Drood

CHAPTER THREE

Cannibalism.

As I rode the train to Charing Cross Station I thought about that odd, barbaric word and reality—cannibalism—and how it had already affected Charles Dickens’s life. (I had no idea at that time how terribly—and soon—it would affect mine.)

There had always been something in Charles Dickens’s make-up that reacted especially strongly to the idea of cannibalism and of being consumed in any manner. During the time of his public separation from Catherine and the scandal that he had done the most to publicise and bring about—although he would never recognise that fact—the writer had said to me more than once, “They’re eating me alive, Wilkie. My enemies, the Hogarths, and the misinformed public who wish to believe the worst are devouring me a limb at a time.”

Many had been the time in the past decade when Dickens would invite me to join him on a trip to London’s Zoological Gardens—a place in which he always took great delight—but as much as he loved the hippopotamus family and aviaries and lions’ den, it was the reptile house feeding time that was the central purpose and destination for his visit. Dickens would not miss it and hurried me so that we would never be late. They fed the reptiles, most specifically the snakes, a diet of mice and larger rats and the spectacle seemed to mesmerise Dickens (who, a mesmerist himself, absolutely refused to allow anyone to mesmerise him). He would stand transfixed. Several times—riding somewhere together, waiting for a play to begin, even when sitting in his parlour at home—Dickens would remind me of how, frequently, two snakes would begin devouring the same rat at exactly the same time until the head and tail and hindquarters of the rodent were invisible in the snakes’ gullets, while the struggling rat was still alive, hind and forelegs scrabbling in the air even as the powerful jaws advanced on them.

Only a few months before the Staplehurst accident, Dickens had confided in me that he was seeing the legs of furniture in his house—his bathtub, the serpentine table and chair legs in various rooms, even the heavy cords for the drapes—as snakes slowly consuming the tabletops and draperies and tub. “When I am not looking, the house is devouring itself, my dear Wilkie,” he’d said to me over rum punch. He also told me that often at a banquet—most frequently a banquet in his honour—he would look down the long table and see his peers and friends and colleagues filling their faces with veal or mutton or chicken, and for a moment, just for a single, terrible second, he would imagine that the utensils lifted to those mouths were wriggling appendages. But not of mice or rats, he said—of men. He said that he found the frequent illusion… unsettling.

But it was actual cannibalism—or at least the rumour of it—that had changed the course of Charles Dickens’s life eleven years ago.

In October of 1854, all of England was shocked to read Dr John Rae’s report on what he had discovered during his search for the missing Franklin Expedition.

If you have never heard of the Franklin Expedition, Dear Reader from my future century, I need to tell you only that it was an attempt by Sir John Franklin and 129 men in 1845 to explore the northern Arctic in two ships provided by the Royal Navy’s Discovery Service—HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. They set sail in May of 1845. Their primary orders were to force the North-West Passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific north of our colony in Canada—England was always dreaming of new and shorter trade routes to the Far East—and Franklin, an older man, was a seasoned explorer. There was every possible expectation of success. The two ships were last seen in Baffin Bay in the late summer of 1845. After three or four years of no word from the expedition, even the Royal Navy became concerned and various rescue expeditions were organised. But the two ships, to this day, have not been found.

Both Parliament and Lady Franklin offered huge rewards. Search parties, not just British but from America and other nations, criss-crossed the Arctic searching for Franklin and his men. Or at the very least for some sign of their fate. Lady Franklin was outspoken in her belief that her husband and the crews were still alive, and few in government or in the Navy wished to contradict her, even when so many Englishmen had given up all hope.

Dr John Rae was an officer in the Hudson Bay Company who had gone north by land and spent several seasons exploring remote northern islands (consisting, it is said, of little more than frozen gravel and endless blowing snow) and the vast stretches of ocean ice into which Erebus and Terror had disappeared. Unlike the Royal Navy or the majority of searchers, Rae had lived with the various Esquimaux savages in the region, learned their crude languages, and—in his report—quoted testimony from many of them. He had also returned to England with various artefacts—brass buttons, caps, ships’ dishes bearing the crest of Sir John, writing instruments—that had belonged to Franklin or his men. Finally, Rae had discovered human remains, both in shallow graves and above ground, including two skeletons actually still seated in one of the ship’s boats tied to a sledge.

What shocked England, beyond this terrible proof of Franklin’s probable fate, was that according to the Esquimaux that Rae had interviewed, Franklin and his men had not only died but had resorted to cannibalism in their final days. The savages told Rae of coming across white men’s camps where there were chewed bones, stacks of hacked-off limbs, and even tall boots with feet and leg bones still within.

This horrified Lady Franklin, of course, and she rejected the report in its entirety (even going so far as to hire another ship, out of her own dwindling fortune, to resume the search for her husband). Dickens also was appalled—and fascinated—by the idea.

He began publishing articles on the reported tragedy then in his journal, Household Words, as well as in other magazines. At first he was simply doubtful, stating that the report was “hasty… in the statement that they had eaten the dead bodies of their companions.” Dickens told us that he had consulted “a wilderness of books”—although he cited no specific sources—to prove that “the probabilities are all against poor Franklin’s people having dreamed of eating the bodies of their companions.”

As the rest of the nation either began to believe in Rae’s report (he did claim the government’s reward for conclusive proof of Franklin’s fate) or to forget, Dickens’s denial turned to serious anger. In Household Words he launched a scathing attack on “the savage”—his phrase for all non-whites, but in this case the scheming, lying, untrustworthy Esquimaux whom John Rae had lived with and interviewed. Dickens in our time was, of course, considered a radical liberal, but those credentials were not impeached when he spoke for the majority of Englishmen and wrote—“… we believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel.” It was simply impossible, he argued, that any of Sir John Franklin’s men had “prolonged their existence by the dreadful expedient of eating the bodies of their dead companions.”

Then our friend did a very strange thing. From the “wilderness of books” he had consulted to support his opinion, he chose 1001Arabian Nights—one of the most important books from his childhood, as he had told me several times—to prove his point. He wrote in summary—“In the whole wide circle of the Arabian Nights, it is reserved for ghoules, gigantic blacks with one eye, monsters like towers of enormous bulk and dreadful aspect, and unclean animals lurking on the sea shore…” to resort to eating human flesh, or cannibalism.

