Drood (78 page)

But—incredibly, unbelievably, inevitably—Dickens did not turn. He strode around the curve of the station onto the platform proper without ever looking back at the single and greatest love of his sentiment-ridden and romance-driven life.

Seconds later the train to London arrived in the station with shocking exhalations of unseen steam and metallic grindings.

With wildly shaking hands, I pulled my watch from my waistcoat. The express was right on time. It would depart Peckham Station in four minutes and thirty seconds.

I stood, shakily, and retrieved my valise from the bench, but still waited a full four minutes for Dickens to board and take his seat.

Would he be sitting in a compartment on this side, staring out the window at the station as I went hurrying by?

So far this day, the gods had been kind to me. Knowing that they would continue to be for no reason that I could have explained then or now, I clutched the valise to my chest and ran to board before all my overly minded machinations were defeated by the departure of an unthinking but schedule-driven machine.

I
T WAS NOT
, of course, a long ride, this express suburban in from Peckham and New Cross to Charing Cross. And it took me most of the ride to work up my nerve to move forward from the rearward compartment of the carriage to which I had rushed. After so many trips with Dickens, I knew which carriage he would have boarded, of course, as well as which part of the almost-empty carriage he would have chosen for the ride.

And yet it was still a shock when, valise still clutched to my chest, I walked forward and found him alone in the compartment, staring at nothing but his own reflection in the window glass. He was a study in absolute sadness.

“Charles!” I cried, feigning pleasurable surprise. Without asking permission, I slipped in to sit opposite him “How uncanny but delightful to find you here! I thought you were in France!”

Dickens’s head snapped around and up as if I had slapped him with my glove. In the next few seconds readable emotions flashed across the usually inscrutable Inimitable visage in rapid succession: first absolute shock, then anger bordering on rage, then a pained sense of violation, then a return to the sadness I had glimpsed in his reflection, and finally… nothing.

“What are you doing here?” he asked flatly. There was no pretence of greeting, nor the slightest simulation of
bonhomie.

“Why, I was visiting my elderly cousin. You remember me telling you about her, I am sure, Charles. She lives between New Cross and Peckham, and since Mother died I have found that…”

“Did you board at Peckham?” he asked. His eyes, usually warm and animated, were cold and searching and set in a prosecutor’s probing, basilisk stare.

“No,” I said, feeling the risky lie catch in my throat like a fish bone. “Farther out towards Gad’s Hill Place. My cousin lives between Peckham and New Cross. I took a cab to the Five Bells and boarded there.”

Dickens continued staring at me.

“My dear Charles,” I managed after a moment of this silence. “You wrote me that you were staying on in France. I am astonished to find you here. When did you get back?”

His silence continued for a terrible, interminable ten more seconds, and then he turned his face back to the glass and said, “Some days ago. I needed a rest.”

“Of course you did,” I said. “Of course you did. After America… after the premiere of your play in Paris! But how splendid that I have stumbled upon you on this important night.”

He slowly turned his face back in my direction. I realised that he looked ten years older than he had a month ago when I had greeted him upon his return from America. The right side of his face looked strangely dead, waxen, drawn down, and slumped. He said, “Important night?”

“The ninth of June,” I said softly. I could feel my heart accelerate its pace again. “The third anniversary of…”

“Of…” prompted Dickens.

“Of the terrible event at Staplehurst,” I finished. My mouth was very dry.

Dickens laughed then. It was a terrible sound.

“What better place to observe the anniversary of such carnage,” he said, “than here in a rattling, swaying carriage set precisely in the same sequence of carriages as on that deadly, fated afternoon. I wonder… how many old bridges shall we cross this evening before reaching Charing Cross, my dear Wilkie?” He looked at me very carefully. “What do you
want,
sir?”

“I want to take you out to dinner,” I said.

“No, impossible,” said Dickens. “I have to…” He paused then and looked at me again. “But then again, why not?”

