And then the large fat lady ran out of steam and collapsed, leaning on her desk for support. She not only owned all of Dickens’ books, but would find herself a character in one of them, I thought with amusement, as I noticed the small, involuntary movements of my friend’s hand, as though he were taking her speech down in his rapid shorthand. It would be lodged securely within his mind, on the shelves of his mind, as he put it, himself, and would rise to the foreground in the middle of some book, still unborn.
‘What a thing to find a friend,’ he said with his usual charm. ‘And now I’m sure that you will be able to help me. I am trying to trace a young girl, an inmate once of your orphanage here. She would be in her early twenties now, but I wouldn’t be too sure of when she left you. Perhaps quite early. Her name,’ he paused there for a second, was going to put the past tense, and then got out of his difficulty by saying decisively, ‘the name that I am looking for is Isabella Gordon. Here as a child, I understand, but, I imagine that she would have left you …’
At the earliest possible opportunity; that would be Dickens’ thought. From what he had told me of this Isabella, she would not be one to hang around a workhouse for a minute longer than necessary.
‘Isabella Gordon, well, that’s familiar.’ The lady clerk resumed her businesslike air. She opened an imposing dark brown leather ledger on the desk before her and turned back a few pages.
‘There you are,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘My sister always says to me, “Never knew anyone like you, Pauline. Don’t know how you do it.” That’s what she says. “Got the memory of an elephant, that’s what you have.”’ The enormous woman giggled happily at her sister’s description while she chatted happily and Dickens’ forefinger wrote rapidly in the air below the high ledge of the desk. The woman had a different accent to London people upriver from her. Cockney, yes, but there was a different intonation, a different emphasis on the ends of words and perhaps quite a strong flavour of the Kentish accent as an overlay.
‘Had a young lady in here, there we are. Three months to the day. Well I never! Asked me the very same question. Look at it there. And you won’t believe this, Mr Dickens, it’s just like God whispered in my ear, “Pauline, don’t you put them records away. A dark stranger will come aquesting them.” You just sit on that there chair, Mr Dickens, and your friend, too, and I’ll get them for you in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.’
And then she was off, calling lustily for someone named Mary Ann.
‘Looks like she did come here,’ said Dickens softly. ‘Can’t think who else might have been interested in Isabella Gordon.’
‘The police,’ I queried, but he smiled pitying my ignorance. By now, I guessed, the police had forgotten all about Isabella Gordon. She had been buried in a pauper’s grave. I had found that out from him. By now the quicklime would have dissolved her flesh, if she was lucky. If not her festering remains would corrupt the air and poison the inhabitants of the small narrow streets near to the cemetery.
‘Here we are!’ Cheerfully the elephantine Pauline came into the room carrying another series of ledgers. Lying on top of it was the first one of the serial editions of Bleak House, stitched into its blue cover, bearing the words ‘Bleak House by Charles Dickens’ and festooned with Mr Browne’s illustrations around the centrepiece.
‘I’ve got another one, I think,’ she said panting with excitement. ‘Please, Mr Dickens, could you write your name in it while I go and have another look.’
‘Looks as worn as though a thousand Paulines have read it on a daily basis,’ said Dickens when she had disappeared again. He signed his name to that one and to the fourth booklet when that turned up and listened patiently to Pauline’s raptures before steering her back to the subject of Isabella Gordon.
‘Yes, a nice young girl, remember her well, wanted to know whether we might have any records of her, had them of course, my goodness me, everything here is documented, Mr Dickens, not a person comes and goes without a note in the ledger, and gracious, I just thought what I will have to write today, the proudest note that I have ever written will be the one that I will write today of your visit.’
Dickens didn’t look too pleased about the idea that his visit would be documented. I saw him open his mouth, but I jumped in quickly.
‘And this Isabella Gordon, she came here twice, did she?’
‘Yes, she did.’ Pauline turned to me as a very much lessor luminary.