So there you have it. Quod erat demonstrandum.

IT WAS IN 1856 that Dickens took his campaign against the possibility of cannibalism amongst Sir John Franklin’s noble men to a new level… and one which would intimately involve me.

While we were sojourning together in France—Dickens called me his “vicious friend” on such voyages and the time in Paris “our dangerous expeditions” (although while he enjoyed the night life and occasional conversations with young actresses, the writer never availed himself of the women of the night as I did there)—he came up with the idea that I write a play, to be performed at Dickens’s home at Tavistock House. Specifically it was to be a play about a lost Arctic expedition such as Franklin’s in which the Englishmen showed courage and valour. It also, he explained, had to be a story about love and sacrifice.

“Why don’t you write it, Charles?” was my obvious response.

Well, he simply could not. He was beginning work on Little Dorrit, giving readings, putting out his magazine… I was to write it. He suggested the title The Frozen Deep, since the play would not only be about the northern wilderness, but about the secret depths of the human heart and soul. Dickens said that he would aid me with the scenario and “do the odd editorial chore,” which I immediately understood to mean that the play would be his and I would just be the mechanism to put words on paper.

I agreed to do it.

We began work on it in Paris—or rather I began work on it while Dickens flitted in and out between dinners with friends, banquets, and other social occasions—and by the end of that hot summer of 1856 we were both at his home in London. Our habits, writerly and otherwise, did not always mesh. In France, I enjoyed the Casino until the early morning hours and Dickens insisted on breakfast between eight and nine. There were more than a few occasions where I had to breakfast alone on pâté de foi gras around noontime. Also, in both Tavistock House and later at Gad’s Hill, Dickens’s work hours were between nine AM and either two or three PM, and everyone in the house, family and guests alike, was expected to stay equally busy during that time. I have seen Dickens’s daughters or Georgina pretend to read proof sheets while Dickens was locked away in his study. At that time—it was before the second Wilkie Collins had begun to fight me for my writing desk and instruments—I preferred working late at night, so I often would have to find a nook in the library in Dickens’s home where I could smoke a cigar and nap in privacy during the day. And more than a few times Dickens would emerge unexpectedly from his study to roust me out of my hiding place and order me back to work.

My work—our work—on the play continued through the autumn of that year. I had conceived of a main character (to be played by Dickens, of course) named Richard Wardour—a sort of combination of what was known about the indomitable Sir John Franklin and his second-in-command, a rather common Irish fellow named Francis Crozier—and my idea was that the Wardour character would be older, perhaps not very competent (after all, the men on Franklin’s Expedition had, apparently, all died), and a bit demented. Perhaps even somewhat of a villain.

Dickens completely rewrote this idea, changing Richard Wardour into a young, intelligent, complex, angry, but—in the end—totally self-sacrificing character. “Perpetually seeking and never finding true affection” was the phrasing in Dickens’s voluminous notes on the re-creation of his character. He wrote many of the character’s monologues by himself and actually kept them to himself until our final rehearsals (yes, I was one of the primary actors in the amateur production). When visiting or staying at his home, I would see Dickens starting out or ending his twenty-mile walks through the country fields of Finchley and Neasden, rehearsing his Wardour monologues in a booming voice—“Young, with a fair sad face, with kind tender eyes, with a soft clear voice. Young and loving and merciful. I keep her face in my mind, though I can keep nothing else. I must wander, wander, wander—restless, sleepless, and homeless—till I find her!”

With hindsight, it is easy to see the truth and depth of these sentiments in Charles Dickens that year when his marriage was ending (and ending by his own choice). The writer had spent his entire life waiting for and searching for that fair sad face with the kind tender eyes and soft clear voice. For Dickens, his imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life, and he had imagined this true, virginal, attentive, young, beautiful (and merciful) woman since his own youth.

My play premiered at Dickens’s Tavistock House on 6 January, 1857—Twelfth Night, which Dickens always celebrated with some special programme, and his son Charley’s twentieth birthday. The author had gone to great lengths to make the experience as professional as possible: having carpenters turn the schoolroom at his home into a theatre that could hold more than fifty people comfortably, ripping out a small stage that was already there and replacing it with a full-size one in the bay windows; having a musical score composed for the play and hiring an orchestra to perform it; hiring professionals to design and paint the elaborate scenic backdrops; spending a small fortune on costumes—he later bragged that we “polar explorers” in the production could walk straight from London to the North Pole in the authentic polar gear we were wearing; and, finally, supervising the theatrical gas lighting himself even while devising elaborate lighting effects that could simulate every hour of the odd polar day, evening, and sunlit Arctic night.

Dickens himself brought a strange, intense, underplayed yet incredibly powerful realism to his essentially melodramatic role. In one scene, in which several of us attempt to restrain “Wardour” from running in anguish from the stage, the author warned us that he meant to “fight in earnest” and that we would have to use all our resources to stop him. This, as it turned out, was an understatement. Several of us were bruised and battered even before we had finished with rehearsals. His son Charley later wrote to my brother—“He went at it after a while with such a will that we really did have to fight, like prize-fighters, and as for me, being the leader of the attacking party and bearing the brunt of the fray, I was tossed in all directions and have been black and blue two or three times before the first night of the performance arrived.”

On opening night, our mutual friend John Forster read the prologue that Dickens had written at the last moment, attempting, as he so often did in his books, to be understood by all as he compared the hidden depths of the human heart to the terrible and frozen depths of the Arctic North—

that the secrets of the vast Profound

Within us, an exploring hand may sound,

Testing the region of the ice-bound soul,

Seeking the passage at its northern pole,

Soft’ning the horrors of its wintry deep,

Melting the surface of that “Frozen Deep”

THE TRAIN HAD COME into London, but I did not go on to Charing Cross. Not yet.

The bane of my life was—is, ever shall be—rheumatical gout. Sometimes it is in my leg. More often it moves to my head, frequently lodging like a hot iron spike behind my right eye. I deal with this constant pain (and it is constant) through strength of personality. And opium taken in the form of laudanum.

