Clara’s anxieties are not allayed when her nurse, Esther, who has the Second Sight, shares her bloody vision in the crimson Devon sunset. (As I mentioned earlier, Dickens went to great pains to create lighting effects in his little schoolroom theatre at Tavistock House that realistically depicted sunlight at all hours of the day.)
“I see the lamb in the grasp of the Lion…” gasps Nurse Esther in the trance of her Second Sight. “Your bonnie bird alone with the hawk—I see you and all around you crying… Bluid! The stain is on you—Oh, my bairn, my bairn—the stain of that bluid is on you!”
THE YOUNG MAN’S NAME was Edmond Dickenson.
Dickens had said that he’d provided a room at Charing Cross Hotel for the injured man, but in truth it was a large suite. An older and not-very-attractive nurse had set up her station in the outer sitting room and showed me in to the invalid.
From Dickens’s description of the difficult extrication of young Dickenson from the wreckage, not to mention the author’s melodramatic narration of blood, clothes torn away, and the young fellow’s need for medical assistance, I expected to find a near-corpse swathed in bandages and rigidified with splints and casts elevated by cables and counterweights. But young Dickenson, although in pyjamas and a dressing-gown, was sitting up and reading in bed when I was shown in. The room’s dresser and bedside tables were bedecked with flowers, including a vase of crimson geraniums that brought back some of the sense of panic I had felt in the yard at Gad’s Hill Place.
Dickenson was a soft young man, perhaps twenty or twenty-one, with a round face, pink cheeks, sparse sandy hair that was already receding from his pink forehead, blue eyes, and ears as delicate as tiny seashells. His pyjamas looked to be made of silk.
I introduced myself, explained that I was Mr Dickens’s envoy sent to enquire into the young gentleman’s state of health, and was quite surprised when Dickenson blurted out, “Oh, Mr Collins! I am deeply honoured to have such a famous writer visit me! I so greatly enjoyed your The Woman in White that was serialised in All the Year Round immediately after Mr Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities ended.”
“I thank you, sir,” I said, almost colouring at the compliment. It is true that The Woman in White had been a huge success, selling more copies of the magazine than most of Dickens’s serialised tales. “I am very pleased that you enjoyed my modest efforts,” I added.
“Oh, yes, it was wonderful,” said young Dickenson. “You are so fortunate to have someone like Mr Dickens as your mentor and editor.”
I stared at the young man for a long moment, but my stony silence went unnoticed as Dickenson babbled on about the Staplehurst crash, the awfulness of it all, and then about Charles Dickens’s incredible courage and generosity. “I would not, I am sure, be alive today if it had not been for Mr Dickens finding me in the wreckage—I was quite hanging upside down and found it all but impossible to breathe, Mr Collins! — and he never left me until he’d summoned guards to help pull me from the terrible wreckage and supervised their carrying me up to the railbed where the injured were being prepared for evacuation. Mr Dickens stayed by my side during the ride to London on the emergency train that afternoon and—as you see! — insisted on putting me up in this wonderful room and providing nursing until I shall be fully recovered.”
“You are not seriously injured?” I enquired in a perfectly flat tone.
“Oh, no, not at all! Merely bruised all black and blue around the legs and hips and left arm and chest and back. I could not walk three days ago after the accident, but today the nurse helped me to the toilet and back and it was a completely successful expedition!”
“I am so glad,” I said.
“I expect to go home tomorrow,” burbled the young man. “I shall never be able to repay Mr Dickens for his generosity. He truly saved my life! And he has invited me to his home at Gad’s Hill for Christmas and New Year’s!”
It was 12 June. “How wonderful,” I said. “I am sure that Charles appreciates the value of the life he helped save. You say you go home tomorrow, Mr Dickenson… may I enquire as to where that home is?”
Dickenson babbled on. It seemed he was an orphan—Charles Dickens’s favourite sort of human being, if one is to believe Oliver Twist or David Copperfield or Bleak House or any of a dozen other of his tales—but had been left money in a Jarndyce-and-Jarndyce manner of labyrinthine inheritance, and had been appointed an elderly Guardian who lived in a Northamptonshire estate that might well have been the model for Chesney Wold. Young Dickenson, however, preferred to live in modest rented rooms in London, where he lived alone, had few (if any) friends, and studied the occasional instrument and apprenticed for the occasional profession, with no real intention of mastering or practising in any of them. The interest on his inheritance allowed him to purchase food and books and theatre tickets and the occasional holiday to the seashore—his time was his own.
We discussed theatre and literature. It turned out that young Mr Dickenson, a subscriber to Dickens’s previous journal Household Words as well as to the current All the Year Round, had read and admired my story “A Terribly Strange Bed” that had appeared in the former magazine.
“Good heavens, man,” I exclaimed. “That was published almost fifteen years ago! You must have been all of five years old!”
Young Dickenson’s blush began in his shell-like ears, migrated quickly to his cheeks, and rose like pink climbing ivy through the vault of his temples to the long curve of his pale forehead. I could see the blush spreading even under his thinning, straw-coloured hair. “Seven years old, actually, sir,” said the orphan. “But my Guardian, Mr Watson—a very liberal M.P. — had leather-bound copies of both Punch and such journals as Household Words in his library. My current devotion to the written word was formed and confirmed in that room.”
“Really,” I said. “How interesting.”
My joining the staff of Household Words years earlier had meant another five pounds a week to me. It seems to have meant the world to this orphan. He could almost recite my book After Dark from memory and was dutifully amazed when I told him that the separate tales which formed the volume had been based in large part upon my mother’s diaries and a more formal manuscript in which she had reminisced about being the wife of a famous painter.
It turned out that the eleven-year-old Edmond Dickenson had travelled up to Manchester with his Guardian to see The Frozen Deep in the huge New Free Trade Hall there on 21 August, 1857.
ACT II OFTHE FROZEN DEEP is set in the Arctic regions where Dickens-Wardour and Wardour’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Commander Crayford, are discussing their slim chances of survival in the face of cold and starvation.
“Never give in to your stomach, and your stomach will end in giving in to you,” the veteran explorer advises Crayford. Such determination—a will that would accept no master—came not only from the pen of Charles Dickens, but from his very soul.
Wardour goes on to explain that he loves the Arctic wastes precisely “because there are no women here.” In the same act he exclaims—“I would have accepted anything that set work and hardship and danger, like Ramparts, between my misery and me… Hard work, Crayford, that is the true Elixir of our life!” And finally, “… the hopeless wretchedness in this world, is the wretchedness that women cause.”