Drood, Page 32

  “But the audience loved it,” I said.

  Dickens shrugged. “Not as much as they love Dombey or Scrooge or Nickleby, which I shall read in a few minutes.”

  I was sure that the programme had listed the Trial from The Pickwick Papers as the thirty-minute reading scheduled for after the interval—Dickens always preferred to end the evenings with sentiment and laughter—but I was not about to correct him.

  The ten minutes were almost up. Dickens rose with some effort, cast his heat-wilted scarlet geranium into the trash, and set a new one in his buttonhole.

  “I shall see you after the reading,” I said and went back out to join the eager multitudes.

  AS THE APPLAUSE DIED, Dickens took up his book and pretended to read aloud, “Nicholas Nickleby at Mr Squeers’s School… Chapter the First.” So it was to be Nickleby.

  None of the exhaustion I had glimpsed backstage was evident now. Dickens seemed even more energetic and animated than he had been during the first ninety minutes. The power of his reading once again reached out like a magnetic current to fix and align the audience’s attention as if their eyes and minds were so many needles on a compass. Once again, the Inimitable’s gaze seemed to settle on each and every one of us.

  Despite that powerful magnetic attraction, my mind began to wander. I began to think of other things—the publication of my novel Armadale in two volumes would be a fact within the week—and it occurred to me that I had to settle on a plot and theme for my next book. Perhaps something shorter and even more sensationalist, although with a simpler plot than the labyrinthine Armadale…

  Suddenly I snapped back to attention.

  Everything had changed in the huge hall. The light seemed thicker, slower, darker, almost gelatinous.

  It was silent. Not the attention-silence of more than two thousand people that had existed an instant earlier—with coughs being stifled, laughter punctuating the silence, the stirrings of so many after more than two hours of listening—but now it was an absolute silence. It was as if twenty-one hundred people had suddenly died. There was not the slightest hint of breathing or movement. I realised that I could not hear or feel my own breathing, nor sense my own heartbeat. The Birmingham hall had turned into a giant crypt and was just that silent.

  At the same moment, I realised that up through the darkness rose hundreds of slender, white, barely perceptible cords, their ends tied to the middle finger on the right hand of every member of the audience. The air was so dark that I could not make out the point at which these twenty-one hundred cords converged above us, but I knew that they must be connected to a massive bell up there. We were, all of us, in the Dead House. The cords—silken ropes, I realised—were tied to us in case one of us might still be alive. The bell, whose tone and toll, I knew instinctively, would be too terrible to hear, was there to alert—someone, something—if any one of us stirred.

  Knowing that I and that I alone was still alive out of these twenty-one hundred dead, I tried not to stir, and focused all of my attention on not tugging at the cord tied to the middle finger of my right hand.

  Looking up, I realised that it was no longer Charles Dickens whose face and hands and fingers glowed in the thick, slow light of the gas lamps in the darkness on the stage.

  Drood looked out at us.

  I recognised at once the pale white skin, the brittle tufts of hair over the ravaged ears, the lidless eyes, the nose that was little more than two nictitating membranes above a hole in the skull, the long, twitching fingers, and the pale, constantly turning pupils.

  My hands shook. A hundred feet above the heads of all the corpses in the audience, the bell vibrated audibly.

  Drood’s head snapped around. His pale eyes locked with mine.

  I began shaking all over. The bell rumbled, then rang. No other corpse there breathed or stirred.

  Drood came out from behind Dickens’s reading table and then out from the rectangle of turgid light. He leaped down from the stage and began gliding up the aisle. My arms and legs shook now as if agued, but I could move no other part of my body—not even my head.

  I could smell Drood as he approached. He smelled like the Thames near Tiger Bay where Opium Sal’s opium den rotted away in the general effluvium when the tide was out and the sewage high.

