Drood (27 page)

A
S I HAD KNOWN
even before he had tried (and failed) to mesmerise me shortly after Staplehurst, Dickens’s fascination with mesmerism went back almost thirty years, to the time when the writer was known everywhere primarily by his early
nom de plume
of “Boz.” All of England was interested in mesmerism at that time: the phenomenon had been imported from France, where a “magnetic boy” seemed to be able to tell time on people’s watches and read cards in a mesmeric trance even while his head and eyes were heavily bandaged. I did not know Dickens then, of course, but he had described more than once how he had attended as many demonstrations of mesmerism as he could find in London. But it was the professor Dickens had mentioned, a certain John Elliotson from University College Hospital, who most impressed the young Boz.

In 1838, Elliotson used his Magnetic Influence to place his subjects—some of them patients at his hospital in London—into a much deeper trance than most mesmerists could achieve. From the depths of those trances, his men and women, boys and girls, not only made strides towards cures of chronic conditions, but also could be induced into prophetic and even clairvoyant states. The Okey sisters, both epileptics, not only left their wheeled chairs to sing and dance while mesmerised by Professor Elliotson, but also showed strong evidence of second sight under what young Dickens had been convinced had been a controlled condition. Dickens was, in other words, a convert.

For a man with no real religious convictions, Dickens became a true believer in animal magnetism and in the mesmeric powers that controlled this energy. You must remember, Dear Reader, the context of our times: science was making huge strides in understanding the underlying and interrelated energies and fluids such as magnetism and electricity. The flow and control of mesmeric fluid common to all living things, but especially to the human mind and body, seemed to Dickens to be as scientific and as demonstrable as breakthroughs shown by Faraday when he generated electricity with a magnet.

The next year, 1839, when Elliotson resigned his position of Professor of Principles and Practices of Medicine at University College—due to pressure, everyone understood, because of the sensational nature of his mesmeric demonstrations—Dickens supported the doctor in public, loaned him money in private, arranged for Elliotson to attend to Dickens’s parents and other family members, and—some years later—attempted to help the distraught and despondent doctor when he became suicidal.

Dickens never allowed himself to be mesmerised, of course. Anyone who thought that Charles Dickens might surrender such control of himself to another person, even briefly, did not know Charles Dickens. It was the young Boz, soon to be the mature Inimitable, who invariably sought to control other people. Mesmerism became just one of the tools he used, but it was one he would be interested in for the rest of his life.

It was not long, of course, before Dickens began attempting his own mesmeric experiments and therapies. By the time he was visiting America in 1842, Dickens told his friends there that he was regularly mesmerising Catherine to cure her of her headaches and insomnia. (Years later, he told me that he had been using animal magnetism to alleviate a much wider range of what he called “hysterical symptoms” exhibited by his hapless wife. He also confessed to me that his first mesmerism of his wife had been an accident; while discussing Magnetic Influence with some American friends he had been “holding forth upon the subject rather luminously,” making hand movements around his listeners’ heads and brushing their eyebrows simply to exhibit the proper procedures he himself had witnessed in demonstrations by experts, when he suddenly magnetised Catherine into hysterics. He had made more hand passes to bring her out of it, but that only succeeded in sending his wife into a deep mesmeric trance. The next night he again used Catherine as his subject in front of friends and shortly after that began his attempt to cure her of her “hysterical symptoms.”) From Catherine he moved on to applying his growing mesmeric abilities to a small circle of family and friends.

But it was with Madame de la Rue that Dickens’s use of Magnetic Influence led to trouble.

Madame Augusta de la Rue was the English wife of Swiss-born banker Emile de la Rue, director of the Genoese branch of the banking firm started by his grandfather. For a brief period starting in October of 1844, the year Dickens had brought Catherine to Genoa so that he could write there through the autumn and winter, the Dickenses and the de la Rues were neighbours and saw each other frequently in the small expatriate circle of Genoese society.

Augusta de la Rue suffered from symptoms of overwhelming nervousness that included insomnia, nervous tics, facial spasms, and attacks of anxiety so severe that they literally tied the poor woman in knots. People of a less sophisticated age than ours might have thought the woman possessed by demons.

