Drood (107 page)

“He looks dead,” I said. “As dead as a post.”

A
S I HAD PREDICTED
, a national—nay, a near
global—
hue and cry for Dickens to be buried in Westminster Abbey began before
rigor mortis
had relaxed its grip.

The London
Times,
long an enemy of Dickens’s and an opponent to every political and reform suggestion the Inimitable had ever made in public (not to mention a publication that had condescendingly dismissed almost all of his more recent novels), cried out in its bannered editorial—

Statesmen, men of science, philanthropists, the acknowledged benefactors of their race, might pass away, and yet not leave the void which will be caused by the death of Dickens.… Indeed, such a position is attained by not even one man in an age. It needs an extraordinary combination of intellectual and moral qualities… before the world will consent to enthrone a man as their unassailable and enduring favourite. This is the position which Mr Dickens has occupied with the English and also with the American public for a third of a century… Westminster Abbey is the peculiar resting place of English literary genius; and among those whose sacred dust lies there, or whose names are recorded on the walls, very few are more worthy than Charles Dickens of such a home. Fewer still, we believe, will be regarded with more honour as time passes, and his greatness grows upon us.

How I moaned at reading this! And how Charles Dickens would have roared with laughter if he could have read his old newspaper enemy grovelling so in its editorial hypocrisy.

The Dean of Westminster, far from being deaf to such outcries, sent word to the Dickens family that he, the Dean, was “prepared to receive any communication from the family respecting the burial.”

But Georgina, Katey, Charley, and the rest of the family (Harry had rushed home from Cambridge too late to see his father alive) had already been informed that the little graveyard at the foot of Westminster Castle was overcrowded and thus closed to further burials. Dickens had, upon occasion, expressed the thought that he might like to be buried at the churches of Cobham or Shorne, but it turned out that these graveyards were also closed to future interments. So after the offer came from the Dean and Chapter of Rochester to lay Dickens’s remains to rest inside the Cathedral itself—a grave had already been prepared in St Mary’s Chapel there—the Inimitable’s family had tentatively accepted when the note from Dean Stanley of Westminster arrived.

Oh, Dear Reader, how I adored the irony of the idea of Dickens’s corpse being encrypted for all Eternity mere yards from where I had planned to slide his skull and bones into the rubble-strewn wall of the Rochester crypt. I still had the copy of the crypts’ key that Dradles had made for me! I still had the short pry bar that Dradles had given to me (or sold to me for £300 and a lifetime annuity of £100 might be a more accurate way of thinking about it) with which I was to slide back the stone into the wall.

How wonderful! How totally delicious! I read all this in my morning letter from Charley and wept over my breakfast.

But, alas, it was not to be. It was too perfect to be true.

With Dickens’s corpse in the house beginning to moulder in the June heat, Forster (how he must have loved this primacy, at long last!) and Charley Dickens came up to London to confer with the Dean of Westminster.

They informed the Dean that Dickens’s will bound them, in no uncertain terms, to an absolutely private and unannounced funeral with no possibility whatsoever of any public homage. Dean Stanley agreed that the great man’s wishes should be obeyed to the letter—but allowed that the “desire of the nation” should also be obeyed.

Thus they went ahead with burying Charles Dickens at Westminster Abbey.

To add insult to injury in all this—as was almost always the case in my two decades of dealings with Dickens, Dear Reader—I had my allocated role in this unceremonious ceremony. On 14 June, I went to Charing Cross to meet the special train from Gad’s Hill and to “accept” the coffin bearing the mortal remains of Charles Dickens. The coffin was removed, as per the dead man’s instructions, to a bare hearse devoid of funeral trappings (pulled by horses devoid of black feathers). It might have been a delivery waggon for all the fuss this vehicle and its team showed.

Again in keeping with Dickens’s commands, only three coaches were permitted to follow this hearse to the Abbey.

In the first coach were the four Dickens children remaining in England—Charley, Harry, Mary, and Katey.