  There was something in Drood’s hand. By the time he was twenty paces from me up the steep aisle, I could see that it was a knife, but unlike any knife I had ever held or used or seen. The blade was a dark steel crescent on which hieroglyphs were visible. The handle was mostly hidden behind the Egyptian’s pale and bony knuckles; the thin handle of the razor-crescent disappeared between Drood’s fingers so the curved blade, at least eight inches across in its thinly gleaming arc of edge, extended from his fist like a lady’s fan.

  Run! I ordered myself. Escape! Scream!

  I could not move a muscle.

  Drood paused above me, at the farthest limit of my peripheral vision, and when he opened his mouth, a miasma of Thames-mud stench enveloped me. I could see his pale pink tongue dancing behind those tiny teeth.

  “You ssseee,” he hissed at me, his right arm and the blade pulling back for the decapitation’s swing, “how easssssy it issss?”

  He swung the blade in a flat, vicious arc. The razor-sharp edge of the crescent-blade sliced through my beard and cut through my cravat, collar, skin, throat, trachea, gullet, and spinal cord as if they were made of butter.

  The audience began applauding wildly. The gelatin-thick air had lightened to normal. The silken cords were gone.

  Dickens turned to leave the stage without acknowledging the applause, but George Dolby was standing at the edge of the curtain. A moment later, with applause still echoing, Dickens stepped back into the glow of the gaslights.

  “My dear friends,” he said after his raised hands had silenced the huge hall, “it appears as if there has been an error. Actually, it appears that I have made an error. Our programme had called for the Trial from Pickwick to be read after the interval, but I mistakenly carried Nickleby out to the podium and went on to read it. You were most gracious in your acceptance of that error and more than generous in your applause. The hour is late—I see by my watch that it is just ten, the precise time scheduled for the conclusion of our evening together—but the Trial was promised and if the majority of you would like, and you can show by your hands or applause if you would so like, to hear the Trial read, I shall happily add it to the unscheduled reading you have just enjoyed.”

  The audience did like. They applauded and cheered and shouted encouragement. No one left.

  “Call Sam Weller!” bellowed Dickens in his judicial voice, and the crowd roared louder in its applause and cheers. As each classic character appeared—Mrs Gamp, Miss Squeers, Boots—the audience roared even louder. I put my hand to my temple and found my brow cold and covered with perspiration. As Dickens read on, I staggered out.

  I went alone to the hotel and drank another cup of laudanum while waiting for the Inimitable and his entourage to arrive. My heart was pounding wildly. I was ravenous and shaken and would have welcomed a large meal sent up to the privacy of my own room, but although Dickens would eat nothing more this evening, he invited Wills, Dolby, and me to dine in his suite as he unwound. There he paced back and forth and talked about the next few days of the tour and about the offer he had received for another tour beginning about Christmastime.

  I ordered pheasant, fish, caviar, pâté, asparagus, eggs, and dry champagne, but just before the waiter came in bringing this and Wills’s tiny meal and Dolby’s beef and mutton, Dickens turned from the fireplace where he had been standing and said, “My dear Wilkie! What on earth is that on your collar?”

  “What?” I confess that I blushed. I had hurriedly carried out my ablutions before drinking my laudanum and coming up to Dickens’s suite. “What?” My hands rose beneath my bearded chin and touched something thick and crusted above the silk of my cravat.

  “Here now, move your hands,” said Wills.
He held the lamp closer.

  “Good God,” said Dolby.

  “Good heavens, Wilkie,” said Dickens in a voice that sounded more amused than alarmed. “There is dried blood all over your collar and neck. You look like Nancy after Bill Sikes has done with her.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The summer of 1866 was tiring.

  My novel Armadale was released on schedule in June and the reviews were much as I expected from the usual hide-bound and tiresome critics. In the Athenaeum, their ancient music-critic and reviewer H. F. Chorley opined—“It is not pleasant to speak as we must of this powerful story; but in the interest of everything that is to be cherished in life, in poetry, in art, it is impossible to be over-explicit in the expression of judgement.”

  His judgement was that the book was immoral.

