Drood (105 page)
“Wilkie,” he muttered as we approached the shade of the trees. “Did I ever tell you about the cherries?”
“Cherries? No, Charles, I don’t believe you did.” I was listening to a confused old man gather wool, but I wanted to keep him moving, keep him hobbling forward. “Tell me about the cherries.”
“When I was a difficult London youth long ago… it must have been
after
the awful Blacking Factory… yes, definitely
after
the Blacking Factory.” He feebly touched my arm. “Remind me to tell you about the Blacking Factory someday, my dear Wilkie. I have never told anyone in my life the truth about the Blacking Factory in my childhood, although it was the most horrible thing that…” He seemed to drift off.
“I promise to ask you about that someday, Charles. You were saying about the cherries?”
The shade of the trees was welcome. I walked on. Dickens hobbled on.
“Cherries? Oh, yes… When I was a rather difficult London youth so long ago, I found myself walking down the Strand one day behind a workingman carrying a rather homely big-headed child on his shoulders. I presumed the boy was the workingman’s son. I had used almost the last of my pence to purchase this rather large bag of ripe cherries, you see…”
“Ah,” I said, wondering if Dickens might have had a sunstroke. Or a real stroke.
“Yes, cherries, my dear Wilkie. But the delightful thing was, you see, that the child looked back at me in a certain way… a certain, singular way… and I began popping cherries into the boy’s mouth, one after the other, and the big-headed child would spit out the pits most silently. His father never heard nor turned. He never knew. I believe I fed that big-headed boy all of my cherries—every single last one. And then the workingman with the boy on his shoulders turned left at a corner and I continued on straight and the father was never the wiser, but I was the poorer—at least for cherries—and the big-headed boy was the fatter and happier.”
“Fascinating, Charles,” I said.
Dickens tried hobbling more quickly, but his foot could bear no weight at all now. He had to rest all of his weight on his cane at each painful step. He glanced at me. “Sometimes, my dear Wilkie, I feel that my entire career as a writer has been nothing more than an extension of those minutes popping cherries into the mouth of that big-headed boy on his father’s shoulders. Does that make sense to you?”
“Of course, Charles.”
“You promise that you will allow me to mesmerise you and release you from my cruelly inflicted magnetic suggestions?” he said suddenly, sharply. “On Wednesday night, eight June? I have your word on that?”
“My word of honour, Charles.”
By the time we reached the stream with its small, arched bridge, I was whistling the tune I remembered from my dream.
I
finished my novel
Man and Wife
early in the afternoon of Wednesday, 8 June, 1870.
I told George and Besse—who would not, in any case, continue in my employ much longer—that I needed the house quiet so I could sleep and sent them away for a day to visit whomever they chose.
Carrie was gone for the week, travelling with the Wards.
I sent a note to my editor at
Cassell’s Magazine
and another to my soon-to-be book publisher, F. S. Ellis, reporting that the manuscript was finished.
I sent a note to Dickens telling him that I had finished my book and reminding him of our appointment the next day, on the afternoon of 9 June. We did not have an appointment for 9 June, of course—our appointment was for that night of 8 June—but I was confident that the note would not arrive until the next morning, so it would serve as what those of us trained in the law call by its Latin name—an “alibi.” I also sent friendly notes to the Lehmanns, the Beards, and others, crowing that I had finished
Man and Wife
and—after a long night of welcomed and well-earned sleep—planned to celebrate the completion by a visit to Gad’s Hill Place the next afternoon, on the ninth.
Late that afternoon, dressed in black travelling clothes with a cape and broad hood thrown back, I took a rented carriage down to Gad’s Hill and parked under the oldest trees next to the Falstaff Inn as the sun set and the darkness sent out fingers from the forest behind that establishment.
I had not succeeded in finding a Hindoo sailor ready to leave England (never to return) in ten days. Nor a German or American or even English sailor ready to be my coachman. Nor had I found the black coach of my opium- and morphia-assisted imaginings. So I drove myself that night—I had little experience in handling coaches or carriages and crept along to Gad’s Hill far more slowly than my careering fantasy-Hindoo driver would have—and the rented vehicle I was driving was a tiny open carriage hardly larger than the pony cart in which Dickens used to fetch me.
