Drood

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The summer of 1866 was tiring.

My novel Armadale was released on schedule in June and the reviews were much as I expected from the usual hide-bound and tiresome critics. In the Athenaeum, their ancient music-critic and reviewer H. F. Chorley opined—“It is not pleasant to speak as we must of this powerful story; but in the interest of everything that is to be cherished in life, in poetry, in art, it is impossible to be over-explicit in the expression of judgement.”

His judgement was that the book was immoral.

The reviewer of The Spectator came to the same conclusion in terms that bypassed the mere strident in favour of the near-hysterical:

The fact that there are such characters as he has drawn, and actions such as he has described, does not warrant his over-stepping the limits of decency, and revolting every human sentiment. This is what Armadale does. It gives us for its heroine a woman fouler than the refuse of the streets, who has lived to the ripe age of 35, and through the horrors of forgery, murder, theft, bigamy, gaol and attempted suicide, without any trace being left on her beauty.… This is frankly told in a diary which, but for its unreality, would be simply loathesome, and which needs all the veneer of Mr Wilkie Collins’s easy style and allusive sparkle to disguise its actual meaning.

This kind of critical attack meant nothing to me. I knew that the book would sell well. And perhaps I have told you, Dear Reader, that the publisher had paid me five thousand pounds—a record at the time and for many years after that—and paid it before a single word of the story had been written. I had serialised it in America in their magazine called Harper’s Monthly and not only had Armadale been wildly popular there, but the editor had written me that my tale had single-handedly saved their magazine from extinction. Its serialisation in England through The Cornhill Magazine had also been wildly popular, certainly causing some of the jealousy we had heard from Dickens the previous Christmas. I was certain that I could adapt Armadale to the stage and that this might well be a greater source of income than the book itself.

It is true that the great sum paid in advance by George Smith at Smith, Elder & Company had all but bankrupted the publisher despite the brisk sales of the two volumes, but that was little concern of mine. It did frustrate me somewhat, however, in the sense that for my next novel—whatever its contents—I would almost certainly have to return to Dickens’s magazine, All the Year Round, just as the author-editor had predicted during our Christmas dinner. The frustration was not merely because the monies in advance of publication would be less—Dickens, John Forster, and Wills were miserly when it came to paying writers other than Dickens—but rather the fact that Dickens would again be my editor.

Yet I remained serenely confident that the hostile reviews of the day meant nothing. Critics and bourgeois reviewers simply were not ready for the heroine of Armadale, my femme fatale Lydia Gwilt. Not only did Lydia dominate the book in a way that no female literary protagonist in my era had done, but she stood out from the pages in a way that no woman in all of Dickens’s fiction ever had or ever would. The full, three-dimensional portrait of this woman, as scheming and vicious as Lydia Gwilt may have seemed to the careless reader or clueless reviewer, was a tour de force.

And yes, speaking of occasionally vicious women, Caroline G— chose this hot summer to upbraid me on a wide front of issues.

“Why will you not consider marriage, Wilkie? You present me as a wife—almost—to your friends who visit here. I am your hostess and proofreader and housekeeper and lover. Everyone who knows you knows that we live as man and wife. It is past time that we make that perception reality.”

I said, “If you know anything about me at all, my dear Caroline, you must know that I do not care a fig for perceptions or other people’s opinions.”

“But I do,” cried the woman with whom I’d spent the past ten years. “And Harriet is now fifteen. She needs a father.”

“She had a father,” I replied placidly. “He died.”

“When she was one year old!” cried Caroline. She appeared to be teetering on that thin ledge between anger and tears, reason and hysteria, upon which women so frequently find themselves. Or deliberately find themselves. “She is becoming a young woman. She will enter into society soon. She needs your name.”

“Nonsense,” I chuckled. “She has a perfectly good name and a perfectly good home. She shall always have my support and our love. What more could any intelligent young woman wish to have?”

“You promised that we would buy or lease the nicer home on Gloucester Place by this year or next,” whined Caroline. I hate and despise it when women whine. All men, Dear Reader, hate and despise it when women whine. It has always been thus. The only difference in men’s reactions to whining is that a very few, like me, refuse to give in to this auditory and emotional blackmail.

I looked over the top of my glasses at her. “I said that we should have the place sooner or later, my pet. And so we shall.”

“How?” demanded Caroline. “I spoke to Mrs Shernwold while you were having fun with Dickens in Birmingham. She says that she would consider leasing or selling ninety Gloucester to us except for the fact that her unmarried son is returning from Africa in a year or so and she has promised it to him.”

