Drood (96 page)

Upstairs on the first floor of his chalet, Dickens waved me to the spare Windsor chair and then sprawled in his own. I could see by the neatly arranged boxes of blue and cream paper, pens, ink pots, and his small statues of fencing frogs that Dickens had been writing out here recently.

“Well, my dear Wilkie, what do you feel we need to talk about?”

“You know very well, my dear Dickens.”

He smiled, took his spectacles out of a case, and set them on his nose, as if he were going to read some more. “Let us assume I do
not
know and proceed from there. Is it that you did not like the beginnings of my new book? I have written more, you know. Perhaps another chapter or two and your interest would have been engaged.”

“This is dangerous stuff, Charles.”

“Oh?” His surprise did not appear fully feigned. “What is dangerous? Writing a tale of mystery? I told you some months ago that I was sufficiently intrigued by the elements of your
Moonstone
—the opium addiction, the mesmerism, the Oriental villains, the central mystery of theft—that I might try my own hand at such a novel. So now I am. Or at least I have made a start.”

“You’re using Drood’s
name,
” I said so softly that it came out as an urgent whisper. I could hear male voices rising in a drinking song from the inn nearby.

“My dear Wilkie,” sighed Dickens. “Would you not agree that it’s time that we—or you—got over this fear of all things Droodish?”

What could I say to that? For a moment I was speechless. I had never told Dickens about Hatchery’s death—the grey glistening cords in the crypt. Or about my night at Drood’s Temple. Or of Inspector Field’s invasion of Undertown and what I now understood of its dire consequences to Field and his men. Or of Reginald Barris—filthy, bearded, living in rags and on scraps, hiding in fear—or of the Overtown temple-hideouts Barris had shown me just four months earlier…

“If I had time this evening,” said Dickens, as if musing to himself, “I would cure you of that obsession. Release you from it.”

I got to my feet and began pacing impatiently back and forth in the small room. “You’ll release yourself from your life if you publish this book, Charles. You once told me that Drood had requested you write a biography of him… but this is a
parody
.”

“Not in the least,” laughed Dickens. “It shall be a very serious novel which explores the layers and levels and contradictions of the criminal’s mind—in this case, the mind of a murderer, but also an opium addict and both master and victim of mesmerism.”

“How can one be
both
a master and victim of mesermism, Charles?”

“Be so kind as to read my book when it is finished, my dear Wilkie, and you shall see. Much will be revealed… and not only of the mystery, but perhaps of some of your own dilemma.”

I ignored that, since it made no sense. “Charles,” I said earnestly, leaning on his table and looking down at him as he sat, “do you
really
believe that smoking opium causes one to dream of flashing scimitars, scores of dancing girls, and—what was it?—‘countless elephants careering in various gorgeous colours’?”

“ ‘. . . white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in numbers and attendants,’ ” corrected Dickens.

“Very well,” I said and stepped back and removed my spectacles to clean them with my handkerchief. “But do you
really
believe that any number of caparisoned or careering elephants and flashing scimitars are the stuff of an actual opium dream?”

“I have taken opium, you know,” Dickens said quietly. He seemed almost amused.

I confess to having rolled my eyes at this news. “So Frank Beard told me, Charles. A tiny bit of laudanum, and that just a few times, when you could not sleep on one of your last reading tours.”

“Still, my dear Wilkie, laudanum is laudanum. Opium is opium.”

“How many minims did you use?” I asked as I still paced back and forth, from open window to open window. Perhaps it was my own increased laudanum use that morning that kept me so excitable.

“Minims?” said Dickens.

“Drops of the opiate distillate in your wine,” I said. “How many drops?”

“Oh, I have no idea. Dolby handled the ministrations the few evenings I tried that medicinal approach. I would say two.”

“Two minims… two drops?” I repeated.

“Yes.”

I said nothing for a minute. That very day, as a guest at Gad’s Hill Place and having brought only a flask and a small refill jug in my baggage for the long weekend, I had drunk at least six hundred minims and possibly twice that. Then I said, “But you cannot convince me—or anyone who has actually researched the drug as I have, my dear Charles—that you dreamt of elephants and scimitars and golden domes.”

Dickens laughed. “My dear Wilkie, just as you said you… ‘tested,’ I believe your word was… your
Moonstone
character Franklin Blake’s ability to enter his fiancée’s bedroom while she was sleeping…”

“Sitting room next to her bedroom,” I corrected. “My editor insisted on it for propriety’s sake.”

“Ah, yes,” said Dickens with a smile. He had been that editor, of course. “Enter into his fiancée’s bedroom’s sitting room to steal a diamond, all while he was asleep, merely under the influence of laudanum he hadn’t known he’d taken…”

“You’ve expressed your doubts as to the realism of that more than once,” I said sourly. “Even though I’ve told you that I did experiment with similar situations under the influence of the drug.”

“Exactly my point, my dear Wilkie. You stretched the point to serve your plot. And so my caparisoned pachyderms and flashing scimitars—to serve the greater story.”

“This is not the point, Charles.”

“What is, then?” Dickens looked sincerely curious. He also looked sincerely exhausted. Those days, when the Inimitable wasn’t reading to others or at play, he tended to look like the old man he had suddenly become.

“The point is that Drood will kill you if you publish this book,” I said. “You told me yourself that he wants a biography, not a sensationalist novel filled with opium, mesmerism, all things Egyptian, and a weak character named Drood…”

“Weak but important to the story,” interrupted Dickens.

I could only shake my head. “You won’t heed my warning. Perhaps if you had seen the face of poor Inspector Field the morning after he was murdered…”

“Murdered?”
said Dickens, suddenly sitting up straight. He removed his spectacles and blinked. “Who said that Charles Frederick Field was murdered? You know very well that the
Times
said he had died in his sleep. And what is this talk of having seen his face?
You
certainly could not have, my dear Wilkie. I remember you were in bed ill for weeks at the time and didn’t even know that poor Field had died until I told you many months later.”