Dickens proposed that he use his growing mesmeric abilities to help Madame de la Rue, and Emile, the lady’s husband, thought it a grand idea.
“Happy and ready to come to you,”
Dickens announced to her in one note, and for the next three months, through November and December of 1844 into January of 1845, the author was with her several times a day. Her husband was present for some of these sessions. (Emile valiantly attempted to learn the mesmeric arts from Dickens so that he could help his wife on his own, but, alas, Emile de la Rue had no talent for Magnetic Influence.)

Central to the mystery of Madame de la Rue’s malady was the presence of a lurking Phantom who haunted her dreams and somehow was the source of her illness. “It is absolutely essential,” Dickens instructed Emile de la Rue, “that this Phantom to which her incapacitating thoughts are directed and clustered around, should not
regain its power.
”

To keep this from happening, Dickens began responding to summonses from the de la Rues at any time of the day or night. Sometimes Dickens would leave Catherine alone in their cold Genoese bed and rush to Madame de la Rue’s bedside at four AM in order to help his poor patient.

Slowly Madame de la Rue’s spasms, tics, contortions, and sleepless nights began to ebb. Emile was delighted. Yet every day Dickens continued to magnetise her to ask more questions about the Phantom. To those who watched the mesmeric sessions in the parlour of the de la Rue mansion, it seemed very much like a séance, with Madame de la Rue—deep in her trance—reporting of dark and light spirit forms shifting around her in some distant location. And always with the Phantom trying to bring her under his or its control, while Charles Dickens valiantly attempted to free Madame de la Rue from the creature’s dark influence.

When Dickens and Catherine left Genoa in late January to continue their travels to Rome and Naples, Emile kept sending the author daily updates and diary entries reporting on his wife’s condition. Dickens wrote back that it was essential that the de la Rues join him in Rome no later than late February, and Emile de la Rue and his wife arranged to travel there early.

Catherine did not know that her husband was planning to reunite with Madame de la Rue. Nor did she know that Dickens had made a private arrangement with his “patient”: he would concentrate for one full hour on mesmerising her in his imagination starting at eleven AM each day. Madame de la Rue, far away, concentrated on receiving the radiation of Dickens’s Magnetic Influence as he turned his “Visual Ray” in her direction.

They were travelling by carriage—Catherine riding atop the vehicle for air, Dickens within—when eleven AM arrived and Dickens began concentrating on his distant patient. He had no sooner begun visualising his mesmeric hand passes and directing the magnetic fluid when he heard Catherine’s muff fall from the box above. Catherine, having no idea that Dickens was sending magnetic influences into the air towards Genoa, nonetheless had gone into a violent mesmeric trance on the carriage box above him, her eyelids quivering in a convulsive manner.

By the time the Dickenses had settled in Rome, the separation of the patient from her Magnetic Doctor had led to serious setbacks. Emile wrote that the Phantom showed signs of reappearing and taking control of Augusta.
“I
cannot
beat it down, or keep it down, at a distance,”
Dickens wrote back.
“Pursuing that Magnetic power, and being near to her and with her, I believe that I can shiver it like Glass.”

The de la Rues appeared in Rome soon after this—to Catherine’s great astonishment—and Dickens resumed the daily sessions, now magnetising her, he wrote,
“under olive trees, sometimes in vineyards, sometimes in the travelling carriage, sometimes at wayside inns during the midday halt.”

It was during this time that Dickens reported to Emile that Madame de la Rue was showing disturbing symptoms.
“She was rolled into an apparently impossible ball, by tic in the brain, and I only knew where her head was by following her long hair to its source.”

It was at this point that Catherine (who had become pregnant again in late January, about the time she joined Dickens in climbing Mount Vesuvius as it was in full eruption) announced to her husband that she was distressed by the apparent impropriety of Charles’s relationship with Augusta.

Dickens, as he always did when accused of something, became furious and railed at Catherine that her accusations were absurd, even obscene, and that it was obvious to everyone else involved and uninvolved that his motives were absolutely the pure concern of a doctor of mesmeric magnetism towards one of his most troubled patients. Dickens shouted, berated Catherine, and threatened to leave Rome without her.

Nonetheless, a three-months-pregnant wife—especially one standing as firm in her position as the Great Wall of China—is hard to bully.

