The Murder of Patience Brooke (31 page)

There was a strangled splutter, then the coughing subsided into an asthmatic wheeze. If you had not known better, you might have thought it sounded suspiciously like laughter.

Dickens dozed from time to time, conscious only of the sound of wheels on iron, sometimes jerked awake by the sound of the whistle signalling its warning that the express was coming. It stopped at Birmingham and Coventry and mottle-face snored on – so loudly that Dickens was afraid the sausage skin would burst. And still the veiled one sat like a waxwork – perhaps she was. Perhaps at journey’s end, mottle-face would lift her out of the carriage and carry her under his arm away to some mouldy exhibition – she was small enough.

They entered his fitful dreams, the woman in black lifting her veil so that he saw the face of a ruined angel. Mottle-face opened his mouth and became Carker, Mr Dombey’s mortal enemy, with his rows of glistening teeth. Dickens saw him again stepping off the platform into the path of the rushing train to be torn into fragments. He heard the shriek of iron and then woke suddenly as the train stopped. Stafford – not long now. Sam woke, too. The veiled lady got out and walked away on her own legs, vanishing into the crush of alighting passengers and porters. The mottle-faced man woke, realised that he was about to be whirled away to unknown regions, grasped his carpet bag and hurried away without a backward glance.

Dickens and Jones got out into the press of boarding and alighting passengers. They had ten minutes. A cold wind whistled down the platform, blowing rain into their faces. They peered into the refreshment room and looked at the card showing what was on offer.

‘No thanks,’ said Dickens. ‘That pie was bad enough. The soup will be brown hot water stiffened with flour, and if you want a mouthful of sand, try one of the cakes!’

‘That pie is my constant companion,’ said Sam. ‘I feel as if I’ve swallowed a rock. Another hour, I should think, after Stafford. We will take a fly to the Hall and get there as quickly as we can. He has three hours’ start on us – time for him to get to the Hall. We must hope that he is still there.’

The whistle blew again, and they climbed back into the carriage where a new passenger was ensconced. He was a thin, lugubrious individual who gazed at them mournfully as they entered. Perhaps he wanted to be alone. He took out a book. Dickens tried to see what it was, lowering and twisting his head round, and squinting his eyes in a manner that might have suggested lunacy had the melancholy man looked up.

‘Neck troubling you again, my boy?’ Sam asked with a gleam in his eye.

‘Yes, Father,’ said Dickens, his handkerchief out.

‘Well, sit still then.’

With that admonition to his restless son, Sam returned to his book. Dickens looked at the slanting rain. He watched the raindrops blown diagonally across the window, and was aware of the darkening skies. He cast a rueful glance at Sam who was thinking, too, that a rain-soaked dash to Crewe Hall was not an inviting prospect.

At last the train slowed, the brakes made their grinding sound and the great engine wheezed and belched out a great cloud of smoke. It rolled into the station with its glass roof and iron pillars, and they climbed out, glad to stretch their legs.

Outside the station there were vehicles for hire. A fly would take them to Crewe Hall. How strange, thought Dickens, that I should be coming here on such an errand. Through the darkening country lanes they drove. In what direction, they did not know. It was a pretty, flat country with low hedges lining the lanes where the occasional gap revealed low buildings humped in the falling darkness. The trees were still winter bare, black against the fading sky.

Dickens did not want to announce himself. Someone there, a servant, perhaps, might know the name, might wonder at his coming. The name Dickens here would not immediately be associated with the writer, but with William and, especially, Elizabeth Dickens who had worked here so long. It was impossible to imagine. He had known little of her; he recalled a grim old lady who lived not far away when they were in Norfolk Street, and whose legacy had released them from the Marshalsea. What she had thought of the son who had got his wife and children in there, he did not know, and his father had not spoken at all of the days when he had lived in this vast mansion. Had John Dickens spent all he had trying to live something like the life he had seen at Crewe Hall?

Sam interrupted his gloomy reflections. ‘No need to explain anything to the servant or whoever answers the door, we need only say that we wish to see Lady Amelia and we simply present the letter.’

At length they came to the handsome gateway of the house with its red-brick lodge built in the Jacobean style. The park was vast, stretching away to the shining levels of a lake, and there was enough light to see how enormous the house was with its great windows, diapered brickwork, balustrade parapets and Jacobean chimneys.

