The Eddie Dickens Trilogy

by Philip Ardagh

  ‘Er, that was a whistle,’ said Eddie.

  ‘Coming from that rowing boat,’ said Lady Constance pointing at the little boat heading for them.

  The oarsman reached the shallows and jumped out into the water, his feet protected by a pair of high leather boots. He dragged the boat behind him.

  ‘Lady Constance Bustle and Master Edmund Dickens?’ he asked, in that ‘oo-arr’ accent which sailors always seem to have in pirate stories.

  ‘Yes,’ said Eddie excitedly.

  ‘Indeed,’ nodded Lady Constance.

  ‘I’m Jolly,’ said the sailor.

  ‘I’m somewhat cheerful myself,’ said Eddie’s great-uncle, ‘despite most of my family being ill or injured.’

  ‘You misunderstand, sir,’ said the sailor. ‘My name be Jolly.’

  ‘Aha!’ nodded Mad Uncle Jack. ‘You’re Mr B Jolly … What does the “B” stand for? Brian?’

  ‘No sir, you see –’

  ‘Benjamin?’

  ‘No, I –’

  ‘Benedict? Bernard? Balthazar?’

  ‘I –’

  ‘Bill?’

  ‘No, my –’

  ‘No, if you were Bill your initial would be “W” and not “B” because your first name would be William –’

  ‘ROGER!’ shouted the sailor in desperation.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Mad Uncle Jack.

  ‘My name, sir … My name be Roger but me shipmates call me Jolly.’

  ‘I see,’ said Eddie with glee. ‘Because the skull-and-crossbones flag is called the Jolly Roger!’

  ‘That be right, young gentleman!’ said the sailor with a toothless grin.

  ‘I do hope the Pompous Pig isn’t a pirate vessel!’ said Lady Constance.

  ‘I wouldn’t let Captain Skrimshank hear you speak like that, m’lady,’ said Jolly. ‘He prides himself on being one of Her Majesty’s most loyal subjects. He carries a picture of her with him everywhere.’

  ‘I, on the other hand,’ said Mad Uncle Jack, ‘carry portraits of my own family with me everywhere.’ He opened his long checked coat to reveal a series of small oil paintings somehow fixed to the lining of his jacket, the tail of the dried swordfish he used as an ear-cleaner-cum-back-scratcher sticking from an inner pocket. Eddie had first laid eyes on these pictures when his great-uncle had nailed them up on a visit to his house, since destroyed by fire.

  Jolly eyed the oil paintings. He eyed the tail of the dried fish. He eyed Mad Uncle Jack. ‘I think we’d better be gettin’ to the Pompous Pig,’ he said. Then he eyed the large trunk. ‘That’ll leave us low in the water.’ Soon they, and their luggage, were in the rowing boat.

  The goodbyes were brief and, in next to no time, Mad Uncle Jack was just a small dot in the distance. Soon Eddie was stepping off the boat and climbing up the rope ladder after Lady Constance, to find himself on the deck of the ship that was intended to carry them to foreign shores.

  *

  Unlike his many years at sea ‘below decks’, Eddie now had a proper cabin to himself, connected by an inner ‘adjoining door’ to Lady Constance’s. He had a proper bed, too, not the hammock (nor, to be more accurately inaccurate, the hummock) MUJ had predicted.

  According to the first mate, Mr Spartacus Briggs, who had greeted them and shown them around the ship on their arrival, there was only one other paying passenger on board, but Eddie had yet to meet him. This was not a pleasure cruise, nor a ship full of immigrants wanting to start a new life in the fairly new (but not quite so new as it used to be) New World of the Americas. It was, first and foremost, a merchant vessel taking cargo to America, with the intention of filling up with other goods in America and bringing them home to Britain. The paying passengers were an added source of income – more money, money, money – for the ship’s owners.

  When Eddie did finally lay eyes on their fellow passenger he couldn’t believe them. A feeling of horror, which started at his heels and spread all over his body like a hot flush, soon engulfed him. It couldn’t be … surely?

  But it was.

  There on the deck stood a man he’d last seen in an arrowed suit, with a ball and chain fitted to his ankle. It was the escaped convict Swags.