This day, before continuing with the errand on which Dickens had sent me, I took a cab from the station—I was too uncomfortable to walk farther—to a small chemist’s shop around the corner from my home. The chemist there (as with certain others within the city and elsewhere) knew of my battle with this pain and sold me ameliorative medicine in quantities generally reserved for physicians, or—to be specific—laudanum by the jug.

I would venture the guess, Dear Reader, that laudanum is still used in your future day (unless medical science has come up with a common remedy even more efficacious), but in case it is not, let me describe the drug to you.

Laudanum is simply tincture of opium distilled in alcohol. Before I began buying it in large quantities, I would—following my physician and friend Frank Beard’s advice—simply apply four drops of opium into a half- or full glass of red wine. Then it became eight drops. Then eight or ten drops twice a day with wine. Finally, I discovered that pre-mixed laudanum, as much opium as alcohol, it seems, was more effective on such unrelenting pain. In the past months I had begun what would become a lifelong habit of ingesting pure laudanum from a glass or from the jug itself. I confess that when I once drank such a full glass at home in front of the famous surgeon Sir William Fergusson—a person whom I certainly thought would understand the necessity for it—the doctor exclaimed that such an amount taken at once should have and could have killed everyone at the table. (I had eight male guests and one woman there that night.) After that incident, I have kept the amount of medicine of which I partake a secret, but not the fact of my general use of the blessed drug.

Please understand, Dear Reader of my posthumous future, that everyone in my day uses laudanum. Or almost everyone. My father, who distrusted all medicines, in his last days consumed huge quantities of Battley’s Drops, a powerful form of opium. (And I am certain that the pain from my rheumatoid gout has been at least the equal, if not worse, than his deathbed pains.) I remember the poet Coleridge, a close friend of my parents, weeping at our home because of his dependency upon opium and I remember my mother’s warnings to him. But also, as I have reminded the few friends who had the bad manners to become censorious about my own dependency on this important medicine, Sir Walter Scott used great quantities of laudanum while writing The Bride of Lammermoor, while such contemporaries of Dickens’s and mine as our close friend Bulwer-Lytton and De Quincey used far greater quantities than I.

That afternoon I returned to my home—one of my two homes—at 9 Melcombe Place, off Dorset Square, knowing that Caroline and her daughter, Harriet, would be out, and secreted the new jug of laudanum, but not before drinking two full glasses of it.

Within minutes I was my real self again… or as close to my real self as I could be while such pain from rheumatoid gout still battered at the windows and scratched at the door of my corporeal self. At least the background noise of pain was diminished enough by the opiate so that I could concentrate again.

I took a carriage to Charing Cross.

THE FROZEN DEEP had been a great success.

The first act was set in Devon, where beautiful Clara Burnham—played by Dickens’s more attractive daughter, Mary (known as Mamie)—is haunted by fears for her dashing fiancé, Frank Aldersley (played by me, in the earliest days of my current beard). Aldersley has been away on a polar expedition, sent, as Sir John Franklin’s real-life expedition had been, to force the North-West Passage, and both ships—the HMS Wanderer and HMS Sea-mew—have not been sighted for more than two years. Clara knows that Frank’s commander on the expedition is Captain Richard Wardour, whose proposal Clara has rejected. Wardour does not know the identity of the rival who succeeded him in Clara’s love, but has sworn to kill the man on sight. My character, Frank Aldersley, is, in turn, totally ignorant of Richard Wardour’s love for his fiancée.

Knowing that the two ships are almost certainly frozen in together somewhere in the Arctic ice, Clara is agonised at the thought that some accident will reveal her two lovers’ identities to one another. So poor Clara is not only in terror of what the Arctic, its weather, beasts, and savages, may do to her beloved, but is in even greater terror of what Richard Wardour might do to her darling Frank should he discover the truth.

Clara’s anxieties are not allayed when her nurse, Esther, who has the Second Sight, shares her bloody vision in the crimson Devon sunset. (As I mentioned earlier, Dickens went to great pains to create lighting effects in his little schoolroom theatre at Tavistock House that realistically depicted sunlight at all hours of the day.)

“I see the lamb in the grasp of the Lion…” gasps Nurse Esther in the trance of her Second Sight. “Your bonnie bird alone with the hawk—I see you and all around you crying… Bluid! The stain is on you—Oh, my bairn, my bairn—the stain of that bluid is on you!”

THE YOUNG MAN’S NAME was Edmond Dickenson.

Dickens had said that he’d provided a room at Charing Cross Hotel for the injured man, but in truth it was a large suite. An older and not-very-attractive nurse had set up her station in the outer sitting room and showed me in to the invalid.

From Dickens’s description of the difficult extrication of young Dickenson from the wreckage, not to mention the author’s melodramatic narration of blood, clothes torn away, and the young fellow’s need for medical assistance, I expected to find a near-corpse swathed in bandages and rigidified with splints and casts elevated by cables and counterweights. But young Dickenson, although in pyjamas and a dressing-gown, was sitting up and reading in bed when I was shown in. The room’s dresser and bedside tables were bedecked with flowers, including a vase of crimson geraniums that brought back some of the sense of panic I had felt in the yard at Gad’s Hill Place.

Dickenson was a soft young man, perhaps twenty or twenty-one, with a round face, pink cheeks, sparse sandy hair that was already receding from his pink forehead, blue eyes, and ears as delicate as tiny seashells. His pyjamas looked to be made of silk.

I introduced myself, explained that I was Mr Dickens’s envoy sent to enquire into the young gentleman’s state of health, and was quite surprised when Dickenson blurted out, “Oh, Mr Collins! I am deeply honoured to have such a famous writer visit me! I so greatly enjoyed your The Woman in White that was serialised in All the Year Round immediately after Mr Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities ended.”

“I thank you, sir,” I said, almost colouring at the compliment. It is true that The Woman in White had been a huge success, selling more copies of the magazine than most of Dickens’s serialised tales. “I am very pleased that you enjoyed my modest efforts,” I added.

