Drood

CHAPTER EIGHT

Gad’s Hill Place gave the strong impression of a gay, relaxed family retreat when I arrived there in mid-afternoon on the crisp early-autumn day after Inspector Field’s visit to my home. It was a Saturday, so the children and visitors were outside playing. I had to admit to myself that Gad’s Hill was the very model of a happy family’s beloved country home. Of course, Charles Dickens wanted Gad’s Hill to be the very model of a happy family’s beloved country home. In fact, Charles Dickens insisted that everyone within his circle do his or her part to maintain the image, fiction, and—I am certain that he hoped, despite the absence of the family’s mother, now banished, and despite tensions from within and without the family—the reality of a happy family’s beloved country home: nothing more complicated than a gay early-autumn retreat for the hardworking author and his worshipful, loving, and appreciative family and their friends.

At times, I confess, I felt like Candide to Charles Dickens’s Dr Pangloss.

Dickens’s daughter Kate was in the yard and approached me as I walked up the lane, sweating and mopping my neck and forehead with my handkerchief. It was, as I said, a crisp autumn day, but I had walked from the train station and was not used to the exercise. Also, in preparation for the meeting with Dickens, I had taken two glasses of my laudanum medicine much earlier in the day than I was used to doing, and while there were no negative effects from the medicine, I admit that the yard, the grass, the trees, the playing children, and Kate Macready Dickens Collins herself appeared to have a corona of golden glow around them.

“Hello, Wilkie,” cried Kate as she came closer and took my hand. “We have seen too little of you in recent days.”

“Hello, Katey. Is my brother here with you this weekend?”

“No, no. He was not feeling well and decided to stay at Clarence Terrace. I will rejoin him this evening.”

I nodded. “The Inimitable?”

“In his chalet, finishing up a bit of work on this year’s Christmas tale.”

“I didn’t know the chalet was ready for habitation,” I said.

“It is. All furnished as of last month. Father has been working there every day since then. He should be stopping any minute so that he can get his afternoon walk in. I’m sure he won’t mind if you interrupt him. It is a Saturday, after all. Shall I walk you through the tunnel?”

“That is a lovely idea,” I said.

We strolled across the lawn towards the road.

The chalet to which Kate was referring had been a gift the previous Christmas from the actor Charles Fechter. According to my brother, who was one of the guests who stayed from Christmas Eve 1864 until the fifth of January, it wasn’t the happiest of Christmases, not the least reason being that Dickens somehow had convinced himself that my brother, Charles, was dying rather than merely indisposed due to his frequent digestive problems. Of course, this may have been more wish than honest diagnosis on Dickens’s part; Katey’s marriage to Charles in 1860 had upset the author beyond the point of tears and quite to the point of distraction. Dickens felt that he had been abandoned in his time of need by an impatient daughter, and—indeed—that was precisely the case. Even my brother understood that Kate was not in love with him. She simply needed to escape Charles Dickens’s household after the upset brought about by her father’s banishment of their mother.

Kate—“Katey,” as so many of us called her—was not a great beauty, but of all the Dickens children, she was the only one who had inherited her father’s quickness, his wit, a more sardonic version of his sense of humour, his impatience with others, his speech patterns, and even many of his mannerisms. She had let my brother know, even as she was more or less proposing to him, that it would be a marriage of escape and convenience for her rather than one of love. Charles agreed.

So the cold, claustrophobically indoor Christmas of 1864 had been somewhat dour at the Dickens home at Gad’s Hill, certainly compared to the great family-and-guest festivals of previous years at Tavistock House, at least until Christmas Day morning, when Charles Fechter presented to the Inimitable… an entire Swiss chalet.

Fechter, who was a strange man himself, brooding, sallow, given to explosions of temper towards his wife and others (but never towards Dickens), announced after breakfast that the mysterious crates and boxes he had brought with him were a disassembled “miniature chalet,” although—as the group soon discovered—not so miniature after all. It was an actual full-sized chalet, quite large enough to live in should one choose to do so.

Energised, excited, Dickens immediately announced that all “strong and healthy bachelor guests”—by which he obviously meant to exclude my brother for more faults than not being a bachelor—should rush outside into the bitter cold to assemble his gift. But Dickens and his guests Marcus Stone (who was indeed a large and powerful man) and Henry Chorley and various male servants and gardeners and local handymen all summoned from their Christmas Days by the hearth found the fifty-eight boxes (there were ninety-four large, numbered pieces in all) more than they could manage. Fechter called for his French carpenter at the Lyceum to finish the job.