‘This is Mr Wilkie Collins. You must read his magnificent book. It’s called Basil. A great book.’ Dickens was always very kind about broadcasting what little fame I had, but I didn’t think that Pauline looked too excited. She was slightly embarrassed, though, about confessing that she had never heard of me and to hide her blushes opened the second ledger and scrutinized it carefully.
‘I remember now,’ she said. ‘The first time that she came I told her that she was down as being temporary and that her mother had left her. Most of them pretend that it’s someone else’s baby, or they found the child, but it’s written here, not my handwriting, Mr Dickens, this is the handwriting of a lady who is retired now. But it’s all here. “Mother says that she wants to reclaim the child as soon as she comes back.”’
‘And where was she going?’ I asked the question. Dickens, I could see, was still absorbing Pauline’s slightly sing-song delivery, reducing it to a mental form of shorthand.
‘Doesn’t say. They have these ideas, all of them, going to make a fortune, going down country, going to marry a farmer, poor girls!’ Pauline gave an enormous sigh that almost lifted the page of the register. ‘I showed it to the girl, to Isabella. Poor thing, no one reclaimed her. Still, I suppose that it was something to her that her mother had planned to come back for her. Thanked me anyway. I remember that. Nice manners. Better than some.’
‘But you say that Isabella came back. Why was that?’
‘Well, she came back a month later. She must have. Here it is in the same book, only a couple of weeks old this entry.’ She peered at it. ‘Not my handwriting. Yes, I remember now. She was so persistent. Some of them are like that, Mr Dickens, poor girls, like that girl in your David Copperfield, well, she was so full of questions, don’t know how she could expect me to know everything, doesn’t know how many of those children who come in and go out of that there gate you see behind you, but as I say, Mr Dickens, she was persistent, so I says to her, Why don’t you come back some Friday because the lady who saw your mother, well she’s retired now, but she works here on a Friday. Just to give me a bit of assistance, you know, Mr Dickens. Let’s me get up-to-date with everything.’
‘And did she, that lady, the retired lady, did she have any extra information?’ I could hardly get the words out. Perhaps the mystery of poor Isabella’s death might be solved.
‘I couldn’t say, to be sure.’ She turned her attention to me for a second and then went back to admiring Dickens’ signature and his carefully penned inscription To Pauline by the Thames from her friend, Charles Dickens.
‘But the other lady, the one that had seen Isabella’s mother when the baby was left here at Greenwich Workhouse.’ I interrupted her protestations that she would cherish that booklet for all of her life and she reluctantly dragged her eyes away from the words and turned to my companion.
‘You could go and see her if you liked, Mr Dickens. Mrs Peters is her name. She lives in a nice little cottage just down by the river, damp, I suppose, but she likes the view, got two holly bushes, one on each side of the gate, small, they are, the winds don’t suit them, but, God help her, she does the best with what she’s got and that’s all that any of us can do, isn’t that right, Mr Dickens?’
After Dickens had gravely assured her that she was right and had promised to drop in the next time that he was in Greenwich by which time she would have all his books piled up on the counter ready for him to sign, we got away from Pauline and made our way back down to the river. Eventually we found the cottage and I knocked at the door, my heart pounding in
unison to my taps on the knocker. The dark, angry face of the schoolmaster, Mr Cartwright, was before my eyes. I wondered whether he knew that we were on his tracks.
‘I’ve got the kettle on and waiting for you, Mr Dickens and Mr Collins,’ were the words that we were greeted with and when we looked puzzled the elderly lady laughed.
‘Pauline sent Mary Ann down by the back lane to warn me,’ she said. ‘Sent a little note, too, about your business and I’ve been racking my brains to see if I can help you.’ She dished up the tea and a couple of slices of homemade cake, told us, without referring to a timetable on the wall, that we had fifteen minutes before the steamboat arrived on the return journey to Westminster.
‘I’ve sent Mary Ann to tell them to wait for you,’ she said in a businesslike way. ‘Now you drink your tea, Mr Collins and Mr Dickens and while you are doing that, I’ll tell you what I told that poor girl. Tell me first of all, how is she?’