  The reviewer of The Spectator came to the same conclusion in terms that bypassed the mere strident in favour of the near-hysterical:

  The fact that there are such characters as he has drawn, and actions such as he has described, does not warrant his over-stepping the limits of decency, and revolting every human sentiment. This is what Armadale does. It gives us for its heroine a woman fouler than the refuse of the streets, who has lived to the ripe age of 35, and through the horrors of forgery, murder, theft, bigamy, gaol and attempted suicide, without any trace being left on her beauty.… This is frankly told in a diary which, but for its unreality, would be simply loathesome, and which needs all the veneer of Mr Wilkie Collins’s easy style and allusive sparkle to disguise its actual meaning.

  This kind of critical attack meant nothing to me. I knew that the book would sell well. And perhaps I have told you, Dear Reader, that the publisher had paid me five thousand pounds—a record at the time and for many years after that—and paid it before a single word of the story had been written. I had serialised it in America in their magazine called Harper’s Monthly and not only had Armadale been wildly popular there, but the editor had written me that my tale had single-handedly saved their magazine from extinction. Its serialisation in England through The Cornhill Magazine had also been wildly popular, certainly causing some of the jealousy we had heard from Dickens the previous Christmas. I was certain that I could adapt Armadale to the stage and that this might well be a greater source of income than the book itself.

  It is true that the great sum paid in advance by George Smith at Smith, Elder & Company had all but bankrupted the publisher despite the brisk sales of the two volumes, but that was little concern of mine. It did frustrate me somewhat, however, in the sense that for my next novel—whatever its contents—I would almost certainly have to return to Dickens’s magazine, All the Year Round, just as the author-editor had predicted during our Christmas dinner. The frustration was not merely because the monies in advance of publication would be less—Dickens, John Forster, and Wills were miserly when it came to paying writers other than Dickens—but rather the fact that Dickens would again be my editor.

  Yet I remained serenely confident that the hostile reviews of the day meant nothing. Critics and bourgeois reviewers simply were not ready for the heroine of Armadale, my femme fatale Lydia Gwilt. Not only did Lydia dominate the book in a way that no female literary protagonist in my era had done, but she stood out from the pages in a way that no woman in all of Dickens’s fiction ever had or ever would. The full, three-dimensional portrait of this woman, as scheming and vicious as Lydia Gwilt may have seemed to the careless reader or clueless reviewer, was a tour de force.

  And yes, speaking of occasionally vicious women, Caroline G—— chose this hot summer to upbraid me on a wide front of issues.

  “Why will you not consider marriage, Wilkie? You present me as a wife—almost—to your friends who visit here. I am your hostess and proofreader and housekeeper and lover. Everyone who knows you knows that we live as man and wife. It is past time that we make that perception reality.”

  I said, “If you know anything about me at all, my dear Caroline, you must know that I do not care a fig for perceptions or other people’s opinions.”

  “But I do,” cried the woman with whom I’d spent the past ten years. “And Harriet is now fifteen. She needs a father.”

  “She had a father,” I replied placidly. “He died.”

  “When she was one year old!” cried Caroline. She appeared to be teetering on that thin ledge between anger and tears, reason and hysteria, upon which women so frequently find themselves. Or deliberately find themselves. “She is becoming a young woman. She will enter into society soon. She needs your name.”

  “Nonsense,” I chuckled. “She has a perfectly good name and a perfectly good home. She shall always have my support and our love. What more could any intelligent young woman wish to have?”

  “You promised that we would buy or lease the nicer home on Gloucester Place by this year or next,” whined Caroline. I hate and despise it when women whine. All men, Dear Reader, hate and despise it when women whine. It has always been thus. The only difference in men’s reactions to whining is that a very few, like me, refuse to give in to this auditory and emotional blackmail.

  I looked over the top of my glasses at her. “I said that we should have the place sooner or later, my pet. And so we shall.”

  “How?” demanded Caroline. “I spoke to Mrs Shernwold while you were having fun with Dickens in Birmingham. She says that she would consider leasing or selling ninety Gloucester to us except for the fact that her unmarried son is returning from Africa in a year or so and she has promised it to him.”

