Drood

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Ichose to join Dickens for a few days well into his tour.

Inspector Field had been correct in saying that Dickens would welcome the idea of my joining him for a bit of time on the road. I sent a note to Wills, who—exhausted as he must have been from travelling every day with the Inimitable—flitted back to London every few days from the tour to carry on his own and Dickens’s business affairs at the magazine with Forster (who disapproved of the entire idea of the reading tour), and within a day I received back that rarest of things for me—a telegram—which read,

MY DEAR WILKIE THE TOUR IS SUCH FUN! OUR DOLBY HAS TURNED OUT TO BE THE PERFECT TRAVEL COMPANION AND MANAGER. YOU WILL ENJOY HIS ANTICS. I CERTAINLY DO. JOIN US AT ANY TIME AND TRAVEL WITH US AS LONG AS YOU WISH. AT YOUR OWN EXPENSE, OF COURSE. LOOKING FORWARD TO YOUR COMPANY! C. DICKENS

I had wondered how the Staplehurst accident was affecting the Inimitable’s almost daily railway journeys, and I discovered this a few minutes after we had departed the station in Bristol on our way to Birmingham.

I was sitting directly across from Dickens in the compartment. He was sitting alone on his bench. George Dolby and Wills occupied the seat beside me but they were chatting, and perhaps I alone could see that the author was becoming more agitated as our carriage got up to speed. Dickens’s hands fiercely gripped first the head of his walking stick and then the sill of the window. He would glance out the window as the vibrations increased, then look away quickly, then glance out again. His face, usually darker than most Englishmen’s due to the effects of the sun during his daily walks, grew paler and was moist with perspiration. Then Dickens removed his travelling flask from his pocket, took a long pull of brandy, breathed more deeply, took a second pull, and put the flask away. Then he lit a cigar and turned to chat with Dolby, Wills, and me.

The Inimitable preferred an interesting—even eccentric, possibly even dashing—wardrobe for his travel: a pea jacket over which he tossed an expensive Count D’Orsay cloak; his grizzled and weary visage, his lined skin bronzed by sun (the pallor had faded with the brandy and was now almost gone), peeking out from beneath a felt hat worn rather jauntily to one side. I’d overheard the bearlike Dolby tell the scarecrow-thin Wills at the Bristol station that the hat “makes the chief look like a modernised gentlemanly pirate with eyes in which lurk the iron will of a demon and the tender pity of an angel.”

I think Dolby had also been partaking of some brandy that morning.

The conversation was lively—we were the only passengers in this first-class compartment, the rest of the small entourage having gone on to Birmingham before us. I had heard from Dickens that during the first days of the tour, Wills had put Dolby through very thorough cross-examinations on how the business manager would handle his work. During those first city readings, Dolby had gone ahead with the gas and lighting men and only Wills had travelled each day with Dickens. Now, with Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Bristol behind them—and no major problems in any of those cities, so thorough was Dolby’s work—the big business manager was travelling with Dickens, much to the Inimitable’s obvious delight. The rest of the tour consisted of Birmingham, Aberdeen, Portsmouth, and then home to the final performances in London.

Dolby, whom a later client—an American writer named Mark Twain—would describe as “a gladsome gorilla,” reached into the large wicker basket he had brought aboard, set linen on the tiny folding table he had thought to provide for the centre of our compartment, and proceeded to present a buffet luncheon of hard-boiled-egg sandwiches with anchovy, salmon mayonnaise, cold fowl and tongue, and pressed beef, with Roquefort cheese and cherry tart for our dessert. He also set out a rather good red wine and kept a gin punch chilled by filling the compartment’s washstand with ice. As the rest of us finished this repast, Dolby warmed coffee over a spirit lamp. Whatever else the huge, whiskered man with his infectious laugh and rather endearing stammer might be, he was certainly efficient.

After a second bottle of wine was opened and the chilled gin punch was finished, the group began to sing travelling songs—some of which I’d sung with Dickens when it had been just the two of us wandering around the country or in Europe the previous decade. This day, as we approached Birmingham, Dickens was moved to dance a sailor’s hornpipe for us as we all whistled accompaniment. When he was finished and out of breath, Dolby gave him the last glass of punch and Dickens began teaching us the drinking song from Der Freischütz. Suddenly an express roared past us going the opposite way on the adjoining track and Dickens’s lovely felt hat was whisked right off his balding head by the vacuum. Wills, who seemed more the consumptive type than an athlete, launched his long arm out the window and caught the hat just before it disappeared forever into the countryside. We all applauded and Dickens pounded the frail man heartily on the back.

“I lost a sealskin cap earlier on this tour under almost exactly the same circumstances,” Dickens said to me as he took the felt hat from Wills and tugged it back on. “I would have hated parting ways with this chapeau. Thank God Wills is famous for his defensive fielding. I can’t remember whether he was famous for playing at Deep fine leg or Backward short leg, but his fielding abilities are legendary. His shelves groan with silver cups.”

“I have never played the game of…” began Wills.

“Never mind, never mind,” laughed Dickens, clapping his companion on the back again. George Dolby boomed out laughter that must have been heard from one end of our express to the other.

IN BIRMINGHAM, I got a taste of the texture and timing of the tour.

