She didn’t immediately speak because, as this thought came to her, she was also thinking that she must reply with great care—which she didn’t do either. What truth had she learned? Impetuously, she started to say, ‘That everyone is—’
She stopped.
‘Everyone is—?’
Kit was too shy to tell Joe something so simple; but there he sat before her, real.
She made an imploring gesture with the hand that had smashed the picture.
‘What?’ he said. The vision of her struggling caused his face to slant into a smile.
Kit gazed back at him, overwhelmed by a kind of anguish. Instead of words, she rose once more to her feet. Without caring, she trod through the litter of glass shards, round the table, walking as a scoundrel might walk the plank. And for the first time, so she realised as he seized her, she kissed Joe passionately, passionately, for himself.
POSTSCRIPT
One holiday, aged about eleven, I found myself quartered in a room with a spellbinding windowsill, on which were wedged not only yellowing paperback adventures by Desmond Bagley and Nevil Shute, but also a desiccated copy of Josephine Tey’s 1950s bestseller, The Daughter of Time. Its plot concerns a detective, confined to bed in hospital, who attempts via intermediaries to disprove the common notion that Richard III was responsible for the murder of the Princes in the Tower. This implausibly compelling tale evidently remained in the back of my mind for all the years that followed, as it was the first book I turned to when it occurred to me that I, too, could take a genuine mystery, which I had stumbled on while messing about in the Bodleian, and give it to a fictional character to solve.
It is perhaps worth noting that the nineteenth-century material cited in this book is all real. The sources of details and quotations are generally indicated where they appear on the page, but in Chapter 7 there are exceptions to this rule. The review of Oliver Twist that warns readers of its being, in places, ‘indescribably repulsive and demoralising’, can be found in the Atlas newspaper, 17th November, 1838. The account of Dickens’s public reading, in which, ‘gradually warming with excitement he flung aside his book’, is given by Edmund Yates in Tinsley’s Magazine (iv), 1869. The story of Dickens acting out ‘Sikes and Nancy’ by himself two days before his death, is reported by John Hollingshead in his essay on Dickens in, According to my Lights, Chatto & Windus, 1900. The text of ‘Sikes and Nancy’ can be found in Philip Collins’s, Charles Dickens: The Public Readings, Oxford, 1975; while for an elegant modern analysis of how this reading affected Dickens’s health, see Helen Small’s essay on the subject in, The practice and representation of reading in England, eds. Raven, Small and Tadmor, Cambridge, 1996. Meanwhile, as suggested in Chapter 6, Charles Field’s daily log of his investigation into Eliza Grimwood’s murder really can be found tucked away in a box in the Public Record Office in Kew, catalogue reference, MEPO 3/40.
All the passages in this book taken from Oliver Twist itself are given in their earliest known form, i.e., as they first appeared in print in 1838. In subsequent editions of the novel, Dickens felt moved to tinker with the scenes of Nancy’s murder, making the language slightly less dreadful. He also cut down on his references to Bull’s-eye’s bloody feet.
Also by Rebecca Gowers
Fiction
When to Walk
Non-fiction
The Swamp of Death
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2009 by
Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2009 by
Canongate Books Ltd
Copyright © Rebecca Gowers, 2009
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 574 3
www.meetatthegate.com
The Twisted Heart Page 24