by M. J. Trow
‘The young idiot?’
‘Not as yet,’ she said. Then her ears pricked up. Someone had let the street door go with a crash and was bounding up the stairs. No editor ever had that amount of energy, drinking to the shade of Dickens for the best part of five days straight or no. ‘But I think that may be him now.’
Chapman had just enough time to step out of the way when the door banged open with as much fervour as the street door had banged closed, and Henry Merivale Trollope burst in. ‘Em,’ he carolled, ‘Fred, sorry I’m late, dears. Horse collapsed on the bridge – heat stroke, poor thing. Made me think, have we got anyone who is a horsey writer? I don’t mean looks like a horse, of course, although …’ He cast his eyes up, scanning some faces in his mind. ‘No, we haven’t really. Elizabeth Barrett Browning looked like her dog, of course, but she’s no longer with us … umm …’ He came back to the here and now and looked at the two faces before him and grinned. ‘Sorry, letting my enthusiasm get the better of me again.’ He pulled a sad face. ‘Here to pay our respects, of course. Charles Dickens, of course. Dear Charles. Very sad. Sudden. I say, I heard a story at my club …’
Chapman took control of the situation, as far as anyone could when the whirlwind that was Henry Trollope was present. ‘If you would go into the board room, Henry, I believe you will find the staff assembled there …’ He raised an interrogative eyebrow at Emmeline Jones, who nodded. ‘And some sherry and biscuits?’ Again, she nodded.
Trollope rubbed his hands together. ‘Splendid. Oh, I say, Em … you’ve not put the funny glasses out, have you? The ones with the thick bottoms, the ones that’re supposed to fool the authors that they’ve had a full measure?’
Miss Jones drew herself up. ‘I have not put out any glasses, Master Henry,’ she said, frostily. ‘Mrs Halfbrackett will have doubtless done what is necessary. Would you like me to call down and find out?’ She reached for the speaking tube by her desk. ‘I can’t promise she will answer – you know how she can be.’
‘No, no, don’t trouble the old trout. I’ll find out soon enough. I’ll go through and have a chinwag with the lads. I’ll tell them you’ll come through when you’re ready, shall I, Fred?’
Frederic Chapman closed his eyes and murmured, ‘That would be just splendid, Henry. Thank you.’
Trollope pushed open the door into the board room and was greeted with cries of delight. He might not be very popular with Miss Jones and Young Mr Frederic, but with editors of every colour, he was a great success. Not only was there the chance that by sucking up to him they might get access to his old man – his father had, after all, bought him a one-third share in the company as a coming-of-age gift – but he was also a lot of fun; not something they had seen much of working for Chapman and Hall before his arrival.
Gabriel Verdon, the most senior editor, patted a chair next to his. ‘Come and sit here, Harry,’ he said. ‘Any gossip today?’
‘I’d better sit up there,’ Trollope said, regretfully pointing to the head of the table. ‘Sad day, all that.’ He worked his way up the table, patting shoulders as he went. ‘But that doesn’t stop me sharing a bit of tittle-tattle. Got to be quick. Freddie is having a bit of a spoon with Em but he won’t be long.’
The editors guffawed, the sound rolling like thunder into the outer office.
Chapman looked at the door, his nostrils quivering. The man was a menace. Coming to work was no reason for hilarity, especially on such a sombre occasion. Did the guttersnipe have no respect for dear Dickens at all? One would almost think that the young idiot enjoyed himself: preposterous! ‘I should join them, Miss Jones,’ he said, looking down at her. She was no oil painting, he had to admit, but she was a sane thing in a mad, mad world. ‘If anyone wants to see me, tell them to come back tomorrow.’
Miss Jones nodded brightly and made a note on the large pad on her desk. Her pencil squeaked across the page – ‘Tell any callers Mr Frederic busy.’ But she knew she wouldn’t have to tell anyone; perish the thought, but all their callers came for Master Henry these days.
