Mr. Dickens and His Carol Page 3

  Dickens couldn’t see or smell it. He barreled forward like a racehorse with blinders on, headfirst, locked jaw and neck, crunching on his bit while rehearsing an impromptu speech about the virtues of “cutting back.” He was unaware that his children could barely keep up. It took them two strides for each of his, except for little Frank, who needed three in double-time and a skipping step. But as they took the last corner for Bumble’s Toy Shop, there was no mistaking the elevated beating of their little hearts.

  “This must not be our usual spree, children. We are merely looking, that we may comprehend our one Christmas wish.”

  “But Katey said—” Young Charley took a sharp elbow to the ribs.

  “Yes, of course, Father,” said Katey as she turned to the sibling behind with a wink. “Merely looking. Pass it on.”

  “Because Christmas is not in the end about things, children. It is about feeling.”

  “It is about feeling, Father,” Katey parroted. “Pass it on.”

  Dickens was only midway through his lecture when he watched them, one by one, break ranks and rush ahead to wonder at Bumble’s famed window display, a profusion of garlands, ornaments, and fat red bows. A thousand tiny white dots had been painted around the edge of the glass, pretending to be frost. The boys admired a tinplate toy train on a track lined with painted trees. Katey imagined herself the master of a French puppet theater. Mamie fell in love with a doll.

  Dickens’ shoulders sagged. This battle would be hard-won.

  At the first jingle of the bell over the door announcing their arrival, the children pushed past him, scattering to every corner. Dickens froze at the threshold, gut bracing at the sight. Stacked floor to ceiling, cranny to nook, were dollhouses, drums, and music boxes, guns and swords, bows and arrows, toy soldiers, rocking horses, blocks and kites. There were toys of wax, wood, rubber, and brass; toys that rolled, toys that pushed, skipping ropes, hoops, ninepin skittles, and battledores. He had stood here a hundred times before, enchanted, but today the elaborate exhibit of childhood trappings threatened to swallow him whole.

  He had a sudden urge to flee, but Bumble had spotted him, with that twinkle in his eye suggesting money and merriment would soon change hands. The Dickens children were a reliable bunch. “Ah, Mr. Dickens!” Bumble pranced toward him on spindly legs, spectacles bouncing on his beaklike nose. “Wonderful to see you!”

  “We are merely looking, Mr. Bumble.”

  “Of course, Mr. Dickens,” said Bumble, with the usual fluttering and flapping about. “Look all you like. But how glad I am you’ve come, as I was hoping to put you first down for our Christmas fund for the Field Lane Ragged School. It is your prized position, Mr. Dickens, and no one else shall have it as long as I live and breathe.”

  Forster’s counsel to “cut down” drummed in Dickens’ head, against all his instincts. The ragged schools had been his great cause since a visit to Field Lane when he was writing Twist showed him wretched children no charity school or church would admit. The poor boys had no place to go and no one who’d have them, save the Fagins of the world, who would use them up and toss them away like chewed-up, spit-out food scraps. What they needed was a school, and it was Dickens who’d led the charge. But he couldn’t carry it alone, not now. He tugged at his cravat, his face contorting, trying to find a way to say so.

  “I admire Field Lane, as we all do.”

  “You more than anyone,” said Bumble.

  “Admire, and yet, sometimes it seems—”

  “That we cannot do enough. I know.”

  “Yes, but sometimes enough is—”

  “The best place to start. I quite agree.”

  Dickens was never at a loss for words, words with precision and punch. But here he was, stumbling through his own thoughts, trying to find a way out. If he could not state the simple fact of being hard up for guineas, how would he ever write a book again, any book at all? Bumble seemed to take the stalling as computation. He licked the point of his pencil, ready to write any sum whatsoever, Dickens supposed, especially a big one. He couldn’t blame Bumble for expecting it. He had always given more each year than the last, where now he just hemmed and hawed.

  When the bell tinkled over the door, Dickens saw his chance. “I shall detain you no longer, Mr. Bumble. Do not miss a customer on my account.”

  “Not to worry, Mr. Dickens. I shall be rid of him at once.”