I hesitated, considering whether to tell Dickens then about Reginald Barris’s explanation of Inspector Field’s true demise. But then I would have to explain Barris and why and where I saw him and all about the Overtown temples.…

While I was hesitating, Dickens sighed and said, “Your belief in Drood is enjoyable in its own dark way, Wilkie, but perhaps it is time it drew to a close. Perhaps it was a mistake for it ever to have begun.”

“Belief in Drood?” I snapped. “Must I remind you, my dear Dickens, that it was
your
story of your meeting with him at Staplehurst and
your
later stories of meeting with the monster in Undertown that got me involved in all this in the first place? It’s a little late, I would say, for you to tell me to cease believing in him, as if he were the ghost of Marley or Christmas Yet to Come.”

I thought Dickens would laugh at this last broadside, but he only looked sadder and more weary than before and said, as if to himself, “Perhaps it is too late, my dear Wilkie. Or perhaps not. But it is definitely too late this particular Sunday. I must go in and prepare to enjoy one of the last meals I may ever share with dear James and Annie.…”

His voice had become so soft and sad by the end of that sentence that I had to strain to hear the words over the sound of the fox hunters riding away from the Falstaff Inn.

“We shall speak of this another time,” said Dickens as he rose. I noticed that his left leg seemed unable to support his weight for a moment and that he steadied himself with his right hand on the table, getting his balance and teetering there a moment with his left hand and leg flailing uselessly, like a toddling infant taking his first steps, before he smiled again—ruefully this time, I thought—and hobbled out the door and down the stairs as we headed back to the main house.

“We shall speak of this another time,” he said again.

And we did, Dear Reader. But too late, as you will see, to avoid the tragedies to come.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

T
hrough the final autumn, winter, and spring of Charles Dickens’s life, he continued writing his novel and I continued writing mine.

Dickens—being Dickens—insisted, of course, on the suicidal folly of using Drood’s name in the title of his new work, even though I heard through Wills, Forster, and that ponce-twit Percy Fitzgerald (who had all but taken my place in the offices of
All the Year Round
and in Dickens’s confidences) that the Inimitable’s earlier ideas for titles had included
The Loss of James Wakefield
and
Dead? Or Alive?
(He had obviously never seriously considered using Edmond Dickenson’s name, as he’d mentioned to me the previous spring—that had been just to bait me.)

I had begun my book months before Dickens had started his, and thus had sold and was to start serialising
Man and Wife
in
Cassell’s Magazine
in January of 1870 and had also sold serial rights to my old stalwart,
Harper’s Magazine,
in New York and—to avoid piracy—had arranged for
Harper’s
to publish their instalments a fortnight earlier than did
Cassell’s
. Dickens’s first instalment of
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
, serialised in green wrappers from Chapman and Hall, was not to see print until April. Meant for a dozen monthly instalments, it would end after six.

My brother, Charley, was hired to be the artist for this ill-fated novel, and although it would turn out that he would be too ill to finish his labours, Dickens’s impulse must have been to give his son-in-law (and thus his daughter) some income. I could also imagine Dickens making the commission simply to give Charley something to do other than lie around his home or Gad’s Hill Place, unemployed and in pain. It had come to the point where even the sight of my brother seemed to incense Charles Dickens.

By continuing to work on the instalments, Dickens was breaking his previously inviolable rule—i.e., never to be working on a novel at the same time he was doing public readings or preparing for readings—since the time for the twelve “farewell readings” he had begged and bullied for was to begin in January.

For my own part, the instalments of
Man and Wife
were flowing easily, aided substantially by the now-monthly letters from Caroline in which she documented the torrent of abuse that her plumber was pouring down upon her. A jealous sort, Joseph Clow would lock her in the coal cellar when he was gone for any extended periods. A drunkard, he would kick and beat her after hours of drinking. A braggart, he would have his friends over for bouts of drinking and gambling and say crude and vulgar things about Caroline and laugh with the other louts as his bride blushed and attempted to flee to her room. (But Clow had taken the door off their tiny bedroom precisely so she could not hide in there.) A mother’s-boy, he allowed Caroline’s mother-in-law to insult her incessantly and would cuff my former lover if she cast so much as a defiant glance at the old woman.

To all these missives of misery, I replied with nothing more than a polite acknowledgement of receipt and the vaguest commiserations— sending the letters, as always, through Carrie (and assuming that Caroline would burn them after reading, since Clow might kill her if he discovered that she was receiving letters from me)—but the details and tone all went into my
Man and Wife.

My seducer—Geoffrey Delamayn—was (and remains to my literary eye) a delightful character: a long-distance runner of superb physique and tiny brain, a player of many sports, an Oxford-educated ignoramus, a brute, a blackguard, a monster.

Critics of even the early instalments of
Man and Wife
would call my novel a bitter and angry book. And I acknowledge to you, Dear Reader, that it was that. It was also very sincere. I was pouring into
Man and Wife
not only my fury at the very
idea
of someone being trapped into marriage—trapped the way Caroline had attempted to trap me and the way that Martha R——, “Mrs Dawson,” even at that moment was scheming to trap me—but also my righteous anger at the treatment that Caroline was receiving at the grimy hands and fists of the lower-class brute
she
had succeeded finally in trapping.

Charles Dickens’s
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
was
not
an angry or bitter novel, but the truths and personal revelations that he was pouring into
it,
as I would understand only much later, were far more astounding than those I thought I was being so candid about in my own book.

When the last autumn of Dickens’s life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully
lived
and
experienced
day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?

Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute?