Drood

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Ere is the block,” whispered Dradles, patting the face of a stone in the wall that looked like all the others in the gloom. “And ’ere the tool to ’andle ’er with.” In the weak lantern light, I saw him reach deep into his layers of flannel and moleskin and filthy canvas and bring out a pry bar as long as my forearm. “And ’ere on top, you see, the notch I chiselled in, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins, sir. Easy as the front door key to your very own ’ouse, you see.”

I could not really see the niche at the top of the block where it met the mortar, but the flat end of the pry bar found it. Dradles grunted rum fumes at me as he leaned all his weight on the upper part of the bar. The stone screamed.

I write “screamed,” Dear Reader, rather than “screeched” or “scraped” or “made a loud sound” because the noise this stone block made sliding back several inches out of its ancient place in the wall of the crypt was precisely that of a woman screaming.

I helped Dradles remove the surprisingly heavy block and set it on the dark, dank stones of the curving crypt stairs. The lantern showed a rectangular hole which I was sure was far too small for my purposes. When Dradles dropped the iron bar on the floor behind me, I confess I jumped several inches.

“Go on, lean ’n’ peer in, make your acquaintance wi’ the old ’uns there,” cackled the stonemason. He took another drink from his ever-present jug as I held the lantern to the aperture and attempted to peer inside.

From what I could see, it still looked too small for my purposes. Less than a foot of space separated this outer wall from the first inner wall of an old crypt, and although I could see that this narrow gap dropped a foot or two below the level of the outer walkway and floor where we crouched, much of this cavity stretching away on both sides of the hole we’d made was half-filled with broken stones, ancient bottles, and other rubbish.

I heard Dradles chuckle to my left. He must have seen my appalled expression in the lamplight.

“Y’er thinkin’ it’s too narrow, ain’t you, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins? But it ain’t. It’s perfect. Shove aside ’ere.”

I held the lantern as Dradles squat-walked forward. He patted his bulging pockets and suddenly there was an animal’s long leg bone in his right hand.

“Where did that come from?” I whispered.

“One of yer bigger test dogs in the lime pit, ’course. It’s me who does the rakin’ out there, now, in’t it? Now watch and learn.”

Dradles pushed the long canine femur or whatever it was sideways through the small aperture and tossed it in with a flick of his fingers. I heard it clatter on the rubbish below and several feet to one side.

“You could get a kennel ’o dogs’ skeletons in ’ere,” he said too loudly. “But it ain’t dogs we’re thinkin’ of to join the old ’uns with their crooks ’ere, is it?”

I said nothing.

Dradles patted at his layers of filthy, dusty garments again and suddenly he was holding a human skull missing only its jawbone.

“Who is… who was that?” I whispered. I hated it that my voice sounded like it was trembling in this narrow but echoing space.

“Oh, aye, names are important for the dead ’uns, though not for them, but for us quick ’uns, eh?” laughed Dradles. “Let us call ’im Yorick.”

Once again, the old man must have seen my expression in the lantern light, for he laughed loudly—the echo of that drunken bark coming back from groined vaults on the level above us and from the walls of the curved and descending staircase-corridor we were in and from unimagined rooms and tunnels and pits in the absolute darkness far below.

“Mr Billy Wilkie Collins mustn’t think that masons of stone don’t know and can’t recite the Bard,” whispered the old man. “’Ere, let us see the last of Poor Yorick.” And with that he fitted the skull carefully through the tight space, held it in one hand, and flicked it to the left and out of sight into the narrow cavity. The noise it made upon hitting the stone and bottles and rubbish below was memorable.

“Skulls is always the ’ardest part,” Dradles said happily. “Spines, e’en wi’ all the vertebrae intact, you can twist in like a petrified snake an’ it don’t matter if some o’ the parts chip off. Where the skull can go though, there can go the whole man. Or ten whole men. Or a ’undred. Seen enough, Mr Billy Wilkie?”

“Yes.”

“Be a good lad, then, and ’elp me lift this stone back in place. When you’re done wi’ your business down ’ere, you let old Dradles know and I’ll touch up the grout ’ere so no one can ever tell that this wall ain’t have been untouched since Noah’s day.”

Outside in the chilly March wind, I gave the old stonemason £300 in various-size bills. As I counted them out, Dradles’s long, dry tongue kept flicking out like a Galapagos lizard’s, licking his own dusty-stubbled cheeks and upper lip in startling pink-and-grey stabs.

“And there will be another hundred pounds each year,” I whispered. “As long as you live.”

