Drood

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The early parts of my plan worked perfectly.

I spent my afternoon and early evening sitting in ever-more-slanting sunlight in the small park between Peckham Station and the rural thoroughfare. Carriages and pedestrians came and went. A single glance through the hedge from where I sat usually told me all I needed to know to certify the arrivals were not my quarry. The only sidewalk from the station driveway to the station platform ran directly past the trellised entrance to my little park, not thirty steps from my bench, and I found that I could keep pace along my side of the hedge and clearly hear the conversation between any pedestrians approaching the station along that walkway.

As I had hoped and planned, this hedge offered me both concealment and the ability to observe through thin gaps that were rather like vertical gun slits. In the parlance of our day, borrowed from English hunters of good Scottish goose on the wing or Bengal tiger in the jungle, Dear Reader, I was in a blind.

The pleasant afternoon passed into pleasant evening. I finished my lunch and my snack and two-thirds of the laudanum in my flask. I had also finished the proofing of the last instalment of The Moonstone and set the long galleys away in my valise with my apple core, cake crumbs, eggshell shards, and pistol. I should have been racked with anxiety as the hours slipped away, torn by the certainty that Dickens had used the New Cross Station or was not going to London at all that day.

But the longer I waited, the more calm I became. Not even the painful shifting of the scarab, which seemed to have burrowed down close to the base of my spine that day, disrupted the rising certainty that calmed my nerves more surely than any opiate. I had never been so sure of anything in my life than that Dickens would come this way this evening. Again, I thought of the experienced hunter of tigers on his raised and camouflaged shooting platform somewhere in India, his oiled, deadly weapon nested secure in the crook of his steady arm. He knew when his dangerous prey was approaching, even though he could not have told the non-white hunter how he knew.

And then, about eight PM, when the June evening shade was turning into cool twilight, I set down the Thackeray that was not holding my interest, peeked out through the hedge, and there he was.

SURPRISINGLY, DICKENS WAS not alone. He and Ellen Ternan were walking slowly on the park side of the dusty thoroughfare. She was dressed as if for an afternoon outing and, despite the fact that the lane was in full shadow from trees and homes on the west side, carried a parasol. Behind the two of them and on the opposite side of the street, a carriage was creeping along—now stopping, now moving forward slowly—and I realised that it must be one that Dickens had hired to carry Ellen back to Linden Grove from the station. The lovebirds had decided to walk to the station together so that she could see Dickens off.

But there was something wrong. I could sense it in the halting, almost pained way that Dickens was walking and by the strained distance between the two of them. I could tell it by the way that Ellen Ternan would now lower the useless parasol, close it, grip it tightly with both hands, and then open it again. These were not two lovebirds. They were two injured birds.

The carriage stopped a final time and waited along the opposite kerb thirty yards from the entrance drive to the railway station.

As Dickens and Ellen came alongside the high hedge, I was suddenly frightened into immobility. The dying evening light and hedge-shadow should have worked in my favour, making the sometimes sparse hedge seem solid and dark to anyone walking beyond it, but for an instant I was certain that I was clearly visible to the two. In a few seconds Dickens and his mistress would see a familiar small man with a high forehead, tiny glasses, and a voluminous beard huddled on a bench less than two feet from the walkway they would be passing. My heart pounded so wildly that I was sure that they would be able to hear it. My hands were half-raised towards my face—as if I had been about to try to hide behind them—and set into the position in which they had frozen. I would appear to Dickens like a soft, pale, wide-eyed, and bearded rabbit caught in the beam of a hunter’s lantern.

They did not look in my direction as they passed the hedge. Their voices were low, but I could hear them easily enough. The train had not arrived, the suburban thoroughfare was empty of traffic save for the parked carriage, and the only other sound was the soft coo of doves under the station’s eaves.

“… we can put our sad history behind us,” Dickens was saying.

The italics were obvious from his tone. So was an undertone of pleading that I had never… never… heard from Charles Dickens.

“Our sad history is buried in France, Charles,” Ellen said very softly. Her broad sleeves brushed the hedge as they moved past me. “But it shall never be behind us.”

Dickens sighed. It came out almost as a moan. The two stopped ten paces before the sidewalk reached the turn towards the station. They were not six paces past my blind. I did not stir.

“What is to be done, then?” he said. The words were so loaded with misery that they might have been extracted from a man being tortured.

“Only what we have discussed. It is the only honourable course remaining to us.”

“But I cannot!” exploded Dickens. It sounded as if he was weeping. I could have leaned my face six inches closer to the hedge and seen him, but that was impossible. “I have not the will!” he added.

