Drood, Page 47

  Caroline tended to agree with that assessment, although not with the good grace and humour I had anticipated, and tended to begin arguments with me whenever I did spend a few days at Number 90 Gloucester Place. As we moved towards December, I spent fewer and fewer days at my new London house and more time at Gad’s Hill or eating in Dickens’s sparse rooms and sleeping in his comfortable bed above the magazine offices.

  I happened to be there when the telegram “Safe and well” arrived for Wills and was duly sent on to Ellen Ternan in Florence, where she was staying with her mother and family. How Dickens had ever imagined that Ellen might travel alone from Italy across the Atlantic to America I cannot imagine. The fantasy was simply another sign of how lost in his romantic dreams Dickens was at this time. I did learn later from Wills, almost by accident, that Dickens had known before he set sail that Americans would not have countenanced the presence of this single woman in Dickens’s small entourage. Dolby had sounded things out after his arrival and sent his verdict on the propriety of Ellen’s presence in a single telegraphed syllable—“No.”

  Dickens and I had agreed that the stage adaptation of No Thoroughfare should be produced at the Adelphi Theatre as close to Christmas Day as possible and that our mutual friend Charles Fechter should play the villain, Obenreizer. I had first been impressed with Fechter’s performances almost fifteen years earlier and had met him in 1860 when he was in London to play in Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas. By common impulse, immediately upon that meeting, Fechter and I had dispensed with the tentative formalities of acquaintance and had become fast friends.

  Born in London of an English mother and a German father, raised in France but having now chosen London as his home again, Fechter was a man of incredible charm and loyalty—the gift of the complete Swiss chalet to Dickens two Christmases ago had been typical of his generosity and impetuousness—but he had no more business sense than a child.

  Fechter’s home in London may have been the only salon less formal than my own. Whereas I had the habit of leaving guests in Caroline’s care at the table if I had to rush off for a theatre engagement or somesuch, Fechter had been known to greet guests in his dressing gown and slippers and to allow them to choose which bottle of wine they preferred and take it with them to their place at the table. He and I adored French cookery and twice we put the inexhaustible resources of gastronomic France to the test by dining on one article of food only, presented under many different forms. I remember that we once had a potato dinner in six courses and another time an egg dinner in eight courses.

  Fechter’s one flaw as an actor was terrible stage fright, and his dresser was known to follow him around with a basin backstage before the curtain went up.

  This November into December I was hurriedly writing the script for the stage version of No Thoroughfare and sent proofs straight to Fechter, who reported that he had “fallen madly in love with the subject” and immediately collaborated on the dramatic scenario. I was not surprised that the actor loved the villainous lead character of Obenreizer, since Dickens and I had held Fechter in mind as we’d created him.

  On the days when I rode the train out towards Rochester to Gad’s Hill Place, it was easy to think that Charles Dickens was gone for good—I still felt it quite probable that he would be, given the sad (if hidden from most) state of his health and the rigours of the American reading tour—and that I not only could someday but already was filling his place in the world.

  By early December No Thoroughfare would be out in All the Year Round and I had no doubt it would be a great success. Certainly Dickens’s name had something to do with that—his Christmas stories had brought the public flocking to buy the Christmas Issue of his two different magazines for twenty years now—but it was also true that my Woman in White had sold better than some serialised Dickens tales and I was confident that The Moonstone would do even better in 1868. Sitting at the dinner table at Gad’s Hill Place with Georgina on my left, my brother, Charley, on my right, Kate down the table, and some of the other Dickens children there as well, it felt as if I had replaced the Inimitable as surely and easily and completely as Georgina Hogarth had replaced Catherine Dickens.

  As for my ongoing research for The Moonstone, after contacting many people in my quest for first-hand knowledge about India (as well as in my search for details on Hindoo and Mohammadan religious practices), I was put in touch with a certain John Wyllie, who had served in the Indian province of Kathiawar during his time in the Indian Civil Service.

