Drood, Page 46

  The house on Gloucester Place was much larger and grander than the home we had leased at Melcombe Place. This house was set back from the street and terraced, five storeys high, with ample room for a family much larger than ours and for servants far more numerous and well-trained and better turned-out than our three poor waifs. We now had enough guest rooms to accommodate a small army of visitors. The dining room on the ground floor was thrice the size of that in Melcombe Place, and we used a comfortable room behind it as our family sitting room. I immediately took possession of the huge L-shaped double drawing room on the ground floor as my study, although it was directly in the path of visitors passing by in the hall, servants cleaning, Caroline working in the nearby sitting room, and all the other intrusion and traffic of daily life. But with its huge fireplace, high windows, central location in the home, and airy feeling, it had none of the closed-off darkness of my Melcombe Place study. I could only hope that the Other Wilkie would not make the move with us.

  When remodelling work on the house was finally completed in the late autumn, it was much to my liking. I had books and pictures everywhere, of course, and the panelled walls of Gloucester Place lent themselves to displaying my art much better than had the dark, wallpapered walls at our previous residences.

  I had a portrait of my mother as a young girl in a white dress— painted by Margaret Carpenter—that I hung in my study. My mother never saw it there (since it would have been inappropriate for her to visit the house with Caroline G—— in it), but I reported to her in a letter that it was “still like you after all these years.” (This was not quite true, since my mother was now in her seventies and age had taken its toll.)

  Also in my study were a portrait of my father and a painting of Sorrento by him, large paintings that flanked my massive writing table, which had also been my father’s. On another panelled wall in that room hung a portrait of me as a young man done by my brother, Charley, and another portrait of me by Millais. The only work of my own in the house was my Academy painting The Smuggler’s Retreat, which I hung in the dining room.

  I did not trust the novelty of gas lighting—although Dickens and others doted on it—so my rooms, books, drapes, writing table, and paintings in Number 90 Gloucester Place continued to be lighted by wax candles and kerosene lamps just as in my previous homes. I loved the soft light that candles and fireplaces imparted to everything—not the least to people’s faces when gathered around a hearth or dining table—and would never have supplanted it with the harsh, inhuman glare of gas lighting, even though working by candlelight or lantern glow often gave me severe headaches which required the administration of more laudanum. It was worth the price for the ambience.

  The house, however grand-looking from the outside, had fallen into some disrepair under the regime of the late Mrs Shernwold, and it took a small army of workmen more than a month to paint, repair or install plumbing, knock down partitions, repanel, retile, and generally bring the house up to the standards one would expect of a famous author’s home.

  My first step in dealing with this chaos was to end all social visitations, either coming or going. My second was to absent myself from the potential felicity of Number 90 Gloucester Place—sleeping and working for weeks exclusively at my mother’s cottage at Southborough or at Gad’s Hill Place—and to leave the dusty, dirty supervision to Caroline. As I wrote to my friend Frederick Lehman on 10 September, the day after we moved in—“I had an old house to leave—a new house to find—that new house to bargain for and take—lawyers and supervisors to consult—British workmen to employ—and through it all, to keep my literary business going without so much as a day’s stoppage.”

  That autumn was a warm one, and Dickens and I carried out our collaboration on No Thoroughfare primarily in his lovely little Swiss chalet. Dickens had turned his long writing table up on the first floor there into a sort of partners desk—with two leg wells—and we put in long hours of scribbling together with only the hum of bees and the corresponding hum of the occasional comment or question passing between us to disturb the comfortable autumn silence.

  Back near the end of August, Dickens had sent me a note that typified the easy give-and-take of ideas and narrative that would mark our work on this project:

  I have a general idea which I hope will supply the kind of interest we want. Let us arrange to culminate in a wintry flight and pursuit across the Alps, under lonely circumstances, and against warnings. Let us get into all the horrors and dangers of such an adventure under the most terrific circumstances, either escaping from or trying to overtake (the latter I think) some one, on escaping from or overtaking whom the love, prosperity, and Nemesis of the story depend. There we can get ghostly interest, picturesque interest, breathless interest of time and circumstance, and force the design up to any powerful climax we please. If you will keep this in your mind, as I will in mine, urging the story towards it as we go along, we shall get a very Avalanche of power out of it, and thunder it down on the readers’ heads.