I had certainly stayed in my share of hotels, and while such travel was usually enjoyable, I was very aware of Dickens’s ill health the previous winter and spring and also knew from personal experience that constant travel and the vagaries of hotel life do little to allow recovery from ill health. He had confided in me that his left eye continued to blur and ache fiercely, that his belly constantly felt distended, that flatulence was a problem all during the tour, and that the vibration of the trains gave him a sort of nausea and vertigo from which he never had time to recover during his short stays in the cities in which he performed. Balancing near-daily travel and exhausting nights of reading was obviously pushing Dickens to and beyond the limits of his endurance.

Upon arriving in Birmingham, before resting or unpacking his valise, Dickens hurried over to the theatre. Wills was preoccupied with other duties, but Dolby and I followed the Inimitable.

Touring the hall with the theatre owner, Dickens immediately ordered changes. As per his instructions, seats on either side of the stage and certain box seats had been either removed or roped off, but now he stood at his customised reading lectern and ordered even more seats on either side of the large theatre to be eliminated. Everyone attending his reading had to be within direct and unoccluded line of sight. Not only to see him clearly, I understood, but so that he could make eye contact with them.

His advance workers had already erected a large maroon screen that would be behind him as he spoke; the screen was seven feet high and fifteen feet wide and there was a carpet of the same colour between the screen and his lectern. The unique gas lighting was also in place. Here Dickens’s gas man and lighting expert had set two upright pipes rising about twelve feet on either side of his reading lectern. Connecting the two pipes but hidden from the sight of the audience by a maroon board was a horizontal row of gaslights in tin reflectors. In addition to this bright lighting, there was a gaslight on each pipe that was protected by a green shade and which was aimed directly at the reader’s face.

I stood in the glow of this clever lighting rig and the two targeted lamps for only a minute but the glare was intimidating. I would have found it very difficult, if not impossible, to read from any book with those lights shining in my face, but I knew that Dickens rarely if ever read from his prompt books doing these ostensible readings. He had memorised all the hundreds of pages of text he would be performing—read and memorised and altered and improved and rehearsed each story at least two hundred times—and would either close the book he had in his hand after beginning his performance or merely turn the pages, absentmindedly and symbolically, as he went along. Most of the time his eyes would be staring through the blazing rectangle of gas lighting towards the audience. Yet for all that ferocious gaslit glow, Dickens could still see the faces of all those in his audience. He deliberately left the house lighting high enough for that.

Before relinquishing my spot at Charles Dickens’s reading desk, I studied the desk itself. Propped on four slender and elegant legs, the table rose to about the height of the Inimitable’s inimitable navel. Flat-topped, the desk was covered by a crimson piece of cloth this afternoon. On either side of the table were small ledges, the one on the right designed to hold a carafe of water, the one on the left meant for Dickens’s expensive kid gloves and a pocket handkerchief. Also on the left side of the desktop was a rectangular block of wood on which Dickens could—and frequently did—rest either his left or right elbow when he leaned forward. (He often read from just to the left of the desk itself and, I knew from seeing him at previous readings in London, might suddenly lean forward almost boyishly with his right elbow on that raised block and his expressive hands in motion. The effect was to make the audience feel an even more personal and intimate bond with him.)

Now Dickens cleared his throat and I moved away from the desk and down off the stage as the author stood at his reading desk and tested the acoustics of the hall with various snippets from the readings he would do that night. I joined George Dolby in the last row of the balcony.

“The Chief began the tour by reading from his Christmas story ‘Doctor Marigold,’ ” whispered Dolby although we were far away from Dickens. “But it didn’t quite work, at least not to the Chief’s satisfaction—and I do not have to tell you that he is the ultimate perfectionist—so he improves it while leaning towards more of the old favourites: the death scene of Paul from Dombey and Son, the Mr, Mrs, and Miss Squeers scene from Nicholas Nickleby, the trial from Pickwick, the storm scene of David Copperfield, and, of course, A Christmas Carol. The audiences can never get enough of A Christmas Carol.”

“I am sure they cannot,” I said drily. I was on record for noting my disdain for the “Cant and Christmas season.” I also noticed that Dolby’s stammer was not present when he whispered. How very strange such afflictions are. Having been reminded of afflictions, I removed the small travelling flask that now held my laudanum and took several swallows of it. “I am sorry I cannot offer you some of this,” I said to Dolby in a conversational tone, unintimidated by Dickens’s still reciting snippets of this and that from his distant stage. “Medicine.”

“I understand perfectly,” whispered Dolby.

“I am surprised that ‘Doctor Marigold’ did not please the masses,” I said. “Our Christmas Issue with that story sold more than two hundred and fifty thousand copies.”

Dolby shrugged. “The Chief got laughs and tears with it,” he said softly. “But not enough laughs and tears, he said. And not at precisely the right times. So he set it aside.”

“Pity,” I said, feeling the careless warmth of the drug enter my system. “Dickens rehearsed it for more than three months.”

“The Chief rehearses everything,” whispered Dolby.

