Drood (35 page)

“Ah, wonderful, wonderful!” said Dolby, all hearty good cheer. He had no idea of the
faux pas
he had committed with his praise.

Indeed, my most recent novel,
Armadale,
riding on the success of
The Woman in White
that had appeared in Dickens’s
Household Words,
had been serialised—with a much higher payment for me—in
The Cornhill Magazine
. And it was to come out in full book form from Smith, Elder & Company, who also published
The Cornhill.

But this was not the full
faux pas,
nor the reason that Dickens’s face—beaming and relaxed and eager just a moment earlier—now looked pinched and old. The reason for his change of mood was, I am certain, precisely the heroine Lydia Gwilt whom Dolby had been so inopportune to mention.

At one point I had had Lydia, who was no stranger to pain, hers and that of those mortals close to her, say in the novel—

Who was the man who invented laudanum? I thank him from the bottom of my heart, whoever he was. If all the miserable wretches in pain of body and mind, whose comforter he has been, could meet together to sing his praises, what a chorus it would be! I have had six delicious hours of oblivion; I have woke up with my mind composed.

I had heard through numerous intermediaries, my brother and Katey included, that Dickens had not been pleased with those words… nor with the general tolerant tone towards laudanum and other opiates shown throughout the novel.

“But you were going to tell us how our act of reading novels relates to the new art form of your proposed readings,” I said to Dickens down the length of the cluttered table.

“Yes,” said the Inimitable, smiling towards Cecile Macready as if in apology for the interruption of his narration. “You know the incomparable and—I would dare say—
unique
feeling one has when reading. The focus of attention to the exclusion of all sensory input, other than the eyes taking in the words, one has when entering into a good book?”

“Oh, rather!” cried Dickenson. “The world just fades away. All other thoughts just fade away! All that remains are the sights and sounds and characters and world created for us by the author! One might as well be anaesthetised to the mundane world around us. All readers have had that experience.”

“Precisely,” said Dickens, his smile back in place and his eyes bright. “This happens to be precisely the receptive state a person must be in for a mesmeric therapist to be able to do his work. It is, through the judicious use of language, phrases, descriptions, and dialogue, a form of lowering the reader into the same sort of receptive state of mind that a patient under Magnetic Influence must feel.”

“By God!” cried Macready. “The—er—the audience at the theatre enters into just such an—a—a—sort of receptive trance. I have always said that the—er—er—audiences are the third point of the collaborative—ah—collaborative triangle with the playwright and the actor.”

“Exactly,”
said Dickens. “And this is the crux of my new performing art as opposed to mere readings. Building upon the receptive state of the audiences—so much more intense even than that of readers alone at home or in a railway carriage or even sitting in their gardens—I intend to use the incipient magnetism, combined with my voice and words, to put them into an even deeper receptive and appreciative and collaborative state than either literature or theatre alone could produce.”

“Through mere words?” asked my brother.

“And the judicious and carefully honed gesture,” said Dickens. “In the proper setting.”

“That setting being the st… st… stage,” said Dolby. “Yes, by Jove. That should be extraordinary!”

“Not merely the stage,” said Dickens, nodding slightly as if he were already prepared to take his bows. “But the darkened room. The precise and scientific use of gas lighting to illuminate my face and hands above all else, the careful seating of the audience so that no one is out of direct line of sight with my eyes…”

“We shall be bringing our own gas and lighting experts on the tour,” interrupted Dolby. “Wills has made it a central item to our negotiations.”

Macready pounded the table and laughed. “Little do audiences know that the—er—er—the—er—er—gaslights are a form of—er—intoxication. Intoxication, by God! They deprive the room, the theatre, the space, of oxygen!”

“Indeed they do,” said Dickens with a mischievous smile. “And we shall be using that to our advantage in putting these—I should modestly hope—very large audiences at the readings into the properly receptive state.”

“Into the properly receptive state for what?” I asked flatly.

Dickens pinned me upon the point of his mesmeric stare. His voice was soft. “That is what these readings—this new art form—shall determine.”