  Even by late September we had no Avalanche yet and Dickens could only report that “I am jogging at the pace of a wheelbarrow propelled by a Greenwich Pensioner” and “Like you I am working with a snail-like slowness . . .,” but the work together at Gad’s Hill accelerated both the pace of our separate and co-mingled narratives and raised our levels of enthusiasm.

  By 5 October I was back at my mother’s cottage, enjoying good meals and a feeling that the end of our joint endeavour was in sight, while Dickens was sending the following note:

  I have brought on Marguerite to the rescue, and I have so left it as that Vendale—to spare her—says it was an accident in the storm, and nothing more. By the way, Obenreizer has received a cut from Vendale, made with his own dagger. This in case you want him with a scar. If you don’t, no matter. I have no doubt my Proof of the Mountain adventure will be full of mistakes, as my MS. is not very legible. But you will see what it means. The Dénouement I see pretty much as you see it—without further glimpses as yet. The Obenreizer question I will consider (q’ry Suicide?). I have made Marguerite wholly devoted to her lover. Whenever you may give me notice of your being ready, we will appoint to meet here to wind up.

  I wonder, Dear Reader, what importance these working notes between two such professional authors might have a century and more hence? Very little, I would suppose, but given Dickens’s fame, even in my lifetime, perhaps even these hastily scribbled and cryptic missives might be of some interest to some minor scholar one day. Could we say the same of the notes I sent Dickens? Alas, we shall never know, since Dickens still regularly burned all correspondence sent to him, continuing—as it were—the ongoing conflagration that he first began in the autumn of 1860.

  It was that same 5 October, the first Saturday of the new month, that I returned home to Number 90 Gloucester Place—having not written or cabled Caroline ahead of time that I would be returning—only to arrive late, to find most of the new home’s rooms unlit, and to discover Caroline having dinner with a strange man in the kitchen.

  I confess to being startled, if not angered. Caroline smiled at me from her place at the table—the servants were gone that night—although I saw the blush begin at her neckline and work its way up behind her ears and then around to her cheeks.

  “What is this?” I asked the man. “Who are you?”

  He was a thin, sallow, short, unimpressive little weasel of a man, his jacket of the most common moleskin. Everything about him was common. He rose and began to answer me, but before he could speak, I said, “Wait, I know you.… I hired you a month ago. Clow, isn’t it? Or something like that. You’re the plumber.”

  “Joseph Clow, sir,” he said, his voice all whine and adenoids. “And yes you did, sir. We’ve just finished the last of the upstairs plumbing today, and your housekeeper, Mrs G——, graciously extended me an invitation to take dinner here, sir.”

  I gave my “housekeeper” a withering look, but she merely smiled back at me. Such insolence! I had just
borrowed and spent a staggering £800 to buy this insolent baggage one of the finest mansions near Portman Square, and here she was arranging an assignation with a common workman behind my back in my own home!

  “Very good,” I said, giving a smile that communicated I shall deal with you later to Caroline. “I just dropped by to pick up some fresh linen. I shall be off to my club.”

  “Your housekeeper prepares an excellent spotted dick,” said this person. Had I detected any insolence or sarcasm, I believe I would have struck him, but his comment seemed innocent.

  “Mr Clow’s father is a distiller and he has part-interest in the business,” said Caroline, brazen to the end. “He brought a very fine sherry to help celebrate the completion.”

  I nodded and went upstairs. I did not lack for linen in my portmanteau. I had come back to renew the laudanum from my large jug. Filling my travel flask and drinking down two large glassfuls, I went to my dresser, felt around in the lower drawer beneath my linens, and found the loaded pistol that Hatchery had given me so long ago.

