Drood

  He was disappointed, deeply disappointed I would say, that there was no fire belching and blazing from the volcano. Evidently a major eruption in 1850 had taken some of the energy out of the mountain; there was much smoke while we were there, but no flames. To say that Dickens was crestfallen would be an understatement. Nonetheless, Dickens quickly put a climbing party together, including the archaeologist and diplomat Austen Henry Layard, and we promptly threw ourselves at the smoking mountain.

  Eight years before our climb, on the night of 21 January, 1845, Dickens had found all the Vesuvian fire and sulphur that someone as indifferent to danger as he might ask for.

  It was the Inimitable’s first trip to Naples and the volcano was very active indeed. With his wife, Catherine, and sister-in-law Georgina in tow, Dickens set off with six saddle horses, an armed soldier for a guard, and—because the weather was harsh and the volcano very treacherous then—no fewer than twenty-two guides. They began their ascent around four PM with the women being carried in litters while Dickens and the guides led the way. The walking stick that the author used that evening was taller and thicker than the bird-beaked cane he was clacking against cobblestones this night in the slums of Shadwell. I am sure that his pace that first time on Vesuvius was no slower than it was tonight on such flat ground at sea level. Charles Dickens’s response to an intimidating slope—as I have witnessed to my chagrin and fatigue many times—was to double his already too-quick pace.

  Near the top of the cinder cone that is Vesuvius’s summit, no one would go on save for Dickens and a single guide. The mountain was in eruption. Flames shot hundreds of feet into the sky above them and sulphur, cinders, and smoke belched from every crevice in the snowfields and rockfields. The author’s friend Roche, who had climbed to within a few hundred feet of the crater but who could not go farther towards the fiery maelstrom, screamed that Dickens and his guide would be killed if they ventured closer.

  Dickens insisted on climbing right to the brink of this crater, on the windy and most dangerous side—the fumes alone have been known to kill people miles below this level—and looking, as he wrote his friends later, “down into the crater itself… into the flaming bowels of the mountain.… It was the finest sight conceivable, more terrible than Niagara.…” The American waterfalls had been his previous exemplar of transcendence and awe in Nature on this world. Equal, he wrote “. . . as fire and water are.”

  All the other members of the party that night, including the horrified and exhausted Catherine and Georgina (who had ridden up the mountainside), attested that Dickens came down the cinder cone “alight in half a dozen places and burnt from head to foot.” The author’s remaining rags of clothing smouldered during the long night’s descent—and the descent was also harrowing. On an endless and exposed ice slope where some of the party had to rope up for safety and guides had to chip footsteps in the ice, one guide slipped and fell screaming down into the darkness, followed a minute later by one of the Englishmen who had joined the party. Dickens and the others descended through the night without learning the fates of these men. The writer later told me that the Englishman had survived; he never learned the status of the guide.

  Twelve years before this Drood-quest in London, Dickens had dragged Egg and me up Vesuvius, but, thank God and the volcano’s relative quiet, it was a far less taxing and dangerous outing. Dickens and Layard pressed ahead at high speed, which allowed Egg and me to rest, discreetly, whenever we felt the need. In truth, it was beautiful as we watched the sun setting towards Sorrento and Capri from our vantage point near the mouth of the crater, the sphere of the sun growing huge and blood red through the pall of smoke and vapour from Vesuvius. We descended easily by torchlight with a new moon rising above us and all of us singing English and Italian songs.

  This was as to nothing compared to our near-fatal—to me—adventure on Carrick Fell shortly after our last performance of The Frozen Deep in Manchester in 1857.

  Dickens was filled then, as he was this night in the Shadwell slums, with a terrible and unquenchable energy, arising, it seemed, from a soul-deep dissatisfaction. He told me some weeks after the play closed that he was going mad, that—if I remember his words correctly—“the scaling of all the mountains in Switzerland, or the doing of any wild thing until I dropped, would be but a slight relief.” In a note he sent me one morning after we had been dining, drinking, and discussing things both solemnly and with wild humour the night before, Dickens said, “I want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable—indescribable—my misery amazing.” And I could tell that besides being amazing, his misery was very real and very deep. I thought at the time that it had only to do with his failing marriage to Catherine; I know now that it had even more to do with his new love for the eighteen-year-old child-woman named Ellen Ternan.

  In 1857, Dickens announced to me suddenly that we were leaving immediately for Cumberland to get inspiration for some jointly penned articles about the North of England for our magazine Household Words. He was to call the piece The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices. Even as co-author—in truth primary author, I may tell you, Dear Reader—I have to say that what resulted was an unoriginal and uninspired series of travel essays. It was only later that I realised that Dickens had little interest in Cumberland, other than climbing that damned Carrick Fell, and almost no interest at all in writing travel articles.

  Ellen Ternan and her sisters and mother were appearing on stage in Doncaster, and that, I know now, was the real purpose for our wild travels north.

  How ironic it would have been if I had died on Carrick Fell because of Charles Dickens’s covert passion for an eighteen-year-old actress who had absolutely no awareness of his feelings for her.

