Death at Hungerford Stairs (33 page)

A blackbird flew out of a tree, flinging its call across the silent graveyard. Sam bent to touch the woman again. She stood and turned to him, but she did not speak. Sam guided her towards the others, and she went before him, looking back from time to time at the grave where her son lay, and which she would never see again. Dickens saw how the rain blurred the thick lenses of the glasses. She could hardly see, but she showed no curiosity about the other two men. Superintendent Rook took off his oilskin, placed it round her unresisting shoulders, and he and Sam walked with her between them. Dickens came behind, and thus they went slowly back to the police station.

Once there, they placed her in a room with a fire burning. Superintendent Rook stayed to write down her confession – should she make one. She still did not speak. She was not afraid. What could the policemen do to her? It was all over. Why should she tell them? What was it to do with them?

Sam signalled to Dickens that he should sit at the other side of the table before her. Dickens understood that he was to question her. Sam stood by the mantelpiece so that he could see her. Dickens sat and looked at her. Victorine saw a man with a face of steel. His eyes looked into the very depths of her, cold, blue, hypnotising. She felt fear then. She did not want to speak, but he would make her, she knew it.

‘Tell me about your boy.'

‘He is dead, that is all.' Her voice was flat. It was as if she felt nothing now.

‘What happened?' His face did not change and he continued to look at her, willing her to answer, using all his power. A certain implacable part of him surfaced like a half-hidden knife. She flinched as if she had seen the blade. He pitied her, but he did not let that interfere with his determination that she should answer.

‘Tell me about it.'

‘He drowned when he was nine.'

‘And Michel?'

She was surprised then. How did they know about Michel? Not that it mattered. Michel. He was nothing to her. Only Victor had mattered. ‘He went to America.'

‘Why did you not go with him?'

‘And leave Victor? Michel did not care. I went to London to please him, but he must go further away, he said. But I would not leave Victor – I could come to Brighton from London.'

‘And the boys you found in London? What about them?'

She looked at him through the smeared lenses, but he could hardly see her eyes. He leant over and took them off and her eyes were suddenly larger. He saw for a moment that she might once have been attractive, that Michel might have found something there that she had hidden since Victor's death. Sam remembered saying that they would peel off the murderer's mask and the killer would know that he was caught. He almost wished that Dickens had not taken off those spectacles; she seemed somehow defenceless before them. But he saw that her eyes gave her away now.

She stared at Dickens. How she hated him. He knew everything. What did it matter? She would tell them, then. She would tell them about those boys, those boys who were nothing compared with her boy. And whose mothers did not care about them.

‘Tell me about that first boy, Jemmy.'

‘I had been to Madame Du Cane to fit a new hat. She was impatient to have it but it needed more work. She was not pleased. I went to the market at Hungerford and then I went to look at the river. The boy was there – he looked like Victor. I gave him some coins, a poor boy. He had no home, he said. I went back another day.'

‘Why did you dress as a man?'

‘It made me powerful. I could do as I wished. Madame Du Cane and Madame Outfin and, oh, yes, that girl, Miss Sophy, they thought I was nothing. They had everything, but I saw how spoilt they were, how selfish. Oh, I watched them in my disguise. I do not sleep – I went out at night. I was safe in my disguise. I could go anywhere. I saw them – that boy, I saw him in the alleys with that girl. A prostitute – and she was to have a child – she.' Her voice was hard with contempt. ‘Oh, yes, they did not know what he did but I knew – behind their masks, they were nothing.'

‘Jemmy?'

‘I went back to the river – I asked him to come with me. I told him that my sister, Mademoiselle Victorine, would feed him – I thought he would come with me. I wanted him – I thought he was like Victor but he was not. He turned on me, accusing me – the words he used, vile, filthy words. Not Victor. He ran into the water and I dragged him out. Why should he live when my good boy was dead?'

‘You drew a mask.'

‘I did – they wore masks. Why not I? They would not find me.They would not know what it meant. No one would know.'

‘What did it mean?'

