Drood (52 page)
“And to visit his mistress in Slough,” Inspector Field said drily, “although my operatives tell me that he is now looking for another house for Miss Ternan—and possibly her mother—in the suburb of Peckham.”
“This has nothing to do with me,” I said coldly. “I am neither a gossip nor keeper of my fellow gentleman’s affairs.” I regretted that last choice of word as soon as it was out of my mouth. Pedestrians were beginning to stare at us as they passed, so I began walking again and Inspector Field briskly joined me.
“Our arrangement was for you to see Dickens as frequently as possible, Mr Collins, and thus to accumulate—and to convey to us—any and all information you received on the murderer who calls himself Drood.”
“And so I have done, Inspector.”
“And so you have done, Mr Collins…
to a very meagre degree.
You did not even spend Christmas with Mr Dickens, although he was at home in Gad’s Hill for the better part of two weeks and came into the city repeatedly.”
“I was not invited,” I said. I meant my tone to be chilly, but it emerged as almost plaintive.
“Which you cannot help,” said Inspector Field in a tone of sympathy that made me want to break my cane over the crown of his balding old head. “But you also have not availed yourself of obvious opportunities to join Mr Dickens either on his tour or during his London sojourns. It may interest you to know, sir, that Dickens continues to elude my operatives at least once every two weeks and disappear into slum basements and old church crypts, not to reappear until he takes the train to Gad’s Hill the next day.”
“You need better operatives, Inspector,” I said.
The old man chuckled at this and blew his prodigious nose again. “Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps. But in the meantime, I wish not to chastise you, Mr Collins, nor to complain of an… imbalance… in the performance of our contractual agreements, but merely to remind you that our common interests lie in running this monster Drood to ground—or to
above
ground—before more innocents have to die by the creature’s hand.”
We had reached the bridge. I stopped at the railing and looked at the line of wharves, hovels, derricks, and low-masted rivercraft running in both directions. Rain squalls whipped the surface of the Thames to rows of white crowns.
The inspector pulled the plush collar of his out-of-date jacket up over the back of his neck. “Now please tell me the reason for this meeting, Mr Collins, and I will do my utmost to accede to your requests for further… ah… research assistance.”
“I admit that my purpose was not merely to pursue research,” I said, “but to offer you a suggestion that may be of inestimable assistance in your efforts to find this Drood.”
“Really?” said Inspector Field, the bushy eyebrows rising under the brim of his top hat. “Please go on, Mr Collins.”
“In the novel I have almost finished outlining,” I said, “there is a section that shall require a detective—one of great intelligence and experience, I might add—who knows all the techniques employed to track down a missing person.”
“Yes? These are common procedures in both my former and current aspects of police work, Mr Collins, and I will be pleased to offer professional insights.”
“But I did not wish this assistance to benefit me alone,” I said, looking at the grey waves rather than at the grey inspector. “It occurred to me that a London man who has gone missing might be your missing link in tracing the chain of contacts and circumstances back to Dickens and Drood’s contacts since the Staplehurst accident… if such contact actually exists.”
“Really? Who might this missing man be, Mr Collins?”
“Edmond Dickenson.”
The old man scratched his cheeks, tugged at his side-whiskers, and, inevitably, set that plump forefinger alongside his ear as if awaiting further information from it. Finally he said, “That would be the young gentleman whom Mr Dickens helped save at Staplehurst. And the same young man whom you reported as having sleepwalked at Gad’s Hill Place a year ago this past Christmas.”
“Exactly the same man,” I said.
“How has he disappeared?”
“That is precisely what I would like to know,” I said. “And it might be precisely what you need to know in order to close the connection to Drood.” I handed him a folder of notes I had taken on my conversation with the solicitor Mr Matthew B. Roffe of Gray’s Inn Square, the address of Dickenson’s last known London dwelling place, and the approximate date when the young man had ordered Mr Roffe to transfer the duties of guardian-executor, for the last few months such a role was required, to none other than Charles Dickens.
“Fascinating,” Inspector Field said at last. “May I keep these, sir?”
“You may. They are copies.”
“This may indeed be of some service to our common cause, Mr Collins, and I thank you for bringing this man—missing or not—to my attention. But why do
you
think that Mr Dickenson might be important in this investigation?”