  “Trust me on this, Caroline my dear,” I said. “I have promised you this home someday and you and Harriet shall have it. Have I ever failed you, my sausage?”

  She glared at me. Caroline G—— was a handsome woman—some would say beautiful—despite her advancing years (although she would never tell me her age, Inspector Field had told me that in all likelihood Caroline had been born thirty-six years earlier, in 1830)—but she was neither handsome nor beautiful when she glared. Despite the tons of romantic literary twaddle to the contrary, trust me, Dear Reader, when I assure you that no woman can be attractive when she whines and glares.

  “You fail me by not marrying me and giving Harriet a proper father,” she all but shrieked at me. “Do not think that I am not capable of finding and marrying another man, Wilkie Collins. Do not think that for a second!”

  “I do not think that for a second, my sausage,” I said and turned back to the newspaper.

  CHARLES DICKENS, DESPITE his continuing illnesses and growing anxieties when travelling by rail, seemed to be having a relaxed summer. I overheard Wills telling Forster at the offices of All the Year Round that the total receipts for Dickens’s spring tour had earned the writer £4,672. The Chappells—whom Dickens had once described to me as “speculators, Wilkie, pure speculators, though, of course, of the worthiest and most honourable kind”—were so delighted with their share of the profits that no sooner had Dickens completed his last London reading on 12 June and returned to Gad’s Hill “. . . to rest and hear the birds sing,” than they proposed to Dickens another tour for the next winter, consisting of fifty nights on the road. Wills told Forster that Dickens had considered asking for £70 a night—he was sure that the ticket sales would support that—but instead offered the Chappells forty-two readings for £2,500. They accepted at once.

  The days at Gad’s Hill through June and July were busy with guests, local fairs at which Dickens judged everything from pie contests to cricket matches, and—of course—more business. The Inimitable was not working on a novel at the moment, but he had begun work on a projected new edition of his works, the so-called Charles Dickens Edition, that would have each of his novels, freshly set, appearing once a month for 3/6. Naturally he could not leave such well-enough alone, so he offered in his prospectus to write a new preface for each volume.

  As it turned out, this would be not only the most popular of all the many editions of Dickens’s work, but would be—for him—his last
edition.

  I saw Dickens frequently that summer, both at Gad’s Hill (where he never seemed to be entertaining fewer than half a dozen guests) and in London (he came up to his offices at All the Year Round at least twice a week, and we would often meet for lunch or dinner). Besides already planning his next Christmas story for our magazine, rehearsing new material for his winter tour, and writing the prefaces for his new editions, Dickens told me that he had some ideas for a new novel that he hoped to serialise in the spring of 1867. He asked me what I was working on.

  “I have a few ideas,” I said. “A thread or two and a few beads to string on them.”

  “Anything that we might serialise?”

  “Quite possibly. I’ve been thinking of a tale involving a detective.”

  “One from Scotland Yard Detectives Bureau?”

  “Or one working for a private detection bureau.”

  “Ah,” said Dickens and smiled. “Something along the lines of the further adventures of Inspector Bucket.”

  I shook my head. “I was thinking that the name Cuff might work,” I said. “Sergeant Cuff.”

  Dickens’s smile widened. “Sergeant Cuff. Very good, my dear Wilkie. Very good indeed.”

  I TOLD THE boy waiting on my corner to tell the inspector that we should meet. The time and place had long since been prearranged, and the next day at two PM, I saw his short, squat figure hurrying towards me at Waterloo Bridge.

  “Mr Collins.”

  “Inspector.” I nodded towards the shadows under the bridge. “ ‘Unfurnished lodging for a fortnight.’ ”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “Sam Weller to Pickwick.”

  “Ah, yes, sir. Of course. Mr Dickens has always been an admirer of this bridge. I helped him with his piece ‘Down with the Tide’ by introducing him to the night toll-taker here some years ago. The literary gentleman was quite interested in the suicides and bodies floating in on the tides, I was told.”