Drood

CHAPTER TWELVE

In December of 1865, Inspector Field reported to me, using hulking Detective Hatchery as his messenger, that Dickens’s “patient,” Ellen Ternan, felt well enough not only to attend a Christmas ball hosted by the brother of her sister’s soon-to-be husband, Anthony Trollope, but was sufficiently recovered from her June injuries at Staplehurst to dance at this party.

With scarlet geraniums in her hair.

By Christmas of that year, Inspector Field was actively complaining to me that he was providing me far more information than I was giving him. It was true. Although Dickens had invited me out to Gad’s Hill several times in the autumn and although he and I had dined in the city and attended various functions together all through that season of his slow recovery from the Staplehurst disaster, we never truly discussed the topic of Drood. It was as if Dickens were somehow aware that I had entered into a covenant of betrayal with the scheming Inspector Field. And yet, if that were true, why would the Inimitable continue to invite me to his home, write me newsy letters, and meet me for dinner at some of our favourite London haunts?

At any rate, Inspector Field had informed me only the week after I had repeated Dickens’s tale of his meeting with Drood, almost word for word, that the writer had lied to me.

If this was true, I realised, then there was no tributary to the buried river of the sort Dickens had described to me. No tunnel leading to another river, no underground rookeries filled with hundreds of the poor driven underground, no Egyptian temple along the banks of this unfound subterranean Nile. Either Dickens had lied to me to protect the real route to Drood’s lair or he had made up the entire encounter.

Inspector Field was not pleased. Obviously he and his men had spent hours or entire nights and days exploring the catacombs and caverns and sewers down there… all to no avail. At this rate, he let me know during our infrequent and sullen meetings, he would never apprehend Drood and would die of old age before pleasing his former superiors at the Metropolitan Police headquarters to the degree that they would reinstate his pension and rehabilitate his good name.

Nonetheless, Field continued to share information with me through the winter. During those autumn months after finishing work on Our Mutual Friend and presumably while having the pleasure of watching its final instalments appear in All the Year Round, Dickens had leased a house for himself in London at 6 Southwick Place, near Hyde Park. There was little mystery in this; he had rented a similar house just around the corner from this one two years before so as to have a convenient place in Tyburnia for his London social engagements, and this new place near Hyde Park was meant to allow his daughter Mamie to come into town whenever she wished for her own society needs (such as they were, since Society seemed to be shunning both Katey and Mamie to a great degree at that time).

So there was no mystery to the lease of a house near Hyde Park. But—as Inspector Field would indicate some weeks later with a wink and a touch of his nose with his corpulent finger—there was significantly more mystery involved in Dickens’s lease of two small homes in the village of Slough: one called Elizabeth Cottage in the High Street, and another one on Church Street only a quarter of a mile away. Although this revelation still lay in the future as the Christmas holiday arrived, I would later learn through Inspector Field that Dickens leased both of these properties under the name of Tringham—Charles Tringham for the Elizabeth Cottage and John Tringham for the house on Church Street.

For a while, Inspector Field would later inform me, the Church Street home lay empty, but then it was occupied by a certain Mrs Ternan and her daughter Ellen.

“We don’t know why Mr Dickens used the name of Tringham,” Inspector Field would say after the New Year as we walked around Dorset Square near my home. “It doesn’t seem important, on the surface, you see, but in our business it always helps if we understand why someone chooses certain aliases under which to do his dirty work.”

Ignoring the “dirty work” allusion, I said, “There’s a tobacconist’s shop on Wellington Street near the offices where Dickens and I work on All the Year Round. The owner, well known to both Dickens and me, is a certain Mary Tringham.”

“Ahh,” said Inspector Field.

“But I do not believe that is the source of the name,” I added.

“No?”

“No,” I said. “Do you happen to know, Inspector, a certain story published in 1839 by Thomas Hood?”

“I don’t believe I do,” the inspector said sourly.

“It’s about village gossip,” I said. “And there’s a bit of a poem in it…

“… learning whatever there was to learn

In the prattling, tattling village of Tringham.”

“Ahhh,” said Inspector Field again, but with more conviction this time. “Well, Mr Dickens… or Mr Tringham, if he prefers… goes to great lengths to hide his presence in Slough.”

“How is that?” I said.

“He dates his letters from Eton, telling his friends that he was merely walking in the Park there,” said Inspector Field. “And he walks miles across back fields from Slough to the Eton railway station, as if he chose to be noticed—if he were noticed at all—waiting for the train to London there rather than in Slough.”

