Charles pushed himself up. “I thought I’d spend the day with Mother. It’s her birthday, you know. I meant to take her on a walk. Maybe to Othello tonight at Covent Garden.”
“That’s fine, Charles, but go to work first, all right? I don’t want a repeat of the summer.”
Charles glared at him, alert now. “I have never let you down or allowed you to be homeless or hungry, which is more than I can say for our parents. We are going to be fine.”
Fred nodded dolefully. “I just thought you needed a boost, is all. You are normally so cheerful, but that has not been the case lately.”
“Romantic troubles are depressing,” Charles said, forcing a smile. “But I know Kate loves me, so there is nothing to fear.”
Charles entered the Chronicle’s offices late that morning, dressed in his best frock coat with the velvet collar, his most freshly pressed neckerchief, and shined shoes. He passed back into the offices as if he still worked there.
Mr. Hogarth’s door was open when he peered in. Charles drew himself up and rapped on the door.
“Mr. Hogarth, sir? Might I implore you to give me a moment of your time?”
Kate’s father had a pencil in his hand and was drawing lines on a piece of paper at his desk. His head was wreathed with smoke as he puffed on his pipe. He glanced up and grimaced at Charles. “What is it?”
Charles immediately felt the futility of his mission, but remained calm. He had right on his side. Pushing the door closed, he stood at Mr. Hogarth’s desk. “Kate is wrong about the baby. I’d like to see her and address the situation. I know she isn’t indifferent to me and I don’t want to lose her.”
“I am aware that she isnae indifferent tae ye, Charles,” the editor said in his most pronounced Scottish brogue. “That is why I want ye to stay away.”
Charles waited to be condemned for speaking to Mary, but the reprimand didn’t come. Which meant he couldn’t admit knowing that Georgina had betrayed him. “Then let me stay here, and do my job. It’s Christmas, sir, and my brother is very alarmed about my loss of position.”
“No, Charles. This situation has made me question your judgment in any version of the truth.”
“What was I supposed to do, let the baby die?”
Mr. Hogarth didn’t answer that. He set his pipe on its plate. Charles saw his jaw work. “I warned ye long ago to stay away from Julie Aga, and this is exactly the sort of trouble I’d foreseen. That actress is trouble.”
“Kate has long since accepted her,” Charles said. “Mrs. Aga is expecting a child. William Aga’s child, not mine. She’s respectable now, married, not an actress.”
“She has a mad mother,” Mr. Hogarth said. “Blood will tell.”
Charles fought to keep from clenching his fists. If his blood told, he’d end up in debtor’s prison, just like his father. Was that what Fred feared? “It does not, Mr. Hogarth. Blood does not tell. You are greater than your father. I am greater than mine. Mrs. Aga has chosen a quiet life.”
Mr. Hogarth picked up his tobacco tin. “My answer is no.”
Footsteps pelted along the passage outside the office.
“Mr. Dickens, Mr. Dickens!” called a thin voice.
Charles pushed the door open and peered out. “I’m Dickens, what is it?”
“I’ve been sent to fetch you,” a ragged boy said. He had a fresh cut on his forehead that looked infected. Charles hadn’t seen him before, but he wore shoes, so probably a street child and not someone from the mudlarks.
“To where?” Charles asked.
“Mr. Screws’s house,” the boy said before coughing hard. “Bloody soot. Sorry. You’re wanted.”
Charles nodded and turned back to Mr. Hogarth.
“We’re done here,” said Kate’s father stiffly.
“For now,” Charles said quietly. Then he stepped out, flipped the boy a coin, and went back to the street, feeling half a decade older and more desperate than before. What was he going to do now? Charles Dickens was not a failure. He was still needed, by Mr. Screws if no one else. How ironic, that the man of business who had rejected his father had begun to rely on him when no one else would do.
