Drood (90 page)
Dickens stood in silence. I remained frozen at the back of the room, forgotten by both principals in this unique dialogue. Dolby went to put the tour list on his writing case, turning away as if sparing his Chief his injured countenance. When he turned back, he saw what I had been seeing.
Dickens was weeping silently.
Dolby froze and before he could move a muscle, Dickens had—inevitably, characteristically—moved forward to embrace the bigger man with what appeared to be absolute affection. “Forgive me, Dolby,” he choked out. “I did not mean it. I am tired. We are all tired. And I know you are right. We will discuss this calmly in the morning.”
But in the morning—I was there at breakfast—Dickens left the Murder in all three readings and added one.
By the time I returned to London, I had observed or heard all of the following facts:
Dickens had been discharging blood, blaming his old problem of piles, but Dolby was less certain that this was the only reason for constant bloody diarrhoea.
The Inimitable’s left foot and leg were swollen again to the point that he needed to be helped to the cab and then into the railway carriage. The only time he appeared to walk normally was when he was going onto or off the stage.
He was melancholy, he admitted, beyond all words to describe it.
In Chester, Dickens was dizzy and confessed that he was suffering a mild paralysis. When a doctor was summoned, he told the man that he was “giddy, with a tendency to go backwards and to turn around.” Dolby later told me that when Dickens had tried to place a small object on a table, he had ended up awkwardly pushing the entire small table forward, almost toppling it.
Dickens told of a strangeness in his left hand and arm and explained that to use that hand—say, to set down an object or to pick it up—he had to look at it carefully and actively
will it
to do as he wished.
Dickens told me that last morning in Edinburgh—laughing as he said it—that he no longer felt secure lifting his own hands to his head, especially his rebellious left hand, and soon might have to hire someone to comb his few remaining hairs before he went out in public.
After Chester, however, he went on to read in Blackburn and then at Bolton, Murdering Nancy as he went.
By 22 April, Dickens had broken down. But I get ahead of myself, Dear Reader.
I
T WAS SOMETIME AFTER I RETURNED
from Edinburgh that I received a letter. It was from Caroline. There was no pathos or bathos in her note—she wrote almost unemotionally, as if cataloguing the behaviour of sparrows in her garden—but she informed me that in the six months of their marriage, her husband, Joseph, was failing to earn a living for them, that they lived off crumbs from his mother (actually from his father’s small estate, doled out grudgingly), and that he beat her.
I read this with mixed emotions, the primary one being—I admit—some small satisfaction.
There was no request from her for money or help of any sort, not even for a return letter, but she signed it,
“Yr Very Old and True Friend.”
I sat for a while in my study, contemplating what a false friend might be if Caroline G——, now Mrs Harriett Clow, were an example of a true friend.
That same day, a letter arrived for George and Besse, who had each been grieving in his or her own way—quietly, to be sure, but Besse had been hurt especially hard by Agnes’s departure (more so than by the death of her parents, who left them no money at all)—and I had not seen the envelope when it arrived or the handwriting (laborious printing, actually) would have certainly caught my eye.
But the next day, George appeared at my study door, cleared his throat, and entered with an apologetic expression.
“Excuse me, sir, but since you showed such a kind interest in the fate of our daughter, dear Agnes, I thought ye’d want to see this, sir.” He handed me a small piece of what turned out to be embossed hotel stationery.
DeaRe Mum an DaD—I Am welle and hop to Find you the Same in This Misiv. My Oportunyty has Turned out Very Well. Corpal MacdonalD, my Belovd, and I Plan to Marrye on Nin Jun. I Shall Write you agane After this Happye Event. W/ love and Afecton, yr. Dauter, AGNES
For a moment after reading this, my face, lips, and muscles were as numb and frozen as they had been on the very few occasions when I dosed myself with too much morphia or laudanum. I looked up at George but found that I could not speak.
“Yes, sir,” he said brightly. “It’s grand news, ain’t it?”
“This Corporal MacDonald is the chap she ran away with?” I eventually managed. My voice sounded, even to my shock-dulled ear, as if it had been poured through a strainer.
