Drood, Page 6

  Please understand, Dear Reader of my posthumous future, that everyone in my day uses laudanum. Or almost everyone. My father, who distrusted all medicines, in his last days consumed huge quantities of Battley’s Drops, a powerful form of opium. (And I am certain that the pain from my rheumatoid gout has been at least the equal, if not worse, than his deathbed pains.) I remember the poet Coleridge, a close friend of my parents, weeping at our home because of his dependency upon opium and I remember my mother’s warnings to him. But also, as I have reminded the few friends who had the bad manners to become censorious about my own dependency on this important medicine, Sir Walter Scott used great quantities of laudanum while writing The Bride of Lammermoor, while such contemporaries of Dickens’s and mine as our close friend Bulwer-Lytton and De Quincey used far greater quantities than I.

  That afternoon I returned to my home—one of my two homes—at 9 Melcombe Place, off Dorset Square, knowing that Caroline and her daughter, Harriet, would be out, and secreted the new jug of laudanum, but not before drinking two full glasses of it.

  Within minutes I was my real self again… or as close to my real self as I could be while such pain from rheumatoid gout still battered at the windows and scratched at the door of my corporeal self. At least the background noise of pain was diminished enough by the opiate so that I could concentrate again.

  I took a carriage to Charing Cross.

  THE FROZEN DEEP had been a great success.

  The first act was set in Devon, where beautiful Clara Burnham—played by Dickens’s more attractive daughter, Mary (known as Mamie)—is haunted by fears for her dashing fiancé, Frank Aldersley (played by me, in the earliest days of my current beard). Aldersley has been away on a polar expedition, sent, as Sir John Franklin’s real-life expedition had been, to force the North-West Passage, and both ships—the HMS Wanderer and HMS Sea-mew—have not been sighted for more than two years. Clara knows that Frank’s commander on the expedition is Captain Richard Wardour, whose proposal Clara has rejected. Wardour does not know the identity of the rival who succeeded him in Clara’s love, but has sworn to kill the man on sight. My character, Frank Aldersley, is, in turn, totally ignorant of Richard Wardour’s love for his fiancée.

  Knowing that the two ships are almost certainly frozen in together somewhere in the Arctic ice, Clara is agonised at the thought that some accident will reveal her two lovers’ identities to one another. So poor Clara is not only in terror of what the Arctic, its weather, beasts, and savages, may do to her beloved, but is in even greater terror of what Richard Wardour might do to her darling Frank should he discover the truth.

  Clara’s anxieties are not allayed when her nurse, Esther, who has the Second Sight, shares her bloody vision in the crimson Devon sunset. (As I mentioned earlier, Dickens went to great pains to create lighting effects in his little schoolroom theatre at Tavistock House that realistically depicted sunlight at all hours of the day.)

  “I see the lamb in the grasp of the Lion…” gasps Nurse Esther in the trance of her Second Sight. “Your bonnie bird alone with the hawk—I see you and all around you crying… Bluid! The stain is on you—Oh, my bairn, my bairn—the stain of that bluid is on you!”

  THE YOUNG MAN’S NAME was Edmond Dickenson.

  Dickens had said that he’d provided a room at Charing Cross Hotel for the injured man, but in truth it was a large suite. An older and not-very-attractive nurse had set up her station in the outer sitting room and showed me in to the invalid.

  From Dickens’s description of the difficult extrication of young Dickenson from the wreckage, not to mention the author’s melodramatic narration of blood, clothes torn away, and the young fellow’s need for medical assistance, I expected to find a near-corpse swathed in bandages and rigidified with splints and casts elevated by cables and counterweights. But young Dickenson, although in pyjamas and a dressing-gown, was sitting up and reading in bed when I was shown in. The room’s dresser and bedside tables were bedecked with flowers, including a vase of crimson geraniums that brought back some of the sense of panic I had felt in the yard at Gad’s Hill Place.

  Dickenson was a soft young man, perhaps twenty or twenty-one, with a round face, pink cheeks, sparse sandy hair that was already receding from his pink forehead, blue eyes, and ears as delicate as tiny seashells. His pyjamas looked to be made of silk.

