Drood, Page 61

  In other words, Dickens’s and Fechter’s beloved Abyss had been precisely that.

  But I could not let Dickens know that I knew this. If he became aware that I was in secret communication with Fechter, he would also realise that I had known that he had left Paris the night of the premiere and had been hiding with his mistress this past week. It would have shown my feigned surprise at seeing him on the train as the lie it was.

  “To more such successes,” I said, and we touched glasses and drank again.

  After a moment or two, I said, “The Moonstone is finished. I have completed the proofreading of the final number.”

  “Yes,” said Dickens with no hint of interest. “Wills has sent me the galleys.”

  “Have you seen the commotion at Wellington Street?” I was referring to the crowds at the door each Friday as mobs pressed in to buy the newest instalment of The Moonstone.

  “Indeed,” Dickens said drily. “I had to use my stick as a sort of machete-knife to hack my way through the crush to get to my office towards the end of May before I left for France. Very inconvenient.”

  “I dare say,” I said. “When I have brought corrections or business papers to Wills in person, I have seen the delivery boys and porters standing in various corners, their packs still on their backs, reading instalments.”

  “Hmmm,” said Dickens.

  “I understand that bets are being made on the street—and in some of the better clubs around town, including my Athenaeum—about when the diamond shall finally be found and who shall be revealed as the thief.”

  “Englishmen will bet on anything,” said Dickens. “I have seen gentlemen on a hunt wager a thousand pounds on which direction the next flight of geese shall pass over.”

  Our sad history is buried in France was the phrase that kept going through my head in Ellen Ternan’s voice. Had it been a boy infant or a girl? I wondered. Weary of Dickens’s endless condescension, I smiled and said, “Wills reports to me that sales of The Moonstone have put both Our Mutual Friend and Great Expectations in the shade.”

  Dickens raised his head and looked at me for the first time. Slowly—very slowly—a thin smile widened beneath his thinning moustache and greying beard. “Yes?” he said.

  “Yes.” I studied the amber of my cordial for a moment and said, “Are you working on anything now, Charles?”

  “No. I’ve found it impossible to begin a new novel, or even a story, although ideas and images flit and buzz in my head as always.”

  “Of course.”

  “I have been… distracted,” he said softly.

  “Of course. The American reading tour alone would stop any writer from working.”

  I had offered the American reading tour as an opening for Dickens to change the subject, since he had much enjoyed discussing his various triumphs there with all of his friends, including me, during the weeks after he came back and before he decamped to Paris. But he chose not to accept my offered segue.

  “I have read the galleys of your last numbers,” he said.

  “Oh?” I said. “Do you find them satisfactory?” It was a perfunctory question, for the first time in our relationship. He was not my editor—Wills had served that needless purpose during the months of Dickens’s absence—and although Dickens was nominally my publisher through his magazine, I had already found a real publisher, William Tinsley, for the first book edition of 1,500 copies and had received a promise of £7,500.

  “I find the finished book extremely tiresome,” Dickens said mildly.

  For a moment I could only hold my glass in both hands and stare at the older man. “I beg your pardon?” I said at last.

  “You heard me, sir. I find The Moonstone tiresome in the extreme. Its construction is awkward beyond endurance; there is a vein of obstinate conceit that runs throughout the entire tale and makes enemies of readers.”

  I could not believe that my friend of long years was saying this to me. I was embarrassed to feel the blood rising to my cheeks, temples, and ears. Eventually I said, “I am heartily sorry, Charles, if the novel disappoints you. It certainly has not disappointed its many thousands of eager readers.”

  “So you have been telling me,” said Dickens.

  “What exactly about the construction do you find tiresome? It follows the structure of your very own Bleak House… only with improvements.”

  As I may have mentioned to you, Dear Reader, the construction of The Moonstone was nothing less than brilliant, consisting, as it did, of a series of epistles solicited by one of the offstage characters for most of the other central characters to tell their various stories in series via an assortment of diaries and notes and letters.

  Dickens had the effrontery to laugh in my face.