I did not know how I felt about this absurd appellation of “Chief” that Dolby had assigned to Dickens, but the Inimitable himself seemed to enjoy the title. From everything I could perceive, Dickens enjoyed almost everything about the big, burly, stammering bear of a manager. I had no doubt that this common theatrical tradesman was usurping the position of close friend and occasional confidant that I had held with Dickens for more than a decade now. Not for the first time—and not for the first time under the clarity of laudanum—I saw precisely how Forster, Wills, Macready, Dolby, Fitzgerald—all of us—were mere planets vying and contesting to see who could circle the closest revolutions around the grizzled, flatulent, lined, and greying Sun that was Charles Dickens.

Without another word I rose and left the theatre.

I HAD INTENDED to return to the hotel—Dickens would go there to rest the few hours before his performance, I knew, but would withdraw into himself, not engaging in conversation until after the long night of readings was over—but found myself wandering the dark and sooty streets of Birmingham, wondering why I was there.

Eight years earlier, in the autumn of 1858—after I had accompanied Dickens on that fool’s errand of a trip north pursuing Ellen Ternan (being convinced by Dickens that we were travelling as research for our collaboration on Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices) and after I had almost died on Carrick Fell—I returned to London with my eye firmly fixed on the theatre. Immediately after the success of The Frozen Deep the previous year, the famous actor Frederick “Frank” Robson had purchased my earlier melodrama The Lighthouse—which Dickens had starred in just as he had in The Frozen Deep—and on 10 August, 1857, my dream of becoming a professional dramatist came true. Dickens sat with me in the author’s box and applauded as others did (I confess to standing and taking a bow during the ovation) but “ovation” may be too strong a word; the applause sounded rather more respectful than enthusiastic.

Reviews of The Lighthouse were equally respectful and tepid. Even gentle John Oxenford of the Times wrote—“We cannot avoid the conclusion that The Lighthouse, with all its merits, is rather a dramatic anecdote than an actual drama.”

Despite this effluvium of tepidity, for months in 1858 I had—to use a phrase I shared with Dickens then—exhausted my brains in the service of more theatrical composition.

It was Dickens’s son Charley, just back from Germany and sharing impressions of a grisly place there in Frankfurt called the Dead House, who gave me my inspiration. I immediately put pen to paper and dashed off a play called The Red Vial. My two lead characters were a lunatic and a lady poisoner (I have always had a fascination with poison and those who poison). I set the main scene of The Red Vial in the Dead House. I confess, Dear Reader, that I thought the set and setting wonderful—a room full of corpses all laid out on cold slabs under sheets, each with a finger wrapped in a string that led upward to a dangling alarm bell, should one of the “dead” not be dead at all. The entire macabre setting reached into the deepest areas of our fears of premature burial and the walking dead.

Dickens himself said little when I proposed the idea and later when I read him the actual sections of the play as I finished them, but he did visit London’s asylum in quest of small details that would add more believability to my lead lunatic. Robson, who had done such a fine job in The Lighthouse, accepted the play for the Olympic Theatre and took the role of the lunatic. I enjoyed the rehearsals immensely, and all of the actors involved assured me that the play was wonderful. They agreed with my premise that although London theatre-goers had become a lumpen lot with dulled minds, a sufficiently strong stimulation might awaken them.

On 11 October, 1858, Dickens accompanied me to The Red Vial’s premiere performance and arranged an after-theatre supper party for me and my friends at his now wifeless home at Tavistock House. A group of at least twenty of us sat together during the performance.

It was a disaster. While my friends shuddered at the delightfully morbid and melodramatic parts, the rest of the audience snickered. The loudest snickers came at the climax of my Dead House scene where—too obviously, according to critics after the fact—one of the corpses rang the bell.

There was no second performance. Dickens tried to be upbeat during all the rest of that endless night, telling jokes at the expense of London audiences, but the supper at Tavistock House was very trying for me. As I later overheard that brat Percy Fitzgerald say—it was a real case of funeral baked meats.

But the disaster of The Red Vial did nothing to dissuade me from my decided course of simultaneously disturbing, fascinating, and repelling my fellow countrymen. Shortly after the wild success of The Woman in White, I was asked the secret of my success and I modestly told my interlocutor—

1. Find a central idea

2. Find the characters

3. Let the characters develop the incidents

4. Begin the story at the beginning

Compare, if you will, this almost scientific artistic principle with the haphazard way that Charles Dickens had thrown his novels together over the decades: pulling characters out of the air (often based willy-nilly on people in his own life) without a thought as to how they might serve the central purpose, mixing in a plethora of random ideas, having characters wander off into incidental occurrences and unimportant side-plots having nothing to do with the overriding idea, and often beginning his story in mid-flight, as it were, violating the important Collins principle of first-things-first.

It was a miracle that we had been able to collaborate the number of times we had. I prided myself not a small bit on bringing some coherence to the plays, stories, travel accounts, and longer works we had outlined or worked on together.

So why, I wondered on this unseasonably cool and rainy May evening in Birmingham, was I here watching Dickens as he was entering the last legs of what sounded to be an amazingly successful reading tour of England and Scotland? Critics incessantly criticised my flair for what they called “melodrama,” but what on earth should one call this new and bizarre combination of literature and rampant theatricals that Dickens was pursuing on the stage this very night? No one in our profession had ever seen anything like it before. No one in the world had ever seen or heard anything like it before. It demeaned the role of author and turned literature into a half-shilling carnival. Dickens was pandering to the masses like an onstage clown with a dog.

