Drood, Page 79

  “That makes no sense,” I say. “You and I have repeatedly discussed the fact that no mesmerist can successfully command someone to commit murder… to commit any crime… against that person’s conscious moral and ethical convictions.”

  “Yes,” says Dickens. He drinks the last of his brandy and slides the flask away in his upper left inside pocket (and I make note of where it is for later). As always when discussing some plot device or other element of his art, Charles Dickens’s voice is a mixture of the veteran professional and the excited boy eager to tell a story. “But you were not listening, my dear Wilkie, when I explained that a sufficiently powerful mesmerist—myself, for instance, but certainly John Jasper Drood or those other, as yet unmet, Egyptian figures beneath the surface of this story—can mesmerise a person like the precentor of Cloisterham Cathedral to live in a fantasy world where he literally knows not what he is doing. And it is the opium and perhaps—say—morphine in great quantities which fuel this ongoing fantasy that can lead him, without his comprehension, to murder and worse.”

  I lean forward. The pistol is in my hand but forgotten. “If Jasper kills his nephew… his brother… while under mesmeric control of this shadowy Other,” I whisper, “who is the Other?”

  “Ah,” cries Charles Dickens, slapping his knee with delight. “That is the most marvellous and satisfying part of the mystery, my dear Wilkie! Not one reader in a thousand—no, not one reader in ten million—not even one fellow writer amongst the hundreds that I know and esteem—shall, until the full confession of John Jasper Drood is complete, be able to guess that the mesmerist and true murderer in the mystery of Edwin Drood is none other than…”

  The bells in the tall tower behind Dickens begin tolling.

  I blink at them. Dickens swivels on his headstone to watch, as if the tower is going to do something other than silently and coldly and blindly house the bells tolling his doom.

  When the twelve strokes are sounded and the final echoes die out over the low, dark streets of Rochester, Dickens turns back to me and smiles. “We have heard the chimes at midnight, Wilkie.”

  “You were saying?” I prompt. “The identity of the mesmerist? The real murderer?”

  Dickens folds his arms across his chest. “I have told enough of this tale for tonight.” He shakes his head, sighs, and gives the smallest of smiles. “And for this lifetime.”

  “Stand,” I say. I feel so dizzy that I almost fall. It is difficult to get a proper grip on the pistol and the unlighted lantern, as if I have forgotten how to do two things at once. “Walk,” I command, although whether to Dickens or to my own legs, I am not certain.

  I REALISE LATER how infinitely easy it would have been for Dickens to flee in that brief moment or two as we walked to the rear of the graveyard and then into the rougher grasses at the edge of the marsh where the quick-lime pit waited.

  If Dickens began running—if I missed with my first hurried shot—then it would have been child’s play for him to run and crawl and hide amongst the high marsh grasses. It would be difficult to find him there in the daylight and nearly impossible at night, even with the small lantern I was carrying. Even the sound of his running or crawling would be disguised by the rising wind and crash of distant surf.

  But he does not run. He leads the way. He seems to be humming a soft tune under his breath. I do not catch the melody.

  When we stop, he is at the brink of the lime pit but facing me. “You must remember,” he says, “that the metal objects in my pockets will not melt in the lime. My watch, given to me by Ellen… the flask… my pin and…”

  “I remember,” I rasp. I suddenly find it very difficult to breathe.

  Dickens glances over his shoulder at the lime but remains facing me. “Yes, this is precisely where I would have had Jasper Drood confess that he brought the corpse of Edwin Drood… Jasper is younger than you and I, Wilkie, so even though the opium has reduced his physical abilities by half, carrying the dead boy a few hundred yards was no hardship…”

  “Be silent,” I say.

  “Do you want me to turn around?” asks Dickens. “To look away? To face the pit?”

  “Yes. No. Suit yourself.”

  “Then I shall continue looking at you, my dear Wilkie. My former friend and fellow traveller and once-eager collaborator.”

  I fire the pistol.