I stopped on our walk and asked, “How do you know what Mr Dickens tells his friends in his private letters, Inspector? Have you been steaming open his mail or interrogating his friends?”

Inspector Field only smiled.

But all of these revelations, Dear Reader, would come about by the spring of 1866, and I must return us now to that bizarrely memorable Christmas of 1865.

WHEN DICKENS INVITED ME up to Gad’s Hill Place for Christmas Day, suggesting in his note that I stay through New Year’s, I accepted at once. “The Butler and the Butler’s Mother shall understand,” he wrote in the same note, referring to Harriet (whom we called Carrie ever more frequently as she matured) and her mother, Caroline, in his usual bantering way. I am not sure Caroline and Carrie did fully understand or appreciate my absence that week, but that was of little concern to me.

As I took the short train ride to Chatham, I held the Christmas Issue of All the Year Round in my hands—the one I’d just contributed to and helped put out and the one that held Dickens’s Christmas story “Cheap Jack” in it—and I thought about the warp and woof of the Inimitable’s fiction these days.

Perhaps it takes a novelist (or some Future Literary Critic such as yourself, Dear Reader) to see what lies behind the words of another novelist’s fiction.

I shall start with Dickens’s most recent Christmas tale:

Cheap Jack, the eponymous hero of the Inimitable’s little fable and a common name in our time for the travelling salesman who moved from village to village with his inexpensive wares, was written about a man whose wife was no longer with him, whose child was dead, and who—for professional reasons—must hide his feelings from the world. Dickens’s character was “King of the Cheap Jacks” and happened to be taking a paternal interest in a young girl with “a pretty face and bright, dark hair.” Was this a twisted self-portrait by the author? Was the young girl Ellen Ternan?

Dickens being Dickens, of course, the girl with the pretty face and bright, dark hair also happens to be deaf and dumb. What would a Dickens Christmas tale be without pathos and bathos?

“See us on the footboard,” Cheap Jack tells us of his time in front of audiences, “and you’d give pretty well anything you possess to be us. See us off the footboard, and you’d add a trifle to be off your bargain.”

Is Charles Dickens telling us here about the great abyss between his gay public life and persona and his private sadnesses and bone-deep loneliness away from the public eye?

And then there was his huge novel Our Mutual Friend, completed (as was “Cheap Jack”) the previous September and which had just ended its full run of nineteen installments in our All the Year Round.

It might truly take another professional author to see just how complex and dangerous a book Our Mutual Friend actually was. I had read it in instalments in our magazine over the past year and a half; I had heard Dickens read parts of it aloud to small groups; I had read some of the book in manuscript form; and after the final instalment was published, I had read it all again. It was incredible. For the first time in my life, I believe I hated Charles Dickens out of sheer jealousy.

I cannot speak for your age, Dear Reader, but already in our nineteenth century just approaching the two-thirds mark, tragedy was replacing comedy in the eyes and hearts and analytical minds of “serious readers.” Shakespeare’s tragedies were to be found on the stage more frequently than his brilliant comedies and they received more serious reviews and discussions. The sustained and profound humour of, say, a Chaucer or Cervantes was being replaced in the short list of masterpieces by the more serious tragedies and histories of both the classics and our contemporaries. If this trend continues, Dear Reader, then by the time you read this manuscript a century and more hence, the art and appreciation of comedies will be all but lost.

But this was a matter of taste. For years—decades now—the fiction of Charles Dickens had grown darker and more serious, allowing themes to dictate the structure of his novels and causing his characters to fit neatly (too neatly) into the pigeonholes of the overall thematic structure much like library cards might be shuffled into the proper drawer. (This is not to say that even the most serious Dickens novels of recent years had been without humour; I do not believe that Dickens could write something totally devoid of humour, any more than he could be trusted to stay completely serious at a funeral. He was truly irrepressible in that regard. But his topics had been increasingly serious as he abandoned the largely unstructured Pickwickian celebrations of life that had made him the Inimitable Boz and as social critique and social satire—all-important to him personally—had moved more towards the centre of his work.

But in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens had created a sustained comedic novel of more than eight hundred cramped pages without striking—as far as I could tell—a single false note.

This was incredible. It made my joints ache and my eyes burn with pain.