Her face grew grave when Dickens told her what had happened.
‘I’m very sad,’ she said after a moment. ‘She was a girl of character. You knew her, did you?’ Her glance went from one to another.
‘She was in a home that Miss Coutts set up for homeless girls. I was associated with it,’ said Dickens. He always, I had noticed, underplayed the role he had in Urania Cottage, rarely mentioned the amount of time that he spent there: the twice weekly visits, the visits to gaols and in police offices checking histories of potential new inmates, and of course, the hours spent talking to the staff and to the girls themselves. ‘But I’m afraid that she wasn’t right for us,’ he concluded.
‘Full of anger,’ said Mrs Peters unexpectedly. And then when he looked at her in surprise, she nodded at him. ‘That’s right, Mr Dickens. They mostly are. They know; even as small children, they know that life has dealt them a bad hand. I used to watch them sometimes in the small time that they got for play. There was a little girl who liked to pretend to be a teacher, to have a school. That’s what she called it when I asked her what she was doing. She would take some stones from the path, arrange them in lines and then go along hitting them with a stick from the hedge and shouting at them. That was her way of playing at school, Mr Dickens. Some of them get adopted, or more likely taken on as cheap servants, but they mostly get sent back to us if they are young enough, or turned out on the streets if they are not. Bad temper; that’s what people say. Ungrateful, too! That’s what people say. They can’t be grateful, you see, Mr Dickens. In a book they could be; like your little Oliver Twist; he was so grateful and so well-spoken, wasn’t he? Nice to read about, but nonsense really. I’m afraid that they’re seldom grateful, not in real life. The iron has entered into their soul.’ And this surprising old lady nodded at us both and added some more hot water to the teapot. Dickens, for once, was speechless and I kept my eyes fixed on my teacup.
‘And now about Isabella Gordon,’ she said. ‘Pretty name, pretty girl. She didn’t remember the place too clearly, blotted it all out, I suppose, poor thing, but she remembered the boats and ships on the river. Pauline had told me that she might be coming back to see me when she had her day off in a month’s time so I had a chance to do a little browsing in the register. Easy enough, not a local name, Gordon, not too common in London either, sounds Scottish to me. So there she was.’ Now for the first time, Mrs Peters hesitated, gave the pot another stir and then a penetrating look at the two of us, as though endeavouring to size us up.
‘And the entry, did it give any details about Isabella?’ asked Dickens. He spoke rather coldly, upset about her criticism of the book that had made a fortune for him.
‘Well, there was something,’ Mrs Peters now spoke in quite a slow and hesitant fashion, unlike her previous crisp delivery. I got the impression that she was weighing up her words as she uttered them. ‘There was something else, written in my handwriting, something that Pauline hadn’t noticed, the words “drawer 786”. The mother had left something. We have all those drawers, a roomful of them, most of them never opened, I must say. Anyway, I found the package. “Deposited by mother who said that she wanted to come back for her baby”; these were the words,’ said Mrs Peters briefly. ‘Lots of them say that, and when they do, we ask that they leave some article that they can mention when they return – in case we give the wrong child, you see, Mr Collins,’ she said, politely including me in the conversation, or perhaps she thought that I looked surprised. It wasn’t surprise, though, but pleasure. An article might help to solve Isabella’s quest.
‘In this case, two articles were left instead of one, and that was a little unusual in itself. One was a little cheap bead necklace, but the other, the surprising one, was a man’s knife. The blade was broken so it was useless, but I thought that it had been a good knife once. And another thing, it was scorched as if it had been in a fire.’
‘You have a very good memory, ma’am,’ I said politely, while Dickens knitted his brows over this.