  I introduced myself, explained that I was Mr Dickens’s envoy sent to enquire into the young gentleman’s state of health, and was quite surprised when Dickenson blurted out, “Oh, Mr Collins! I am deeply honoured to have such a famous writer visit me! I so greatly enjoyed your The Woman in White that was serialised in All the Year Round immediately after Mr Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities ended.”

  “I thank you, sir,” I said, almost colouring at the compliment. It is true that The Woman in White had been a huge success, selling more copies of the magazine than most of Dickens’s serialised tales. “I am very pleased that you enjoyed my modest efforts,” I added.

  “Oh, yes, it was wonderful,” said young Dickenson. “You are so fortunate to have someone like Mr Dickens as your mentor and editor.”

  I stared at the young man for a long moment, but my stony silence went unnoticed as Dickenson babbled on about the Staplehurst crash, the awfulness of it all, and then about Charles Dickens’s incredible courage and generosity. “I would not, I am sure, be alive today if it had not been for Mr Dickens finding me in the wreckage—I was quite hanging upside down and found it all but impossible to breathe, Mr Collins!—and he never left me until he’d summoned guards to help pull me from the terrible wreckage and supervised their carrying me up to the railbed where the injured were being prepared for evacuation. Mr Dickens stayed by my side during the ride to London on the emergency train that afternoon and—as you see!—insisted on putting me up in this wonderful room and providing nursing until I shall be fully recovered.”

  “You are not seriously injured?” I enquired in a perfectly flat tone.

  “Oh, no, not at all! Merely bruised all black and blue around the legs and hips and left arm and chest and back. I could not walk three days ago after the accident, but today the nurse helped me to the toilet and back and it was a completely successful expedition!”

  “I am so glad,” I said.

  “I expect to go home tomorrow,” burbled the young man. “I shall never be able to repay Mr Dickens for his generosity. He truly saved my life! And he has invited me to his home at Gad’s Hill for Christmas and New Year’s!”

  It was 12 June. “How wonderful,” I said. “I am sure that Charles appreciates the value of the life he helped save. You say you go home tomorrow, Mr Dickenson… may I enquire as to where that home is?”

  Dickenson babbled on. It seemed he was an orphan—Charles Dickens’s favourite sort of human being, if one is to believe Oliver Twist or David Copperfield or Bleak House or any of a dozen other of his tales—but had been left money in a Jarndyce-and-Jarndyce manner of labyrinthine inheritance, and had been appointed an elderly Guardian who lived in a Northamptonshire estate that might well have been the model for Chesney Wold. Young Dickenson, however, preferred to live in modest rented rooms in London, where he lived alone, had few (if any) friends, and studied the occasional instrument and apprenticed for the occasional profession, with no real intention of mastering or practising in any of them. The interest on his inheritance allowed him to purchase food and books and theatre tickets and the occasional holiday to the seashore—his time was his own.

  We discussed theatre and literature. It turned out that young Mr Dickenson, a subscriber to Dickens’s previous journal Household Words as well as to the current All the Year Round, had read and admired my story “A Terribly Strange Bed” that had appeared in the former magazine.

  “Good heavens, man,” I exclaimed. “That was published almost fifteen years ago! You must have been all of five years old!”

  Young Dickenson’s blush began in his shell-like ears, migrated quickly to his cheeks, and r
ose like pink climbing ivy through the vault of his temples to the long curve of his pale forehead. I could see the blush spreading even under his thinning, straw-coloured hair. “Seven years old, actually, sir,” said the orphan. “But my Guardian, Mr Watson—a very liberal M.P.—had leather-bound copies of both Punch and such journals as Household Words in his library. My current devotion to the written word was formed and confirmed in that room.”

  “Really,” I said. “How interesting.”

  My joining the staff of Household Words years earlier had meant another five pounds a week to me. It seems to have meant the world to this orphan. He could almost recite my book After Dark from memory and was dutifully amazed when I told him that the separate tales which formed the volume had been based in large part upon my mother’s diaries and a more formal manuscript in which she had reminisced about being the wife of a famous painter.

  It turned out that the eleven-year-old Edmond Dickenson had travelled up to Manchester with his Guardian to see The Frozen Deep in the huge New Free Trade Hall there on 21 August, 1857.

