Tom All-Alone's (32 page)

‘The doctor came but he says there's little we can do but keep him warm, and trust to hope. And there is hope, Mr Charles, there is hope.'

Stornaway is standing in the doorway, and although his words are brave there is a break in his voice. And as Charles reaches again for his uncle's wrinkled hand, there is a new and different catch in his throat, and he can scarcely see for tears. Everything he'd wanted to say – everything he now so wants to share – Maddox will not hear it now. May never hear it. Charles told himself it could wait till tomorrow, but tomorrow is here, and it is too late.

Stornaway comes slowly forward. ‘It came on so sudden – I thought at first it were just another of his turns. He'd been fretting about you, and I was trying to turn his mind to other things. I told him he had no cause to worry on your account – that you'd become a fine detective in your own right, and even the highest in the land were now knocking on your door—'

‘I'm sorry, Abel, I don't understand—'

Stornaway looks at him, ‘That card in the hall, Mr Charles, did you not see whose it was?'

Charles wipes his hand across his eyes and puts his hand into his pocket. The card itself is over-embellished and a little pretentious, but otherwise hardly very remarkable. But the name – the name!

It's scarcely conceivable that two short words can conjure such a fever of contradictory ideas, but even in his first confusion Charles knows that this man must be – can only be
– a son who bears his father's name, for the man now venerated by some almost to idolatry died an outcast and a pariah almost thirty years before, his heart cut out and his body burned on a windswept Italian shore.

Charles turns to Stornaway. ‘You showed my uncle this?'

Abel nods. ‘I wish to God I hae never done it, but how could I hae known he would take on so? All on a sudden he was shouting wildly about things long ago and then he gripped me by the arm and said a name I have nae heard from his lips for half a lifetime or more. The next thing I knew he had fallen back in his chair with no stir of life about him, just as you see him now.'

‘He said a name? What name?'

Stornaway sighs and shakes his head. ‘He loved once, Mr Charles. Loved and lost. He never spoke of it, after they parted – not to me, and not to Fraser. But we knew, all the same. They met when we were in Northamptonshire working a case, but in the end she upped and married another. I never knew what became o' her after that, or if he ever saw her again. But it was her name, Mr Charles – the last word he spoke to me was her name. It must hae been her – with the life he's lived I know of nae other.'

Charles looks at Stornaway, and then at the card in his hand, and wonders suddenly if he has another answer to that question, however extraordinary and unlikely it may seem. For he knows – as Stornaway may not – that the woman whose son has left this card was once as infamous as the man she married, the brilliant daughter of brilliant parents – an old woman now, if yet she lives, but celebrated once for her beauty, and her cloud of red-gold hair.

‘Mary,' he says softly, half to himself, but as he glances up at Abel's face he sees the old man's eyes widen in sudden
amazement, and realizes with an absolute clarity that whatever this card means – whatever demands are made of him, or questions asked – there is an unguessed secret that lies unseen, in the darkness and vacancy of his uncle's cold repose.

These acknowledgements include details of the novel's plot, so readers may want to wait to read them until the end.

As any Dickens devotee will know, ‘Tom-All-Alone's' is not only the name of the notorious and disease-ridden slum described so vividly in
Bleak House,
but one of the titles Dickens originally considered giving to that book. I've always considered
Bleak House
to be without question Dickens' masterpiece, and it is the first and most important of the three great mid-Victorian texts that inform my own novel.

Bleak House
was first published in instalments between March 1852 and September 1853, and is a wonderful, complex, and compelling work. It's a gripping story, a powerful social commentary, and a panoramic portrait of contemporary London life. It also manages – single-handedly and almost in passing – to create a whole new literary genre: the detective mystery. For a writer who aspires to write ‘literary murders' herself, it could hardly be richer territory to explore, and I hope that anyone who loves Dickens as much as I do will enjoy seeing how I have interleaved my own mystery with the characters and episodes of his novel, and used his chapter titles for events in my own, though each time with a new twist, and a rather different meaning. In doing this I have, of course,
drawn extensively on
Bleak House,
and also on others of Dickens' works, especially his
Overland Tour to Bermondsey,
the
Sketches by Boz,
which includes his account of Seven Dials, and
On Duty with Inspector Field,
a piece he wrote for the
Household Words
magazine about the real-life police inspector who may well have been the model for Mr Bucket.

