thought, then spoke as if reciting something learnt long ago by painful rote. ‘
Lady Jane was falling into some unexpectedly deep feeling that for a moment made her stammer. Mistaking this as grief for her husband, Dickens was touched by what was clearly a more genuine emotion than she had hitherto shown. He had found something unearthly, even ridiculous, in her triumphant rendering of her husband. Part of him despised such nonsense. But another part of him wanted to share in it, to shore up its leaking holes, to buttress and burnish this improbable story of English greatness and English goodness.
‘I did what I…’ she began, but then for an instant she thought somebody, something was tugging at her skirts. She twisted around in her seat, expecting to see a small girl in a red dress. But there was no one. A friend had written some years before from Van Diemen’s Land telling her what had become of Mathinna.
Lady Jane longed to stand up, run away; wished for someone, anyone, to wash and soothe her, comfort her. She wished to be held. She wished to feel her dress being tugged. She saw red garments unloose parrots, possums, snakes. When she was young, she had wanted to be known as sweet. She was not sweet. She had fallen such a long way. She remembered the softness of those dark eyes; the sight that once had angered her and now moved her so, of those bare feet.
‘Their destiny,’ her correspondent had concluded, ‘can only be interrupted by kindness, but never altered by it.’
I am so alone, she thought. Those bare, black feet. She had burnt the letter and then done something uncharacteristic. She had cried.
She looked up. Her head steadied her reckless heart which had once, long ago, caused her such trouble. Though she feared the great novelist might find her aged and vile, she wanted her words to accord with common sense.
‘I have had experience of such people,’ said Lady Jane finally, and her voice oddly hardened. ‘Not the Esquimaux, but similar savages. The Van Diemonians—’
‘Cannibals?’ Dickens interrupted.
Lady Jane remembered her last sight of the bedraggled child, alone in the muddy squalor of that courtyard. She felt gripped by pain, as if in a terrible retribution she only dimly apprehended, as though it were a vengeance that might consume her completely as the ice had her husband. She forced herself once more to smile.
‘Your husband,’ said Dickens. ‘I cannot begin to compass your terrible—’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not that I…’ She paused. She thought she smelt damp sandstone. ‘It is difficult,’ she went on—but what was she saying? Still she went on, trying to fashion belief and certainty out of words that felt comfortable. ‘It is impossible to form an estimate of the character of any race of savages from the way they defer to the white man when he is strong.’
‘I beg to say,’ said Dickens, smiling, ‘that I have not the least belief in the noble savage.’
‘Of course, such things are not unknown, even to white men. After all, in Van Diemen’s Land there were cases of escaping convicts taking vile resort in eating each other. But they were men devoid of religion, a hundred times worse than the most barbarous heathens because they had turned away. You see, Mr Dickens, the distance between savagery and civilisation is—’
But had she not said such things before? Something seemed wrong—with her reasoning, or her memory, or how she had once behaved. Just when she felt uncharacteristically faint and lost, Dickens rescued her.
‘The distance, Ma’am, is the extent we advance from desire to reason.’ He would not tell her his whole life was an object lesson in control of one’s passions; that it was what had led him to sit there with her that very day.
‘I do not entirely agree with those that say it is a matter of science,’ said Lady Jane. ‘Rather it is an affair of the spirit.’
She stood up and went to a display cabinet, from which she took a wooden box. Sitting it on the mahogany
‘It is a king of the Van Diemonian savages, Mr Dickens. I have shown it to several professors and men learned in phrenology. To test them, I did not say who it once was. Some found irrefutable signs in the skull’s shape of degeneracy, others of nobility. It appears it is both.’
‘The convict, the Esquimau, the savage: all are enslaved not by the bone around their brain,’ said Dickens, reaching across and closing the lid, ‘but by their passions.’ He raised his hand with a flourish, as he did when performing. ‘A man like Sir John is liberated from such by his civilised and Christian spirit.’
‘Exactly,’ said Lady Jane.
‘As for the noble savage, I call him an enormous nuisance and I don’t care what he calls me. It is all one to me whether he boils his brother in a kettle or dresses as a seal. He can yield to whatever passion he wishes, but for that very reason, he is a savage—a bloodthirsty wild animal whose principal amusement comes from stories at best ridiculous and at worst lies.’
‘Lies, you say, Mr Dickens?’
‘I do say, Lady Jane. Terrible, wretched, disgusting, mirroring lies. Here we have a race of thieving, murdering cannibals asserting that England’s finest were transformed into thieving, murdering cannibals—what remarkable coincidence!’
‘They had evidence, Mr Dickens,’ said Lady Jane.
‘Murderous thieves produce damning evidence of murderous thievery—and what do we do?’ said Dickens, picking up
Later, when he came to kiss her liver-spotted hand in farewell, Lady Jane asked him if it was in his power to question such a story.
‘I only know I am in yours,’ replied Dickens brightly.
But as the door of Lady Jane’s home closed behind him and he faced the morning gloom, thick flakes of soot eddied around him like black snow, and nothing seemed bright. He made his way from Pall Mall in a hansom cab, through mud and shit so thick and deep that dogs and horses seemed formed from it. People dissolved in and out of the dirty fog like fen monsters, like wraiths, filthy rags wrapped around their faces to ward off the cholera miasma that had carried away six hundred souls only a month before. London seemed all stench and blackness: blackness in the air and blackness in his eyes, blackness in his very soul begging to be white once more as he made his way home to his family.
Family, of course, was everything by that morning in 1854—families alike and unlike, families happy and unhappy—for across classes and suburbs and counties, family had arrived like the steam train, unexpectedly but undeniably. Everybody had to be family and all had to celebrate family, whether it was the young queen and her consort or the poorest factory worker. Like any boom, there were opportunities to be had in family, and just as there were railway speculators, there were family speculators. Few had gambled so boldly and profited so handsomely as Lady Jane, the exemplary devoted wife, or Dickens, the very bard of family. But celebrating family was one thing. Practising it, Dickens had discovered, was something else again.
Because it had been raining too much and he had been gloomy too often, because he felt something too close to failure stalking him like a shadow, because he wanted light and needed to know he was still moving forward in all things, because he felt cold and the cold was growing, that evening he proposed to his wife, Catherine, that they go to Italy the following month. But she did not want to: the children had commitments of one type or another, and besides, her condition, after ten children, did not make travelling a welcome prospect.
Then, after what he felt was an innocent comment from him about her weight, which, as he said, was a simple truth, Catherine abruptly stood and walked out. According to their daughter, Katy, who rushed in soon after, angry at him, at her, at the whole miserable, wretched house they were doomed together to inhabit, along with all the other children, domestics and dogs and birds, her mother had now taken to her bed.
Her bed! thought Dickens, turning away from Katy. Again and again, over and over, back to her bed she would go after every argument, where she would once more become a heaving mound of feather quilt, rheumy eyes and stifled sobs. The last time, he had remonstrated, argued, apologised and, when daring, touched her on her forehead, her cheeks, her lips—but she had recoiled as if bitten by a mad dog. This time he did nothing. Weighing
