Death at Hungerford Stairs

by J C Briggs

  ‘The shawl – where did you get it? You said it was Madame Outfin’s.’

  ‘I took it. It was at the Du Canes. Someone had thrown it away. They did not care about my work. I took what was mine.’

  ‘There was another boy.’

  ‘Not my boy. I made a mistake. I saw his face – he was a monster. Why should he live when my boy was dead?’ Her eyes were cold. She was not afraid now. This man who thought he was so powerful. He was nothing.

  He told her about Mrs Hart, how she had loved her son, how she had died for lack of Robin. But there was nothing. Dickens saw no remorse there, no pity. He had seen enough. Silently, he handed back her glasses. She put them on, her mask. Nothing now could pierce that impenetrable face. She was closed to them. She had told her tale.

  They took her to London – to Newgate. And she spoke no more.

  27

  GALLOWS

  A great many things took place in December. Charley had his interview for Eton and showed great intelligence in his knowledge of Virgil and Herodotus. Dickens wrote to Charley’s tutor, Mr Jones, that he was inexpressibly delighted at the readiness with which Charley went through this ordeal with a stranger. Dickens kept Christmas in the usual way; on the twenty-fourth day of December he took his children to the toy shop in Holborn where they selected their Christmas presents; there was the pantomime with Mark Lemon and a country dance to end the old year. Kip flourished at Urania Cottage – a good-natured donkey with mild eyes had been bought and was Kip’s special responsibility. James Bagster took him to his daughter’s house at Kensal Green where he played with James’s two grandchildren, and ate plum pudding for the first time in his life. Sam and Elizabeth entertained the Brim family – and Scrap, of course. The shop was closed and Mr Brim rested in the upstairs bedroom at Norfolk Street. Captain Pierce took Davey to live near the sea where the wind scoured the lanes and fields clean so that it was possible to breathe the clear air which dissolved some of the dark terrors of London, and eventually he forgot the nightmare city.

  On December 29th Dickens sat in his study looking at the snow outside. The first page of the tenth instalment of David Copperfield was staring at him with what he called a blank aspect. He took up his quill to write a letter to his friend William de Cerjat in Lausanne. He told him that Little Em’ly must fall, but that he hoped to put the story before the thoughts of the people in a new way which might do some good, perhaps evoking sympathy for the seduced and ruined girl. He recalled the hanging of the Mannings: the conduct of the people was so indescribably frightful that I felt for some time afterwards almost as if I were living in a city of devils. I feel, at this hour, as if I never could go near the place again… And he felt the same about Newgate where Victorine Jolicoeur was imprisoned. She would surely hang in the New Year.

  Newgate. Looming black, a stern slab of thick, cold stone, sombre as a fortress, where Mademoiselle Victorine waited in the condemned cell for the day of her execution. Dickens would not go. He could imagine it all too well, the narrow and obscure staircase leading to the dark passage in which a charcoal stove cast a lurid tint, and the massive door of the condemned cell. He could picture her in that stone dungeon with its scratched, hard bench, its iron candlestick which at night would cast flickering shadows on the wall until extinguished at ten o’clock by the two warders who kept guard over that slight, anonymous woman who had said nothing in her own defence, who had been found guilty, and who had listened impassively to the judge with the black silk on his head while he uttered the sombre words: hanged by the neck until you are dead. He could see in his mind’s eye the Bible and the prayer book, and wondered if she had read them, or if she had made her confession to the black-robed priest from the Sardinian church. Dickens had remembered the kindness and concern in the priest’s eyes, and had gone back there to enquire if the priest would visit her.

  On the Sunday before the hanging, the gaol bell would summon the prisoners from their various wards to the chapel. The condemned woman would be brought in to sit in the black pew from where she would stare at the pulpit and reading desk hung with black. The prison chaplain would ascend the pulpit. Dickens could imagine the words addressed to the unhappy prisoner doomed to die on the morrow, who must call upon Him who alone had the power of forgiveness, and who had said though her sins were red as scarlet, He would make them white as snow. He looked through the window at the white garden, at the thickening sky where snow gathered to fall silent and slow. He thought of Mrs Hart, Robin, Jemmy and Nose to be buried soon under the cold earth. He thought again of Victorine in Newgate.

