The Murder of Patience Brooke (4 page)

‘
Thrown on the wide world, doom’d to wander and roam

Bereft of my parents, bereft of my home,

A stranger to pleasure, and to comfort and joy,

Behold little Edmund, the poor peasant boy.
’

As his voice faded, he looked at Davey. There was terror in his eyes. Guiltily, Dickens reassured him, ‘Never mind, Davey. It was only a poor man passing, I’m sure. Nothing to do with Patience.’

The boy shook his head in agitation and wrote again:
Man selling. Sang about
poor boy.

‘A pedlar?’

A nod.

‘He sang the song?’

A nod.

‘Tonight?’

A nod.

‘You saw him here before?’

A nod.

‘Selling things here?’ Dickens wanted to be sure.

A nod. The hazel eyes frightened.

‘A frightening man?’

A twisting of the head. Two hands pulling the face round.

‘A man with a crooked face?’

The clock of St Mark’s struck four. Davey was in his bed. The doctor and the constable were gone. The death certificate was signed and the constable had written his report, all subject to the authority of the superintendent who had assured both that the case was now in his hands. In exceptional circumstances, which these were, a policeman had the authority to remove dead bodies from private houses at the request of the householder who, Superintendent Jones had explained, was, in this case, Mrs Morson and who would be glad that the matter could be taken care of.

‘What now?’ asked Dickens.

‘We take her to London. We have five days before the death need be registered and we can keep her safe until we find out more.’

‘But,’ interrupted Mrs Morson, her face strained with pity.

‘I know. It’s hard but if you don’t want those girls to know, if you don’t want a rabble of newspapermen here, if you don’t want Mr Dickens’s name in the headlines, as if he were the murderer, then this is what must be done.’ The superintendent’s tone was harsh but they had to see what might ensue. ‘Do it for the girls,’ he said. ‘Protect them.’

Mrs Morson saw his logic. Dickens was a few moments behind them, his imagination conjuring the sensation of his being accused of murder. In a moment, he had seen himself dangling on the hangman’s noose. The superintendent gave him an appraising glance which almost had a smile in it. Dickens recognised his own weakness for self-dramatisation and half-smiled, too.

‘When we get to London?’ he asked.

‘I will summon the aid of my faithful and discreet Constable Rogers, and we will take her into the police mortuary. I must see the Commissioner at Scotland Yard, and I must give him the facts and ask him to keep this matter quiet. He will agree when I tell him that the case involves the reputation of Charles Dickens – he is a great reader – and possibly, the reputation of Miss Coutts, the greatest heiress in England. I shall mention your supporters, Mr Tracey of Tothill Prison and Mr Chesterton of Coldbath Fields Prison. The Commissioner, in turn, will speak to the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey. The same names will be mentioned and you and I, Mr Dickens, with the help of Mrs Morson, and Constable Rogers, will be left to pursue the case as we think fit and we have already decided what is fitting. We should like justice for Patience Brooke. Are we all agreed?’

‘We are,’ asserted Dickens and Mrs Morson.

‘Then we must bring her down. Mrs Morson, we will leave you to deal with the girls tomorrow, or today, rather. It will be enough to tell them that Patience has disappeared, and if anyone here is involved, he or she will be much disturbed by our false story which may lead to the guilty party being panicked into some kind of action. We shall see. We will rely on your discretion – see what you can find out. It would be best to leave Davey alone. Let me see, it is now Saturday. We will try to come back on Sunday with news and some ideas to pursue. Mr Dickens can question the girls. They will be suspicious and defensive if a policeman is brought into it.’

They went up to the room. Mrs Morson had done her work well. Patience was dressed in an old grey gown of Mrs Morson’s, a white band covered the hideous scarlet gash, her hair was smoothed back under a white linen cap and the cheeks were as pale as they had been in life, all trace of the crude red gone.

‘
After life’s fitful fever she sleeps well. Nothing can touch her further
,’ murmured Dickens.

‘Aye, she looks peaceful now, thank you, Mrs Morson.’

‘You have given her back herself,’ said Dickens, ‘a self that someone tried to take away.’