In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens had abandoned the grand motifs of Little Dorrit and Bleak House and Great Expectations and almost completely subordinated his personal and social opinions into a masterful display of language and nuance that came very close to perfection. Very close. The complexity of his characters in this book far surpassed anything he had done before; indeed, Dickens seemed to have resurrected many of his earlier characters and reimagined them with the focus of a newly gained maturity and a newly found sense of forgiveness. Thus the evil lawyer Tulkinghorn from Bleak House reappears as the young lawyer Mortimer Lightwood, but redeems himself as Tulkinghorn never could have. The vile Ralphy Nickleby is reborn as the bounder Fledgeby, but does not escape punishment as had Nickleby. (Indeed, the severe caning of Fledgeby by the other bounder, Alfred Lammle, is one of the high points in all of Charles Dickens’s long list of fictions.) Similarly, Noddy Boffin turns into a Scrooge who avoids becoming a miser; the old Jew Mr Riah atones for the sins of Dickens’s sometimes-criticised (especially by Jews) Fagin by not being a heartless money-lender but only the conscience-stricken employee of a Christian heartless money-lender; and Podsnap is—besides being a devastating portrait of John Forster (devastating and so subtle that Forster never recognised himself in the character, although everyone else did)—Podsnap is… Podsnap. The quintessence of Podsnappery. Which may well be the quintessence of our age.

Yet even while the tone and structure of Our Mutual Friend is one of flawless satiric comedy that would have honoured Cervantes, the underlying chiaroscuric background of the novel is dark to the point of despair. London has become a barren and stony desert, “cheaper as it quadrupled in wealth; less imperial as its empire widened.” It is “a hopeless city, with no rent in the leaden canopy of its sky.” The tones are sombre to the point of funereal, with even the sky being darkened by the inescapable fog from yellow and brown to an underlying creeping blackness—“a heap of vapour charged with muffled sounds of wheels and enfolding a muffled catarrh.” The city so beloved by Dickens is portrayed as either grey or dusty or dark or muddy or cold or windy or rain-swept or drowned in its own refuse and filth. Most commonly in Our Mutual Friend, it is revealed to be all these things at once.

But within this horror of a landscape—and within great surges of distrust, vicious scheming, incipient dishonesty, ubiquitous greed, and murderous jealousy—the characters manage to find love and support not within families, as had been the example so used by Dickens and other writers of our era before this, but within small circles of friends and beloved, trusted individuals that make up ad hoc families which shield those characters we care about from the storm of poverty and social injustice. And it is these same circles of love which punish those whom we despise.

Dickens had created a masterpiece.

The public did not recognise this. The first number in All the Year Round had sold very well (it was, after all, the first new Dickens novel in two and a half years), but sales quickly fell off and the last number sold only 19,000 copies. I knew that this was a bitter disappointment to Dickens, and although he had personally profited (I learned from Katey’s comments to my brother, Charley) to the tune of about £7,000, the publishers Chapman and Hall actually lost money on the book.

The critics either loved or hated the book without reservation and laboured over either verdict with their usual cock-sure hyperbole, but the general critical trend was one of disappointment. Those in the intellectual sphere had expected another thematic novel with social criticism front and centre, again in the mould of Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations, but all they received was a… mere comedy.

But, as I say, it took another professional author such as myself to see that Dickens had achieved the nearly impossible in sustaining such a gentle satirical tone at such length, and with such perfection, to see that the satire never slipped into cynicism, that the comic vision did not slide into mere caricature, nor the relentless critique of society devolve into mere rant.

It took me, in other words, to see that Our Mutual Friend was a masterpiece.

I hated him. As a competing writer, I wished at that moment—as the train left London for his home in Gad’s Hill—that Charles Dickens had died in the Staplehurst accident. Why had he not? So many others had. As he so insufferably wrote and bragged to me and to so many other of his friends, his was the only first-class carriage that had not been thrown to the riverbed below and smashed to flinders.

But all that aside, it was the personal revelation in Our Mutual Friend that I found most revealing and relevant to the current situation we all found ourselves in.

To my trained writer’s eye and experienced reader’s ear, signs and echoes of Dickens’s disastrous culmination of his long relationship with his wife and the commencement of his dangerous liaison with Ellen Ternan were to be found everywhere in this book.