  Bumble flitted toward a rotund fellow with a red bulbous nose, capacious waistcoat, and a white wig perched on top of his head but not quite right. Despite his reprieve, Dickens couldn’t help listening in. “I shall remember,” said Bumble, lifting his spectacles to inspect the fine print on the man’s business card: “Fezziwig and Cratchit.”

  “Good names!” Dickens marched toward them, momentarily forgetting his own predicament. He plucked the card from Bumble’s hand. “‘Fezziwig and Cratchit.’ I shall put them in my mental museum.”

  Glad to see his best customer’s enthusiasm waxing, Bumble cut in: “Mr. Dickens. Let me introduce you. This is Mr.… which one are you again?”

  But on hearing “Dickens,” the man attempted a sidestep toward the door. Dickens gently blocked his way, surveying the man head to foot, everyone a potential character.

  “Hmm. I take you as more a Cratchit than a Fezziwig.”

  “Oh, no, sir!” Cratchit blushed like a beet. “Smith is my name. Cratchit is no one’s name, I assure you. Why, it is hardly a name at all.”

  “It’s a name to me!” Dickens gazed upward, considering its possibilities. “Hmm, sounds like scratch, and crutch, or better yet, cratch, like a rack, a cradle, a manger! Yes, I like it very much. And if Mr. Cratchit be not present in body and soul, why, I shall do him the honor of a place in my newest book.”

  “But, sir! If that be so, Cratchit shall throw himself into the Thames!”

  “Ah, yes. So he shall,” said Dickens. “Couldn’t write it better myself!” Blithely unaware of the terror he had struck in the poor man’s heart, he lifted Bumble’s pencil from between his fingers and dug in his pockets for a blank mem-slip, one of the scraps of paper he carried for writing down fresh ideas. By the time he looked up, the man was hotfooting away as fast he could.

  “Oh, dear,” said Bumble. “I guess not everyone wants a place in one of your books.”

  Dickens looked at the card one more time, and put it in his pocket with a shrug. “Oh, well. There’s always Fezziwig.”

  “But never mind him, sir.” Bumble retrieved his pencil and licked the end to freshen its point. “Where were we? Ah, yes. We could start with the usual array of gifts for the boys at Field Lane.”

  Caught at last, Dickens felt a tug at the hem of his coat. He looked down to find Walter with a black cape tied about his neck, a magic set in his arms, eyes brimming with wonder. “Look, Father. A conjuring set!”

  Dickens knelt across from his son, forehead to forehead, all resolve teetering.

  *

  Outside Bumble’s window, a pair of dark eyes watched Dickens’ every move without blinking. They were shiny brown with coal-black lashes, and belonged to a small ragged boy whose face was smudged with pencil lead. There were faint freckles beneath the grime, and a barely detectable dimple on his left cheek. He had twigs for bones and clothes too big by half, a man’s clothes, rolled up where necessary to fit his tiny frame. An old tattered jacket, patched at the elbows, had five buttons, but no two that matched. He wore a pair of corduroy trousers rubbed bald at the knees and turned up twice at the hem. They were pinched high on his waist with a makeshift rope belt. His small hands, in fingerless wool gloves, holey and thin, clutched a dog-eared sketch pad to his chest.

  The boy studied how Dickens tousled his son’s hair, perked his ears to listen, nodded now and then, and seemed even once to laugh. He pulled off his brown cloth cap and leaned closer to the window. His breath made a small circle of white vapor on the glass. But no one saw him. Not even Bumble, attentive to all possible comers, paid the boy any mind.<
br />
  People had a way of looking past him.

  *

  Inside, Dickens was losing ground fast. “Oh, all right, my little Young Skull. Perhaps just the magic set.”

  “But what about the rest of us, Father?” asked young Charley.

  Soon all the children gathered around him with armfuls of toys. Dickens dropped his head back to roll his eyes at the ceiling, but a brightly colored Chinese lantern grazed his face. He batted it away. “What Walter may or may not get has nothing to do with the rest of you.” When they looked at him with long faces, he could feel himself wavering. “We must think not of those who have more than we do, but of those who have less!”

  Little Frank whimpered. Mamie hoisted him onto her hip. Katey put a hand on her sister’s shoulder in solidarity.