We rode in silence the rest of the way into London.

W
E DINED AT VéREY’S,
where we had enjoyed so many celebratory repasts in years gone by. This was not to be one of the more amiable times spent there.

In my planning for this confrontation I had intended to begin the meal and negotiations directly with
I need to see Drood again. I need to go with you tonight when you go into Undertown
.

If Dickens pressed me for a reason, I would describe to him the agony and terror I had suffered from the scarab. (I had reason to believe that he knew something about such agony and terror from that source.) If he did not ask for my reasons, I would simply go along with him that night.

I did not plan to tell him that I intended to put two bullets into the monster Drood’s body and one into his ugly head. Dickens might have pointed out that Drood’s subterranean minions—the Lascars and Magyars and Chinamen and Negroes and even young Edmond Dickenson with his head shaved—would tear us apart.
So be it
was my response, although I did not expect it to come to that.

But because of what I had overheard in Peckham between the Inimitable and the actress (former actress), I realised that a more subtle and roundabout approach might better serve my cause of going with him to see Drood. (Inspector Field and his agents had never been able to track Dickens into Undertown during the writer’s various sojourns there, although they had witnessed him entering various cellars and crypts in central London. The actual secret doorways, passages, and access points remained a mystery known only to Dickens and Drood.)

We discussed the menu with Henry, the
maître d’hôtel,
and the conversation entered that foreign language (which I so loved) of sauces, gravies, and preparations. Then we took our time ordering wines and a cordial before the wines. Then we talked.

We did not have a fully private room—Vérey’s now reserved those only for larger parties—but we might as well have: our table was a banquette set within flocked red walls, partitions, and heavy drapes in a raised area away from the main room. Even the noise of the other diners was shielded from us.

“Well,” I said at last when Henry, other waiters, and the sommelier were gone and the red velvet drapes closed, “congratulations on the successful premiere of
L’Abîme
!”

We drank to that. Dickens, rousing himself from his thoughts, said, “Yes, it was a great success. Parisian audiences appreciated the revised tale in a way that London audiences did not.”

As if you were here since January to see and hear the reaction of London audiences,
I thought. I said, “The London production continues still, yet all honours to the new blood of the Parisian version.”

“It is much improved,” grunted Dickens.

I could put up with such arrogance because, thanks to secret letters from Fechter, I knew that for all of Dickens’s illusion that the Parisian premiere had been a triumph, the French critics and enlightened audiences understood it to have been a mere
succès d’estime
. One Parisian critic had written—
“Only the sympathetic respect of the French prevented this
Abîme
from engulfing its authors.”

In other words, Dickens’s and Fechter’s beloved
Abyss
had been precisely that.

But I could not let Dickens know that I knew this. If he became aware that I was in secret communication with Fechter, he would also realise that I had known that he had left Paris the night of the premiere and had been hiding with his mistress this past week. It would have shown my feigned surprise at seeing him on the train as the lie it was.

“To more such successes,” I said, and we touched glasses and drank again.

After a moment or two, I said, “
The Moonstone
is finished. I have completed the proofreading of the final number.”

“Yes,” said Dickens with no hint of interest. “Wills has sent me the galleys.”

“Have you seen the commotion at Wellington Street?” I was referring to the crowds at the door each Friday as mobs pressed in to buy the newest instalment of
The Moonstone.

“Indeed,” Dickens said drily. “I had to use my stick as a sort of machete-knife to hack my way through the crush to get to my office towards the end of May before I left for France. Very inconvenient.”

“I dare say,” I said. “When I have brought corrections or business papers to Wills in person, I have seen the delivery boys and porters standing in various corners, their packs still on their backs, reading instalments.”

“Hmmm,” said Dickens.

“I understand that bets are being made on the street—and in some of the better clubs around town, including my Athenaeum—about when the diamond shall finally be found and who shall be revealed as the thief.”