The chalet—which turned out to be so much more than the oversized dollhouse Dickens had anticipated when looking at the packing crates—now stood on the author’s extra property on the other side of the Rochester High Road. Shaded by tall cedars, it was a lovely gingerbread chalet of two storeys with a large, single ground-floor room and a first-floor room with a fretted balcony which one reached by an outside staircase.

Dickens took a great and boyish delight in his chalet, and when the ground thawed that spring, he had workmen dig a pedestrian tunnel under the road so that the author would be able to pass all the way from his house to the chalet without being observed, disturbed, or run down by some runaway pony cart. Kate had told me how Dickens had applauded like a child when the workmen broke through at the centre in their tunnel, and then brought everyone—guests, children, workmen, gawking neighbours, and idlers from the Sir John Falstaff Inn across the road—into the house for grog.

As we reached the tunnel and began the cool stroll through it, Kate asked, “What are you and Father doing on all these long, secretive nights, Wilkie? Even Charles does not seem to know.”

“What in heaven’s name are you talking about, Katey?”

She looked at me in the dim light. She had taken my arm and now she squeezed it. “You know what I mean, Wilkie. Please don’t be coy. Even with the press of finishing Our Mutual Friend and his other work, even with his current terror of rail travel, Father has been disappearing at least one night a week, sometimes twice a week, since that first secret adventure you and he shared in July. Georgina confirms this. He leaves in the evening, taking the slow train into London, and returns very, very late—as late as mid-morning the next day—and won’t tell Georgina or any of us a word about the reasons for these nocturnal prowls. And now this most recent trip to France and him returning after a sunstroke. We’ve all assumed, even Charles, that you have introduced Father to some new form of debauchery in London and that he may have tried it on his own in Paris and found it too much for his constitution.”

Beneath Kate’s bantering tone, I could hear the real concern.

Patting her arm, I said, “Well, you know that we gentlemen are honour bound to protect each other’s secrets, Katey… such as they are. And you, of all women, know that male writers are a mysterious species—we’re always out doing some odd research about the world here or there, day or night.”

She looked at me in the gloom of the tunnel and her eyes seemed luminous and dissatisfied.

“And you also know,” I continued, my voice so soft that it was almost absorbed by the bricks overhead and under our feet, “that your father would never do anything to dishonour himself or your family. You must know that, Katey.”

“Hmmm,” said Kate. Dishonouring himself and his family was precisely what Kate Macready Dickens Collins honestly believed her father had already done in the affair of the banishment of her mother and his pursuit of Ellen Ternan. “Here,” she said, freeing her arm. “The light at the end of the tunnel, Wilkie. I shall leave you to it. And to him.”

MY DEAR WILKIE! Come in, come in! I was just thinking about you. Welcome to my eyrie. Step in, dear friend.”

Dickens had jumped up from his small writing table and heartily shaken my hand as I’d stopped at the open door of his upstairs room. I confess that I had not been sure how he would greet me after the relative silence and separation of the past two months. His warmth surprised me and made me feel all that much more the traitor and spy.

“I am just jotting down revisions to the last line or two of this year’s Christmas story,” he said with enthusiasm. “A thing called ‘Cheap Jack’ that I assure you, my dear Wilkie, will be a great hit with the readers. Very popular, is my prediction. Perhaps my best since ‘The Bells.’ The idea occurred to me in France. I shall finish in a minute and then I am yours for the afternoon and evening, my friend.”

“By all means,” I said and stepped back as Dickens returned to his table and quill, striking out with great flourishes and writing between the lines and in the margins. He reminded me of an energetic conductor in front of an attentive and obedient orchestra of words. I could almost hear the notes as his quill rose, swung, dipped, scratched, lifted, and swept down again.