  Dickens looked at their cherub faces, his voice faltering. “We cannot all have whatever it is we want … whenever we want it.”

  But soon enough the jingling bell over the door signified their departure, all carrying whatever it was they wanted, wrapped and ready for Christmas Day. Mr. Bumble waved after them.

  “I shall save your spot in the holiday fund, Mr. Dickens! Never worry!”

  Dickens smiled weakly and turned to bring up the rear, balancing the tallest stack of the very presents he had sworn against. The children gabbled and clucked ahead of him, all shouting over one another with excitement.

  He muttered under his breath, “Cut back, indeed. Well done, Mr. Dickens.”

  8

  Half the distance to home, Dickens’ children scattered behind him like quail. He turned to see Mamie pressing her nose to Mudie’s window, clutching her new china doll with a sweet green bow about its neck. She never passed without stopping, wanting to see the latest installment of whatever he was writing, usually front and center in an elaborate display with framed illustrations, a sketch of “the author,” and knickknacks on tiered shelves behind swags of gold satin.

  Young Charley pulled to Mamie’s left. “Look, Father,” he called.

  Dickens edged closer. He peered over his gifts to a stack of unsold numbers towering in the window, and a sign: FREE WITH PURCHASE OF TEA— Martin Chuzzlewit.

  “Good Lord. They cannot give them away.”

  Young Charley leaned lightly against his father’s shoulder. The other children made a half circle around him. Mamie threaded her gloved hand through his arm. “Perhaps the warm weather has people in less than a reading mood,” she said.

  He tried to think of something reassuring to say to them, but he had no words for this. The older children knew well that by now every copy in the city, if not the country, ought to be long sold out, sometimes within the first week after Magazine Day—that monthly literary riot here at Mudie’s and bookstalls everywhere when readers of every variety lined up around the block long before opening, in wild anticipation of the newest Dickens number. They’d crowd the window taking turns to catch a glimpse of the illustrated cover, pointing to their favorite characters, chattering about last month’s twist at the end, venturing guesses as to which way it would turn. Forster called it a veritable Boz-o-mania. From Pickwick on, his popularity was unrivaled. Now here he was, quietly taking in a new universe of possibility in which Charles Dickens was no longer at the top of the heap.

  A tap-tap-tap on his shoulder sent a jolt down his spine. He spun around, ready to pounce, to find a gentleman in a high-collared coat and sharp-pointed shirt. Dickens judged, by the small leather journal the man held in his hand, that an admirer had appeared just in time.

  “Would you do me the honor of an autograph, sir?”

  “Why, certainly I will,” he said, loud enough for his goslings to hear.

  Katey and Mamie gladly relieved him of the presents he was carrying. The man slid an album into Dickens’ open hand. It was only a little larger than his palm, thin and wider than it was tall, and gold-embossed. He leafed through to a fresh page, pulled a pencil from his pocket, and flapped his elbows, preparing to write.

  “To whom shall I make it?”

  “Marley, sir. Jacob. A man who’s never missed a word you’ve written.”

  “My favorite sort of reader.” Dickens signed with a flourish. He sensed his children watching, felt Mamie squeeze his arm. He handed the album back with a satisfied smile. “Jacob Marley, I am ever in your service.”

  The gentleman flipped to the page to review his newest get. “Dickens? I thought you was Thackeray!” He tore it out, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it into the street, stomping away.

  The children watched their father’s autograph be further insulted by the wheel of an omnibus clip-clopping past.

  Dickens narrowed his eyes. “Well. How sad Mr. Marley will be when I introduce him in my new number, only to kill him off in the next.”

  “He should be dead to begin with,” said young Charley.

  “Dead as a doornail,” said Katey.

  “So he shall. So he shall.”

  The matter settled, Dickens turned for home. His children trooped behind in cautious silence.

  *

  In the spot where they’d stood, five scruffily clad street urchins appeared, watching the author disappear down the street, his top hat bobbing in the crowd. Their “captain” was a beetle-browed, hairy-lipped youth of not quite seventeen. He wore a series of three scraggy coats: one had no buttons, another no sleeves, and the last a lapel but little else. The captain picked up the crumpled paper from the street and flattened it against his dirty tweed trousers. He couldn’t read, but he could put pieces together.