British hotel rooms – like this one in Tavistock Square – weren’t a patch on those in New York, New York, that Beulah would attest, and she did it loudly and often. Henry had got used to her over the years and hardly heard her any more as he carried on with what he felt he did best, which was writing. He would agree, if asked, that the lighting could perhaps be improved, but he had pushed the little table over to the window and was getting on famously; the dappled sunlight filtering through the trees was very pleasant, and surely even Beulah would have to agree that the view of the little railed garden full of perambulating nannies and their charges was a vast improvement on that from their own sitting room at home, which was a brick wall not three feet away.
‘I said, Henry, I said … Henry? Are you listening?’
His pen didn’t falter. ‘Indeed I am, Beulah my love. The bed here isn’t as soft as the ones in hotels in New York and you don’t think they wash the comforters very often. You’ve just found a long blonde hair.’
She tutted. ‘If you hear me, Henry, I say, if you hear me, Henry, why don’t you answer?’
He put his pen down carefully and turned to face her. ‘I didn’t know there was an answer, my love,’ he said, patiently. ‘Why don’t you go for a little walk in the garden over the way there, while I finish this?’
Beulah leapt up, to the extent that she ever made any sudden movements. She had always been a bit top-heavy – in fact, Henry, in expansive mood when out on the town with his fellow journalists, had been known to remark that that was the main reason he had married her – but now, with middle-age creeping on, she had a bust like a roll-top desk which made her a little circumspect. She stood over Henry now, roll-top heaving indignantly. ‘Do you mean to tell me, Henry Morford, that you expect me to go outside alone – me, a woman, alone in …’ she took a deep breath and lowered her voice to give it proper gravitas, ‘London?’
Her husband sighed. He looked at his writing, half finished or less. He looked at his wife, looming over him like a shop awning. He looked outside at the sunshine. He looked at the nannies, tripping through the gardens, and he made his decision. ‘Well, Beulah,’ he said, smiling up at her. ‘When you put it like that.’ He got up and shrugged into his coat. ‘Get your bonnet on and we’ll go explore a while. Time we got the lie of the land, I’d say.’
Dimpling with pleasure, Beulah tied her bonnet beneath her chin with a jaunty bow. ‘Oh, Henry,’ she said. ‘You spoil me, you really do. And don’t forget, we’re bound to meet some local colour – cusses who grind knives and sell trinkets, that sort of thing. It’ll be good for your writing, Henry, I say, Henry, it’ll be good for your writing.’
‘Beulah,’ he pecked her on the cheek, ‘you’re always thinking of me. It’s not many wives would come all this way just for a dream.’
‘Aw, Henry,’ she linked her arm in his. ‘But if it comes off, we’ll be in clover. I say—’
‘Yes,’ he smiled, cutting her off in mid-flow. ‘Clover is right, my love. Clover is just the right word.’
Beulah beamed. If her Henry, great writer that he was, thought it was the right word, then right word it was certain to be!
‘Gentlemen! Gentlemen!’ Frederic Chapman rapped the table with the end of his pencil but to no avail.
‘I say, chaps,’ Trollope murmured. ‘A bit of hush for the guv’nor.’
The editors all turned as one man to gaze on their employer. Chapman hated it when they did that; he could almost see their avid thirst for words, like a bottomless well before him. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘as you know, today is a very sad occasion. We meet here to pay our respects to that great writer and great man, Mr Charles Dickens, who, as you know, departed this vale of tears peacefully last Thursday, at his home, Gads Hill.’
Trollope turned his snort into a cough and looked down into his lap. That wasn’t exactly as he had heard it, but if it made the old man happy, who was he to argue?
‘The world will mourn him, gentlemen, as will we.’
‘He’s left a void; that much is certain.’
‘We shall not look on another like him, not in our lifetime,’ Gabriel Verdon was sure.
‘He trod on my foot once. I’ll never polish that boot again.’
After that eulogistic flurry, the room fell silent. Inevitably, it was the young idiot who broke the silence. ‘John,’ he looked earnestly at the solid, square-looking man in the corner, ‘you knew him better than any of us. How’s the biography coming along?’
John Forster raised his whiskered head for the first time. ‘Sala,’ he said and lowered it again.
The editors at their respective levels looked at each other. ‘George Sala?’ Chapman found his voice first.
Forster nodded. ‘I have it on good authority that the blighter has taken it upon himself to write a Life quicker than any of us.’
‘Preposterous!’
