Drood (56 page)

“At any rate,” said Dickens, settling deeper into the leather cushions of his wing chair, “I’ve decided to send Dolby over in early August to investigate the lay of the land, as the Americans like to say. He’ll be carrying my two new stories, ‘George Silverman’s Explanation’ and ‘A Holiday Romance.’ They were commissioned by American publishers, and I believe the latter is appearing there in a children’s magazine called
Our Young Folks
or something similar.”

“Yes,” I said. “You showed me ‘A Holiday Romance’ at Gad’s Hill a few weekends ago, you might remember… told me that the tales in it
were
written by children, as was their whimsical conceit. And I believed you.”

“I was not sure whether to be flattered or insulted, my dear Wilkie.”

“Neither, of course, Charles,” I said. “A mere statement of fact. As always, when you set out to do a thing with words, it is done in its convincing entirety. But I do remember you telling me that your strength was almost broken twenty-five years ago under the travel and labour of your first American tour. And Forster says to this day that the Americans were unworthy of a man of genius such as yourself. Are you certain, Charles, that you wish to put yourself under such a strain once again?”

Dickens had accepted my invitation to smoke a cigar and now blew smoke towards my ceiling. “It is true that I was younger then, Wilkie, but I was also worn out from writing
Master Humphrey’s Clock
and—only days before departing—I had undergone a rather serious surgical operation. Also, the speechmaking I was required to carry out once in America would have exhausted an M.P. with nothing else to do. I was also—I admit it—less patient and much more irritable then than I am now in the serenity of my middle life.”

I thought about the so-called serenity of this author’s middle life. Inspector Field had informed me that Ellen Ternan had been ill throughout much of April and May, requiring that Charles Dickens—perhaps our nation’s most public man—disappear for long days on end so that he could be by his ailing mistress’s bedside. Dickens’s habit of secrecy did not extend just to his alleged meetings with the creature named Drood; dissembling had become second nature to the writer. On at least two recent occasions I knew of for certain, Dickens had sent me letters purportedly written from Gad’s Hill Place when, in actuality, he was with Ellen Ternan or staying at his secret home nearby.

“There are other reasons why I must leave the country,” Dickens said softly. “And it has come time to speak to you of them.”

I raised my eyebrows slightly, smoked, and waited. I expected some new fabulation, so Dickens’s actual words were a surprise.

“You remember the personage I have referred to as Drood,” said Dickens.

“Of course,” I said. “How could I forget either your telling of the creature’s purported story or our expedition two summers ago into the tunnels under the city?”

“Indeed,” Dickens said drily. “I think that you do not believe me when I speak of Drood, my dear Wilkie.…” He waved away my hurried objections. “No, now listen a moment, my friend. Please.

“There are many things I have not told you, Wilkie… many things I could not tell you… many things you would not have believed if I
had
told you. But the existence of Drood is real enough, as you almost discovered in Birmingham.”

Again I opened my mouth, but found I could not speak. What did he mean? I had long since convinced myself that my waking nightmare-vision during Dickens’s reading more than a year earlier in Birmingham had been a laudanum-dream brought on by the terrible confrontation with the thugs in the alley in that same city. The blood I had later found on my shirt collar and cravat had, of course, come from a reopening of the slight wound inflicted when one of the thugs had laid his knife to my neck that very afternoon.

But how could Dickens know about my drug-induced dream?
I had told no one, not even Caroline or Martha.

Before I could formulate a question, Dickens was speaking again.

“Instead of wondering about the reality or non-reality of Drood, my dear Wilkie, have you ever wondered about your friend Inspector Field’s true motivations in his obsession with capturing or killing the man?”

I blushed at the “your friend Inspector Field.” I always assumed that Dickens knew little or nothing about my continued contact with the ageing detective—how could he know?—but I was often surprised by what Dickens actually
seemed
to know or had somehow managed to surmise.

Then again, if Drood were real—which I was not for a second ready to concede—it was possible that Dickens came by his information through that phantom and his agents, much as I was now doing through Inspector Field and
his
agents.