He squinted at me. His voice, when he spoke, was much, much too loud. “Mr Billy Wilkie Collins ain’t thinkin’ that old Dradles’s silence ’as to be bought, now, does he? Dradles can be as silent as the next good man. Or the next bad ’un, for that matter. If one who’s done what you plan to do goes to thinkin’ about payin’ for silence, ’e might go to thinkin’ about doin’ more of what he done to make sure o’ that silence. That’d be a mistake, Mr Billy Wilkie. It surely would. I’ve told me apprentice all about this ’ere business and sworn ’im to keep silence on pain of death by Dradles’s wrath, but ’e knows, sir. ’E knows. An’ ’e would let others know if something untowards-like were to ’appen to his good, stalwart old Dradles.”

I thought a moment about his apprentice—an idiot deaf-mute, if I remembered correctly. But I said, “Nonsense. Think of it as an annuity. And annual payment in exchange for service and your investment in our common…”

“Dradles knows what an annuity is, sure as he knows ol’ Yorick we left back there was a man of infinite jest, young ’Oratio. Just let Dradles know when you wants the stone, which looks perfectly fine and old now, grouted and mortared up for all of ’ternity.” And with that he turned on his worn heel and walked away, touching his finger to what could have been a brim of what might have been a hat, without looking back.

MONTHLY SALES OF THE SERIALISED Man and Wife were not as impressive as had been The Moonstone’s. No long lines waited for the monthly release of instalments. Critical reaction was tepid, even hostile. The English reading public was, as I had anticipated, angered by my careful and accurate description of the abuses and self-abuses of the Muscular Christian athlete. Word from the Harper brothers in New York indicated that the American reading public had limited interest in and even less outrage over the unfairness of our English marriage laws, which allowed—even encouraged—entrapment of one member of the couple into an unwanted matrimony.

None of these facts bothered me in the least.

If you have not read my Man and Wife there in the future, Dear Reader (although I sincerely hope it is still in print a century and more hence), let me give you a taste of it here. In this scene from Chapter the Fifty-fourth (page 226 in the first edition), I have my poor Hester Dethridge come upon a terrifying (to me, at least) encounter:

The Thing stole out, dark and shadowy in the pleasant sunlight. At first I saw only the dim figure of a woman. After a little it began to get plainer, brightening from within outwards—brightening, brightening, brightening, till it set before me the vision of MY OWN SELF—repeated as if I was standing before a glass: the double of myself, looking at me with my own eyes.… And it said to me, with my own voice, “Kill him.”

Cassell’s Magazine had paid me an advance of £500 and a total payment of £750. I had made arrangements to publish Man and Wife in three volumes, with the initial release date being 27 January, with the firm F. S. Ellis. Despite the moderate sales in America, Harper’s was so delighted with the quality of the early instalments that they sent me a totally unexpected cheque for £500. Also, I had written the novel Man and Wife with both eyes firmly set on its stage adaptation—in some ways, it and my ensuing novels would be theatrical scripts in shorthand—and I looked forward to further income from that very quick translation to both the London and American stage.

Compare all this to Charles Dickens’s lack of literary production in the past year and more.

Thus it was all the more galling one day in May when I stepped into the Wellington Street offices of All the Year Round to discuss (demand) reversions of my copyrights with Wills or Charley Dickens—only to find both of them absent to lunch—and, wandering from office to office as was my old habit there, came across an open letter of accounting from Forster and Dolby.

It was a summary of earnings from Dickens’s readings, and looking at it made the scarab scuttle behind my right eye and brought a band of excruciating headache pain tightening around my forehead. It was through just such rising agony that I read the following in Dolby’s tight, ledger-columned script:

Charles Dickens’s paid readings over the past years had totalled 423, including 111 given while Arthur Smith was the Inimitable’s manager, 70 under Thomas Headland, and 242 under Dolby. It seemed that Dickens had never kept precise records of his profits under Smith and Headland, but this spring he estimated them at about £12,000. Under Dolby, those profits had reached almost £33,000. This gave a total of some £45,000—an average of more than £100 per reading—and, according to the note from Dickens appended, represented almost half of his entire current estate’s value, estimated at about £93,000.

Ninety-three thousand pounds. All last year and this, because of my personal investment in the theatrical production of Black and White, my excessive loans to Fechter, the constant upkeep on the grand house on Gloucester Place (and the attendant salaries for the two servants and frequent cook there), my generous payments to Martha R—, and especially the constant need to purchase large quantities of both opium and morphia for personal medicinal reasons, I had been struggling financially. As I had written to Frederick Lehmann the year before (when that good friend had offered to lend me money)—“I shall pay the Arts. Damn the Arts!”

BECAUSE IT WAS BAD WEATHER, I was taking a cab home from Wellington Street that afternoon when I saw Dickens’s daughter Mary walking along the Strand in the rain. I immediately had the driver stop the cab, ran to her side, and discovered that she was walking alone and unprotected in the rain (returning to the Milner Gibson house after a luncheon downtown) because she had been unable to hail a cab. Helping her into my coach, I rapped on the ceiling with my cane and called up to the driver, “Five Hyde Park Place, driver, across from the Marble Arch.”