“Then have the courage,” said Ellen Ternan.

There came a rustling, the small sound of her small shoes slightly scuffing pavement, the heavier sound of his. I pictured Dickens leaning towards her, she taking an involuntary step back, and Dickens resuming his strained distance from her.

“Yes,” he said at last. “Courage. I can summon courage where will fails me. And summon will when courage flags. That has been my life.”

“You are my dear good boy,” she said softly. I imagined her touching his cheek with her gloved hand.

“Let us both be courageous,” she went on, her voice lilting with a forced lightness that ill-befitted a mature woman in her late twenties. “Let us change to brother and sister from this day forth.”

“Never to be… together… as we have?” said Dickens. His voice was the calm monotone of a man ordered to the guillotine repeating the judge’s sentence.

“Never,” said Ellen Ternan.

“Never to be man and wife?” said Dickens.

“Never!”

There was a silence then that stretched for such a length that I was again tempted to lean forward and peek through the hedge to see if Dickens and Ellen had somehow dematerialised. Then I heard the Inimitable sigh again. His voice was louder, stronger, but infinitely hollow when he spoke.

“So it shall be. Adieu, my love.”

“Adieu, Charles.”

I was sure they did not touch or kiss, although how I was sure, I could not tell you, Dear Reader. I sat motionless as I listened to Dickens’s footsteps pass around the curve in the hedge. They paused once at that curve—I was certain he was looking back at her—and then resumed.

I did lean forward then and set my face to the branches of the hedge to watch Ellen Ternan cross the street. The carriage driver saw her and drove forward. Her parasol was folded once again and both her hands were lifted to her face. She did not look towards the station as she got into the carriage—the bewhiskered old driver helping her as she climbed up and took her seat and then softly closing the door behind her—and she did not look towards the station as the old man retook his seat and as the carriage made a slow, broad turn on the empty boulevard and headed back towards Peckham proper.

It was then that I turned my head to the left and looked through the open trellis.

Dickens had passed right in front of the opening, gone up the four steps to the platform level, and now he paused.

I knew what would happen next. He would turn to look out over the park and over the hedge to catch one final glimpse of Ellen Ternan’s open carriage disappearing up the street. He had to turn. The imperative was written in the tense bunching of his shoulders under his summer linen suit and in the pain of his lowered head and in the half-step pause of his body itself on the platform.

And when he turned—in two seconds, perhaps less—he would see his former collaborator and presumed friend, Wilkie Collins, hunched over from staring through the hedge like the cowardly voyeur he was, his bloodless, guilty face staring back blindly at Dickens, his eyes mere blank ovals where the spectacles would be reflecting the paling sky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dickens continued staring at me.

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

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

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

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

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

“Of…” prompted Dickens.

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

Dickens laughed then. It was a terrible sound.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It is much improved,” grunted Dickens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hmmm,” said Dickens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dickens had the effrontery to laugh in my face.

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

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

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

“Your Mrs Jellyby from Bleak House…” I began.

Dickens held up one hand. “Spare us comparisons with Mrs Jellyby. They simply won’t do, dear boy. They simply won’t do.”

I looked at my food.

“And your character of Ezra Jennings, who springs from nowhere to solve all outstanding questions in the final chapters,” continued Dickens, his voice as flat and steady and relentless as one of the tunnel-boring machines working along Fleet Street.

“What about Ezra Jennings? Readers believe him to be a most fascinating character.”

“Fascinating…” said Dickens with that terrible smile. “And familiar.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think I would not remember him?”

“I have no idea what you are talking about, Charles.”

“I am talking about the physician’s assistant we encountered during our northern walking tour in September 1857—dear me, almost eleven years ago—when we climbed Carrick Fell and you slipped and sprained your ankle and I had to carry you down the mountain and then take you by cart to the nearest village, where that physician bandaged your ankle and leg. His assistant had precisely that incredible piebald hair and skin which graces your monster called ‘Ezra Jennings.’ ”

“Do we not compose from real life?” I asked. My voice sounded plaintive in my own ears, and I hated that.

Dickens shook his head. “From real life, yes. But it cannot have escaped your attention that I had already created your Ezra Jennings in the form of Mr Lorn, the albino and piebald assistant to Dr Speddie in our collaborative Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices in the Christmas Issue that same year.”

“I fail to see the similarities,” I said stiffly.

“Do you really? How odd. The tale of Mr Lorn—the dead man in the bed who came back to life in the young Dr Speddie’s shared room in the overcrowded inn—took up the bulk of that rather forgettable short novel. The same tragic past. The same haunted expression and manner of speaking. The same albino complexion and piebald hair. I clearly remember writing those scenes.”

