Drood (101 page)

“Not a parody,” he says. “An affectionate remembrance.”

I sip from my flask and wave that away. It is not important. “But your
Drood
tale is less than half done—only the four monthly instalments have seen print and your entire manuscript to date is completed to only half the length of the full book—and yet you have already murdered young Edwin Drood. Asking as one professional to another—and as one with decidedly more experience and perhaps greater expertise in writing about mysteries—how can you possibly hope to sustain interest, Charles, when you have committed the murder so early in the tale yet have only one logical choice for the murderer… the very clear villain, John Jasper?”

“Well,” says Dickens, “as one professional replying to another, we must remember that… wait!”

The pistol jerks up in my hand and I blink away distraction as I aim the muzzle at his heart some four feet away. Has someone entered the graveyard? Is he trying to distract me?

No. It appears that the Inimitable simply has been struck by a thought.

“How is it, my dear Wilkie,” continues Dickens, “that you know of Datchery’s appearance and even of poor Edwin’s murder when these scenes, those numbers even, have not yet appeared and… ahh… Wills. Somehow you got a copy of the finished work from Wills. William Henry is a dear man, a trusted friend, but he has not been the same since that accident, what with all those doors creaking and slamming in his head.”

I say nothing.

“Very well, then,” says Dickens. “You know of the murder of young Drood on Christmas Eve. You know of Crisparkle’s discovery of Edwin’s watch and tie-pin in the river, although no body is found. You know of the suspicion falling on the fiery-tempered young foreigner from Ceylon, Neville Landless, brother to the beautiful Helena Landless, and of the blood found on Landless’s stick. You know of Edwin’s engagement to Rosa having been broken off and you know of Edwin’s uncle, the opium-eater John Jasper, fainting after the murder when he first learns that there had been no engagement and that his obvious jealousy had been for naught. I currently have six of the contracted twelve instalments written. But what is your question?”

I feel the laudanum warmth in my arms and legs and I grow more impatient. The scarab in my brain is even more impatient than I. I can feel it scurry back and forth past the inside of the bridge of my nose, peering first from one eye, then from the other, as if jostling for a better view.

“John Jasper did the murder on Christmas Eve,” I say, waving the pistol just a trifle as I speak. “I can even name the murder weapon… that long black scarf you have taken pains to mention at least three times so far for little reason. Your clues are hardly subtle, Charles!”

“It was to be an overly long cravat or neck tie,” he says with another damning smile. “But I changed it to the scarf.”

“I know,” I say impatiently. “Charley told me that you emphasised that the cravat must be shown in the illustration and then told Fildes to change it to a scarf. Neck tie, scarf, it makes little difference. My question remains—how can you possibly hope to keep the readers engaged for the full second half of the book if we all know that John Jasper is to be revealed as the murderer?”

Dickens pauses before speaking as if struck by an important thought. He sets his brandy flask down carefully on the weathered stone. For some reason, he has put his spectacles on—as if discussing his never-to-be-finished book might require some reading aloud to me—and the moon’s now twice-reflected glow turns the lenses of his spectacles to opaque silver-white disks.

“You want to finish the book,” he whispers.

“What!”

“You heard me, Wilkie. You want to approach Chapman and tell him that you can finish the novel for me—William Wilkie Collins, the famous author of
The Moonstone,
stepping in to carry on the work of his fallen friend, his deceased onetime collaborator. William Wilkie Collins, you will tell dear mourning Chapman and Hall, is the only man in England—the only man in the English-speaking world—the only man in the entire world!—who knew Charles Dickens’s mind sufficiently that he, William Wilkie Collins, can complete the mystery so tragically truncated when the aforesaid Mr Dickens disappeared suddenly, almost certainly taking his own life. You want to complete
The Mystery of Edwin Drood,
my dear Wilkie, and thus quite literally replace me in the hearts of readers as well as in the annals of great writers of our time.”

“That’s absolutely absurd,” I shout so loudly that I cringe and look around in embarrassment. My voice has echoed back from the cathedral and its tower. “It’s absurd,” I whisper urgently. “I have no such thought or ambition. I have never
had
any such thought or ambition. I write my own immortal books—
The Moonstone
sold better than your
Bleak House
or this current tale!—and as a mystery tale
The Moonstone
—as I was pointing out to you tonight—was infinitely more carefully plotted and thought out than is this confused tale of the murder of Edwin Drood.”

“Yes, of course,” Dickens says softly. But he is smiling that mischievous Dickens smile again. If I had a shilling for every time I have seen that smile, I would never have to write again.

“Besides,” I say, “I know your secret. I know the ‘Great Surprise,’ your clever plot hinge, upon which this rather transparent tale—by my professional standards—obviously hangs.”

“Oh?” says Dickens affably enough. “Please be so kind as to enlighten me, my dear Wilkie. As a newcomer to this mystery business, I may have failed to see my own obvious Great Surprise.”

Ignoring his sarcasm and idly pointing the pistol at his head, I say, “Edwin Drood is not dead.”

“No?”

“No. Jasper
attempted
to murder him, that is clear. And Jasper may even think that he succeeded in his efforts. But Drood survived, is alive, and shall join forces with your oh-so-obvious ‘heroes’—Rosa Bud; Neville and his sister, Helena Landless; your Muscular Christian, Minor Canon Crisparkle; and even that new sailor character you drag in so late…” I rack my memory for the character’s name.

“Lieutenant Tartar,” Dickens offers helpfully.

“Yes, yes. The heroic rope-climbing Lieutenant Tartar, so instantly and conveniently fallen in love with Rosa Bud, and all these other… benevolent angels… shall conspire with Edwin Drood to reveal the murderer… John Jasper!”

