Drood (60 page)
Perhaps it would not have mattered to them.
On 9 November, I went up to Liverpool with Caroline and Carrie to see Dickens off as he departed for America.
The author had been given the Second Officer’s spacious cabin on the deck of the
Cuba.
(Carrie later asked me where the Second Officer might be sleeping during the crossing, and I had to admit that I had no idea.) Unlike most accommodations on the ship, the cabin had both a door and a window that could be opened to take advantage of the fresh sea air.
Dickens was fretful and distracted during our short visit and only I knew why. And I knew why only because of my continued association with Inspector Field.
Despite his first-hand knowledge of the Puritanical conservative nature of Americans from a quarter of a century earlier, Dickens somehow had not yet surrendered his plan to bring Ellen Ternan to America so that she could share the tour with him, perhaps in the disguise of an assistant to Dolby. This would never come to pass, of course, but Dickens was truly a hopeless romantic when it came to such fantasies.
I was not supposed to know about it, but the Inimitable had arranged with Wills at the magazine office to forward a coded telegram to the young actress in which she would be instructed on what to do once Dickens arrived in the New World. A message of “All well” would have her speeding on the next ship to America, all expenses paid through an account Dickens had left under Wills’s supervision. A reluctant code of “Safe and well” would mean that she would remain on the Continent, where she and her mother were currently vacationing while she waited word on her fate.
In his heart—or perhaps “in his rational mind” would be more appropriate—Dickens must have known that fair day of 9 November, as I had known when I first heard of the foolish scheme through Inspector Field, that the message “Safe and well,” meaning “Lonely but very, very much in the scowling, prying, judging, public American eye,” would be the one sent to Ellen via Wills.
Our own goodbyes were emotional. Dickens was aware of how much work he had left for me to finish—the proofings and revisions of
No Thoroughfare
as well as the scripting and staging with Fechter—but there was more to the emotion than that. After Carrie, Caroline, and I had descended the gangplank, I returned to the airy Second Officer’s cabin under the pretext of having forgotten one of my gloves. Dickens was expecting me.
“I pray God that Drood will not follow me to America,” he whispered as we again clasped hands in farewell.
“He will not,” I said with a certainty I did not feel.
As I turned to leave, thinking that it was possible—even probable—that I would never see my friend Charles Dickens again, he stopped me.
“Wilkie… in the conversation with Drood in your study on nine June, the discussion you do not remember… I feel it necessary to warn you…”
I could not move. I felt as if my blood had turned to ice and that the ice had invaded my very cells.
“You agreed to be Drood’s biographer if something happened to me,” said Dickens. He looked seasick even though the
Cuba
was still firmly tied to the wharf in Liverpool Harbour and was not rocking in the least. “Drood threatened to kill you and all of your family if you reneged on this promise… just as he has threatened, repeatedly, to kill me and mine. If he finds out that I went to America to escape him rather than to speak to publishers there about his biography…”
After a minute I found that I could blink. In another minute I could speak. “Think nothing of it, Charles,” I said. “Have a good reading tour in America. Return to us safe and healthy.”
I went out of the cabin and down the gangplank to a waiting Carrie and a sulking, worried Caroline.
I
n the month after Dickens left for America I felt rather as if my father had died again. It was not an altogether unpleasant sensation.
I had never been busier. Dickens had not only left me the revisions and proofs of
No Thoroughfare,
but had also put me in charge of editing the entire Christmas Issue of
All the Year Round
. This nonplussed our friend William Henry Wills—the Inimitable’s second-in-command at the magazine, who had been unalterably opposed to Dickens’s going to America in the first place—but Wills, always the obedient soldier, soon settled into his position of second-in-command to
me
. I spent more and more time at the magazine’s offices as November went on and—since Dickens had also requested that I check regularly on Georgina, Mary, and Katey at Gad’s Hill (and since I found it easier to edit and work on
The Moonstone
there and since my brother, Charley, was also there much of the time), I was soon living more in Charles Dickens’s life than in Wilkie Collins’s.