I opened my gloved hands above the railing. “Is it not obvious, even to a non-detective such as myself? Young Dickenson was perhaps the only other living person who we
know
—through Dickens’s own testimony—was in the immediate area with Drood at the Staplehurst site. Indeed, it was Drood, according to Dickens, who led my friend to the young man, who was trapped in the wreckage and who would have died had it not been for Dickens’s—
and Drood’s!
—intervention. There is also, I would suggest, the inexplicable interest that Dickens took in the orphan in the months after the accident.”
Inspector Field rubbed his cheeks again. “Mr Dickens is widely known to be a public altruist.”
I smiled at this. “Of course. But his interest in young Dickenson bordered on the… shall I say… obsessive?”
“Or self-interested?” asked Field. The wind had arrived from the west, and we were both now holding our hats with our free hands.
“How do you mean, sir?”
“How much money,” asked the old man, “was under trust to whomever the guardian of Edmond Dickenson was until the young man reached his majority last year? Did your investigations, Mr Collins, happen to extend to visiting young Dickenson’s bank and having a chat with the manager?”
“Of course not!” I said, voice cold again. Such an idea was totally outside the scope of a gentleman’s behaviour. One might as well open another gentleman’s mail.
“Well, that will be easy enough to find out,” muttered Inspector Field as he tucked my papers away into his jacket. “What did you wish in return for this possible help in our search for Drood, Mr Collins?”
“Nothing in exchange,” I said. “I am neither a tradesman nor peddler. After you look into the disappearance of this man who, despite his claims to the contrary, actually may have seen Drood at Staplehurst—indeed, his having seen Drood may be the
reason
for his disappearance, who knows?—all I wish to hear are the details of your investigation… so as to add verisimilitude to my own writings about the investigation into a missing person, you understand.”
“I understand perfectly.” The old inspector stepped back and extended his hand. “I am delighted that we are working on the same side again, Mr Collins.”
I looked at the extended hand for several long seconds before finally shaking it. It made a difference that we were both wearing gloves.
I
t was May and we were in Dickens’s alpine chalet. It was a pleasant place to be.
After a wet, cold, slow-to-waken spring, late May had suddenly erupted in sunlight, flowers, blossoms, green lawns, warm days, long evenings, soft scents, and gentle nights perfect for sleeping. My rheumatical gout had improved to the point that I was using the least laudanum in two years. I had even considered discontinuing my Thursday-night trips into King Lazaree’s world.
It was a beautiful day and I was on the upper level of the chalet enjoying the breeze through open windows and telling the partial story of my book to Charles Dickens.
I wrote “telling” advisedly because although I had forty pages of my written outline and synopsis on my lap, Dickens could not read my handwriting. That has always been a problem with my manuscripts. I have been told that printers scream aloud and threaten to resign when confronted with the manuscripts of my novels—especially the first half of the book, where I admit that I have a tendency to rush, to scratch out, to write in all available margins and open spaces, and to substitute until the cramped words and letters become a blur of ink and a riot of lines, arrows, indicating marks, and violent scratches. The laudanum, I admit, does not increase the legibility.
I also wrote “partial story of my book” advisedly, since Dickens wanted to hear my general outline of two-thirds of the novel even though I had not decided the particulars of the specific ending. That longer reading-aloud, we had decided, would happen in June, when Dickens would make the final decision on whether my
Eye of the Serpent
(or perhaps
The Serpent’s Eye
) would appear in his magazine
All the Year Round.
So on this beautiful late-May day in 1867, I spent an hour reading and telling the story of my novel to Charles Dickens, who—to his credit—was fully attentive, not even interrupting to ask questions. Other than my voice, the only sounds were the occasional waggon going by on the road below, the soft wind rustling leaves and branches in the trees on either side of the chalet, and the occasional humming of bees.
When I was finished I set the manuscript notes aside and took a long drink of water from the chilled carafe that Dickens kept in his writing space.
After a few seconds of silence, Dickens literally leaped out of his chair and cried, “My dear Wilkie! That is a
wonderful
tale! Wild and yet domestic! Filled with excellent characters and carrying a great mystery! And the surprise near the part where you leave off—well, it was an
absolute
surprise to me, my dear Wilkie, and it is hard to surprise an old writer warhorse such as myself!”