Not for the first time in the past two years, I felt like a pawn in some terrible chess game being played in the dark of night.

“You’ve told me your thoughts about Inspector Field’s so-called obsession,” I said. “You said that he thought such a
coup
would result in his pension being reinstated.”

“That hardly seems adequate motive for the inspector’s recent draconian… one might say
desperate
… measures, does it?” asked Dickens.

I thought about that. Or at least I frowned, squinted, and projected an image of thinking. In truth, I was most aware at that moment of the rheumatical gout gathering in a sphere of spreading pain behind my right eye, creeping around behind my right ear, embedding tendrils of itself deeper into my skull with each passing moment. “No,” I said at last. “I guess it does not.”

“I know Field,” said Dickens. The fire crackled and coal embers collapsed in upon themselves. The study suddenly felt appallingly warm. “I’ve known Field for almost two decades, Wilkie, and his ambition surpasseth all understanding.”

You are speaking of yourself,
I thought, but said nothing.

“Inspector Charles Frederick Field wants to be Chief of Detectives again,” said Dickens. “He fully plans on being head of Scotland Yard Detective Bureau.”

I laughed despite my growing pain. “Surely this cannot be the case, Charles. The man is ancient… in his mid-sixties.”

Dickens scowled at me. “We have admirals in the Royal Navy in their eighties, Wilkie. No, it’s not Field’s age that is laughable, nor even his ambition. Merely his means of reaching his goal.”

“But,” I said quickly, realising that I had offended Dickens with talk of old age, “you yourself told me that Inspector Field was out of favour with all of the Metropolitan Police for irregularities he committed as a private enquiries man. They denied him his pension, for heaven’s sake! Certainly he could never reclaim his former position in the newer, larger, more modern London police force!”

“He might, my dear Wilkie. He might… if he were to bring to justice the purported mastermind of a nest of murderers whose crimes ran to the hundreds of victims. Field learned years ago how to use the city newspapers and he would certainly do so now.”

“So you agree with the inspector, Charles, that Drood is a murderer and a mastermind of other murderers?”

“I agree with nothing that Inspector Field has said or imagined,” said Dickens. “I am trying to explain something to you. Tell me, my dear Wilkie, do you enjoy Plato’s Socrates?”

I blinked through my growing headache at this dizzying change of subject. Charles Dickens was, as everyone knew, a self-educated man and somewhat sensitive about the fact, despite his rigorous attempts at self-education throughout his lifetime. I had never heard him bring up Plato or Socrates before and could not guess at any connection these philosophers might have to the topics of our conversation.

“Plato?” I said. “Socrates? Yes, of course. Marvellous.”

“Then you will forgive me if I put to you a few Socratic questions in our mutual quest of discovering and bringing out an innate—but perhaps not obvious—truth.”

I nodded.

“Assuming that the man we are referring to as Drood is more than an hallucination or cynically created illusion,” Dickens said softly, setting down his brandy glass and steepling his fingers, “have you wondered, my dear Wilkie, why I have continued seeing him over the past two years?”

“I had no idea you
had
continued seeing him, Charles,” I lied.

Dickens smiled sceptically at me from behind the pyramid of his long fingers.

“But if you had continued his acquaintance… for argument’s sake,” I went on, “then I would assume your earlier explanation to me would be the reason.”

“Learning the finer and higher arts of mesmerism,” said Dickens.

“Yes,” I said. “And details of his ancient religion.”

“All worthy goals,” said Dickens, “but do you think such minor curiosity would justify the very real risks one would have to take? The hounding by Inspector Field’s zealous agents? The repeated descents into Undertown? The mere proximity to a madman who—according to our esteemed inspector—has killed hundreds?”

I had no idea what Dickens was asking me now. After a laudanum-fuzzy moment of what I hoped was taken as deep contemplation, I said, “No… no, I think not.”

“Of course not,” said Dickens. He was using his schoolmaster voice. “Have you ever considered, my dear Wilkie, that I might be
defending
London from the monster’s wrath?”