“Trust me on this, Caroline my dear,” I said. “I have promised you this home someday and you and Harriet shall have it. Have I ever failed you, my sausage?”

She glared at me. Caroline G— was a handsome woman—some would say beautiful—despite her advancing years (although she would never tell me her age, Inspector Field had told me that in all likelihood Caroline had been born thirty-six years earlier, in 1830)—but she was neither handsome nor beautiful when she glared. Despite the tons of romantic literary twaddle to the contrary, trust me, Dear Reader, when I assure you that no woman can be attractive when she whines and glares.

“You fail me by not marrying me and giving Harriet a proper father,” she all but shrieked at me. “Do not think that I am not capable of finding and marrying another man, Wilkie Collins. Do not think that for a second!”

“I do not think that for a second, my sausage,” I said and turned back to the newspaper.

CHARLES DICKENS, DESPITE his continuing illnesses and growing anxieties when travelling by rail, seemed to be having a relaxed summer. I overheard Wills telling Forster at the offices of All the Year Round that the total receipts for Dickens’s spring tour had earned the writer £4,672. The Chappells—whom Dickens had once described to me as “speculators, Wilkie, pure speculators, though, of course, of the worthiest and most honourable kind”—were so delighted with their share of the profits that no sooner had Dickens completed his last London reading on 12 June and returned to Gad’s Hill “… to rest and hear the birds sing,” than they proposed to Dickens another tour for the next winter, consisting of fifty nights on the road. Wills told Forster that Dickens had considered asking for £70 a night—he was sure that the ticket sales would support that—but instead offered the Chappells forty-two readings for £2,500. They accepted at once.

The days at Gad’s Hill through June and July were busy with guests, local fairs at which Dickens judged everything from pie contests to cricket matches, and—of course—more business. The Inimitable was not working on a novel at the moment, but he had begun work on a projected new edition of his works, the so-called Charles Dickens Edition, that would have each of his novels, freshly set, appearing once a month for 3/6. Naturally he could not leave such well-enough alone, so he offered in his prospectus to write a new preface for each volume.

As it turned out, this would be not only the most popular of all the many editions of Dickens’s work, but would be—for him—his last edition.

I saw Dickens frequently that summer, both at Gad’s Hill (where he never seemed to be entertaining fewer than half a dozen guests) and in London (he came up to his offices at All the Year Round at least twice a week, and we would often meet for lunch or dinner). Besides already planning his next Christmas story for our magazine, rehearsing new material for his winter tour, and writing the prefaces for his new editions, Dickens told me that he had some ideas for a new novel that he hoped to serialise in the spring of 1867. He asked me what I was working on.

“I have a few ideas,” I said. “A thread or two and a few beads to string on them.”

“Anything that we might serialise?”

“Quite possibly. I’ve been thinking of a tale involving a detective.”

“One from Scotland Yard Detectives Bureau?”

“Or one working for a private detection bureau.”

“Ah,” said Dickens and smiled. “Something along the lines of the further adventures of Inspector Bucket.”

I shook my head. “I was thinking that the name Cuff might work,” I said. “Sergeant Cuff.”

Dickens’s smile widened. “Sergeant Cuff. Very good, my dear Wilkie. Very good indeed.”

I TOLD THE boy waiting on my corner to tell the inspector that we should meet. The time and place had long since been prearranged, and the next day at two PM, I saw his short, squat figure hurrying towards me at Waterloo Bridge.

“Mr Collins.”

“Inspector.” I nodded towards the shadows under the bridge. “ ‘Unfurnished lodging for a fortnight.’ ”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Sam Weller to Pickwick.”

“Ah, yes, sir. Of course. Mr Dickens has always been an admirer of this bridge. I helped him with his piece ‘Down with the Tide’ by introducing him to the night toll-taker here some years ago. The literary gentleman was quite interested in the suicides and bodies floating in on the tides, I was told.”

“Thirteen,” I said.

“Pardon me, sir?”

“Thirteen years ago,” I said. “Dickens published ‘Down with the Tide’ in Household Words in February of 1853. I edited it.”

“Ah, of course,” said Inspector Field. He brushed his chin with his thumb. “Is there a reason you suggested we meet, Mr Collins? News of any kind?”

“Rather an absence of news,” I said. “You never responded to my written report or query.”