  The man’s hooded eyes met his with a piercing stare. There was no doubt in Eddie’s mind that the villain recognised him in return. It was unlikely that Swags would have forgotten him. Eddie had helped in the capture of one of his fellow convicts – the leader of his little group, in fact – which probably made him not only memorable but very unpopular, too!

  What made matters even worse, of course, was that, on board ship, there was nowhere to run …

  Episode 8

  Discoveries

  In which Eddie may be at sea, but we seem to spend most of the time amongst familiar faces on dry land

  How Even Madder Aunt Maud came to be in Eddie’s large sea trunk no one knows to this day. It became a regular topic of conversation in the Dickens family and many theories have been put forward over the years, even from Dickenses who weren’t even born at the time, but the truth went with Even Madder Aunt Maud to her grave – buried inside Marjorie in her beloved rose garden – not long after her 126th birthday (which is nearly a quarter of a century after Eddie, Lady Constance and Maud-in-the-trunk set sail for America).

  What is known is that it took nearly a week at sea before Even Madder Aunt Maud was discovered aboard the Pompous Pig, because she soon vacated the trunk and moved about the ship, sleeping in a variety of places from the cook’s cauldron in the galley to the crow’s nest at the top of the main mast.

  There had been rumours spreading around the ship of a strange being cackling to herself and taking things but Eddie knew from experience that sailors were a superstitious bunch who drank a lot, which didn’t make them the best eye-witnesses when apparently ‘seeing things’. It was only when Eddie heard a number of reports of this apparition – variously described as a ‘water witch’ and ‘sea hag’ and everything in between – wielding some kind of animal, possibly a rigid ferret, that Eddie began to fear the worst; that his great-aunt and Malcolm had somehow got on board!

  It took almost as long for the folks back at Awful End to discover that Even Madder Aunt Maud had gone missing. With Mr Dickens up his wooden scaffolding rig, Gibbering Jane under the stairs, Mad Uncle Jack back in his tree house, Mrs Dickens pootling about doing whatever she did and poor old Dawkins, the gentleman’s gentleman, doing everyone’s bidding, they probably assumed that Even Madder Aunt Maud was in Marjorie or, on finding the cow empty, had just nipped out with Malcolm for a breath of fresh air. When they did finally realise that she was well and truly GONE, they had no idea where. There were no telephones, no ship-to-shore telegraphs or radios, and the word ‘email’ was nothing more than a misspelling of ‘female’, with the ‘f’ missing; so there was no way that those aboard the Pompous Pig could let them know she was safe and well. To put it bluntly, the folk at Awful End were baffled. She seemed to have vanished into thin air.

  MUJ went to the local police station to report his wife missing. He knew the detective inspector from a previous encounter and demanded to see him. Knowing that Mad Uncle Jack was the gentleman living up at ‘the big house’ and completely mad, of course, the sergeant at the front desk led him straight through to the inspector’s office. The front desk was a new idea and the sergeant was still in the looking-at-it-admiringly stage, and was keen to get back to it. He’d bought a tin of beeswax with his own money (and he didn’t get paid very much so this was beyond the call of duty). He intended to wax and polish the front desk in his lunch hour which was, for some inexplicable reason, only 45 minutes long.

  ‘There’s this madman to see you, sir,’ said the sergeant, showing MUJ into the inspector’s office. The inspector was sitting behind his desk on a pile of gazetteers (which are a kind of book). He was a very large man and his desk chair had recently broken under the weight of him. The detective inspector struggled to his feet. ‘Ah, Mad Mr Dickens
,’ he said in greeting. ‘How may I be of service?’

  Mad Uncle Jack fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a dried halibut. A halibut is a flat fish and therefore, if you’re that way inclined, an ideal fish to write on. ‘My wife has disappeared,’ he explained. ‘I’ve made some notes on her last known movements.’

  ‘Disappeared, you say?’ said the detective inspector.

  ‘Disappeared,’ MUJ nodded. He handed the policeman the dried halibut.

  The inspector could not read so did not know that MUJ’s scribbles were writing. He simply assumed that the dried fish had strange markings and was being proffered as a snack – in much the same way that you or I might offer someone a crisp/potato chip – so he tried to take a bite out of it. He nearly broke his teeth.

