Drood (38 page)
I was no longer surprised or shocked to hear that Field’s men had followed us. I would not be surprised to learn that he had secreted a dwarf into the walls of our home on Melcombe Place in order to take notes on our quarrels.
“It is a fine home,” I said. “But the current resident, a Mrs Shernwold, does not wish to sell. And I’d be strapped to find the funds for it at this time anyway.”
“Both of these impediments could be eliminated, Mr Collins,” purred Inspector Field. “If we were working together again, I could all but guarantee that you and your lady and her daughter could be moved into that fine residence on Gloucester Place within a year or two, even while your Miss R—— could be reinstated on Bolsover Street, if you wish, with our help in meeting her travel and other immediate expenses.”
I squinted at the old man. My head hurt. I wanted to go home to breakfast and then bed. I wanted to pull the bedcovers over my head and to sleep for a week. We had moved from blackmailing to bribery. On the whole, I believe I had been more comfortable with the blackmail.
“What do I have to do, Inspector?”
“Nothing more than we have already discussed, Mr Collins. Use your good offices with Charles Dickens to find out where Drood is and what he is up to.”
I shook my head. “Dickens is completely absorbed in his preparations for his imminent reading tour. I am sure he’s had no contact with Drood since Christmas. Besides being frightened by what he thought he saw outside his window that night, Dickens is buried now in details. You have no idea the amount of preparation such a tour involves.”
“I am sure I do not, Mr Collins,” said Inspector Field. “But I do know that your friend will begin his tour with an opening night reading in a week, on the twenty-third of March, at the Assembly Rooms in Cheltenham. Then, on the tenth of April, he will appear at St James’s Hall here in London, followed immediately by readings in Liverpool, then Manchester, then Glasgow, then Edinburgh.…”
“Do you have the entire itinerary?” I interrupted.
“Of course.”
“Then you would know how impossible it would be for me to get Charles Dickens’s attention during the tour. All authors’ public readings are exhausting for the author. A Dickens reading is exhausting for the author and for everyone around him. There is simply nothing in the world like a Charles Dickens reading, and he promises this tour to be even more intense.”
“So I have heard,” Inspector Field said softly. “Somehow, Drood is involved in this reading tour of your friend’s.”
I laughed. “How could he be? How could a man of such appearance travel with Dickens or be seen at his readings without comment?”
“Drood is a man of infinite guises,” Field said. His voice was hushed, as if Hatchery or Miss Darby or the boy Billy could be the Egyptian criminal in disguise. “I
guarantee
that your friend Dickens is—consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or as an instrument of Drood—carrying out that Devil’s purposes on this tour.”
“How could he…” I began and stopped, remembering Dickens’s odd insistence that he would be magnetising the entire audience during each reading.
Mesmerising
them. But to what dark purpose?
This was all absurd.
“Still,” I said wearily, “you know Dickens’s schedule. And you know he has only a small entourage travelling with him.”
“Mr Dolby,” said Inspector Field. “His agent Mr Wills.” Field went on to name the gas man and lighting expert and even those agents sent in advance to inspect the theatres and arrange for ticketing prices, advertising, and such. “But surely, Mr Collins, Dickens would enjoy seeing his dear friend during such an exhausting tour. I know that he plans to see Macready at the Cheltenham opening. Could you not arrange to spend a few days of travel with your famous friend, attend one or two of his readings?”
“That’s all you want of me?”
“Your help in these small things—a simple matter of observing and chatting and reporting—could be invaluable,” purred Inspector Field.
“How on earth do you plan to make ninety Gloucester Place available to us, even by next year, if Mrs Shernwold is reserving it for her missionary son and absolutely refuses to sell?” I asked.
The inspector smiled. I half-expected to see canary feathers protruding from between those liver-coloured lips. “That will be my problem, sir, although I expect no problems at all. It is a privilege to help someone aiding us in the public service of ridding London of its least notorious but most successful serial murderer.”
I sighed and nodded. If Inspector Field had extended his hand then to seal our dark deal, I’m not sure if I could have touched him. Perhaps he sensed as much, for he merely nodded—the deal was set—and looked around.
“Would you like Miss Darby and the boy to burn us some more sherry, sir? It’s a wonderful preparation for sleep.”
