Drood, Page 43

  I finished my ale and smiled at Hibbert Hatchery as the huge man, in his attempt not to overhear us, was respectfully browsing through the copy of The Woman in White that I had just signed for him. “Does the book meet with your approval, Detective Hatchery?”

  “It is a gift beyond measure, Mr Collins,” rumbled the giant.

  “The anniversary, Mr Collins?” prompted the insufferable Barris.

  “Mr Dickens did not invite me to stay at Gad’s Hill or to wander the city with him on Sunday night—the ninth—in search of his phantom Drood,” I said, still not turning to look at Barris.

  “Then, sir,” said the detective, “it is imperative that we arrange a time for you to meet with Inspector Field. He has laid on twenty-three operatives for Sunday night’s watch and…”

  “Instead,” I continued, smoothly interrupting the upstart, “Mr Dickens has agreed to come to dinner at my house at Melcombe Place on Sunday and…” I paused just an instant for full effect. “. . . to spend the night there in my home.”

  Barris blinked. “Dickens will be at your house on the night of the Staplehurst anniversary?”

  I nodded, feeling some well-earned condescension in the slow motion of my head.

  Barris jumped to his feet and turned the chair around with a clatter. “I must deliver this information to the inspector at once. Thank you, Mr Collins. This is an… extraordinary… development.” He touched his invisible hat brim and, to Hatchery, said, “Stay safe there, Hibbert.”

  And then Barris was out of the public house, and Hatchery and I walked the mile and a half or so to St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery. There he set out his few things for his long vigil—a small lantern, a greasy sack with his three AM dinner inside it (packed, no doubt, by one of his daughters), a small flask of water, and his pristine copy of The Woman in White.

  Descending the stairs into the ancient catacombs, I reflected—not for the first time—on the human creature’s infinite ability to adapt to circumstances. Two years ago, this descent as I followed Dickens down to the catacombs had been strange and not a little terrifying for me. Now it was as nothing—as commonplace as walking to my corner chemist’s to renew my weekly jug of laudanum.

  King Lazaree the Chinee and his two bodyguards met me at the tattered curtain to their alcove. My pipe was filled and ready for me.

  Eight hours later, when I ascended the stairs to a new day, Detective Hatchery had tidily tucked everything away except the novel, which he was reading in a thin strip of morning light coming in through the partially opened crypt door.

  “Everything all right, sir?” he asked as he slipped the book into one of his many voluminous pockets.

  “Everything is very much all right, Detective Hatchery. Very much so. It appears to be a beautiful day.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  On Sunday, 9 June, 1867, I returned home later than I had planned. I had told Caroline that morning that I would be at my club working on my book until evening but that I would be home before Dickens arrived for dinner. As you may have guessed, Dear Reader, I actually spent most of the day with Martha R—— in her rooms on Bolsover Street, had lost track of the time, and hurried home feeling slightly dishevelled and a bit knackered.

  I came into the downstairs parlour to find Charles Dickens again making mesmeric passes over an apparently somnolent Caroline G——.

  Dickens was the first to notice me. “Ah, my dear Wilkie,” he cried jovially. “Just in time!”

  Caroline opened her eyes and said, “Mr Dickens was mesmerising me.”

  “So it appears,” I said coolly.

  “Showing me how to apply the procedure to you!” she said. “To help you get to sleep on those nights when… you know.”

  “I know that I’ve been sleeping quite well of recent,” I lied.

  Dickens smiled. “But if Caroline can use the magnetic influence to help you drift off of an evening,” he said, “you could cut back or eliminate your dependence on laudanum at night.”

  “I need hardly use any as it is,” I said.

  “Oh, Wilkie, you know that’s not true!” cried Caroline. “Just two nights ago you were…” She broke off when she saw my cold stare. “I shall go talk to Cook,” she said, “and see if dinner is ready.”