  ‘What are you doing?’ demanded Mad Uncle Jack, wanting to know why the detective was eating his carefully written notes.

  ‘What are you doing?’ demanded the inspector, wanting to know why on Earth he had been handed an uneatable snack. (And, no, the word shouldn’t be ‘inedible’. If something’s inedible, it means that you can physically eat it but it’s so horrible that no one in their right mind would want to. If something’s uneatable, you physically can’t eat it; such as a chunk of rock … or one of Mad Uncle Jack’s dried fish.)

  ‘I want you to read my notes!’ Mad Uncle Jack protested. He had been around to every member of the household asking them when they’d last actually seen Even Madder Aunt Maud and had carefully written down their responses. Now he could see that there were teeth marks on his notes and that the detective’s saliva had smudged some of the replies … and he’d been very proud of his initial investigations!

  The inspector was equally angry. ‘I may not be able to read,’ he said, ‘but I know the difference between a piece of paper and a dried fish, and I don’t take kindly to you trying to make a fool out of me!’

  ‘Can’t read?’ spluttered Mad Uncle Jack. ‘Who ever heard of a police inspector who can’t read?’

  ‘Me for one, sir,’ said the sergeant from the front desk who’d come back into the office to ask to borrow a cloth for the polishing. ‘The detective inspector, here, can’t read and he’s the best detective inspector for miles around.’

  ‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ said the inspector, returning to his seat of books and sitting back down behind his desk.

  ‘I expect you’re the ONLY detective inspector for miles around!’ said the clearly agitated Mad Uncle Jack.

  ‘Not true!’ said the inspector and was about to pull out a map marked with the county’s police stations when he thought better of it. He placed the dried halibut on his desk and then folded his arms across his stomach. ‘Do, please, sit down, Mad Mr Dickens, and tell me all about your dear lady wife’s disappearance.’

  The detective inspector may not have been able to read but he was certainly a very good detective inspector. He listened very carefully to what MUJ had to say and, based on the facts laid out before him, made an initial hypothesis (not to be confused with an initialled hippopotamus … which is rather unlikely, come to think of it).

  ‘It would seem that no one has seen your wife since you, your great-nephew Edmund and his travelling companion Lady Constance left to catch the Pompous Pig,’ said the inspector, ‘which leads me to conclude that she either disappeared during your brief absence or, somehow, went with you.’

  ‘How do you mean went with us?’ asked Mad Uncle Jack, so deep in concentration that he was unaware that he was combing his moustache with the serrated edge of his dried swordfish’s nose.

  ‘That she hung on to the back or underside of your coach, or somehow got inside your great-nephew’s luggage,’ said the police officer, which would have sounded crazy if they weren’t talking about Even Madder Aunt Maud. He’d met her once before and had built up an extremely accurate psychological profile of her: completely bonkers.

  ‘Well …’ said Mad Uncle Jack, a little hesitantly, ‘I suppose that’s a possibility. In our early years of marriage, she did once glue herself to the underside of a performing African elephant when the circus came to town, so went with them to the next venue, though she did reassure me afterwards that it’d been by mistake … She’s a truly remarkable woman.’

  ‘Remarkable,’ repeated the inspector, as he was prone to do; though he said the word as though it wasn’t necessarily the one he’d have chosen first and foremost to describe Mad Uncle Jack’s missing spouse.

  ‘And what about the other possibility? Her disappearing during my absence instead?’ asked MUJ, slipping the dried fish back into his pocket.

  ‘That would be more of a coincidence,’ the detective pointed out, ‘but not an impossibility. If she’d disappeared during the period when there were all those breakouts from Grimpen Jail and escaped convicts on the loose, I’d be concerned for her safety. But all the escapees, bar one, were recaptured a long, long time ago and the single one still at large will have fled the district long ago, too. No, in my professional opinion, your wife has probably ended up aboard the Pompous Pig.’

  ‘If she was simply hanging on to the back or underside of our carriage, she might have dropped off at the station before we got on the train,’ Mad Uncle Jack pointed out.