These were the thoughts that were in my mind at the time I walked down a dismal, windowless street—more alley than lane if truth be told—as I turned back towards my hotel, only to find two men barring my path.

“Excuse me, please,” I said brusquely, waving my gold-headed cane to get them out of the way.

They did not budge.

I walked to the right in the narrow lane, but they moved to their left. I stopped and began walking to my left, and they shifted to their right.

“What is this?” I demanded. Their only answer was to begin moving towards me. Both men put their hands in their tattered jacket pockets and when those calloused, filthy hands emerged, it was with short knives.

I turned quickly and began hurrying towards the main thoroughfare, only to see a third man step into the lane and block it, his bulky form a threatening silhouette against the brighter evening light beyond him. He also held something in his right hand. Something that glinted in that failing light.

I confess here, Dear Reader, that my heart began to pound wildly and I felt an urgent liquidity in the region of my bowels. I do not like to think of myself as a coward—what man does? — but I am a small man, and a peaceful one, and though I might write fiction from time to time about violence, fisticuffs, mayhem, and murder, these are not things that I had then personally experienced, nor wanted to.

At that moment I wanted to run. I had the absurd but real compulsion to call out for my mother, although Harriet was hundreds of miles away.

Even though none of the three men said a word, I reached into my jacket and removed my long wallet. Many of my friends and acquain-tances—certainly Dickens—thought me a shade too reluctant to part with money. Actually, Dickens and his friends, all having been gifted with money for many years, ignored my need for pecuniary discipline and thought me cheap, a penny-pinching miser in the mode of pre-revelation Ebenezer Scrooge.

But at that moment I would have given up every pound and shilling I had on me—and even my not-gold but quite serviceable watch—if these ruffians would only let me pass.

As I said, they did not demand money. Perhaps that is what frightened me most. Or perhaps it was the terribly serious and inhuman looks on their bewhiskered faces—especially the alert deadness combined with something like anticipatory joy in the grey eyes of the largest man, who approached me now with knife raised.

“Wait!” I said weakly. And again, “Wait… wait…”

The big man in the shabby clothes raised the knife until it was almost touching my chest and neck.

“Wait!” shouted a much louder and much more commanding voice from behind the four of us, towards the thoroughfare, where there was still light and hope.

My assailants and I all turned to look.

A small man in a brown suit was standing there. Despite the commanding voice, the figure was no taller than I. He was hatless, and I could see short, curly grey hair plastered to his head by the light rain that was falling.

“Go away, friend,” growled the man holding the knife to my throat. “You don’t want no part of this.”

“Oh, but I do,” said the short man and ran towards us.

All three of my assailants turned in his direction, but my legs felt too unsteady to allow me to bolt. I was sure that within seconds both I and my would-be rescuer would be lying dead on the filthy paving stones in that unnamed, lightless lane.

The brown-suited man, whom I had first thought to be as portly as I but who I now saw to be compact but as muscled as a diminutive acrobat, reached into his tweedy suit jacket and quickly brought out a short, obviously weighted piece of wood that looked like a cross between a sailor’s marlin spike and a policeman’s club. This club had a dull, heavy head and appeared to be cored with lead or something as heavy.

Two of my assailants leaped at him. The brown-suited stranger broke the wrist and ribs of the first thug with two quick swings and then cracked the second one over the head with a sound such as I had never heard before. The burliest of my attackers—the whiskered and deadly-eyed man who had, only a second before, been holding the knife to my throat—extended the blade with his thumb atop it and feinted and whirled and lunged and swung at my rescuer from a poised, catlike crouch, all dance-like motions which, I am sure, had been honed in a thousand back-alley knife fights.

The brown-suited man jumped back as his attacker’s blade swung first right and then back left in vicious arcs that would have disemboweled him if not for his agility. Then—much more quickly than one could ever imagine judging from his stolid appearance—my saviour leaped in, broke our mutual assailant’s right forearm with a downward swing of his small cudgel, broke the thug’s jaw with the backhand return of the same swing, and—as the big man fell—struck him a third time in the groin with such violence that I winced and cried out myself, and then hit him a final time in the back of the head as the thug went first to his knees and then to his face in the mud.

Only the first assailant, the one with the broken ribs and wrist, remained conscious. He was staggering towards the darkness deeper in the alley.

The brown-suited man ran him down, spun him, struck him twice in the face with the short but deadly weapon, kicked his legs out from under him, and then struck him a final savage blow to the head as he lay there moaning. Then there were no more moans.

The compact man in brown turned towards me.

I admit that I backed away with my hands up, palms open imploringly towards the short, deadly figure that approached. I had come very, very close to soiling my linen. Only the incredible—I would say impossible—speed of the violence I had just witnessed had prevented my full and total reaction of fear.

I had written about violent altercations many times, but the physical events were all recorded as if choreographed and carried out in slow, deliberate motions. All of the real violence I had just witnessed—certainly the worst I had ever witnessed, and the most savage—had happened in seven or eight seconds. There was, I realised, a very real chance that I might vomit if the brown-suited terror did not kill me first. I held my hands up and tried to speak.

