Far Above Rubies Read online

  That evening, I said to Mary what could never be said to Charles.

  She had not removed the locket from around her neck and even now, as she lay in bed, she caressed it gently between her finger and thumb, deep in thought.

  My voice broke into her reverie. ‘Mary, if I were ever to consider giving Charles up, could you see yourself in my place? As his love, I mean?’ I tried to mask the bitter note of jealousy that my voice betrayed.

  Mary sat up in bed abruptly.

  ‘Catherine, whatever are you implying? How could you say such a thing? Charles is yours and yours alone. It is true that I had a girlish fancy for him once, but I can only think of him now as a much-loved brother, and nothing more.’

  ‘Are you sure, Mary? Are you sure that you have not unknowingly encouraged any intentions he may have towards you?’

  ‘Catherine, you don’t know your own sister if you could entertain such thoughts. How can you doubt Charles’s love for you? Remember the beautiful bracelet he sent you, and his letters of devotion?’

  I knew that her words were true, and I began to wonder if there was something wrong with me. How could I doubt Mary’s loyalty and integrity? But of Charles I was still not sure.

  Over the holiday, I watched him closely as he seemed ever more drawn to Mary’s side, laughing at her jokes, complimenting her on her musical accomplishments, bombarding her with ideas for stories that he vowed he would one day put down on paper. When the New Year arrived Charles told me that he had decided to leave Selwood Terrace and return to Furnival’s Inn as it was closer to his work in the City. My heart sank at the thought of starting our married life in those dull grey lodgings, but what he said next drained the colour from my face.

  ‘Kate, I have been thinking – it is selfish of me to take you further away from your family as you will be spending a good deal of time on your own once we are wed. Perhaps it would be good for Mary to come and live with us at Furnival’s Inn so that she can keep you company.’

  A feeling of panic flooded through my veins; I could see the silver locket twirling before my eyes, once again I saw Charles fasten it tenderly around Mary’s neck; lastly I saw the look of adoration in his eyes.

  ‘Charles, I do not—’

  He lifted his hand. ‘No, Kate, you do not have to thank me. I shall not change my mind. In fact, Mary has already agreed to it.’

  It was nothing unusual, I knew. Many young sisters lived with an older sibling until their own wedding day, but I did not want it. I did not want it at all. I feared that Mary would continue to outshine me under my very own roof; however, what Charles had decided I could only concede to. But how could he know that it was his ambiguous feelings about Mary that continued to lie at the heart of all my insecurities?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  2 April 1836

  St Lukes’s Church, Chelsea

  The day of the wedding arrived. I had not been able to eat one mouthful of the kippers and poached eggs that Alice had put before me that morning, and no amount of cajoling on her part could induce an appetite in me.

  ‘Well don’t come a-blamin’ me, lassie, if ye faint away in the middle of the vows!’ Alice scowled, taking the plate away.

  I sat at my dressing table struggling with trembling fingers and thumbs to pin a piece of heather onto my dress. Mama had given it to me for good luck, but it stubbornly refused to be fixed as if withholding its blessing on my future happiness. It is naturally every young woman’s dream to reach this day in her life, yet I wondered, is it possible? Can one person really make another happy for a whole lifetime?

  I thought about my parents’ marriage. It had been twenty-one years since they wed in their native Scotland, both of them barely twenty years old. Papa had grown steady and wise, with a good head for business, and Mama, well, Mama was not steady or wise at all, but Papa loved her nonetheless and indulged her histrionics. So perhaps there was no perfect pairing. Perhaps the most that one could hope for was a mutual acceptance of one another’s shortcomings.

  And what of the shortcomings of my own intended? I loved him deeply, so would that not cover ‘a multitude of sins’? I hesitated to answer, realizing how little I truly knew him, his fears, his secrets. I wondered what lay hidden in that dark place, the secret person of the heart that no one really knows, except God and ourselves? True, I had witnessed his ambition for success, but hard work is not a vice, is it? And I had also been on the receiving end of his temper. But should a man not show righteous indignation when his integrity is questioned? Had I not unduly provoked him? I reassured myself that this was true and that I should give him absolutely no cause to be angry with me once we were wed.

