The Murder of Patience Brooke (2 page)

It was unusual for Mrs Morson to act without consulting Mr Dickens first, but she knew that Patience would elicit his sympathy and curiosity and so she did. Mr Dickens seemed fascinated by her. He told Mrs Morson how intense his anxiety was to know her secret, but Patience resisted, which testified to her strength of character, for she revealed nothing to Mr Dickens; she even avoided him, as if fearful that one day he would prevail, such was his power.

That Patience had a secret, Mrs Morson did not doubt, and that it was a terrible one, the cloaked figure on the steps outside confirmed. Mrs Morson sat in the darkened kitchen. She heard the clock of St Mark’s strike twelve, every chime echoing through the stillness. The house was silent. She wondered where Davey was now. He had been gone for just over an hour; he ought to be there soon. Mr Dickens must be there, he must. Then they would go for Superintendent Jones. Restless now, she went to the door and opened it as if to check that Patience was there – she was. Mrs Morson regarded the dark shape. How long must she wait? Another hour or two or more? The thought was almost unendurable but she had endured before. She remembered the long hours of darkness when her husband was dying and the long days of anguish that followed his death.

She turned back to the kitchen and again fed the dying fire, but she did not light a candle. Feeling a chill, she looked again at the door. This time it was open and that dreadful fog, more of a misty vapour now, drifted in, turning back on itself as if beckoning someone outside to come in. Mrs Morson felt terror. It was the worst moment, worse even than finding the body, for Mrs Morson who had loved Patience Brooke experienced only horror at the thought of her coming in. She strode to the door and shut it, restraining herself only just in time to stop it slamming. She stood motionless, her breath suspended, her heart knocking at her ribs until the stillness and silence settled again and she sat once more, waiting.

Charles Dickens was in his office in Wellington Street looking out at the fog. It seemed to be lifting now though there were greenish wreaths of it still twining round the gas lamps so that the long line of street lamps was blurred as if seen through tears, and wisps of vapour lingered in the air like fading ghosts. The street was empty. Dickens had watched until his friend Forster had disappeared across the road on his way to his lodgings at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, along the Strand to Chancery. He was restless and unsettled – it was a Friday, a day of omen.

Dickens and Forster were old friends – friends from
1837
. They shared a similar history, both born in the same year,
1812
, into poor circumstances, Forster the son of a Newcastle butcher who had worked his way up to being literary editor of
The Examiner
and editor of
The Daily News
. When Forster told him that Charles Dilke had once seen Dickens as a boy working in a warehouse near the Strand, Dickens felt it as a blow, as if Dilke had exposed him as a fraud, a man who was not as he had presented himself. It was as if a disguise had fallen from him to reveal to the world a shabby boy, grubbing for a living in a factory which was exactly as it had been – while his family had lived in the Marshalsea where John Dickens was imprisoned for debt. It was as if the velvet jackets, the flamboyant waistcoats, the plaid trousers had been stripped from him to show the rags beneath yet he had been impelled by some desire he could not restrain to tell more whilst at the same time he found it unbearable. He had given Forster a manuscript detailing the first part of his life, a part he had never revealed – the story of his time as a boy at the blacking factory, a time of humiliation and misery. He felt like the haunted man of his Christmas story for
1848
.

Now, in a bitter cold spring of
1849
– more like winter – he had started his new novel,
David Copperfield
. The starting of a new novel was a kind of agony. He was irritable and wanted to be solitary yet he desired the streets, walking about at night into the strangest places, seeking rest and finding none.

He ought to be at home; there was a new baby, Henry, to look to and Catherine to care for but he was dissatisfied and disquieted. He looked at himself in the glass as if to check that he was still there. He saw the self he gave the world. On
7
th February he had reached his thirty-seventh birthday; he was still young, and he thought there was still much to do. If someone had been at his shoulder, looking at the reflection in the mirror, they would have seen a face looking back, characterised by a broad forehead with rich brown curled hair brushed to the side. The eyes, large and brilliant, could light up a room, shining with good humour and tenderness. But, looking into those eyes they might see there two deeper, darker points of melancholy, and their lustre spoke often of restlessness as tonight. There was, he thought, a kind of sickness in him, such a sense of loss sometimes that he felt he was foundering. He turned back to his desk and took up his goose-quill, but wrote nothing.

