“But no,” Fanny protested. “The wedding is only a few months away.”
Charles knew it well. “All couples have these moments. A wedding can be a great strain. There are familial obligations, expenses to consider . . .”
“Kate is such a delight. The wedding should be simple,” Leticia said.
“Everyone loves Kate,” Charles snapped.
“Doesn’t she love us?” Leticia frowned.
He stared down his sister. “Of course she does.”
“Then whatever is the trouble?”
“Holiday nerves,” Charles muttered. He couldn’t tell them how bad it was.
Fanny, always a good friend to him, patted his arm. “For some, Christmas is a sad time. Everything will be back to normal by Epiphany, you’ll see.”
Charles stared at the curtain, willing it to rise. As much as he loved his sisters, he wanted Kate.
“I pray I am up to the duty of a wife,” Fanny whispered. Charles patted her shoulder. “There could be no better wife than Frances Dickens, I am convinced.”
“And no better husband than you, my dear,” she said in return.
He hoped Kate still believed that.
* * *
The next morning, Mr. Hogarth called Charles into his office. “William is too ill to come in today.”
Charles stiffened in his chair and fretted. Ill? Was Timothy ill as well? And what about Julie and her unborn child? “Th-thank you so much for telling me, s-sir,” he stammered. “I shall attend upon them at once.”
Mr. Hogarth’s eyes narrowed. “Whatever for? The man has a head cold. The note he had a newsboy bring here was positively splattered with ink. Must have been sneezing.”
Charles cleared this throat. “If that is not what you wanted?”
The editor sighed. “I need ye to take William’s assignment. He was to attend an inquest at The Cooked Goose this morning.”
“Oh? Who is the magistrate presiding?”
He consulted a paper on his desk. “Sir Silas Laurie.”
“Our old friend,” Charles said. “What is the case?”
“One Goodwin Golden, found dead in the river,” Mr. Hogarth said.
The corners of Charles’s mouth turned down. “That will be a delightful corpse.”
Charles went to the now familiar public house. The case had not received much attention. A trio of newspapermen were on hand and were allowed stools since no family attended. The case open and shut with no trouble, due to the late Goodwin Golden having been in the company of a known cutpurse at a dockside tavern the night before he was found alongside the riverbed near London Bridge by a porter.
After the jury returned a verdict of manslaughter that afternoon and the corpse was nailed into its coffin and taken away, Charles asked Sir Silas for a moment of his time.
“It is Dickens, correct?” the baronet queried.
“Yes, sir,” Charles said. “I wanted to ask you about the Jacob Harley situation.”
“Yes?” Sir Silas pulled up his coat skirts and sat on one of the vacated stools next to Charles. “Have there been new developments? I think Mr. Kittle has the paperwork in our traveling file.” He gestured to the man behind the makeshift desk, employing his quill rapidly over a piece of paper.
“This is the latest development,” Charles said. He explained the attack on him in Princes Street.
“From what you say,” Mr. Silas said thoughtfully, “there has been a new provocation from you since the death. Therefore, this potential attack may have no bearing on the Harley death. Which, as you recall, is currently designated an accidental death.”
“I’ve been thinking about those marks on Mr. Harley,” Charles said. “Johnny’s hands are so absurdly large. Would he have made marks like that or would they have been larger?”
“We can experiment,” Sir Silas said. He checked the watch on his waistcoat chain. “At this time of day there are probably a variety of workmen in the taproom downstairs. Are you game for a few bruises?”
Charles chuckled and nodded at the coroner. “As long as I can have a large rum and water afterward, I will tolerate some abuse. Why don’t we go to the taproom?”
Chapter 13
Sir Silas slid off his stool and glanced at his assistant, Mr. Kittle. “I concur. You did sketch the bruises on the late Mr. Harley?”
Mr. Kittle flourished a sheet. “Of course, Sir Silas. Right here.”
Sir Silas took the sheet. “Life size, you would agree, Mr. Dickens?”
Charles stared at the marks. “Yes, that looks right to me.” He laid his fingers over the marks. “My hands are too small.”