“It’s all right, Mr Collins,” said the man, tucking his cudgel into his jacket pocket and firmly taking me by the arm and leading me back the way I had come, out into the thoroughfare light. Broughams and cabs passed as if nothing extraordinary had just happened.

“Who… who… are you?” I managed. His grip was as relentless as one imagines a smithy vice’s steel grip might be.

“Mr Barris, sir. At your service. We need to get you back to the hotel, sir.”

“Barris?” I was ashamed to hear the quaver and stammer in my voice. I have always prided myself on being cool in difficult situations, at sea or on the land (although in recent months and years, I admit, that equanimity had been in small part due to the laudanum).

“Yes, sir. Reginald Barris. Detective Reginald Barris. Reggie to my friends, Mr Collins.”

“You’re Birmingham police?” I said as we turned east and began walking quickly, his hand still on my arm.

Barris laughed. “Oh, no, sir. I work for Inspector Field. Came up from London by way of Bristol, just as you did, sir.”

One uses the word “wobbly” in relation to “legs” often enough in fiction; it is a cliché. To actually feel legs so unsteady and wobbly that it is difficult to walk is an absurd situation, especially to someone like me, who loves to sail and who has not the slightest problem peramubulating on a pitching deck in the high seas of the Channel.

I managed to say, “Should we not go back? Those three men might be injured.”

Barris, if that was his true name, chuckled. “Oh, I guarantee that they are injured, Mr Collins. One is dead, I believe. But we are not going back. Leave them lie.”

“Dead?” I repeated stupidly. I could not believe that. I would not believe that. “We must inform the police.”

“The police?” said Barris. “Oh, no, sir. I think not. Inspector Field would sack me if I got my name and our Private Enquiries firm’s name in the Birmingham and London papers. And you might be delayed here for days, Mr Collins. And called back to testify in an endless series of inquests and hearings. And all for three street thugs who were ready to cut your throat to steal your purse? Please, sir, put such thoughts out of your mind.”

“I don’t understand,” I said as we turned east on an even wider street. I recognised the way back to the hotel now. The lamps were being lit all along this busy boulevard. “Did Field send you to… watch over me? Protect me?”

“Yes, sir,” said Barris, releasing my arm at last. I could feel the blood rush in where he had cut off circulation. “That is, sir, there are two of us… ah… accompanying you and Mr Dickens on this tour. In case Mr Drood should make an appearance, sir. Or his agents.”

“Drood?” I said. “Agents? Do you believe that those three men were sent by Drood to kill me?” For some reason, this thought caused my bowels to go loose again. This Drood fantasy had all been a clever if somewhat tiring game up to this point.

“Them, sir? Oh, no, sir. I’m quite sure that those blackguards had nothing to do with this Drood the inspector is hunting for. Nothing at all, sir. You can be confident of that.”

“How?” I said as the hotel came into sight. “Why?”

Barris smiled thinly. “They were white, sir. Drood almost never uses white men in his service, although the occasional German or Irishman has been known. No, he would’ve sent Chinamen or Lascars or Hindoos or even some black just off a ship if he’d wanted you dead here or in Bristol, sir. Well, here is your and Mr Dickens’s hotel, Mr Collins. One of my colleagues is there and will look after your well-being once you’ve entered the lobby. I’ll stand here and watch until you reach the doors, sir.”

“Colleague?” I repeated. But Barris had stepped back into the shadows of an alley and now raised his hand to his forehead as if tipping an invisible bowler.

I turned and wobbled towards the lighted doorway of the hotel.

I HAD NO intention of attending Dickens’s performance after such a terrible experience, but after a warm bath and at least four cups of laudanum—I drained my flask and refilled it from the carefully wrapped bottle I’d brought in my luggage—I decided to dress approriately for the evening and go to the reading. This was, after all, the reason I had come to Birmingham.

I knew from Wills and Dolby that Dickens was all but unapproachable in the last hour or two before his nightly performance. He and his manager walked to the theatre and I took a cab over a bit later. I had no intention of walking alone, in the dark, on Birmingham streets again. (If Detective Barris or his colleagues were out there watching me, I did not see them as the hansom cab dropped me at the side door of the theatre.)

It was quarter to eight and the audience was just arriving. I stood at the back of the hall and watched as Dickens’s gas and lighting experts appeared, appraised the structure of dark pipes and unlit lamps from positions on both sides of the theatre, and then withdrew. A moment later the gas man appeared alone, made some adjustment to the overhead lamps hidden behind the maroon cloth—covered board, and withdrew again. Several minutes later the gas man appeared a third time and turned on the gas. The effect of the lighting against the dark background, dim at this point but clearly illuminating Dickens’s reading table, was quite striking. There were hundreds of people in their seats by this time, and all became quiet and strained to watch with a focused interest that was almost palpable.

George Dolby ambled onto the stage and peered up at the low lighting, down at the table, and out at the congregating audience with an air of self-importance. Dolby slightly repositioned the carafe of water on Dickens’s table, nodded as if satisfied by this important and essential adjustment, and slowly disappeared behind the high screen that extended from the curtained side of the stage to the central reading area. As I walked up the side of the platform to go backstage myself, Dolby coming in just behind me, I thought of Shakespeare’s most famous of stage instructions, from A Winter’s Tale—“Exit, pursued by a bear.”