In the street, Charles dodged street hawkers and carts, carriages, and a great abundance of women, doing a bit of holiday trading in better weather than had been seen in London of late. He passed by a girl with bunches of mistletoe wrapped in red ribbon and a cart heaped high with evergreen bows. Steam rose from an urn full of spiced wine. He pressed on, though he could not think of why Mr. Screws needed him yet again. Perhaps he ought to go to Spitalfields first and see if the undertaker had turned up yet. At some point the bribe would cease to pay Mr. Dawes’s expenses and he would return to his profession.
Instead, he kept going on. At least someone thought him worth a conversation.
When he reached Finsbury Circus, he found John Coachman lounging at the front door. Charles climbed up the steps after searching the street for the carriage itself and not finding it. “What’s going on?”
The coachman shook his head. “Bad news, Mr. Dickens.”
“Is it Mr. Screws?”
“No, sir. ’e’s all right.”
“You seem to be on guard.”
“I vas asked to be.” He turned and opened the door, then saluted Charles. “There you go, sir.”
Charles walked in. The ground floor seemed deserted as far as the front of the house went. He wouldn’t be able to hear anything in the servants’ part of the house, hidden as it was behind a thick baize-covered door. Above him, though, he heard footsteps, so he went up to the family rooms.
He found the small maid sitting on a bench at the top of the stairs, wiping at her eyes with her apron. Charles wished he had learned her name on his last visit. At his approach, she looked up and sniffed, then mutely pointed him toward the room where Mr. Harley had met his height-challenged demise.
Charles turned left, then peered into the open door of the room. Mrs. Pettingill sat on the edge of a four-poster bed, clutching a handkerchief. A rocking chair faced away from Charles, toward the window. A table had been pushed underneath it. It hadn’t been there during Mr. Harley’s day, but it was heaped with books and papers now.
“Mr. Dickens,” Mr. Screws said, coming from the space in between the table and the bed. Charles hadn’t seen him because of the bed curtains. Pale, except for high circles of red on his cheek, he could have been an elderly, painted doll.
“What has happened?” Charles felt his chin compressing into his muffler, as if he could hide like a turtle. He forced himself to stop it and hold his head high, despite the forbidding sense of menace in the room.
“Come here.” Mr. Screws gestured him forward with a shaking index finger.
Reluctantly, Charles obeyed. Mr. Screws pointed at the rocking chair. Charles went all the way to the window, glancing through the half foot of space where the curtains were open to the park in the center of the circus, then turned back again.
To see death.
Chapter 17
Edward Pettingill slumped in the rocking chair in his bedchamber, once Jacob Harley’s. Charles saw no sign of the in-and-out mechanics of breathing in the thin, winter’s afternoon sunlight.
“No sign of life,” he whispered, glancing up at Mr. Screws, who made futile washing gestures with his hands in the doorway. Had the old man meant to escape the death chamber?
The tassel of the dead man’s red sleeping cap rested on his forehead. He still wore his dressing gown over his shirt and trousers, as if he’d started his morning routine and never had a chance to complete it. The shirt lay open, exposing a neck that had been draped in something extremely odd.
Against his better judgment, Charles leaned forward, and saw a long white length of silk wrapped around the dead man’s neck, along with a strand of pearls. Judging from the color of his skin, Mr. Pettingill had been strangled to death, though the cloth hid the marks on his neck.
“It’s a dreadful business,” Mrs. Pettingill choked
. “My poor Mr. Pettingill.”
“This must be the work of Primus Harley,” Mr. Screws quavered. “He has the strength to do this. An intimate death, Mr. Dickens.”
Charles walked around the rocker, eager to get away from the staring eyes of the dead man, the expression of confusion. “The slats in the chair were used.” He bent down. “I can see where the wood was rubbed. I see what you mean about intimacy. He would have been close enough to smell Mr. Pettingill, but still, he wouldn’t have had to look him in the eyes.”
“So debasing,” Mrs. Pettingill said, looking very unfuneral-like in an aged pink silk dress. “Clearly the work of a degenerate member of the lower classes.”