Sir Silas reproduced the motion. “As are mine. Mr. Kittle?”
The secretary obliged, displaying ink-stained hands. “Mine are about the same as yours, sir.”
Sir Silas nodded. “Downstairs we go.” When they reached the ground floor, he called to the barman for drinks and scanned the room.
Charles nodded at a trio by the fire. “A hulking bunch.”
“I concur,” Sir Silas agreed. “Into the breach.”
Charles went up to the men. They had as hostile an air as a small mob, but when he told them he was a newspaper reporter doing an experiment to catch a murderer, they agreed to help for a fresh round of ale.
“None of them are as large as Johnny,” Charles whispered.
“This gentleman closest to the fire isn’t too far off,” Sir Silas said, smiling at the mostly toothless dockworker in the corner. “May I borrow your hands, sir?”
The man pushed his chair against the wall. “Let’s make this quick. My mouth is ready for that free drink,” he growled.
“If I may?” Sir Silas pushed aside the empty tankard and set down the drawing in front of the man. “Put your forefinger and thumb thus,” he said, demonstrating. “Do they fit in the marks?”
The man pressed down his digits then pulled away. Grease stains extended past the thumb marks on the paper.
“He’s smaller than Johnny Dorset, yet the finger marks are larger than the killer’s,” Charles said.
“But what about the hands?”
Charles whipped out his notebook and set it over the secretary’s drawing. “May we outline your hands, sir, for comparison?”
The man grunted once the barmaid approached with the tankards. Charles quickly drew around the man’s hands, then went around the table reproducing the experiment.
“We should find a man with exactly the right fingers,” Sir Silas said.
They had the attention of the taproom by then. Sir Silas wandered around the eight tables, looking down his nose. “Ah, here’s a fellow,” he called to Charles.
“Another ale if we can experiment on you,” Charles told the man, who looked like a clerk in some kind of manufacturing office, because from the waist up he wore a good tailcoat, proper neckcloth, and waistcoat, but coarse breeches and boots below.
The man nodded.
“Success!” Sir Silas crowed when the man’s fingers fit smoothly over the marks on the paper. “Trace his hands, my fine fellow!”
Charles did so, then paid for a meat pie for the clerk. He took a sip of his rum and water, feeling they’d accomplished a great deal. They might have ruled out Johnny Dorset as the murderer, even. But if not him, then who?
“Now for the bruising,” Sir Silas announced.
“What?”
The clerk looked startled.
“I won’t offend these fine men by asking you to disrobe, Mr. Dickens, but if you could remove your coat and roll your sleeve up to a fatty part of your forearm?”
Charles did as requested, choosing the arm he didn’t write with. Sir Silas smiled with satisfaction. “Now, my good sir, could you please squeeze this gentleman’s arm with your thumb and forefinger, very hard? We want to see the marks develop.”
The clerk shrugged. “If you wasn’t a gentleman, sir, I’d think you belonged in the madhouse.”
Charles winced as the clerk squeezed his arm. Sir Silas
ticked away seconds, rapping his toe on the wood floor of the taproom. “That should be enough,” he said eventually. “Thank you, sir.”
Charles rolled down his sleeve. The clerk muttered an apology but Charles brushed it away as unnecessary. Then he and Sir Silas went back upstairs with their cooling drinks, feeling very pleased.
Sir Silas had asked for food to be sent up. He, his secretary, and Charles ate soup and sandwiches while they waited for the bruises to bloom. After a few minutes, Sir Silas motioned to Charles’s sleeve. He pushed it up, displaying angry red marks.
“Mr. Kittle, could you please trace and label these new marks?”
The secretary did so as gently as possible. Charles pretended he wasn’t wincing at the feel of the quill scratching against the bruises. Then, Sir Silas compared them to the now rather dirty sheet with the original marks on Mr. Harley. “Very close.” He showed them to his companions. “We have done good work.”
“Do we know what the size of Mr. Harley’s hands was?” Charles asked. “Could he have made the marks on his own flesh while fighting against the chains?”