“Indeed,” I murmured shyly. I always craved praise from Charles Dickens, and now the pleasure from his words spread through me rather like the warm glow from my daily medicine.
“We shall definitely want this book for the magazine!” continued Dickens. “My prediction is that it shall outshine anything we have serialised to date, including your marvellous
Woman in White
!”
“We can hope,” I said modestly. “But would you not prefer to hear the outline of the last fourth of the book—when I decide how to tie up the obvious loose ends, such as the reenactment of the crime—rather than commit to purchasing it now?”
“Not in the least!” said Dickens. “However much I look forward to hearing you tell me the true ending in a week or two, I have heard enough to know what a splendid story it is. And that plot surprise! To have the very narrator not know of his own culpability! Wonderful, my dear Wilkie, absolutely wonderful. As I say, I have rarely been so taken by surprise by another writer’s dexterous plotting!”
“Thank you, Charles,” I said.
“May I pose a few questions or make a few minor suggestions?” asked Dickens as he paced back and forth in front of the open windows.
“Of course! Of course!” I said. “Besides being my editor at
All the Year Round,
you have been my collaborator and fellow-plotter for too many years for me to not benefit from the sagacity of your advice at this stage, Charles.”
“Well then,” he said, “about the crucial plot twist. Is it at all possible that having our hero, Franklin Blake, perform the robbery of the diamond under the influence
both
of laudanum—however surreptitiously administered—
and
the mesmeric control of the Hindoo jugglers, too much of a coincidence? What I mean is, the Hindoos he encountered on the lawn could not have known that our Mr… what was his name?”
“Who?” I asked. I had taken out my pencil and was hurrying to make notes on the back of my manuscript page.
“The medic who died with a scrambled memory.”
“Mr Candy,” I said.
“Of course!” said Dickens. “Well, my only point is that the Hindoos encountered randomly on the estate’s grounds that night could hardly have known that Mr Candy would have put opium in Franklin Blake’s wine as a sort of prank. Could they?”
“No…” I said. “I suppose not. No, they could not have.”
“So, in truth, the dual revelations of secretly administered laudanum
and
the mesmeric magnetism of the Hindoo mystics on the lawn may be redundant, no?”
“Redundant?”
“I mean, my dear Wilkie, it would only take the coincidence of one or the other to allow Franklin Blake to carry out his somnambulistic thievery, isn’t that so?”
“I think… yes… it is,” I said, making a few notes.
“And how richer it is for the reader’s imagination that poor Mr Franklin Blake steals the diamond from his beloved’s bureau drawer in an attempt to
protect
it, not under the evil influence of the Hindoos, don’t you think?”
“Hmmm,” I said. This reduced my Huge Surprise to a sort of odd coincidence. But it might work.
Before I could comment, Dickens had gone on. “And the odd, lame servant—I apologise; what was her name?”
“Rosanna Spearman.”
“Yes, lovely name for that odd and disturbed character— Rosanna Spearman. You say, early on, that she is a product of— that is, that Lady Verinder had hired her from, I believe—a Reformatory?”
“Precisely,” I said. “I rather imagined that Rosanna had come from some institution very similar to your Urania Cottage.”
“Ahh, which I set up some twenty years ago with Miss Burdett-Coutts’s help,” said Dickens, still smiling and pacing. “So I thought, my dear Wilkie. But I’ve taken you to Urania Cottage. You’re quite aware that all of the women there are Fallen Women, being given another chance.”
“As was Rosanna Spearman,” I said.
“Indeed. But it’s simply unthinkable that Lady Verinder or anyone of her obvious calibre would hire Rosanna if the lady knew that she had been a… a woman of the streets.”
“Hmmm,” I said. Having Rosanna being a reformed woman of the streets had been, precisely, my goal. It explained both her doomed infatuation with Mr Franklin Blake and the erotic subtext to that infatuation. But it
was
difficult to argue that anyone so refined as my fictional—and equally as doomed as Rosanna Spearman—Lady Verinder would have hired a prostitute, however reformed. I made a note on my page.