Sam instructed the driver to wait for them. They stood on the massive steps and rang the bell. An imposing figure answered the door – the steward or butler, William Dickens’s successor, perhaps. Dickens regarded him curiously as Sam stated their business. He was certainly an impressively dignified and grave figure, more so than Sir Hungerford himself. Sam wasted no time, merely offering the letter addressed to Lady Amelia Crewe, and giving his own name as Superintendent Jones from Bow Street, London.

They stepped into the Jacobean panelled entrance hall with its marble chimneypiece supported by Tuscan columns. A heavily carved Jacobean staircase was decorated with gilded, heraldic animals. Dickens gazed at it all while the imposing man looked at the letter. His face betrayed nothing. And then he went away up the staircase with the letter on a silver salver taken up from a massively carved chest in the hall. They watched him come down, impassive, imperturbable, the ideal, discreet servant. Dickens found it very hard to imagine careless, convivial John Dickens here. They were taken upstairs at the same measured tread and announced or, rather, the superintendent was.

They entered a panelled oak room. Dickens noted the large Jacobean overmantel with its intricate carvings. Lady Amelia rose to meet them, the letter in her hand. She wasted no time, either. She was tall and thin with pale parchment skin, the Crewe nose and intelligent hazel eyes. Dickens guessed her age at about sixty.

‘Superintendent Jones, and?’ Her voice was crisp and authoritative. She wanted to know with whom she was dealing.

The superintendent introduced himself and told her that his companion was Mr Charles Dickens. The boy from the blacking factory appeared again – the little ghost who had come with Dickens to Crewe Hall.

‘Mr Dickens? The writer?’

‘Yes, ma’m,’ Dickens answered. The little ghost vanished.

‘I am very glad to meet you. Your books are well known to us here. Mr Pickwick has given us many hours of enjoyment. But how is it that you are here with the superintendent?’

‘I have an interest in Mr Crewe and the superintendent wishes to find him.’

‘I have read the letter, Superintendent. However, I am afraid that Edmund Crewe is not here. He arrived a few hours ago to collect some luggage and papers and then he departed in some haste, saying that he was to catch a train to Liverpool. You have missed him, I fear. The Liverpool train will have gone by now. The letter from my nephew says that this inquiry of yours concerns Patience. Has she been found?’

‘She is dead, Lady Amelia,’ said Sam.

Lady Amelia looked back at the letter and again at them. Her sharp eyes told them that she had worked it out. After all, she must have known Edmund Crewe all his life, and she must have known something of what he was.

‘You think that Edmund is linked to her death? And you have told my nephew all of this?’

‘We have – he knows it all, and he does not wish to protect Mr Crewe for the sake of the family name,’ said Sam.

‘No, he would not. Hungerford is an honourable man. He will be much distressed by all this. Where is Patience now?’

‘Her body lies at the infirmary until the inquest can be held.’

‘When it is over, she must be brought here to be buried in the churchyard. She was Edmund’s wife and there is her child to think of.’

‘They were married then?’ asked Dickens.

‘I am certain of it. Of course, Edmund tried to deny it when it suited him to be rid of her. Superintendent, Mr Dickens, I have no illusions about Edmund Crewe. My brother, Sir John, was generous. The boy was an orphan. He was brought up here, educated with tutors and allowed the Crewe name, but, I think it was a mistake. He is ungrateful – and worse, if what you suspect is true. His own father, Francis Lee, was a wastrel who seduced our cousin and left her. He died in penury, a drunkard and a gambler, as his son came to be. But I liked Patience. I found it very hard to credit that she had left him for another man or, indeed, that she had lived with Edmund as his mistress. Bring her home, Mr Dickens, for her child’s sake.’

‘The child is brought up here?’

‘Yes, a little girl. You may see her, if you wish. I will ask nurse to bring her.’ She went out with a firm step, a tall, stately old woman, whose carriage was as upright as her nature. If she believed that Patience had married Edmund Crewe then it had to be true.

She came back with the nursemaid who carried the little girl, about two years old with Patience’s grey eyes and pale skin. Dickens saw, too, the Crewe nose which would give her older face distinction. He was glad for Patience’s sake that she was well cared for and had a home. If she took after her mother and this clear-sighted, intelligent old lady, then the strength of the two would drive out the weakness of the father, he was sure. One little girl he did not have to worry about.

