The Murder of Patience Brooke by J C Briggs

Author:J C Briggs
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750957595
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2014-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

17

MEMORY

Dickens had parted from the superintendent and made his way home to Devonshire Terrace where he expected guests for dinner.

All the time during the dinner at which he sparkled as usual, a thin dark thread of thought ran at the back of his mind. Looking at the distinguished guests, and the table with its pyramids of bright fruit, the candles rising out of the artificial flowers, their reflections glittering on the glasses and silver, he was remembering his grandmother, the housekeeper at Crewe Hall and his grandfather, the steward. It amused him in a cynical, if painful way, that those seated there knew nothing about his grandparents in service more than forty years ago nor about his maternal grandfather, Charles Barrow, caught out in defrauding the Navy Pay Office. He knew that sharp-tongued Jane Carlyle, there with her husband tonight, laughed behind his back sometimes. He had been told that Edward Fitzgerald had thought him a snob for calling his son after Tennyson. Did they not know that he was well aware of his desire for substance, for the material things with which he wanted to weigh himself down? He wanted to make assurance double sure, otherwise the dark might close in and all that he had gained might vanish. Beneath the glittering surface of his fame, as if deep in dark water, lay the memories of the Marshalsea and his father’s disgrace, Gower Street, the home with nothing left but a few chairs, the trips to the pawn shop, a family so reduced that his mother and the younger children were forced into the prison, and he left to drudge in the blacking factory and to pay for his own bread and cheese, lounging about the streets as forlorn as any vagabond. And now the name of Crewe had risen out of the dark water like a spectre come to haunt him.

Later in bed, Dickens lay awake thinking about the Crewe name and the link to Blackledge, and if there were a connection to Patience Brooke. It was uncanny and disturbing the way in which fragments of his own life touched the murder – it had occurred at the Home set up by him, the song Davey had heard, Blackledge at Gray’s Inn where he had started his working life, Patience Brooke at the Polygon, and now the Crewe name. We are all connected by fate, without knowing it, he thought. People supposed to be strangers suddenly brushed by us, looming out of the crowd to disturb us when we least expected them.

He slept at last, but restlessly, and in his dream he was in that suffocating tunnel with Scrap who vanished into the shadows, leaving Dickens to face the figure that followed them, the man with the crooked face and a knife in his hand who dissolved into another shape, a man whose face he did not know, but who pursued him through a maze of strangely empty alleys that seemed to go down and down, never ending, never reaching the light.

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