  “There is no part of India… so fanatically Hindoo in religious and so startlingly barbarous in primitive ethics,” Wyllie said to me between great drams of brandy. He directed me to “a collection of Wheeler’s letters or articles in the Englishman… Eleusinian mysteries are a joke to the abominations there revealed.”

  When I explained that my small group of Hindoos in The Moonstone would indeed be villainous but would also have a certain noble martyrdom about them, since they would have to spend decades propitiating their gods for violating their caste rule of never travelling across the “Dark Water,” Wyllie just scoffed and stated flatly that their reinstatement in caste would be more a question of bribes paid to the right Brahman parties rather than the lifelong quest for purification my tale required.

  So I threw away most of the comments and advice from Mr John Wyllie, formerly of the Indian Civil Service, and went with the dictates of my Muse. For the English setting of my novel I simply reached into my memory of the Yorkshire coast. For the historical events—since the main part of the novel was to begin in 1848—I continued to rely upon the excellent library at the Athenaeum. The only thing I carried over from Mr Wyllie’s recommendations was the wild Indian province of Kathiawar; so few white men had been there and lived to tell about it that I decided I could make up its geography, topography, and particular brands and cults of Hindoo belief.

  I continued working on the novel every day, even amidst the unimaginable demands of preparing No Thoroughfare for the stage.

  News of our play had somehow arrived in the United States before the co-author of the tale upon which it was based. I received a letter from Dickens in which he announced that he had been met by theatrical managers immediately upon his arrival in New York; the men seemed to be under the impression that the script for No Thoroughfare was in the novelist’s pocket. Dickens asked me to send copies of each act as I finished it and added, “I have little doubt, my dear Wilkie, of being able to make a good thing of the Drama.”

  There followed a flurry of correspondence back and forth in which Dickens announced that he was hurrying to find an American citizen to whom we could consign the MS, thus assuring the right of playing it in America while equally assuring that we would gain some profit from such a production. By Christmas Eve, Dickens had received my final copy of the play, prompting this reply from Boston: “The play is done with great pains and skill, but I fear it is too long. Its fate will have been decided before you get this letter, but I greatly doubt its success.…” The rest of the note was all about Dickens’s fear of the inevitable American pirating of some version of our story, but, in truth, I had lost real interest after the words “. . . but I greatly doubt its success.”

  DESPITE ALL OF THE OBLIGATIONS upon my time and energy, I had honoured, in mid-December, a written request from Inspector Field to meet him at Waterloo Bridge. I anticipated the substance of what he had to say to me and I have to say that my prediction was not in error.

  The old detective looked insufferably pleased with himself, which at first seemed odd, since after my telling him that nothing untowards had happened in my home the previous 9 of June, the trail of Drood had gone very cold indeed. But one of the first things that the inspector told me as we walked over Waterloo Bridge into a breeze carrying light snow, our collars turned high and Field’s heavy wool cape flapping about his shoulders like the wings of a bat, was that the Metropolitan Police had captured a Malay suspected of murder. The Malay, it turned out, was one of Drood’s
lieutenants and was being interrogated “briskly” in a deep cell even as we walked. Early information from the interrogation suggested that Drood may have moved from Undertown and was hiding in the surface slums of London. It was only a matter of time, Inspector Field informed me confidently, before they would have the best lead on the Egyptian murderer that they had obtained in decades of ceaseless effort.

  “So the police are sharing the information with you,” I said.

  Inspector Field showed his large, yellow teeth in a smile. “My own men and I are carrying out the interrogation, Mr Collins. I still have many close friends on the force, you see, even if the commissioner and those higher up continue to treat me with less than the respect I have earned.”

  “Does the current chief of detectives know that one of Drood’s top lieutenants has been captured?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” said Field and set that corpulent forefinger of his alongside his nose. “Now, you may be wondering why I have called you for this meeting on such a bitter cold day, Mr Collins.”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “Well, sir, it is with some regret that I have to declare that our long working relationship is at an end, Mr Collins. It grieves me to do so, but my resources are limited—as you might imagine, sir—and from this point on, I shall have to focus those resources on the End Game with the monster Drood.”

