Drood (100 page)
Before I could ask anything else, the dark figure backed away and then seemed to be melting down into the filthy stones of the alley. There must have been a basement stairway there that I could not see, but to my eye the shadowy figure simply melted vertically out of sight in the dark alley until it was gone.
Nine June.
But how to arrange things with Dickens myself before that date? He would be back at Gad’s Hill Place soon, and we were both working hard on our respective novels. How could I lure him away—especially to where I needed to take him—so that I could do what I had to? And before the ninth of June, that anniversary of Staplehurst that Dickens had always set aside in order to meet with Drood?
I had written a formal and rather cold letter to Wills demanding the reversion of copyrights for all of my stories and novels that had ever appeared in
All the Year Round,
and Dickens himself wrote me back in that last week of May 1870.
Even the business part of the letter was surprisingly friendly—he assured me that papers were being drawn up at that moment and that, even though we had not contractually arranged such returns of copyright, all such rights were to be returned to me at once. But it was his brief peroration that seemed wistful, almost lonely.
“My dear Wilkie,”
he wrote,
“I don’t come to see you because I don’t want to bother you. Perhaps you may be glad to see me by and by. Who knows?”
This was perfect.
I immediately wrote Dickens a friendly note asking if we could meet “at your earliest convenience, but preferably before the anniversary you honour each year at this time.” If Dickens did not burn this note, as was his habit, this wording might prove sufficiently cryptic to anyone who read it later.
When a warm and affirmative response came back from Dickens by the first of June, I completed the last of my preparations and set the Act III
finale
into motion.
W
here am I?
Gad’s Hill. But not Gad’s Hill Place, merely Gad’s Hill, the site where Falstaff attempted to rob the coach but was set upon by “thirty ruffians”—actually just Prince Hal and a friend—and was all but robbed himself before he fled in panic.
My black coach is parked to one side of the Falstaff Inn. The hired coach looks rather like a hearse, which is fitting. It is almost invisible in the shadows under the tall trees as the last of the evening’s twilight begins to fade. The driver up on the box is no driver, but a Hindoo sailor I have hired for this one night, paying him the equal of six months’ salary for a real driver. He is a poor driver but he is also a foreigner. He speaks no English (I communicate with him through our mutual schoolboy bits of German and some sign language) and knows nothing of England or its famous people. He will be at sea again in ten days and may never return to English shores. He is curious about nothing. He is a terrible driver—the horses sense his lack of skill and show him no respect—but he is the perfect driver for this night.
When is it?
It is the gentle evening of 8 June, 1870, twenty minutes after the sun has set. Swallows and bats dart through the shadows and into the open, the wings of the bats and the forked tails of the swallows showing as flattened V’s against the flat, clear pane of paling water-colours that is the twilight.
I see Dickens trotting across the road—or trying to trot, since he is hobbling slightly. He is wearing the dark clothing that I had suggested he don for this outing and has some sort of soft slouch hat on. Despite his obviously sore foot and leg, he carries no cane with him this evening. I open the door and he hops up into the coach to sit next to me.
“I told no one where I was going,” he says breathlessly. “Just as you requested, my dear Wilkie.”
“Thank you. Such secrecy will be necessary this one time only.”
“This is all very mysterious,” he says as I rap the ceiling of the coach with my heavy cane.
“It is meant to be,” I say. “Tonight, my dear Charles, we shall each find the answer to a great mystery—yours being the greater.”
He says nothing to this and only comments once as the coach careers and wobbles and jolts and lurches its way east along the highway. The sailor-driver is working the horses far too hard, and his crashing into holes and wild swerves from the slightest oncoming object threaten to spill the coach and us into the watery ditch from moment to moment.
“Your driver appears to be in an unholy hurry,” says Dickens.
“He is foreign,” I explain.
Some time later, Dickens leans across me and looks out the left window at the approaching tower-spire of Rochester Cathedral rising like a black spike against the dimming sky. “Ah,” he says, but I believe I detect more confirmation than surprise in the syllable.
