Grave Expectations

by Heather Redmond

  Charles leapt to his feet. “The actor can make it so, with exaggerated faces and such.” He sang the verse, affecting the exaggerated manner of an eighteenth-century macaroni. When he finished, he executed a flourish-heavy bow.

  Breese laughed and clapped. “Bravo, Dickens.”

  Charles smiled modestly. “I once studied hard to be the new Charles Matthews.”

  “Oy vey. You wanted to be an actor.”

  “Yes. I even had an audition, but I was so ill that day that my face swelled up and I had to cancel.”

  “You never rescheduled?”

  “No.” Charles cleared his throat. “My reputation as an accurate reporter began to grow, and I had plenty of work. The money was good, and in the end, I craved respectability too much to be a professional thespian.”

  “I understand that, but you do have an ear for verse and song. Why don’t you try writing with me? I could use a good rhyming partner.”

  “I’ll join you another time,” Charles said. “I have to take my fiancée to Bloomsbury tonight, and then I think I will stay in Holborn for a couple of days.”

  “Very wise,” Breese agreed. “I am sure your rooms are infinitely worse than my own.”

  Charles stared down at his forlorn neighbor. “Do you want to stay with me in London? You can sleep on my sofa.”

  His neighbor’s eyebrows rose.

  Charles hoped he didn’t think that his difference of religion would preclude a friendship between them.

  “Very decent of you, Dickens, but I think I will stay here. I have a meeting with the playwright tonight in Chelsea.”

  “Fair enough,” Charles said, then hummed Breese’s tune again. “Do you have a second verse?”

  “Not yet. I—”

  Charles heard heavy footsteps. He turned and found a man with a dark scowl on his face approaching. He wore a black velvet cap, and his white beard was very full, like a cloud of whipped cream. His hair hung down from his cap in curly white locks.

  “This is no place for singing,” the man hissed.

  Breese jumped to his feet. “I apologize, Rabbi. My friend was trying to help me.”

  The rabbi said something in a foreign tongue, and Breese bowed his head in shame. Charles opened his mouth to apologize, but the words did not leave his mouth before the rabbi had stalked away from them, his long coat fluttering around his ankles.

  “The dead need their peace,” Breese said softly.

  “I am sorry,” Charles whispered. “I didn’t mean to disturb your secret place. I had never seen the gate open before and was intrigued. If you’re staying here, can you keep an eye out? I want to open my windows. I don’t have much worth stealing, but if you hear anyone prowling around, it’s not likely to be me.”

  Breese held out his hand, and Charles shook it. “I can do that. I’ll make up a list of some topics we can write about.”

  Charles pulled a face. “It’s all about girls, isn’t it?”

  Breese lifted his hand with a world-weary flourish. “But what kind of girl? A milkmaid? A laundress? A shopgirl? A flower seller? A courtesan?”

  Charles’s lip curled in a sneer. “Not a laundress. I can never find a decent one.”

  Breese chuckled silently. “Then a laundress it must be, my dear Dickens. For your passions are stirred, and therein lies a song.”

  “What would bother you? A parlormaid? A duchess?”

  Breese’s gaze displayed confusion. “All or none. I am indifferent.”

  Charles sketched a wave, then turned on his heels and marched out of the burying ground. Muttering rhymes to himself, he almost collided with another man as he stepped onto the street.

  “Charles! Deep in composition? A new sketch?”

  Charles blinked. “Greetings, William. My apologies. I didn’t see you there.”

  William peered over his shoulder. “Never seen the gate open before.”

  Charles took his arm. “No, but the rabbi didn’t like that I was in there. Is the inquest done, or does the jury need to come back tomorrow?”

  William lifted the bag he held. “Done. I’m back to the city to write up my notes. Going to spend the night at Furnival’s Inn.” He had kept his rooms there, as well, so that he had a place to sleep when he worked late.

  “It will be a long article?” Charles tilted his hat to keep the sun out. He was starting to feel uncomfortable pressure behind his eyes.