  We took the train from London to Carlisle and the next day we rode to the village of Heske, at the base of this “Carrock or Carrick Mountain or Carrock or Carrick Fell I have read about, my dear Wilkie. The spellings are unreliable.”

  So it was at Carrick Fell that I fell.

  Dickens’s burning frustration and energy demanded a mountain, and for some reason known to no one—not even to himself, I am sure—Carrick or Carrock Fell was to be the mountain we were to throw ourselves against.

  There were no guides in tiny Heske to lead us to or up this hill. The weather was terrible: cold, windy, rainy. Dickens finally convinced the landlord of the rather sad little inn where we were staying to be our guide, even though the older man confessed to “havin’ never bin oop or doon that partic’lar hill, sirrr.”

  We managed to find Carrick Fell, its summit disappearing in the lowering evening clouds. We began to climb. The innkeeper hesitated frequently but Dickens usually pushed on, guessing at our course. A bone-chilling wind rose up around nightfall—more a mere dimming of the twilight into deeper darkness as mist and fog rolled in—yet still we climbed. We soon were lost. The landlord confessed to having no idea even of which side of the mountain we were on. As dramatically as when he played the wandering Richard Wardour on stage, Dickens produced a compass from his pocket, pointed the way, and we pressed on into the gloom.

  Within thirty minutes, Dickens’s city-bought compass was broken. The rain poured harder and we were soon soaked through and shivering. Darker and darker came on the northern night while we wound our way round and round the rocky fell. We found what could have been its summit—a slippery, rocky ridge set amidst a plethora of identical slippery, rocky ridges all disappearing into the fog and night—and we started down, having not the slightest sense of which way lay our village, our inn, our dinner, our fire, or our beds.

  For two hours we wandered so with the rain terrific, the fog thick, and the darkness now approaching some Stygian absolute. When we came to a roaring stream that blocked our path, Dickens greeted it as if it were a long-lost friend. “We follow it down to the river at the base of the peak,” Dickens explained to the shivering, miserable wretch of a lan
dlord and to his equally miserable co-author. “The perfect guide!”

  This guide may have been perfect, but it was treacherous. The sides of the gully became steeper and steeper, the rocks along the sides ever more treacherous with rain and incipient ice, the torrent beneath us wilder. I fell behind. My foot slipped, I fell heavily, and I felt something twist terribly in my ankle. Lying half in the stream, hurting and shivering, starving and weak, I had to call into the darkness for help, hoping that Dickens and the trembling innkeeper had not descended beyond earshot. If they had, I knew I was a dead man. I could not even put weight on the ankle while using my walking stick. I would have had to crawl down the streambed itself some miles to the river, then—if I somehow guessed the proper direction to the village—crawl miles more along the river’s bank that night. I am a city man, Dear Reader. Such exertions are not in my physical vocabulary.

  Luckily, Dickens heard my calls. He came back and found me lying in the stream, my ankle already swollen to more than twice its normal size.

  At first he merely assisted me as I hopped down the treacherous slope with him, but eventually he actually carried me. I knew without any doubt that Dickens was imagining himself as the hero Richard Wardour carrying his rival, Frank Aldersley, across the Arctic wastes to safety. As long as he did not drop me, I did not care what fantasies he indulged in.

  Eventually, we found the inn. The landlord—shaking and muttering and cursing under his breath—woke his wife to cook us some late-night supper or early-morning breakfast. Servants stoked the fires in the public room and in our rooms. There was no doctor in Heske—there really was no Heske in Heske—so Dickens iced and bound my swollen ankle as best he could until we reached civilisation.

  We went on to Wigton and then to Allonby and then to Lancaster and then to Leeds—continuing the charade that we were gathering material for a travel tale, even though I could not walk without the aid of two sticks and spent all my time in the hotels—and then finally went on to Doncaster, which had been our true and secret (or rather, Charles Dickens’s secret) destination all along.

  There we saw several plays, including the one in which Ellen Ternan had a brief appearance. The next day, Dickens went on a picnic with the family and—I am certain now—also on a long, private walk with Ellen Ternan. Whatever transpired on that walk, whatever thoughts or feelings were expressed and rejected, remains a mystery to this day, but I know for a fact that the Inimitable returned from Doncaster in a foul and murderous mood. When I tried to arrange times at the Household Words office for us to finish our writing and editing of the weak Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices essays, Dickens sent me an unusually personal reply in which he said, “. . . the Doncaster unhappiness remains so strong upon me that I can’t write and (waking) can’t rest, one minute.”

  As I said, I did not then know and do not now know the precise nature of that Doncaster unhappiness, but it was soon to change all of our lives.

  I share this, Dear Reader, because I suspected that night in July of 1865, and I suspect more firmly now as I write this some years later, that our search for the mysterious Drood that hot, reeking night was not so much for the resurrected phantom Drood as it was for whatever Charles Dickens sought out in Ellen Ternan in Doncaster in 1857—and in the eight mystery-filled years since then up until Staplehurst.

  But as was true of Carrick or Carrock Fell, such obsessions can have their terrible price for other people through no planning of the obsessor: other people can end up just as injured or dead as if it had all been premeditated.