  He had written of the condemned man in that cell with its small high window barred with heavy iron, listening to the deep bell of St Paul’s, counting the hours, seven, six, five left. He had written of how such a man might still hope for reprieve, and how in his restless sleep, he would dream of a happier past and wake to find that Time, inexorable, unstoppable, had marched grimly on, bringing the grey light of morning stealing into the cell. He did not think that Victorine would dream of a happier past. She would not sleep. She would lie awake, her eyes open in the darkness, and Mrs Hart, Robin, Jemmy and Nose would come to her then to watch her in silence, their eyes accusing and the boys would merge into one boy. And that boy would be Victor, streaming with water, his drowned eyes weeping, his grief for her a searing reproach. She would reach for him, but he would be gone.Then she would know what she had done. She would start from her uneasy bed. She would fumble for her spectacles, and see in that dank morning gloom that every object in the narrow cell was too frightfully real to admit of doubt – she would know that she was the condemned woman and that in two hours she would be dead.

  And it all came to pass as he foretold. On a grimly freezing Monday morning when the bells of St Paul’s and St Sepulchre’s struck eight, the crowd was gathered, thick as flies, pushing and jostling for the best view. There was the black scaffold and the black chain with its hook to which would be attached the hempen rope that would encircle that fragile neck. Another bell rang out and the Debtor’s Door opened to let out the solemn procession. First the chaplain intoning the words of the burial service: The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Then Mademoiselle Victorine, so slight as to be almost weightless, her arms already pinioned.Then William Calcraft, sometime cobbler and pieman, hangman now for twenty years, paid a guinea a week and a guinea for each execution as well as the money he made from selling pieces of rope from executions. The short drop was his speciality and it could be an ugly business if the victim did not die soon – and Mademoiselle Victorine weighed nothing. He had measured her with his keen, cold eye. He’d have to be nifty, he thought, down the ladder to pull on her legs. Still, it made a decent show for the mob. Couldn’t disappoint his public. He had hanged Mr and Mrs Manning before a crowd of, it was thought, thirty thousand or more. That day’s crowd was no less guilty of the wickedness and levity against which Dickens had fulminated in his letter to The Times.

  Mademoiselle Victorine walked steadily, betraying nothing of fear or sorrow – her eyes were lowered. Without her spectacles she could see very little, but she could hear the low growl of the crowd rising to a cacophony of shrieks and jeers. She was placed on the trapdoor, her head and face covered in a white cap and the noose placed round her neck.

  Sam turned away – he had fulfilled his duty by being there, but he did not want to see to what end he had brought her. The horror of the crime almost faded from his mind when he looked upon the howling mob. The pity and horror, Dickens had said about the execution of the Mannings. He pitied her then and her victims, and poor Victor whom he had never known, but whose death had brought this. With these churning thoughts, he walked away, sick at heart.

  EPILOGUE

  In Paris, the hat shop was closed. Madame Regnier and Madame Manette had gone to the country for a little holiday. Apparently, Madame Manette was expecting her first child – it was well to be careful, Madame Rigaud had told her neighbour. The shop would open again in a few wee
ks. The girl would serve at the counter, and Madame Manette would sew quietly in the back room where the canary sang and Frou curled up by the fire. The child, a boy, was born in April. Spring, not winter. It was an easy birth.

  In New York, Michel Blandois read an account of the hanging. He wondered if he might have prevented it all. He thought of a woman with soft curling brown hair framing her thin face and dreaming grey eyes that without spectacles could awake desire. He had loved her once. He thought of a winter’s day by the sea and a child playing, running in and out of the water, his face glowing with life. He thought of how he had left him to talk to a Frenchman he knew, and how, when he had gone back to the shore, the laughing boy had gone, swept away by the drag of the tide. She had not forgiven him.

  In the little apartment Michel lived with his new wife – she did not know that he was already married. It did not matter, Michel thought. His first wife would never know. The past was in France; the future was here in America, an empty slate on which he could write any version of his life that he wanted. The child cried and his mother hushed him, wrapping the beautifully embroidered shawl round him. He wished now he had not kept it. He had told Louisa that it had been his mother’s – she had liked that. She was pretty with her short hair – when they needed money, she had sold her long black hair and now she looked like an attractive boy. Michel did not like it, but she said it would grow and she would be his Louisa again. She brought the child to him.

  ‘He needs a name, Michel. He must be baptised soon. What shall we call him?’

  ‘Victor,’ he said.