  “As you can imagine, Sir Silas was very irritated that Daniel Jones was locked away as the main suspect. I can see how the police and the coroners are going to come to blows, since they have some of the same responsibilities.”

  “Where does that leave our situation? Was the burial order signed?”

  “Yes. I hope our rooms will be habitable again in a day or two. The verdict came in as sudden, violent death by the hand of another, where the offender is not known.”

  Charles blinked sunspots out of his eyes and walked half a block, searching for a break from the sun. “They didn’t charge Daniel Jones?”

  William followed him, then stopped in the indifferent shade of a smaller tree. “You missed the bit where the governor of Coldbath Fields testified that a prisoner had indeed escaped.”

  Charles gasped. “I wish I hadn’t.”

  “Ned Blood,” William said. “What a name, eh? The governor couldn’t identify the manacles found in the Joneses’ blacksmith shop, because the police have them, but no other prison is missing anyone.”

  “They think this Blood character killed Miss Haverstock, abetted by the blacksmith?”

  “Apparently so. When the lovely Miss Jaggers testified, she described a retiring, elderly, homebound lady with no enemies.” He shrugged. “An escaped convict looking for portable property is as likely as anything under those circumstances.”

  “I would agree with Miss Jaggers’s assessment of the lady,” Charles said, “but no one else has had a break-in since we arrived. That’s the part that makes no sense.”

  “Do you care? Should we?”

  “Of course. What if the convict returns to our building?” Charles asked. “Or the thieves? But mostly, Mrs. Jones asked for my help with her husband. There’s no help for him if Ned Blood isn’t found.”

  “How do you go about finding a missing murderer?” William lifted his free hand. “You know London better than anyone, but Blood could have gone anywhere since Wednesday night. It’s been more than four days.”

  “People don’t usually move very far from what they are used to. I’m sure his associates will have some idea of where he is holed up. Murderers don’t get sent to Coldbath Fields. This might very well have been his first kill, and he’s probably hiding out, terrified.”

  William shifted his bag from one hand to the other. “I don’t know what he was in for.”

  “Something with no more than a two-year sentence. For now, there really isn’t anything I can do. I have to go to Bloomsbury tonight, and tomorrow I have a sketch due.” Charles waved his hand over his face. “I suppose I should visit with Mrs. Jones and see how she coped with the inquest.”

  “She’ll have been dosed and put to bed,” William said. “No, enjoy your family time. You want Miss Hogarth to make a good impression on your parents.”

  “Quite the opposite, I assure you.” He pulled William on to the next tree, searching for better shade. A carriage passed by them on the street, the driver wiping his streaming face with a large handkerchief. “While I admit my mother has some good connections among her extended family, my father’s impecunious lifestyle has caused no end of trouble. I hope to never be in debt.”

  “A good plan, if you do not have wealthy relations,” William agreed.

  “Not all of us can fall in love with the niece of a baroness,” Charles said.

  “Ah, but I could not help myself.” William smiled fondly. “My Julie is light herself.”

  “She’s a lively one.” Charles had never quite trusted his friend’s wife, though she generally had a way of angling he
rself into the right over time. But he couldn’t deny the couple’s affection for each other, and their heated glances made him quite uncomfortable at times.

  “I do wish my Julie and your Kate could be friends,” William said. “For they will be thrown together.”

  “I am sorry for it,” Charles said honestly. He preferred not to remember Julie’s flirtatious behavior toward him back when they had first met. “But Julie, for however short a period of time, was my live-in maid. I would hope, now that she’s a respectable married lady instead of an actress, that the frost would cool.”

  “Maybe after you are wed,” William said.

  “Either way, you and I will remain the best of friends,” Charles assured him. “It is up, up, up for both of us in our careers. I have my sketches, and you have your monographs.”

  “Very good.” William grinned at him. “We will purchase our mansions soon enough. Why don’t you take your papers to Lugoson House? Panch will let you in and make you comfortable in the library for a few hours.”