“Oh, yes, it was wonderful,” said young Dickenson. “You are so fortunate to have someone like Mr Dickens as your mentor and editor.”

I stared at the young man for a long moment, but my stony silence went unnoticed as Dickenson babbled on about the Staplehurst crash, the awfulness of it all, and then about Charles Dickens’s incredible courage and generosity. “I would not, I am sure, be alive today if it had not been for Mr Dickens finding me in the wreckage—I was quite hanging upside down and found it all but impossible to breathe, Mr Collins! — and he never left me until he’d summoned guards to help pull me from the terrible wreckage and supervised their carrying me up to the railbed where the injured were being prepared for evacuation. Mr Dickens stayed by my side during the ride to London on the emergency train that afternoon and—as you see! — insisted on putting me up in this wonderful room and providing nursing until I shall be fully recovered.”

“You are not seriously injured?” I enquired in a perfectly flat tone.

“Oh, no, not at all! Merely bruised all black and blue around the legs and hips and left arm and chest and back. I could not walk three days ago after the accident, but today the nurse helped me to the toilet and back and it was a completely successful expedition!”

“I am so glad,” I said.

“I expect to go home tomorrow,” burbled the young man. “I shall never be able to repay Mr Dickens for his generosity. He truly saved my life! And he has invited me to his home at Gad’s Hill for Christmas and New Year’s!”

It was 12 June. “How wonderful,” I said. “I am sure that Charles appreciates the value of the life he helped save. You say you go home tomorrow, Mr Dickenson… may I enquire as to where that home is?”

Dickenson babbled on. It seemed he was an orphan—Charles Dickens’s favourite sort of human being, if one is to believe Oliver Twist or David Copperfield or Bleak House or any of a dozen other of his tales—but had been left money in a Jarndyce-and-Jarndyce manner of labyrinthine inheritance, and had been appointed an elderly Guardian who lived in a Northamptonshire estate that might well have been the model for Chesney Wold. Young Dickenson, however, preferred to live in modest rented rooms in London, where he lived alone, had few (if any) friends, and studied the occasional instrument and apprenticed for the occasional profession, with no real intention of mastering or practising in any of them. The interest on his inheritance allowed him to purchase food and books and theatre tickets and the occasional holiday to the seashore—his time was his own.

We discussed theatre and literature. It turned out that young Mr Dickenson, a subscriber to Dickens’s previous journal Household Words as well as to the current All the Year Round, had read and admired my story “A Terribly Strange Bed” that had appeared in the former magazine.

“Good heavens, man,” I exclaimed. “That was published almost fifteen years ago! You must have been all of five years old!”

Young Dickenson’s blush began in his shell-like ears, migrated quickly to his cheeks, and rose like pink climbing ivy through the vault of his temples to the long curve of his pale forehead. I could see the blush spreading even under his thinning, straw-coloured hair. “Seven years old, actually, sir,” said the orphan. “But my Guardian, Mr Watson—a very liberal M.P. — had leather-bound copies of both Punch and such journals as Household Words in his library. My current devotion to the written word was formed and confirmed in that room.”

“Really,” I said. “How interesting.”

My joining the staff of Household Words years earlier had meant another five pounds a week to me. It seems to have meant the world to this orphan. He could almost recite my book After Dark from memory and was dutifully amazed when I told him that the separate tales which formed the volume had been based in large part upon my mother’s diaries and a more formal manuscript in which she had reminisced about being the wife of a famous painter.

It turned out that the eleven-year-old Edmond Dickenson had travelled up to Manchester with his Guardian to see The Frozen Deep in the huge New Free Trade Hall there on 21 August, 1857.

ACT II OFTHE FROZEN DEEP is set in the Arctic regions where Dickens-Wardour and Wardour’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Commander Crayford, are discussing their slim chances of survival in the face of cold and starvation.

“Never give in to your stomach, and your stomach will end in giving in to you,” the veteran explorer advises Crayford. Such determination—a will that would accept no master—came not only from the pen of Charles Dickens, but from his very soul.

Wardour goes on to explain that he loves the Arctic wastes precisely “because there are no women here.” In the same act he exclaims—“I would have accepted anything that set work and hardship and danger, like Ramparts, between my misery and me… Hard work, Crayford, that is the true Elixir of our life!” And finally, “… the hopeless wretchedness in this world, is the wretchedness that women cause.”

It was, nominally, my play. My name was listed on the playbill as author (as well as my listing there as an actor), but almost all of Richard Wardour’s lines had been written or rewritten by Charles Dickens.

These were not the words of a man happy in his marriage.

At the end of Act II, two men are sent out across the ice as the trapped crews’ last chance for rescue. These men must cross a thousand miles of the frozen deep. The two men, of course, are Richard Wardour and his successful rival for Clara Burnham’s hand, Frank Aldersley. (Perhaps I have already mentioned that Dickens and I both grew beards for our roles.) The second act ends with Wardour discovering that the injured, starved, weakened Aldersley is his worst enemy, the man he swore to murder on sight.

DID YOU HAPPEN TO SEE the gentleman named Drood at the accident site?” I asked Edmond Dickenson when the young fool finally stopped talking and the nurse was out of the room.

“A gentleman named Drood, sir? In faith, I am not sure. There were so many gentlemen there helping me, and—other than our wonderful Mr Dickens—I learned so few of their names.”

“It seems this gentleman has a rather memorable appearance,” I said and listed some specifics of Dickens’s description of our Phantom: the black silk cape and top hat, the missing fingers and eyelids and attenuated nose, the pallor and baldness and brittle fringe of hair, the terrible stare, his odd way of seeming to glide rather than walk, the sibilant hiss and foreign accent in his speech.

“Oh, good heavens, no,” cried young Dickenson. “I surely would have remembered seeing or hearing such a man.” Then his gaze seemed to turn inward, much as Dickens’s had several times in his darkened study. “Even in spite of the incredibly terrible sights and sounds everywhere around me that day,” he added.

“Yes, I am sure,” I said, resisting the impulse to tap the bedclothes above his bruised leg in a minor show of sympathy. “So you’ve never heard the name Drood or heard others talking about him… on the train that day, perhaps?”

