He would have put the finger on Cheery good and proper when his name was first raised. So what was it they were hiding? Everyone was watching me now, as I groped my way up this narrow chimney to the truth. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like what I found at the top – and I didn’t. I could have wept. I’d thought it was Cheery who wanted Alice’s soul, and Joe her body, but I’d had it the wrong way round. Joe really loved that girl.
“You were protecting Alice, weren’t you?” I addressed all four of them, not just Joe. “Even after her death.”
Joe blushed a bit, and Buzzer shuffled his feet. Edie pursed her lips together, and Charlie didn’t cry. He just sat watching me stumble towards the answer.
“Bob Cheery killed Alice all right, and you all knew it,” I said. “But you also knew he hadn’t murdered Toodle. And nor had Jacob Dear.”
Even then I hoped they’d deny it. But they didn’t, so I had to go on:
“Alice killed him.”
A long silence, and then Joe said awkwardly, “She came to see me after she got the sack. Told me all about it. Bob kidded her that when Toodle was dead, her father would inherit the money, which meant she’d get it too. So when she told Toodle she wanted the case reopened and he laughed in her face, she killed him.”
“She didn’t know what she was doing, bless her,” Edie cried.
“That’s right,” Joe agreed.
“Yeah,” said Buzzer.
So it was left to Charlie or me to point out that when she went to meet Toodle she’d taken a knife with her. Neither of us did.
Oh Alice, little Alice. What am I going to tell Mr Dickens? Nothing.
It’s not nobody’s fault, Alice. It’s everybody’s because life put so much soot in your chimney. But it was you who took that knife. So I was glad that Mr Dickens changed his mind and called his novel Little Dorrit. That’s the Alice I’ll remember.
Miss Havisham’s Revenge
Alanna Knight
Between completing Little Dorrit and commencing Great Expectations, Dickens’s life once again became turbulent. He had acquired Gad’s Hill at Higham, just outside Rochester, which became his final home, and he entertained many guests there, including Hans Christian Andersen, who rather overstayed his welcome. Dickens continued with his theatrical company, even performing The Frozen Deep, a play he had written with Wilkie Collins, for Queen Victoria. It was the first performance of this play that brought Dickens in touch with a young actress, Ellen Ternan, with whom he soon became infatuated. Dickens had for some years grown estranged from his wife, Kate, and Kate believed that Dickens was having an affair with her sister, Georgina. Dickens managed to keep his relationship with Ellen Ternan secret, but was still able to go through with a formal separation from Kate in the summer of 1858. Dickens established separate homes for Kate and Ellen in London while he settled into Gad’s Hill.
Needing to keep himself occupied, Dickens began another round of public readings, and also determined to wrest Household Words away from his publisher, Bradbury and Evans. He succeeded, after an acrimonious struggle, and then promptly merged it with a new magazine he had just launched, All the Year Round, which began with the serialization of Dickens’s new novel, A Tale of Two Cities. Other family problems pressed upon Dickens at this time. His eldest children had left home, his brother, Alfred, had just died and Dickens suffered a real sense of loss. Amongst his other essays and stories at this time, Dickens turned once again to visit his childhood and, by way of therapy, to rewrite it.
Great Expectations, which began in All the Year Round in December 1860, is Dickens’s last major novel and one of his best and we have two stories here which it has inspired. It tells of the young orphaned boy Philip Pirrip, known
as Pip, raised by his tyrannical sister. Pip helps a convict, Magwitch, who has escaped from a prison ship, though he is later recaptured and transported to Australia. The years pass and Pip is summoned by the elderly Miss Havisham, a rich but unforgiving woman who has turned against all men since she was jilted at the altar by (Pip later learns) the villainous Compeyson, a former associate of Magwitch. Miss Havisham has raised as her ward, Estella, with whom Pip gradually falls in love despite the fact that she taunts him and is heartless towards all men, a trait encouraged by Miss Havisham. Although Pip is to be apprenticed as a blacksmith he learns he has a secret benefactor, whom he believes is Miss Havisham, and sets up home in London to be educated as a gentleman. He befriends Herbert Pocket, who calls Pip by the pet name, Handel. It is only later that Pip learns his benefactor is actually Magwitch, who has made his fortune in Australia though has returned illegally. Pip and Herbert hide Magwitch, who now goes by the name Provis, but Magwitch is betrayed by his former companion Compeyson and the two fight to the death. Pip confronts Miss Havisham over her deception and learns that Estella is to marry the odious Bentley Drummle. He also learns that Estella is Magwitch’s daughter. Pip and Herbert eventually make their way in business and become successful.