  The incredible noise it makes and the unexpected recoil in my hand—I could not in all honesty say that I truly recall the experience of firing it in the servants’ stairway two winters ago—causes me almost to drop the weapon.

  “Good God,” says Dickens. He is still standing there. He pats his chest, belly, groin, and upper legs almost comically. “I believe you missed,” he says.

  Still he does not run.

  There are, I know, three bullets left in the gun.

  My entire arm shaking, I take aim this time and fire again.

  The tail of Dickens’s jacket leaps up about level with his waist. Again he pats himself. This time he holds up the jacket and in the moonlight I can see his forefinger poking through the hole the bullet made. It must have missed his hip by less than an inch.

  “Wilkie,” Dickens says very softly, “perhaps it would be better for both of us if…”

  I fire again.

  This time the bullet strikes Dickens in the upper chest—there is no mistaking that sound, like a heavy hammer striking cold meat—and he spins around once and falls on his back.

  But not into the lime pit. He lies at the edge of the pit.

  And he is still alive. I can hear the loud, pained rasping of his breath. It seems to be burbling and gurgling somewhat, as if there is blood in his lungs. I walk closer until I am towering over him on the side away from the quick-lime. I wonder as he looks up if he sees me as a terrible silhouette against the stars.

  In my writing, I have had—upon a few occasions—to use that ugly French term coup de grâce—and for some reason I always have trouble remembering how to spell it. But I have no trouble remembering of what it consists—the final shot must be to the brain, to be certain.

  And there is only one bullet left in Hatchery’s pistol.

  Going to one knee, I set the lantern down and crouch next to the Inimitable, the creator of fools such as the Dedlocks and the Barnacles and the Dombeys and Grewgious, but also of such villains and parasites and dark souls as the Fagins and Artful Dodgers and Squeerses and Casbys and Slymes and Pecksniffs and Scrooges and Vholeses and Smallweeds and Weggs and Fledgebys and Bumbles and Lammles and Hawks and Fangs and Tiggs and…

  I set the muzzle of Hatchery’s heavy gun hard against the moaning Charles Dickens’s temple. I realise that I am holding my empty left hand up as a sort of shield to protect my own face from the spatter of skull shards, blood, and brain matter that will erupt in a second or two.

  Dickens is mumbling, trying to speak.

  “Unintelligible…” I hear him moan. Then, “Wake up… awaken… Wilkie, wake…”

  The poor deluded b—— d is trying to wake himself from what he must think is a terrible nightmare. Perhaps this is how we are all dragged out of this life, moaning and grimacing and praying to an absent and unfeeling God that we might wake up.

  “Awake…” he says, and I pull the trigger.

  It is done. The brain that conceived of and brought to life David Copperfield and Pip and Esther Summerson and Uriah Heep and Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit and Bob Cratchit and Sam Weller and Pickwick and a hundred other living beings that live on in the minds of millions of readers is now spread across the edge of the lime pit in a grey-and-red line of slime that looks oily in the moonlight. Only the shattered bits of skull look white.

  Even with his helpful warning, I almost forget to take his gold and other metal possessions before rolling the corpse into the pit.

  I hate touching him and try to touch only fabric, which is possible in getting the watch, the flask, the coins in his pocket, and the pin, but for the rings and studs, I am forced to mak
e contact with his cooling flesh.

  I light the shielded bullseye lantern for this final operation and notice—with some small satisfaction—that my hand is steady as I strike the match and set it to the wick. I’ve brought a rolled-up burlap bag in my outside jacket pocket and now set all the metal objects in it, making sure not to drop anything into the high grass here near the pit.

  Finally I am finished and set the sack away in my bulging pocket next to the pistol. I will have to remind myself to stop at the nearby river and throw all those things—pistol and sack—into the deep water there.

  Dickens lies sprawled in the impossibly unselfconscious attitude known only to the dead. Standing with my booted foot on his bloodied chest, I consider saying some words but decide not to. There are times when words are superfluous, even to a writer.

