Drood

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

On 29 October of that year, 1868, I dressed in my finest formal clothes and took a hired carriage to St Marylebone Parish Church to see Caroline G— be married to Joseph Charles Clow.

The bride looked every bit of her thirty-eight years, and more. The groom looked even younger than his twenty-seven years. Someone just dropping into the church and spying the wedding ceremony without knowing the Happy Couple might have been forgiven for thinking that Caroline was the mother of the bride or groom.

The mother of the groom was there—a fat, stupid little gnome of a woman in an absurd maroon dress ten seasons out of style. She wept through the entire ceremony and brief reception after and had to be helped to her carriage after the Happy Couple had ridden off, not to an elaborate honeymoon but back to the tiny home they would later share again with his mother.

There were few other guests on either side. Not surprisingly, Mrs G—, Caroline’s mother-in-law, did not attend (although the old woman had been pining for her daughter-in-law to marry again). Another reason that Caroline’s former mother-in-law chose not to attend (if the old woman was sufficiently aware of events in her current state of addlement to be able to choose) became clear when I glanced at the marriage book: Caroline had invented a false name for her father—a certain “John Courtenay, gentleman.” This was part of an entire reinvention of herself, her family, and her past, even her first marriage, which I had agreed to support in any particulars (as her “previous employer of record”) if ever pressed to do so.

The temptation to reinvent oneself seemed contagious. I noticed that young Carrie, signing as a witness, had signed herself as “Elisabeth Harriette G—” on the marriage certificate, which was a reinvention of the spelling of her names. But perhaps the largest lie on the marriage certificate belonged to the groom, who signed his occupation simply as “gentleman.”

Well, if a plumber with permanent ground-in filth behind his ears and eternal grime under his fingernails was now an English gentleman, England had reached that wonderful socialist state that so many medical reformers had agitated so diligently to bring about.

I have to admit that the only person to look happy at this wedding was Carrie, who, either through the obliviousness of youth or sheer dedication to her mother, not only looked beautiful but acted as if she and we were all attending a joyous occasion. But when I say “we,” I mean just the tiny handful of people. There were two people on Joseph Clow’s side of the aisle: the weeping, crepe-draped mother and an unintroduced, unshaven man who might have been Clow’s brother or perhaps merely another plumber who had come hoping that there would be food after the service.

On Caroline’s side, there was only Carrie and Frank Beard, and me. Our group was so small that Beard had to be the second person to sign alongside Carrie as one of the two required witnesses. (Beard suggested that I sign, but my taste for the ironic absurd was not quite that well developed.)

Joseph Clow looked paralysed with fear and tension throughout the ceremony. Caroline’s smile was so broad and her face so flushed that I felt certain she would burst into tears and hysterics any second. Even the rector seemed to sense something odd about the proceedings and glanced up frequently from his missal, peering myopically out at the tiny gathering as if waiting for some word that it had all been a joke.

Throughout the ceremony I felt an odd numbness spreading through my body and brain. It may have been the extra dose of laudanum I had ingested to help me through the day, but I believe it was more a sense of true detachment. As the bride and groom repeated their final vows, I admit to looking at Caroline, standing so tensely upright in her ill-fitted and rather cheap-looking bridal gown, and remembering the precise touch and texture of every soft— now too soft—curve and bulge under that fabric. I felt no emotion throughout the proceedings except for a strange, spreading emptiness that had first come over me the past weeks when I arrived at Number 90 Gloucester Place to find no Caroline, no Carrie, and even my three servants often missing (with permission) because of an illness in Besse’s family. It was a large house to be so empty of human voices and sounds.

When the wedding was over, there was no food or reception to speak of—merely a brief and uncomfortable milling-about in the chilly courtyard of the parish church. Then the new bride and groom left in an open carriage—it was too cold a day for an open carriage and it had begun to rain, but the couple had obviously been unable to spend the extra amount for a closed carriage. The image of the happy couple headed off to bliss was spoiled a bit when Frank Beard offered to use his carriage to drop Carrie and Joseph Clow’s mother at the same home for which the newlyweds had just left. (It had seemed important to Caroline that Carrie spend the first few weeks of her mother’s married life in that crowded, spartan little house, although the girl would still be working as a governess from time to time and soon would move back to live with me at Gloucester Place.)

Finally, after the rector had retreated back inside his dark church in true confusion, there was only the other plumber (I had decided that he was no relation to Joseph) and me left standing in the chilly late-October wind in front of the church. I tipped my hat to the hungry man and walked all the way to my brother Charley’s home in South Audley Street.

Charley’s health had improved somewhat as the hot summer ended, and by mid-September he and Katey were spending most of their time at their London home rather than at Gad’s Hill Place. Charles was also working on various illustration jobs when he could, although the stomach pains and general disability struck often.

Still, I was surprised to find him not at home on that Thursday, 29 October, when I knocked at their door. Katey was home and she greeted me in their small and rather dark parlour. She knew of Caroline’s wedding and asked me to tell her “all the marvellous high points.” She offered me some brandy—which I happily accepted; my nose, cheeks, and hands were red with the autumn cold—and I received the distinct impression that she had been drinking before I arrived.