  Who would blame me if I shot both Caroline and her skinny, moustached, grimy plumber of a lover? The man had probably been in my bed in my new home even before I had—or at least it was certain he had hoped to.

  Then again, I realised, to the world at large, Caroline G—— was indeed my housekeeper, not my wife. I was certainly justified in shooting Joseph Clow as an intruder, but few juries or judges would see the justification of my shooting a gentleman caller who had agreed to have dinner in the servants’ kitchen with my housekeeper. Even the accursed sherry might be put into evidence by an eager prosecutor.

  Smiling grimly, I set the pistol away, gathered up a valise of clothing merely for the show of it, made sure my flask was topped off, and went out the front way to spend the night at my club. I did not go to the back of the house to look in again at Caroline—who had looked flushed and lovely in the candlelight, despite her advanced age of being in her thirties—or at her weasel-plumber of a prospective lover and husband.

  By the time I reached my club, I was whistling and in a good mood. I could see even then how I could use Mr Joseph Clow to my own advantage.

  DICKENS AND I completed No Thoroughfare in late October, weeks later than we had anticipated. I was in charge of reprint rights and dealt with Frederick Chapman in the negotiations, but in the end George Smith of Smith and Elder made a better offer and I immediately transferred the rights to him.

  Dickens and I both saw the theatrical potential in No Thoroughfare and because, in those days, any thief with a stage and a few actors could steal literary material simply by adapting it first, we decided to steal a march on any potential thieves and adapt it ourselves. Dickens—in a hurry to wind up his affairs so that he could depart for America—rattled off a rough scenario to our actor-impresario mutual friend Fechter and gave me the responsibility of doing the hard work of adaptation after he, Dickens, had left the country.

  At the end of October, the tall house at Number 90 Gloucester Place was finished to my satisfaction—even the plumbing—and Caroline and I gave a house-warming dinner that also served as a farewell party for Dickens, who was scheduled to sail for America on 9 November. I hired an excellent French cook for the affair—she was to work for us on a semi-permanent basis in the coming years, although she did not live in the house—and took an active part in preparing the menu and overseeing the preparation.

  The party was a great success and the first of many at the Gloucester Place home.

  A few days later, on 2 November, I was one of the stewards at a huge and much more formal farewell banquet for Dickens that we held at the Freemasons’ Hall. There were 450 invited guests, the crème of London’s art, literary, and dramatic universe—all male of course—crowding the main body of the hall, while some 100 women (including the duplicitous but lovely Caroline G—— as well as Dickens’s sister-in-law Georgina and daughter Mary) sat sequestered up in the Ladies Gallery, though the women were allowed to join the men for coffee afterwards. Caroline’s daughter, Carrie, now almost seventeen, was also there that night. In my nervousness, I had written the organisers twice to make sure that my request for tickets for the two ladies had been honoured.

  The Grenadier Guards’ band played from another balcony that night. One surprise guest was Dickens’s son Sydney, a sailor whose ship had just docked in Portsmouth two nights before. British and American flags bedecked the main dining hall, and panels above twenty arches honoured with golden laurels each bore the title of one of Charles Dickens’s works. Lord Lytton, now sixty-four years of age but looking twice that, was the chairman for the evening and hovered over the proceedings like a gimlet-eyed bird of prey in all-black formal dress.

  When Dickens finally rose to speak after a series of increasingly hyperbolic speeches of praise, my collaborator at first faltered and then began to weep. When he finally could speak, his words were eloquent but not, many agreed afterwards, as eloquent as his tears.

  I confess to sitting at the main table that night, my head spinning with wine and an extra fortifying round of laudanum, and wondering what all these famous guests—Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, Sir Charles Russell, Lord Houghton, a veritable gaggle of Royal Academicians, the Lord Mayor of London—might say if they could have seen Dickens descending into the sewers of Undertown as I had. Or if they had any suspicion of the probable fate of a lonely young man named Edmond Dickenson.

  Perhaps it would not have mattered to them.