For the first time, Catherine had spoken out against one of Dickens’s obsessions and flirtations, and for the first and only time, he had relented. He explained to the de la Rues that Catherine was upset at the amount of time he was spending with his patient, but he also apologised profusely for Catherine’s attitude, calling her oversensitive to her own needs and insensitive to others’.

And Dickens never forgot or forgave this insult to his honour. Years later, shortly before he cast Catherine out of the house after the incident of the Ellen Ternan bracelet, he brought up what he called her irrational jealousy from fourteen years earlier and the effect such an insult had on him. “Whatever made you unhappy in that Genoa time had no other root, beginning, middle, or end, than whatever has made you proud and honoured in your married life, and given you station better than rank, and surrounded you with many enviable things,” he flung at her.

She had seen his relationship with poor, bedevilled Madame de la Rue as something suspect. Dickens informed her years later that she should have
known
—had she been a good and true wife she
would
have known—that his helping the poor woman had been the purest expression of his own innate creativity and nobility. His ability to mesmerise others, much like his ability to write great novels, was part of the firmament of character that was his greatest gift.

But now Dickens the minor master of Magnetic Influence had met the ultimate Master.

As I finished my breakfast at the club and folded my newspapers and left my napkin on the chair and found my hat and cane and went to the door, I had no doubt whatsoever that Dickens had been travelling into London every week on the train that terrified him into sweats to learn more about mesmerism from
someone.

And it seemed to make sense that this someone was named Drood.

W
ELL, MR COLLINS
. What a pleasant coincidence,” said a brusque voice behind me as I walked up Chancery Lane towards Lincoln’s Inn Court.

“Mr Field,” I said, half-turning and nodding but not stopping, omitting the “Inspector” before his name by choice.

He either did not notice the omission or pretended not to. “It is a lovely autumn day, is it not, Mr Collins?”

“It is.”

“It was a pleasant day yesterday as well. Did you enjoy your outing to Chatham and Gad’s Hill?”

I double-tapped my stick on cobblestones. “Am I being followed,
Mr
Field? I thought you had a boy waiting on Melcombe Place and Dorset Square for any message I might want to send you.”

“Oh, I do, Mr Collins,” said Field, responding only to my second question. “The lad Gooseberry is there now, waiting patiently. He can afford to be patient, since I pay him to wait. My own profession does not allow for such patience without severe penalties. Time, as they say, is money.”

We passed through Lincoln’s Inn Fields. John Forster had lived here during his many years as a bachelor, and I always wondered if it was mere coincidence that Dickens had given the villainous lawyer Tulkinghorn in
Bleak House
Forster’s old address.

When we passed through the Fields and reached Oxford Street, we both paused on the kerb as some dray waggons rumbled by. Then we had to wait for a line of carriages. Field removed his watch from his waistcoat and checked it. “Eleven twenty-five,” he said. “Miss R—— should be on the outskirts of London by now, on her way back to Yarmouth.”

I gripped the cane as if it were a club. “So you have people following all of us,” I said through gritted teeth. “If you’re paying your operatives to do that, Inspector, then you are wasting both time
and
money.”

“I agree,” said Field. “This is why your information will liberate both of us from wasted time, Mr Collins.”

“If you had me followed yesterday,” I said, “then you know everything I know.”

Field laughed. “I can tell you the route you and Mr Dickens took on your three-hour walk, Mr Collins. But I cannot report even the gist of your conversation, although I know that the two of you were talking—or rather, Mr
Dickens
was talking—for most of the way back from Cooling Marsh.”

I admit that a flush of real anger crept up from my collar to my cheeks at hearing this. I did not remember seeing any other pedestrians during my walk with Dickens. Yet some blackguard had been hovering nearby the entire time. I felt guilty and exposed, even though Dickens and I had been doing nothing more sinister than taking an afternoon constitutional. And how did Field know that Martha had left on the 11:15 train, only ten minutes before the infernal inspector announced it to me? Had one of his operatives rushed pell-mell from Charing Cross Station to inform his meddling and blackmailing superior of this vital fact? Were his agents signalling to him even now from some alley in the direction of Gray’s Inn or Seven Dials? The anger continued to rise until I felt my heart pounding beneath my starched shirt.