“Not to my knowledge, Mr Collins,” said the young man. “Is it of some importance to Mr Dickens to find the man? I would do anything for Mr Dickens, if it were in my power.”

“Yes, I am sure you would, Mr Dickenson,” I said. This time I did tap at his knee under the blankets. “Mr Dickens specifically charged me with asking you if there were any additional service that he might offer,” I said and checked my watch. “Any want or lack or pain that the nurses or our mutual friend might remedy?”

“Nothing at all,” said Dickenson. “Tomorrow I should be able to walk well enough to leave this hotel and begin living on my own again. I do have a cat, you know.” He laughed softly. “Or rather, she has me. Although, as is the nature of so many of her species, she comes and goes at will, hunts for her own meals, and certainly will not be inconvenienced by my absence.” Again there came that sense of his gaze turning inward, staring at the death and dying at Staplehurst just three days earlier. “Actually, Pussy would not be unduly inconvenienced had I died. No one would have missed me.”

“Your guardian?” I prompted, not wishing to bring on a torrent of self-pity.

Dickenson laughed easily. “My current Guardian, a gentleman of the law who had known my grandfather, would have mourned my passing, Mr Collins, but our… relationship… is more of a business nature. Pussy is about the only friend I have in London. Or elsewhere.”

I nodded briskly. “I shall check on you again in the morning, Mr Dickenson.”

“Oh, but there is no need…”

“Our mutual friend Charles Dickens feels otherwise,” I said quickly. “And, his health permitting, he may come tomorrow to see you and enquire in person about your recovery.”

The boy blushed again. It was not unbecoming, although it did make him somehow appear all the softer and sillier in the late-afternoon June sunlight filtering in through the hotel drapes and curtains.

Nodding and fetching my walking stick, I left young Edmond Dickenson and went out through the sitting room past the silent nurse.

ACT III OFTHE FROZEN DEEP opens with Clara Burnham travelling to Newfoundland to search for news (much as the real Lady Franklin had hired her own ships and gone to the Far North with her niece Sophia Cracroft in search of her husband, Sir John). Into a remote ice cavern along that coast staggers a starved, exhausted man just escaped from the frozen sea. Clara sees that it is Wardour, and there are hysterical accusations that he has murdered—and perhaps eaten? the audience wonders—her fiancé, Frank Aldersley. Wardour—Dickens—rushes out and returns with Aldersley—me, in ragged clothes that left me more naked than not—in his arms and alive. “Often,” gasps Wardour, “in supporting Aldersley through snow-drifts and ice-floes, have I been tempted to leave him sleeping.”

Delivering that line, Dickens… Richard Wardour… collapses, his exertions, starvation, and exhaustion from keeping his rival alive on the ice for so long finally catching up to him. Wardour manages to say, “My sister, Clara! — Kiss me, sister, kiss me before I die!” He then dies in Clara’s arms with Clara’s kiss upon his cheek and Clara’s tears streaming down his face.

At our dress rehearsal, I was tempted to vomit on stage. But during all four performances at Tavistock House, I found myself weeping and heard myself whispering, “This is an awful thing.” You may, Dear Reader, interpret that in any way you wish.

Dickens’s performances were powerful and… strange. William Makepeace Thackeray, one of our attendees the night of the first performance, later remarked of Dickens—“If that man would now go upon the stage, he would make his £20,000 a year.”

This was wild hyperbole in 1857, but by the time of the Staplehurst accident, Dickens was making almost that much through his “acting” in his reading tours in the United States and throughout England.

The audiences blubbered like children during the four performances of The Frozen Deep at Tavistock House. Professional reviewers whom Dickens had invited to the opening nights professed to be deeply impressed by Dickens’s performance and his strange immersion in the role of Richard Wardour. Indeed, it was the author’s terrible intensity—a sort of dark energy which filled the room and swept all viewers and listeners into its vortex—that everyone remarked upon.

Dickens was depressed after the last performance of The Frozen Deep. He wrote to me of the “sad sounds” of the workmen “battering and smashing down” his schoolroom theatre.

There was a clamour for Dickens to stage more performances of my play; many urged him to do so for profit. It was rumoured, correctly it turned out, that the Queen herself wanted to attend a performance. But Dickens resisted all such suggestions. None of us in the amateur production wished to be mere performers for money. But in June of that year, 1857, that fateful year in which Dickens’s domestic life would change forever, the writer was shocked to hear of the death of our mutual friend Douglas Jerrold.

Dickens told me that just a few nights before the other author’s death, the Inimitable had dreamt that Jerrold had given him copy to edit but Dickens could not make sense of the words. This is every writer’s nightmare—the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us—but Dickens found it interesting that he had dreamt it just as Jerrold was, unbeknownst to any of us, on his deathbed.

Knowing that Jerrold’s family would be left in dire financial circumstances (Douglas was much more the reformer radical than Dickens, despite his posturing, would ever be), Dickens came up with the idea for a series of benefit performances: T. P. Cooke in revivals of Jerrold’s two plays, Black Eyed Susan and Rent Day; Thackeray and the war correspondent William Howard Russell giving lectures; and Dickens himself doing afternoon and night readings.

And, of course, a return of The Frozen Deep.

Dickens’s goal was to raise £2,000 for Jerrold’s family.

The Gallery of Illustration on Regent Street was rented for the series of performances. The Queen—always careful not to appear at a benefit for a single charity—not only gave her name in support of this effort, but sent word that she was intensely eager to see The Frozen Deep and suggested that Mr Dickens select a room in Buckingham Palace in which he could provide a private performance for Her Majesty and her guests.

Dickens refused. His reasons were clear enough: his daughters, who appeared in the play, had never been introduced at Court and he did not want their first appearance before the Queen at the palace to be as actresses. He proposed that Her Majesty should come to a private performance at the Gallery of Illustration a week before subscription night and that she should bring her own gallery of guests. Faced with the iron will of the Indomitable, the Queen agreed.