In the second coach were Georgina, Dickens’s (mostly-ignored-in-life) sister Letitia, his son Charley’s wife, and John Forster (who undoubtedly was wishing that he could be in the
first
coach, if not in the actual coffin alongside his master).

In the third coach rode Dickens’s solicitor, Frederic Ouvry, his ever-loyal (if not always discreet) physician Frank Beard, my brother, Charles, and me.

The bell of St Stephen’s was tolling half-past nine in the morning as our small procession reached the entry to the Dean’s Yard. No word of this burial had got out—a small triumph there of the Inimitable’s will over the habits of the press—and we saw almost no one lining the streets on the way. The public was banned from the Abbey that day.

As our carriages rolled into the courtyard, all the great bells began tolling. With help from younger men, we old friends carried the coffin through the western cloister door along the Nave and into the South Transept to the Poets’ Corner.

Oh, Dear Reader, if my fellow pallbearers and mourners could have read my thoughts as we set that simple oak box down in the Poets’ Corner. I have to wonder if such obscenities and imaginative curses had ever been thought in the Abbey of Westminster Cathedral, although some of the poets interred there certainly would have been up to the task had their brains been functioning rather than rotting to dust.

A few words were said. I do not recall who said them or what they were. There were no singers, no choir, but an unseen organist played the Dead March as the others turned away and filed out. I was the last to leave and I stood there alone for some time. The bass notes from the huge organ vibrated the very bones in my burly flesh, and it amused me to realise that Dickens’s bones were similarly vibrating inside his box.

I know you would have preferred to have those bones dropped unmarked into the wall of Dradles’s favourite old ’un’s crypt in Rochester,
I thought to my friend and enemy as I looked down at his simple coffin. The good English oak was adorned only with the words
CHARLES DICKENS
.

This is still too much,
I thought when I finally turned to leave and join the others outside in the sunlight.
Far too much. And it is only the beginning.

It was very cool and properly dim under the high stone vaultings of the Abbey. Outside, the bright sunlight seemed cruel in comparison.

Friends were allowed to visit the still-open grave, and later that day, after many medicinal applications of laudanum and some of morphia, I returned with Percy Fitzgerald. By this time there was a wreath of roses on the flagstones at the foot of Dickens’s coffin and a huge bank of shockingly green ferns at his head.

In
Punch,
a few days later, the cloying elegy bellowed—

He sleeps as he should sleep—among the great

In the old Abbey; sleeps amid the few

Of England’s famous thousands whose high state

Is to lie with her monarchs—monarchs too.

And,
I thought again as Percy and I came out into the evening shadows and June garden scents,
it is only the beginning.

Dean Stanley had given permission for the grave to be left open for a few days. Even that first day, the afternoon papers brayed the news. They were on the story the way dear old Sultan used to leap upon any man in uniform—worrying, tearing, chewing, and worrying it some more.

By the time Percy and I left when the Abbey closed at a few minutes after six o’clock—five days almost to the minute from when Dickens had sobbed and wept a single tear and finally condescended to quit breathing—there were a thousand people who had not yet received admittance, silently and solemnly queued up.

For two more days the grave remained open and for two more days the procession too long and endless for anyone to find its tail kept filing past. Tears and flowers were dropped into the grave by the thousands. Even after the grave was finally closed and a great block of stone bearing Dickens’s name was slid into place above it—for months after this theoretical closure—the mourners kept coming, the flowers kept appearing, the tears kept falling. His headstone soon became invisible under a huge mound of fragrant, colourful blossoms and it would stay that way for years.

And it is only the beginning.

When Percy—who was blubbering as fiercely as had Dickens’s tiny granddaughter Mekitty when she had seen her “Wenerables” cry and speak in strange voices on stage the previous spring—and I left that evening of 14 June, I excused myself, found an empty and private area behind high hedges in the surrounding gardens, and bit into my knuckles until blood flowed in order to stop the scream rising in me.

And that was only the beginning.

L
ATE THAT NIGHT
of 14 June I paced back and forth in my empty house.

