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Chapter One
Wilkie Collins
Charles Dickens never tumbled a whore in his life, never let a woman know he felt lust. He truly believed all women were pure and virginal. When Miss Coutts approached him with a scheme for saving prostitutes, he saw it as the opportunity to fulfill a personal mission.
"I'm convinced they're better than people think," he told me over a pint of bitter one dreary London evening. "Fallen girls, of course. Some of them even criminals, I should think, but they deserve a second chance!" He pounded the table like an aggrieved member of Parliament. He was on a moral campaign.
"Wilkie, these are fallen girls with pure hearts."
"I'm sure they are, sir," I said. "I've known several myself over the years."
"If it weren't for you, Wilkie, there would be far fewer on the streets today."
"I take that as a compliment, sir. I do my best to help the working classes."
We were drinking in the Olde Pelican. As usual, a crowd gathered outside the window to watch Charles Dickens drink. Eventually we requested a room on the first storey to avoid a constant pecking on the pane.
"Now, now, I'm serious here," Dickens said. "I'm talking about young girls, you see. Mere children who sincerely want to reform. They only need a place of shelter and love to find a better life for themselves. Miss Coutts and I have decided to raise funds for an asylum."
Dickens' relation to women had always been perturbing. He wrote stories about perfect young children, about angels and little girls, never about adult women with any hint of sensuality. One of his earliest stories was about an innocent child whose gin-sotted father sold her as a prostitute. In the story, I recall, Dickens wanted to save her because she was virtuous and pure, but she dies early and the reader is led to believe she goes straight to heaven.
Whore heaven, no doubt.
"In all due respect, sir" I said, "the larks I've known are more interested in a pint and a bed. Only two nights ago, in this very tavern, I met a gay young thing, told me she was an orphan in need of rent money. I immediately recognised the need for a little charity."
"Wilkie, you are a sensualist."
"Of course I'm a sensualist!"
I reminded him of my first sexual experience at age thirteen -- with an older woman in Rome, a city I'd come to believe invented sensuality.
"I've never believed a word of it, Wilkie. It's impossible."
He sipped his bitter and looked about with studied unconcern.
He leaned across the board and whispered. "Now this woman in Rome. Was she what one might call a prostitute?"
"Absolutely not. She was a friend of my father's, one of his models actually, a fine matron of the arts. A married woman of spectacular person. You know what I mean. Luxurious attributes, as they say. A fullness of growth found only in Italian Baroque."
Dickens looked like a priest shaken by dark confession. "I don't want to hear about it. Not at thirteen. My God, Wilkie, Miss Coutts would faint." He leaned across the board and whispered coarsely, "What was it like?"
Poor soul. It wasn't until I took personal charge of his needs that Charles Dickens discovered true pleasures of the female sex. Perhaps it turned out badly, becoming, you might say, a lurid tale I couldn't have foreseen. But I want to make clear early, the story was never about Ellen Ternan. Ellen was a mere actress, playing a part of no great consequence, barely more than a slender child with oddly beautiful eyes and boyish hips. I wasn't at all attracted to her person. She had a charming, sly humour, always a little secretive, as if she knew more than she let on. She could hold the attention of a man attracted to innocence, to insouciance, to flirtation, a man like Charles Dickens.
Ellen Ternan appeared far too late to be a central figure. She floated about the periphery like a succubus dressed in silk. She was mysterious, beautiful, vital. None of us understood her. She was never truly at the heart of it, yet she was always there, her own double in everything. There was no way to penetrate her secret, and no need to because the story wasn't about her.
Let me begin again. As a mystery writer, I was better than Charles Dickens. Dickens knew how to create magnificent Characters -- better than anyone -- I'll grant you that. But for me, it was brilliant plots and intricacies, plot remarkably superior to life. Full of intrigue and romance, shocking frights, and surprising resolutions. All quite intelligent. Life is more untidy. Set your goal, march off in one direction, and suddenly you find it's the wrong direction, or the wrong goal, or the wrong life. Charles Dickens knew how to create magnificent characters, but the plot of his life turned out all wrong.