In his dressing room, Dickens was in formal evening clothes. I was glad that I had decided to wear mine, although everyone who knew me also knew how little I cared for formal clothing or the proper appearance. But this night the white tie and tails seemed appropriate… perhaps even necessary.

“Ah, my dear Wilkie,” said the Inimitable as I entered. “It is so kind of you to attend the proceedings this night.” He appeared completely calm, but it was as if he had forgotten that I had spent the day travelling to Birmingham with him.

There was a bouquet of scarlet geraniums on his dressing table, and he now cut one for his buttonhole, adjusted it, and then cut another and set it in my lapel.

“Come,” he said as he adjusted his gold watch-chain and made a final check of buttons and beard and oiled curls in the mirror. “We shall peek out at the natives in the hope that they are becoming restless.”

We went out onto the stage itself, behind the shielding screen where Dolby was still hovering. Dickens showed me a small chink in the screen where—once a flap of fabric had been moved aside—we could look out at the now completely assembled and mildly fidgeting audience. He allowed me a glimpse. I felt anxious at that moment and wondered, for all my theatrical experience as an actor, if I should ever be able to carry out a reading without succumbing to nervousness, but Dickens himself showed no anxiety whatsoever. The gas man came up to him, Dickens nodded, leaned closer to the hole in the screen, and—as the gas man calmly walked out onto the stage to make the final adjustment to the lamps—the Inimitable whispered to me, “This is my favourite part of the evening, Wilkie.”

I leaned so close that I could smell the pomade on the author’s side curls as we both watched through the chink. Suddenly the lights went up dramatically and some two thousand faces were illuminated in reflected light as an “Aaahhhhh…” of expectation rose from the audience.

“You’d best take your seat, my friend,” whispered Dickens. “I wait another minute or so to whet their anticipation, then we shall begin.”

I had started to leave when he waved me back. Putting his mouth close to my ear, he whispered, “Keep your eye out for Drood. He might be anywhere.”

I could not tell if he was serious, so I nodded and moved away in the dark and then out, finding my way to the side stairs, then up against the flow of late arrivers to the rear of the hall, and then down towards the stage again to my reserved seat along the aisle about two-thirds of the way back. I had asked Wills to set aside this seat for me so that I might slip out to join Dickens in the dressing room more easily at the break about ninety minutes into the two-hour reading. The maroon carpet on the stage, simple table, and even the carafe of water—illuminated as they were by the bright lights—seemed pregnant with potential in that last minute before Dickens appeared.

Suddenly there erupted an explosion of applause as Dickens’s slim figure walked to his reading desk. The applause rose and continued at a deafening level, but Dickens ignored it completely, pouring some water for himself from the carafe and waiting silently for the ovation to abate much as one might wait for carriages to pass before crossing a street. Then, when silence finally descended, Dickens… did nothing. He merely stood there looking out at the audience, occasionally turning his head slightly so as to see everyone. It was as if he were meeting the gaze of every single man and woman there that night… and there now must have been more than two thousand of us crowded into the hall.

A few stragglers were finding their seats near the rear of the theatre and Dickens waited with that total and somehow unsettling calm until they did so. Then he seemed to fix them for a few seconds with his cool, serious, intense, yet mildly questioning gaze.

Then he began.

Several years after this night in Birmingham, Dolby was to say to me—“Watching the Chief read during those last years was not like attending a performance; it was more like being part of a spectacle. It was not at all a matter of being entertained; it was a case of being haunted.”

Haunted. Yes, perhaps. Or possessed, as the spirit rappers so in vogue in my day, Dear Reader, were supposedly possessed by their spirit guides to the Other Side. But it was not only Charles Dickens who seemed possessed during these readings; the entire audience joined him. As you will see, it was hard not to join him.

It saddens me, Dear Reader, that no one in your future generation will have heard or seen Charles Dickens read. There are experiments in my time as I write this with recording voices on various cylinders almost as photographers capture images of a person on film plates. But all this has come after Charles Dickens’s death. No one in your day will ever hear his thin, slightly lisping voice or—since to my knowledge none of his talks were ever captured on daguerreotype or other photographic devices (and since such forms of photography available in Dickens’s day were too slow to record any person in even the slightest motion anyway, and Dickens was always in motion)—see the strange change that came over the Inimitable and his audiences during these performances. His readings were unique in our day and—I would venture the opinion—will never be equalled or adequately imitated in yours (if authors still write books at all in this future you inhabit).

Even in the glare of those brilliant gaslights, a strange, iridescent cloud seemed to hover around Charles Dickens as he read from his most recent Christmas tale. That cloud, I believe, was the ectoplasmic manifestation of the many characters whom Dickens had created and whom he now summoned—one at a time—to speak and act before us.

As these ghosts entered him, Dickens’s posture would change. He would jerk alert or slump in despondency or laziness as the character’s spirit dictated. The author’s face would change immediately and totally—some facial muscles used so frequently by Charles Dickens going lax, others coming into play. Smiles, leers, frowns, and conspiratorial glances never used by the man who lived at Gad’s Hill flitted across the face of this spirit-possessed receptacle in front of us. His voice changed from second to second, and even in rapid-fire exchanges of dialogue Dickens seemed to be inhabited by two or more possessing demons at once.