I admired the view from Dickens’s “eyrie” and had to admit that it was wonderful. The chalet, standing between two tall, shading cedars that stirred now in the wind, had many windows that looked out over fields of ripened corn, forests, and more fields, and even allowed glimpses of the Thames, with the white movement of sails there. From the roof of Gad’s Hill Place across the road, I knew, one could easily see London in the distance, but from the chalet the view was more bucolic, with the distant river, a glimpse of the spire of Rochester Cathedral, and the yellowing and rustling fields of corn. Traffic was light today on the Rochester Road. Dickens had outfitted his eyrie with a bright brass telescope on a wooden tripod, and I could imagine him pondering the moon at night and the ladies in their yachts on the Thames on warm summer days. Where there were no windows, there were mirrors. I counted five mirrors. Dickens loved mirrors. Every bedroom in his Tavistock House and now at Gad’s Hill Place had always sported multiple mirrors and there were mirrors in hallways and foyers and a large one in his study. The effect up here in his chalet was to make one feel rather as if he were standing on an open platform—a child’s house in a tall tree, minus all walls—with sunlight and blue sky and foliage and yellow fields and far views reflected everywhere. The breezes that passed freely through the open windows carried the scent of foliage and flowers, of the fields beyond, of the smoke from someone burning leaves or weeds from a field nearby, and even the salt tang smell of the sea.

I could not help but think how totally opposite this world of Charles Dickens was from our night expedition to Opium Sal’s den and then the unmitigated nightmare of Undertown. All of that darkness seemed to be fading like the bad dream it had been. The daylight and clean scent of this world were real—as glowing and pulsing as it seemed through the pulse of my medicinal laudanum. I could not see how that reeking darkness of the catacombs and sewers, nor even the slums above, could co-exist with this clean reality.

“There,” cried Dickens. “Done. For now.” He blotted his last page and set it with others in a leather portfolio. He rose and took his favourite blackthorn walking stick from its place in a corner. “I’ve not had my walk today. Shall we away, my dear Wilkie?”

“By all means,” I said again, although with less conviction this time.

He surveyed me with eyes at once analytical, amused, and mocking. “I thought perhaps a quick trek past Cobham Wood and then to Chalk and Gravesend and home again.”

“Ah,” I said. That would be twelve hard miles. “Ah,” I said again and nodded. “But what about your guests? And children? Is this not the hour you usually play with them, amuse them, show the guests the stables?”

Dickens’s smile was mischievous. “Is there another invalid in the family today, my dear Wilkie?”

I knew that by “family” he meant the Collins family. It seemed he would never cease the harping on my younger brother’s presumed illness.

“A minor disposition,” I said brusquely. “The rheumatical gout which pursues me from time to time, as you know, my dear Dickens. It chooses to be a bit difficult today. A shorter romp would suit me.” A slow walk next door to the Sir John Falstaff Inn would have suited me perfectly was the message I intended to send.

“But your gout is not in your legs, is this not true, my dear Wilkie?”

“That is largely true,” I said, unwilling to tell him that this gout hurt every part of my person when it spread as it had threatened to that morning. Without the early double doses of laudanum, I would have been in bed. “It tends to afflict my eyes and head the most.”

“Very well,” sighed Dickens. “I had hoped for a walking partner today—the Forsters are my guests this weekend and John has given up all exertion since coming into his wife’s fortune, as I am sure you know—but we shall make a short outing of it, you and I, just over to Chatham and Fort Pitt, through Cooling Marsh and home. I shall make up the difference this evening, alone.”

I nodded, although still without enthusiasm. That would be six miles and more with Dickens’s unrelenting pace of four miles per hour exactly. My head and joints throbbed in anticipation.

IT WAS NOT as bad as I had feared. The afternoon was so pleasant, the air so cool, the scents so invigorating, that I kept up with Dickens as he led the way down the road to a lane, from lane to path, from path to grassy ruts along a canal, from the canal tow path through autumn fields of grain—taking care never to tread on a farmer’s crop—and from the field to shady forest trail, then back to the roadside again and onward.

During the first half hour of silent walking—or rather, my silent walking, since Dickens chatted amiably the whole way, discussing Forster’s increased Podsnapperies, the problems within the Guild, details of his son Alfred’s business ineptitude and his daughter Mary’s diminishing prospects for marriage, grousings about the Negro uprising in Jamaica that still rankled him, observations on his youngest son Plorn’s apparent laziness and lack of intellectual depth—I spent my time nodding and thinking of how to trick the information desired by Inspector Field out of Charles Dickens.

Finally I surrendered that approach and said, “Inspector Field came to visit me yesterday.”

“Oh, yes,” Dickens said casually, his blackthorn rising and falling with his stride. “I assumed that to be the case.”

“You’re not surprised?”

“Hardly, my dear Wilkie. The wretched man was here at Gad’s Hill on Thursday. I assumed that you would be his next victim. Did he threaten you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“With what, may I ask? He was quite clumsy and heavy-handed with his minor attempts to blackmail me.”

