Drood, Page 22

  I stared at the ageing detective.

  “So you see, Mr Collins,” Field said, “it is quite possible that you and I could be of great assistance to one another should we share all information we have. I believe your friend Mr Dickens is in great danger. Indeed, I know that Mr Dickens is in danger if he continues to meet with this fiend called Drood. I appeal to your responsibility as the great author’s friend to help me be his protector.”

  I caressed my beard for a moment. Finally, I said, “Inspector Field, what do you want of me?”

  “Only information that may better allow us to protect your friend and to apprehend the fiend,” he said.

  “In other words, you want me to continue to spy on Charles Dickens and to report to you on everything he tells me about this Drood.”

  The old detective continued staring at me with those penetrating eyes. If I had not been looking for his nod, I would not have noticed it, so imperceptible was it.

  “Is there anything else?” I asked.

  “If you could convince Mr Dickens that your company would be required on another nocturnal expedition into Undertown, all the way to Drood’s lair this time, that would be of great help,” said Field.

  “So that I could personally show you the way when it comes time to apprehend the man,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  It was my turn to nod. “It is a very hard thing, Inspector, to become an informant on one’s closest friend—especially when that friend is of the temperament and position of power of Mr Charles Dickens. He could destroy me, professionally and personally.”

  “But you are doing this in his own best interests…” began the inspector.

  “So we have ascertained,” I interrupted. “And perhaps someday Dickens might see it that way. But he is a man of strong emotions, Inspector. Even if my… spying… were to save his life, it is quite possible that he may never forgive me. Even try to ruin me.”

  The detective continued to watch me closely.

  “I simply want you to understand the risk I take,” I said. “And why such a risk requires me to request two things in return from you.”

  If there was a smile, it appeared and disappeared too quickly to be caught by the human eye. “Of course, Mr Collins,” he said smoothly. “This is, as I said, a transaction between two gentlemen. May I know the nature of your two requests?”

  I said, “Inspector, did you happen to read Dickens’s novel Bleak House?”

  The older man made a rough noise. For a second I thought he was going to spit on the sidewalk. “I… looked at it… Mr Collins. In a passing way.”

  “But you are aware, Inspector, that many people believe that you are the original for the character named Inspector Bucket in that novel?”

  Field nodded grimly and said nothing.

  “You are not pleased with the depiction?” I asked.

  “I thought the character called Bucket was a caricature and a travesty of proper police behaviour, procedure, and decorum,” growled the old detective.

  “Nonetheless,” I said, “Dickens’s novel—which I thought rather dreary and stodgy to that point, especially in the person of the cloying and saccharine narratoress named Esther Summerson, did seem to come alive in the penultimate chapters as our Inspector Bucket took charge of the murder case regarding Lawyer Tulkinghorn, as well as in his fruitless but exciting pursuit of Lady Dedlock, Esther’s true mother, who was to die outside the city burial ground.”

  “Your point, sir?” asked Field.

  “My point, Inspector, is that as a professional novelist myself, I see the potential for real interest in a book which has, as its protagonist and central character, a Scotland Yard or private detective not so different from Inspector Bucket, except… of course… more intelligent, more insightful, more educated, more handsome, and more ethical. In other words, Inspector Field, a fictional character not so different from yourself.”

  The older man squinted at me. His corpulent forefinger was resting next to his ear as if he were again listening to its whispered advice. “You are too kind, Mr Collins,” he said at last. “Too kind altogether. And yet, perhaps, in some modest way, I could be of help for your research into such a character and such a novel? Offering advice, perhaps, on the proper investigatory methods and police procedures, so as to avoid the sort of travesty shown in Mr Dickens’s novel?”

  I smiled and adjusted my spectacles. “More than that, Inspector. I would benefit greatly from having access to your… what would you call them?… murder files. I presume you keep such things, as ghastly as they must be?”