  * * *

  Charles glanced up blindly from his papers when he heard the St. Luke’s bells toll four times. Lifting his hands over his head to stretch, he enjoyed the fact that his body didn’t hurt, thanks to the Lugosons’ luxurious chairs. He’d have to race over to the Hogarths in order to get them in the hackney in time to make it to Bloomsbury for dinner.

  He tossed his papers into his carpetbag, then walked swiftly through a maze of passages that deposited him in the drawing room where he had first met the Lugosons and their distinguished guests back on that tragic night in January. Stepping through French doors that led directly onto a terrace, he then descended a stone staircase into a formal garden that edged the Hogarth property.

  Charles took deep breaths of the purple-blue lavender that brushed against his knees. A red squirrel dashed across his path, racing toward a stand of trees at the far end of the property. The scent of roses filled the air in the next part of the garden. He then admired white lilies, orange and yellow nasturtiums, and pink and white hollyhocks in turn. Enthusiastic bees buzzed in their favorite plantings. The tall purple foxgloves in one of the final rectangles gave him an uncomfortable feeling, since he knew they could be used to make poison.

  He reached the Hogarth orchard. The petals had dropped from the trees, leaving tiny fruitlets behind. He’d much rather stay here, among the trees, than head into urban Bloomsbury, but his family must be faced, and all female elements of the Hogarth and Dickens clans introduced in turn.

  Some of the relations had already met. His mother and sisters had been at his birthday party in February along with Kate and her father. Fanny and Letitia would always make good impressions, and his mother had a great deal of flighty charm. Fred, at fourteen, had endeared himself to every member of the Hogarth family but Mary, who was just enough his elder to find the lad less than impressive.

  But none of them had met his father, and John Dickens, while at least his wife’s equal in charm, was not a parent a young man on the make could be proud to possess. Back when Charles had met Kate Hogarth, his father had recently been released from a lock-up house in Cursitor Street, where his debtors, both landlord and wine merchants, had secured him while Charles raised funds to keep his father from going to prison. Again. Not only had Charles had to borrow money to give to his father’s creditors, but he’d also had to support the entire family, and yet his father had been at his old tricks within weeks of being released, asking for loans again. He had a pension from his first career as a navy pay officer, but it was never enough, and his reporting career hadn’t been the success Charles’s had.

  Still, his parents had reunited after his father’s sojourn with a laundress out of town in the winter months, and now they had rooms in Bloomsbury.

  When he reached the Hogarths’ kitchen door, Mary opened it and regarded him with her hands on her hips. “Ready to go a-visiting?”

  He tweaked one of her dark brown curls. “That I am, Mary dear. Are your sister and mother ready?”

  “There ye are!” Mrs. Hogarth exclaimed, peering around Mary. About five years younger than his mother, she had no gray hair in her dark locks yet, though she’d let her figure expand into soft, comfortable folds and rolls. “I wondered what was keeping ye. The hackney is waiting out front.”

  He gave Mary a lip-smacking buss on the cheek before following Mrs. Hogarth to the small entry hall, where a bench squatted on the floor, under pegs for coats.

  Kate, radiant in a refashioned white dress that she’d inherited from Christiana Lugoson the previous winter, twirled for him. “What do you think?”

  “I’d never have known where it came from,” Charles said, admiring the fine silk skirt. Christiana had been a slip of a girl, a couple of years younger than his Kate.

  “I fashioned the new bodice from the skirt of one dress and used the rest of the fabric to finish remaking this skirt.” She crossed one arm over her breasts to finger the lace on the other short sleeve.

  “Very summery,” he praised, “and I always like blue ribbons on you. They do so much for your pretty eyes.”

  She curtsied, belling out her skirt so that the blue ribbons nearly touched his ankles. “La, sir, the things you say.”

  Mrs. Hogarth opened the front door. “That’s enough from the pair of ye. We had best go, or your mother will think we don’t want to eat her fine dinner.”

  Charles’s stomach growled. “Never.” He picked up the portmanteau Mrs. Hogarth and Kate were sharing with his free hand and marched out the front door. As they walked down the path, George and William poked their heads out of their father’s study, waving and shouting goodbye. Kate waved back and blew kisses until Charles helped her into the hackney cab, never an easy process, then did the same with her mother.