In other readings, I had heard his tone shift instantly from the hoarse, rasping, lisping, urgent, whispered croak of Fagin—“Aha! I like that thellow’th lookth. He’d be of use to uth; he knows how to train the girl already. Don’t make ath much noise as a mouthe, my dear, and let me hear ’em talk—let me hear ’em”—to the sombre tenor of Mr Dombey to the silly, mincing tones of Miss Squeers, and then to a Cockney so perfect that no actor then on the English stage could rival his accent.

But it was more than voice and language that drew us all in that night. Everything about Dickens would change in the instant when he slipped from one character to the next (or in that instant when one character departed his body and another entered). When he became the Jew Fagin, Dickens’s eternally upright, almost martial posture would melt into the rounded, hunched-shouldered stoop of that evil man. The author’s brow seemed to rise and elongate, his eyebrows grew bushier, as his eyes receded into two dark wells and seemed to gleam of their own accord in the bright gaslight. Dickens’s hands, so composed and assured when he was reading descriptive passages, would quiver, clutch one another, rub themselves fitfully, twitch with money hunger, and try to hide themselves in sleeves when they belonged to Fagin. While reading, Dickens would pace several steps to this side of his customised desk, then several steps the other way, and though the motion was smooth and confident when it was Dickens standing there, it became lithe, shifty, and almost snakelike when he was possessed by the spirit of Fagin.

“These characters and changes are as real for me as they are for the audience,” Dickens had told me before this particular reading tour began. “So real are my fictions to myself that I do not recall them but see them done again before my very eyes, for it all happens before me. And the audience sees this reality.”

I certainly did that night. Whether it was because of the consumption of oxygen by the gas flames or because of the literally mesmeric quality of Dickens’s face and hands illuminated so starkly against the dark maroon background due to the unique lighting, I constantly felt the author’s eyes on me—even when those eyes belonged to one of his characters—and, with that audience, I entered into a kind of trance.

When he was Dickens again, reading narration and description rather than character-inhabited dialogue, I could hear the unfaltering certainty in his voice, sense the enjoyment revealed in the gleam of his eye, and perceive a real hint of aggression—masked as confidence to the majority of the crowd, I was sure—coming from his own knowledge that he could mesmerise so many for so long.

Then the Christmas tale and bit of Oliver Twist were finished, the longer, ninety-minute segment of the evening finished, the interval in the evening’s performance arrived at, and Dickens turned and left the platform, as seemingly oblivious of the crowd’s wild applause as he had been when first coming on stage.

I shook my head as if awakening from a dream and went backstage.

Dickens was sprawled on a couch and appeared to be too exhausted to rise or move. Dolby bustled in and out, supervising a waiter who was setting out a glass of iced champagne and a plate with a dozen oysters. Dickens stirred himself to sip the champagne and suck down the oysters.

“It’s the only thing the Chief can eat in the evening,” Dolby whispered to me.

Hearing the whisper, Dickens looked up and said, “My dear Wilkie… how splendid of you to pop in during the interval. Did you enjoy the first part of the evening’s fare?”

“I did,” I said. “It was… extraordinary… as always.”

“I believe I told you that we shall be replacing the ‘Doctor Marigold’ parts should I accept more such engagements in the autumn or winter,” said Dickens.

“But the audience loved it,” I said.

Dickens shrugged. “Not as much as they love Dombey or Scrooge or Nickleby, which I shall read in a few minutes.”

I was sure that the programme had listed the Trial from The Pickwick Papers as the thirty-minute reading scheduled for after the interval—Dickens always preferred to end the evenings with sentiment and laughter—but I was not about to correct him.

The ten minutes were almost up. Dickens rose with some effort, cast his heat-wilted scarlet geranium into the trash, and set a new one in his buttonhole.

“I shall see you after the reading,” I said and went back out to join the eager multitudes.

AS THE APPLAUSE DIED, Dickens took up his book and pretended to read aloud, “Nicholas Nickleby at Mr Squeers’s School… Chapter the First.” So it was to be Nickleby.

None of the exhaustion I had glimpsed backstage was evident now. Dickens seemed even more energetic and animated than he had been during the first ninety minutes. The power of his reading once again reached out like a magnetic current to fix and align the audience’s attention as if their eyes and minds were so many needles on a compass. Once again, the Inimitable’s gaze seemed to settle on each and every one of us.

Despite that powerful magnetic attraction, my mind began to wander. I began to think of other things—the publication of my novel Armadale in two volumes would be a fact within the week—and it occurred to me that I had to settle on a plot and theme for my next book. Perhaps something shorter and even more sensationalist, although with a simpler plot than the labyrinthine Armadale…

Suddenly I snapped back to attention.

Everything had changed in the huge hall. The light seemed thicker, slower, darker, almost gelatinous.

It was silent. Not the attention-silence of more than two thousand people that had existed an instant earlier—with coughs being stifled, laughter punctuating the silence, the stirrings of so many after more than two hours of listening—but now it was an absolute silence. It was as if twenty-one hundred people had suddenly died. There was not the slightest hint of breathing or movement. I realised that I could not hear or feel my own breathing, nor sense my own heartbeat. The Birmingham hall had turned into a giant crypt and was just that silent.