I had to have known that. George must have told me that. I was sure that he had. Hadn’t he?
“Aye, sir. And I may amend my ’arsh judgement of the lad if ’e makes an honest woman out o’ our sweet Agnes.”
“I certainly hope this will prove to be the case, George. This is very happy news. I am overjoyed to hear that Agnes is safe and well and happy.” I handed him back the note. The heading at the top of the cheap paper was from an Edinburgh hotel, but not the one I had stayed at while visiting Dickens.
Hadn’t we walked over to another hotel to dine that evening after Dickens complained of the beef in the hotel in which we were staying being inferior? I was sure we had. Was it this one whose stationery I was still staring at as George tucked it into his moleskin waistcoat? I was almost certain it was. Had I picked up some of the stationery in the lobby while I was there—perhaps so. Quite possibly so.
“Just thought you’d be interested in ’earing our good news, sir. Thank ye, sir.” George bowed awkwardly and backed out.
I looked down at the letter I had been writing to my brother, Charley. In my agitation, I had spilled a huge blob of ink across my last paragraph.
After the argument between Dickens and Dolby that night, I had used an unusually large amount of my laudanum. We went to dinner. I remembered little of the evening after our first drinks and glasses of wine. Did I return to my room and pen “Agnes’s” letter? Certainly I knew her patterns of misspellings from the note she had copied from my dictation in January. Had I then gone down in the night and posted the letter to George and Besse at the front counter?
Possibly.
I must have.
That was the only explanation and it was a simple one.
I had done other things under the influence of opium and laudanum which I had forgotten about the next day and in days after. Thus the solution to
The Moonstone.
But had I known the d
——
ned Scottish corporal’s name?
Suddenly feeling dizzy, I walked quickly to the window and pulled up the sash. The early-spring air came in, carrying with it taints of coal and horse dung and the distant Thames and its tributaries already beginning to stink in the tentative spring sunlight. I gulped it in and leaned on the sill.
There was a man in an absurd opera cape on the sidewalk opposite the house. His skin was parchment white and his eyes seemed as sunken as a corpse’s. Even from this distance I could see him smile at me and could make out the strange darkness between teeth preternaturally sharpened to points.
Edmond Dickenson.
Or the walking-dead servant of Drood who had once been young Edmond Dickenson.
The figure tipped his tall, shiny, out-of-style top hat and moved on down the sidewalk, looking and smiling back at me only once before making the turn at Portman Square.
T
he premiere of my play
Black and White
was on a Sunday, 29 March, 1869. I hovered backstage in an advanced stage of nerves, too agitated even to gauge the audience response by the sound or absence of laughter and applause. All I could hear was the beating of my heart and the pounding of my pulse in my aching temples. My stomach revolted frequently in the carefully calculated ninety-one minutes that the play ran (not so long as to bore the audience, not so brief as to make them feel short-changed, all according to the accursed, hovering Fechter’s calculations). Borrowing an idea from Fechter—who had called for the same boy earlier, before the curtain went up—I had the lad follow me around with a basin. I was forced to resort to it several times before the end of Act III.
Peeking out through the curtains, I could see my family and friends crowding the author’s box—Carrie looking especially lovely in a new gown given to her by the Ward family (for whom she still worked); my brother, Charley, and his wife, Katey; Frank Beard and his wife; Fred and Nina Lehmann; Holman Hunt (who had attended Mother’s funeral in my place); and others. In the lower omnibus-box closer to the stage was Charles Dickens and all of his family that was not scattered to Australia or India or to lonely exile (Catherine)—Georgina, his daughter Mamie, his son Charley and his wife, his son Henry, home for a break from Cambridge, and more.
I could not bear to watch their reaction. I went back to cowering backstage, the boy with the basin scrambling to stay close.
Finally the last curtain came down, the Adelphi Theatre exploded with wild applause, and Fechter and his leading lady, Carlotta Leclercq, went out to take their bows and then to summon out the rest of the cast. Everyone was smiling. The ovation continued unabated and I could hear the cries of “Author! Author!”