  It takes more effort than I have imagined, but after several strong shoves with my boot and a final kick, Dickens rolls once and slides into the quick-lime. Left to its own devices, the body would have half-floated and remained visible until daylight arrives, but I fetch the long iron pole that I have set away in the weeds for this night and push and poke and lean my weight into it—it feels rather like pressing a rod down into a large bag of soft suet—until the body goes under the surface and stays under the surface.

  Then, holding the lamp close just long enough to check that I have no blood or other incriminating material on my person, I douse the light and walk back to the road to summon the waiting sailor-driver and coach. I whistle a soft tune as I walk through the glowing headstones. Perhaps, I think, it is the same tune that Dickens whistled under his breath just a few minutes earlier.

  AWAKEN! WILKIE . . . wake up! Awake.”

  I moaned, rolled, thrust my forearm over my forehead, but managed to open one eye. My head pounded with a laudanum-morphia headache that sang of overdose. Thin moonlight painted random stripes across furniture in my bedroom. And across a face mere inches from mine.

  The Other Wilkie was sitting on the edge of my bed. He had never come so close before… never.

  He spoke.

  His voice this time was not my voice, nor even an altered imitation of my voice. It was the voice of an old, querulous woman, the voice of one of the Weird Sisters in the opening scene of Macbeth.

  He or she touched my bare arm and it was not the touch of a living being.

  “Wilkie…” he/she breathed at me, the bearded face almost touching mine. His breath—my breath—stank of carrion. “Kill him. Wake up. Listen to me. Finish your book… before June ninth. Finish Man and Wife quickly, next week. And on the day you finish it, kill him.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  In response to my letter replying to his “Perhaps you may be glad to see me by and by. Who knows?” overture, Dickens invited me down to Gad’s Hill Place on the fifth of June, a Sunday. I sent word that I would be there by three PM, after the Inimitable’s usual Sunday writing time, but actually took an earlier train and walked the last mile or so.

  The beauty of the June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming was in bloom and blossom. The sunlight was a benediction. The breezes were so caressingly soft and intimate on the skin as to be embarrassing. A few white puffy clouds moved like aerial sheep above the green and rolling hills inland, but towards the water there was only more blue, more sunshine. The air was so clear that one could see the towers of London from twenty miles away. The farmlands beyond my carriage window and on either side of the dusty road as I walked the last mile or so were busy with playful little calves, running colts, and the occasional cluster of rural human children intent upon whatever games such a species pursues in early-summer fields and forests. It was almost enough to make a confirmed city-dweller such as myself want to buy a farm—but a jolt of laudanum followed by some brandy from a second, smaller flask cured that idiot’s passing impulse.

  No one greeted me at the drive of Gad’s Hill Place this day, not even the pair of sentry dogs—sired by that assassinated Grendel-of-dogs, Sultan, I was sure—that Dickens usually kept chained there by the entrance pillars.

  The red geraniums (still Dickens’s favourite flower, the annuals faithfully planted by the author’s gardeners every spring and left, at his command, as late into the autumn as possible) were everywhere—along the drive, in the sunny section near the bow windows outside Dickens’s office in the main house, paralleling the hedges, out along the road—and, as always and for reasons I did not yet understand, I recoiled from their serried ejaculations of red blotches with a sense of real horror.

  Guessing that Dickens might be in his chalet on such a perfect day, I went down through the cool tunnel—although there was almost no traffic on the highway above it—and emerged near the outside stairway that led up to the first-storey office.

  “Halloa the bridge!” I called up.

  “Halloa the approaching sloop,” came down Dickens’s strong voice.

  “Permission to come aboard?”

  “What is the name of your ship, sirrah? And where are you from and where are you bound?”

  “My poor barque is called the Mary Jane,” I called back up the staircase, putting on my best attempt at an American accent. “Set sail from Saint Looee and bound for Calcutta, by way of Samoa and Liverpool.”

  Dickens’s laughter came down on the soft breeze. “Then by all means, Captain, you must come up!”