‘I saw it again only a few weeks ago when I got them out and gave them to Isabella.’ There was, once again, a slight hesitation in her manner. I wondered whether Dickens noticed it, or whether I was imagining it. I glanced across at him but he was still frowning at the lacy tea cloth. Mrs Peters looked at him also. Our glances met for a second then we both looked away and she continued rather hurriedly. ‘And I remembered then all about it,’ she said. ‘You see, Mr Dickens, it’s our rule that we only take children if there is no man to support them so the knife made me a bit suspicious. I see I have a note here stating that the baby looked well cared for and well fed, not at all like most of the little mites who are given up to the poorhouse. I asked the woman if she were married and she said, no, no, that she had never been married. She came out with the usual story that they had planned to marry, but then the father of the baby had been blown up in an accident in the gunpowder mills and she had been left on her own to care for the child. Well, that was plausible enough. There were always accidents happening in these places, but I had a quick look at her hand. You see, Mr Dickens, here in Greenwich we get the fog that you get in London, but we get a bit of sea air, too, and most people get brown in the summer. This was December, so there wasn’t much of the summer tan left, and that girl was pale, after having the baby, I suppose. But her hands, well, they were still quite brown. And there on the girl’s left hand, on her ring finger, was a broad white band. I could have sworn that she had been wearing a wedding ring for a year at least.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘None of my business. I was only the clerk,’ said Mrs Peters briskly. ‘If the beadle wanted to make a fuss about it then he could, but I wasn’t going to say anything. If a mother is determined to leave her baby, then it’s best to take the little mite with no unnecessary questions asked. I had done my duty, done what I was paid to do and I wasn’t going to do any more. I wrote down “unmarried”, and that the child’s name was Isabella Gordon and the mother’s name was Annie Gordon. But I had my doubts. Not a local name, Gordon. Sounds Scottish, but this girl was local, I would have guessed, by the way that she talked. She had a Greenwich accent. She wasn’t Scottish, anyway. There were Scots who worked in the gunpowder mill. I used to hear them sometimes when I was on my way home. Hard to make out a word of what they were saying.’
‘So you think that the father could have been Scottish, is that right, ma’am?’
‘That’s what I thought, Mr Dickens.’
‘And you may well be right, Mrs Peters. There was a mill blown up in Scotland when I was a young lad, completely destroyed. Could never be rebuilt. Blew up a mountain face behind it, broken rocks strewn all over the site. I remember the newspaper where I was working had a feature about it. This fellow, Gordon, might have travelled south for a job in another gunpowder mill.’
‘Well, that band of white on her ring finger made me think that Annie Gordon had been married, for nine months or so at least and that’s what I told this girl, Isabella, when I talked with her. We had a nice chat. Not too busy tha
t day. I gave her the knife and the string of beads and she went off with them. And that’s the last that I saw of her, poor child.’ There was a note of regret in the old lady’s voice, but something else, also. Something that I noted. That slight hesitation.
‘And that was all that was left for her, the knife and the string of beads. Nothing else, was there?’ I asked the question to fill an awkward moment as Dickens seemed lost in his thoughts.
‘As I told you, Mr Collins, that was what I gave to her,’ said the old lady drily.
Not a real answer, I thought, but perhaps it was just her manner.
‘Isabella spoke of a brother,’ said Dickens. ‘The other maidservant in the house where she worked told us of that. Did she have a brother?’
‘Not here,’ said Mrs Peters. ‘If she had, it would have been on the same page. No, she was eight months old, according to her mother and weaned. I remember that was in the book. We sent her off to Mrs Dawson’s baby farm.’
I saw Dickens look at me and I looked at him. We were both startled. Not a terribly unusual name, but not a very common one, either. Could Mrs Dawson of the baby farm be the same Mrs Dawson who worked as a housekeeper in the lodging house?
Dickens got to his feet and held out his hand. ‘You’ve been very kind, Mrs Peters, giving us your time like that. Now we must go and relieve Mary Ann of her wait.’ He half-hesitated. Now would be the moment when Mrs Peters would produce a shilling booklet of one of his books, or even a piece of paper for the famous signature, and my friend Dickens was a generous man, generous with his time, and generous in acknowledgement of a debt. We’d partaken of tea and cake, had received the information that we had been seeking. He waited expectantly.
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