“Defending?” I repeated. The rheumatical gout had now encircled my head and enveloped both eyes and my cranium with pain.

“You have read my books, my friend. You have heard me speak. You have visited the homes for the poor and for the lost women that I have helped start and have funded. You know my views on social issues.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, of course, Charles.”

“Then do you have any idea of the anger seething and fomenting there in Undertown?”

“Anger?” I said. “Drood’s anger, you mean?”

“I mean the anger of the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of men, women, and children driven into those subterranean vaults, sewers, basements, and slums,” said Dickens, his voice rising to the point that Caroline might have heard it from downstairs. “I mean, my dear Wilkie, the anger of those thousands in London who cannot eke out a daily living even in the worst slums of the surface and who are driven down into the darkness and stench like rats. Like
rats,
Wilkie.”

“Rats,” I repeated. “What are we speaking of, Charles? Surely you are not saying that this… Drood… represents the tens of thousands of London’s poorest residents. I mean, you yourself said that the man is grotesque… a
foreigner.
”

Dickens chuckled and tapped the ends of his fingers together in a manic rhythm. “If Drood is an illusion, my dear Wilkie, he is an illusion in the form of upper London’s worst nightmare. He is a darkness in the heart of the soul’s deepest darkness. He is the personified wrath of those who have lost the last meagre rays of hope in our modern city and our modern world.”

I had to shake my head. “You have lost
me,
Charles.”

“Let me begin again. It is growing late. Why would such a creature as Drood seek me out and select me in the fields of death that were the Staplehurst accident, Wilkie?”

“I wasn’t aware that he
had
sought you out, Charles.”

Dickens flicked his right hand in a quick gesture of impatience and raised his cigar again. Through the blue smoke he said, “
Of course
he sought me out. You need to
listen,
my dear Wilkie. As both novelist and dear friend, it is the one area in which your sensitivities should seek improvement. You are the only person on earth to whom I have revealed the existence of Drood and my relationship to him. You must listen if you are to understand the dire importance of this… drama. This drama that Inspector Field insists on treating as if it were a game and a farce.”

“I am listening,” I said coolly. I did not care for Dickens—a mere author whom I had outsold in numbers of recent books published and a man who had never received an advanced payment from a publisher on the level I had—when he chose to criticise me.

“Why would Drood choose me? Of all the survivors at Staplehurst, why would the awakened-from-his-coffin Drood choose me?”

I thought about this while I covertly massaged my throbbing right temple. “I am not sure, Charles. You were certainly the most famous man on the train that day.”
With your mistress and her mother,
I silently appended.

Dickens shook his head. “It is not my fame that drew Drood to me and which now holds him in check,” he said softly between long exhalations of blue smoke. “It is my ability.”

“Your ability.”

“As a
writer,
” Dickens said almost impatiently. “As… you will pardon my immodesty due to the centrality of this point… as perhaps the most important writer in England.”

“I see,” I lied. Then, perhaps, I did finally see. At least a glimmer. “Drood wants you to write something for him.”

Dickens laughed. It was not a cynical or derisive laugh—I might have taken my headache and gone off to bed at that moment if it had been—but rather Dickens’s usual boyish, deep, head-back, sincere laugh.

“I would say, yes,” he said, tapping ashes into the onyx ashtray at his chairside. “He
insists
that I write something. Nothing less than his biography, my dear Wilkie. Certainly an effort that would require five long volumes, perhaps more.”

“His biography,” I said. If Dickens was weary of my repeating his statements, he was not as weary of it as I was. The evening that had started with a fine meal and laughter had now risen—or descended—into the realm of pure insanity.

“It is the only reason that Drood has not unleashed the full extent of his wrath upon me, upon my family, upon the accursed Inspector Field, upon you, upon all of London,” Dickens said wearily.

“Upon
me?
” I said.

It was as if Dickens had not heard me. “Almost every week I descend into the Hades that is London Undertown,” he went on. “Every week I take out my notebook and I listen. And I write notes. And I nod. And I ask questions. Anything to draw out the interviews. Anything to postpone the inevitable.”