  “I am… surprised, Inspector,” I said while wrapping my red scarf higher around my face in order to hide a smile. This was precisely what I had expected. “Does this mean that there will be no boy waiting near Number Ninety Gloucester Place to carry messages back and forth between us?”

  “It does, alas, Mr Collins. Which makes me remember the sad fate of poor young Gooseberry.” Here the old man amazed me by removing a huge handkerchief from his coat pocket and blowing his glowing red nose repeatedly.

  “Well, if our working relationship must end…” I said as if filled with reluctant sadness.

  “I am afraid it must, Mr Collins. And it is my opinion, sir, that Drood no longer has use for our mutual friend Mr Charles Dickens.”

  “Really?” I said. “How have you deduced that, Inspector?”

  “Well, first of all, there is the fact of last June’s anniversary of the Staplehurst meeting passing without Drood making any effort to contact Mr Dickens, or vice versa, sir.”

  “Certainly your cordon of trained operatives made such a rendezvous impossible for Drood,” I said as we turned our backs to the wind and began our walk back over the bridge.

  Inspector Field coughed a laugh. “No chance of that, sir. Where Drood wants to go, he goes. Five hundred of the Metropolitan force’s finest would not have prevented him from meeting with Dickens that night—in your very house, sir, if necessary—if he had wanted to be there. Such is the diabolical nature of the foreign monster. But the final and absolutely convincing factor in deducing that Mr Dickens is no longer of service to Drood is the simple fact that the writer is in North America now.”

  “How is that a convincing factor, Inspector?”

  “Drood would never have let Mr Dickens go so far if he still had use for him,” said the old detective.

  “Fascinating,” I murmured.

  “And do you know what that use was, Mr Collins? We have never spoken of it.”

  “I had never considered the matter, Inspector,” I said, happy that the frigid air on my exposed cheeks would hide the blush of a liar.

  “Drood was considering having Mr Dickens write something for him, sir,” announced Inspector Field in a tone of revelation. “Under coercion, if necessary. I would not be surprised if Drood caused the entire tragedy of the train wreck at Staplehurst precisely to put England’s most famous novelist under his thrall.”

  This was nonsense of course. How could even the “foreign monster” of the old detective’s imagination have known that Dickens would not be killed in the terrible plummet of first-class carriages from the incomplete trestle? But all I said was “Fascinating.”

  “And can you guess, Mr Collins, what it is that Drood would have had Mr Dickens pen and publish for him?”

  “His biography?” I ventured, if only to show the old man that I was not a complete dunce.

  “No, sir,” said Inspector Field. “Rather, a compilation of the ancient pagan Egyptian religion with all of its wicked rites and rituals and secrets of magick.”

  Now I was surprised. I stopped and Inspector Field stopped next to me. Closed carriages passing had their side lamps lit, even though it was only mid-afternoon. The taller buildings along the river here were mere blue-black shadows with lamps burning in them as well.

  “Why would Drood have a novelist write up the details of a dead religion?” I asked.

  Inspector Field smiled broadly and tapped his nose again. “It ain’t dead to Drood, Mr Collins. It ain’t dead to Drood’s legion of London Undertown followers, if you take my meaning, sir. You see that, sir?”

  I looked towards where the inspector was pointing, northwest along the river’s edge.

  “The Adelphi Theatre?” I asked. “Or the site of the old Warren’s Blacking Factory beyond? Or do you mean Scotland Yard itself?”

  “I mean all of it, Mr Collins. And more—stretching down to Saint James Palace and back up Piccadilly to Trafalgar Square and beyond, including Charing Cross and Leicester Square back along the Strand to Covent Garden.”

  “What of it, Inspector?”