Most novelists create the occasional character—often a villain—who leads a double life, but Dickens’s fiction now seemed saturated with such dualities. In Our Mutual Friend the hero, young John Harmon (heir to the Harmon dust heap fortunes), who appears to be drowned under suspicious circumstances while returning to London after many years at sea, immediately visits the decomposing body (dressed in his clothes and thus presumed to be him) at the police station. Harmon then changes his identity to Julius Handford and then later to John Rokesmith so that he can act as secretary to the Boffins, lowly servants who have, by default, inherited the fortune and dust heaps that should have been John Harmon’s.

The villains in Our Mutual Friend—Gaffer Hexam, Rogue Riderhood, Mr and Mrs Alfred Lammle (grifters who have deceived each other into a loveless and moneyless marriage and who join hands now only in deceiving and using others), peg-legged Silas Wegg, and especially the murderous headmaster Bradley Headstone—may pretend to be someone or something else, but are allowed to remain their sincere selves at heart. Only the positive protagonists in the novel suffer from dual or multiple identities amounting to an actual confusion of self.

And that tragic confusion is inevitably brought about by one form of energy—love. Misplaced, displaced, lost, or concealed romantic love is the engine that drives all the secrecy, machinations, and violence in Dickens’s single most energetic (and terrible) comedy. Our Mutual Friend, I realised to my own pain and horror, was a title and tale worthy of Shakespeare.

John Rokesmith/Harmon hides his identity from his beloved, Bella, until long after they are married and even after they have a child, all the better to manipulate and test and educate her—away from love of money towards love for love’s sake. Mr Boffin becomes an ill-tempered miser to all appearances, driving the Boffins’ ward, Bella, out of the house and back to her impoverished roots, but it is all a charade—another means of testing the true mettle of Bella Wilfer. Even the wastrel lawyer Eugene Wrayburn—one of the strongest (if most confused) personalities in all of Dickens’s fiction—reaches, because of his illogical love for low-born Lizzie Hexam, a point where he taps his head and breast in confusion, speaks his own name, and cries out—“… perhaps you can’t tell me what this may be? — No, upon my life I can’t. I give it up!”

John Harmon, lost amidst all his disguises and manipulative strategies, reaches a similar loss of identity and cries, “But it was not I. There was no such thing as I, within my knowledge.”

The weak and jealous headmaster Bradley Headstone seems to confess to all of Charles Dickens’s own hidden passions and jealousies when he tells the much-in-demand Lizzie Hexam—

“You draw me to you. If I were shut up in a strong prison, you would draw me out. I should break through the wall to come to you. If I were lying on a sick bed, you would draw me up—to stagger to your feet and fall there.” And later—“You are the ruin of me… Yes! You are the ruin—the ruin—the ruin—of me. I have no resources in myself, I have no confidence in myself, I have no government of myself when you are near me or in my thoughts. And you are always in my thoughts now. I have never been quit of you since I first saw you.”

Compare this to what Charles Dickens had written in a private letter not so long after he had met Ellen Ternan for the first time—“I have never known a moment’s peace or content, since the last night of The Frozen Deep. I do suppose that there never was a man so seized and rended by one Spirit.” And—“Oh, that was a wretched day for me! That was a wretched, miserable day!”

Charles Dickens’s passion for Ellen Ternan, much less the destruction to his sense of self, family, and sanity that this passion was causing, cried out to me from behind the mask of every character and violent event in Our Mutual Friend.

In the terrifying scene where Bradley Headstone confronts the cowering Lizzie Hexam with his passion—set, I thought, quite appropriately in a foggy burial ground, since the schoolmaster’s love is doomed and one-sided and short-lived even before it dies from jealousy and resurrects itself as murder—the deranged schoolmaster seems to cry out in a voice echoing Charles Dickens’s silent screams of agony that year—

No man knows until the time comes, what depths are within him. To some men it never comes; let them rest and be thankful! To me, you brought it; on me, you forced it; and the bottom of this raging sea has been heaved up ever since.… I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell; what I mean is, that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me. You could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This, and the confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the ruin of me.

And all the time Bradley Headstone is shouting these things, he is wrenching at the stone of the graveyard wall until powdered mortar spills and dribbles onto pavement and until, finally, “bringing his clenched hand down upon the stone with a force that laid the knuckles raw and bleeding.”

Charles Dickens had never before written so clearly and painfully and forcefully about the terrible twinned power of love and jealousy. He was never to do so again.

As with Bradley Headstone, could the confusion of identities and loss of control over his own life, casualties of erotic and romantic obsession, lead Charles Dickens to madness in daylight and murder in the night? It sounded absurd, but it sounded possible.