As Mamie dripped onto the upholstery—I had offered two clean handkerchiefs for her to dry her face and hands at the very least—and as I saw her reddened eyes, I realised that she had been crying. We talked as the cab moved slowly north through traffic and while she mopped at herself. The rain on the roof of the cab had a particularly insistent sound that afternoon.

“You are so kind,” began the distraught young woman (although, at the advanced age of thirty-two, she was hardly still a young woman). “You have always been so kind to our family, Wilkie.”

“As I shall always be,” I muttered. “After having received unlimited kindness from the family over the years.” The driver above us in the rain was shouting and cracking his whip not at his own poor horse but at some dray waggon driver who had crossed in front of him.

Mamie did not seem to be listening to me. Handing back my now-sodden handkerchiefs, she sighed and said, “I went to the Queen’s Ball the other night, you know, and had ever so much fun! It was so gay! Father was to have been my escort, but at the last minute he was unable to go…”

“Not because of his health, I hope,” I said.

“Yes, sadly, yes. He says that his foot—and these are his words, so you must forgive me—is a mere bag of pain. He can barely hobble to his desk to write each day.”

“I am dismayed to hear that, Mamie.”

“Yes, yes, we all are. The day before the Queen’s Ball, Father had a visitor—a very young girl with literary aspirations, someone Lord Lytton had recommended visit Father and sent over—and while Father was explaining to her the enjoyment he was having in writing this Drood book for serialisation, this upstart of a girl had the temerity to ask, ‘But suppose you died before all the book was written?’ ”

“Outrageous,” I muttered.

“Yes, yes. Well, Father—you know sometimes in a conversation he smiles but how his gaze suddenly becomes focused on something very far away—he said, ‘Ah-h! That has occurred to me at times.’ And the girl became flustered.…”

“As well she should have been,” I said.

“Yes, yes… but when Father saw that he had embarrassed her, he spoke very softly in his kindest voice and said to her, ‘One can only work on, you know—work while it is day.’ ”

“Very true,” I said. “All of us writers feel the same on this issue.”

Mamie began fussing with her bonnet, setting her wet hair and sagging curls to rights, and I had a moment to contemplate the rather sad future for both of Dickens’s daughters. Katey was married to a very sick young man and was currently a social outcast both because of her father’s separation from her mother and because of Kate’s own flirtations and behaviour. Her tongue had always been too sharp for either Society’s ear or that of most men who might have been marriage partners. Mamie was less intelligent than Kate, but her sometimes frenzied efforts towards social acceptance were always carried out at the fringes of society, usually within a maelstrom of malicious gossip, again because of her father’s political attitudes, her sister’s behaviour, and her own spinsterhood. Mamie’s last serious marriage possibility had been Percy Fitzgerald, but—as Katey had said last New Year’s Eve—Percy had settled on that “simpering charmer” and forgone his last opportunity of marrying into the Dickens fold.

“We shall be so glad to be back in Gad’s Hill Place,” Mamie said suddenly as she finished flouncing her wilted skirts and setting damp bodice lace to a semblance of propriety.

“Oh, you’re leaving the Milner Gibson house so soon? I was under the impression that Charles had leased it for a longer period.”

“Only until the first of June. Father is very impatient to get back to Gad’s Hill for the summer. He wants us to be there with the house all opened up and happy and us all settled by the second or third of June. He shall have very little reason to come into town then, for the rest of the summer, you know. The rail travel is so hard on Father these days, Wilkie. Also, it will be easier for Ellen to visit there than it has been here in the city.”

I blinked at this and then took off my spectacles to wipe them on one of the soggy handkerchiefs in order to hide my reaction.

“Miss Ternan still visits there?” I said offhandedly.

“Oh, yes, Ellen has been a regular visitor over the past few years—certainly your brother or Katey has told you that, Wilkie! Come to think of it, it’s odd that you haven’t been a guest there during the periods that Ellen has come to stay. But then—you are so busy!”

“Yes,” I said.

So Ellen Ternan was still a frequent guest at Gad’s Hill. This was a surprise. I was sure that Dickens had sworn his daughters into secrecy on this—another reason for Society to shun all of them—but that light-headed Mamie had forgotten. (Or assumed that I was still such a close friend of her father’s that he would have told me.)