Great Expectations has one of Dickens’s most intricate but most rewarding plots. It contains so much that the following two stories, whilst both drawing upon the book, do not overlap in any way. In the first we discover the full story of Estella’s marriage from her own perspective. Alanna Knight has had a long and successful writing career since her first book, Legend of the Loch (1969) won the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s best first novel award. She is known as an expert on the life of Robert Louis Stevenson and has written The Robert Louis Stevenson Treasury (1982) and other books about the man. This provided her with considerable background on Victorian Edinburgh from which she developed her series featuring Inspector Faro which began with Enter Second Murderer (1988). The following story has been adapted and extensively revised from her novel Estella (1986).
Even as I record these events, I fear my fate remains in the balance. If my husband dies, his mother and cousin will endeavour to have me accused and hanged for his murder.
My name is Estella, my strange destiny began when I was adopted by Miss Alicia Havisham, not from any tender impulse to adopt an unfortunate orphan but merely the grim determination to rear a pretty female child as a breaker of men’s hearts.
To avenge the bridegroom who had betrayed her.
The room I first entered at Satis House did not terrify me then as it was to do in later years when its true significance became clear. Beyond the candles high in their sconces, seeping through tight closed shutters, a hundred birds in a hundred trees greeted the still warm autumn sunlight while inside the candlelight glittered remorselessly upon a scene of decay and corruption.
A grim charade, with a corpse-like woman whose faded unhealthy skin had not felt God’s wind or rain or the blessing of sunlight for a quarter-century, wearing her fusty yellowed bridal gown, all withered and rotted like the obscenity of skeletal bridal flowers, their petals long returned to dust. And dominating that ghostly wedding banquet, the crumbled tower once a wedding cake now woven through and through with curtains of cobwebs, the crawling spiders and the mice who scampered, squeaking into retreat at our footsteps.
“You are not afraid of them, Estella,” said Miss Havisham.
I shook my head and a ghastly smile of satisfaction revealed yellowed teeth. Dismissing Mr Jaggers, her lawyer, who had brought me, she patted my arm, her hand once beautiful, now a skeletal claw. “Good, dear child. They are our companions. That is your first lesson.”
I was to be given every luxury, treated like a princess in a fairy tale who did not possess a heart to give love or show emotions. Provided with a maid, a poor girl inappropriately surnamed Jolly, under Miss Havisham’s watchful eye my lessons in bullying and humiliation began.
The main object of my cruelty was Pip Gargery. If she beheld him near to tears, she would cry out: “If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces, love her. I adopted her to be loved.”
My formal education at Dame Clarissa’s School for Young Ladies was completed at Mme Chauvez’s finishing school in Paris. There the heartless princess had to endure the odious attentions of a spotty eighteen-year-old son and his portly father who possessed between them as many pairs of lecherous hands as the more worthy spiders of Satis House possessed legs. Mme Chauvez, convinced that Mlle Estella was intent upon seducing her innocent son and her dear husband, demanded that I leave immediately.
My return was followed by an immediate encounter with a distinguished young gentleman so elegantly clad I could be forgiven for failing to recognize the blacksmith’s boy Pip. My once despised companion and whipping-boy now had great expectations of a fortune on condition that he retained the name of Pip and did not seek to know the identity of his mysterious benefactor.
As I showed Pip out, he smiled. “I can recount every meeting we ever had together, the very first when you brought out food for me at the back door like a beggar.”
“And you pretended you had helped some wretched convict in his escape from the Hulks just to impress me.”
“It was true, Estella, although I cannot prove it and I expect he is dead long ago.”