  DICKENS HAD BEEN WRITING at his table and he was setting his manuscript pages into his oiled-leather portfolio as I came in. His left foot was propped up on a pillow which sat on a low stool, but he took his leg down as I entered. Although Dickens waved me to the only other chair in the room, I was too agitated to sit and contented myself with pacing from one window to the next and back.

  “I am so delighted you chose to accept my invitation,” Dickens was saying as he secured his writing utensils and buckled the portfolio closed.

  “It was time,” I said.

  “You look a bit heavier, Wilkie.”

  “You look thinner, Charles. Except for your foot, which seems to have put on a few pounds.”

  Dickens laughed. “Our dear and mutual friend Frank Beard has warnings for both of us, does he not?”

  “I see less of Frank Beard these days,” I said, moving from the east-facing window to the south-facing one. “Frank’s lovely children have declared war on me since I revealed the hypocrisies of Muscular Christianity.”

  “Oh, I hardly think it is the revelation of hypocrisy that has made the children angry at you, Wilkie. Rather the heresy of impugning their various sports heroes. I have not had the time to read it myself, but I hear that the instalments of Man and Wife have ruffled quite a few feathers.”

  “And sold more and more copies as it has done so,” I said. “Before this month is out, I plan to publish it in book form, in three volumes, with the firm of F. S. Ellis.”

  “Ellis?” said Dickens, getting to his feet and reaching for a silver-headed cane. “I wasn’t aware that the Ellis firm published books. I thought it dealt with cards, calendars, that sort of thing.”

  “This is their first venture,” I said. “They will be selling on commission and I will be receiving ten percent on every copy sold.”

  “Marvellous!” said Dickens. “You seem somewhat restless—perhaps even agitated—today, my dear Wilkie. Would you care to join me in a walk?”

  “Can you walk, Charles?” I was eyeing his new cane, which was indeed a cane, of the long-handled type one saw being carried by lame old men, rather than the sort of dashing walking stick preferred by young men such as myself. (As you may remember, Dear Reader, I was 46 in this summer of 1870, while Dickens was 58 and showed every year and month and more of that advanced age. But then, several people had recently commented on the grey in my beard, my ever-increasing girth, my problems catching my breath, and a certain hunched-over quality my tired body had assumed o
f late, and some had been so impertinent as to suggest that I was looking much older than my years.)

  “Yes, I can walk,” said Dickens, taking no offence at my comment. “And I try to every day. It is getting late, so I do not suggest a serious walk to Rochester or some other daunting destination, but we might manage a stroll through the fields.”

  I nodded and Dickens led the way down, leaving—one presumes—the portfolio with his unfinished manuscript of The Mystery of Edwin Drood there on his chalet worktable where anyone might come in off the highway and filch it.

  WE CROSSED THE ROAD towards his house but then went around the side yard, past the stables, through the rear yard where he had once consigned his correspondence to a bonfire, and out into the field where Sultan had died some autumns earlier. The grasses here that had been dead and brown then were green and high and stirring in the breeze today. A well-worn path led off towards the rolling hills and a scrim of trees that marked the path of a broad stream that ran towards the river that ran to the sea.

  Neither of us was running this day, but if Dickens’s walking pace had been diminished, I could not discern it. I was huffing and puffing to keep up.

  “Frank Beard tells me that you’ve had to add morphine to your pharmacopoeia in order to sleep,” said Dickens, the cane in his left hand (he had always carried his stick in his right hand before) quickly rising and falling. “And that, although you’ve told him you discontinued the practice, a syringe he lent you some time ago has gone missing.”

  “Beard is a dear man,” I said, “who often lacks discretion. He was keeping the world informed as to your pulse rate during your final reading tour, Charles.”

  My walking partner had nothing to say to that.

  Finally I added, “The daughter of my servants, George and Besse—still servants of mine for the time-being at least—had been pilfering things. I had to send her away.”

  “Little Agnes?” cried Dickens. “Stealing? Incredible!”