  “Indeed we do, sir,” said Field. “And they would indeed be of inestimable benefit to a literary gentleman wishing to achieve, as they say, verisimilitude, in the writing of such a work. This is an honourable request and I agree to it without hesitation.”

  “Good,” I said. “My second condition also should not cause you any problems, since I am sure you will be carrying out the surveillance I wish access to whether or not I should be the one making the request for it.”

  “What surveillance is that, sir?”

  “I want to know everything that you and your operatives can learn about the actress Ellen Ternan. Her whereabouts. The location of her lodgings—hers and her mother’s—and whether Dickens is paying for them. The way she makes her money and whether those funds are sufficient to support her in the circumstances which she currently enjoys. Her comings and goings. Her relationship to Charles Dickens. Everything.”

  Inspector Field continued to bathe me in the blank, flat, mildly accusatory gaze which—I was sure—he had levelled at a thousand felons. But I was not a felon—not yet—and I did not wilt under its power.

  “An odd request, Mr Collins, if you do not mind me saying so, sir. Unless you were to have your own personal interest in Miss Ternan.”

  “None whatsoever, Inspector. I can assure you of that. Rather, I am convinced that Miss Ternan connects to this… mystery… that you and I are attempting to unravel, even as I am convinced that the best interests of Charles Dickens may have been compromised by this woman. In order to protect my friend… and perhaps myself… I need to understand more about her life and their relationship.”

  Field rubbed his lower lip with that curved and corpulent finger. “You think, Mr Collins, that Miss Ternan might actually be a co-conspirator with the monster Drood? An agent of his?”

  I laughed. “Inspector, I don’t know enough about the woman even to speculate. Which is why further knowledge of her, her sisters, her mother, and her relationship with my friend Dickens is essential if we are to enter into this pact.”

  Field continued to pat and press his lip.

  “Then we understand each other, Inspector?” I said.

  “I believe we do, Mr Collins. I believe that we understand each other very well indeed. I agree to your conditions and hope to provide you with all of the information you need.” Field extended his calloused hand.

  I shook it.

  A minute later, resuming my walk towards the British Museum, Field hurrying alongside me, I told him everything that Charles Dickens had told me the day before on our walk to Cooling Marsh and back.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Winter came in hard, stripping the leaves from all the trees near Gad’s Hill Place by November, sending Dickens from his summer chalet into his front-of-the-house study with its green porcelain fireplace and crackling fire, killing the scarlet geraniums in his garden, and sending low grey clouds scudding over the low grey stone of the buildings and streets of London where I resided.

  With winter came deeper bouts of illness for both Dickens and myself. The more famous writer continued to wrestle with his terrors from the Staplehurst accident and with constant exhaustion, with kidney pain that had pursued him since childhood, and with the deadness in his left side from his “sunstroke” in France in September. Clearly there was something more seriously wrong than the author would admit. Dickens and I shared a doctor—our mutual friend Frank Beard�
�and though Beard would rarely discuss his other patient, I sensed a deep concern.

  I had my own problems, which included the terrible rheumatical gout and its accompanying pain, fainting spells, aching joints, a growing obesity which left me disgusted with myself even as I failed to reduce the size of the meals I enjoyed, flatulence, cramps, an assortment of other digestive disorders, and terrible palpitations of the heart. No one seemed aware of Dickens’s physical disorders, but all the world seemed to know of mine. A Frenchman wrote me through my publisher to say that “he had betted ten bottles of champagne that I am alive, against everyone’s belief,” and if I were still breathing, he begged me to inform him of the fact.

  I wrote to my mother that autumn—

  Here is “forty” come upon me [I was, in truth, forty-one that previous January]—grey hairs shrinking fast… rheumatism and gout familiar enemies for some time past, my own horrid corpulence making me fat and unwieldy—all the worst signs of middle age sprouting out on me.

  And yet, I confided to her, I didn’t feel old. I had no regular habits, no respectable prejudices.

  Dear Reader, I have not yet told you anything about the most important woman in my life.