The knocking woke him. It was loud and insistent. His heart misgave. A message from home? The child ill? He looked out of the window to where a horse and trap stood in the street under the gas lamp. Recognising it, he took his candle, hurried downstairs to open the door and found Davey holding out a piece of paper. The boy’s face expressed fear and agitation. Having read Mrs Morson’s message, Dickens told Davey to wait while he went inside for his coat. He came out again to find Davey already with the reins in his hands. It was no use asking the boy for more information. Davey could not reply. He was mute but not deaf so Dickens reassured him.

‘We will go for Superintendent Jones as quickly as we can – we must go to Bow Street. Then we will get to Mrs Morson. She is a good, sensible woman, Davey. There is nothing to fear.’

Was there not? Dickens thought. Patience Brooke dead; the urgency and brevity of Mrs Morson’s message and her sending Davey all pointed to something dreadfully wrong. And, he had to hope that Superintendent Jones was at Bow Street and not further north at his home in Norfolk Street.

They travelled along the dark street not speaking. Dickens could feel the weight of the boy’s fear as if it were something actually leaning against him. Davey knew something though it might only be that the girl was dead. He had responded to her quiet gentleness and she had taught him to read and write. Dickens looked at the white face – poor Davey of whom he had become fond. Dickens had found him curled up in a doorway like a lost dog, a child of the streets who seemed to have no name nor anyone to whom he belonged. There were hundreds like him and Dickens could not rescue them all. He had done what he could, finding employment for a crippled boy at his publisher’s, placing a shoe-black boy in a ragged school. All these boys were his other self, the one who would have slaved on in the blacking factory had he not been rescued. This boy who could not speak, and whose transparent hazel eyes had gazed at him in wonder from the doorway, stirred his immediate compassion. Here was a boy who needed not just a place in a school or an office; here was a boy who needed safety and the care of a mother. Mrs Morson needed a boy to do the odd jobs, to chop the wood, bring in the coals, to look after the horse and the stables. Dickens would take him to her. Dickens had much liking and respect for the matron of the Home who mothered the fallen girls and referred to them as the family. Most of those girls loved her too and wept when they left. She, a mother of three children, would care for the boy; he would not be a slave.

Davey had flourished under the care of Mrs Morson and of Patience Brooke. Dickens had given him his name, oddly prescient of the name he was to give to David Copperfield, the boy who lost his loving mother and was turned out to work in the bottle factory. Davey had flourished, but he had not spoken. Whatever his memories were, they were locked in, too terrible, perhaps, ever to be told. And now, thought Dickens, had come this death which might wreck them all.

So they travelled on, the silent boy and the silent man, through the dark streets. The fog had fled; there was a moon now to light their way to Bow Street, and then to Shepherd’s Bush and Lime Grove where Mrs Morson and dead Patience waited for them.

‘Not far now, Davey.’

Bow Street Police Station loomed ahead. A policeman keeping watch let Dickens in. He hurried down the long passage to the bare room like a guard house – without the drums and muskets, Dickens always thought. In the right-hand corner of the room was a window at which an inspector presided to hear charges. By the window stood Police Constable Rogers, in his strong, leather pot hat and his brass-buttoned, stiff-collared coat, a red-faced, cheerful young man whose good temper seemed at odds with his calling amongst the confined, intolerable rooms burrowed out in the gloomy courts and narrow alleys like the holes of rats where hid the coiners, and smashers, and thieves and rogues. He greeted Dickens as an old acquaintance. The superintendent was in and Rogers would take a message. He vanished down an ill-lit corridor.

Soon, Dickens saw the superintendent coming along the corridor, a tall and commanding man whose swift walk suggested the authority and decisiveness which made him so successful as a policeman. Burly, greying and imperturbable, he evinced no surprise at seeing his old friend Dickens. A being of acute intelligence, he knew that whatever business brought Dickens to Bow Street at such an hour must be urgent. Silently, Dickens offered him Mrs Morson’s note which he read and understood the import of at once. Dickens saw in his keen, grey eye that the superintendent thought what he had also thought – such a message told that it was death by suicide or murder.