  ‘If that was the case, she, or someone who ran into her, would have probably been in contact with you by now,’ the inspector reasoned. ‘She has a … er, very distinctive way about her.’ What he actually meant was that a potty woman wielding a stuffed stoat would stick out like a pyramid in a sandpit.

  ‘But what makes you so sure that she’s actually aboard my great-nephew’s ship?’ asked Mad Uncle Jack.

  ‘The very fact that there’s been no report of anyone having seen her,’ said the detective inspector. ‘If she’s on the Pompous Pig, neither she nor the crew can contact us unless they land and send someone ashore with a message … and the first stop after Ireland is America itself.’ He struggled to his feet once more. ‘Just to be doubly sure, I’ll have my sergeant check the daily reports from other districts to see whether there have been any sightings, but I’m sure I’d have remembered them from the morning briefings. I’ll also have him fill in a full missing person’s report. I have all the information I need stored in here.’ He tapped the side of his head and a small, round peppermint fell out of his ear on the opposite side, and rolled across the floor.

  The policeman was more startled than Mad Uncle Jack, who simply assumed that the detective inspector had a head full of them. What had actually happened was that the inspector’d had a peppermint in his hand before dozing off at his desk, resting his head in said hand. The peppermint had got pushed into his ear and, when he’d been awoken by the sergeant knocking at the door to his office, he’d sat bolt upright, blissfully unaware that the peppermint had been lodged there … until now.

  ‘If you find anything out, please inform me immediately,’ said Mad Uncle Jack. ‘You can usually find me in my tree house.’

  ‘If you find anything out, please inform me immediately,’ added the detective inspector. ‘You can usually find me in my tree house.’

  ‘You have a tree house?’ asked Mad Uncle Jack.

  ‘No,’ confessed the detective inspector. ‘I don’t know what made me say that. Sorry.’

  Mad Uncle Jack left the police station, striding past the desk sergeant who was watching the hands of the police station clock approach the hour. He was itching to get out his beeswax and make a start on his desk.

  Episode 9

  That Sinking Feeling

  In which both Eddie and Mad Uncle Jack make plans regarding the ‘recapture’ of Even Madder Aunt Maud

  The first thing Eddie did on seeing Swags, the escaped convict on board the Pompous Pig, was to tell Lady Constance.

  ‘Are you sure that it’s him?’ she asked when he’d told her the whole story.

  ‘I’m sure,’ nodded Eddie, wishing that there was some room for doubt.

  ‘And is Swags his real name?’

  He
thought hard. ‘I think it was short for Swagman, but that was only a nickname, too.’

  ‘I believe that a swagman is an Australian drifter,’ said Lady Constance, with a puzzled frown.

  ‘That’s it!’ said Eddie. ‘I remember now. He was given the nickname because he’d been sent on a convict ship to Australia but had somehow escaped back to England … only to be jailed for something else and to escape again. This time to the moors.’

  ‘And it looks like he’s now trying to escape to America,’ said Lady Constance, letting it sink in.

  ‘So what should we do? Inform the captain?’ asked Eddie. ‘He could be dangerous.’

  ‘Do you know what Swags was in jail for?’ asked his travelling companion.

  ‘No,’ Eddie confessed.

  ‘So he could be harmless,’ said Lady Constance. ‘I’ve heard stories of men being convicted for stealing a loaf of bread, and I don’t think a loaf-thief will do much harm …’

  ‘He might do if he’s afraid of being caught!’ protested Eddie. ‘And, anyway, for all we know, Swag could be a murderer!’

  They were in Eddie’s cabin, him sitting on his bed and Lady Constance in a chair. She stood up and sat down next to him on the bed, taking his hand. ‘Eddie,’ she said. ‘You don’t even know his real name. You don’t know what he was originally locked up for and it’s your word against his that he’s an escaped convict. Don’t you think it would be better to say nothing?’

  ‘I … I …’ Eddie was speechless. This wasn’t what he’d expected her to say at all.

  ‘Not only that, he’s unlikely to try to harm you if he wants to get to America, isn’t he? It’s in his best interest to behave himself and to keep a low profile. If he goes around threatening people he’ll simply draw attention to himself but, if he does try anything, then we should go straight to Mr Briggs or Captain Skrimshank. Agreed?’ asked Lady Constance.