I set aside the magazine as the train rolled into the station and shifted in my seat to look out into the cold, grey, shadowless Christmas Day. This promised to be an interesting visit.

A YEAR EARLIER—before Staplehurst—Dickens’s comparatively desultory Christmas gathering for 1864 had been composed of my brother, Charley, and his wife, Katey, the artist Fechter and his wife (and Fechter’s amazing gift of the Swiss chalet), Marcus Stone, and Henry Chorley. This year I was mildly surprised to find another bachelor, Percy Fitzgerald, a guest for several days, not surprised at all to see Charley and Katey back at the Dickens hearth, pleased to find the other Gad’s Hill residents Mamie and Georgina in relatively good spirits, and totally surprised—despite the fact that the young Staplehurst survivor had mentioned Dickens’s invitation to me the previous summer—to find young Edmond Dickenson installed at Gad’s Hill for the week. That made three bachelors at the table, if one did not count Dickens himself as such.

And that morning, Dickens promised me another gratifying surprise by dinnertime. “My dear Wilkie, you shall love our surprise guests tonight. I promise you that. They shall be a delight to us, as always.”

If it had not been for the plural, I might have mockingly asked the Inimitable if Mr Drood were making an appearance at our Christmas table. Or perhaps I might not have; despite his enthusiasm about the mystery guests, Charles Dickens seemed very tired and haggard this Christmas Day. I enquired about his health and he admitted to having been plagued with pains and mysterious weaknesses during the late autumn and early winter. Evidently our mutual friend and physician, Frank Beard, had been consulted frequently, although Dickens rarely followed Beard’s advice. It seems that Beard had diagnosed “a want of muscular powers in the heart,” but Dickens seemed certain that the injured heart in question lay more in the realm of emotions than in his chest cavity.

“It’s these accursed muggy days this winter which prey upon the mind, Wilkie,” said Dickens. “Then, after three or four days of unusually warm humidity, these constant cold snaps batter one’s morale like a mace. But—have you noticed? — it never snows. I would give anything for the simple, cold, snowy Christmases of my childhood.”

It was true that there was no snow on the ground in London or at Gad’s Hill this particular Christmas. But we were in one of the cold snaps he had described and our afternoon walk that Christmas Day—Percy Fitzgerald came along, as did young Dickenson and Dickens’s real son Charley, but my brother Charles stayed in the house—resembled more a waddling procession of insensate and multiple-layered bundles of wool than it did a gentlemen’s outing. Even Dickens, who usually seemed oblivious to the rain or heat or cold, had added a thicker topcoat than he usually wore on walks and a second wool muffler, red, wound about his collar and lower face.

Besides the five of us men, there were five dogs with us on that outing: Linda, the lumbering Saint Bernard; Mary’s little Pomeranian, living up to her name of Mrs Bouncer; Don, the black Newfoundland; the great mastiff named Turk; and Sultan.

Dickens had to restrain Sultan on a thick leash. The dog also required a leather muzzle. Percy Fitzgerald, who’d given Dickens the Irish bloodhound as a puppy the previous September, was happy to see Sultan almost grown and obviously healthy, but when Percy approached to pet the hound, Sultan growled ferociously and snapped within the constraints of his muzzle as if he were determined to bite Fitzgerald’s hand off at the wrist. Percy drew back, frightened and mortified. Dickens seemed strangely pleased.

“Sultan continues to be gentle and obedient with me,” he told us. “But he is a monster with most other living creatures. He has chewed through five muzzles and often comes home with blood on his snout. We know for certain that he bolted a certain blue-eyed kitten whole, but Sultan did show agonies of remorse for that dastardly deed… or at least agonies of indigestion.”

As young Edmond Dickenson laughed, Dickens added, “But notice that Sultan has growled and snarled at all of you… except for Wilkie here. While Sultan is loyal only to me, there is some strange affinity between that dog and Wilkie Collins, I tell you.”

I frowned over the rim of my wool scarf. “Why do you say that, Dickens? Because we both come from Irish stock?”

“No, my dear Wilkie,” said Dickens from behind his own red scarf. “Because you both can be dangerous unless properly restrained and treated with a strong hand.”

The idiot Dickenson laughed again. Charley Dickens and Percy merely looked puzzled at the comment.

