Drood (109 page)
Despite my greater experience at all this (or what felt like it), I
would
have forgotten—and tumbled Clow into the pit with rings, a gold necklace and locket I would soon find (with a woman’s picture in it, but
not
Caroline’s), as well as his watch and many coins, all of which would have been very difficult or impossible to find in the quick-lime in a week or two when I returned—had it not been for her reminder. As it was, the metal objects, including Hatchery’s now emptied and impotent pistol (for which I had no nostalgia whatsoever), were in the burlap bag in a minute and Clow was out of sight under the surface of the quick-lime two minutes after that.
I tossed the metal rod that I’d kept there in the weeds for so long into the marsh and walked back to the erstwhile picnic site. “What are you doing now?” I asked, my voice sounding odd. I could not catch my breath, as though we were climbing to some place high in the Alps rather than standing in a churchyard at sea level.
“Finding and fitting all the pieces of the plate he broke. That was a nice plate.”
“Oh, for God’s sa…” I stopped as I heard voices raised in the direction of the highway. It was an open carriage going by on the road. A man, a woman, and two children were laughing and pointing towards the pink clouds where the sun had set, in the opposite direction from the Cathedral and graveyard. Their heads and gazes did not turn back in our direction as I watched.
“You need to do something with
this,
” said Caroline and handed me the stained, blackened, and still internally smouldering pillow.
It was my turn to laugh then, but I resisted the impulse, since I was not sure that I could stop once begun.
“And for heaven’s sake, Wilkie,” she said, “take off that bright apron!”
I did so, carrying the pillow and my leather lawyer’s portmanteau holding the coins and other items back to the quick-lime pit. There was no sight of Clow in the pit itself. I had learned through my experiments with various dog carcasses that even with the bloating and putrefaction of decay adding to the dead body’s buoyancy, once pressed far enough beneath the surface, anything deep in the thick lime tended to
stay
beneath the surface until raked out.
But what to do with the pillow? The quick-lime presumably would eat it away in a day or two, just as it had the various items of clothing I had tested here—buttons and belts (minus their brass buckles) and braces and laces and boot soles were the stubbornest of objects—but would the pillow stay submerged? And I had already tossed away the iron rod and had little wish to wade into the muck and reeds to retrieve it.
In the end I threw the brown embroidered thing as far out towards the sea as I could fling it. Were this in one of my sensationalist novels—or in Dickens’s—I am sure that it would have been a major clue and the key to my (and Caroline’s) undoing. Some more-clever version of Inspector Bucket or Sergeant Cuff or even of Dick Datchery, Detective, would find us out, and during Caroline’s and my walk up the thirteen steps to the gallows, each of us would be thinking,
That d
——
ned pillow!
(Although I would never ascribe such language to a woman.)
But as it was, the miserable pillow—barely visible in the failing light, since the bright moon was yet to rise—merely arced far out over the reeds and cattails and then disappeared into the marsh and muck there.
Remembering who had given me the embroidered nightmare as a gift, I did finally smile as I thought,
This may be Martha R
——
’s greatest contribution to my future happiness.
Caroline was ready, the shards of her broken plate all retrieved and packed away in her picnic hamper, and we left the graveyard together. We would catch the same
9.30
express to London but we would not sit together—or even in the same carriage. Not yet.
“Are all your things packed and shipped?” I asked softly as we walked through the narrow old streets of Rochester towards the lights of the station.
She nodded.
“No need to go back?”
“None.”
“Three weeks,” I said. “And I have Mrs G——’s address at the little hotel near Vauxhall Gardens where she will be staying.”
“But no contact until the three weeks are up,” whispered Caroline as we came out onto a busier street. “Do you really believe that I shall be able to move back in by the first of September?”
“I am absolutely certain of it, my dear,” I said. And I was.
A
short while ago as I write this, Dear Reader, a little after sunrise, just after I switched off the light next to the easy chair in which I rest, I wrote the following note to Frank Beard—
“I am dying—come if you can.”