  Dinner was ready soon and it was a success, not only in taste and quality (a surprise, since our “Cook,” Besse, was also our parlourmaid and one of only three servants we kept, the others being her husband, George, and their daughter, Agnes, who was Carrie’s age) but also in terms of conversation and merriment.

  Carrie, who always seemed to delight something in Charles Dickens (even as his own daughters did so less and less frequently those days), was at her blushing, school-girl best—young Harriet, like her mother, was intelligent enough and had already learned the subtle arts of being beguiling with older men without being coquettish—and even Caroline carried her own in our conversations. Dickens himself was relaxed and affable.

  I do not know if I’ve described it accurately or sufficiently in this poor memoir, Dear Reader from my posthumous future, but Charles Dickens, while quite possibly a villain and even a murderer, was almost always a most pleasant man to be around. His conversation was easy, agreeable, almost never self-centred, and totally free of any effort or humbug. He held the unique position of being, at least among my circle of famous English friends and acquaintances, never boring and a capable and sympathetic conversationalist.… He never reached after aphorisms or heavy wit… and one aspect of his active listening was that he laughed a lot. And infectiously.

  Dickens laughed much this ninth of June in the Year of Our Lord 1867. It seemed at that dinner that he had no concerns and nothing on his mind.

  After dinner, we went up to my study for brandy and cigars. I admit to being a bit concerned about going into the study so close to dark—the evenings were long in this time in June, and though the weather had turned and it was cool and pouring rain outside, dim light still came in through the drapes—but I comforted myself with the knowledge that I rarely saw the Other Wilkie this early at night. Nor had I ever seen the Other Wilkie when anyone else was around, even though—and perhaps I should have told you before this, Dear Reader—I have been haunted, in one way or the other, by the sensed and then-visible presence of the Other Wilkie since I was a small boy.

  But not this night.

  Dickens excused himself to visit the water closet, and I took my brandy and went over to part the drapes and look out into the darkness.

  The rain still poured down. I smiled slightly, thinking of Inspector Field and his twenty-three operatives—most of them hired on just for tonight, I’d learned this week, since, surprisingly, Field’s own private investigations agency had only seven men working full-time—out there now somewhere, unseen but also certainly uncomfortable in the rain and unseasonable cold. Carrie and our girl Agnes had got a fire going strong in my study and it felt quite cosy.

  It had amused me, only the day before, when I had been required to get Caroline, Carrie, and the three servants all out of the house on various ruses so that Field, Barris, and several of his men could go through our Melcombe Place home from cellar to attic.

  Inspector Field had insisted on this and I could do nothing but walk behind him as they inspected all doors and windows—estimating aloud how impossible a jump would be from the nearby roofs to these upstairs windows and deciding upon various vantage points in the neighbourhood from which to watch the alley, back yard, and nearby sidestreets. Finally they had gone through the cellar with a sort of fanatical intensity, even going so far as to move half a ton or so of coal in my coal-cellar. There, where the coal was always piled several feet high near the back wall, they had discovered a hole in the stone wall… a hole not ten inches wide.

  The detectives shined their bullseye lanterns down the hole, but the corrugated tunnel so revealed simply curved down out of sight into stone and soil.

  “Where does that go?” demanded Inspector Field.


  “How could I know?” I said. “I have never seen it before.”

  Field then called for Barris and his men, who—unbelievably!—had brought bricks, mortar, and the tools with which they could close up such an innocuous aperture. They did so in less than ten minutes, with Barris himself laying the bricks and applying the trowel. I noticed the easy expertise with which he worked and could imagine the reasons for those massive forearms. However much Mr Reginald Barris might sport an Oxford or Cambridge accent, his background was decidedly that of a lower-class craftsman.

  “Are you protecting Dickens and me from rats?” I asked with a smile.

  The inspector aimed that corpulent and strangely ominous finger at me. “Mark my words, Mr Collins. Either Mr Dickens will strive to see Drood tomorrow, this important anniversary of their meeting at Staplehurst, or Drood will find a way to see Dickens. Either way, sir, you are in danger if that meeting takes place here.”