‘And who we will find, Mr Dickens. Now let us be on our way. Time goes on. It will be nearly light when we get to London. I should like the dark to hide us when we get there. Mrs Morson, is there cart or wagonette there instead of the trap?’ Mrs Morson nodded. ‘Then I will harness the horse to it whilst you and Mr Dickens wait below. Think on any questions we need to ask. I will come back soon.’

Dickens felt relief that the superintendent would take charge of the practical necessities to do with the horse. He had always been a rider, taking the beasts rather for granted until one bit him and nearly tore off his arm – an event which had left him more ill than he had ever admitted. There had been something almost cruel in the horse’s rolling eye, and Dickens had felt the injustice of it. What had he done that he should be attacked so viciously? Any exposure of his vulnerability seemed to create in him acute distress.

They looked at Patience once again, tranquil in her white cap – she looked nun-like in her death. Dickens wondered if that was what she had sought at Urania Cottage, the seclusion of the nunnery and the peace of celibacy. And that meant that somewhere in her past, perhaps, there was someone who threatened that peace. They descended the stairs and the superintendent went out to the stable.

Mrs Morson and Dickens were somehow bereft. They felt his absence as a loss of comfort, as if they were children left in the dark. Mrs Morson began to clear the bread and cheese and tea cups; Dickens put more coal on the range. He felt a kind of intimacy in the situation as if they were married and tidying their house together. Mrs Morson stood at the sink, her back to him, and he watched her slight figure and wondered at her strength.

This was a young woman whose husband had died in Brazil and left her with a child on the way, and two little girls in a wild land with no resource. She had travelled hundreds of miles by mule to find a ship which would take her home. Arriving in England, she found that her brother-in-law had embezzled the money left by James Morson, and yet she had mustered her courage to find a job, to make a living for herself and three children who were now living with their grandparents. He could not forbear from comparing her with Catherine, his wife, who was nervous and unwell so often, and who, he thought, was temperamentally unsuited to him, and who had lost her girlish delicacy. Mrs Morson turned to him and he admired the fineness of her features, and how, when she smiled, her face still looked girlish. He could not stop himself. Taking a step towards her, he grasped her hands.

‘Mrs Morson … Georgiana … I … What a terrible night you have had, we have had. I must tell you how much I have admired your courage and the delicacy of your treatment of Patience.’

Mrs Morson was neither flirtatious nor coy. She thanked him gravely but allowed him to keep her hands, which were warmed by his. And there they stood, she looking at his tender face with a gaze of her own. Something settled between them. And then the superintendent came. They did not jump apart. Why should they? What had passed between them was nothing about which to feel shame. The superintendent came and took both their hands in his.

‘We must begin, Mr Dickens, and we must take Patience Brooke on her last journey.’

It was still dark when they laid Patience Brooke on the floor of the wagonette. She was covered in Mrs Morson’s thickest and best cloak with a pillow to rest her head. The crescent moon, pale as silver sand, cast its weak light on the empty road and the darkened fields on either side. He turned and saw Mrs Morson go back into the house, the little light from the kitchen suddenly extinguished, and he thought of her tired face looking at his in the candlelight, and what he had felt then and what he must hide in his heart. Ahead was London and the sickly corridors of the morgue where they must leave the body, though, Dickens hoped, her spirit was elsewhere, free of whatever had wounded her in that secret, mysterious life that they must examine whether she wanted it now or not. Nothing, he thought, could touch her now, and he almost felt that they should leave it, be done with it, bury her deep under winter snow. He would remember her fragile beauty which sometimes looked like plainness, her paradoxical strength and her gentleness. Davey would not forget her patient kindness nor would Mrs Morson, but her murderer would remember, perhaps with satisfaction in the killing. He would recall with savage pleasure what he had done and how he had left her for the world to think she was a harlot. No, they could not leave it. They would find him and he must live to be afraid of the crime he had committed.

His thoughts were interrupted by the superintendent who had been equally lost in his own thoughts. ‘Well, Mr Dickens, what did Davey tell you?’