Because of the cold, or because of Dickens’s pity on his guests, or perhaps because of Dickens’s own health problems, the afternoon walk was more of a leisurely stroll around the property than the usual Dickensian marathon. We ambled to the barn and looked in on the horses, including Mary’s riding horse, Boy; the older Trotty Veck; and the always serious-demeanoured Norwegian pony named Newman Noggs. As we were standing in the clouds of warm exhalations of the horses’ breath, feeding carrots to them, I remembered my summer visit here to see Dickens right after the Staplehurst accident and how the Inimitable’s nerves could not bear even the slow trot of Newman Noggs pulling the basket cart. That cart and Noggs’s harness, which was hanging on the wall of the stable, were decked out today as they usually were with a lovely-sounding set of Norwegian musical bells, but it was too cold to go for a ride.

We left the stables, and Dickens—with Sultan straining at the leash ahead of him—led us through the tunnel to the chalet. The green summer cornfields beyond had died into jagged expanses of frozen brown stubble. The Dover Road was all but empty this grey Christmas Day—a single, tilted hayrick waggon could be seen moving slowly far down its frozen-mud expanse. Brittle grass crackled and split asunder under our boots.

After leaving the empty chalet, our procession followed Dickens to and through the field behind his house. Here the writer paused and looked at me and for a second I flattered myself that I knew exactly what he was thinking.

Here on this very spot, a mere five years earlier, on a lovely day in the first week of September, Charles Dickens had burned every bit of correspondence he had received in the past three decades. With his sons Henry and Plorn hauling basket after basket of letters and files out from his study, and with his daughter Mamie begging him not to destroy such priceless literary and personal artefacts, Dickens burned every letter he had ever received from me, from John Forster and Leigh Hunt, from Alfred Tennyson and William Makepeace Thackeray, from William Harrison Ainsworth and Thomas Carlyle, from his American friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Washington Irving and James T. and Annie Fields, and from his wife, Catherine. And from Ellen Ternan.

Later, Katey told me that she had argued with her father as she held the letters in her hands, argued as she recognised the handwriting and signatures of Thackeray and Tennyson and so many others, and had begged him to think of posterity. But Katey, for whatever reason, was lying to me when she told that story. Kate was actually on her honeymoon in France with my brother, Charles, on 3 September, the day Dickens suddenly decided to burn all of his correspondence. She had not even learned of it until many months later.

Her sister Mamie was there—here, on this very spot where I now stood in Dickens’s back yard overlooking the frozen fields and bare, distant forests of Kent—and Mamie did implore her father not to destroy the letters. Dickens’s response was—“Would to God every letter I had ever written was on that pile.”

When the files and drawers of Dickens’s study were empty that day, his sons Henry and Plorn had roasted onions on the ashes of the great bonfire until a sudden afternoon rainstorm drove everyone inside. Dickens later wrote me—“It then rained very heavily… I suspect my correspondence of having overcast the face of the Heavens.”

Why had Dickens burned his legacy of correspondence?

Just the previous year, in 1864, Dickens had told me that he’d written to his old friend the actor William Charles Macready—

Daily seeing improper uses made of confidential letters in the addressing of them to a public audience that have no business with them, I made not long ago a great fire in my field at Gad’s Hill, and burnt every letter I possessed. And now I always destroy every letter I receive not on absolute business, and my mind is so far at ease.

What improper uses? Some friends whom Dickens and I had in common—of the few who had learned of the mass burning— speculated that the Inimitable’s difficult and public separation from Catherine (made public mostly through his own poor judgement, we should remember) had terrified him into imagining would-be literary biographers and other literary ghouls in the days and months after his demise poring over his confidential correspondence of so many years. For decades, these mutual friends speculated, Charles Dickens’s life and work had been public property. He would be damned, they believed, if reactions from friends to his most private thoughts should also be gawped and gaped at by the curious public.

I had a slightly different theory about why Dickens burned the letters.

I believe that I put the idea of burning the letters into Dickens’s head.

In the Christmas 1854 edition of Household Words, in my story “The Fourth Poor Traveller,” the narrator, a lawyer, says, “My experience in the law, Mr Frank, has convinced me that if everybody burnt everybody else’s letters, half the Courts of Justice in this country might shut up shop.” The courts of justice, such as they were, were very much on Charles Dickens’s mind in those days as he wrote Bleak House and then again in 1858 when his wife’s family threatened to drag him into court for various injustices to Catherine, including, one presumes, adultery.