Meaning Primus, son of an Irishwoman, Charles supposed. Was the widow too cold, too unfeeling? Where were the tears, the screams? “I understand this took some strength, but why do you suspect Mr. Harley’s illegitimate son specifically?”
The widow snorted and dabbed at dry eyes with her handkerchief. “He has done it to get control of the business. He is killing us all, one by one.”
Charles remembered Mr. Screws had not suspected Primus Harley. “Was he his father’s heir? I hadn’t thought so.”
The old man squeezed his fingers into fists. “A solicitor came to the countinghouse this morning. I knew the man. Jacob had used him before. He had a will with him. I hadn’t known it existed, but Jacob had left his estate to his son.”
“But not the business?”
“No, that was mine, due to old contracts from the formation.” He stepped forward to look at his nephew again.
“Then Mr. Harley never would have received ownership of the countinghouse. He isn’t named in your will, correct?”
“I don’t have one,” Mr. Screws said. “If I die, I suspect Primus could make his case for taking control.”
Mrs. Pettingill gave a little scream, then fell silent.
Mr. Screws stared defiantly at the widow. “There was no one else. We were two men quite separate from society. Who did we have, but his son and my nephew?”
“You didn’t name my Edward in a will?” Mrs. Pettingill whispered. “Oh, Mr. Screws, we all die. We must taste eternity in the end.”
“If I’d known Jacob had made one, I’d have done the same,” Mr. Screws said in weary tones. “How the years pass.” He swayed on his feet.
Charles took his arm. “Come, I’ll take you to your private chamber.” He supported the elderly man through the narrow space between the bed, Mrs. Pettingill’s lower appendages, and the rocking chair, not breathing until they had reached the passage.
“It must be a recent death,” Charles ventured. “I smelled nothing more than what I thought were the contents of a missed chamber pot.”
“That is why I posted the coachman at the front,” Mr. Screws said. “I was afraid the killer was still here. But the kitchen maid searched the house and no one is in the house except myself, the widow, the two maids, and the cook.”
“Mr. Fletcher?”
“At the countinghouse. He was there when I returned home for a hot meal.”
“Mrs. Pettingill seemed quite a resentful person,” Charles ventured.
Mr. Screws shook his finger. “I won’t hear of her being suspected.”
“Why not? We aren’t killers. Maybe it didn’t take as much strength as we thought.”
“She is my dependent now. It would be unchristian to mistreat her,” Mr. Screws said in a lecturing tone. He took a key from his pocket and unlocked his bedroom door.
“Is that a new measure of safety?”
Mr. Screws nodded. “Since the night Jacob died. No one is allowed in here, except to clean.”
Charles sighed. If a maid had the key, the lock probably gave no more than a dangerous, false sense of security.
Mr. Screws sat down in an armchair by another stove, not decorated this time. It was the only chair in the room, so Charles leaned against the wall.
Mr. Screws sighed. “If Mr. Harley didn’t do it, then Mr. Appleton probably did, because it was Mr. Pettingill who told us about his business in the first place and talked Mr. Appleton into accepting the loan that he almost defaulted on.”
“I didn’t know that. If only Mr. Appleton didn’t appear to be such a meek and respectable sort.” Charles didn’t think him any more likely than Mrs. Pettingill. He understood now why Primus Harley seemed the better candidate. But why had Mr. Pettingill been showing an interest in the countinghouse when he’d been kept out of it? It didn’t sound like very Pettingillian behavior.
“What do we do now?” Mr. Screws asked.
Charles rubbed his nose. “I’ll need to go for a constable, unless you want the coachman to do it.”
“You go please, Mr. Dickens. You’re used to speaking to the police.”
Charles scratched his annoying itch again. His finger came away black with soot. How long had it been since the windows in this room were opened? “I’ll have the kitchen maid bring you up something hot to drink.” Before he closed the door, he said, “You might want to lock yourself in until the police come.”