‘I could see – I must go home, but the eyes behind the mask, my eyes, they watched all – they could see the dead, and the living who found them and who would not understand.'

She closed her eyes then. They saw the terrible weariness in that pale, thin face – no, she did not sleep. Sam was reminded of the masks he had drawn, the blind eyes holding their secrets. He hoped she would not refuse to answer any more questions. He shifted purposely, making a noise with his feet as if he were stepping forward. Her eyes flew open and Dickens seized the moment.

‘And the second boy, Robin?'

‘He was a nice boy – at first. I gave him pennies. He was hungry. I would take him in – I would feed him. He always said he wanted to go home – how did his mother deserve a boy like that? She did not feed him. I saw him one night when I was out walking. I took him to the churchyard. I said my sister, Mamselle Victorine, wanted him to take something to a customer, and that she was waiting at the church. My sister would pay him, I said. But when I showed him the shawl he said it was his mother's shawl. He tried to take it. He talked only of his mother. And he said he did not like Mademoiselle Victorine – she frightened him. He hated her, he said. But Victor loved me. That boy, his face when he said he hated me.'

Dickens thought of the boy leaning against the killer, submissive in her arms. Yes, he had been dead when those girls had seen them in St Giles's. She had pulled him to her and the pin had slid in. If they had come a minute or two before, Robin might have lived. No time to think. Move on before those eyes closed up again. They had to know it all.

‘The shawl – where did you get it? You said it was Madame Outfin's.'

‘I took it. It was at the Du Canes. Someone had thrown it away. They did not care about my work. I took what was mine.'

‘There was another boy.'

‘Not my boy. I made a mistake. I saw his face – he was a monster. Why should he live when my boy was dead?' Her eyes were cold. She was not afraid now. This man who thought he was so powerful. He was nothing.

He told her about Mrs Hart, how she had loved her son, how she had died for lack of Robin. But there was nothing. Dickens saw no remorse there, no pity. He had seen enough. Silently, he handed back her glasses. She put them on, her mask. Nothing now could pierce that impenetrable face. She was closed to them. She had told her tale.

They took her to London – to Newgate. And she spoke no more.

A great many things took place in December. Charley had his interview for Eton and showed great intelligence in his knowledge of Virgil and Herodotus. Dickens wrote to Charley's tutor, Mr Jones, that he was inexpressibly delighted at the readiness with which Charley went through this ordeal with a stranger. Dickens kept Christmas in the usual way; on the twenty-fourth day of December he took his children to the toy shop in Holborn where they selected their Christmas presents; there was the pantomime with Mark Lemon and a country dance to end the old year. Kip flourished at Urania Cottage – a good-natured donkey with mild eyes had been bought and was Kip's special responsibility. James Bagster took him to his daughter's house at Kensal Green where he played with James's two grandchildren, and ate plum pudding for the first time in his life. Sam and Elizabeth entertained the Brim family – and Scrap, of course. The shop was closed and Mr Brim rested in the upstairs bedroom at Norfolk Street. Captain Pierce took Davey to live near the sea where the wind scoured the lanes and fields clean so that it was possible to breathe the clear air which dissolved some of the dark terrors of London, and eventually he forgot the nightmare city.

On December 29th Dickens sat in his study looking at the snow outside. The first page of the tenth instalment of
David Copperfield
was staring at him with what he called a blank aspect. He took up his quill to write a letter to his friend William de Cerjat in Lausanne. He told him that Little Em'ly must fall, but that he hoped to put the story before the thoughts of the people in a new way which might do some good, perhaps evoking sympathy for the seduced and ruined girl. He recalled the hanging of the Mannings:
the conduct of the people was so indescribably frightful that I felt for some time afterwards almost as if I were living in a city of devils. I feel, at this hour, as if I never could go near the place again…
And he felt the same about Newgate where Victorine Jolicoeur was imprisoned. She would surely hang in the New Year.