I didn’t believe I was actually dying when I wrote that, but I do feel worse now and may well begin that final dying any minute, and a good writer plans ahead. I may not have the energy to write the note later, you see, so I shall keep it on hand. I have not sent it yet, but since Caroline is elsewhere today, I may ask Marian or Harriet soon to send it along to Frank, who is as ancient and weary and worn-out as I. But he does not have far to come. I can see his home through my bedroom window here.
At this point you may well be asking—When
are you writing this?
For the first time in our long voyage together, Dear Reader, I shall answer that question.
I am finishing this long manuscript to you in the third week of September of the year 1889. I was very ill this past summer—but still working towards finishing these memoirs—and then, as autumn approached, I was feeling much better. I wrote this note to Frederick Lehmann on September 3—
I have fallen asleep and the doctor forbids the waking of me. Sleep is my cure, he says, and he is really hopeful of me. Don’t notice the blots, my dressing gown sleeve is too large, but my hand is still steady. Goodbye for the present, dear old friend; we may really hope for healthier days.
But the week after I wrote that, I came down with a respiratory infection on top of my other ailments and I can tell that dear old Frank Beard—although he has not said so to my face—has given up hope for me.
I trust you will notice but forgive the same blots in the last chapters of this manuscript I have set aside for you. My dressing gown sleeve truly is too large and, to be honest with you in a way I hesitate to be with Frederick or Frank or Caroline or Harriet or Marian or William Charles, my eyesight and coordination are not what they once were.
As recently as this past May of 1889, when an inquisitive and impudent young correspondent asked me directly about the rumour of my long use of stimulants, I responded thusly—
I have been writing novels for the last five and thirty years and I have been regularly in the habit of relieving the weariness which follows on work of the brain—declared by George Sand to be the most depressing of all forms of mortal fatigue—by champagne at one time and brandy (old cognac) at another. If I live until January next, I shall be sixty-six years old, and I am writing another work of fiction. There is my experience.
Well, I believe on this cool day of 23 September that I shall
not
live ’til January next, when my birthday would have sent the bells tolling sixty-six times. But already I have lived five years longer than my teetotalling father did and some twenty years longer than my dear brother, Charles, who never used a stimulant stronger than the rare sip of whisky as long as he lived.
Charley died on 9 April, 1873. He died of cancer of the bowel and stomach, which was precisely what Dickens had always insisted that Charley was suffering from, despite all our protests to the contrary. My only consolation is that Dickens had been dead almost three years by the time Charley finally succumbed and went under. I would definitely have had to murder Charles Dickens if I’d heard him gloating about the correctness of his diagnosis when it came to my dear brother.
Shall I summarize the nineteen years I have lived since the summer of the Inimitable’s death? It hardly seems worth the effort for either of us, Dear Reader, and lies outside the purpose and purview of this memoir. And equally outside your range of interest, I am sure. This was about Dickens and Drood, and there your curiosity lies, not in your modest and unworthy narrator.
Suffice it to say that Caroline G—— returned to my home at Number 90 Gloucester Place in the early autumn of 1870, just weeks after… weeks after Dickens died and after her husband of the time disappeared. (Since Joseph Clow’s mother had recently suffered a series of strokes, it was as if no one noticed that he had disappeared, and his wife with him. Enquiries were made by a few mildly interested parties, but all of Mr and Mrs Clow’s bills had been paid, all debts met, the rent for their tiny house paid to the end of July, and the house itself sealed up tidily and emptied of all clothing and personal possessions before the couple were found to be missing—and then the house and its few pieces of cheap furniture were taken over again by the party who had rented it to them—and the few people who had known the Clows at all assumed that the hard-drinking workingman and his unhappy bride had moved away. Most of his ruffian friends believed that the unlucky plumber and his accident-prone wife had moved to Australia, since after a few drinks Clow had always threatened precisely such a sudden departure.)
By March of 1871, I was once again legally listing Mrs Caroline G—— on the parish records as my housekeeper. Carrie was delighted to have her mother home and never—to my knowledge—asked a single question as to how Caroline had extricated herself from the bad marriage.
On 14 May of 1871, my younger daughter, Harriet—named after my mother, of course—was born to “Mrs Martha Dawson.” Martha and I had a third child—William Charles Collins Dawson—who was born on Christmas Day in 1874.