  In England, quicklime, white like crystallised snow, strewed the unmarked grave in the ground of Newgate. It was thought that quicklime would hasten the decomposition of the bodies, that it would eat the flesh and bones, and even the poor, twisted heart that had loved Victor. True snow fell softly on the grave where Victor lay, covering the pitiful, tattered flowers which would rot in the months to come, never to be replaced; it fell on the quiet grave wherein lay Mrs Hart and Robin, and it fell now on the grave of Jemmy and Nose, softening the harshness of the dark earth. Dickens and Jones stood there looking at the mounds of earth after the funerals for which Dickens and Sam had paid – not for these victims an unmarked pauper’s grave, not for them the number scrawled in chalk on the cheap coffin which would split as it was lowered, not for them the crowded earthen vault. There would be a headstone for each pair, one inscribed with the names Jemmy Kidd and Joe Joram. Nose was all the name that poor disfigured face had possessed so Dickens had christened him, thereby blessing him with a name and a mother. Minnie Joram could be glimpsed by the reader of David Copperfield, dancing a little child in her arms, while another little fellow, Joe Joram, clung to her apron – a good mother. It was all he could do for that unknown, abandoned child. Someone, sometime, would pass by and wonder who they were, two boys in one grave – and pity, even if for a moment.

  ‘Their little lives, rounded with a sleep – sleep that shuts up sorrow’s eye.’ There was comfort in Shakespeare’s words, thought Sam, listening to the half-murmured phrases which were Dickens’s epitaph for the dead. They walked away from the graveyard. Sam went home to the warmth of Norfolk Street and Elizabeth.

  Dickens stood outside the door of number one Devonshire Terrace and looked up at one bright star shining, and thought of a story in which a child looked upon the star as on the home he was to go to. I hope it may be true, he thought as he opened the door to a tremendous rampaging and ravaging on the stairs down which several boys appeared to be tumbling all at once. Catherine stood at the top of the stairs, smiling down at the confusion of boys, Henry in her arms, and holding back Sydney who was longing to fling himself after the others. Georgina was at the bottom of the stairs, just in time to catch the plump and unpoetical Alfred Tennyson, aged four. Home. Magic word. He had come a long way from Hungerford Stairs.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  In November 1849, Charles Dickens was writing David Copperfield. In the novel, young David is sent to work at the bottle factory owned by Murdstone and Grinby. As a twelve-year-old boy Dickens had worked at Warren’s blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs; he never forgot the misery and humiliation of those days: ‘Until old Hungerford Market was pulled down, until old Hungerford Stairs were destroyed, I never had the courage to go back to the place where my servitude began. I never saw it. I could not endure to go near it.’

  Dickens married Catherine Hogarth in 1836; by 1849 they had eight children, the baby, Henry Fielding Dickens, being ten months old. Henry Fielding was the most successful of Dickens’s children – he became a judge. Charley, the eldest son, did go to Eton in 1850; Sydney, whom Dickens presciently named ‘Ocean Spectre’, did go to sea. He died in 1872 and was buried at sea. Katey married Charles, the younger brother of Wilkie Collins, and Mamie stayed with her father until his death in 1870.

  Dickens established the Home for Fallen Women with Angela Burdett-Coutts in 1847. He said that Georgiana Morson was the best matron he ever employed. Isabella Gordon and Anna-Maria Sesini were dismissed from the Home in 1849 for misconduct. I have imagined their subsequent history.

  John Forster, Dickens’s close friend, wrote the first biography of Dickens, and Mark Lemon, another close friend, was editor of Punch magazine.

  Dickens met Edgar Allen Poe in 1842, and the French poet Lamartine in 1844 and 1847.

  The periodical Household Words came out in March 1850. It was in this magazine that Dickens wrote his articles on the London police, including the anecdote On Duty with Inspector Field. The character of Superintendent Sam Jones of Bow Street is fictional, though his character does owe something to Inspector Field, particularly his authority over the criminals he and Dickens encounter. There is no evidence that Dickens was ever involved in a murder case, but he was interested in crime, and a recent biographer observed that he had a secret desire to be a detective. In this novel, and in the first of the Dickens and Jones mysteries, The Murder of Patience Brooke, I have imagined what might have happened if Dickens had been given the opportunity to investigate a murder.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  J.C. BRIGGS taught English for many years in Hong Kong and Lancashire and now lives in Cumbria. Death at Hungerford Stairs is the second of the cases for Charles Dickens and Superintendent Jones.

  COPYRIGHT

  First published in 2015

  The Mystery Press is an imprint of The History Press

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  This ebook edition first published in 2015

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  © J.C. Briggs, 2015

  The right of J.C. Briggs to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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