We performed before her on 4 July, 1857. Her Majesty’s guests included Prince Albert, the king of Belgium, and the prince of Prussia. It was especially in honour of Prince Albert that Dickens had directed the entrance and stairs to be decked with flowers. Some of us, I confess, were apprehensive that such a royal audience might not react with the passions of those who had been our audience at Tavistock House the previous winter, but Dickens assured us that the Queen and her guests would laugh at the funny parts, weep at the sad parts, blow their noses exactly when our more common audiences had, and that—during the farce called Uncle John presented after The Frozen Deep— some of the royalty would bray like donkeys. He was, as usual, correct on all counts.

After our performance, the delighted Queen invited Dickens to come forth to accept her thanks.

He refused.

The reason he sent this time—“I could not appear before Her Majesty tired and hot, with the paint still upon my face.”

Actually, of course, it was more than the actors’ paint that kept Dickens from allowing himself to be presented to Her Majesty and her guests. You see, our romantic farce of Uncle John had left Dickens in his Uncle John costume of a floppy dressing gown, a silly wig, and a red nose. There was no way on earth that Charles Dickens, one of the proudest and most self-conscious men who ever lived, was going to allow himself to be introduced to Queen Victoria in that regalia.

Once again, the Queen politely gave way.

We offered two more performances of The Frozen Deep at the Gallery of Illustration, but though the play once again met with wild enthusiasm and ecstatic reviews from everyone who attended and its receipts accounted for the vast majority of the money raised for the Jerrold family fund, we still fell short of the £2,000 goal.

John Dean, manager of the Great Manchester Art Exhibition, had been pressing Dickens to perform The Frozen Deep at that city’s New Free Trade Hall, and—unwilling to end up with anything less than the full £2,000 he had promised the Jerrolds—Dickens immediately went up to Manchester to do a reading of A Christmas Carol there and to inspect the hall, which could easily hold two thousand people.

He decided at once that it would be a perfect venue for the play but that it was simply too large for the meagre acting skills of his daughters and sister-in-law Georgina, all of whom had central roles. (It never occurred to Charles Dickens that he might not be up to the professional requirements of such a huge hall and such large audiences. Dickens knew from experience that he could master crowds of three thousand and more with his magnetic influence.)

He would need to hire and rehearse some professional actresses. (Mark Lemon, Dickens’s son Charley, and I were allowed to stay in the troupe, but the Inimitable began rehearsing us all as if we had never performed the play before.)

Alfred Wigan, manager of the Olympic Theatre, suggested to Dickens two promising young actresses whom he had recently hired for his theatre—Fanny and Maria Ternan—and with Dickens’s rapid approval (he and I had already seen both of these Ternan girls, their younger sister, and veteran-actress mother perform in other plays), Wigan approached them to see if they would be interested in appearing in The Frozen Deep. They were eager to do so.

Wigan then suggested to Dickens that he might also consider the young women’s mother, Frances Eleanor Ternan, as well as the youngest and least impressive member of the acting family—just eighteen—a certain Ellen Lawless Ternan.

And thus Charles Dickens’s life changed forever.

AFTER LEAVING THE CHARING CROSS HOTEL I took a hackney cab part of the way home and decided to walk the rest of the way, stopping for supper at a club to which I did not then belong but at which I had guest privileges.

I was angry. That impertinent young Dickenson whelp with his “You are so fortunate to have someone like Mr Dickens as your mentor and editor…” had put me in a foul mood.

When, five years earlier in late summer of 1860, my novel The Woman in White had begun appearing in All the Year Round the week that Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities concluded (and I should note to you, Dear Reader, that Dickens’s character of Sydney Carton had been taken most liberally from my selfless and self-sacrificing character of Richard Wardour in The Frozen Deep—why, Dickens even said as much, allowing that the Carton character and idea of Tale of Two Cities had come to him during the last performance of The Frozen Deep while he lay on the floorboards with Maria Ternan’s—the new Clara Burnham—real tears soaking his face and beard and ragged clothes, to the point that he had to whisper to her—“My dear child, it will be over in two minutes. Pray compose yourself!”)…

Where was I?

Oh, yes, when The Woman in White appeared in eight-months’ serialisation in Dickens’s new weekly magazine—and appearing to tremendous interest and acclaim, I might modestly add—there was much idle chatter and some small written comment to the effect that I, Wilkie Collins, had learned my craft from Charles Dickens and honed my skills under the tutelage of Charles Dickens and had even borrowed my narrative styles from Charles Dickens. It was said that I lacked Dickens’s depths and whispered in certain quarters that I was “incapable of character-painting.”

This, of course, was pure nonsense.

Dickens himself had written me a note after first reading my manuscript in which he said that it was “a great advance on all your former writing, and most especially in respect of tenderness… in character it is excellent.… No one else could have done it half so well. I have stopped in every chapter to notice some instance of ingenuity, or some happy turn of writing.”

But then, of course, Dickens… being Dickens… ruined the effect by adding that he must “always contest your disposition to give an audience credit for nothing, which necessarily involves the forcing of points on their attention.”

One might have responded that Charles Dickens invariably gave his audiences credit for too much and, through his self-indulgent flights of impenetrable fantasy and unnecessary subtlety, left far too many ordinary readers lost in the thick forest of Dickensian prose.

To be honest with you, Dear Reader who lives and breathes in such a remote branch of my future that no hint of my candour could possibly get back to anyone who loved Charles Dickens, I am… was… almost certainly always shall be… ten times the architect of plot that Charles Dickens ever was. For Dickens, plot was something that might incidentally grow from his marionette-machinations of bizarre characters; should his weekly sales begin slipping in one of his innumerable serialised tales, he would just march in more silly characters and have them strut and perform for the gullible reader, as easily as he banished poor Martin Chuzzlewit to the United States to pump up his (Dickens’s) readership.

My plots are subtle in ways that Charles Dickens could never fully perceive, much less manage in his own obvious (to any discerning reader) meandering machinations of haphazard plotting and self-indulgent asides.

Impudent and ignorant people, such as this orphan-whelp Edmond Dickenson, were always saying that I was constantly “learning from Charles Dickens,” but the truth is quite the opposite. Dickens himself admitted, as I have mentioned earlier, that his idea for self-sacrificing Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities had come from my character of Richard Wardour in The Frozen Deep. And what was his “old woman in white” in Great Expectations, the much-ballyhooed Miss Haversham, if not a direct steal from my central character in The Woman in White?