  “Bleak House,” he said softly, “was told from a limited series of third-person viewpoints, always with an authorial eye above, with the single first-person narration by the dear Miss Esther Summerson. It was constructed as a form of symphony. The Moonstone strikes any reader’s ear as a contrived cacophony. The level of contrivance in the endless series of first-person written testaments is, as I say, unbelievable and tiresome beyond all words to convey it.”

  I blinked several times and set my glass down. Henry and two waiters bustled in with the first course. The wine steward bustled in with the first bottle—Dickens tested it and nodded—and the flurry of black tails and starched white collars bustled back out. When they were gone, I said, “I’ll have you know that the testimony and character of Miss Clack are the talk of the town. Someone at my club said recently that he has not laughed so well since The Pickwick Papers.”

  Dickens winced. “To compare Miss Clack to Sam Weller or any of the other characters in The Pickwick Papers, my dear Wilkie, would be the equivalent of comparing a spavined, swaybacked mule to a thoroughbred racehorse. The characters in Pickwick were—as generations of readers and audiences might tell you, should you bother to ask—drawn with a loving eye and a steady hand. Miss Clack is a mean-spirited caricature of a poorly rendered cartoon. There are no Miss Clacks on this world or on any Earth generated by any sane Creator.”

  “Your Mrs Jellyby from Bleak House…” I began.

  Dickens held up one hand. “Spare us comparisons with Mrs Jellyby. They simply won’t do, dear boy. They simply won’t do.”

  I looked at my food.

  “And your character of Ezra Jennings, who springs from nowhere to solve all outstanding questions in the final chapters,” continued Dickens, his voice as flat and steady and relentless as one of the tunnel-boring machines working along Fleet Street.

  “What about Ezra Jennings? Readers believe him to be a most fascinating character.”

  “Fascinating…” said Dickens with that terrible smile. “And familiar.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you think I would not remember him?”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about, Charles.”

  “I am talking about the physician’s assistant we encountered during our northern walking tour in September 1857—dear me, almost eleven years ago—when we climbed Carrick Fell and you slipped and sprained your ankle and I had to carry you down the mountain and then take you by cart to the nearest village, where that physician bandaged your ankle and leg. His assistant had precisely that incredible piebald hair and skin which graces your monster called ‘Ezra Jennings.’ ”

  “Do we not compose from real life?” I asked. My voice sounded plaintive in my own ears, and I hated that.

  Dickens shook his head. “From real life, yes. But it cannot have escaped your attention that I had already created your Ezra Jennings in the form of Mr Lorn, the albino and piebald assistant to Dr Speddie in our collaborative Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices in the Christmas Issue that same year.”

  “I fail to see the similarities,” I said stiffly.

  “Do you really? How odd. The tale of Mr Lorn—the dead man in the bed who came back to life in the young Dr Speddie’s shared room in the overcrowd
ed inn—took up the bulk of that rather forgettable short novel. The same tragic past. The same haunted expression and manner of speaking. The same albino complexion and piebald hair. I clearly remember writing those scenes.”

  “Ezra Jennings and Mr Lorn are two quite different characters,” I said.

  Dickens nodded. “They are certainly different in texture. Mr Lorn had a tragic past and character. Your Ezra Jennings, of all the diseased and unnatural characters you have created in your quest for the sensational, is the most repellent and disturbing.”

  “Disturbing in what way, may I ask?”

  “You may ask and I will tell you, my dear Wilkie. Ezra Jennings, besides being the worst sort of opium addict—a trait shared by so many of your characters, my dear boy—shows every sign of inversion.”

  “Inversion?” I had lifted a forkful of something minutes earlier, but it had yet to reach my mouth.

  “Not to mince words,” Dickens said softly, “it is obvious to everyone reading The Moonstone that Ezra Jennings is a sodomite.”

  My fork stayed raised; my mouth remained open. “Nonsense!” I said at last. “I meant no such implication!”

  Or had I? I realised that—as with the Miss Clack chapters—the Other Wilkie had written most of the Ezra Jennings numbers when I was attempting to dictate while in the deepest throes of my morphine and laudanum.