But I set the small bullseye lantern under the single seat behind me and had Hatchery’s pistol—all four cartridges unfired and nestled in place—in my jacket pocket next to the burlap sack for metal objects, just as I had planned. In truth, this arrangement wherein I drove myself made much more sense: no driver, Hindoo or otherwise, could ever be a blackmail threat this way.
The evening also was not the perfect June night I had envisioned.
It rained hard during the tiring drive out and between the showers and the splashes onto the absurdly low box this miniature carriage offered, all of me was soaked through by the time I arrived at the Falstaff Inn just after sunset. And the sunset itself was more of a grey, smudged, watery afterthought to the day than the beautiful scene I had painted in my mind.
I tucked the single (ancient) horse and wobbly carriage as far back under the trees to the side of the inn as I could, but the rain showers still soaked me when they blew in, and after they departed, the trees continued to drip on me. The footwell in the tiny carriage space was actually filling up with puddles.
And Dickens did not come.
We had set the rendezvous time for thirty minutes after sunset (and he could be forgiven for not noticing the exact time of that cloudy anticlimax of a sunset), but soon it was an hour after sunset and still no sign of Dickens.
Perhaps, I thought, he could not see my dark carriage and black, dripping horse and black, soaked self there in the darkness under the trees. I considered lighting one of the lamps on the side of the carriage.
There were no lamps on the side or back of this cheap carriage. I considered lighting the bullseye lantern and setting it on the box next to me. Dickens might be able to see me from the house or his front yard then, I realised, but so would everyone coming or going from the Falstaff Inn or even those just passing by on the highway.
I considered going into the inn, ordering a hot buttered rum, and sending a boy over to Gad’s Hill Place to let Dickens know I was waiting.
Don’t be an idiot,
whispered the trained-lawyer as well as the mystery-book-writer parts of my brain. And there rose again the odd word but necessary concept—
alibi.
Ninety minutes after sunset and still no sign of Charles Dickens, perhaps the most punctual fifty-eight-year-old man in all of England. It was approaching ten PM. If we did not start out soon for Rochester, the entire trip might be lost.
I secured the dozing horse to a branch, made sure the pitiful example of a carriage’s brake was set, and I moved through the edge of the trees towards Dickens’s Swiss chalet. Every time the chilly night wind came up, the fir and deciduous branches dumped more Niagaras of water on me.
I’d seen at least three carriages turn into Dickens’s driveway in the past ninety minutes and two were still visible there. Was it possible that Dickens had forgotten—or simply decided to ignore—our mystery-trip appointment? (For a moment I had the chilled certainty that my false note reminding him of our appointment
tomorrow
had somehow arrived here at Gad’s Hill this afternoon, but then I remembered that I had deliberately posted it late in the day. No mail courier in the history of England would have delivered the message so quickly; in truth, it would be a stroke of unusual competence if Gad’s Hill Place saw the delivery of that reminder by late Friday—and this was Wednesday night).
I touched the pistol in my outer pocket and decided to approach the house through the tunnel.
What was I going to do if I peered through one of the windows of the new conservatory in back (just added this spring and Dickens’s delight) and saw the Inimitable still sitting at his dining table? Or reading a book?
I would rap on the conservatory glass, beckon him out, and kidnap him at gunpoint. It was that simple. And it had come to that.
As long as Georgina and the others who depended upon Dickens’s succour and income like sucking lampreys on a larger fish were not around. (And I had to include my brother, Charles, in that Pisces-metaphor group.)
The tunnel was
very
dark and smelled of the spoor of wild creatures who may have evacuated their bowels in there. I felt like one of them that night and, soaked as I was, could not stop shivering.
Emerging from the tunnel, I avoided the noisy gravel of the main drive and walked through the low hedge into the front yard. I could see now that there were three carriages crowding the inner turnaround—although it was too dark for me to identify any of them—and one of the horses suddenly raised its head and snorted as it caught my scent. I wondered if it smelled a predator.