A
FTER DINNER, WE
men decamped with brandy and cigars to the billiards room behind Dickens’s study. This was a pleasant space, well-lighted, with one wall half-tiled to prevent any damage from our flailing cue-sticks, and I had spent many a pleasant hour in it. Dickens took his game of billiards seriously—he liked to say that billiards “brings out the mettle in a man” and then, often, glancing at my brother, would add, “or the lack of.” In either case I shall always remember the Inimitable leaning long over the green-baized table, his coat off and wearing those large double-glasses which gave him an odd, Pickwickian, earlier-era old-mannish look.

One of the reasons that Dickens enjoyed Percy Fitzgerald was that the younger man was serious about the game of billiards and quite good at it—at least good enough to give Dickens and me a game. I could more than hold my own at the game, as befits any serious bachelor, but I was surprised this night to find that our Resident Orphan, young Edmond Dickenson, played rather like someone who earned his living on the winnings. (And perhaps he did, for all I knew and for all of Dickens’s talk of the boy’s being independently wealthy.)

Macready played for a loud while before his wife trundled him off to bed after a glass of warm milk. But it was George Dolby—Dickens’s future business manager and reading-tour companion—who brought that night’s games to life: roaring with laughter, telling truly amusing stories with no hint of his earlier stammer, his great bald scalp and forehead gleaming with perspiration in the light from the overhead lamps, Dolby repeatedly dispatched Percy, then me, then Dickens, and finally the stubborn and oddly skilled young Dickenson, whose play showed both an appreciation of ballistics and a deviousness which one would never credit by looking at him.

Dickens, as was his usual habit, retired at midnight but urged us all to continue playing. Usually I did when there were interesting male guests still awake, often playing and enjoying our host’s brandy until dawn, but when Dolby set down his cue and retired soon after Dickens said his goodnights—perhaps not yet certain of his prerogatives as a guest at Gad’s Hill—the game broke up, Percy set off for the Falstaff Inn with a servant holding a lantern for him, and Dickenson and I went upstairs to our respective rooms.

Despite my earlier ministrations of my medicine, the rheumatical gout was racking me as I got ready for bed. Measuring the amount of laudanum remaining in my travel jug, I took two more glasses of the restorative and soporific.

I say “restorative and soporific” because laudanum, as you almost certainly know in your more medicinally enlightened future, Dear Reader, serves to quiet the nerves and allow sleep or to awaken the sensibilities and allow long bouts of hard work and provide a higher than usual level of attention. I did not know—perhaps no one knew—how the same drug served both opposing needs, but I knew beyond doubt that it did. This night I needed its ministrations as soporific.

My busy mind wanted to dwell on Dickens’s bizarre plans for a reading tour to serve as “an entirely new art form” and to connect the strands of nonsense he’d spoken about mesmerism and magnetism to the visits he purported to have been making to see the cellar-dweller named Drood, but the blessed laudanum relieved me of those turgid questionings.

My last thoughts before going to sleep that night were about a piece of information that Inspector Field had given me some weeks earlier.

It seemed that Ellen Ternan had been followed to this area and even to Gad’s Hill several times since autumn. Of course, reported Field, the former actress had relatives in Rochester which brought her to the area separate from any collusion with Dickens, but it was certain that she also came to visit at Gad’s Hill repeatedly and appeared to have spent at least five nights here since September.

How, I wondered, did Mamie and Katey react to this usurpation of their mother’s place? I could easily imagine Mamie following Georgina Hogarth’s lead in welcoming the intruder into their home, knowing—as they must have—that Charles Dickens was a man racked by loneliness and a need for the illusions of youth that only romance can bring to the ageing male mind and soul. But Katey? Kate Macready Dickens, as lonely as she appeared to be in her own right—her father had mentioned to me in October that my brother’s wife “was so discontented… so intensely eager to find other lovers, that she is burning away both character and health slowly but steadily, Wilkie”—still seemed to be loyal to the memory of her exiled mother. I could not imagine Katey, who was the same age as Ellen Ternan, opening her heart to her father’s probable mistress.