  “And your so-called Quivering Sands…” began Dickens.

  “Shivering Sands,” I corrected.

  “As you wish. They do not exist, you must know.”

  Here I had him. Here I had him! “They do indeed,” I said, voice rising. “As any yachtsman such as myself would know. There’s a shoal just like the Shivering Sands on the Thames Estuary, nine miles north of Herne Bay.”

  “Your Quivering Sands do not exist along the coast of Yorkshire,” said Dickens. He was, I realised, calmly cutting and eating his meat. “Everyone who has ever visited Yorkshire knows that. Anyone who has ever read about Yorkshire knows that.”

  I opened my mouth to speak—to speak bitingly—and could think of nothing to say. It was at this point that I remembered the loaded revolver in my valise sitting next to me on the banquette.

  “And many believe, as I do, as Wills does, that the scene with your Quivering Sands shivering is also indecent,” said Dickens.

  “For God’s sake, Dickens, how could a shoal, a strand, a beach stretch, of quicksand be considered indecent by any sane person?”

  “Perhaps,” said Dickens, “through the author’s choice of language and insinuation. And I quote from memory—and from your poor, doomed Miss Spearman’s observation—‘The brown face of it heaved slowly, and then dimpled and quivered all over.’ The brown face, my dear Wilkie, the brown skin, dimpling and quivering all over and then, and I believe I quote, sucking one down—which is precisely what it does to poor Miss Spearman. An overt and clumsy description of what some might imagine a woman’s physical climax in the act of love to be like, no?”

  Again, I could only stare with mouth agape.

  “But it is the ending, your much-anticipated resolution to this much-admired mystery, that I find to be the apex and pinnacle of contrivance, my dear boy,” went on Dickens.

  I realised that he might never stop talking. I imagined the dozens of diners in the other alcoves and in the larger room of Vérey’s all pausing in their meals, all listening, shocked but attentive.

  “Do you really believe,” bored on Dickens, “or expect us, the readers, to believe that a man, motivated by a few drops of opium in a small glass of wine, would walk in his sleep, enter his fiancée’s sleeping room—a scene that was all but indecent for that impropriety alone—and go through her safe box and belongings, and then steal and secrete a diamond elsewhere, all with no memory of the event afterwards?”

  “I am sure of it,” I said coldly, stiffly.

  “Oh? How can you be sure of such a ridiculous thing, dear boy?”

  “Every reference to behaviour under the ministrations of laudanum, pure opium, or other drugs in The Moonstone was carefully researched and experienced by me before I put pen to paper,” I said.

  Dickens laughed then. It was a long, full, easy, and cruel laugh and it went on far too long.

  I stood, threw down my linen napkin, lifted my valise, and opened it. The huge pistol was quite visible there beneath my curled galley sheets and the remnants of my lunch.

  I closed the valise and stalked out, almost forgetting my hat and stick in my rush. I could hear Henry bustling into the alcove at the rear to enquire of “Mr Dickens” as to whether there was anything wanting with the food or service.

  Three blocks from Vérey’s I stopped, still breathing hard, still clutching my walking stick as if it were a hammer, not noticing the traffic or the busy streets on this lovely June evening or even the ladies of the night who were watching me from the shadows of an alley across the way.

  “God d—— n it!” I cried loudly, startling two ladies walking with an older, stooped gentleman. “God d—— n it!”

  I turned and ran back to the restaurant.

  This time all conversation did stop as I ran through the main room and threw back the curtains to the alcove.

  Dickens was gone, of course. And my last chance on the third anniversary of Staplehurst to follow him to Drood’s lair was gone with him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  In July, my brother was staying at Gad’s Hill Place for an extended period because of his health. Charley had been very ill with terrible stomach cramps and had been vomiting for days on end. His wife, Katey, continued to find it easier to care for him at her father’s house than at their home in London. (I also believe she found it more comfortable for herself to be waited on there.)