Caroline tended to agree with that assessment, although not with the good grace and humour I had anticipated, and tended to begin arguments with me whenever I did spend a few days at Number 90 Gloucester Place. As we moved towards December, I spent fewer and fewer days at my new London house and more time at Gad’s Hill or eating in Dickens’s sparse rooms and sleeping in his comfortable bed above the magazine offices.
I happened to be there when the telegram “Safe and well” arrived for Wills and was duly sent on to Ellen Ternan in Florence, where she was staying with her mother and family. How Dickens had ever imagined that Ellen might travel alone from Italy across the Atlantic to America I cannot imagine. The fantasy was simply another sign of how lost in his romantic dreams Dickens was at this time. I did learn later from Wills, almost by accident, that Dickens had known before he set sail that Americans would not have countenanced the presence of this single woman in Dickens’s small entourage. Dolby had sounded things out after his arrival and sent his verdict on the propriety of Ellen’s presence in a single telegraphed syllable—“No.”
Dickens and I had agreed that the stage adaptation of
No Thoroughfare
should be produced at the Adelphi Theatre as close to Christmas Day as possible and that our mutual friend Charles Fechter should play the villain, Obenreizer. I had first been impressed with Fechter’s performances almost fifteen years earlier and had met him in 1860 when he was in London to play in Victor Hugo’s
Ruy Blas
. By common impulse, immediately upon that meeting, Fechter and I had dispensed with the tentative formalities of acquaintance and had become fast friends.
Born in London of an English mother and a German father, raised in France but having now chosen London as his home again, Fechter was a man of incredible charm and loyalty—the gift of the complete Swiss chalet to Dickens two Christmases ago had been typical of his generosity and impetuousness—but he had no more business sense than a child.
Fechter’s home in London may have been the only
salon
less formal than my own. Whereas I had the habit of leaving guests in Caroline’s care at the table if I had to rush off for a theatre engagement or somesuch, Fechter had been known to greet guests in his dressing gown and slippers and to allow them to choose which bottle of wine they preferred and take it with them to their place at the table. He and I adored French cookery and twice we put the inexhaustible resources of gastronomic France to the test by dining on one article of food only, presented under many different forms. I remember that we once had a potato dinner in six courses and another time an egg dinner in eight courses.
Fechter’s one flaw as an actor was terrible stage fright, and his dresser was known to follow him around with a basin backstage before the curtain went up.
This November into December I was hurriedly writing the script for the stage version of
No Thoroughfare
and sent proofs straight to Fechter, who reported that he had “fallen madly in love with the subject” and immediately collaborated on the dramatic scenario. I was not surprised that the actor loved the villainous lead character of Obenreizer, since Dickens and I had held Fechter in mind as we’d created him.
On the days when I rode the train out towards Rochester to Gad’s Hill Place, it was easy to think that Charles Dickens was gone for good—I still felt it quite probable that he would be, given the sad (if hidden from most) state of his health and the rigours of the American reading tour—and that I not only could someday but already
was
filling his place in the world.
By early December
No Thoroughfare
would be out in
All the Year Round
and I had no doubt it would be a great success. Certainly Dickens’s name had something to do with that—his Christmas stories had brought the public flocking to buy the Christmas Issue of his two different magazines for twenty years now—but it was also true that my
Woman in White
had sold better than some serialised Dickens tales and I was confident that
The Moonstone
would do even better in 1868. Sitting at the dinner table at Gad’s Hill Place with Georgina on my left, my brother, Charley, on my right, Kate down the table, and some of the other Dickens children there as well, it felt as if I had replaced the Inimitable as surely and easily and completely as Georgina Hogarth had replaced Catherine Dickens.