“Englishmen will bet on anything,” said Dickens. “I have seen gentlemen on a hunt wager a thousand pounds on which direction the next flight of geese shall pass over.”

Our
sad history
is buried in France
was the phrase that kept going through my head in Ellen Ternan’s voice. Had it been a boy infant or a girl? I wondered. Weary of Dickens’s endless condescension, I smiled and said, “Wills reports to me that sales of
The Moonstone
have put both
Our Mutual Friend
and
Great Expectations
in the shade.”

Dickens raised his head and looked at me for the first time. Slowly—very slowly—a thin smile widened beneath his thinning moustache and greying beard. “Yes?” he said.

“Yes.” I studied the amber of my cordial for a moment and said, “Are you working on anything now, Charles?”

“No. I’ve found it impossible to begin a new novel, or even a story, although ideas and images flit and buzz in my head as always.”

“Of course.”

“I have been… distracted,” he said softly.

“Of course. The American reading tour alone would stop any writer from working.”

I had offered the American reading tour as an opening for Dickens to change the subject, since he had much enjoyed discussing his various triumphs there with all of his friends, including me, during the weeks after he came back and before he decamped to Paris. But he chose not to accept my offered segue.

“I have read the galleys of your last numbers,” he said.

“Oh?” I said. “Do you find them satisfactory?” It was a perfunctory question, for the first time in our relationship. He was not my editor—Wills had served that needless purpose during the months of Dickens’s absence—and although Dickens was nominally my publisher through his magazine, I had already found a real publisher, William Tinsley, for the first book edition of
1,500
copies and had received a promise of £
7,500
.

“I find the finished book extremely tiresome,” Dickens said mildly.

For a moment I could only hold my glass in both hands and stare at the older man. “I beg your pardon?” I said at last.

“You heard me, sir. I find
The Moonstone
tiresome in the extreme. Its construction is awkward beyond endurance; there is a vein of obstinate conceit that runs throughout the entire tale and makes enemies of readers.”

I could not believe that my friend of long years was saying this to me. I was embarrassed to feel the blood rising to my cheeks, temples, and ears. Eventually I said, “I am heartily sorry, Charles, if the novel disappoints you. It certainly has not disappointed its many thousands of eager readers.”

“So you have been telling me,” said Dickens.

“What exactly about the construction do you find tiresome? It follows the structure of your very own
Bleak House
… only with improvements.”

As I may have mentioned to you, Dear Reader, the construction of
The Moonstone
was nothing less than brilliant, consisting, as it did, of a series of epistles solicited by one of the offstage characters for most of the other central characters to tell their various stories in series via an assortment of diaries and notes and letters.

Dickens had the effrontery to laugh in my face.

“
Bleak House,
” he said softly, “was told from a limited series of third-person viewpoints, always with an authorial eye above, with the single first-person narration by the dear Miss Esther Summerson. It was constructed as a form of symphony.
The Moonstone
strikes any reader’s ear as a contrived cacophony. The level of contrivance in the endless series of first-person written testaments is, as I say, unbelievable and tiresome beyond all words to convey it.”

I blinked several times and set my glass down. Henry and two waiters bustled in with the first course. The wine steward bustled in with the first bottle—Dickens tested it and nodded—and the flurry of black tails and starched white collars bustled back out. When they were gone, I said, “I’ll have you know that the testimony and character of Miss Clack are the talk of the town. Someone at my club said recently that he has not laughed so well since
The Pickwick Papers.
”

Dickens winced. “To compare Miss Clack to Sam Weller or any of the other characters in
The Pickwick Papers,
my dear Wilkie, would be the equivalent of comparing a spavined, swaybacked mule to a thoroughbred racehorse. The characters in
Pickwick
were—as generations of readers and audiences might tell you, should you bother to ask—drawn with a loving eye and a steady hand. Miss Clack is a mean-spirited caricature of a poorly rendered cartoon. There are no Miss Clacks on this world or on any Earth generated by any sane Creator.”