  I’d laughed and pointed to the tiny hole, now fully and redundantly bricked over. “You expect Drood to somehow slide his way through that?” I showed with my hands how narrow the aperture had been; a child oiled with grease could not have slithered through.

  Field did not smile in return. “The thing that you call Drood can enter in through smaller apertures than that, alas, Mr Collins. If once invited, that is.”

  “Well, there you have it, Inspector,” I said, still laughing softly. “I have never invited Mr Drood into my home.”

  “No, but perhaps Mr Dickens has,” said Inspector Field. Then the men went on to inspect every square inch of the rest of my cellar.

  I AM GOING to America,” said Dickens.

  We were relaxing with the last of our brandy and cigars, the fire hissing and spitting at our feet and the rain pounding at the windows. Dickens was as quiet and sombre in my study now as he had been jovial and talkative at our dinner table an hour earlier.

  “You can’t be serious,” I said.

  “I am.”

  “But…” I began and had to pause. I was about to say, But surely your health will not allow this, but discretion caught me in time. I had heard the serious state of Dickens’s health from several sources, including Frank Beard, my brother, Charley, and Dickens’s daughter Kate (often through Charley), as well as through other mutual friends, but it would only infuriate Dickens if I brought up my awareness of his several serious infirmities: among which were an increasing fatigue that had caused him to collapse between performances during his spring tour of Scotland and England, increasing trouble with his left leg and left kidney, difficulties with digestion, flatulence, and accompanying headaches, and—perhaps most visible to all of us—his rapid ageing.

  I said aloud, “But surely your dislike of America and the Americans would preclude you from returning there. You certainly made your disdain clear in American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit.”

  “Pfah,” said Dickens with a wave of his hand. “I visited America twenty-five years ago, my dear Wilkie. Even such a backward place has had to reform in twenty-five years. They certainly have in terms of respect of copyright and payment to English authors for serialised works—as you must know, to your great benefit.”

  This last was true. I had made an excellent deal with the Americans for Armadale and had almost completed negotiations for an even better arrangement for The Moonstone, which I had just begun writing.

  “Besides,” continued Dickens, “I have many friends there, some of whom are too old or timid to make the Crossing. I should like to see them a final time before they or I die.”

  Dickens’s talk of death made me anxious. I sipped the last of my brandy and stared into the fire, again imagining foolish Inspector Field and his small legion of men huddling out there in the rain somewhere. If Dickens was going to do what Field had insisted he might—plead some forgotten meeting somewhere and slip out of my house rather than spend the night—he had better hurry. It was getting late.

  “At any rate,” said Dickens, settling deeper into the leather cushions of his wing chair, “I’ve decided to send Dolby over in early August to investigate the lay of the land, as the Americans like to say. He’ll be carrying my two new stories, ‘George Silverman’s Explanation’ and ‘A Holiday Romance.’ They were commissioned by American publishers, and I believe the latter is appearing there in a children’s magazine called Our Young Folks or something similar.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You showed me ‘A Holiday Romance’ at Gad’s Hill a few weekends ago, you might remember… told me that the tales in it were written by children, as was their whimsical conceit. And I believed you.”

  “I was not sure whether to be flattered or insulted, my dear Wilkie.”

  “Neither, of course, Charles,” I said. “A mere statement of fact. As always, when you set out to do a thing with words, it is done in its convincing entirety. But I do remember you telling me that your strength was almost broken twenty-five years ago under the travel and labour of your first American tour. And Forster says to this day that the Americans were unworthy of a man of genius such as yourself. Are you certain, Charles, that you wish to put yourself under such a strain once again?”

  Dickens had accepted my invitation to smoke a cigar and now blew smoke towards my ceiling. “It is true that I was younger then, Wilkie, but I was also worn out from writing Master Humphrey’s Clock and—only days before departing—I had undergone a rather serious surgical operation. Also, the speechmaking I was required to carry out once in America would have exhausted an M.P. with nothing else to do. I was also—I admit it—less patient and much more irritable then than I am now in the serenity of my middle life.”