  My mother, Harriet Geddes Collins, had met my father, the artist William Collins, when they were both in their mid-twenties. My mother was also descended from a long line of artists; she and both her sisters drew constantly and one of my mother’s sisters had entered the school of the Royal Academy in London. Harriet Geddes and my father had first crossed paths at a ball given by some artist acquaintances of my father’s for their girlfriends, subsequently seen each other several times in the London of their day, confirmed in 1821 that neither had cultivated other attachments, and were married in Edinburgh in 1822. I was born a little less than eighteen months later, on 8 January, 1824. My brother, Charles, was born in January of 1828.

  One of my father’s friends was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and I clearly remember the day when I was a young boy and the poet came to our home, found my father gone, and stayed to weep to my mother about his increasing dependence upon opium. It was the first time I had seen or heard a fully grown man weep—Coleridge was sobbing so hard he could not catch his breath—and I shall never forget my mother’s words to him that day: “Mr Coleridge, do not cry; if the opium really does you any good, and you must have it, why do you not go out and get it?”

  Many has been the time in recent years, as I wept my own bitter tears because of my growing need for the drug, that I have called back my mother’s voice on the subject.

  My father had come home just after this advice was given to Coleridge, and I remember the poet’s cracked voice as he said, “Collins, your wife is an exceedingly sensible woman!”

  My mother was a sensible woman, but my father was a great artist and a great man. I was given my Christian middle name—Wilkie— due to his relationship with the honourable Sir David Wilkie, an old friend of my father’s from their school days, who lifted me up shortly after my birth, looked into my eyes, and pronounced, “He sees.” (This seemed to have laid the mantle of succession, in artistic terms, from my father’s shoulders to mine, but—as we shall see—that was not to be. My younger brother, Charley, was to inherit the stronger artistic ability and to be chosen for that role.)

  My father was a great man with great men as friends. When I was growing up—a wide-eyed, rather gentle, bulbous-foreheaded child—I took it for granted that the Wordsworths, Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Sir Walter Scott would be familiar acquaintances of our family and visitors to our home. My father had not only received commissions from, but had spent much time with, such estimables as Sir Francis Chantrey, the Duke of Newcastle, Sir Robert Peel, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Sir Thomas Heathcote, Sir Thomas Baring, Sir George Beaumont, and Lord Liverpool.

  Of course, it is true that the vast majority of my father’s time spent with greatness was spent out of the sight of our mother. I am sure that my father was not ashamed of my mother, nor certainly of Charles or me, but he did prefer to spend his time amongst great men far from our hearth. But he wrote home faithfully and, often after listing the exciting events and personal encounters of his days and weeks away, might add such a codicil as this I found when arranging my mother’s papers recently—

  I cannot help longing for home, although I am so pleasantly spending my time, as pleasantly as the kindest friends, sprightly young ladies, and all the gaieties of this life can make me. I flatter myself that the idle life I am leading will please you, and perhaps make me stronger and therefore, I am determined to make the most of it.

  He did make the most of it, I believe, although, despite the many commissions by such famous men, his income was rarely solid or consistent. But my mother lived frugally and made sure that Charley and I did as well, so money was set aside.

  My father was an extremely religious man. He had long since vowed to banish inclinations to indolence or impiety from his own life and would brook none in the lives of his wife or children. Some called him censorious, even priggish, but this was unfair. In another letter to my mother, sent from some Scottish castle when Charley and I were in short pants, my father wrote—

  Tell the dear children that the only way they can serve their parents is to obey them in all things; let Charley find out the passages in the Scripture where this duty is most strongly insisted on, and write them down for me.

  And in a separate letter to my brother and me, one still in my possession and reread frequently, William Collins showed the true spirit of his religious intensity—

  Your mother’s account, in her last letter about you both, pleased me very much. Go on praying to God, through Jesus Christ, to enable you, by his Holy Spirit, to be blessings to your parents; and then you must be happy.