The second of my three great works is
The Woman in White,
written by Dickens' friend Wilkie Collins, and published in 1860. Even if the relationship between this novel and my own is not made explicit until the closing chapters, the moment when
Tom-All-Alone's
really came to life for me was when I realized that the time-scheme of
Bleak House
could be made to run parallel with Collins' very precise chronology for
The Woman in White,
which culminates in Sir Percival Glyde's death in a fire in late November 1850. This allowed me to create a ‘space between' these two great novels, where I could locate a new and independent story of my own, and explore some of the same nineteenth-century themes of secrecy, madness, power, and abuse, though with the benefit of twenty-
first-century
hindsight.

Last but not least of my three is
London Labour and the London Poor,
by Henry Mayhew. This huge work was originally published in the form of sixty-three pioneering articles in the
Morning Chronicle,
which were then collected together in book form in 1851.
London Labour and the London Poor
is the closest thing we have to an oral history of the crowded, rowdy, filthy streets of the mid-Victorian city: Mayhew conducted hundreds of interviews with real people, and gives many of their words almost verbatim. The result is an account so immediate that it's almost as if we're walking those streets by his side, and eavesdropping on his conversations. In fact this is exactly what I do during some of the episodes of
Tom-All-Alone's,
most
notably the rat-killing, where I send young Charles Maddox to the Graham Arms on the very night when – with a little artistic licence – I imagine Mayhew himself might have been there.

I talked just now about looking at the nineteenth century from a twenty-first-century perspective, and there's another obvious reference point for
Tom-All-Alone's
which famously took a similar approach, though set some seventeen years later. John Fowles'
The French Lieutenant's Woman
has long been one of my favourite modern novels, and when a close friend casually observed to me that there was ‘room for a
French Lieutenant's Woman
for this generation', I realized at once that this could indeed be one of my ambitions for
Tom
. Much of my novel was already written by then, and it seemed a wonderful coincidence that I had already named my young hero Charles after his great-uncle, and made him an amateur scientist, even if in a different field from that Charles Smithson in Fowles' novel. It's Fowles who is the ‘celebrated novelist' I refer to in Chapter 17, and readers who knows his book well will spot a very young Ernestina Freeman walking with her nurse in Hyde Park, and the deliberate echoes of Sarah Woodruff in my own ‘Sarah'.

Anyone who has visited Sir John Soane's Museum in London will recognize his extraordinary collection in my depiction of Tulkinghorn's underground gallery, though Tulkinghorn's more infamous items are his, and his alone. I have taken one or two architectural liberties, but the museum is essentially as I describe it, and in 1850 this real collection had already been amassed in Soane's real house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, the same square where Dickens sets his lawyer's fictional chambers. Dickens himself says nothing of Tulkinghorn having such a collection, of course, but nor does anything in
Bleak House
preclude it. In fact one of the great delights, for me, in writing this book was the chance it gave me to add new layers to a character like Tulkinghorn, from the secrets of his private museum to the even more horrifying secrets of his private history.

I would like to thank Timothy Duke, Chester Herald at the College of Arms, for his kind help with some of the finer points of English heraldry, and Jan Turner, Deputy Librarian at the Royal Geographical Society's Foyle Reading Room, for her assistance with the history of the Society, and with Baron von Müller in particular. Most of the speech I give him was indeed his own, and formed part of an address he delivered to the Society in March 1850 (though everything else is my own invention). There seems to be no trace of him thereafter, so it may be that his belief in unicorns was indeed his professional downfall, though not, needless to say, at the hands of one ‘Charles Maddox'! James Duncan is another real historical figure, though having him and his drawings in the British Museum is also my invention.

I read a number of books about London in the 1850s as part of the research for this novel, including Jerry White's fascinating
London in the Nineteenth Century,
Catherine Arnold's
Necropolis: London and its Dead, and The Victorian Underworld
by Donald Thomas. Books like this also helped point me to useful primary material, as did the excellent website www.victorianlondon.org.

As for Robert Mann, I owe a debt of gratitude to Mei Trow's book
Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer
for providing a new suspect in the Ripper killings who was old enough to have started his murderous career as early as 1850, and who might – just possibly – have been prevented from any further atrocities until the 1880s by the vigilance of a man like Inspector Bucket.

Finally I would like to thank my husband Simon, my ‘first reader', and my excellent agent, Ben Mason of FoxMason, whose input was absolutely invaluable as the novel took shape. I would also like to thank my two wonderful editors, Krystyna Green of Constable & Robinson, and Kate Miciak of Random House, for everything they did to make this book as good as it could be.

Lynn Shepherd studied English at Oxford, before working in the City and then in PR. She's been a freelance copywriter for over ten years, and has also published an academic work on the ‘Father of the English novel', Samuel Richardson. She lives near Oxford with her husband and two cats.

Murder at Mansfield Park