‘He saw Patience go out of the kitchen and up the steps. She carried no bag so she was not about to leave with whoever came in the night. But she must have been going to meet someone. He saw no one but he heard something strange – a man singing, singing an old song, the words of which I recognised, words about Edmund, the poor peasant boy, all alone in the world. And, he wrote about a man selling things, a man with a crooked face who came to the home sometime before. But I hadn’t time to ask more for that was when the doctor came and you brought the constable, and Mrs Morson put Davey to bed. I should have –’

‘No matter. He’ll have gone now, vanished, but we can ask Mrs Morson about him, a pedlar I assume, when he came – and if Patience saw him. What about those girls? We are sure, are we not, that one of them could not be involved?’

‘They are often foolish, sometimes intractable, sometimes given to outbursts of passion and jealousy of each other and they have led hazardous and forbidden lives; some have seen violence, some have been at the receiving end of brutish treatment, some cannot conform to the quietness of our regime, but I do not think that any of the present group would murder.’

‘No,’ said the superintendent, ‘I think this was a man’s crime. It would have taken some strength to tie her to the railings. This was not a crime of passion in the sense that the killer was provoked into murder – let us say, the kind of killing where a knife is plunged into a heart at the height of rage or jealousy or fear. It seems to me to have about it the desire to shame the victim. He took time to disarrange her hair, to tear the dress, and to rouge her face.’

‘And I do not think any of our girls would have motive to degrade Patience,’ Dickens offered.

‘No, I was more wondering about one acting as a go-between.’

‘I see,’ said Dickens, ‘though I do not like to see. There is one fairly new girl, Isabella Gordon, who is something of a troublemaker. She is impudent and can be sly – she might think it a joke to get Patience into trouble by setting up a meeting with a man. She is easily bored, often restless. Once she told me she wished she could go to the races. I don’t know – I do not want to think that she – in any case, Augustus Tracey, Governor of Tothill Fields Prison, remembered her fondly from her prison days. I don’t think she is vicious –’

‘But, as you say, she might think it a joke to get someone she thought was an authority figure into trouble – she might enjoy the irony of plain, in her view at any rate, modest Patience Brooke meeting a man. Well, we will see. Mrs Morson might find out something. Now, if we think that this is a man’s killing, we must consider, apart from our mysterious pedlar who else might have had contact, however slight on the surface, with Patience – who else can you tell me about? Never mind how far-fetched.’

‘There are only the gardener and Davey at the Home
.
And the gardener, Mr Bagster, is away at his daughter’s in Kensal Green – his son-in-law gardens at the cemetery.’

‘When did he leave?’

‘Mrs Morson said he went away on Friday afternoon – but you cannot think – he hasn’t a crooked face – his face is as straight as his garden hoe.’

‘We cannot assume that it was our crooked man who was singing last night – it is the kind of song anyone might sing. You know it yourself.’

‘But I wasn’t singing it last night!’ Dickens exclaimed.

‘No, I am sure you were not, but my point holds – it could be a coincidence. Or simply that someone had the tune in his head. It might have been someone other than the murderer, someone passing by.’

‘But Davey seemed to be sure that the singer was the man with the crooked face. I suggested the passer-by notion and that’s when he became so upset – if you had seen him then –’

‘I do not doubt that Davey linked the two, but he was afraid, as you said yourself. He is imaginative, young, and he was bewildered by the fact that Patience had gone out – it’s not surprising that he believed that the singer must be the man with the crooked face. Think how the man’s appearance affected him – think of that face from a child’s viewpoint. To you or me or even to the girls, he might have seemed a bit unusual, unfortunate in his looks perhaps, but to Davey he must have been a figure from a nightmare, and who knows what nightmare figures inhabit Davey’s memory – and he cannot tell us.’

Dickens was much struck by the superintendent’s perception. It was exactly what he had experienced himself. He recalled the idiot man from his boyhood days in Chatham, how his ten-year-old self had been horrified by the face all awry and the dreadful hands

‘It is true,’ he said. ‘I have often thought what secrecy there is in the young under terror. I suppose I was like Davey then, ready to believe in the bogeyman come in the dark, singing his song whilst wielding the knife.’