  They rattled through the streets, moving into Kensington and driving alongside the gardens there. Charles told them about all the blooms in the Lugoson garden, and Mrs. Hogarth said they’d been invited to walk there whenever they liked. Kate asked if he’d seen any new books in the Lugoson library, but Charles had to admit he hadn’t looked at the shelves, as he had so much work to do.

  “You must take time to look about you,” Kate admonished. “You work too hard and I want to know more about poor Miss Haverstock’s inquest. Have you heard anything?” Kate asked.

  Charles relayed William Aga’s comments as they passed Hyde Park, enjoying the sight of people in their finest taking advantage of the long summer day.

  “It doesn’t seem like anything useful happened. Is that truly just because poor Daniel Jones had been arrested already?”

  “I’d like to think poor Mr. Jones would have been exonerated, had he been interrogated at the inquest. I think what needs discovering is any possible relationship between Mr. Jones and this Ned Blood character.”

  “What a thrilling name,” Kate said, wriggling her shoulders. Her poofy sleeves wiggled in turn, as if separately animated. “Ned Blood. Sounds like a pirate.”

  “Sounds like a murderer,” Charles mused. “I like descriptive names. I shall have to do a better job with names in my sketches.”

  Chapter 7

  The clop-clop-clopping of the horse’s hooves finally stopped as the hackney moved from the center to the side of the road in front of the Dickens’s lodgings in Bloomsbury. Church bells tolled five times around them as they dismounted.

  The family’s rooms were over a tailor’s shop, and while they weren’t any larger than the lodgings of a few months before, at least John Dickens’s pension was paying the rent, instead of Charles’s and his older sister Fanny’s salaries.

  “Have you ever used them?” Mrs. Hogarth asked, peering in the bowed window.

  “No, but I believe my mother had some coats of Father’s made over for the younger boys.”

  “She doesn’t do her own sewing?” Kate asked.

  “I believe the light is poor upstairs,” Charles said. “Fanny has her singing career, you know, so that just leaves Mothe
r and Letitia to manage the household, and both of my sisters are courting.”

  “How nice,” Mrs. Hogarth exclaimed. “More weddings in the family?”

  “Not this year,” Charles said. “But maybe next. It’s a matter of income, of course.”

  “Still, it’s nice for a woman to know her girls are being settled.”

  Charles smiled and hoisted their two bags in his hands. One for him and Fred, and the other for the Hogarths. He took them up the stairs behind the exterior door. The air in the stairwell smelled strongly of fried fish and potatoes.

  “Are we having fish for dinner?” Kate asked.

  “I don’t know. The tailor’s family lives upstairs, too.”

  A bang sounded as a door hit a wall. A small face appeared at the top of the stairs.

  “Boz!” Charles called. “Come to greet us?”

  His brother waved.

  As they walked toward him, Kate exclaimed, “Oh, he’s a tiny you. Look at all that hair.”

  “No one would miss mistaking us for brothers,” Charles agreed. He dropped the bags on the landing and gave his brother a hearty handshake. “How is school treating you, Mr. Dickens?”

  “Well enough,” Boz muttered. “But I don’t like it much.”

  “Come in, come in,” Mrs. Dickens said, appearing in the doorway. Her hair was frizzed around her charming face, and while the apron she must have just removed had protected the main part of her dress, her sleeves looked like they’d been splattered by grease.

  “Mother, you’ll remember Mrs. George Hogarth and Miss Hogarth?” Charles said.

  “Of course. Welcome,” Mrs. Dickens said. “So lovely to see you both. I cannot believe it has been many months since we last saw you.”

  “It has been too long,” Mrs. Hogarth said kindly. “But we’ll have the rest of our lives to know each other.”

  “So very true,” Mrs. Dickens said with a tinkling laugh. “This way, please!”

  They followed her swishing skirt into the tiny entryway, barren of furnishings other than an empty crate, then went into the parlor. Fanny’s piano had been settled under the one window looking out over the street.