The coach grinds and squeals to a stop at the entrance to the churchyard and we climb out—me carrying a small unlighted lantern and both of us moving somewhat stiffly due to the jouncing and bouncing of the wild ride here—and then the driver applies his whip again and the black coach rumbles away into the deepening twilight.
“You don’t wish the coach to wait for us?” Dickens enquires.
“The driver will come back for me when it is time,” I say.
If he notices my use of “for me” rather than “for us,” he does not comment on it. We move into the graveyard. The church and this old part of the city and the cemetery are empty and silent. The tide has gone out and we can smell the decaying reek of the mudflats, but from somewhere beyond that there comes the fresh salt scent of the sea and the sound of slow breakers. The only illumination is from a waning crescent moon.
Dickens says softly, “What now, Wilkie?”
I pull the pistol from my jacket—fumbling a moment to get the protruding hammer and sight free of the pocket lining—and aim it at him.
“Ah,” he says again, and again there is no audible tone of surprise. To my ear, through the pounding of my pulse, the syllable sounds merely sad, perhaps even relieved.
We stand there like that for a moment, an odd and awkward tableau. The wind from the sea rustles the boughs of a pine tree close to where the graveyard wall hides us from the street. The hem and loose collars of Dickens’s long summer jacket swirl around him like black pennants. He raises a hand to hold on to the brim of his soft cap.
“It’s the lime pit, then?” asks Dickens.
“Yes.” I have to try twice before the word comes out properly. My mouth is very dry. I am dying for a drink from my laudanum flask, but I do not want to divert attention from Dickens for an instant.
I gesture with the pistol and Dickens begins walking towards the blackness that is the rear of the graveyard where the open pit waits. I follow several feet behind, taking care not to get too close in case the Inimitable were to make some lunge for the gun.
Suddenly he stops and I do as well, taking another two paces away from him and raising and aiming the pistol.
“My dear Wilkie, may I make one request?” His voice is so soft that the words are all but lost to me under the hiss of the wind in the few trees and many marsh grasses.
“It hardly seems the time for requests, Charles.”
“Perhaps,” says Dickens, and I can see him smiling in the weak moonlight. I do not like him looking at me this way. I had hoped that he would keep his back turned until we reached the lime pit and the deed was done. “But I still have one,” he continues softly. Maddeningly, I cannot detect fear in his voice, which is far steadier than mine has been. “But only one.”
“What?”
“It may sound odd, Wilkie, but for some years now, I have had the strong premonition that I would die on the anniversary of the Staplehurst accident. May I reach in my waistcoat and look at my watch?”
To what purpose?
I think dizzily. To prepare for the evening, I had drunk almost twice my usual allotment of laudanum and injected myself twice with the morphine, and now I feel the effects of these medicines not so much as reinforcment to my resolve but as a giddiness and odd light-headedness. “Yes, look, but quickly,” I manage to say.
Dickens calmly takes out his watch, peers at it in the moonlight, and winds it slowly and maddeningly before setting it back. “It is some minutes after ten,” he says. “The summer twilight lasts so late this time of year and we left late. It shan’t be long until midnight. I cannot explain why—since your goal is obviously for no one to know the means or location of my death or interment—but it would mean something to
me
if I were allowed to fulfil my various premonitions and leave this world on nine June rather than eight June.”
“You are hoping that someone comes along or that something arises to allow your escape,” I say in my new and shaky voice.
Dickens merely shrugs. “Should someone enter the graveyard, you can still shoot me and make your escape through the sea grasses and back to your carriage waiting nearby.”
“They would find your body,” I say in flat tones. “And you would be buried in Westminster Abbey.”
Dickens laughs then. It is that loud, unselfconscious, carefree, and infectious laugh that I have heard from him so many times before. “Is
that
what this is about, my dear Wilkie? Westminster Abbey? Does it calm your fears any that I have already stipulated in my will that I demand a simple, small funeral? No ceremonies at Westminster Abbey or anywhere else. I make clear that I want no more than three coaches in the final funeral procession and no more people at the burial than those three small coaches can carry.”