“He could have, but it would be awkward,” Sir Silas said after considering. “They would be higher up, I should think, if he was trying to remove the chains. None of this excludes Johnny Dorset from having attacked you.”
“It’s hard to know if Mrs. Dorset took him away because she thought he was guilty, or if she ran because she was insulted that I suggested it,” Charles said.
“You would have to ask her,” Sir Silas said lazily. “I find that simply asking questions is the best way to get answers. Mr. Kittle will make a tracing of the hand for you. Please let me know if Johnny Dorset’s hands are the same size. This may be enough evidence to reopen the inquest.”
“Thank you, Sir Silas,” Charles said. “Wise advice.”
* * *
Charles spent the rest of the afternoon writing up his shorthand notes on the inquest for the Chronicle. Mr. Hogarth came to his desk personally and told him William had sent a note saying he’d be in the next day. Charles thanked him, wondering if his editor even knew he and Kate hadn’t spoken for almost a week. The family must be wondering where he had been, and the thought of their conversation on the matter, how the truth must soon come out, made his flesh prickle with nervous energy.
With that cheering thought, he went home by way of a cook shop, picking up Fred’s favorite pork and potato pie, in the hopes of enticing his brother to speak to him again. He even purchased two plump little bundles of plum duff from a street seller near his rooms. Someone must be his friend again, even if it took a bribe.
When he opened his front door, he saw nothing but the back of his brother scurrying off. He set his bundles on the deal table in front of the fire. They still ate like bachelors, without an ordained dining table and chairs. God help him if he was living like this in six months.
He went and rapped on the door sharply. “Fred. I’ve bought your favorite dinner. Please come and speak to me.”
Fred opened the door, a sneer on his face. “I’ve eaten.”
“Really?” The scent of rich pastry, pork fat, and the pudding wafted past his nose.
His brother put his hand to his stomach. “I have every right to be angry with you. You haven’t even introduced me to my nephew.”
“Very funny.” Charles kept his tone mild. “Don’t you think I’d have told you the truth, one man to another, if I had fathered the child?”
Fred worked his lower lip between his teeth. “I honestly don’t know, Charles. You do keep secrets.”
“From Kate, maybe. Do you think her parents would have agreed to my suit if they knew about Warren’s Blacking Factory and that I’d once been a grimy-faced, uneducated worker there?”
Fred sighed, looking older than his fifteen years. “Very possibly not, Charles. That’s why you have to be careful.”
Charles lifted his hands. “I couldn’t take the child to the workhouse. He’s so tiny. He would have died by now if I hadn’t cared for him. Babies deserve better than that.”
Fred nodded and gently touched Charles’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Charlie. But you should have told me.”
“I forget you are a man, now.” He smiled at Fred. “I need to do something about clearing my name, but I don’t know what.”
“I could go to Hatfield and see what I could learn,” Fred offered.
“I appreciate that, but how would you know where to begin? The housekeeper at his mother’s employment had no idea she’d had a baby. William has questioned people.” Charles sighed.
“Have you placed an advertisement?”
“Yes, with no response.”
Fred bit his lips. “Babies look very similar to one another. You can’t take him from shop to shop and ask who he looks like. But maybe when he’s older.”
Charles chuckled. “Let’s eat. While we do, we can discuss who else I might write. The local clergymen?” He walked past his brother and poured two cups of ale from their bottle, then set them down above the chairs.
“The other senior staff at her place of employment,” Fred said. “Someone there must know of the mother’s sweetheart.”
Charles grabbed plates and utensils from their crate and set everything next to his food, then sliced into the pie, dividing it in two. This cook shop had layered the inside with good-quality bacon before filling it completely with generous cuts of pork shoulder, potatoes, and turnips.
“What’s in the other bag?” Fred asked, pulling a chair to the table.
Charles sat on the sofa. “I brought an extra bribe.”
Fred laughed. “Too bad pudding won’t work on Kate.”
“At least she hasn’t told her father.” Charles took a big bite, feeling famished. He’d forgotten to eat a midday meal.
“She’s a good girl and she loves you.” Fred matched his bite, just as a knock came at the door.
“I’ll get it,” Charles said, wiping the greasy corners of his mouth with the back of his hand.
He opened the door, never expecting to see the sight of one tall, slight man in a massive cream comforter and a blue sleeping cap. “Mr. Pettingill!” he exclaimed. “What has you out and about this evening?”
The man rubbed bloodless, gloveless hands together. “You must-t-t wonder how I had your address.” His teeth were chattering.
“Never mind that, come to the fire,” Charles said, pulling him in. “You aren’t dressed for the night air.”
“I never g-g-go out at night, generally,” said the man.
Fred had leapt up and was adding coal to the fire.
Charles felt the ends of the comforter and found it damp. He unwound Mr. Screws’s nephew from it and draped it over the back of the armchair William had given him when he left Furnival’s Inn. Fred went to the kettle and poured some hot water into a cup, then doctored it with the bottle of rum that rested on the mantelpiece.
“Thank you,” their visitor said. “Your brother?”
“Yes, this is Fred Dickens,” Charles said. “Would you like to join us for our meal? We have scarcely tucked into our pie.”
Mr. Pettingill took a deep drink. Color came back into his face, though he coughed as the rum hit the back of his throat. “I cannot stay, Mr. Dickens. I’ve come to fetch you.”
“Why?” Charles asked, sitting down and setting his fork into his pie. He shoved a large bite into his mouth.
“Mr. Screws, poor man, has collapsed, I am afraid. Your warning to me was well timed. My uncle is not well.”
Charles stared at him, speechless. “I suppose I should have expected this, given the state of his appearance. Do you have a carriage waiting?”
“No, but I saw the stand in front of your building.”
Charles nodded. He glanced up and down Mr. Pettingill’s thin form, noting his knobby hands. Were they the size of the killer’s? “Fred, go and see if you can find a pair of mittens that will fit this gentleman.”
Fred glanced over. “Leticia made
me an oversized pair two years ago. They itch, so they are still in my trunk. I’ll get them.”
“Too kind,” Mr. Pettingill said, wrapping his hands around his cup and drinking again. When he was finished, he said, “You must wonder why my uncle wants you.”
“Do you know the reason?” Charles cut off another piece, thick with bacon and turnip, then gestured to his guest.
“No, thank you. I will have another drink, though.”
Charles rose, mouth full, and fetched the kettle and the rum bottle. By the time he’d satisfied his guest, Fred was back, waving a massive knobby pair of white knitted mittens.
“Excellent, good man,” Mr. Pettingill said. “Very obliged to you, young sir.”
“I’ll lend you a cloak as well. I’ll bring it back with me later on.”
“My uncle, old gentleman, never explains himself,” said the nephew, “but something has him most alarmed.”
“Then we’ll be off.” Charles took one last bite of pie and left the puddings for his brother. They’d have to write letters another time.
* * *
The hackney pulled up in front of the now familiar house. Mrs. Dorset’s decorations still survived. In fact, Mrs. Pettingill seemed to have woven holly complete with berries into the ivy that had already been wound around the iron railings.
Mrs. Pettingill opened the door. Her husband smiled at her. “I’ve brought our Mr. Dickens, dear man.”
“Good evening, sir,” she said.
“I am sorry to see you again under such troubling circumstances,” Charles said as he entered. “Has there been any change?”
“He is conscious,” she replied. “I feel as if we have come just in time. I’ll take you upstairs to his private chamber.”
Charles climbed the steps behind her. When the stairs turned, outside the view of any casual visitor, the good carpet vanished, replaced by some elderly, stained stuff. The passage was bare.
“That’s the room we’ve taken,” Mrs. Pettingill said, pointing to the room where Mr. Harley had fallen from. She turned away from it and marched down the hall, then knocked on a cracked-open door. “Uncle Emmanuel, here is your Mr. Dickens.”
Charles pushed open the door despite the lack of response. He went in, noting the washstand and wardrobe. All had the musty scent of an older person. The hangings were very fine, some kind of patterned red velvet that hung on thick iron rings from a plain wood bed frame.
A Christmas Carol Murder Page 16