George and Besse had returned from their twenty-four-hour vacation on 9 June and I had promptly fired them, sending them packing that evening. I gave neither reason for terminating their employment nor any letters of recommendation. I had not yet gotten around to hiring their replacements. Carrie would be stopping by the next day—a Wednesday, one week from the day that Dickens and I had agreed to meet after dusk outside the Falstaff Inn—but that would be a brief interruption before she went off for her monthly visit to her mother in Joseph Clow’s home.

In the meantime, I had the huge house to myself. The only sounds coming through the windows flung high for spring were the occasional rumbles of late-night traffic going by and the rustle of foliage as gentle breezes stirred the branches. Beneath that, there came the occasional scrape and scratch—like dry twigs or thorns brushing against thick wood—of whatever remained of poor little Agnes, clawing at the boarded-up doorway to the servants’ stairs.

On the first two days after I’d heard of Dickens’s death, the rheumatical gout pain had diminished astonishingly. Even more astonishing—and exciting to me—was the absence of any movement in my skull. I became certain that when Dickenson, Barris-Field, and Drood himself had somehow rendered me unconscious amidst the scarlet geraniums in Dickens’s flower bed six days ago this night, Drood had removed the scarab from my brain.

But that day, during the carrying-in of the coffin to Poets’ Corner and later with Percy, the old pressure and pain and skittering behind my eyes and even the
sound
of the beetle-burrowing in my brain had all come back.

I had self-administered three healthy injections of morphia on top of my usual nightly allocation of laudanum, but still I could not sleep. Despite the warmth and open windows, I built a large fire in my study fireplace.

Something to read… something to read!

I paced before my high bookcases, now pulling down a book I had promised to read or finish, standing by the fireplace or near the candles on the shelves or by the lamp on my desk as I read a page or two, then thrusting the volume back in its place.

That night, and every day and night since, seeing a book spine missing from its allotted space on my shelves reminded me of the stone that I should have removed from the wall of Dradles’s crypt. How many bones and skulls and skeletons are thrust into the void of such missing or unwritten books?

Finally I took down the beautiful leather-bound copy of
Bleak House
that Dickens had inscribed and given to me two years after we had met.

I chose
Bleak House
without actively thinking about it because, I now believe, I both admired and hated that book as much as any writing in the dead man’s
ouevre
.

I had been inhibited from telling any but a very few confidants of how absurd I found Dickens’s much-lauded writing to be in that book. His occasional first-person narration by “Esther Summerson” was the height of this absurdity.

I mean, Dear Reader (if the unworthy book has survived until your time, which I very much doubt—although I truly believe that
The Moonstone
will and has), just look at Dickens’s chosen primary metaphor that opens the book—that fog! It appears, it becomes the central metaphor, and it creeps off, never to be used as such again.

What amateur writing! What a failure of theme and intention!

And just look, Dear Reader—as I was madly doing that night of Dickens’s funeral, flipping through the pages with the intensity of a lawyer seeking a precedent by which to save (or, in this case, condemn) his client—at how ridiculous the totally unbelievable coincidences are in that book… and how unbelievably cruel the character of the always-a-child Harold Skimpole was, since we all knew at the time that he had based Skimpole on our common acquaintance Leigh Hunt or… there is the abject failure of his late-in-the-book mystery element, so inferior in every way to that in
The Moonstone
or… the shifting and contradictory impressions of Esther’s looks after she has suffered the smallpox (I mean, was she disfigured or not!? Now yes! Now not at all! What a conspiracy of auctorial incompetence wrestling with narrative dishonesty) and then… but look here first!… look, if you will, at that entire narration by Esther Summerson! What do you say to that? What
can
you—or any honest reader sitting in judgement—say to that!

Esther begins her narration with the poorly educated and naive child’s view we might expect for a poorly educated and unworldly child—she speaks in near-infant’s sentences such as (I riffled and tore at the pages to find this)—
“My dear old doll! I was such a shy thing that I seldom dared to open my lips, and never dared open my heart, to anybody else.… O you dear faithful Dolly, I knew you would be expecting me!”