  Yesterday, Mama had spoken to me late into the evening, advising me of a wife’s responsibilities and how I should never permit Charles to be concerned about domestic matters.

  ‘Ye must allow him to concentrate entirely on his work, m’dearie. Your haime should be a place of peace and refuge for him.’

  Fine words coming from Mama! But true even so. However, I feared that I too should somehow be inadequate; I had never run a house before and I was not in the least organized by nature. I sighed wearily, and addressed my reflection in the dressing-table mirror.

  ‘Come now, Catherine, these sober thoughts are subduing all the romantic fancies that should accompany such a day. No more of this gloomy mood, do you hear? This is your wedding day, after all.’

  There was a gentle tap on the door which brought me to my senses.

  ‘Are you quite well, my dear?’

  ‘Yes, of course, Papa,’ I called hastily. ‘I was just coming.’ I attempted to secure my corsage once more and, at last, I succeeded.

  ‘There!’ I smiled to myself. ‘You see, everything will be just fine.’

  Papa had spared no expense in arranging the wedding of his eldest daughter. I had chosen cousin Elizabeth, Mary, and little Georgina to be my bridesmaids, and when Papa saw us together, he pronounced himself to be ‘the proudest man in all England’.

  We stepped out onto the pavement of York Place to find that the day was sunny but breezy, and I feared that the wind might tug at my bonnet and snatch it away completely, but Mary, with her calming touch, came to my aid with a pin to secure both my hat and my confidence.

  I grasped at her wrist, ‘Mary, I—’

  She put a finger to my lips. ‘Catherine, it is far too late to give way to doubts now. Marry him and determine to be happy.’ And she and Papa assisted me up into the waiting carriage.

  As Papa walked me down the aisle, I watched Charles’s face intently to see whether his eyes wavered to Mary, following behind me radiant with the bloom of youth. But his eyes never left mine for a moment and after saying my vows all my anxieties faded away.

  ‘Dear, sweet, clumsy Kate, at last we are wed,’ he whispered in my ear. The vicar proclaimed that he may kiss the bride, and I blushed as the congregation rang with applause.

  The wedding breakfast held at York Place was an array of temptation: cooked hams, lobster salad and game pie laid out alongside champagne, trifles, blancmange and fruit jellies. After I had thought that I could smile and shake hands no more, I noticed a portly, ruby-cheeked man who was helping himself to a rather large portion of game pie. He whistled chirpily, as if he had not seen a spread like this in a good while, and then put a leg of chicken in each of his pockets for good measure.

  Charles’s face went pale at the sight of him, and then blood-red. ‘What the blazes is he doing here? That man will be the undoing of me!’ He excused himself from my side and, with a purposeful stride, crossed the room to where the fellow was now wrapping another portion of pie in his oversized handkerchief. My eyes grew wide as I watched while Charles remonstrated with him, and the man, looking sheepish, took the offending items from his pockets and handed them back to Charles. I could not hear what was being said but my husband behaved in the manner of a disappointed father scolding his child. The man, thoroughly shamed, nodded apologetically at each admonition,
and after giving one last emphatic nod, he meekly followed Charles to my side.

  In a moment, he had regained his buoyancy, wiped his greasy fingers on his waistcoat and held out his hand in greeting.

  ‘John Dickens, ma’am,’ he enthused, ‘pleased to make your h’acquaintance at last.’

  His clothes looked as though they had seen the inside of a pawnbroker’s shop on more than a few occasions and I turned to Charles for an explanation.

  ‘My father.’ Charles coughed with embarrassment.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ I said, taking the greasy hand as graciously as I could manage. ‘And your dear wife, sir, is she here too?’ which was the only thing that I could think to say, feeling quite perplexed by the situation.