  ACT II OFTHE FROZEN DEEP is set in the Arctic regions where Dickens-Wardour and Wardour’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Commander Crayford, are discussing their slim chances of survival in the face of cold and starvation.

  “Never give in to your stomach, and your stomach will end in giving in to you,” the veteran explorer advises Crayford. Such determination—a will that would accept no master—came not only from the pen of Charles Dickens, but from his very soul.

  Wardour goes on to explain that he loves the Arctic wastes precisely “because there are no women here.” In the same act he exclaims—“I would have accepted anything that set work and hardship and danger, like Ramparts, between my misery and me… Hard work, Crayford, that is the true Elixir of our life!” And finally, “. . . the hopeless wretchedness in this world, is the wretchedness that women cause.”

  It was, nominally, my play. My name was listed on the playbill as author (as well as my listing there as an actor), but almost all of Richard Wardour’s lines had been written or rewritten by Charles Dickens.

  These were not the words of a man happy in his marriage.

  At the end of Act II, two men are sent out across the ice as the trapped crews’ last chance for rescue. These men must cross a thousand miles of the frozen deep. The two men, of course, are Richard Wardour and his successful rival for Clara Burnham’s hand, Frank Aldersley. (Perhaps I have already mentioned that Dickens and I both grew beards for our roles.) The second act ends with Wardour discovering that the injured, starved, weakened Aldersley is his worst enemy, the man he swore to murder on sight.

  DID YOU HAPPEN TO SEE the gentleman named Drood at the accident site?” I asked Edmond Dickenson when the young fool finally stopped talking and the nurse was out of the room.

  “A gentleman named Drood, sir? In faith, I am not sure. There were so many gentlemen there helping me, and—other than our wonderful Mr Dickens—I learned so few of their names.”

  “It seems this gentleman has a rather memorable appearance,” I said and listed some specifics of Dickens’s description of our Phantom: the black silk cape and top hat, the missing fingers and eyelids and attenuated nose, the pallor and baldness and brittle fringe of hair, the terrible stare, his odd way of seeming to glide rather than walk, the sibilant hiss and foreign accent in his speech.

  “Oh, good heavens, no,” cried young Dickenson. “I surely would have remembered seeing or hearing such a man.” Then his gaze seemed to turn inward, much as Dickens’s had several times in his darkened study. “Even in spite of the incredibly terrible sights and sounds everywhere around me that day,” he added.

  “Yes, I am sure,” I said, resisting the impulse to tap the bedclothes above his bruised leg in a minor show of sympathy. “So you’ve never heard the name Drood or heard others talking about him… on the train that day, perhaps?”

  “Not to my knowledge, Mr Collins,” said the young man. “Is it of some importance to Mr Dickens to find the man? I would do anything for Mr Dickens, if it were in my power.”

  “Yes, I am sure you would, Mr Dickenson,” I said. This time I did tap at his knee under the blankets. “Mr Dickens specifically charged me with asking you if there were any additional service that he might offer,” I said and checked my watch. “Any want or lack or pain that the nurses or our mutual friend might remedy?”

  “Nothing at all,” said Dickenson. “Tomorrow I should be able to walk well enough to leave this hotel and begin living on my own again. I do have a cat, you know.” He laughed softly. “Or rather, she has me. Although, as is the nature of so many of her species, she comes and goes at will, hunts for her own meals, and certainly will not be inconvenienced by my absence.” Again there came that sense of his gaze turning inward, staring at the death and dying at Staplehurst just three days earlier. “Actually, Pussy would not be unduly inconvenienced had I died. No one would have missed me.”

  “Your guardian?” I prompted, not wishing to bring on a torrent of self-pity.

  Dickenson laughed easily. “My current Guardian, a gentleman of the law who had known my grandfather, would have mourned my passing, Mr Collins, but our… relationship… is more of a business nature. Pussy is about the only friend I have in London. Or elsewhere.”

  I nodded briskly. “I shall check on you again in the morning, Mr Dickenson.”

  “Oh, but there is no need…”

  “Our mutual friend Charles Dickens feels otherwise,” I said quickly. “And, his health permitting, he may come tomorrow to see you and enquire in person about your recovery.”