As for my ongoing research for
The Moonstone,
after contacting many people in my quest for first-hand knowledge about India (as well as in my search for details on Hindoo and Mohammadan religious practices), I was put in touch with a certain John Wyllie, who had served in the Indian province of Kathiawar during his time in the Indian Civil Service.
“There is no part of India… so fanatically Hindoo in religious and so startlingly barbarous in primitive ethics,” Wyllie said to me between great drams of brandy. He directed me to “a collection of Wheeler’s letters or articles in the
Englishman
… Eleusinian mysteries are a joke to the abominations there revealed.”
When I explained that my small group of Hindoos in
The Moonstone
would indeed be villainous but would also have a certain noble martyrdom about them, since they would have to spend decades propitiating their gods for violating their caste rule of never travelling across the “Dark Water,” Wyllie just scoffed and stated flatly that their reinstatement in caste would be more a question of bribes paid to the right Brahman parties rather than the lifelong quest for purification my tale required.
So I threw away most of the comments and advice from Mr John Wyllie, formerly of the Indian Civil Service, and went with the dictates of my Muse. For the English setting of my novel I simply reached into my memory of the Yorkshire coast. For the historical events—since the main part of the novel was to begin in 1848—I continued to rely upon the excellent library at the Athenaeum. The only thing I carried over from Mr Wyllie’s recommendations was the wild Indian province of Kathiawar; so few white men had been there and lived to tell about it that I decided I could make up its geography, topography, and particular brands and cults of Hindoo belief.
I continued working on the novel every day, even amidst the unimaginable demands of preparing
No Thoroughfare
for the stage.
News of our play had somehow arrived in the United States before the co-author of the tale upon which it was based. I received a letter from Dickens in which he announced that he had been met by theatrical managers immediately upon his arrival in New York; the men seemed to be under the impression that the script for
No Thoroughfare
was in the novelist’s pocket. Dickens asked me to send copies of each act as I finished it and added,
“I have little doubt, my dear Wilkie, of being able to make a good thing of the Drama.”
There followed a flurry of correspondence back and forth in which Dickens announced that he was hurrying to find an American citizen to whom we could consign the MS, thus assuring the right of playing it in America while equally assuring that we would gain some profit from such a production. By Christmas Eve, Dickens had received my final copy of the play, prompting this reply from Boston:
“The play is done
with great pains and skill,
but I fear it is too long. Its fate will have been decided before you get this letter, but I greatly doubt its success.…”
The rest of the note was all about Dickens’s fear of the inevitable American pirating of
some
version of our story, but, in truth, I had lost real interest after the words
“. . . but I greatly doubt its success.”
D
ESPITE ALL OF THE OBLIGATIONS
upon my time and energy, I had honoured, in mid-December, a written request from Inspector Field to meet him at Waterloo Bridge. I anticipated the substance of what he had to say to me and I have to say that my prediction was not in error.
The old detective looked insufferably pleased with himself, which at first seemed odd, since after my telling him that nothing untowards had happened in my home the previous 9 of June, the trail of Drood had gone very cold indeed. But one of the first things that the inspector told me as we walked over Waterloo Bridge into a breeze carrying light snow, our collars turned high and Field’s heavy wool cape flapping about his shoulders like the wings of a bat, was that the Metropolitan Police had captured a Malay suspected of murder. The Malay, it turned out, was one of Drood’s lieutenants and was being interrogated “briskly” in a deep cell even as we walked. Early information from the interrogation suggested that Drood may have moved from Undertown and was hiding in the surface slums of London. It was only a matter of time, Inspector Field informed me confidently, before they would have the best lead on the Egyptian murderer that they had obtained in decades of ceaseless effort.
“So the police are sharing the information with you,” I said.
Inspector Field showed his large, yellow teeth in a smile. “My own men and I are carrying out the interrogation, Mr Collins. I still have many close friends on the force, you see, even if the commissioner and those higher up continue to treat me with less than the respect I have earned.”
“Does the current chief of detectives know that one of Drood’s top lieutenants has been captured?” I asked.