I SETTLED DOWN to my solitary meal. I enjoyed coming to this club because of how the chef here prepared lark pudding, which I considered one of the four great works produced by my present age. Tonight I decided to dine relatively lightly and ordered two types of pâté, soup, some sweet lobsters, a bottle of dry champagne, a leg of mutton stuffed with oysters and minced onions, two orders of asparagus, some braised beef, a bit of dressed crab, and a side of eggs.

While enjoying this modest repast at my leisure, I recalled that one of the few things I had ever liked about Dickens’s wife was her cooking—or at least the cooking she oversaw at Tavistock House, since I had never seen the woman actually don an apron or lift a ladle. Years ago Catherine Dickens had (under the name Lady Maria Clutterbuck) brought out a volume of recipes, based on what she served regularly at their home at Devonshire Terrace, in a book called What Shall We Have for Dinner? Most of her choices were to my liking—and many were visible on my table here this evening, although not in such plentitude or with an equal glory of gravies (I consider most cooking as simply a prelude to gravies)—as her tastes had also run towards lobsters, large legs of mutton, heavy beefs, and elaborate desserts. There were so many variations of toasted cheese in Catherine’s volume of recipes that one reviewer commented—“No man could possibly survive the consumption of such frequent toasted cheese.”

But Dickens had. And had never put on a pound over the years. Of course, it is possible that his habit of briskly walking twelve to twenty miles a day might have something to do with that. I am, myself, of a more sedentary nature. My inclinations, as well as my chronic illness, keep me close to my desk and couch and bed. I walk when I must but recline when I can. (It was a ritual of mine, when spending time at Tavistock House or Gad’s Hill Place, to hide in the library or some empty guest room until two PM or three PM—whenever Dickens finished his writing labours and came hunting for someone to go on one of his confounded forced marches with him. Of course, it was a ritual of Dickens’s to seek me out—often tracking me by the smell of my cigar smoke, I realise now—so I was often good for a mile or two of Dickens’s long walks, which would be less than twenty minutes or so at his impossible pace.)

This night, I could not decide between two desserts, so—Solomon-like—I chose both the lark pudding and the well-cooked apple pudding. And a bottle of port. And coffees.

While finishing my pudding I noticed a tall, aristocratic, but very old man rising from a chair across the room and for an instant thought it was Thackeray. Then I remembered that Thackeray had died on Christmas Eve of 1863, almost a year and a half ago.

I had been in this very club, a guest of Dickens, when the older writer and the Inimitable had reconciled after several years of cold silence. That breach had begun during the height of the madness surrounding Dickens’s separation from Catherine, when he was most vulnerable. Someone at the Garrick Club had mentioned that Dickens was having an affair with his sister-in-law, and Thackeray, evidently without thinking, had said something to the effect—“No, it is with an actress.”

Word got back to Dickens, of course. It always did. Then a young journalist friend of Dickens’s, part of his “squad” as it was said then, a certain Edmund Yates (who, like Iago, always had a lean and hungry look, I thought), had written a truly unpleasant and dismissive profile of Thackeray in Town Talk. Deeply stung, the old gentleman-writer noted that both he and Yates were members of the Garrick and asked the club to expel the younger man on the grounds that his conduct in writing such a piece had been “intolerable in the society of gentlemen.”

In an astounding act of insensitivity towards his old friend Thackeray, Dickens had taken the young man’s part in the dispute and then resigned from the Garrick himself when the membership committee had agreed with Thackeray and expelled the journalist.

So it was here in the Athenaeum Club, years later, that the breach was finally healed. I had heard Dickens describe the reconciliation to Wills. “There I was hanging up my hat in the Athenaeum,” he said, “when I looked up and saw Thackeray’s haggard face. The man looked like a ghost, Wills. He looked as dead as Marley and lacked only the chains. So I said to him, ‘Thackeray, have you been ill?’ And we struck up a conversation after the years of silence and shook hands and all now is as it was before.”

This is very touching. It is also very false.

I happened to have been in the Athenaeum that night, and both Dickens and I saw Thackeray trying to struggle into his coat. The old gentleman was speaking to two other members. Dickens, coming in, passed close by the old writer without giving him a glance. I was putting away my stick and hat and Dickens had already passed Thackeray and had his foot on the stair when the older author chased after Dickens, catching him on the stairway. I heard Thackeray speak first and then hold out his hand to Dickens. They shook hands. Then Dickens went into the dining room and I watched Thackeray return to his interlocutor—I believe it was Sir Theodore Martin—and I heard him say, “I am glad I have done this.”

Charles Dickens was a kind and frequently sentimental man, but he was never the first to mend a quarrel. A fact that I would be reminded of soon enough.

AS I TOOK A CAB HOME, I thought about Dickens’s queer plan to seek out this phantom named Drood.

As I was listening to Dickens tell his story of the Staplehurst disaster that morning, I had gone through shifting opinions on the veracity of the “Mr Drood” commentary. Charles Dickens was not a liar. But Charles Dickens was also always convinced of the veracity and truth of whatever position he took on any subject and—through his telling, but especially through his own writing—he would always convince himself that something was true, simply because he said it was, even when it was not. His various public letters blaming his wife, Catherine, for the separation eight years earlier, a separation that was obviously his idea, his need, and his instigation, is a perfect example of this phenomenon.

But why invent this Drood character?

Then again, why tell everyone that he, Dickens, had taken the initiative to settle his long breach with Thackeray when it had been the older writer’s move to do so?

The difference is that Charles Dickens’s lies and exaggerations, while perhaps not told deliberately—speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call “the real world”—were almost always promulgated in order to make Charles Dickens look better.

By all objective accounts, including that of the pudgy little homunculus Edmond Dickenson—may his bruises fester and rot and turn to cankers—Dickens had been the hero of the Staplehurst railway disaster. Adding a phantasm such as Drood to the telling did nothing to increase the Inimitable’s heroism in the telling. Indeed, Dickens’s obvious anxiety in describing the odd, almost inhuman man detracted from the Dickensian aura of heroism.

