Wanting

strength and flown away, Dickens could not withhold the feeling that there was something liberating in the omen.

Yet he was enraged at the sheer lack of generosity his own wife showed towards the production.

‘Why waste all this time on something that was working perfectly well before?’ Catherine asked her husband one morning. She stood before him in his study with a vase of flowers. ‘Look at these,’ she said. ‘Begonias and dahlias and all these beautiful annuals for your desk.’ And when he didn’t look up, she said, her tone suddenly cold, ‘These Ternan women—if they are such good professionals, why do you need to be bothering rehearsing them so much?’

When Catherine stepped forward to place the vase down on the desk, her back, which had been bad since the birth of their second daughter, gave a sharp twinge. She stumbled and then dropped the vase, and flowers and water went spilling over a neat pile of writing.

Dickens leapt up and away from the puddling water. Frantically trying to rescue his pages, he muttered under his breath how she could not even keep house properly and it was no wonder that he was embarrassed to take her out into society.

But you haven’t borne ten children, she wished to reply as she awkwardly got her balance back. You don’t know what it does to you. You grow heavy, your memory wanders, your body leaks, your back burns. But she said none of it.

‘I’m sorry, Charles,’ she said, her voice shaking. ‘I’m so sorry.’

As she mopped the table with her crinoline, she continued apologising. He shook a wet book that had been open on his desk. He asked her, was she that stupid? She wasn’t. It was Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution, dedicated to Dickens by the great historian himself. She knew he pored over it incessantly, once telling a visitor he had read it five hundred times. She stood there, not knowing what to do. She understood none of it. Surely he would be sick of the book by now.

Her mind seemed to be twisting into something so painful she had to hit her forehead with a fist in a vain attempt to reset the terrible clockwork of her life. She watched mute as her husband rang for a servant to come and clean up, then grabbed his coat and stormed out.

She realised she had never understood him. He was unstoppable, undeniable, he bent the world to his schemes and dreams as surely as he did his characters. And she knew that her part, henceforth, would be the fat and hopeless housekeeper, the hysteric, the invalid, the harridan and the virago.

Yet hadn’t he, in every book and speech and utterance, said it was all about family and hearth and home? And hadn’t she broken her body giving him children and trying to please him? Hadn’t she loved him, and in his books wasn’t such love always triumphant? She could not understand why in his home he had come to despise that same love as stupid.

And as she returned to gathering the strewn flowers, Catherine finally understood that she had been his invention as surely as any of the blurred pages on the desk, as much as any of those dull creatures he passed off as women in his books. He had made her stupid. He had made her that boring woman of his novels; she had become his heroine in her weakness and compliance and dullness.

Only now, having lived with her, he no longer liked that woman and wanted her gone. And she knew he would remake her with his wit, with his tongue, with his cruel names, and to the world she would be ridiculous and heartless. The world, she realised, was whatever Charles wanted. She had no defence.

She tried to rearrange the flowers. Larkspur, dahlias, cornflowers, sweet pea, begonias and baby’s breath. She had gone in lockstep with it all—the ivy-clad cosy old house, the horde of children, the servants who had to be comical, him telling the world in his articles and speeches of their delightful Christmases, the endless merry times at the huge dinners for many. She had stuffed the mutton with oysters, made sure the cock-a-leekie was just as he liked it and the croquettes of chicken not lacking in imagination and the spiky pigeon feet poking perfectly like winter birch trees from the top of the pie. She had played along with all the games and the charades and leapfrogging. And yet, for everything good that had happened, so much more had for so long been ebbing out of her.

She remembered how, only the day before, he had said she was turning the children against him, saying such wicked things, that she never cared for them properly, that she was mentally disordered. She was stupid, she knew, her back burnt, her heart leaked. Try as she might, none of the flowers came together in any pattern as the world swam in a cruel whirlpool around her.

The front door slammed and Katy came into the study to find her mother alone, both she and the vase of flowers she held in disarray. She looked half-mad; she was gasping, as though she were suffocating. Oblivious to her daughter, Catherine summoned from some void deep within a terrible sound, not a woman’s voice, but some desolation far older. As though a thing infinitely precious had been stolen from her, she abruptly cried out—

‘It hurts!’

And then said no more.

That night, Dickens came to bed late and lay for some time on his back. Neither touched. When she was almost asleep, she felt him slowly, almost absent-mindedly unlacing her nightgown. She reached out to him. She brought his face into her breasts. He smelt the lavender oil with which she perfumed herself every evening. She did not feel his tears. He was recalling Danton: You do not make a revolution with rosewater.

Away with a shriek and a roar and a rattle from the town they now fled, burrowing at first among the dwellings of men and making the streets hum, flashing out into meadows, mining in through the damp earth, booming on in darkness and heavy air, bursting out again into the sunny day so bright and wide. Fleeing through the hay, through the rock, through the woods, past objects almost in the grasp and ever flying from the traveller, Dickens felt a deceitful distance growing within him, while Ellen Ternan felt she was finally moving towards what life should be: joyous, exciting and so much fun.

On that train trip north in the month of August 1857, with The Frozen Deep’s large company and entourage taking several carriages, Dickens even had Mrs Ternan crying with laughter playing Conundrums, the answers for which he insisted on being passed window to window poised on umbrellas and walking sticks. When they were lost in the rushing wind he would run back and forth, pretending to tear out his hair in anguish, mimicking a lisping conductor by crying out, ‘What a conundwum! My! My! What a wetched conundwum!’

And if such innocence were tinged with a flirtatious frisson, what of it? Ellen Ternan might enjoy his attentions as the tribute she was discovering men would pay to youthful beauty. But that was all. And Dickens, for his part, might play, possibly even tease, perhaps indulge in a certain kind of romance that permitted no sense of romantic attachment, and it would end, because his disciplined heart demanded no less. Destiny’s darker edges were as Dickens was, dancing the sailor’s hornpipe just as the train swerved around a great bend and tossed him into a corner: something simply to laugh at. What blow or fall could not be met and overcome with good humour? They were joyously alive and oblivious to everything, even as the world around them began to change by imperceptible degrees into something altogether different.

As the most famous Englishman of the age rolled around the floor of a train carriage, the eyes of those travelling with him were wet with tears of laughter. The train shrieked and cried louder and louder as it tore on resistless, until its way was strewn thickly with ashes and everything grew blackened. Around the train arose some strange charred forest from which humanity had simultaneously been exiled and was condemned henceforth to survive in.

Beyond the train windows, the filthy smoke writhed around battered roofs and broken windows and they could see into wretched rooms where want and fever hid themselves in many awful forms with death ever present, and Dickens turned away and tried not to think of what Wilkie had once said to him in an unguarded moment, that he lived as he acted, with a dead father in one pocket and a dead daughter in the other, unable to erase the image of either from his mind.

‘Never ever this late,’ Mrs Ternan was saying over and over, as she bustled Ellen and her two sisters into the smoke and noise of Manchester Railway Station two days later. ‘Who knows whether they’ll still be here?’

They strode through the crowd and, though Ellen’s preparations for the outing had delayed them all and cost her a great deal of effort, to say nothing of her begging and pleading and more than a few moments of tears, she was now revelling in walking so purposefully through the carbon and sulphur haze, slightly sweet and somewhat