My pounding pulse—and now pounding headache—seem to be trying to synchronise with the distant pounding of surf on a sandbar somewhere to the east, but the irregular rhythm of the wind denies the syncopation.
I say, “There will be no funeral procession.”
“Obviously not,” says Dickens and infuriates me with another small smile. “All the more reason to grant me this one, last kindness before we part company forever.”
“To what purpose?” I ask at long last.
“You spoke of each of us solving a mystery tonight. Presumably my mystery to be solved is what—if anything—there might be after the instant of one’s death. But what is yours, Wilkie? What mystery did you wish to have solved this beautiful evening?”
I say nothing.
“Let me venture a guess,” says Dickens. “You would like to know how
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
was to have ended. And perhaps even learn how
my
Drood connects to
your
Drood.”
“Yes.”
He looks at his watch again. “It is only ninety minutes before midnight. I brought a flask of brandy—at your suggestion (although Frank Beard would be horrified to know this)—and I am sure you brought some refreshment for yourself. Why don’t we find a comfortable seat somewhere in this place and have one last conversation before the bells in that tower toll my appointed day?”
“You think that I will change my mind,” I say with a malicious smile.
“In truth, my dear Wilkie, I do not for a second believe that you will. Nor am I sure that I would want you to. I am very… weary. But I am not averse to a final conversation and taste of brandy in the night.”
With that Dickens turns on his heel and looks amidst the surrounding stones for some place to sit. My choice is either to follow his lead or shoot him there and drag his corpse the many yards to the waiting lime pit. I had hoped to avoid this last indignity for both of us. And, in truth, I do not mind the idea of sitting for a few minutes until this temporary light-headedness passes.
T
HE TWO FLAT GRAVESTONES
he chooses for our chairs, separated by almost four feet of a longer, wider headstone that might be a low table, remind me of the day in this very churchyard when Dickens played waiter to Ellen Ternan, her mother, and me.
After receiving permission, Dickens removes his brandy flask from his jacket pocket and sets it on the table-stone in front of him and I do the same with my silver flask. I realise that I should have patted the Inimitable’s pockets when I first aimed my pistol at him. I know that Dickens keeps his own pistol in a drawer at Gad’s Hill Place, as well as the shotgun with which he murdered Sultan. Dickens’s apparent lack of surprise at the purpose of our “mystery outing” makes me think that he might have secreted a weapon on his person before coming out to the coach… and this might explain his otherwise inexplicable insouciance.
But it is too late now. I shall just keep a careful eye on him for the short time remaining.
We sit in silence for a while. Then the bells in the looming tower strike eleven, and my jagged nerves leap to the point that I almost accidentally pull the trigger on the pistol I am still aiming at Dickens’s heart.
He notes my reaction but says nothing as I lay the gun along my upper leg and knee, keeping it aimed at him but removing my finger from the inside of what Hatchery called, I believe, the “trigger guard.”
Dickens’s voice after the long silence makes me jump in my skin again. “That is the weapon that Detective Hatchery showed us once, is it not?”
“Yes.”
The wind rustles grasses for a moment. As if afraid of this silence, as if it is weakening my resolve, I force myself to say, “You know that Hatchery is dead?”
“Oh, yes.”
“And do you know
how
he died?”
“Yes,” says Dickens. “I do. Friends on the Metropolitan Police Force told me.”
We have nothing else to say on this topic. But it leads me to the questioning that is the only reason Charles Dickens remains alive this final, extra hour. “I was surprised that you used a character—obviously a detective in disguise with his huge head of false hair—named Datchery in
Edwin Drood,
” I say. “Such parody of poor Hatchery, especially given the… ah… lamentable details of his death, hardly seems sensitive.”
Dickens looks at me. As my eyes have adapted to the churchyard darkness, so far from the nearest streetlamps or the windows of inhabited homes, the headstones around us—and especially the flat one of light marble lying between Dickens and me like a games table upon which we have laid our final hands in poker—seem to be reflecting the moonlight into Dickens’s face like weak imitations of the focused gaslights he had rigged for his readings.