Drood (91 page)

Beard brought Dickens back to London that very night and the next morning had arranged a consultation with the famous physician Sir Thomas Watson. After a very thorough examination and interrogation of the Inimitable on his symptoms, Watson announced, “The state thus described shows plainly that C. D. has been on the brink of an attack of paralysis of his left side, and possibly of apoplexy.”

Dickens rejected these dire predictions, saying in the following months that he had been suffering only from over-fatigue. Still, he called a pause in his tour. Dickens had finished seventy-four of his planned one hundred readings (this was only two fewer than the number that had driven him to near-collapse in America).

And yet, after a few weeks of relative rest at Gad’s Hill Place and in London, the Inimitable began pressing Dr Watson to allow him to salvage his rescheduled tour. Sir Thomas shook his head, warned against the writer’s over-optimism, prescribed extreme caution, and said, “Preventative measures are always invidious, for when the most successful, need for them is the least apparent.”

Dickens won the argument, of course. He always won. But he agreed that his final readings—his
true
farewell readings—were to number no more than twelve, were to involve no railway travel whatsoever, and would necessarily have to be delayed until 1870, eight months away.

And so Dickens returned to London, living during the week— he was at Gad’s Hill most weekends—in his rooms above the offices of
All the Year Round
at Wellington Street, and threw himself full-tilt into the editing, refurbishing, writing, and planning of the magazine. When he had nothing else to do (I saw this myself during a visit to pick up a cheque), he went into Wills’s now frequently empty office and tidied and sorted and rearranged and dusted.

He also ordered his solicitor, Ouvry, to draw up and finalise his will, which was done quickly and signed and executed on 12 May.

But little of the melancholy he showed during the most exhausted days of his reading tour was visible during these late-spring and early-summer months. Dickens was anticipating the long visit by his old American friends James Fields and his wife, Annie, in that feverish way that only a boy eager to share his toys and games could evince.

And, with his will signed, his doctors predicting imminent apoplexy and death, and the warmest and most humid summer in memory settling over London like a Thames-stinking wet horse blanket, Dickens was beginning to think about another novel.

B
Y SUMMER I
had already begun my new book and was researching and writing it with a will.

I had decided for certain the form and thrust of the book one weekend in late May, when I was visiting Martha R—— (“Martha Dawson” to her landlady) in the persona of William Dawson, travelling Barrister at Law. It was one of those rare times when, in order to please Martha, I stayed two nights. I had brought my flask of laudanum, of course, but decided to leave the morphia with its attendant syringe at home. This led to two sleepless nights (not even extra laudanum allowed me to sleep more than a few anxious minutes). So it was on the second of these nights that I found myself sitting in a chair, watching Martha R—— sleep. Because of the early-summer warmth I had opened a window and left the drapes wide, since this bedroom looked out only upon a private garden. Moonlight painted the floor, the bed, and Martha in a broad white stripe.

Now, some say that a woman with child becomes especially attractive. And it is true that there is—with all but the most sickly sort—a strange glow of joy and healthiness that tends to hover around a woman at least during part of her time in confinement. But many men, at least of my acquaintance, also subscribe to the odd theory that a woman with child is also
erotically
attractive (and I apologise for this candid and perhaps vulgar talk, Dear Reader of the Future—perhaps my time was a more direct and honest one), but I fail to see that.

In fact, Dear Reader, as I sat there in the deepest hours of the morning on that warm and sticky May night, turning the pillow over and over in my hands, I looked at Martha where she was sleeping and saw not the innocent young woman who had so enticed me just a few years earlier, but an ageing, ponderous, blue-veined, bosom-bloated, and bizarre figure that was, to my keen novelist’s eye, not quite human.

Caroline had never looked this way. Of course, Caroline had had the good manners—at least in my presence—never to be pregnant. But more than that, Caroline had always looked like the lady she purported to be and worked so hard to become. This snoring form painted by the wide stripe of moonlight looked… bovine.

I turned the pillow over in my hands and thought about all this with the clarity that only the proper dosage of laudanum can bring to a mind already sharpened by education and logic.

Mrs Wells, Martha’s landlady (not to be confused with the much cannier Mrs Wells who had been my mother’s final caretaker), had not seen me arrive. She had been, Martha told me, shut up in her tower room with the croup for more than a week. A neighbour boy brought her soup in the evening and toast and tea in the morning, but I hadn’t seen the boy when I’d arrived or during any of the time I was in Martha’s private rooms. Mrs Wells was a foolish old woman who read nothing, almost never went out, and knew nothing of the modern world. She knew me only as “Mr Dawson” and we had spoken only a few times in passing. She believed me to be a barrister. I was sure that she had never heard of the writer named Wilkie Collins.

I held the pillow tight, compressing it and then stretching it in my soft-looking but (I believe) powerful hands.

There was, of course, the land agent with whom I had arranged to rent these rooms from Mrs Wells years before. But he also had known me only as Mr Dawson, and I had given a false address for myself.

Martha almost never wrote her parents, and not just because of an estrangement arising from her association with me. Despite my patient lessons with Martha, neither she nor her mother was really literate—they could form letters and sign their names, but neither could read with any assurance and neither took the time to write letters. Her father could but never chose to. Occasionally Martha went home to visit—she had no real friends in her former home town or in nearby Yarmouth, only family—but she always assured me that she’d given no details of her life here: not her address, never her true situation, and especially not the fiction of her marriage to “Mr Dawson.” As far as her family knew, based on her last visit some time ago, Martha was single and working as a parlourmaid in some unspecified London hotel and living in a cheap tenement flat with three other good Christian working girls.

Could I trust that she had not told them the truth?

Yes, I was certain I could. Martha had never lied to me.

Had I ever seen anyone in the city—or, more important, had they seen us—when I went out in company with Martha R
——
?

I was all but certain that I had not. As small as London seems at times, as frequently as friends and acquaintances in the upper crust of society cross paths, I had never taken Martha anywhere—especially in the daylight—where those in my true circle might have stumbled across us. On those few occasions when Martha and I had strolled together, I had always taken her to odd corners of the city—distant parks, poorly lighted inns, or back-alley restaurants. I was sure that she had seen through my explanation of wanting to explore, of seeking out new parts of the city like a child playing hide-and-catch, but she had never complained.

No, no one knew—or if they
had
seen us, they had no idea who the young woman had been and would have thought little of it. Just another young actress on that rogue Wilkie Collins’s arm. I had spent time with so many. Just another young periwinkle. Even Caroline had known of the periwinkles.

I left my chair and went over to sit on the edge of the bed.

Martha stirred, half-rolled towards me, and ceased snoring for a moment, but she did not wake.

The pillow was still in my hands. Now the moonlight covered my long, sensitive fingers as if dabbing them with white paint. Each finger was whiter than the linen on the pillow and suddenly they all seemed to blend with that delicate linen, to sink into it, to melt and become one with the fabric. They became the hands of a corpse disappearing into chalk.

Or melting in a pit of lime.

I leaned forward and held the pillow over Martha’s sleeping face. The scarab behind my right eye scuttled forward for a better view.

Frank Beard!

Two months earlier, I had told the physician about a married but abandoned female friend of an acquaintance of mine—the woman being alone and with child at the moment and with little money. Could he recommend a midwife?

Beard had given me a partially amused, partially scolding look and said, “Do you know when this female friend of an acquaintance is due?”

“Late June, I think,” I said, feeling my ears burn. “Or perhaps early July.”

“Then I shall look in on her myself in her ninth month… and most probably attend the birth as well. Some midwives are wonderful. Many are murderesses. Give me the lady’s name and address.”

“I do not know such information offhand,” I’d replied. “But I shall ask my acquaintance and send her name and address to you in a letter.”

And so I had. And then forgotten about it.

But Frank Beard might not forget if he read a newspaper this week and…

“D—— n!” I cried and threw the pillow across the room.

Martha was awake in an instant, levering herself upright in bed like some Leviathan rising from the surface of a sheeted sea. “Wilkie! What is it?”

“Nothing, my dear. Just the rheumatical gout and a terrible headache. I apologise for wakening you.”

The headache was real enough, as the scarab—furious for some reason—burrowed itself back into the deepest recesses of my brain.

“Oh, my darling boy,” cried Martha R—— and hugged me to her bosom. Some time later, I fell asleep like that, with my head still on her swollen breast.

T
HE BOOK I WAS WRITING
during this period was titled
Man and Wife
. The theme of it was how a man might be trapped into a terrible marriage.

I had recently read a report on marriage in our kingdom published the year before by the Royal Commission; astoundingly, the Commission sanctioned the Scottish law which legalised marriage by consent and then
defended
these marriages by pointing out that they were “wronged-women’s ways” of capturing men with dishonourable intentions towards them. I underlined and then wrote in the margins of the report—
“That they act, on certain occasions, in the capacity of a trap to catch a profligate man!!!!”

The four exclamation marks may seem excessive to you, Dear Reader, but I assure you that they were a profound understatement of my emotion at this absurd and obscene twisting of the law to aid a man-hungry wench. The idea of being trapped into marriage—with the consent and help of the Crown!—was a Horror beyond imagining to me. It was a Horror beyond the Entity in the servants’ stairway at Number
90
Gloucester Place.

But I knew that I could never write the book from the point of view of a victimised man. The Reading Public in 1869—nay, the General Public—simply would never see the pathos and tragedy of such a trap inflicted on a man they hypocritically would call a “cad” (even while the majority of those male readers and that male public had a similar “profligate” history).

So I cleverly turned my victimised male into a frail but very high-class and highbred lady trapped—by a mere moment’s indiscretion—into a forced marriage to a brute.

I made the brute not only an Oxford man (oh, how I hated Oxford and everything it represented!!) but an Oxford athlete.

This last aspect of the brute’s character was a stroke of genius, if I do say so myself. You must understand, Dear Reader from the impossibly distant future, that at this time in England, the idiocy of exercise and the absurdity of sports had melded with the hypocrisies of religion to create a monstrosity called “Muscular Christianity.” The idea that good Christians should be “muscular” and throw themselves into any number of mindless, brutish sports was all the rage. More than the rage, Muscular Christianity was both an exercise in Mr Darwin’s insights and an explanation of why England’s Empire had the right to rule the world and all the weak little brown people in it. It was Superiority personified in barbells and track meets and fields of fools jumping and hopping and pushing themselves up and down. The proselytising for this Muscular Christianity belched out from the newspapers, the magazines, and the pulpits. And Oxford and Cambridge—those Grand Old English nurseries for pedantic dolts—embraced it with all their usual arrogant vigour.

So you see why I took such joy in tossing this fad right in the face of my unsuspecting readership. I might be the only one to know that my trapped and abused heroine was really the captured male, but my Oxford brute would create quite enough controversy.

Even in the early stages of writing
Man and Wife,
I made enemies through it. Frank Beard’s children and Fred Lehmann’s children—all of whom had loved me and whom I had entertained many a time by telling ripping yarns of classic prizefights and by describing the massive biceps of England’s champion, Tom Sayers—heard about my Oxford brute and were furious with me. It was a betrayal to them.

This made me laugh all the more as I pressed Frank Beard into taking me out to various pugilistic and team sport training camps where he served as attending physician from time to time. There I would press the trainers and others for stories of how unhealthy this muscular life truly was—how it turned the athletes into brutes as surely as a return to Darwin’s jungle would—and, through Beard, I hurled questions at the camp doctors about physical and mental breakdowns due to such training. Being out in the sunlight and taking such notes was difficult work for me, but I got through it by sipping from my laudanum flask at least hourly.