  True to his beliefs, my father became known for his denunciations. His tolerance for tolerance was very low. Once when our close neighbour, the artist John Linnell (who had painted several of our portraits), was seen working on Sunday—nailing his peach and nectarine trees to his northern wall—my father not only upbraided Linnell but denounced him to a visiting Congregational preacher. Father also believed and spread the rumour that Linnell had cheated one of his gardeners out of his wages, and when Linnell challenged him on the fact, Father cried, “Of what consequence is it, whether you cheated a man out of his wages or not, when you are constantly doing things ten times worse?”

  The things-ten-times-worse included working on Sunday and becoming a Dissenter.

  I was with my father when we met the poet William Blake in the Strand, and when Blake—an acquaintance—hailed my father and offered his hand, my father deliberately ignored him, turning his back on the poet and leading me away before I could speak. Blake, you see, was carrying a pot of porter in the hand he was not offering in friendship.

  Later, when I was in my early twenties and writing my father’s memoirs after his death, I realised how jealous of him many of the so-called great artists of the period were. John Constable, for instance, an acquaintance of many years, was receiving only a few hundred pounds for his cloudy, obscure paintings during years that my father earned over £1,000 a year on commissions for what Constable sneered at as “pretty landscapes” and “flat, soulless, fashionable portraits.” When Constable could find no patrons at all (due, largely, to his persisting in painting such unpopular works as his Corn-Field at the same time that my father had his finger on the pulse of patrons’ and the Academy’s desires for more decorative works), the frustrated landscape painter wrote the following in a letter that was made public, much to my father’s fury—“Turner exhibits a large picture of Dieppe… Calcotte nothing I hear… Collins, a coast scene with fish as usual and a landscape with a large cow turd at least as far as colour and shape is concerned.”

  I mentioned earlier that my father decided when we were still quite young that Charley, not I, would be the real inheritor of his artistic talents and career, despite the crib-side assurances of Sir David Wilkie, my name
sake. Father enrolled Charley in a private art school, spent much extra time with my brother during our long trips to Europe—analysing paintings in cathedrals and museums (although my father loathed entering Papist churches)—and helped Charley gain acceptance into the prestigious Royal Academy.

  Father never really spoke to me about my future or how I would fill it, other than one suggestion, when I was thirteen, that I might consider going to Oxford with a view to entering the Church.

  It was when I was thirteen, in Rome during one of our long family stays in Europe, that I experienced my first full love adventure. I remember telling the details to Charles Dickens precisely seventeen years later, during my next visit to Rome and my first trip there with the famous author, and Dickens was so pleased with the amatory precociousness of the affair that he later told me he had informed his sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, sparing her, he said, only the details of “how the affair had proceeded to the utmost extremities.” He chuckled when he described how Georgina had blushed when Dickens had summarised my first complete physical encounter by saying, “Our young Willy came out quite a pagan Jupiter in the business.”

  At any rate, even at age thirteen I had no intention of entering Oxford with an eye on going into the Church.

  Artists are notoriously sensitive—at least to their own feelings—and young Charley was more sensitive than most. It is not an exaggeration to say that he was a doleful child, constantly brooding about this or that, and both of my parents—but especially my mother—took this incessant unhappiness (bordering on sullenness) as a sign of his artistic genius. He also disliked women and girls.

  I interrupt here, Dear Reader, to beg your indulgence on this point. Were this not a memoir consigned to the distant future, I would not mention it at all, but—as perhaps you have already detected in this memoir—there was a deep and constant tension between Charles Dickens and his son-in-law, Charles Collins, and I fear that this small matter of Charley’s aversion to women (if not outright misogyny) may have played a part in Dickens’s prejudice. You see, however such things have played out in your distant time, it was not uncommon in our era for young men to go through long periods where they much preferred the company of boys and men to that of women. Given the limitations to education of women in our time, much less the obvious difficulties of the fairer sex in acquiring and mastering more difficult aspects of learning throughout history, it was logical that thoughtful, sensitive men should focus their energies and intercourse on other men.