Dickens removes his spectacles, considers them with a smile for a moment, and then folds them carefully away in their case and sets the case back in his jacket pocket. I want to shout at him,
Throw them away! You will have no more use for spectacles! If you keep them now, I will simply have to fish them out of the lime pit later!

He says softly, “And will Dick Datchery be one of these… benevolent angels… helping the resurrected Edwin to reveal the identity of the attempted murderer?”

“No,” I say, unable to hide the triumph in my voice, “for the so-called ‘Dick Datchery’ is actually Edwin Drood himself… in disguise!”

Dickens sits on his headstone and thinks about this for a moment. I have seen this silent motionless statue of the always-in-motion Charles Dickens before, but only when I have put him in checkmate in one of my few victorious chess games against him.

“You are… this extrapolation is…
very
clever, my dear Wilkie,” he says at last.

I have no need to speak. It must be almost midnight. I am both anxious and eager to get to the quick-lime pit and to finish the night’s business and then to go home and take a very hot bath.

“But one question, please,” he says softly, tapping at his flask with his manicured forefinger.

“What?”

“If Edwin Drood survived the murder attempt by his uncle, why does he have to go to all these labours… staying in hiding, enlisting allies, disguising himself as the almost comedic Dick Datchery? Why does he not just come forward and tell the authorities that his uncle attempted to murder him on Christmas Eve? Attempted, perhaps, even to the point of dumping Edwin’s presumed-dead but in-truth-unconscious body into a pit of quick-lime (from which he must have awakened and crawled out as the acidic substance began to eat upon his skin and clothing… a delicious scene, I admit to you, as one professsional to another, but not, I also confess, one that I had cause to write)… but surely then we
have
no murderer, only a crazy uncle
attempting
murder, and no reason for Edwin Drood to remain in hiding. There is then no murder of Edwin Drood and precious little mystery.”

“There are reasons for Drood to stay in hiding until the proper time comes,” I say confidently. I have no idea what they might be. I take a long drink of laudanum but make sure that I do not close my eyes for even an instant.

“Well, I wish you luck, my dear Wilkie,” Dickens says with an easy laugh. “But you should know this before you attempt to complete the book according to the outline I never wrote…
young Edwin Drood is dead. John Jasper, under the influence of the same opium-laudanum you are drinking at this moment, murdered Edwin on Christmas Eve, just as the reader suspects at this point halfway through the book
.”

“That’s absurd,” I say again. “John Jasper is so jealous of his nephew over Rosa Bud that he
murders
him? But what then… we have half the novel ahead to fill with nothing but… what? John Jasper’s confession?”

“Yes,” says Dickens with a truly evil smile. “That is precisely correct. The remainder of
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
is indeed—or at least the core of it shall be—the confessions of John Jasper and his alternate consciousness, Jasper Drood.”

I shake my head but the dizziness only grows worse.

“And Jasper is not Drood’s uncle, as we are given to believe,” continues Dickens. “He is Drood’s
brother
.”

I mean to laugh at this but it emerges as a particularly loud snort. “Brother!”

“Oh, yes. Young Edwin, you must remember, is planning to go to Egypt as a member of a troupe of engineers. He plans to
change
Egypt forever, perhaps make it his home. But what Edwin does not know, my dear Wilkie, is that his half-brother (
not
his uncle), Jasper
Drood
(not John Jasper) was born there… in Egypt. And he learned his dark powers there.”

“Dark powers?” I keep forgetting to aim the pistol but now bring the muzzle up again.

“Mesmerism,” whispers Dickens. “Control of the minds and actions of others. And not merely our English parlour-game level of mesmerism, Wilkie, but the serious sort of mind-control which approaches true mind reading. Precisely the sort of mental contact we have seen in the book between young Neville Landless and his beautiful sister, Helen Lawless. They honed their mind abilities in Ceylon. Jasper Drood learned his in Egypt. When Helen Lawless and Jasper Drood finally meet on the field of mesmeric battle—and they shall—it will be a scene spoken of in awe by readers for centuries.”

Helena Landless, not Lawless,
I think, noting Dickens’s confusion of his own characters.
Ellen Lawless Ternan. Even in this last unfinished fragment of a failed book, Dickens cannot restrain himself from connecting the most beautiful and mysterious woman in the novel with his own fantasy and obsession. Ellen Ternan.

“Are you listening, my dear Wilkie?” asks Dickens. “You look as if you may be on the verge of dozing.”

“Not at all,” I say. “But even if John Jasper is actually Jasper Drood, the murder victim’s older brother, what interest will that be to the reader who has to suffer through another several hundred pages of mere confession?”

“Never
mere
confession,” chuckles Dickens. “In this novel, my dear Wilkie, we shall be in the mind and consciousness of a murderer in a way that no reader has ever before experienced in the history of literature. For John Jasper—Jasper Drood—is
two
men, you see—two complete and tragic personalities, both trapped in the opium-riddled brain of the lay precentor of the Cloisterham…”

He pauses, turns, gestures theatrically to the tower and great structure behind him.

“. . . of the
Rochester
Cathedral. And it is within those very crypts…”

He gestures again and my dizzied gaze follows his gesture.

“. . . those very crypts where John Jasper / Jasper Drood will hide the quick-lime-reduced bones and skull of his beloved nephew and brother, Edwin.”

“This is sh——,” I say dully.

Dickens brays a laugh. “Perhaps,” he says, still laughing under his breath. “But with all the twists and turns ahead, the reader will be…
would have been
… delighted to learn of the many revelations that lie…
would have lain
… ahead in this tale. For instance, my dear Wilkie, our John Jasper Drood has committed his murder under the influence of both mesmerism and opium. The latter, the opium in greater and greater quantities, has been the trigger for the former—the mesmeric command to murder his brother.”

“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?”