  I thought about the so-called serenity of this author’s middle life. Inspector Field had informed me that Ellen Ternan had been ill throughout much of April and May, requiring that Charles Dickens—perhaps our nation’s most public man—disappear for long days on end so that he could be by his ailing mistress’s bedside. Dickens’s habit of secrecy did not extend just to his alleged meetings with the creature named Drood; dissembling had become second nature to the writer. On at least two recent occasions I knew of for certain, Dickens had sent me letters purportedly written from Gad’s Hill Place when, in actuality, he was with Ellen Ternan or staying at his secret home nearby.

  “There are other reasons why I must leave the country,” Dickens said softly. “And it has come time to speak to you of them.”

  I raised my eyebrows slightly, smoked, and waited. I expected some new fabulation, so Dickens’s actual words were a surprise.

  “You remember the personage I have referred to as Drood,” said Dickens.

  “Of course,” I said. “How could I forget either your telling of the creature’s purported story or our expedition two summers ago into the tunnels under the city?”

  “Indeed,” Dickens said drily. “I think that you do not believe me when I speak of Drood, my dear Wilkie.…” He waved away my hurried objections. “No, now listen a moment, my friend. Please.

  “There are many things I have not told you, Wilkie… many things I could not tell you… many things you would not have believed if I had told you. But the existence of Drood is real enough, as you almost discovered in Birmingham.”

  Again I opened my mouth, but found I could not speak. What did he mean? I had long since convinced myself that my waking nightmare-vision during Dickens’s reading more than a year earlier in Birmingham had been a laudanum-dream brought on by the terrible confrontation with the thugs in the alley in that same city. The blood I had later found on my shirt collar and cravat had, of course, come from a reopening of the slight wound inflicted when one of the thugs had laid his knife to my neck that very afternoon.

  But how could Dickens know about my drug-induced dream? I had told no one, not even Caroline or Martha.

  Before I could formulate a question, Dickens was speaking again.

  “Instead of wondering about the reality or non-reality of Drood, my dear Wilkie, have you ever wondered about yo
ur friend Inspector Field’s true motivations in his obsession with capturing or killing the man?”

  I blushed at the “your friend Inspector Field.” I always assumed that Dickens knew little or nothing about my continued contact with the ageing detective—how could he know?—but I was often surprised by what Dickens actually seemed to know or had somehow managed to surmise.

  Then again, if Drood were real—which I was not for a second ready to concede—it was possible that Dickens came by his information through that phantom and his agents, much as I was now doing through Inspector Field and his agents.

  Not for the first time in the past two years, I felt like a pawn in some terrible chess game being played in the dark of night.

  “You’ve told me your thoughts about Inspector Field’s so-called obsession,” I said. “You said that he thought such a coup would result in his pension being reinstated.”

  “That hardly seems adequate motive for the inspector’s recent draconian… one might say desperate… measures, does it?” asked Dickens.

  I thought about that. Or at least I frowned, squinted, and projected an image of thinking. In truth, I was most aware at that moment of the rheumatical gout gathering in a sphere of spreading pain behind my right eye, creeping around behind my right ear, embedding tendrils of itself deeper into my skull with each passing moment. “No,” I said at last. “I guess it does not.”

  “I know Field,” said Dickens. The fire crackled and coal embers collapsed in upon themselves. The study suddenly felt appallingly warm. “I’ve known Field for almost two decades, Wilkie, and his ambition surpasseth all understanding.”

  You are speaking of yourself, I thought, but said nothing.

  “Inspector Charles Frederick Field wants to be Chief of Detectives again,” said Dickens. “He fully plans on being head of Scotland Yard Detective Bureau.”

  I laughed despite my growing pain. “Surely this cannot be the case, Charles. The man is ancient… in his mid-sixties.”