“I apologise,” said the inspector, but there was no real tone of apology in his husky voice. “It has been very busy, Mr Collins. Very busy indeed. I very much appreciated your report on Mr Dickens’s reading in Birmingham, even though our friend Drood did not appear. Was there a specific query I could answer?”

“You could tell me if any of those three men died,” I said.

“Three men?” The inspector’s flushed, chapped, and heavily veined visage was the picture of innocent ignorance.

“The three men in the alley, Inspector. The three men who assaulted me and whom your Detective Reginald Call-Me-Reggie Barris clubbed down. Barris said that one or more of them might be dead from the blow. I went back to that alley the next morning before leaving Birmingham, but there was no sign of them.”

Inspector Field was smiling and nodding now, his forefinger along the side of his nose. “Yes, yes, of course. Barris did report to me about the incident in the alley. I’m sure that all of those ruffians suffered no more than a headache and an insult to their thieves’ pride, Mr Collins. You have to forgive Barris. He has a penchant for melodrama. Sometimes I believe he would have preferred a career on the stage to the life of private investigative enquiries.”

“Why did you have him follow me, Inspector? I thought that the idea was to observe Charles Dickens in the hope that Drood might contact him… not follow me around.”

Field’s bushy eyebrows lifted towards what remained of his hairline. “Surely Detective Barris must have explained that to you, sir. We have concerns that this Drood might make an attempt on your life.”

“Barris said that the three men in the alley were most likely simple thieves,” I said.

“Aye,” agreed Inspector Field, nodding again. “Them being white men and all, that is almost certainly the case. But you must admit that it was fortuitous that Barris was there. You might have been severely injured, Mr Collins, and you certainly would have been robbed.”

We had walked across the Waterloo Bridge twice by now and this time continued walking north towards the Strand. Somewhere to the west along the river here was the Warren’s Blacking Factory, where Katey Dickens had once told me her father had been sent to labour as a child. He had mentioned it to her in an almost joking manner, but Katey confided in me that she felt it may have been the most upsetting and formative event of his life.

“I know where your Drood is, Inspector,” I said as we turned right on the Strand towards Somerset House and Drury Lane.

Field stopped. “You do, sir?”

“I do, sir.” I let the silence between us fill the air under the rumble and roar of passing traffic. “Dickens is Drood,” I said at last.

“I beg your pardon?” said the inspector.

“Dickens is Drood,” I said again. “There is no Drood.”

“That seems highly unlikely, Mr Collins.”

I smiled almost patronisingly. “I’ve said before that Drood appears to be a figment of the writer’s imagination, Inspector. Now I know that the phantom is no more than that. Dickens has created Drood to suit his own purposes.”

“And what might those purposes be, sir?”

“Power,” I said. “A mischievous sense of power over others. For many years, as I’ve told you, Dickens has played with magnetic influence and mesmerism. Now he invents this Master of Mesmerism as his alter ego, as it were.”

We had resumed walking east and now Inspector Field tapped the pavement with his heavy stick. “He could hardly have invented Drood, Mr Collins, seeing as I have been pursuing the blackguard for twenty years come this August.”

“Have you ever seen him, Inspector?” I said. “Drood, I mean.”

“Seen him?” repeated the older man. “Why no, sir. I believe I’ve told you that I have never personally laid eyes on the murderer. But I have apprehended some of his agents and I have certainly seen the results of his work. More than three hundred murders in those twenty years, not the least terrible of which was the grisly death of Lord Lucan in 1846. You yourself told me the story that Dickens reported Drood telling him—and the identity of Lord Lucan, who was long rumoured to have had a son in Egypt, fits perfectly.”

“Too perfectly,” I said smugly.

“Pardon me, sir?”

“You may be a detective, Inspector Field,” I said, “but you have never plotted and written a story with detective work in it. I have.”

Inspector Field continued striding and tapping, but he looked my way and listened.

“Certainly there has been a legend of a murderous Egyptian named Drood for these two decades or so,” I explained. “The shadowy dockside murderer. The phantom Oriental mesmeriser, sending his agents out to rob and kill. The unreal occupant of the very real Undertown. But he is only a legend, with no more real history to him than there is actual physicality. Charles Dickens has walked these riverside and dockside slums for years and years. He certainly has heard of this Drood—perhaps before you did twenty years ago, Inspector—and for his own purposes, he has incorporated actual events such as the murder of Lord Lucan (with its delicious element of the man’s heart being ripped from his chest) into his biography of the unreal personage.”