“No,” I said, trying to get to my feet and suddenly feeling Hatchery’s huge hand on my arm, effortlessly lifting me out of the booth. “I want to go home.”
I
chose to join Dickens for a few days well into his tour.
Inspector Field had been correct in saying that Dickens would welcome the idea of my joining him for a bit of time on the road. I sent a note to Wills, who—exhausted as he must have been from travelling every day with the Inimitable—flitted back to London every few days from the tour to carry on his own and Dickens’s business affairs at the magazine with Forster (who disapproved of the entire idea of the reading tour), and within a day I received back that rarest of things for me—a telegram—which read,
MY DEAR WILKIE Ń THE TOUR IS
SUCH
FUN! OUR DOLBY HAS TURNED OUT TO BE THE
PERFECT
TRAVEL COMPANION AND MANAGER. YOU WILL ENJOY HIS ANTICS. I CERTAINLY DO. JOIN US AT ANY TIME AND TRAVEL WITH US AS LONG AS YOU WISH. AT YOUR OWN EXPENSE, OF COURSE. LOOKING FORWARD TO YOUR COMPANY! Ń C. DICKENS
I had wondered how the Staplehurst accident was affecting the Inimitable’s almost daily railway journeys, and I discovered this a few minutes after we had departed the station in Bristol on our way to Birmingham.
I was sitting directly across from Dickens in the compartment. He was sitting alone on his bench. George Dolby and Wills occupied the seat beside me but they were chatting, and perhaps I alone could see that the author was becoming more agitated as our carriage got up to speed. Dickens’s hands fiercely gripped first the head of his walking stick and then the sill of the window. He would glance out the window as the vibrations increased, then look away quickly, then glance out again. His face, usually darker than most Englishmen’s due to the effects of the sun during his daily walks, grew paler and was moist with perspiration. Then Dickens removed his travelling flask from his pocket, took a long pull of brandy, breathed more deeply, took a second pull, and put the flask away. Then he lit a cigar and turned to chat with Dolby, Wills, and me.
The Inimitable preferred an interesting—even eccentric, possibly even dashing—wardrobe for his travel: a pea jacket over which he tossed an expensive Count D’Orsay cloak; his grizzled and weary visage, his lined skin bronzed by sun (the pallor had faded with the brandy and was now almost gone), peeking out from beneath a felt hat worn rather jauntily to one side. I’d overheard the bearlike Dolby tell the scarecrow-thin Wills at the Bristol station that the hat “makes the chief look like a modernised gentlemanly pirate with eyes in which lurk the iron will of a demon and the tender pity of an angel.”
I think Dolby had also been partaking of some brandy that morning.
The conversation was lively—we were the only passengers in this first-class compartment, the rest of the small entourage having gone on to Birmingham before us. I had heard from Dickens that during the first days of the tour, Wills had put Dolby through very thorough cross-examinations on how the business manager would handle his work. During those first city readings, Dolby had gone ahead with the gas and lighting men and only Wills had travelled each day with Dickens. Now, with Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Bristol behind them—and no major problems in any of those cities, so thorough was Dolby’s work—the big business manager was travelling with Dickens, much to the Inimitable’s obvious delight. The rest of the tour consisted of Birmingham, Aberdeen, Portsmouth, and then home to the final performances in London.
Dolby, whom a later client—an American writer named Mark Twain—would describe as “a gladsome gorilla,” reached into the large wicker basket he had brought aboard, set linen on the tiny folding table he had thought to provide for the centre of our compartment, and proceeded to present a buffet luncheon of hard-boiled-egg sandwiches with anchovy, salmon mayonnaise, cold fowl and tongue, and pressed beef, with Roquefort cheese and cherry tart for our dessert. He also set out a rather good red wine and kept a gin punch chilled by filling the compartment’s washstand with ice. As the rest of us finished this repast, Dolby warmed coffee over a spirit lamp. Whatever else the huge, whiskered man with his infectious laugh and rather endearing stammer might be, he was certainly efficient.