Moving to my right, I stood on tip-toes to peer over the hedges and lower clipped cedars to see between white curtains. The bow windows of Dickens’s study were dark, but that did seem to be the only unlighted room in the house. I saw a woman’s head—Georgina? Mamie? Katey?—pass by one of the front windows. Was she moving with some haste, or was this observation merely a function of my taut nerves?
I took several steps back so that I could better see the upper lighted windows and removed the heavy pistol from my pocket.
An anonymous assassin’s bullet crashing through the window glass, murdering the most famous author in all of…
What idiocy was that? Dickens had not only to die; he had to
disappear.
Without a trace. And tonight. And as soon as he stepped out that door, belatedly remembering his meeting with me, he
would.
This I swore not only to God, but to all the Gods of the Black Lands.
Suddenly I was seized from behind by many hands and half-dragged, half-lifted as I was pulled backwards on my heels and away from the house.
This sentence does not do justice to the violence that was inflicted upon my person at that moment. There were several men’s hands and they were
strong
. And the owners of those rough hands had no scruples whatsoever about my well-being as they dragged me through a hedge, through low branches of a tree, and threw me down onto the stones and sharp-twigged flower bed of closely packed geraniums.
The red geraniums!
They filled my vision—along with flashing stars following my skull’s impact with the ground—and the red of the blossoms struck me clearly, impossibly, even in the darkness.
Dickens’s red geraniums. Blossoms of blood. A gunshot’s flower blossoming on the white field of a formal shirt. The red geranium flower of Nancy’s Murder as Bill Sikes bashed her brains out.
My nightmares had been premonitions, perhaps powered by the opium that also fueled my creativity when all else failed.
I tried to rise, but the strong hands forced me back down into the mud and loam. Three white faces floated above me as I caught a hint of crescent moon sliding between quickly moving black clouds.
As if to prove my prescience, Edmond Dickenson’s face thrust itself into my field of vision just a foot from
my
face. His teeth had indeed been sharpened into tiny white daggers. “Easssy there, Mr Collinsss. Easy doesss it. No fireworksss tonight, sir. Not
thisss
night.”
As if to explain that cryptic statement, other strong hands removed the pistol from my twitching hand. I had forgotten it was there.
Reginald Barris’s face took the place of Dickenson’s. The powerful man was smiling or grimacing horribly—I could not tell the difference—and I realised that it had not been dental decay that had shown dark places in his smile when I had seen him last in that narrow alley. Barris had filed his teeth down to sharp points as well. “Thisss iss
our
night, Mr Collinsss,” the pale face hissed.
I struggled to no avail. When I looked up again, Drood’s face was floating above me.
I use the word “floating” advisedly here.
All
of Drood seemed to be floating above me, his arms outstretched rather as would be those of one entering deep water, his face looking down at me, his black-cloaked body levitating on invisible supporting currents and hovering parallel to mine only five or six feet above the Earth.
The places where Drood’s eyelids and nostrils should have been were so red-raw that they looked to have been cut away with a scalpel only minutes earlier. I had almost forgotten how the Drood-thing’s long tongue flicked in and out like a lizard’s.
“You can’t kill Dickens!” I gasped. “
You
can’t kill Dickens. It must be I who…”
“Hussssshhh,” said the floating, hovering, expanding white skull-face. Drood’s breath carried the stench of grave dirt and the sewer-sweetness of dead, bloated things floating in an Undertown river. His wide eyes were rimmed and rivuleted with blood. “Hussssh, now,” hissed Drood, as if soothing a demon-child. “It’sss Charlesss Dickens’sss sssoul we take tonight. You can have whatever isss left, Mr Billy Wilkie Collinssssss. Whatever isss left, isss yourssss.”
I opened my mouth to scream, but at that second the floating Drood removed a redolent black silk handkerchief from his operacape pocket and pressed it down over my straining face.
I
was wakened in late morning by Caroline’s daughter, Carrie, even though—as I mentioned earlier—she was supposed to be travelling out of the city with the Wards, the family for whom she served as governess. She was weeping as she knocked repeatedly and then, when I did not answer, came into my bedroom.