  WE WALKED FOR about twenty minutes through even darker and more reeking slums. At times there were signs of crowded human habitation in the sagging tenements, whispers and catcalls rising out of the thick darkness on both sides of the narrow lanes, and at other times the only sound was that of our boots and Dickens’s cane tapping on the cobblestones of those few lanes that had cobblestones. I was reminded that night of a passage in Dickens’s most recent—and still uncompleted—book, Our Mutual Friend, one of the first numbers to be serialised in the past year, in which our author has two young men riding in a carriage down to the Thames to identify a body found drowned and dragged out of the river by a father and daughter who do that daily for a living—

  The wheels rolled on, and rolled down by the Monument, and by the Tower, and by the Docks; down by Ratcliffe, and by Rotherhithe; down by where accumulated scum of humanity seemed to be washed from higher grounds, like so much moral sewage, and to be pausing until its own weight forced it over the bank and sunk it in the river.

  In truth, like the dissolute young characters in the coach in Dickens’s tale, I had been paying little attention to the direction we were going; I merely followed the large shadow of Detective Hatchery and the lithe shadow of Dickens. I was later to regret my inattention.

  Suddenly the constant background stench changed its flavour and grew in intensity. “Pfah!” I cried to my shadowy companions ahead. “Are we nearing the river again?”

  “Worse, sir,” said Hatchery over his wide shoulder. “It’s burial grounds, sir.”

  I looked around. For some time I had been under the general but contradictory impression that we were approaching either Church Street or the London Hospital area, but this dark avenue had opened instead on our right onto a sort of field encircled by walls and an iron fence and a gate. I saw no church nearby, so this was no churchyard cemetery, but rather a municipal cemetery of the kind that had become so common in the past fifteen years.

  You see, Dear Reader, in our time, the almost-three-million of us in London lived and walked above the corpses of at least that many of our common dead, and almost certainly more. As London grew and devoured its surrounding suburbs and villages, those graveyards were also subsumed, and it was to them that the hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands of rotting bodies of our beloved dead were consigned. St Martin-in-the-Fields churchyard, for instance, was only about two hundred feet square, but by 1840, some twenty-five years before this eventful night, it was estimated to contain the remains of between 60,000 and 70,000 of our London departed. There are many more there now.

  In the 1850s, about the time of the Great Stink and the worst of the terrible cholera epidemics, it was becoming apparent to all of us that these overcrowded churchyards were creating a health risk to those unlucky enough to live nearby. Every burial place in the city was—and remains—overcrowded to the point of overflow. Thousands of bodies were buried in shallow pits beneath chapels and schools and workplaces and in empty lots and even behind and beneath private homes. So the Burial Act of 1852—a piece of legislation which Dickens had spoken for—demanded that the General Board of Health establish some cemeteries open to all the dead regardless of their religion.

  Perhaps you also know, Dear Reader, that until recently in my lifetime, all those to be buried in England had to receive Christian burial in parish churchyards. There were few exceptions. It was as late as 1832 that an act of Parliament put an end to the common practice of my fellow Englishmen burying suicides in public highways with a stake driven through the dead sinner’s heart. The Act—a paragon of modern thought and philanthropy—allowed the corpses of suicides to be buried in churchyards with Christians, but only if the dead one was interred between the hours of nine PM and midnight, and always then without the rites of the Church. And I should mention that the compulsory dissection of murderers’ corpses was also abolished in 1832—that enlightened year!—and even murderers may be found in Christian cemeteries in this liberal era.

  Many—I should say most—of those graves remain unmarked. But not necessarily undiscovered. Those men digging new graves each day or night here in London invariably sink their spades into rotting flesh—layers of it, I am told—and then into unnamed skeletons beneath. Some churchyards hire men to check the grounds each morning for chunks of decaying parishioners that have risen to the surface—especially after heavy rains—in too-eager anticipation of the Final Trumpet Call. I have seen these worker
s carrying arms and hands and other, less distinguishable parts, in wheelbarrows while in the pursuit of their rounds, rather like a diligent gardener on an estate will carry off fallen limbs and branches after a storm.

  These new interment areas were called “burial grounds” as distinct from parish “churchyards” and they had been very popular. The first burial grounds were commercial ventures (and as was still the custom in so many places on the Continent, if the family fell behind on payment on their loved ones’ graves, the bodies were dug up and tossed aside, the beautiful headstones used to pave retaining walls or walkways, and the earth sold to a more reliable customer), but since the 1850s Acts enforcing the closure of many overflowing London churchyards, most of our new cemeteries were of the municipal variety, with separate seating, as it were, for religious Conformists (complete with chapels and consecrated ground) and a different area for Dissenters. One wonders if they were uncomfortable spending Eternity within a cricket pitch’s distance of one another.

  The burial ground we were approaching now in the dark looked to have been an ancient churchyard at some point—until the church was abandoned as the neighbourhoods here got too dangerous for decent people, then its structure burned down in order to raise more tenements so that landlords could squeeze more money out of immigrants with nowhere else to light—but the churchyard itself had remained and been used… and used… and used… perhaps taken over by Dissenters a century or two ago, then converted to a bury-for-profit graveyard some time in the last twenty years.