All those stories about how he began as a poor young lad. Don't let them fool you. By the age of twenty-five he had pulled his literary sword from the stone. By thirty, he had slain all dragons, sat down to tea with the Queen, and found himself roundly cheered by the yeomen. By forty, he was famous beyond mortal understanding. You and I can't know what that kind of fame does to a man. The surge of inner power and vitality -- lifting you like a windhover high above rippling clouds, soaring alone, I would think, in a lone and windless sky.
Everyone knew Charles Dickens, everyone tipped his hat, deferred to his decisions. They queued three deep to buy his novels. They pushed and shoved to see him act in a play or give a speech. They bowed and curtseyed to him on the street, as if he were Royal. He was more than a famous writer. The working class saw in Dickens an image of its own striving. The man who rises from poverty to wealth, who becomes a gentleman, yet retains great feeling for those he's left behind. He was a saint who remained in sympathy with clerks and kitchen maids, blacksmiths and coal miners. Without knowing quite how it happened, Charles Dickens found himself the standard for Christian virtue and manly character. He became rich and kept a carriage, two carriages, then three. He became a symbol. He became England.
Now. How can any mortal live up to that? In early years, he was exuberant. After a while, it was duty. Then, burden. Dickens discovered he had to grow into the man they wanted him to be, and after playing the part for so long, he became the part, the part the nation scripted for him. There wasn't any Charles anymore. Only the famous author, famous playwright, the Great Man, The Great Dickens. Even he got confused, you know. He wouldn't remember which one he really was. And then he couldn't find the other one. The dirty child, humiliated by poverty, driven to work day and night to overcome the shame. He couldn't find that one anymore. Like an actor who has played Shakespeare onstage too many times and been celebrated too often. Like Macready, who began to talk to his friends in blank verse, even in private. The voice changes. The truly celebrated ones begin to speak in sonorous tones. The posture arches. They talk to you with a three-quarter pose, their best profile toward you. They can't move their arms anymore except to make bold gestures.
I remember speaking to Dickens once and he seemed to be listening, when I realised he was only permitting me to talk. He was being generous. Tolerating little folk. And to my greater horror, I recognised that wasn't it at all. His eyes -- grey with dark green, almost hazel, unforgettable and lost -- his eyes were focused on the horizon, one ear cocked toward me, and I understood the truth. He couldn't hear me. Not that he wasn't listening. He couldn't hear my voice. It was too far away, too faint and distant for him. He wanted to listen, actually wanted to, but the voices mingled and overlapped now, like too many garbled whispers in a dream. The cheers and the hurrahs and the honours. Out there somewhere, my poor voice was lost with the others. He so desperately wanted to hear it. He smiled on, pretending, wishing, and feeling alone, so desperately alone.
* * *
I was in my twenties when I met Dickens. It was Augustus Egg introduced us. Egg was a mutual friend and a painter of some repute. My father had been a painter. So it all came about naturally, and we liked each other. Dickens asked me to perform in a play he was producing, a private showing before the Court. The opportunity to work with the Great Charles Dickens was the dream of every would-be writer in London. But I wasn't like the other toadies who slithered around him, wanting the afterglow of his fame to improve my own complexion. I had already published my first mystery novel. Dickens knew I was my own man. I answered him with blunt good humour, teased him, told him he was wrong when no one else dared contradict the Great Man. We became friends.
Even then Charles Dickens was rude, demanding, arrogant, and always right. Everyone could sense it. He had more energy than all the rest of us, working ceaselessly, serialising novels, organising theatrical productions, directing, acting, editing a journal, encouraging young writers. He entered a room like a volcanic wind. You braced yourself against a desk or a door and Dickens bellowed with laughter, shook a man's hand vigorously, shouted an order, demanded his barrister be sent for, stamped across the boards in heavy boots, and hugged his frightened scrivener. He was vigorous, there's no other word for it, and adored.
Yet he was unhappy. He never mentioned it directly, but there was increasing distance between Dickens and his wife. In the beginning, everyone said, Catherine was perfect. She was childlike, a frightened little bird with small black eyes. She was decent and maternal, easy to cry, confused. I've seen a photogravure of her. She had a small beautiful mouth, a sweetness about her, but something sad. She bore children like a rabbit -- litters of them -- and she grew pink and fat. She ate sweets and issued chocolate-smelling farts, little hissing ones that made her pause and listen to them, turning up her eyes and concentrating, as if measuring the sound or the smell by some secret standard known only to her.