Fechter came back to lead me out, and I strode onto the stage with as much an appearance of modest aplomb as I could muster.
Dickens was standing and appeared to be leading the crowd’s wild applause. He was wearing his spectacles and was so close to the stage that the limelights reflected in them turnd his eye sockets into circles of blue fire.
We had a hit. Everyone said so. The newspapers the next day congratulated me on having—at last—found the perfect formula for theatrical success by mastering, as they said,
“the essential business of neat, tight, dramatic construction.”
No Thoroughfare
had run for six months. I fully expected
Black and White
to run (with a full house) for a year, perhaps eighteen months.
But after three weeks, empty seats began appearing like leprous lesions on a saint’s face. After six weeks, Fechter and his troupe were emoting to a half-empty house. The play closed after a mere sixty days, less than half the run of the far clumsier and collaborative
No Thoroughfare
.
I blamed the bovine stupidity of London playgoers. We had laid a pure pearl at their feet and they had wondered where the rancid oyster meat had gone. I also blamed those elements in Fechter’s original scenario for what I (and certain French newspapers) called the overly “Oncle Tommerie” aspects of the play. England in the early 1860s (just as America shortly before it) had gone ecstatically mad about
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
—everyone in England with a threadbare suit of evening clothes had seen the thing twice—but interest in slavery and its cruelties had faded since then, especially after the American Civil War.
And in the meantime, Fechter’s “Triumph” was coming close to driving me to Marshalsea debtors prison—although Marshalsea itself had been closed and partially torn down decades earlier. When he promised “copious backers” for
Black and White,
he essentially had me in mind. And I had complied—secretly pouring a fortune into expenses, actors’ salaries, artists’ fees for backdrops, musicians’ fees, et cetera.
I had also been lending more and more money to the always-insolvent (yet always-living-well) Charles Albert Fechter, and it did not console me in the least to know that Dickens had also been subsidising the actor’s extravagant style of living (to the combined tune, I knew now, of more than £
20,000
).
When
Black and White
closed after sixty days, Fechter shrugged and went off in search of new roles. I received the bills. When I finally cornered Fechter about what he owed me, he replied with his usual childish cunning—“My dear Wilkie, you know I love you. Do you think I should love you so if I were not firmly convinced you would do the same thing in my place?”
This response made me remember that I still owned poor Hatchery’s pistol with its four remaining bullets.
So, to pay the bills and to begin digging myself out of the debt that had so soon followed and replaced true financial security (with Mother’s inheritance and my earnings from
The Moonstone
and other projects now all but gone), I did what any writer would do in such an emergency: I drank more laudanum, took my nightly injections of morphine, drank much wine, bedded Martha more frequently, and began a new novel.
D
ICKENS MAY HAVE LEAPT
to his feet applauding during the premiere of my
Black and White,
but a month later his reading tour had him flat on his back.
In Blackburn he was giddy and in Bolton he staggered and almost fell, although months later I overheard him telling his American friend James Fields, “. . . only Nelly observed that I had staggered and that my eye had failed and only she dared to tell me.”
Nelly was Ellen Ternan, also still referred to by Dickens as “the Patient” because of the slight injuries she had suffered at Staplehurst four years earlier. Now
he
was the patient. And she was still travelling with him from time to time. This was interesting news. What a terrible and final turning-point it is in any ageing man’s life when one’s young lover becomes one’s caretaker.
I knew from Frank Beard that Dickens had been compelled to write him describing these symptoms. Beard, in turn, had been sufficiently alarmed that he had departed by rail for Preston the very afternoon he received the letter.
Beard arrived, examined Dickens, and announced that there could be no more readings. The tour was over.
“Are you certain?” asked Dolby, who was in the room. “The house is sold out and it is too late to refund the tickets.”
“If you insist on Dickens taking the platform tonight,” said the physician, glowering at Dolby almost as fiercely as had Macready, “I will not guarantee but that he goes through life dragging a foot after him.”