  The boy blushed again. It was not unbecoming, although it did make him somehow appear all the softer and sillier in the late-afternoon June sunlight filtering in through the hotel drapes and curtains.

  Nodding and fetching my walking stick, I left young Edmond Dickenson and went out through the sitting room past the silent nurse.

  ACT III OFTHE FROZEN DEEP opens with Clara Burnham travelling to Newfoundland to search for news (much as the real Lady Franklin had hired her own ships and gone to the Far North with her niece Sophia Cracroft in search of her husband, Sir John). Into a remote ice cavern along that coast staggers a starved, exhausted man just escaped from the frozen sea. Clara sees that it is Wardour, and there are hysterical accusations that he has murdered—and perhaps eaten? the audience wonders—her fiancé, Frank Aldersley. Wardour—Dickens—rushes out and returns with Aldersley—me, in ragged clothes that left me more naked than not—in his arms and alive. “Often,” gasps Wardour, “in supporting Aldersley through snow-drifts and ice-floes, have I been tempted to leave him sleeping.”

  Delivering that line, Dickens… Richard Wardour… collapses, his exertions, starvation, and exhaustion from keeping his rival alive on the ice for so long finally catching up to him. Wardour manages to say, “My sister, Clara!—Kiss me, sister, kiss me before I die!” He then dies in Clara’s arms with Clara’s kiss upon his cheek and Clara’s tears streaming down his face.

  At our dress rehearsal, I was tempted to vomit on stage. But during all four performances at Tavistock House, I found myself weeping and heard myself whispering, “This is an awful thing.” You may, Dear Reader, interpret that in any way you wish.

  Dickens’s performances were powerful and… strange. William Makepeace Thackeray, one of our attendees the night of the first performance, later remarked of Dickens—“If that man would now go upon the stage, he would make his £20,000 a year.”

  This was wild hyperbole in 1857, but by the time of the Staplehurst accident, Dickens was making almost that much through his “acting” in his reading tours in the United States and throughout England.

  The audiences blubbered like children during the four performances of The Frozen Deep at Tavistock House. Professional reviewers whom Dickens had invited to the opening nights professed to be deeply impressed by Dickens’s performance and his strange immersion in the role of Richard Wardour. Indeed, it was t
he author’s terrible intensity—a sort of dark energy which filled the room and swept all viewers and listeners into its vortex—that everyone remarked upon.

  Dickens was depressed after the last performance of The Frozen Deep. He wrote to me of the “sad sounds” of the workmen “battering and smashing down” his schoolroom theatre.

  There was a clamour for Dickens to stage more performances of my play; many urged him to do so for profit. It was rumoured, correctly it turned out, that the Queen herself wanted to attend a performance. But Dickens resisted all such suggestions. None of us in the amateur production wished to be mere performers for money. But in June of that year, 1857, that fateful year in which Dickens’s domestic life would change forever, the writer was shocked to hear of the death of our mutual friend Douglas Jerrold.

  Dickens told me that just a few nights before the other author’s death, the Inimitable had dreamt that Jerrold had given him copy to edit but Dickens could not make sense of the words. This is every writer’s nightmare—the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us—but Dickens found it interesting that he had dreamt it just as Jerrold was, unbeknownst to any of us, on his deathbed.

  Knowing that Jerrold’s family would be left in dire financial circumstances (Douglas was much more the reformer radical than Dickens, despite his posturing, would ever be), Dickens came up with the idea for a series of benefit performances: T. P. Cooke in revivals of Jerrold’s two plays, Black Eyed Susan and Rent Day; Thackeray and the war correspondent William Howard Russell giving lectures; and Dickens himself doing afternoon and night readings.

  And, of course, a return of The Frozen Deep.

  Dickens’s goal was to raise £2,000 for Jerrold’s family.

  The Gallery of Illustration on Regent Street was rented for the series of performances. The Queen—always careful not to appear at a benefit for a single charity—not only gave her name in support of this effort, but sent word that she was intensely eager to see The Frozen Deep and suggested that Mr Dickens select a room in Buckingham Palace in which he could provide a private performance for Her Majesty and her guests.