At any rate, I told her “all the marvellous high points,” but I expanded the definition of “high points” from the wedding ceremony to my entire history with Mrs Caroline G—. The tale is shocking, of course, to bourgeois sensibilities, but I had long known that Kate suffered from few of her father’s middle-class illusions. If the many rumours and reports were to be believed, Katey had long since taken a lover—or several lovers—to make up for my brother’s lack of ardour (or inability to express it). This was a woman of the world, sipping brandy so close to me in the dark and shuttered little parlour with its tiny coal fire offering most of the dim light we had, and I found myself telling her details of my history with Caroline that I had told almost no one, including her father.

And, as I spoke, I realised that there was another reason—beyond my need to unburden myself at long last—why I was telling Kate Dickens these things.

Reluctantly, secretly, painfully, I had come to agree with her insensitive father’s prediction that my brother would not be so long for this world. It was true that Charley’s affliction, while sometimes lessening, continued to grow worse in the overall scheme of things. It now felt probable, even to me (his loyal and loving brother), that Charles might be dead in a year or two, and this ageing (she was twenty-eight) but still-attractive woman would be a widow.

Katey showed her own indiscretion by saying, “You would be surprised what Father has had to say about Mrs G—’s marriage.”

“Tell me,” I said and leaned closer.

She poured us each another brandy but shook her head. “It might hurt your feelings.”

“Nonsense. Nothing your father could say would hurt my feelings. He and I have been friends and confidants for far too long. Pray tell me. What did he say about today’s ceremony?”

“Well, he did not say anything to me, of course. But I happened to overhear him say to Aunt Georgina… ‘Wilkie’s affairs defy all prediction. For anything one knows, the whole matrimonial pretence may be a lie of that woman’s, intended to make him marry her, and—contrary to her expectations—breaking down at last.’ ”

I sat stunned. I was hurt. And amazed. Could it be true? Could even the wedding have been another of Caroline’s ploys to trap me into marriage? Was she hoping that I would feel such loss that I would come after her even into Joseph Clow’s household, defying and denying all marriage bonds, and beg her to come back to me… to marry me? My skin rippled with something like revulsion.

Stricken, all I could choke out to Kate Dickens was “Your father is a very wise man.”

Surprisingly—thrillingly—she reached out and squeezed my hand.

Over a third brandy, I heard myself whining to Katey some words that, much later and in a much different context, I would share almost verbatim with Charley himself.

“Kate… do not be too harsh on me. Between my illness and the death of my mother and my loneliness, it has been a terrible year. Seeing Caroline married today, while being strangely satisfying in one respect, was also oddly disturbing. She has, after all, been part of my life for more than fourteen years and part of my household for more than ten. I think, my dear Katey, that a man in my situation is to be pitied. I am not… I have not been for a long time… I am not accustomed to living alone. I’ve been accustomed to having a kind woman there to talk with me, as you are now, Kate… and to take care of me and perhaps to spoil me a bit from time to time. All men enjoy that, but perhaps I more than most. It is difficult for a woman, a wife, such as yourself, to know what it is like for a man to be used always to seeing a pretty creature in his home… someone always nicely dressed, someone always about the room or hovering nearby, bringing a form of light and warmth to an old bachelor’s life… and then, suddenly, for no reason of one’s own, to be left alone as I am now, to be left… out in the cold and the dark.”

Katey was staring at me very intensely. She seemed to have leaned closer to me as I was explaining all this. Her knee under her long green silken dress was only inches from my own. I had the sudden urge to kneel on the floor, throw my head into her lap, and to weep like a child. I was certain at that instant that she would have put her arms around me, would have patted me on my back and head, perhaps even raised my tear-streaked face to her breast.

Instead, I sat there but leaned even closer. “Charley is very ill,” I whispered.

“Yes.” The single syllable seemed to hold no special sadness, only agreement.

“I have also been ill, but my recuperation is assured. My illness is a transient thing. Even now it does not interfere with my faculties or my… needs.”

She looked at me with what I thought was something like a thrilled expectancy.

I then said, softly but urgently, “Kate, I suppose you could not marry a man who had…”

“No, I could not,” Kate said decisively. She stood.

Reeling in confusion, I stood as well.

Kate called for her maid-servant to bring my coat and stick and hat. I was out on the cold stoop before I could think of anything to say. Even then I could not speak. The door closed with a slam.

I was half a block away, leaning into the cold wind, rain blowing into my face, when I saw Charley on the sidewalk opposite. He hailed me, but I pretended that I had not seen or heard him and ran on quickly, my hand holding the brim of my hat and my forearm hiding my face.

Two blocks farther I hailed a hansom cab and had it take me to Bolsover Street.

Martha R—, with no servants there at that time, opened the door herself. Her unguarded expression showed her true pleasure at seeing me.

That night I impregnated her with our first child.