By the time I knew her she was afraid of Dickens, peering out from behind puffy cheeks like a frightened child. She must have felt trapped inside that billowing maternal flesh. Decent and tender is how she struck me, easy to manipulate. I think she meant to please him in any way she could. She was the innocent child bride he wanted her to be. She had never been his mistress, not even his lover. And now all that was hidden deep under layers of overripeness. She had taken to wearing a flannel nightgown with a hole in it, centrally located. She refused to lift the hem, refused to move, or couldn't move. Afterward, Dickens would be up half the night, pacing, smoking his cigar. The next day he would shout at the scriveners, bark rudely to Forster, lock himself in his office, and write furiously for six hours. We would all tiptoe. The others thought it was temperament. I knew differently and teased him about it. I was the only one he allowed to tease him. Until later, when Ellen Ternan came along.
I seem to be rambling. Nothing like a tightly structured plot here. No clear good and evil, no villain, no comedy or tragedy. Just a famous old writer who had everything except what a man needed as a man. Not that he hadn't tried, mind you. In our early years, we travelled across Europe, searching out the best quality of women, the most charming and sumptuous. We drank heartedly with them, laughed and flirted with them. And that was all. In spite of rumours you may have heard, nothing happened. At the appropriate moment, Charles Dickens would disappear or grow suddenly ill or pass out. His conscience closed like a cold fist about his heart. Or perhaps he was overwhelmed by a terrifying fear his admirers might discover he was mortal. He couldn't explain it.
Still, it affected him. Dickens grew harder, master of home and hearth, morally principled, generous to the public, more and more sentimental in his stories, inwardly dead and empty. He wrote about angels and little girls. Something melancholy in him longed for passion. He began to drink an extra pint or two, he took up cigars, grew his beard like a wild thicket. In the smoke and haze of the Olde Pelican he told me Catherine was like a great sow with hanging teats. He was disgusted with her fertility.
"She's obese, Wilkie. Her body is like a pile of clammy pillows. She smells like wet face powder. Her buttocks are scarred with dimples."
He spoke under his breath, as if ashamed of his own feelings.
"Her stomach gurgles. Her chins wiggle. When I come to her at night, her little black eyes peek out with the hurt innocence of a fat, dumb puppy. She lies there in absolute silence, waiting for me to be done with it. Or she's afraid of me, I can't tell which."
Now what kind of reply can a friend make? What was I to tell him?
I told him about Caroline Graves, of course. A lovely woman, sensuous, mysterious in her own right, unbalanced, but totally irresistible.
I'd seen her first by moonlight in early summer, when the air floated with the last faint odour of lilacs. My brothers and I had been drinking and we were strolling home through the narrow lanes of North London, a few years before they put in the gas lamps. We were singing, pushing each other about when a woman's scream pierced the garden of a villa nearby. For a moment, every drop of blood in our bodies was brought to a stop. A great iron gate in the wall beside us rushed open and a woman dressed in white flew into the moonlight. She seemed to be floating over the cinders, and she passed without seeing us. My brothers gave each other a look but started on as before, arms about each other's shoulders. It wasn't our business, you see.
Yet inside my heart I felt something happening. It was all so foolish and melodramatic. My brothers only laughed, but I turned back and followed her, overcome by that old heritage of the English gentlemen.
"Wait," I called out.
She ran on, her footsteps crunching on the cinders. Finally, out of breath, and crying, she stopped, leaning heavily against a shadowed stone wall.
I heard her whisper, "You won't hurt me, will you?"
It sounded like something I would write in one of my novels.
"Of course not," I said, approaching her cautiously. "Are you in danger?"
She stared past me down the lane. Listening. We could neither of us hear a sound. It was almost midnight and the moon was full. The young woman was no more than twenty-two or -three, with wistful eyes.
"If you'll escort me," she said, placing a still trembling hand on my arm, "I'll be eternally grateful."
We crisscrossed the city that summer night, walking through moonlit lanes that shimmered like the mysterious canals of Venice. She told me her tale and I fell in love.