‘Davey is waiting,’ said Dickens and out they went.

‘I need not tell you what I think of this,’ said the superintendent indicating the message. ‘You have guessed what it might mean and what the implications might be for the Home.’

‘I fear,’ replied Dickens, ‘what it could signify. There are those who do not like us, who do not believe that kindness can be a cure; they would like to see these girls shaven-headed, punished, confined, in a silent regime. They do not believe that it is possible for fallen women to be rescued and to lead better lives.’

‘Aye, they’d rather leave them in the streets to become more depraved and diseased, and to commit more crime.’

‘If – and we do not know all yet – if a crime,’ Dickens glanced at Davey and then back to the superintendent to indicate his caution. The superintendent nodded. Dickens continued, ‘If a crime has been committed it will surely justify those who believe that a criminal is always such. Suspicion will fall on our girls, on Patience herself and about her we know nothing. I regret now that I did not insist on knowing something.’

‘She may have said more to Mrs Morson than you know – some confidence she was asked not to break – even to you. Now it can be broken, and if there is something then it may help us in investigating this death. I will keep it as quiet as I can. Mrs Morson, admirable woman, has seen to it that, as yet, no one knows but we two.’

‘And Davey – he knows. Look at him.’

‘Aye, but he can’t tell,’ the superintendent remarked, ‘but you are right, he is afraid of something and you, Mr Dickens, will have to be the means of finding it out. He trusts you.’

‘I don’t think he would be involved,’ said Dickens quickly, afraid suddenly that he had placed Davey under suspicion.

‘Nor do I. He is a good lad and an honest one. He’ll tell you the truth if you can get it from him, by some means. Meanwhile, let us be quiet and think. If we talk more, he will be all the more frightened. Stop a minute, Davey. Let me take the reins and you get by Mr Dickens here.’

They drove on under the impassive moon, and Dickens slept while the solid bulk of Superintendent Jones warmed Davey who slept, too. Superintendent Jones looked into the night, at the dark road ahead, revolving many thoughts which centred on one word – murder.

Mrs Morson slept without knowing that she did so, and in her dream, Patience Brooke – with her red hair streaming and red jewels on a black velvet band round her neck – danced in a room lit by a hundred candles, her partner a man with a crooked face whose hard eyes were hot with lust, who changed into young Davey who looked at her with love. The dance went on, but when she stopped, the jewels round Patience’s neck dissolved into scarlet liquid which poured down her white throat and bosom, until she was covered with what seemed to be a cascade of blood, the ripples created by the folds of her white dress where the scarlet flowed unchecked. Then she was gone and Mrs Morson murmured in her sleep. The kitchen door stayed shut; the fog dispersed, its vapours disappearing beneath the wet fields. Patience Brooke slept on, never to wake again, never to dance again – if she ever had, for no one knew.

The clock of St Mark’s struck two. Mrs Morson woke, shuddering at the dream and remembering that Patience Brooke was still outside with blood on her grey dress. Strange that it was white in the dream. The fire had almost gone out and the kitchen was cold now. Mrs Morson felt the coldness of the floor, shivered, and was aware that she was still in her nightdress. The dream had shaken her; she felt vulnerable, exposed, and a sense of something like shame sent her to the passage where old cloaks were kept. And her feet were bare. Somehow she wanted to be covered when Mr Dickens came – soon surely. Nearly three hours had passed. Wrapped in the cloak and wearing an ancient pair of boots that she had found with the cloak, she put coal on the nearly dead range, stirring it into reluctant life with the poker. Thirsty, she took a cup of water and stood by the window, noting the moonlight which now shone over the gardens, creating shadows of trees and bushes in which there were things hidden. The silence seemed palpable as if it were crushing her. ‘Come, come, please,’ she found herself whispering, ‘come, soon.’ She tried to comfort herself, focusing on the side gate. Soon, surely, she would see them come this way, across the garden, the superintendent’s strength dispersing the shadows. Davey would bring them to the kitchen door not to the front. They would not knock for the message, brief as it was, would be a warning not to wake the house.