He went downstairs, gave the maid instructions, and left by the front door in search of help. After fifteen minutes of searching on the main road in the cold, he heard the telltale rattle and headed in that direction. He didn’t recognize the constable, but appreciated the calm way the graying policeman pulled coin purses from inside a youth’s shirt as a soberly dressed, tubby man some twenty years his senior berated both the thief and the officer of the law, with his bulbous index finger flashing back and forth between their two faces.
Another constable arrived. They conferred and the original one took the lad by the collar and marched him down the road, probably heading for the police station. It wouldn’t end well for the child, whose toes poked out from his ripped shoes. How could he learn ethics when he clearly led a life of want?
The victim continued his tirade, holding his recovered purse, raining down epithets on the new officer’s head, but the second constable seemed less calm than the first.
When Charles approached, the constable seemed eager for distraction.
“Sir?” he asked with a hint of desperation widening his shadowed eyes.
“There’s been a murder at Finsbury Circus,” Charles said, instinctively pointing in that direction. “Inside one of the houses.”
The constable adjusted his heavy, reinforced hat as the gentleman suspended his tirade.
“A murder?” the gentleman said, regaining himself. “Pish posh, sir. Finsbury Circus does not have murder.”
“That’s wrong,” the constable insisted. “Why there was a murderous death there just about three weeks ago.”
“I am glad you think so, Constable,” Charles said. “For I agree with you, though the inquest did not declare it such.”
“Didn’t it?” The constable’s brow creased. “I hadn’t heard. Well then, who’s dead now?”
“Another man, in the same house.”
“The other old gentleman? They were talking about him down at the pub. Never gives a penny when people collect for charities,” the constable said.
Charles knew they were both speaking about Emmanuel Screws. “No. I’m afraid it’s his young nephew, and no one could deny it is murder this time.”
“We’ll have to send for the coroner. What a mess.” The constable went into the street and circled his rattle over his head, the whirring sound calling for reinforcements.
The robbed gentleman turned up his nose. “I’m so glad we moved into Myddelton Square, despite the construction.”
Charles listened to the man prattle on about the advantages of living in Clerkenwell with half an ear. Had he not enough troubles without another death? He needed employment; he needed his reputation restored; he needed vindication.
He covered his mouth with his hands and breathed into them to restore the feeling in his nose with his somewhat warm breath. When another constable passed within hearing of the rattle, the second constable, who by then ha
d revealed his name was Thornton, left with Charles for Finsbury Circus.
“This is no way to manage a murder,” Constable Thornton said mournfully as they walked through the noontime streets. “With the ever-increasing number of people in London, we have to do something about the policing situation.”
“The Metropolitan Police is only a few years old,” Charles said.
“It’s insufficient,” Thornton snapped. “We are miserably overworked. Drunkenness is a plague.”
“I sense you are more educated than the average constable,” Charles said. “You have the speech of a gentleman.”
“My mother educated me. Better born than my father, she is now forty-five and utterly worn out by life. There was no money for school.” He cleared his throat. “My hope is that I do not meet my future bride until I am at least forty and she is over thirty. I wish to break the curse of a large family.”
Charles thought of Kate, just twenty. But she was a perfect little miss to his mister, and he did not want to lose her. If he could not regain her family’s trust, she’d be married to someone else within the next couple of years, too tempting a fruit to be left on the tree. “I believe there are plenty of governesses, schoolteachers, and the like moldering away in their twenties with educations and no families to take them out in the world.”
The constable winked at him. “Exactly. There is a vast army of women that age desperate for a good home. I intend to make something of myself, and I have many years in which to do it.”
“Don’t you get lonely?”
“I board with a married brother. I share a bedroom with my nephew and pay very little.”
Charles had thought the constable a couple of years older than he at least, but he worked outdoors, aging his face. At twenty-three, he could not imagine his life comprising half a bedroom with a child. He had too much ambition to accept such humble surroundings now.
When they reached Mr. Screws’s house, Charles saw a small man at the door, his top hat at least the length of his arm. Primus Harley.
“I can’t believe it. One of the suspects is at the door,” Charles told Constable Thornton.
A Christmas Carol Murder Page 20