No, no, her story isn't important here. This is Charles Dickens' story, isn't it? But Caroline Graves is essential to what happened. I knew Dickens couldn't possibly find courage to rearrange his life, set up a second household, keep a woman not his wife for God's sake, without ever once toppling into the arms of a single courtesan. If I hadn't met Caroline, if she hadn't become my mistress, I would never have convinced Dickens he, too, should consider taking a younger woman under his wing. Dickens' story would be totally different. No disaster, no tragedy. Dickens would have maintained his purity, all the while letting a few selected friends believe he was whoremaster of the Continent, with a wink here, a droll story there. He would have lived a longer life, unhappy perhaps -- definitely unhappy -- but less dramatic and exciting. And Ellen Ternan would be a name forever lost to history. Don't you see, this is how a true plot develops, from a small incident that seems unrelated to the main character, while step by unforeseen step it leads to revelation and death.
Caroline Graves put it about that she was the daughter of a good family, but like most of her life, it was only part of an ever-changing tale. She told me her father was a gentleman and her husband a great squire in Northumberland. Later that night she stopped me as we circled back toward Regent's Park, placing both hands on my lapels, looking up at me with desperation.
"I haven't been telling the truth," she said. "I was afraid you might be part of the conspiracy."
"What conspiracy?"
"Promise you'll never force me to go back."
"On my honour."
She studied my face to be certain, and I studied those weeping eyes, so deeply frightened yet trusting, like those of a child awakened in the night.
"It's the Count, you see. Count Fosco. When he discovered my husband was only an army captain with no inheritance -- a gambler who deserted me -- the Count became outraged and began to chase me about the house with an iron poker. It was only my money he wanted. I'd led him to believe my child was my niece. It was horrid of me, I know, but I was desperate for protection."
"But what about your father, the Squire? Can't you seek his protection?"
"My father?" She looked puzzled. "Oh, he wasn't a Squire. He was the second son of famous clergyman. I can't reveal his name. He preached at St. Paul's."
"But you spoke about an estate in Northumberland."
"Yes, yes, originally. Before the Great Fire destroyed it, and we were forced to live with my aunt in Greenwich."
"The Great Fire?"
"Surely you've heard of it, an educated gentleman like yourself." She looked at me with sudden distrust, as if I might not be a gentleman at all if I'd never heard of the Great Fire.
"Do you mean the Great Fire of London? In sixteen sixty-six?" I asked.
Caroline placed her head on my breast in obvious relief. "Yes" she sighed.
"But Northumberland ..."
"I know, I know. We were so very unlucky."
Her real name was Elizabeth. It took several months before I found out. Something had gone wrong as a child. She began to call herself Rebecca, then Isabella and later Caroline. Her father, I believe, was a stonemason, and in a desperate act to escape him, she married an accountant named Graves who died shortly after she gave birth to a daughter, a child she introduced for the rest of her life as her niece. The natural child of the Earl of Greenwich, she told people.
And still I fell in love. For a short while, I kept her a secret, but I had no need to. My father built a great reputation for himself and his family, painting portraits of the noble and the wealthy, painting landscapes to please the gentry, twelve and sometimes fifteen hours a day, painting to ensure that he left a small fortune for his family after his death. But to what end? I had to ask. To what end does a man do everything for others, for reputation, for wealth? Had he lived a full life?
No, in fact his life had been rich in art but empty of all other human experiences. When he took us to Rome, he didn't see Rome, he painted it. When he bought us a large house in London, he didn't sit before the fire and enjoy his sherry, he locked himself in his studio and sketched preening wives of the peerage. Did he laugh? Did he frolic? Never.
And so I took rooms in a small house on Howland Street, a foul lane of leaning shops where painters and writers lived overhead, wonderful rascals who taught me how to shed my foolish inhibitions, taught me to live life fully without concern for the bourgeoisie. And there I set up Caroline Graves or Elizabeth Compton (whatever she wanted to be called), and her daughter Harriet or her niece Alexis, and in those cold narrow rooms, we made love, we chased each other naked down hallways, we horrified the servants and drove them all away until we found one or two who merely tolerated our madness, and those we kept forever. Later, we found other lodgings, in Albany Street and then in New Cavendish Street, settling at last on Gloucester Place. But it was that first one set my life free, and it was that freedom the Great Charles Dickens never had, could not even imagine, which intrigued him and drew him to me like a hypnotised bird.
"Tell me about it, Wilkie," he said, with small beads of sweat on his brow. "Tell me what it's like."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Rag & Bone Shop by Jeff Rackham. Copyright © 2001 by Jeff Rackham. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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