Newgate. Looming black, a stern slab of thick, cold stone, sombre as a fortress, where Mademoiselle Victorine waited in the condemned cell for the day of her execution. Dickens would not go. He could imagine it all too well, the narrow and obscure staircase leading to the dark passage in which a charcoal stove cast a lurid tint, and the massive door of the condemned cell. He could picture her in that stone dungeon with its scratched, hard bench, its iron candlestick which at night would cast flickering shadows on the wall until extinguished at ten o'clock by the two warders who kept guard over that slight, anonymous woman who had said nothing in her own defence, who had been found guilty, and who had listened impassively to the judge with the black silk on his head while he uttered the sombre words:
hanged by the neck until you are dead.
He could see in his mind's eye the Bible and the prayer book, and wondered if she had read them, or if she had made her confession to the black-robed priest from the Sardinian church. Dickens had remembered the kindness and concern in the priest's eyes, and had gone back there to enquire if the priest would visit her.

On the Sunday before the hanging, the gaol bell would summon the prisoners from their various wards to the chapel. The condemned woman would be brought in to sit in the black pew from where she would stare at the pulpit and reading desk hung with black. The prison chaplain would ascend the pulpit. Dickens could imagine the words addressed to the unhappy prisoner doomed to die on the morrow, who must call upon Him who alone had the power of forgiveness, and who had said
though her sins
were
red as scarlet
, He would
make them white as snow
. He looked through the window at the white garden, at the thickening sky where snow gathered to fall silent and slow. He thought of Mrs Hart, Robin, Jemmy and Nose to be buried soon under the cold earth. He thought again of Victorine in Newgate.

He had written of the condemned man in that cell with its small high window barred with heavy iron, listening to the deep bell of St Paul's, counting the hours, seven, six, five left. He had written of how such a man might still hope for reprieve, and how in his restless sleep, he would dream of a happier past and wake to find that Time, inexorable, unstoppable, had marched grimly on, bringing the grey light of morning stealing into the cell. He did not think that Victorine would dream of a happier past. She would not sleep. She would lie awake, her eyes open in the darkness, and Mrs Hart, Robin, Jemmy and Nose would come to her then to watch her in silence, their eyes accusing and the boys would merge into one boy. And that boy would be Victor, streaming with water, his drowned eyes weeping, his grief for her a searing reproach. She would reach for him, but he would be gone.Then she would know what she had done. She would start from her uneasy bed. She would fumble for her spectacles, and see in that dank morning gloom that every object in the narrow cell was too frightfully real to admit of doubt – she would know that she was the condemned woman and that in two hours she would be dead.

And it all came to pass as he foretold. On a grimly freezing Monday morning when the bells of St Paul's and St Sepulchre's struck eight, the crowd was gathered, thick as flies, pushing and jostling for the best view. There was the black scaffold and the black chain with its hook to which would be attached the hempen rope that would encircle that fragile neck. Another bell rang out and the Debtor's Door opened to let out the solemn procession. First the chaplain intoning the words of the burial service:
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
Then Mademoiselle Victorine, so slight as to be almost weightless, her arms already pinioned.Then William Calcraft, sometime cobbler and pieman, hangman now for twenty years, paid a guinea a week and a guinea for each execution as well as the money he made from selling pieces of rope from executions. The short drop was his speciality and it could be an ugly business if the victim did not die soon – and Mademoiselle Victorine weighed nothing. He had measured her with his keen, cold eye. He'd have to be nifty, he thought, down the ladder to pull on her legs. Still, it made a decent show for the mob. Couldn't disappoint his public. He had hanged Mr and Mrs Manning before a crowd of, it was thought, thirty thousand or more. That day's crowd was no less guilty of the wickedness and levity against which Dickens had fulminated in his letter to
The Times.

Mademoiselle Victorine walked steadily, betraying nothing of fear or sorrow – her eyes were lowered. Without her spectacles she could see very little, but she could hear the low growl of the crowd rising to a cacophony of shrieks and jeers. She was placed on the trapdoor, her head and face covered in a white cap and the noose placed round her neck.