I realised at that moment that none of us—none of Dickens’s friends or family or even his biographers in some future era such as yours, Dear Reader—would ever know the real story of his strange relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan. Had they actually buried a child in France, as I had surmised after overhearing that one snippet of conversation between them at Peckham Station? Were they now living merely as brother and sister, their passion—should they ever have acted on it in the first place—put behind them forever? Or had that passion resumed in a new form, edging towards being made public—perhaps a very scandalous divorce and second marriage for the ageing novelist? Would Charles Dickens ever find that happiness with a woman that had seemed to elude him throughout his passionate, naive, romance-haunted life?

The novelist in me was curious. The rest of me did not give a d— n for the answers. The old friend in me vaguely wished that Dickens had found that happiness in his lifetime. The rest of me recognised that Dickens’s lifetime needed to be over and that he needed to be gone—missing, lost, expunged, eradicated, his corpse never found—so that the adulatory mobs could not bury him in Westminster Abbey or its churchyard. That was very important.

Mamie was babbling on about something—going on about someone she had danced and flirted with at the Queen’s Ball—but suddenly the coach stopped and I peered out through the rain-streaked window and saw the Marble Arch.

“I shall walk you to your door,” I said, stepping out and waiting to help the silly spinster down.

“Oh, Wilkie,” she said, taking my hand, “you truly are the kindest of men.”

I WAS WALKING home alone from the Adelphi Theatre several nights after this chance meeting when someone or something hissed at me from a darkened alley.

I stopped, turned, and lifted my bronze-headed walking stick as any gentleman would do when threatened by a ruffian in the night.

“Misster Collinssss,” hissed the figure in the narrow aperture.

Drood, I thought. My heartbeat raced and my pulse pounded in my temples. I felt frozen, unable to run. I grasped the stick in both hands.

The dark shape took two steps closer to the opening of the alley but did not emerge fully into the light. “Mister Collinsss… it’s I, Reginald Barrisss.” He gestured me closer.

I would not enter the alley, but from the opening to that stinking black crevice, I could see a trapezoid of light from the distant streetlamp falling on the dark form’s face. There was the same dirt, the same wild beard, the same hooded eyes of a hunted man always flicking one way then another. I saw only a glimpse of his teeth in the dim light, but they appeared to have decayed. The once handsome and confident and burly Detective Reginald Barris had become this shadowy, fearful form whispering at me from an alley.

“I thought you dead,” I whispered.

“I am not far from it,” said the shadow-figure. “They hunt me everywhere. They do not give me time to ssleep or eat. I musst move consstantly.”

“What news do you have?” I demanded. I still held my heavy stick at the ready.

“Drood and his minionss have set a date on which to take your friend Dickenss,” he hissed at me. His breath was foul, even from three feet away. I realised that his missing teeth must be causing this Droodish hiss.

“When?”

“Nine June. Not quite three weeks from now.”

The fifth anniversary, I thought. It made sense. I asked, “What do you mean they will take him? Kill him? Kidnap him? Take him down to Undertown?”

The filthy figure shrugged. He pulled his tattered hat brim lower so that his face went back to darkness.

I said, “What shall I do?”

“You can warn him,” rasped Barris. “But there iss no place he can hide—no country where he would be ssafe. Once Drood decidesss a thing, it is done. But perhapsss you can tell Dickensss to get his affairss in order.”

My pulse still raced. “Can I do anything for you?”

“No,” said Barris. “I am a dead man.”

Before I could ask anything else, the dark figure backed away and then seemed to be melting down into the filthy stones of the alley. There must have been a basement stairway there that I could not see, but to my eye the shadowy figure simply melted vertically out of sight in the dark alley until it was gone.

Nine June. But how to arrange things with Dickens myself before that date? He would be back at Gad’s Hill Place soon, and we were both working hard on our respective novels. How could I lure him away—especially to where I needed to take him—so that I could do what I had to? And before the ninth of June, that anniversary of Staplehurst that Dickens had always set aside in order to meet with Drood?

I had written a formal and rather cold letter to Wills demanding the reversion of copyrights for all of my stories and novels that had ever appeared in All the Year Round, and Dickens himself wrote me back in that last week of May 1870.

Even the business part of the letter was surprisingly friendly—he assured me that papers were being drawn up at that moment and that, even though we had not contractually arranged such returns of copyright, all such rights were to be returned to me at once. But it was his brief peroration that seemed wistful, almost lonely.

“My dear Wilkie,” he wrote, “I don’t come to see you because I don’t want to bother you. Perhaps you may be glad to see me by and by. Who knows?”

This was perfect.

I immediately wrote Dickens a friendly note asking if we could meet “at your earliest convenience, but preferably before the anniversary you honour each year at this time.” If Dickens did not burn this note, as was his habit, this wording might prove sufficiently cryptic to anyone who read it later.

When a warm and affirmative response came back from Dickens by the first of June, I completed the last of my preparations and set the Act III finale into motion.