“Ezra Jennings and Mr Lorn are two quite different characters,” I said.

Dickens nodded. “They are certainly different in texture. Mr Lorn had a tragic past and character. Your Ezra Jennings, of all the diseased and unnatural characters you have created in your quest for the sensational, is the most repellent and disturbing.”

“Disturbing in what way, may I ask?”

“You may ask and I will tell you, my dear Wilkie. Ezra Jennings, besides being the worst sort of opium addict—a trait shared by so many of your characters, my dear boy—shows every sign of inversion.”

“Inversion?” I had lifted a forkful of something minutes earlier, but it had yet to reach my mouth.

“Not to mince words,” Dickens said softly, “it is obvious to everyone reading The Moonstone that Ezra Jennings is a sodomite.”

My fork stayed raised; my mouth remained open. “Nonsense!” I said at last. “I meant no such implication!”

Or had I? I realised that—as with the Miss Clack chapters—the Other Wilkie had written most of the Ezra Jennings numbers when I was attempting to dictate while in the deepest throes of my morphine and laudanum.

“And your so-called Quivering Sands…” began Dickens.

“Shivering Sands,” I corrected.

“As you wish. They do not exist, you must know.”

Here I had him. Here I had him! “They do indeed,” I said, voice rising. “As any yachtsman such as myself would know. There’s a shoal just like the Shivering Sands on the Thames Estuary, nine miles north of Herne Bay.”

“Your Quivering Sands do not exist along the coast of Yorkshire,” said Dickens. He was, I realised, calmly cutting and eating his meat. “Everyone who has ever visited Yorkshire knows that. Anyone who has ever read about Yorkshire knows that.”

I opened my mouth to speak—to speak bitingly—and could think of nothing to say. It was at this point that I remembered the loaded revolver in my valise sitting next to me on the banquette.

“And many believe, as I do, as Wills does, that the scene with your Quivering Sands shivering is also indecent,” said Dickens.

“For God’s sake, Dickens, how could a shoal, a strand, a beach stretch, of quicksand be considered indecent by any sane person?”

“Perhaps,” said Dickens, “through the author’s choice of language and insinuation. And I quote from memory—and from your poor, doomed Miss Spearman’s observation—‘The brown face of it heaved slowly, and then dimpled and quivered all over.’ The brown face, my dear Wilkie, the brown skin, dimpling and quivering all over and then, and I believe I quote, sucking one down—which is precisely what it does to poor Miss Spearman. An overt and clumsy description of what some might imagine a woman’s physical climax in the act of love to be like, no?”

Again, I could only stare with mouth agape.

“But it is the ending, your much-anticipated resolution to this much-admired mystery, that I find to be the apex and pinnacle of contrivance, my dear boy,” went on Dickens.

I realised that he might never stop talking. I imagined the dozens of diners in the other alcoves and in the larger room of Vérey’s all pausing in their meals, all listening, shocked but attentive.

“Do you really believe,” bored on Dickens, “or expect us, the readers, to believe that a man, motivated by a few drops of opium in a small glass of wine, would walk in his sleep, enter his fiancée’s sleeping room—a scene that was all but indecent for that impropriety alone—and go through her safe box and belongings, and then steal and secrete a diamond elsewhere, all with no memory of the event afterwards?”

“I am sure of it,” I said coldly, stiffly.

“Oh? How can you be sure of such a ridiculous thing, dear boy?”

“Every reference to behaviour under the ministrations of laudanum, pure opium, or other drugs in The Moonstone was carefully researched and experienced by me before I put pen to paper,” I said.

Dickens laughed then. It was a long, full, easy, and cruel laugh and it went on far too long.

I stood, threw down my linen napkin, lifted my valise, and opened it. The huge pistol was quite visible there beneath my curled galley sheets and the remnants of my lunch.

I closed the valise and stalked out, almost forgetting my hat and stick in my rush. I could hear Henry bustling into the alcove at the rear to enquire of “Mr Dickens” as to whether there was anything wanting with the food or service.

Three blocks from Vérey’s I stopped, still breathing hard, still clutching my walking stick as if it were a hammer, not noticing the traffic or the busy streets on this lovely June evening or even the ladies of the night who were watching me from the shadows of an alley across the way.

“God d—— n it!” I cried loudly, startling two ladies walking with an older, stooped gentleman. “God d— n it!”

I turned and ran back to the restaurant.

This time all conversation did stop as I ran through the main room and threw back the curtains to the alcove.

Dickens was gone, of course. And my last chance on the third anniversary of Staplehurst to follow him to Drood’s lair was gone with him.