I hardly need tell you that Martha continued to get fatter during and after each pregnancy. After William was born, she made no pretense of trying to shed the weight that hung on her like great slabs of lard. It was as if she had given up caring about her appearance. I had once written about Martha R—— that she was a fine specimen of that type of girl I liked,
“the fine fleshy beef-fed English girl.”
But all that fleshy beef-feeding had a predictable effect. If I had been asked to rewrite that sentence in 1874, it would have read—
“She is the perfect specimen of a vast, fleshy, girl-fed English beef.”
If Caroline G—— ever heard about Martha and the children, even after I moved them all to 10 Taunton Place to be more comfortable and closer to my own home, she never once mentioned it or let on that she knew. If Martha R—— ever heard or knew that Caroline G—— was living with me at Number 90 Gloucester Place (and then, in more recent years, on Wimpole Street) from 1870 onward, she never once mentioned it or let on that she knew.
I
F YOU WANT TO KNOW
about my literary career after Dickens’s death, Dear Reader, I shall summarise it for you in a single cruel sentence: the World thought it and I were a success, while I knew all along that my career and I had conspired to become the most dismal of failures.
As Dickens had before me, I eventually took to giving public readings. My friends told me that they were delightful and a success. I knew—and the honest critics reported both here and in America—that they were mumbling, lifeless, incoherent failures.
As Dickens had before me, I continued to write books and turn them into plays whenever possible. Each book was weaker than the one before it and all were weaker than my masterpiece,
The Moonstone,
although I have seen for many years that
The Moonstone
was no masterpiece. (And it was the unfinished
Mystery of Edwin Drood
that made me see that.)
Perhaps my unpopularity with the public—for that is what it has been, Dear Reader from my future—began just days after Charles Dickens’s death, for it is then that I privately approached Frederick Chapman of the publishers Chapman and Hall and suggested to him that I could complete
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
for them if they so chose. I let them know that while no notes for the remainder of the book were in existence—and it was true that none of Dickens’s usual marginal notes and outlines on blue paper have ever come to light for the unfinished portions of
Drood
—Dickens had taken me (and me alone) into his confidence before the end. I—and I alone—could finish the writing of the entire second half of
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
for only a nominal fee and equal credit as author (just as the co-authorship of our earlier collaborations had been registered).
Chapman’s response totally surprised me. The publisher was furious. He let me know that
no man in England,
no matter how gifted the writer might be or might
think he was
—and he implied that he did not think me all that gifted—could ever fill the shoes of Charles Dickens, even if I had a hundred completed outlines in my pocket.
“Better that the world never knows who killed Edwin Drood—or indeed, if Edwin Drood is dead,”
he wrote me,
“— than a lesser mind pick up the Master’s fallen pen.”
I thought that last metaphor very garbled and grotesque indeed.
Chapman even swore that he would never let the slightest whisper of my offer to him slip out (and warned me never to tell anyone) for fear that
“You shall then inevitably and irretrievably become the most hated and assuredly assumed and presumed presumptuous man in all of England and the Empire and the World.”
How even a publisher and editor could write and express himself that poorly, in a sentence that spavined, I have no idea to this day.
But rumours and whispers against me did begin about that time and that is—as I say—when the active dislike of me by the public seems to have begun in earnest.
A
S DICKENS HAD BEFORE ME
, I did a reading tour of the United States and Canada. Mine was in 1873 and 1874, and it could objectively be categorised as a total disaster. The travel by ship and by train and by coach exhausted me even before the tour was really under way. The American audiences seemed to agree with the English audiences that my readings lacked energy, even audibility. I was never well during the entire tour and reached a point where not even massive ministrations of my laudanum—which I found oddly hard to find and purchase in the States—could bring back any energy or pleasure. The American audiences were idiots. The entire nation was composed of prudes and bluestockings and boors. While the French had never had the least problem with Caroline travelling with me, the Americans would have been scandalised at the very idea of a woman not my wife in my entourage—so I had to suffer my travels and illnesses and nightly humiliations on stage without her help for those long months in America.