  On this particular day, Charley was feeling somewhat better and was in the library at Gad’s Hill, talking to the other Charley—Dickens’s son—who was doing some work in the library there. (I don’t believe I mentioned, Dear Reader, that in May, my editor and Charles Dickens’s indefatigable sub-editor at All the Year Round, William Henry Wills, had somehow contrived to fall off his horse during a hunt and put a serious crease in his skull. Wills recovered somewhat but announced that he continued to hear doors slamming all the time. This reduced his effectiveness as an editor, also as Dickens’s administrator, accountant, manager, marketing chief, and ever-faithful factotum, so Dickens—after asking me to come back to the magazine in May and receiving no positive reply—had put his rather ineffectual and disappointing son Charles in the position of filling at least some of Wills’s many duties while he, the Inimitable, took care of the rest. What this amounted to was that his son was answering letters at the office and at home, but even this required at least 110 percent of Charles Dickens Junior’s feeble capabilities.)

  So on this July day at Gad’s Hill, my brother, Charley, was in the library there with Charley Dickens when suddenly both young men heard two people, a man and a woman, shouting and arguing, the rising racket coming from somewhere on the lawn out of sight below and behind the house. It was the unmistakable sound of a quarrel escalating into violence. The woman’s screams, my brother later told me, were terrifying.

  Both Charleys rushed down and outside and around the house, Dickens’s son arriving a full half-minute before my convalescing brother.

  There, in the meadow behind the long yard and barn where Dickens and I had seen young Edmond Dickenson sleepwalking several Christmases earlier, Charles Dickens was now striding up and down, speaking and shouting in two different voices, one male, one female, all the while gesticulating wildly and finally rushing an unseen victim and attacking… attacking her… with a great, invisible club.

  Dickens had become the bully-thug Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist and was lost in the bloody act of murdering Nancy.

  She tried to escape, crying out for mercy. No mercy, bellowed Bill Sikes. She cried out for God to help her. God did not answer, but Bill Sikes did, shouting and cursing and striking her down with his he
avy club.

  She tried to rise, holding her arm and hand up to ward off the blow. Dickens/Sikes struck again, and again, breaking her delicate fingers, smashing the bones of her upraised forearm, then bringing the full weight of the club down on her bloodied head. And again. And again.

  Charley Dickens and Charley Collins could see the blood and brain tissue flying. They could see the pool of blood growing beneath the now prone dying woman as Bill Sikes continued clubbing her. They could see the blood spattering Sikes’s screaming, distorted face. The very paws and legs of Sikes’s dog were bloody!

  And still he kept clubbing her, even after she was dead.

  Still crouched over the imaginary woman’s corpse, the invisible club still held in two hands and poised above the battered and bloody form in the grass, Charles Dickens looked up at his son and my brother. His face was twisted and contorted in triumph. His eyes were wide, wild, and in no way sane. My brother, Charley, later said that he was sure he could see pure, murderous evil in the eyes of that twisted, gloating countenance.

  The Inimitable had, at long last, found his Murder for his next round of public readings.

  IT WAS AT ABOUT THIS TIME that I became certain that I had to kill Charles Dickens.

  He would pretend to murder his imaginary Nancy on stage, in front of thousands. I would murder him in real life. We would see which ritual murder was more effective in driving the Drood-scarab out of a man’s brain.

  To prepare the way, I wrote him a letter of apology, even though I had nothing to apologise for and Dickens had everything for which to beg forgiveness. It made no difference.

  90 Gloucester Place Saturday, 18 July, 1868

  My Dear Charles:

  I write to offer my sincere and total apologies for the contretemps I provoked last month at our favourite place of dining, Vérey’s. My failure to consider that you were overtired from your many travels and exertions undoubtedly provoked the illusion of disagreement between us, and my not-unusual clumsiness in expression led to unfortunate consequences for which I again apologise and humbly ask your forgiveness. (Any accidental attempt on my part to compare my poor current literary efforts to your incomparable Bleak House were presumptuous and in error. No one shall ever confuse this humble protégé with Cher Maître.)