“What would those purposes be, Mr Collins?” asked Inspector Field. We had just passed Somerset House. Once a royal residence, the newer structure had housed government offices for the past thirty years. I knew that Dickens’s father and uncle had been employed there.

We crossed the Strand and took a narrow lane as a shortcut in the direction of Drury Lane, where the fictional David Copperfield had ordered beef in a restaurant and where a very real Wilkie Collins hoped to have a successful staging of Armadale before too much more time passed.

“To what purpose, sir?” repeated the inspector when we were alone in the lane. “To what purpose would Mr Dickens lie to you about the existence of Drood?”

I smiled and swung my own walking stick. “Let me tell you a little story from Dickens’s reading tour, Inspector. I heard it last week from George Dolby.”

“As you wish, sir.”

“The travel part of the tour ended in Portsmouth at the end of May,” I said. “Dickens had a little time that was his own so he led Wills and Dolby on one of his walking expeditions and they found themselves in Landport Terrace. ‘By Jove!’ exclaimed Dickens. ‘Here is the place where I was born! One of these houses must be the one.’ And so he led Wills and Dolby from house to house, explaining that one must be it because it ‘looked so like my father.’ Then, no, another must be the correct one ‘because it looked like the birthplace of a man who had deserted it.’ But no again, a third must be it because it was ‘most definitely like the cradle of a puny, weak youngster…’ and so on through the row of homes.

“Then, Inspector, in an open square in the town, all lined with redbrick houses dotted by white window frames, Dickens decided to imitate the clowning of Grimaldi.”

“Grimaldi?” said Inspector Field.

“A pantomimist whom Dickens adored,” I said. “So, with Wills and Dolby watching, the famous writer Charles Dickens mounted the steps to one of these houses, gave three raps to the brass-plated green door, and lay down on the top step. A moment later when a stout woman opened the door, Dickens leapt up and took off running, with Dolby and Wills beating a hasty retreat behind him. Dickens would point behind them at an imaginary policeman pursuing and all three distinguished gentlemen would pick up their pace. When the wind blew off Dickens’s hat and scuttled it ahead of them, the pursuit became real enough as all three chased the hat in comic pantomime.”

Inspector Field stoppped. I stopped. After a moment, he said, “Your point, Mr Collins?”

“My point, Inspector, is that Charles Dickens, although chronologically fifty-four years of age, is a child. A mischievous child. He manufactures and plays the games he enjoys and—through his fame and force of personality—bullies those around him to play the game as well. We are now involved, you and I, in Charles Dickens’s Game of Drood.”

Field stood there, scratching the side of his nose while seemingly lost in thought. He suddenly looked very old to me. And not at all well. Finally he said, “Where were you on nine June, Mr Collins?”

I blinked at this. Then I smiled and said, “Didn’t your agents inform you, Inspector?”

“Yes, sir. In truth, they did. You went to your publisher’s offices in the late morning. Your new book was released that day. Then you went to several bookshops from Pall Mall along the Strand to Fleet Street, where you signed several copies of the volumes for certain friends and admirers. That evening you dined… there…”

Field was pointing his cane at the Albion, opposite Drury Lane Theatre.

“… with several artists, including one older gentleman who was a friend of your father’s,” continued the inspector. “You returned home a little after midnight.”

He had managed to wipe the smile off my face and it irked me that he had. “The point of this intrusive and unwarranted recitation, Inspector?” I asked coldly.

“The point is that both you and I know where you were on the ninth of June, Mr Collins. But neither of us knows where Mr Dickens was on that important anniversary.”

“Important anniversary?” I said and then remembered. It was the first anniversary of Dickens’s near thing in the railway accident at Staplehurst. How could I have forgotten?

“Mr Dickens was at Gad’s Hill Place that day,” said Inspector Field without looking at any notes, “but took the four thirty-six PM express to London. Once here he began one of his long walks, this one in the general vicinity of Bluegate Fields.”

“Opium Sal’s,” I ventured. “The entrance to Undertown through the crypt in the cemetery he called Saint Ghastly Grim’s.”

“Not this time, sir,” said Inspector Field. “I had seven of my best agents following Mr Dickens. We felt that the odds were great that the author would contact Drood on this first anniversary of their meeting. But your friend gave my men and myself—I was involved in the tailing that night—quite a merry chase. Just when we were sure that Dickens had gone to ground, he would pop out of some ruin or slum, hail a cab, and be off. Eventually he left Bluegate Fields and the dock areas there and came quite close to where we stand at this moment.… To Saint Enon Chapel north of the Strand near the eastern entrance to Clement’s Inn, to be precise.”