  Standing with Fanny was a slightly built woman with sharp features, who, I was alarmed to note, picked up the wedding gifts one by one from the table and examined each one with a squinted eye.

  ‘That’s my Lizzie, over there,’ said Mr Dickens proudly, and when he called his spouse she jumped, as if being caught red-handed in some shady act.

  She joined her oily husband’s side and exclaimed joyfully, ‘Fancy! My Charles marrying the daughter of a gentleman! Who would have believed it?’ and she rubbed her hands together in a most gleeful manner. Charles quickly dispatched his errant parents to a table in a distant corner of the garden with a hissed warning that they should touch nothing, and that under no circumstance should his mother dance.

  When it was time to leave for our honeymoon, it was hard to say goodbye to my family and to the life that I had known before.

  ‘Look at her, George,’ my mother sniffed. ‘Our wee lassie, all grown up and now a wife.’

  While Papa embraced me, Mr Dickens chanced to congratulate his son and whispered discreetly in Charles’s ear. Charles rolled his eyes skywards, sighed wearily and took out a coin from his pocket which he deposited in his father’s ready hand.

  Mr Dickens tipped his hat in appreciation. ‘Lord, bless you, Charlie. I knew you wouldn’t refuse your old pa. Not now you’re a-makin’ your way in the world.’

  We stepped into the waiting carriage to set off for the village of Chalk where we planned to spend a week in a small cottage.

  Here, at last, we could lose ourselves in each other’s company without distraction, interruption or thoughts of anyone else and, apart from brief moments when Charles would slip away to that distant place in his mind – a place where not even I could reach him – he gave me his undivided attention and said that he could never have imagined that he would find such contentment in his life.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Summer 1836

  Furnival’s Inn, London

  In the weeks and months that followed our wedding, The Pickwick Papers became an unexpected success and I was having to share Charles with his editor, his illustrator, his publishers and a growing number of admiring readers. He had been right about my need for Mary’s companionship; there were days when the hours seemed to be filled with nothing more than the ticking of the clock and waiting for him to return home.

  Even then, he often worked late into the night and I would wake in the early hours to see that his place in bed beside me was still empty. If I went into the sitting room, I would find him writing in the guttering light of a candle. Or, sometimes, he would simply be slumped across his work asleep, the pen still between his finger and thumb. I never woke him, for when I did he would not return to bed, but would take up his pen again with great haste, distressed by his somnolence.

  If today he had produced twenty pages, then tomorrow it must be five more, and he would labour on and on with unflagging resolve until he had reached his goal.

  ‘After all, Kate,’ he would say with great earnestness, ‘my luck could change in a moment.’

  But his success brought with it jealousy and resentment from some of his former associates. An editor named John Macrone, with whom Charles had previously worked, was now calling upon him to produce a novel that Charles had once discussed writing, but as this had only been a verbal agreement, Charles did not feel bound to keep it. Macrone was unreasonable and threatened legal action if he was not compensated for his loss and, with no apparent head for business, Charles found himself handing over the copyright to some of his earlier work, and the loss was now his own.

  That evening he came home in the foulest of tempers. Mary and I sat reading in what remained of the evening light. We heard the door to the lodgings slam, and Charles ascended the stairs to our rooms cursing to himself. My body tensed in anxious anticipation.

  ‘If I could get hold of that opportunist by the throat, I would squeeze it and shake him until there was not a breath left in his body!’

  He hurled his hat onto the sofa, walked across to the dining table and struck it violently with his cane. ‘Never again shall I let anyone force my hand! Never! How dare he?’

  I felt quite frightened by his vehemence and was at a loss as to what to say or do; to me, Charles’s moods were like a foreign language that I could neither read nor understand. Mary, on the other hand, interpreted every twitch of his physiognomy with the ease of a native speaker. With her usual perception she whispered that she would fetch him a glass of brandy and I got up and tentatively went to his side.