So what was all this about?

I had to assume that there had been a very strange personage named Drood at the wreck site and that something very close to their brief conversation and bizarre interactions as Dickens had described them had occurred.

But why try to find the man? Agreed, there was a certain mystery in such an odd figure, but London and England and even our railways were full of odd figures. (Even that impertinent mayfly young Mr Dickenson seemed a character out of a Dickens novel—orphaned, with his rich Guardian and Chancery-endowed fortune, listless, aimless, given only to reading and lazing about. What extra stretch was there to believe in a “Mr Drood” with his leprous appearance, missing fingers and eyelids, and lisping utterances?)

But again, I wondered as I approached my street, why try to find this Drood?

Charles Dickens was a man given to much planning and careful premeditation, but he was also a creature of impulses. During his first tour of the United States, he had alienated the majority of his audiences and almost all of the American newspapers and journals with his insistence on the creation of an International Copyright. The fact that Dickens’s fiction—and most English authors’ fiction—was being blatantly stolen and published in America with no recompense whatsoever to its author evidently seemed only right and fair to the upstart Americans, so Dickens’s anger was justified. But, shortly after the tour—after the damage was done between Dickens and his original adoring audiences there—Dickens simply lost interest in the Copyright. He was, in other words, a careful man with careless impulses.

At Gad’s Hill Place or his earlier homes, or on any voyage or outing, it was invariably Charles Dickens who decided on the destinations for outings, who decided on the location of picnics, and who decided on the games to be played, who decided who the captains would be, and—most frequently—it was Dickens who kept score, announced the winners, and awarded the prizes. The occupants of the village nearest to Gad’s Hill Place even treated him rather like a squire, obviously honoured to have the famous author hand out awards at fairs and competitions.

Dickens had always been the boy who led the other boys in play. He never doubted that this was his role in life and he never relinquished that role as an adult.

But what game would we be pursuing if Dickens and I actually sought out this Mr Drood figure? What purpose would it serve other than to gratify yet another boyish impulse of Charles Dickens’s? And what dangers would be involved? The neighbourhoods that Drood had allegedly mentioned to Dickens as they descended the railway grade to the carnage below were anything but safe areas of London. They were indeed, as Dickens called them— the Great Oven.

I WAS IN great PAIN from the rheumatical gout as I arrived home.

The light from the street gas lamps hurt my eyes. My own footfalls struck my brain like chisel blows. The rumble of a passing waggon made my entire body twitch with pain. I was trembling. A sudden, bitter taste of coffee filled my mouth—not an echo of the coffee I had enjoyed with dessert, but something far more vile. There was a confusion in my mind and a nauseating sickness permeating my body.

Our new home was at Melcombe Place; we had moved from Harley Street a year earlier, partly because of the greater income and literary position that The Woman in White had afforded me. (For my next novel, No Name, I received more than £3,000 for book publication and a guaranteed £4,500 if British or American serialisation was included.)

When I say “our” or “we” I refer to the woman I had been living with for some years, a certain Caroline G— and her then fourteen-year-old daughter, Harriet, whom we often called Carrie. (There was a rumour that Caroline was my model for The Woman in White—and it is true that I had encountered her running away from a blackguard in the night outside a villa in Regents Park and, running after her, later rescued her from the streets much as was the case with the character in my novel—but I had conceived the idea for The Woman in White long before I met Caroline.)

But Caroline and Harriet were away this week, visiting a cousin in Dover, and—with our two real servants also gone this night (I admit to listing Caroline’s daughter as a “maid-servant” on our annual tax role census at this time)—I had the house to myself. It was true that not too many miles from this home was another house with another woman in it—a certain Martha R—, a former hotel servant in Yarmouth, now visiting London for the first time and with whom I also hoped to live in a comfortable domestic circumstance in the future, but I had no intention of visiting Martha tonight or any time soon. I hurt too much.

The house was dark. I found the jar of laudanum where I kept it in a locked cupboard and drank two glasses, then sat at the servants’ table in the kitchen for several minutes, waiting for the worst of the pain to pass.

The physik soon did its work. I felt renewed, re-energised, and deciding that I would go up to my study on the first floor and write for an hour or two before turning in, I went up the closest stairway.

The back stairway, the servants’ stairway, was very steep and the flickering gaslight at the first-storey landing worked poorly, casting but the smallest circle of doubtful light, leaving the rest of the stairs in deepest darkness.

Something moved in that darkness above me.

“Caroline?” I called, knowing that it would not be she. Nor would it be one of the servants. Our maid-servant’s father had come down with pneumonia and they were in Wales.

“Caroline?” I called again, expecting—and receiving—no answer.

The noise, obvious now as a silk dress rustling, descended the dark stairway from the attic above. I could hear the careful placement of small bare feet in the darkness there.

I fumbled with the light on the wall, but the uncertain jet only flared and faded again, returning to its low flickering.

She stepped into the distant perimeter of ebbing and flowing light then, a mere three steps above me. She looked as she always did—wearing an aged green silk dress with a high bodice. On the dark green silk were tiny gold fleurs-de-lis that descended in constellations to her black-banded waist.

Her hair was drawn up in a bun from a previous era. Her skin was green—the green of very old cheese or of a moderately decomposed corpse. Her eyes were solid pools of black ink that glistened moistly in the lamplight. Her teeth—when her mouth opened as it did now as if to greet me—were long and yellow and curved like tusks.

I had no illusions as to her purpose on the stairs. She wished to grab me and fling me down the long flight of steps. She preferred this back stairway to the wider, brighter, less dangerous front steps. She took two more steps down towards me, her yellow smile widening.

Moving quickly but not in fear or great haste, I flung open the servants’ door to the first-storey landing, stepped through, and closed and locked the door behind me. I heard no breathing through the door—she did not breathe—but there was the faintest of scramblings at the wood, and the porcelain knob turned slightly and then shifted back.

I lighted all the lamps on the first storey. There was no one else here.

Breathing deeply, I undid my pin and collar and went into my study to write.