“Saint Enon Chapel,” I repeated. The name rang a faint bell. Then I remembered. “The Modern Golgotha!”

“Exactly, sir. A charnel house. The vaults under Saint Enon had so filled with unclaimed corpses that in 1844, after I had begun work in the Police Bureau but before I became Chief of Detectives, the commissioner of sewers sealed it off while creating a drainage tunnel beneath the building. Still the bodies festered there for years, until the premises were purchased by a surgeon in 1847 with the purpose of removing the remains to—I believe he called it—‘a more appropriate place.’ The exhumation continued there for almost a year, Mr Collins, with two giant heaps accumulating in the alleys above those vaults—one heap a pile of human bones, the other a mountain of decaying coffin wood.”

“I went to view that as a young man,” I said, turning slightly to look off in the direction of St Enon. I remembered the stench then on that cool February day I had viewed the awful spectacle. I could not imagine what the smell would be like on a hot and humid summer day such as this one.

“You and some six thousand other Londoners came to stare,” said Inspector Field.

“What does Saint Enon Chapel have to do with Dickens and June nine?”

“He managed to vanish from our view near there, Mr Collins,” said Field, tapping angrily at the cobblestones with his heavy brass-headed stick. “Seven of my best agents and myself, perhaps the finest detective London has ever known, in pursuit, and your writer gave us the slip.”

I had to smile again. “He is enjoying this, Inspector. As I said, Dickens is a child at heart. He loves mysteries and ghost stories. And upon occasion he has a cruel sense of humour.”

“Indeed, sir. But more to the point, somehow your friend knew about a secret entrance to that very drainage tunnel dug in 1844 when all the thousands of leaking and rotting corpses were still there. We found the tunnel eventually—it opens into scores of leaking, stinking holes where hundreds of squatters are living beneath the streets of London—and that in turn opens to another labyrinth of tunnels, sewers, and caverns.”

“But you couldn’t find Dickens?”

“We did, sir. We saw his lantern in the maze ahead of us. But at that point, we came under attack—hand-thrown and slingshotted stones, many as big as your fist, sir.”

“The Wild Boys,” I said.

“Precisely, sir. Detective Hatchery actually had to fire his weapon before the attackers—mere shadows, emerging from side tunnels and flinging at us, then retreating into deeper shadows—fled and we could continue our pursuit of your friend. But by then it was too late. He gave us the slip in the flooded labyrinth.”

“It sounds to be very frustrating, Inspector,” I said. “And exciting. But what, exactly, is your point?”

“My point, Mr Collins, is that it seems rather doubtful that Charles Dickens—the Charles Dickens—should go to such absurd lengths to lose us while traipsing through the Undertown of London all night… unless there is a man named Drood waiting for him.”

I was able to laugh. I was unable not to laugh. “I would suggest just the contrary, Inspector. It is the fun of the pursuit and the fiction of the mystery he has created that brings Dickens to waste so much time leading you on this wild goose chase through the tunnels under London. Had he not been aware that your men would be following him, I assure you that he would not have come to London that night. There is no Drood.”

Inspector Field shrugged. “Have it as you wish, sir, but we appreciate your continued cooperation in helping us track down the murderer and mastermind whom you do not believe exists. Those of us in police work who have come up against Drood and his agents know him to be a real and frightening force.”

There was nothing to be said to that.

“Was your query about the brigands in Birmingham the only reason you asked for this meeting, Mr Collins?”

“No, actually,” I said, shuffling unconsciously in my embarrassment. “I wished to take you up on an offer you made to me.”

“Ninety Gloucester Square and Mrs Shernwold?” said Field. “I am working on that, sir. I remain confident that you and your… Mrs G—… shall have the place by this time next year.”

“No,” I said. “The other offer. When you said that I might borrow the good services of Detective Hatchery should I wish to go back to Saint Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery, move the slab in the crypt, and find my own way down to King Lazaree and his opium den in the catacombs there. The rheumatical gout has been all but intolerable in recent weeks… the laudanum helps almost not at all anymore.”

“Detective Hatchery will be at your service whenever you wish,” the inspector replied crisply with no discernible tone of censure or victory in his voice. “When would you like him to report for duty, Mr Collins?”

“Tonight,” I said. I could feel my pulse accelerate. “Tonight at midnight.”