And just a few months before Dickens had committed his letters to the bonfire, I had written of burning a letter in my novel The Woman in White, which was then being serialised in Household Words, carefully edited by Dickens. In my tale, Marian Halcombe has received a letter from a certain Walter Hartright. Marian’s half-sister, Laura, is in love with Hartright but has agreed to fulfil her promise to her dying father to marry someone else. Hartright is ready to sail away to South America. Marian decides not to tell Laura about the contents of the letter.

I almost doubt whether I ought not to go a step farther, and burn the letter at once, for fear of it one day falling into wrong hands. It not only refers to Laura in terms which ought to remain a secret forever between the writer and me; but it reiterates his suspicion—so obstinate, so unaccountable, and so alarming—that he has been secretly watched.… But there is a danger in my keeping the letter. The merest accident might place it at the mercy of strangers. I may fall ill; I may die—better to burn it at once, and have one anxiety the less.

It is burnt! The ashes of his farewell letter—the last he may ever write to me—lie in a few black fragments in the hearth.

My theory, such as it is, is that this scene from The Woman in White made a profound impression upon Dickens at the time that he was working so very, very hard to create a second and secret life with Ellen Ternan, but also that—for whatever reason—it was his daughter Kate’s marriage to my brother in July of 1860 that finally forced him to burn his correspondence and, I am almost certain, to convince Ellen Ternan to burn all letters he had sent her in the past three years. I am certain that Dickens saw Katey’s marriage to Charles Collins as a form of betrayal from within his family, and it is not too much to speculate that he could then imagine his daughters and sons, but especially his daughter Kate, she who everyone agreed was so much like him, betraying him yet again by selling or publishing his correspondence when he was dead.

Dickens had aged terribly in the years between 1857 and 1860—some say that he went from being a youth to an old man with almost no pause for middle age along the way—and it could very well have been his brush with illness and the spectre of death at that time which reminded him of my letter-burning scene and prompted him to get on with destroying all evidence of his inner thoughts.

“I know what you’re thinking, my dear Wilkie,” Dickens said suddenly.

The other men looked startled. Swathed in their layers of wool, they had been watching the weak sun set beneath the layer of clouds to the west across the rolling, frozen Kentish fields.

“What am I thinking, my dear Dickens?” I said.

“You’re thinking that a great bonfire here would warm us wonderfully,” said Dickens.

I blinked at this, feeling the stiffness of my frozen lashes against my icy cheeks.

“A bonfire!” cried the young Dickenson. “What a capital idea!”

“It would be if we weren’t needed inside to join the women and children in their Christmas Day games,” said Dickens, clapping his heavy gloves together with a sound like a rifle shot. Sultan shied suddenly, leaping sideways against the leash and cowering as if a real rifle had been fired at him.

“Warm punch for everyone!” cried the Inimitable, and our procession of woollen spheroids with bright scarves waddled into the house behind him.

I ABSENTED MYSELF from the felicity of playing games with the children and women and sought the refuge of my room. I always stayed in the same guest room at Gad’s Hill Place and I was quietly relieved to discover that it was still mine, that I had not been demoted in recent months. (Because of the crowding with family staying over the holidays and the Mysterious Guests still to arrive that evening, Percy Fitzgerald had been relegated to a room in the Falstaff Inn across the street. I found this odd, since Percy was an old friend and certainly deserved a room in Dickens’s home much more than did the Dickenson orphan, who was staying in the house. But I had long ago given up trying to understand or predict Charles Dickens’s whims.)

I should note here, Dear Reader, that I had never shared my late-night laudanum insight that Dickens was planning to kill young rich-orphan Edmond Dickenson (all having something to do with scarlet geraniums spilled about the landscape and hotel room like blood) with Inspector Field or with anyone else. The reason is obvious—it was a late-night laudanum revelation, and although some of those have proven priceless to me as a novelist, it would be hard to describe to the squinting Inspector Field the chain of hidden logic and drug-induced intuition that had led to the insight.

But back to my room at Gad’s Hill Place. Although I told Caroline otherwise after long stays with Dickens, his home was a comfortable refuge for guests. Every guest room had a marvellously comfortable bed in which to sleep, several expensive and equally comfortable items of furniture, and—always, in every guest room and in some hallways and public rooms—a table covered with writing materials, including headed notepaper, envelopes, cut quill pens, wax, matches, and sealing-wax. All this was arranged in a room that was invariably clean, scrupulously neat, and impeccably comfortable.