  “Dickens, eh?” he said, with a menacing glint in his mud-brown eyes.

  9

  Dickens stared at the sheet of foolscap that had vexed him for the better part of a week. Each day he’d redoubled his commitment to rescuing Martin Chuzzlewit from the clutches of foreign snobbery, yet had barely the bones of a paragraph, the remains of a sentence. He found every reason not to write and very few in its favor. All he could think of was the money trench he was in, with only a handful of weeks to dig himself out. Today, having vowed to stick to his chair, he was stuck. He adjusted his inkstand an inch to the right, the glue pot to the left, picked a different quill, then another with just the right fineness and ink flow, changed the nib, thought long and hard on the merits of blue or black ink, decided firmly on iron gall, and dipped.

  Still nothing.

  The clock on his desk ticked louder and louder. In the early days, Chapman and Hall had wooed him with punch ladles and silver spoons; there was an oil portrait on one occasion, a celebratory dinner on another. But nothing had pleased him more than the fine fusee clock, with its burled wood, clear chime, and brass bezel. It greeted him every morning, with its gilt Roman dial and matching moon hands. He’d wind it three turns to the right with its heart-shaped key—it seemed to be a clock always in want of winding—and only then could begin to write. But now each agonizing tick-tock marked another precious second gone with nothing to show for it. He tried covering his ears, but it tapped on in his brain. Dickens wanted to scream. Instead, he stood, opened the window, and pitched the clock out. The defenestration ended successfully with a bang at the bottom of the garden steps. He listened for the silence, closed the window, and wiped his hands of the deed.

  Back in his chair, Dickens scrunched his eyes shut and put a finger to each temple, trying to image forth a mental picture. But nothing came to him at all.

  He was saved by a light knock on the door. “Good Lord, just come in!”

  Topping popped inside, carrying an unwieldy stack of letters. “Interruptin’, sir?”

  “I should think that unlikely. Haven’t managed to write one good word all day.”

  “Just the post. A few bills, past due. Usual contingent of beggin’ letters…”

  “’Tis the season,” Dickens said with a sigh.

  Topping deposited the first letters on his master’s desk, one at a time. “Various confirmations of yer speeches and engagements: Royal Theatrical Fun
d … Poor Man’s Guardian Society … Royal Hospital for Incurables … Second Annual Dinner of the Charitable Society for the Aged, Infirm, Deaf, and Dumb…”

  “Has Charles Dickens ever met a cause that was not good?”

  “Only if it was bad, sir—”

  “Which apparently requires twice the effort.” He rested his chin in a hand, watching the pile of mail lean precariously to the left.

  “Oh, and an invitation from the Ebenezer Temperance Society.” Topping held up the letter with an arch of his ginger brows.

  Dickens stood and grabbed it from Topping’s hand. “Can these teetotalers not see I am set upon improving the pleasures of those who have nothing, not denying them what little they have?”

  “Relieved to hear it, sir.”

  “These Ebenezers…” Dickens curled the fingers of his right hand into a tight fist, as if he wanted to punch the letter itself. “I’d like to screw and bruise them, scrouge and scruze them!”

  “Only wot they deserves, sir.”

  “Why these people continue to vex me, I do not know.” Dickens tore the letter into tiny bits, opened the window, and tossed them in the direction of the clock.

  “Speaking of vexing, sir, your father—”

  “Not here, is he?”

  “Just arrived. Downstairs.”

  “Well, send him away. Make some excuse.”

  But it was too late. John Dickens appeared in the doorway clutching the brim of his faded brown bowler. His son sank at the sight of him. His father was north of sixty, but by temperament still a good deal south of death. He was maddeningly sanguine for a man who lived on other people’s money. It puzzled him how his father affected an affable, confident air, no matter how down on his luck, like someone who had known money, or at least met it once or twice, and still considered it a friend. Never mind that the seams of his snuff-colored coat were hanging on for dear life.

  “Hello, son.”

  “Father. What a surprise.” He signaled to Topping that he could go.

  The old man walked into the room with a limp, the result of a nagging left hip. He steadied himself with a hand on the back of a tall leather chair.