‘Unthinkable!’
‘Unreadable, that much is certain,’ Gabriel Verdon was convinced of that.
‘Dickens barely knew the man.’
‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ Chapman called them to order again. ‘We are all missing the point here. The master will indeed leave a great void. John will write a masterpiece of a biography and no one will read Sala. But the point at issue, gentlemen, is that Charles Dickens left unfinished business. Our business depends upon it. I can sum it up in two words, gentlemen – Edwin Drood.’
TWO
‘I think he was losing the plot, you know.’ James Batchelor put down the latest instalment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood and stared at the empty fireplace.
‘Hmm?’ Matthew Grand had his nose buried in the Telegraph, wondering if Magic, Captain Osgood’s yacht, had a hope in Hell in the America’s Cup next month.
‘Dickens,’ Batchelor explained. ‘His latest opus – forever unfinished now, I suppose – The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Not much of a mystery, really. Uncle Jasper did it.’
‘Did he?’ Grand looked up. ‘How do you know?’
‘Please, Matthew,’ Batchelor chuckled, ‘I am an enquiry agent.’
‘Of course you are.’
‘So, it’s not just that the “who” in “whodunit” is as plain as the nose on George Sala’s face, it’s that about a third of the book is written in the present tense.’
‘Is that illegal?’ Grand wondered aloud. He had been in England for less than five years and he knew they did things differently over here.
‘It should be,’ Batchelor told him. ‘Reads appallingly. I’m surprised at Dickens; I’d hoped for more. How did you get on with the burial details?’
‘Well, I couldn’t get into the abbey for the crowds.’
‘He was a national treasure, however you look at it.’
Grand nodded. He remembered Abraham Lincoln’s funeral, with strangers crying and hugging each other. Everybody wanted to touch the casket, pat the white horses, collect the petals that floated down in the April sun. Four men claimed to have laid the pennies on the dead president’s eyes. Barbers in Washington made a fortune selling locks of the great man’s hair that had been nowhere near the great man’s head. ‘It wasn’t that simple, though,’ he said.
‘What wasn’t?’
‘Well, it seems Dickens wanted to be buried in a village called Shawe, the church of St Peter and St Paul.’
‘No, no,’ Batchelor shook his head. ‘His adoring public wouldn’t have allowed that.’
‘Exactly. The authorities from Rochester Cathedral were round to the Dickens place like rats up a pipe. Said they’d already dug the grave.’
Batchelor looked at him. ‘That was a little premature,’ he said, ‘or am I mixing my authors?’
‘Time was,’ Grand reminded him, ‘you’d have given your right arm for a word from Dickens. According to you, the sun shone out of his—’
‘Yes, but that was before this.’ Batchelor waved the paper at him. ‘Chapters Ten to Twelve.’
‘When’s the next instalment due?’
‘Thirteen to Sixteen should be out next month, but perhaps that won’t happen now; without the end, there seems little point. But I have to admit, Matthew, I’m disappointed. It’s just not up to his usual standard.’
‘The obituaries said he hadn’t been well.’
‘So you think George Sala was wrong – about the murder, I mean?’
Grand shrugged. ‘You know the man better than I do, James,’ he said. ‘You tell me.’
‘“No stone unturned”,’ Batchelor murmured, staring again into the blackness where the fire roared in darker, cooler days. ‘He seemed pretty adamant.’
‘And he did pay us a retainer.’
Batchelor snorted. ‘Notice how pale he turned, though? The man would rather have his teeth drawn than draw a cheque, I fancy. So, how did Dickens end up in Westminster Abbey?’
‘Dean Stanley.’
‘Who?’
‘Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster.’
‘You’ve met him?’
‘No, I’ve spent most of the day in the various bookstores around the church—’
‘Abbey,’ Batchelor corrected him.
‘Right. If you want to find out local details, ask the store clerks. Most people wanted to chew my head off on Gladstone’s Irish policy. One of them couldn’t understand why we weren’t backing the Prussians by invading France. And don’t get me started on Mr Forster’s Education Act.’
‘But on Dean Stanley …?’
‘On Dean Stanley, they were as one. He’s a Helluva nice cuss, who would never suggest that England’s greatest writer should be buried in his ch … abbey, but he knows the very place, right between Handel and Sheridan.’