Each guest at Gad’s Hill would also find himself with a veritable library to choose from in his room, with several volumes set out on the bedside table. These books would have been chosen specifically by Dickens for that particular guest. On my bedside table were a copy of my own The Woman in White—not the inscribed one I had personally given to Dickens but a newly purchased one with the pages not yet cut—as well as Spectator essays, a copy of 1001 Arabian Nights, and a volume of Herodotus with a leather bookmark set in a chapter on the ancient historian’s Egyptian travels, which opened to a discussion of Sleep Temples.

Above a dressing room mirror in my room was a card which read—“Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks—which seemed to the family AGES!”

I knew something about that extended visit. One night over wine, Dickens had described the friendly Dane (who spoke very little English, which must have made his long stay with the Dickens family even more stressful) as “a cross between my character Pecksniff and the Ugly Duckling, Wilkie. A very heavy Scandinavian cross to bear for a week, much less for two fortnights and more.”

But when I frequently told Caroline or Harriet, after several days or even weeks as a guest at Gad’s Hill, that the stay had been “a trial,” I meant it in a more literal sense. Despite Dickens’s very real good humour and very real efforts always to set his guests at ease, seeing to their every comfort, catering to them in conversation at all meals and gatherings, there was also a very real sense of being judged by the Inimitable when one was a guest in his home. At least I felt that. (My guess is that poor Hans Christian Andersen—who had commented, without complaining, on the brusqueness of Katey and Mamie and the boys during his long stay here—had not noticed the impatience and occasional censure from his host.)

In the quiet of my room—although I could hear squeals of delight from the children and Charles Dickens downstairs in the parlour as they played their games—I removed the jug of laudanum from its well-protected place in my valise and filled the clean glass that sat next to the constantly replenished jug of cool water by the hand basin. The evening, I was sure, would be a trial for me—physically as well as emotionally. I downed the first glass of medicine and filled the next.

You may be wondering, Dear Reader from my possibly judgemental future, why I had agreed to inform on Dickens to the inquisitive former policeman. I hope you have not thought less of me during the pages of memoir that have intervened here since I related consummating that conspiratorial deal.

The reasons I agreed to that Faustian bargain were threefold—

First, I believe that Dickens wanted me to tell former inspector Charles Frederick Field both everything that had happened that night we searched for Drood and everything the Inimitable had told me about Drood since that night. Why would Dickens want me to inform on him? you ask. I am not certain of all the reasons, but I am quite certain that the author wanted me to do so without actually requesting me to do so. Dickens knew that the private detective was querying me. He certainly knew that a man like Field would attempt to blackmail me beyond a mere threat to expose the very public nature of my relationship with Caroline. More to the point, Dickens would never have told me the story of Drood’s background or admitted to the fact of his—the writer’s—trips to London’s Undertown if Dickens had not anticipated, even wanted, me to forward the information to the bullying inspector.

What Dickens’s game was, I did not know. But the sense of silent collusion was thicker between the Inimitable and me than it was between the scheming Inspector Field and myself.

Second, I had my own strong reasons for using the inspector as my means to gather information about Charles Dickens and Ellen Ternan. There, I knew, in that aspect of his life, Dickens would never share information with me. His relationship with the actress, long before the expository intervention of the Staplehurst disaster, had changed every aspect of the Inimitable’s life and every relationship—including his with me—in that life. Yet the details and extent of that secret relationship and busy Second Life would, if Dickens were to have his way (and when did he not?), remain a mystery until and after the end of his life. I had reasons, which I may reveal to you later, Dear Reader, for needing to know those details. Inspector Field, with his proclivity for prying and his complete lack of a gentleman’s moral perspective and with the help of his far-flung group of busy detectives, was the perfect source of this information.

Third, I entered into the apparent conspiracy with Inspector Field out of my own need to rearrange elements of an intimate relationship with Charles Dickens that I had seen deteriorate over the past year, long before Staplehurst. In a real sense, I was transmitting the Drood information to the detective in order to help protect Charles Dickens at one of his most vulnerable times. I felt that a renewal of our endangered friendship—and the reassertion of my own eroded equality in it—was important if my friend Charles Dickens was to be helped and protected.

Twenty minutes had passed since I had drunk the laudanum, and I could feel the encroaching pain from rheumatical gout begin to release its vice around my aching head and bowels and extremities. A sense of deep equilibrium and mental alertness spread through my system.

Whatever the surprises Charles Dickens had for us at this Christmas Dinner, I now felt ready to face them with my usual and expected Wilkie Collins brand of poise and good humour.