After a second bottle of wine was opened and the chilled gin punch was finished, the group began to sing travelling songs—some of which I’d sung with Dickens when it had been just the two of us wandering around the country or in Europe the previous decade. This day, as we approached Birmingham, Dickens was moved to dance a sailor’s hornpipe for us as we all whistled accompaniment. When he was finished and out of breath, Dolby gave him the last glass of punch and Dickens began teaching us the drinking song from
Der Freischütz
. Suddenly an express roared past us going the opposite way on the adjoining track and Dickens’s lovely felt hat was whisked right off his balding head by the vacuum. Wills, who seemed more the consumptive type than an athlete, launched his long arm out the window and caught the hat just before it disappeared forever into the countryside. We all applauded and Dickens pounded the frail man heartily on the back.
“I lost a sealskin cap earlier on this tour under almost exactly the same circumstances,” Dickens said to me as he took the felt hat from Wills and tugged it back on. “I would have hated parting ways with this chapeau. Thank God Wills is famous for his defensive fielding. I can’t remember whether he was famous for playing at Deep fine leg or Backward short leg, but his fielding abilities are legendary. His shelves groan with silver cups.”
“I have never played the game of…” began Wills.
“Never mind, never mind,” laughed Dickens, clapping his companion on the back again. George Dolby boomed out laughter that must have been heard from one end of our express to the other.
I
N BIRMINGHAM, I
got a taste of the texture and timing of the tour.
I had certainly stayed in my share of hotels, and while such travel was usually enjoyable, I was very aware of Dickens’s ill health the previous winter and spring and also knew from personal experience that constant travel and the vagaries of hotel life do little to allow recovery from ill health. He had confided in me that his left eye continued to blur and ache fiercely, that his belly constantly felt distended, that flatulence was a problem all during the tour, and that the vibration of the trains gave him a sort of nausea and vertigo from which he never had time to recover during his short stays in the cities in which he performed. Balancing near-daily travel and exhausting nights of reading was obviously pushing Dickens to and beyond the limits of his endurance.
Upon arriving in Birmingham, before resting or unpacking his valise, Dickens hurried over to the theatre. Wills was preoccupied with other duties, but Dolby and I followed the Inimitable.
Touring the hall with the theatre owner, Dickens immediately ordered changes. As per his instructions, seats on either side of the stage and certain box seats had been either removed or roped off, but now he stood at his customised reading lectern and ordered even more seats on either side of the large theatre to be eliminated.
Everyone attending his reading had to be within direct and unoccluded line of sight.
Not only to see him clearly, I understood, but so that he could make eye contact with
them.
His advance workers had already erected a large maroon screen that would be behind him as he spoke; the screen was seven feet high and fifteen feet wide and there was a carpet of the same colour between the screen and his lectern. The unique gas lighting was also in place. Here Dickens’s gas man and lighting expert had set two upright pipes rising about twelve feet on either side of his reading lectern. Connecting the two pipes but hidden from the sight of the audience by a maroon board was a horizontal row of gaslights in tin reflectors. In addition to this bright lighting, there was a gaslight on each pipe that was protected by a green shade and which was aimed directly at the reader’s face.
I stood in the glow of this clever lighting rig and the two targeted lamps for only a minute but the glare was intimidating. I would have found it very difficult, if not impossible, to read from any book with those lights shining in my face, but I knew that Dickens rarely if ever
read
from his prompt books doing these ostensible readings. He had memorised all the hundreds of pages of text he would be performing—read and memorised and altered and improved and rehearsed each story at least two hundred times—and would either close the book he had in his hand after beginning his performance or merely turn the pages, absentmindedly and symbolically, as he went along. Most of the time his eyes would be staring through the blazing rectangle of gas lighting towards the audience. Yet for all that ferocious gaslit glow, Dickens could still see the faces of all those in his audience. He deliberately left the house lighting high enough for that.
Before relinquishing my spot at Charles Dickens’s reading desk, I studied the desk itself. Propped on four slender and elegant legs, the table rose to about the height of the Inimitable’s inimitable navel. Flat-topped, the desk was covered by a crimson piece of cloth this afternoon. On either side of the table were small ledges, the one on the right designed to hold a carafe of water, the one on the left meant for Dickens’s expensive kid gloves and a pocket handkerchief. Also on the left side of the desktop was a rectangular block of wood on which Dickens could—and frequently did—rest either his left or right elbow when he leaned forward. (He often read from just to the left of the desk itself and, I knew from seeing him at previous readings in London, might suddenly lean forward almost boyishly with his right elbow on that raised block and his expressive hands in motion. The effect was to make the audience feel an even more personal and intimate bond with him.)