‘Have you daughters, Mr Dickens?’

‘Yes, two.’

‘Good. I am sure that they will be intelligent and strong-minded – you will make sure of that. It is not easy for girls in our time – so easy for them to be used and abused like poor Patience. Her daughter will have a very different fate as long as I am here to ensure it. However, I am keeping you from your task, Superintendent. I am sure that you wish to be after your quarry. There will be another train to Liverpool in an hour’s time.’

They bade farewell to that formidable and surprising woman and the child who waved her little hand. They descended the magnificent staircase to the hall where the butler showed them out into the cold twilight. The fly was waiting to take them back to the station. And then to Liverpool and the vast, lonely stretches of the sea, perhaps. Dickens looked back at the great house outlined against the darkening sky. The huge door shut against them. I shall not come here again, he thought. I have seen enough.

There were a few disconsolate travellers shivering in the cold on the platform for the Liverpool train. Porters lounged against the walls; there were mailbags heaped on the platform, trunks and portmanteaus stacked next to them. On enquiry, they discovered that the next train would be late because the earlier train had not yet arrived which meant that Edmund Crewe could not yet have gone on to Liverpool, so where was he? Had he changed his mind and taken a fly or hired a coach to take him the thirty or so miles to the port? They scanned the faces of the waiting passengers. A tall man in a tweed greatcoat and hat over his eyes glared at them as they threaded their way through – he wasn’t Crewe nor, obviously, was an elderly man with spectacles. They looked down the empty platform to where it ended and the line went on into the empty distance. They retraced their steps. In the waiting room, a few coals flickered reluctantly in the black grate, but he was not among the shivering group gathered there. They went back from the platform to where there was a refreshment room and peered in through the misty window.

‘There,’ breathed Sam. ‘It is him, I’m sure.’

Dickens looked at the figure hunched over the marble table top, the coat collar turned up and the hat pulled down. But there was something about the head and the broad shoulders. The stranger looked up and at the window. Dickens eyes met his and Crewe knew him. He was up in a flash, pushing his way to the door where a woman was just going in. He shoved her aside and ran on to the first platform, leaping over the boxes, pushing a porter with his trolley out of the way. Jones darted after him, leaving Dickens to assist the toppled lady whom he thrust without ceremony into the arms of an astonished porter. He flew after Jones who was extricating himself from an encounter with a heaped pile of trunks. They ran on to the platform where knots of travellers were alighting from the train that had just come in. They could see Crewe, his hat fallen off, his blonde hair streaming as he ran along the platform pushing through indignant crowds, leaping with athletic grace over tumbled boxes and trunks. Would he board the train?

No, they saw him enveloped for a moment in vapour, careering down the platform towards the emptiness beyond. Where was he going? Did he think he could escape along the line? A whistle sounded in the distance. There was the sound of a train slowing as it was coming into the station on the other line. Surely he would not risk it? They ran on, their progress impeded by the passengers alighting and boarding. They could hardly push through as he did, heedless of anyone else. Jones sidestepped a woman with a large basket and found himself in an embrace with a corpulent man who would not let him go. Dickens ran on, zig-zagging through the crowd, losing his hat, barking his shins on a porter’s trolley, reaching almost the end of the platform. But, impossibly, Crewe had disappeared. Where?

Dickens looked round, baffled. Was Crewe on the track, running for his life? The other train was coming in, belching its steam into the air. He looked beyond the platform and looked up. He was there, climbing up a precarious iron ladder which led on to a narrow gantry. The train’s whistle sounded as it approached the gantry upon which Crewe was now balanced. He looked down at his pursuer. Dickens saw the ruined face in the clouds of smoke, and Crewe looked at him. He seemed to smile, and raised his hand as if in farewell. Involuntarily Dickens raised his hand as if in acknowledgement. Of what? Of Crewe’s choice? In that moment they were connected. He understood the man and pitied him. Then, as if in slow motion, Dickens saw him fall into the steam and sparks and vanish.
Hurled headlong,
flaming from the ethereal sky
, thought Dickens, remembering Satan’s fall from heaven. There was a moment of silence, then someone screamed, and the people on the platforms turned to see what had happened. Dickens turned away, sick suddenly.