  On 9 November, I went up to Liverpool with Caroline and Carrie to see Dickens off as he departed for America.

  The author had been given the Second Officer’s spacious cabin on the deck of the Cuba. (Carrie later asked me where the Second Officer might be sleeping during the crossing, and I had to admit that I had no idea.) Unlike most accommodations on the ship, the cabin had both a door and a window that could be opened to take advantage of the fresh sea air.

  Dickens was fretful and distracted during our short visit and only I knew why. And I knew why only because of my continued association with Inspector Field.

  Despite his first-hand knowledge of the Puritanical conservative nature of Americans from a quarter of a century earlier, Dickens somehow had not yet surrendered his plan to bring Ellen Ternan to America so that she could share the tour with him, perhaps in the disguise of an assistant to Dolby. This would never come to pass, of course, but Dickens was truly a hopeless romantic when it came to such fantasies.

  I was not supposed to know about it, but the Inimitable had arranged with Wills at the magazine office to forward a coded telegram to the young actress in which she would be instructed on what to do once Dickens arrived in the New World. A message of “All well” would have her speeding on the next ship to America, all expenses paid through an account Dickens had left under Wills’s supervision. A reluctant code of “Safe and well” would mean that she would remain on the Continent, where she and her mother were currently vacationing while she waited word on her fate.

  In his heart—or perhaps “in his rational mind” would be more appropriate—Dickens must have known that fair day of 9 November, as I had known when I first heard of the foolish scheme through Inspector Field, that the message “Safe and well,” meaning “Lonely but very, very much in the scowling, prying, judging, public American eye,” would be the one sent to Ellen via Wills.

  Our own goodbyes were emotional. Dickens was aware of how much work he had left for me to finish—the proofings and revisions of No Thoroughfare as well as the scripting and staging with Fechter—but there was more to the emotion than that. After Carrie, Caroline, and I had descended the gangplank, I returned to the airy Second Officer’s cabin under the pretext of having forgotten one of my gloves. Dickens was expecting me.

  “I pray God that Drood will not follow me to America,” he whispered as we again clasped hands in farewell.

  “He will not,” I said with a certainty I did not feel.

  As I turned to leave, thinking that it
was possible—even probable—that I would never see my friend Charles Dickens again, he stopped me.

  “Wilkie… in the conversation with Drood in your study on nine June, the discussion you do not remember… I feel it necessary to warn you…”

  I could not move. I felt as if my blood had turned to ice and that the ice had invaded my very cells.

  “You agreed to be Drood’s biographer if something happened to me,” said Dickens. He looked seasick even though the Cuba was still firmly tied to the wharf in Liverpool Harbour and was not rocking in the least. “Drood threatened to kill you and all of your family if you reneged on this promise… just as he has threatened, repeatedly, to kill me and mine. If he finds out that I went to America to escape him rather than to speak to publishers there about his biography…”

  After a minute I found that I could blink. In another minute I could speak. “Think nothing of it, Charles,” I said. “Have a good reading tour in America. Return to us safe and healthy.”

  I went out of the cabin and down the gangplank to a waiting Carrie and a sulking, worried Caroline.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  In the month after Dickens left for America I felt rather as if my father had died again. It was not an altogether unpleasant sensation.

  I had never been busier. Dickens had not only left me the revisions and proofs of No Thoroughfare, but had also put me in charge of editing the entire Christmas Issue of All the Year Round. This nonplussed our friend William Henry Wills—the Inimitable’s second-in-command at the magazine, who had been unalterably opposed to Dickens’s going to America in the first place—but Wills, always the obedient soldier, soon settled into his position of second-in-command to me. I spent more and more time at the magazine’s offices as November went on and—since Dickens had also requested that I check regularly on Georgina, Mary, and Katey at Gad’s Hill (and since I found it easier to edit and work on The Moonstone there and since my brother, Charley, was also there much of the time), I was soon living more in Charles Dickens’s life than in Wilkie Collins’s.