Watching him leave as I had done so many times and through so many changes, suddenly I wanted to call him back, for at the mention of Mr Jaggers, to be his guardian until he came of age, our eyes had sought Miss Havisham and we truly believed that she intended us for each other.
Instead it was Bentley Drummle who entered my life. Introduced by a mutual friend of Pip, and looking as if he had stepped down from one of the heroic paintings I had admired in the Art Galleries of Paris. Warriors of a bygone civilization might well have been the model for this English gentleman with expectations of a baronetcy in Shropshire.
Black hair and eyes, a sallow complexion with brooding heavy-lidded gaze, a large man, whose slightly ungainly physique suggested power. He walked like a wrestler, forward on the tips of his toes, moving his head slowly from side to side, as if he were on the defensive.
After the first bowing over my gloved hand, his manner was of the utmost detachment, even of boredom. Not even when we parted did he deign to look my way in the interests of politeness.
This was indeed a new and intriguing state of affairs for Estella Havisham, already recognized by male acquaintances as being worthy of a second glance. Could I be losing my looks so soon? Panic gnawed at me fiercely, for I had to confess a secret attraction to his outlandish looks.
My guardian now decided that having kept me too long as companion since completing my education I was to proceed to Richmond and in the house of Mrs Matilda Brandley, her one time close confidante, I was to be brought out and presented to society.
There I discovered that my activities were no longer limited to breaking men’s hearts only, for the urgent matter of finding a suitable husband was predominant in Mrs Brandley’s curriculum.
Pip was elected to escort me, not unwillingly I might add, to Mrs Brandley. A little dainty bird-like woman with an unmarried daughter, past thirty; as colourless as her mother shone pink and white, as staid and dull as her mother was youthful and flighty. Most men, one felt, given a straight choice, would opt for the sprightly widow rather than the sullen daughter.
Mrs Brandley’s sole conversation about clothes and cards soon palled, as did her tinkling laughter, while her dedication to be young at all costs set my teeth on edge.
“We must be ready to give of our best at all times, my dear Estella. We must never be tired or cross. Frowns are for age, but smiles are for youth.”
My patience was sorely tried at being a mere exhibit in her matrimonial showcase, where marriages were based on dowries and hard-headed calculations, and Romance belonged between the printed sheets of novelettes rather than the bridal bed.
; And my price tag was high, for Mrs Brandley had spread the word that I was ward to the wealthy Miss Havisham and had expectations of a great fortune. Admirers came from far and wide. In all shapes and sizes and ages and conditions they descended upon us. The very young, to middling young, mature to downright elderly. Even hopeful old widowers hid in their ranks, on the lookout for a little extra capital to comfort their declining years, the added attraction a girl, young, healthy and strong enough to act as companion and nurse. Tall and short, fat and thin, bald and hairy, moustached or clean shaven, there were none who bowed over my hand whose names I wished to remember.
“Moths and many kinds of ugly creatures are attracted to the flame of a candle.” I remember my words to Pip when, hearing of my success, he accused me of heartless flirtation and I can still blush at the memory of my supreme self-gratification. Let that be so, since emotions of passion presented certain difficulties for one bred without any heart.
Into this stultifying atmosphere, the presence of Bentley Drummle at an unusually tedious soirée was an exceedingly agreeable diversion. Even as I smiled and postured as required, striving to recall every detail of the elaborate rigmarole my guardian had so carefully laid down for a breaker of hearts, Mrs Brandley was ushering him over, her manner purposeful.
Extending my hand, I found myself oddly tongue-tied. “We have met before.”
He stared at me frowning. Horror of horrors, what humiliation. He had forgotten entirely.
“It was at Rochester—” I began.
“Hmm,” he interrupted, looking over his shoulder in the manner of one who desires instant flight, but there was no evading Mrs Brandley.
“Mr Drummle, sir, you will oblige me by escorting Miss Estella Havisham into dinner.” Trapped, we regarded each other desperately. But perhaps to make amends for our forgotten earlier encounter and in a supreme effort to be gracious, offering his arm he led the way into the conservatory.
The Mammoth Book of Dickensian Whodunnits Page 39