It is a hard thing to tell the brother of your daughter’s husband that she is so discontented with her husband that she is eagerly searching for other lovers, and I suspect that Dickens said those words so that I might repeat them to Charley. But, of course, I did not.

Yet Katey must not have vocally opposed Ellen’s visits or the former actress would not have kept returning to Gad’s Hill.

With these thoughts still in mind, I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

S
OMEONE WAS SHAKING
me violently and whispering my name.

I rolled over groggily. The room was dark except for a strange light that seemed to be coming from the floor at the side of the bed. A fire? There was a dark form looming over me, shaking me.

“Get up, Wilkie.”

I focused on that shape.

Charles Dickens in a nightshirt with a woollen coat thrown over his shoulders, carrying a two-barrelled shotgun in one hand and a crumpled shroud in the other.

The time has come,
I thought.

“Get up, Wilkie,” he whispered again. “Quickly. Just put your shoes on. I brought your coat.”

The shape dropped the shroud on my legs and I realised it was my overcoat. “What…”

“Sshhh. You’ll wake the others. Get up. Quickly. Before he gets away. We have no time to waste. Just the coat and shoes. That’s a good man.…”

We went down the back stairs, Dickens with his gun and lantern ahead of me, both of us trying to make as little noise as possible.

Sultan, the ferocious Irish bloodhound, was tied up in the back hall, muzzled and leashed but straining to get out the door.

“What is this?” I whispered to Dickens. “What’s wrong?”

The Inimitable’s wisps of hair atop his head and long whiskers were curled this way and that in the tangle of sleep, some standing straight up, all of which would have been very amusing under different circumstances. But not tonight. There was something like real fear in Charles Dickens’s eyes—something I don’t believe I had ever seen before.

“It was Drood,” he whispered. “I could not sleep. I kept thinking of something I should have noted for Wills. So I rose from my bed, intending to go down to the study to make a note, and I saw it, Wilkie.…”

“Saw what, man?”

“Drood’s face. That pale, tortured face. Floating at the window. Pressed against the cold panes.”

“Of your study?” I said.

“No,” said Dickens, his eyes as wild as a runaway horse’s, “at the windows of my bedroom.”

“But, Dickens,” I whispered back, “that is impossible. Your bedroom is up on the first floor, with the guest rooms. Drood would have to be standing on an eight- or ten-foot ladder to peer into those windows.”

“I
saw
him, Wilkie,” rasped Dickens.

He flung the door open and with the lantern and leash in one hand and his two-barrelled gun in the other, was pulled out into the night after his straining dog.

I
T WAS VERY COLD
and very dark in Dickens’s back yard. There was no moon, no stars, no light from the house. The cold wind cut through my loosely donned coat in a second and I shivered under my fluttering nightshirt. My legs and ankles were bare between the coat and my shoes, and the night air was so frigid against my flesh there that I felt as if the frozen grass were slashing at me with tiny razors.

Sultan snarled and surged. Dickens let the dog lead us as if we were outraged villagers on the trail of a murderer in a second-rate sensationalist novel.

And perhaps we were.

We hurried around the side of the house in the dark and stood in the garden beneath Dickens’s bedroom windows. Sultan pulled and snarled and tugged to continue, but Dickens paused long enough to unshutter the small lantern and focus its beam on the frozen soil in the flower bed. There were no incriminating footprints and no signs that a ladder had been set there. We both glanced up towards his dark bedroom window. A few stars appeared between rapidly moving clouds and were then erased.

If Drood had stared into that window without a tall ladder beneath him, he must have been floating ten feet off the ground.

Sultan growled and tugged and we followed.

We returned to the back of the house and paused in the small field where Dickens had burned all of his letters in 1860. The cold wind moved bare branches with skeletal clicks. I whispered to Dickens, “How could it be Drood? How could he be here?
Why
would he be here?”

“He followed me from London one morning,” Dickens whispered back, slowly turning in a full circle, the long double-barrelled weapon in the crook of his right arm. “I am sure of it. I have seen a shadowy figure on the other side of the road, by the chalet, many nights now. The dogs bark. When I emerge, the form is gone.”