  “Imagine a huge glass pyramid there, Mr Collins. Imagine all of London from Billingsgate to Bloomsbury to Regent’s Park being huge glass pyramids and bronze sphinxes.… Imagine it if you can, sir. For Drood certainly does.”

  “That’s mad,” I said.

  “Aye, Mr Collins, it’s as mad as a hatter’s Sunday, sir,” laughed Inspector Field. “But that’s what Drood and his crypt-crawling worshippers of the old Egyptian gods want, sir. And it’s what they mean to get, if not in this century then the next. Imagine those glass pyramids—and the temples, sir, and the secret rites in those temples, with mesmeric magic and slaves to their mental influence—rising everywhere you look in that direction come the twentieth century.”

  “Madness,” I said.

  “Yes, sir,” said Inspector Field. “But Drood’s madness makes him no less dangerous. More so, I would say.”

  “Well then,” I said as we reached the end of the bridge again, “I am well out of it. Thank you for all your care and protection, Inspector Field.”

  The old man nodded but coughed into his hand. “There is one last detail, sir. One unfortunate by-product of the end of our working relationship, as it were.”

  “What is that, Inspector?”

  “Your… ah… research, sir.”

  “I don’t quite understand,” I said, although I understood perfectly well.

  “Your research into the Undertown opium dens, sir. Your Thursday trips to King Lazaree’s den, to be precise. I am sorry to tell you that I can no longer offer Detective Hatchery as your personal guide and bodyguard.”

  “Ahhh,” I said. “I see. Well, Inspector, think nothing of that. I was ready to terminate that aspect of my research at any rate. You see, what with the play I am putting on and the novel I am more than half done with, I simply do not have time or further need for that research.”

  “Really, sir? Well… I admit that I am relieved to hear it. I was worried that Detective Hatchery’s reassignment would be an inconvenience for you.”

  “Not at all,” I said. In truth, my weekly public house meetings with Hatchery before my descent to King Lazaree had long since turned into weekly dinings out. At one of these in November, Hatchery—my spy now—had warned me that Inspector Field soon would be relieving him of his duty of being my bodyguard during my weekly outings.

  I had been prepared for this and had asked him—quite diplomatically—if he, Hatchery, were free to do detective duties outside Inspector Field’s investigative agency.

  He was, he said. Indeed he was. And, in fact, he had made su
re that his renewed duties with Inspector Field would not include Thursday nights. “For my daughters, I told him,” said Hatchery to me over our cigars and coffee.

  I had offered him a generous sum for continuing his protective duties without telling his superiors. Hatchery had accepted at once and our handshake had sealed the deal, his gigantic hand enveloping mine.

  So it was on this mid-December day in 1867 that Inspector Field and I also shook hands and walked in opposite directions on Waterloo Bridge, assuming—at least on my part—that we should never see each other again.

  THAT SAME WEEK that I swept Inspector Field out of my life, I honoured another appointment, this time one that I had set, by going to the Cock and Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street to dine. Deliberately arriving late, I found Joseph Clow already seated and, though dressed in an ill-fitting serge suit, looking decidedly ill at ease in the surroundings that must have been far more refined—and expensive—than those he was used to as a plumber and distiller’s son.

  I called the wine steward over and ordered, but before I could say anything to Clow, the thin, furtive little man said, “Sir… Mr Collins… if this is about my staying for dinner that evening in October, I apologise, sir, and can only say that your housekeeper, Mrs G——, had invited me as a reward for my finishing the upstairs plumbing ahead of schedule, sir. If it wasn’t proper for me to do so, and I see now it mightn’t have been, I just want to say that I am very sorry and…”

  “No apologies, no apologies,” I interrupted. Setting my hand on his rough-weave sleeve, I set the tone immediately. “I invited you here, Mr Clow… may I call you Joseph?… to apologise to you. I am sure that my look of surprise that night two months ago could have been… must have been… mistaken as one of disapproval, and I hope that my entertaining you to a fine meal here at the Cock and Cheshire Cheese will go some small distance towards making amends for that.”