‘Perfect. So,’ Batchelor crossed to the brandy decanter and poured for them both. He raised his glass. ‘To the detecting game, Captain Grand.’
Grand raised his glass too. ‘To the detecting game, indeed, Mr Batchelor. The only game in town. Now, what have we got?’
George Sala was a great story teller, no one would deny him that. In fact his detractors would go further and say that everything he wrote was a story, no matter how factual it was meant to be. But he was so wound up in the toils of the tale of a dead man that he went backwards, forwards and sideways randomly, so that in the end Batchelor’s notes, taken during his discursion, looked like the ravings of a madman. While everything was fresh in his mind, Batchelor had retired to his garret and rewritten it all in an attempt to make it seem like sense. But even then there were so many gaps and bits of nonsense that he was sure that he had got the wrong end of the stick more than once.
He now planned to read it all out to Grand, who was invited to interrupt whenever he thought Batchelor had gone wrong, as he remembered it.
‘I’m sorry, James,’ Grand said before the reading even began. ‘At times I wondered whether the man hadn’t come straight here from some opium den or somewhere. He was … well, I can only use the word incoherent.’
‘Sala does have a habit of using twelve long words where one short one would do,’ Batchelor agreed. ‘I’ve cut all that out where I can.’
‘That’s a mercy,’ Grand said, leaning over and tugging the bell, the only one that linked to the kitchen. ‘Brandy’s good when you have work to do, but shall we have a snack as well? I’m as hungry as a hunter.’
Batchelor sighed. They had both managed to lose the excess weight caused by their brief employment of a gourmet chef, but Grand had been left with a taste for canapés of an evening. Sadly, Mrs Rackstraw had never quite got the knack, and she usually produced a cheese sandwich, cut into small squares. She was an excellent plain cook, as her references all attested, but with the emphasis very much on the plain.
In answer to the bell, there was a thunder of running feet in the hall and the housekeeper burst in as though the hounds of Hell were at her heels. ‘Yes?’ Then, ‘Sir?’ There was something about her timing that added insolence to injury whenever she spoke.
‘Umm … yes,’ Grand said, ignoring the slur. ‘Could we have some canapés, do you think? Not cheese-based, if possible.’
The woman stood there, still swaying with the violence of her entry, but didn’t speak.
‘So … that would be marvellous, thank you,’ Grand smiled and turned back to Batchelor. After a moment or so, the door slammed, and the running feet were heard to disappear down the corridor. The slamming of the green baize door completed the picture.
‘Shall I wait …?’ Batchelor was loath to begin when she would be back shortly with a tray of something unidentifiable. With cheese out of the question, it was doubtful that she would have anything else she could squeeze between two bits of bread.
‘No, no,’ Grand said, waving a hand. ‘Let’s get going. We can’t hang around waiting on the help all the time. When did Sala’s story begin? I could hardly tell even that, honestly.’
Batchelor shuffled his papers and tapped them into neatness on the table. ‘I don’t know when Sala’s story began, but I have started with the finding of the body. Dickens, as you probably know, did all his writing in a small summerhouse in the grounds of Gads Hill, which everyone refers to as the chalet.’
Grand threw up his hands. ‘There you are, you see; I have already learned something.’
Batchelor was aghast. ‘Everyone knows that,’ he said.
Grand made a decision and leaned forward. ‘James, before this all begins in earnest, can we come to a consensus? I won’t keep on telling you it was news to me, if you don’t keep telling me that everyone knows that. Is that agreed?’
Batchelor was sulky, but agreed. He took a deep breath. ‘So, on the 9 June last, Dickens’s housekeeper, Georgina Hogarth, known as Georgy, went to the chalet.’
The door crashed back. Mrs Rackstraw deposited a plate of toasted squares of bread oozing something brown. ‘Canapés,’ she remarked.
‘And they contain …?’ Grand wasn’t sure he wanted to know, but couldn’t help but ask.
‘Dripping,’ she said. ‘You said you didn’t want cheese.’ As an explanation it left a little to be desired, but she swept out anyway, giving him no chance to pursue the matter.