  I placed my hand gently on his arm. ‘Come, my love, whatever has taken place, surely all that matters is you and I, and our love for one another. Have you forgotten that?’ I smiled nervously.

  He looked at my hand and then at me, as though I had quite taken leave of my senses.

  ‘Kate, can you not conceive that my world now reaches far beyond these insignificant walls?’

  His voice was full of contempt and, for a moment, I wondered if he was joking.

  ‘Charles?’

  He shook off my hand abruptly. ‘You have no idea of my life and what I do each day, do you? No idea at all.’

  Mary came back into the room and almost collided with me as I fled through the door in distress.

  ‘Catherine? Catherine!’

  But I did not answer. I ran down the stairs and taking the shawl that hung on a hook by the door, I hurried out into the courtyard and pushed past a small group of loiterers who looked on with idle interest. Mary called after me from the doorway, but all that I could hear were the words that Charles had spoken: ‘My world reaches far beyond these insignificant walls!’

  I ran across the market square, which was now empty save for the rats that crawled in the shadows and sniffed at rotten fruit. Fuelled by my anger I walked on aimlessly from one place to another, ruminating over my husband’s thoughtless words which tumbled around in my head. I supposed that he might be worrying a little over me now. Well, it would do him good to worry about me for a change, instead of his writing.

  The sound of raucous laughter spilled out onto the streets from the coaching inns. A lamplighter eyed me with suspicion and raised his shabby brown hat.

  ‘’Tis late to be out, miss. Are you all right there?’

  I nodded, saying that I hadn’t realized the time and that I was just on my way back home to Furnival’s Inn.

  ‘You’ll want to be a-turnin’ around then miss,’ he grinned, ‘you’re headin’ the wrong way.’ His teeth were quite brown and rotten and, although he meant no harm at all, I felt that I was being sized up for a meal by a hungry fox. I pulled my shawl tightly about me, turned around and hurried away.

  The streets that bustled with life during the day had become strangely unfamiliar now that it was dark. My anger dissolved into a feeling of panic as I realized that I was completely lost. My shawl flapped about me in the wind, I heard soft footsteps in the shadows, and turned to look over my shoulder. A figure darted back into the shadows and I began to quicken my pace. I passed under a bridge and swallowed hard, my heart hammering within my chest.

  On the opposite side of the street, a red-haired woman stumbled and laughed, clinging on to the arm of a gentleman soldier. I hurried across the road to beg for their aid. ‘You must h
elp me. Please! I think that someone is following me.’

  The woman laughed again and pushed me away. Her companion raised his cane. ‘Be off with you! Can’t you see that we’re busy?’

  I heard the footsteps of my pursuer again and I began to run. But as I came to the end of the street, my escape was blocked by a dead end. I turned, and in that moment in the flickering gaslight I saw him. His face was partly obscured by a tangle of dark hair through which his eyes blazed with violent intent. He grabbed me around the neck snarling, ‘Your jewellery, I want it!’

  He tightened his grip on my throat and in a moment of clarity, I pulled off my rings and hurled them as far as I could down the alleyway. He threw me to the floor and he stumbled after them fearful that they would be lost in the mud. He did not return and I lay curled up on the ground, still and shaken with the horror of what had happened. Time passed.

  The outline of a tattered boot came into focus and I sat up with shock at the sight of it.

  ‘You ’urt, miss?’

  A young woman, her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her striped skirt, chewed at the pipe in her mouth, and looked down at me with curiosity.

  Without a word of answer I took to my feet and began to run as far as my breath would allow until I saw the spire of St. Etheldreda’s Church, pointing the way home, a signpost in the moon’s light. It was such a welcome vision that I nearly cried at the sight of it and I kept my eyes firmly fixed upon it until I passed back through the market and at last turned into the courtyard of Furnival’s Inn.

  In the hazy light of the street lamps I could see Charles and Mary standing in the doorway. Mary was crying on his shoulder and, as I drew closer, I could hear her anguished voice. ‘Where can she have got to? We have looked everywhere, Charles.’