At the same moment, I realised that up through the darkness rose hundreds of slender, white, barely perceptible cords, their ends tied to the middle finger on the right hand of every member of the audience. The air was so dark that I could not make out the point at which these twenty-one hundred cords converged above us, but I knew that they must be connected to a massive bell up there. We were, all of us, in the Dead House. The cords—silken ropes, I realised—were tied to us in case one of us might still be alive. The bell, whose tone and toll, I knew instinctively, would be too terrible to hear, was there to alert—someone, something—if any one of us stirred.

Knowing that I and that I alone was still alive out of these twenty-one hundred dead, I tried not to stir, and focused all of my attention on not tugging at the cord tied to the middle finger of my right hand.

Looking up, I realised that it was no longer Charles Dickens whose face and hands and fingers glowed in the thick, slow light of the gas lamps in the darkness on the stage.

Drood looked out at us.

I recognised at once the pale white skin, the brittle tufts of hair over the ravaged ears, the lidless eyes, the nose that was little more than two nictitating membranes above a hole in the skull, the long, twitching fingers, and the pale, constantly turning pupils.

My hands shook. A hundred feet above the heads of all the corpses in the audience, the bell vibrated audibly.

Drood’s head snapped around. His pale eyes locked with mine.

I began shaking all over. The bell rumbled, then rang. No other corpse there breathed or stirred.

Drood came out from behind Dickens’s reading table and then out from the rectangle of turgid light. He leaped down from the stage and began gliding up the aisle. My arms and legs shook now as if agued, but I could move no other part of my body—not even my head.

I could smell Drood as he approached. He smelled like the Thames near Tiger Bay where Opium Sal’s opium den rotted away in the general effluvium when the tide was out and the sewage high.

There was something in Drood’s hand. By the time he was twenty paces from me up the steep aisle, I could see that it was a knife, but unlike any knife I had ever held or used or seen. The blade was a dark steel crescent on which hieroglyphs were visible. The handle was mostly hidden behind the Egyptian’s pale and bony knuckles; the thin handle of the razor-crescent disappeared between Drood’s fingers so the curved blade, at least eight inches across in its thinly gleaming arc of edge, extended from his fist like a lady’s fan.

Run! I ordered myself. Escape! Scream!

I could not move a muscle.

Drood paused above me, at the farthest limit of my peripheral vision, and when he opened his mouth, a miasma of Thames-mud stench enveloped me. I could see his pale pink tongue dancing behind those tiny teeth.

“You ssseee,” he hissed at me, his right arm and the blade pulling back for the decapitation’s swing, “how easssssy it issss?”

He swung the blade in a flat, vicious arc. The razor-sharp edge of the crescent-blade sliced through my beard and cut through my cravat, collar, skin, throat, trachea, gullet, and spinal cord as if they were made of butter.

The audience began applauding wildly. The gelatin-thick air had lightened to normal. The silken cords were gone.

Dickens turned to leave the stage without acknowledging the applause, but George Dolby was standing at the edge of the curtain. A moment later, with applause still echoing, Dickens stepped back into the glow of the gaslights.

“My dear friends,” he said after his raised hands had silenced the huge hall, “it appears as if there has been an error. Actually, it appears that I have made an error. Our programme had called for the Trial from Pickwick to be read after the interval, but I mistakenly carried Nickleby out to the podium and went on to read it. You were most gracious in your acceptance of that error and more than generous in your applause. The hour is late—I see by my watch that it is just ten, the precise time scheduled for the conclusion of our evening together—but the Trial was promised and if the majority of you would like, and you can show by your hands or applause if you would so like, to hear the Trial read, I shall happily add it to the unscheduled reading you have just enjoyed.”

The audience did like. They applauded and cheered and shouted encouragement. No one left.

“Call Sam Weller!” bellowed Dickens in his judicial voice, and the crowd roared louder in its applause and cheers. As each classic character appeared—Mrs Gamp, Miss Squeers, Boots—the audience roared even louder. I put my hand to my temple and found my brow cold and covered with perspiration. As Dickens read on, I staggered out.

I went alone to the hotel and drank another cup of laudanum while waiting for the Inimitable and his entourage to arrive. My heart was pounding wildly. I was ravenous and shaken and would have welcomed a large meal sent up to the privacy of my own room, but although Dickens would eat nothing more this evening, he invited Wills, Dolby, and me to dine in his suite as he unwound. There he paced back and forth and talked about the next few days of the tour and about the offer he had received for another tour beginning about Christmastime.

I ordered pheasant, fish, caviar, pâté, asparagus, eggs, and dry champagne, but just before the waiter came in bringing this and Wills’s tiny meal and Dolby’s beef and mutton, Dickens turned from the fireplace where he had been standing and said, “My dear Wilkie! What on earth is that on your collar?”

“What?” I confess that I blushed. I had hurriedly carried out my ablutions before drinking my laudanum and coming up to Dickens’s suite. “What?” My hands rose beneath my bearded chin and touched something thick and crusted above the silk of my cravat.

“Here now, move your hands,” said Wills. He held the lamp closer.

“Good God,” said Dolby.

“Good heavens, Wilkie,” said Dickens in a voice that sounded more amused than alarmed. “There is dried blood all over your collar and neck. You look like Nancy after Bill Sikes has done with her.”