“He threatened me with public exposure of… my domestic situation.” The only thing I was secure about at the moment was that Dickens did not know—could not have known—about the existence of Miss Martha R—. Inspector Field obviously knew, but it would not have been in his interest to tell the Inimitable.

Dickens laughed easily. “Threatened to tell the world about your Landlord and Butler, eh? Much as I had guessed, Wilkie. Much as I had guessed. Mr Field is a bully but—as is true of so many bully boys—not the ripest grape on the vine. How little he knows of your free spirit and disregard for society’s opinions if he thinks that such a revelation would cause you to turn traitor. All of your friends know that you have skeletons in your closet—two delightful and witty female skeletons, to be precise—and none of your friends gives a fig for the fact.”

“Yes,” I said. “But why is he so eager to have this information on Drood? He acts as if his life depends upon it.”

We passed from the road to a path that wound its way through and around Cooling Marsh.

“In a very real sense, our Mr Field’s life does depend on discovering whether Mr Drood is real and where to find him if he is,” said Dickens. “And you notice that I refer to our blackmailing friend as Mr Field, not Inspector Field.”

“Yes,” I said as we stepped gingerly from stone to stone in an especially swampy part of the path. “Field mentioned to me that his title was honourary now that he does his detective work in private life.”

“A self-appointed honour that the Detective Bureau of Scotland Yard and of the Metropolitan Police do not appreciate, my dear Wilkie. I’ve kept some tabs on our Mr Field since I—if you forgive the immodesty—immortalised him as Inspector Bucket in Bleak House or even earlier, in my admiring little essay about him, “On Duty With Inspector Field,” in our Household Words in 1851. He left his official capacity shortly after that, you know… 1853, I do believe.”

“But you admired him then,” I said. “At least enough to create a fascinating character out of him.”

Dickens laughed again as we turned back around the marsh towards distant Gad’s Hill. “Oh, I admire many people for their potential as characters, my dear Wilkie, yourself not excluded. How else could I have suffered the Podsnapperies of Forster all these years? But there has always been the pungent scent of the schoolhouse bully hovering about our dear Mr Field, and bullies always tend to overreach and be called to task.”

“You’re saying that he is out of favour with Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police,” I said.

“Quite so, Wilkie. Did you happen to follow the notorious Palmer poisoning case some time ago… my, a decade ago now. How time, to coin a phrase, does fly. At any rate, did you follow that in the papers or at the Club?”

“No. I can’t say that I did.”

“No matter,” said Dickens. “Let us just say that our retired Inspector Field was involved with the sensational murder case, was quite popular with the press, and insisted on using the title Inspector Field. In truth, Wilkie, I believe our corpulently digited friend actively encouraged the press and populace to believe that he was still affiliated with the Metropolitan Police. And his successors there, the real police detectives and inspectors, did not appreciate it, Wilkie. Not one small smattering did they appreciate it. So they stopped his pension.”

I stopped in my tracks. “His pension?” I cried. “His bloody pension? The man interrogates you and tries to blackmail me, all for a… bloody… pension?”

Dickens obviously was irked to be thrown off his walking rhythm, but he stopped, hacked at some weeds with his blackthorn, and actually smiled. “Yes, for his pension. Our fauxinspector acquaintance has his Private Enquiry Bureau and makes some money through it—indeed, I paid a pretty penny for our hulking friend Hatchery’s one night of effort on our behalf—but you may remember me once telling you, Wilkie, how… avaricious is not too strong a word, I think… avaricious this former policeman named Field was, is, and ever shall be. He cannot abide not receiving his pension. I do believe he would murder to get it back.”

I blinked at that. “But why Drood?” I asked at last. “What will it gain him if he finds this phantom Drood?”

“It may gain him his pension,” said Dickens as we resumed our walk. “Or so he thinks. At this very moment, Home Secretary Sir George Grey is reviewing Field’s suspension of payments, after the long growling from Field’s solicitor—not a cheap undertaking that, I can assure you! — and I am quite sure that Mr Field, in his aged delusions…”

I did not interrupt here to remind him that Charles Frederick Field was only some seven years older than Dickens himself.

“… has concocted a deus ex machina plot in his own mind in which, when he tracks down and captures this criminal mastermind Drood… a spectral figure who evaded Chief Inspector Field some twenty years ago… the Home Secretary and Scotland Yard Detective Bureau and all of his former friends and indifferent successors at the Metropolitan Police shall not only forgive him, and reinstate his pension, but be forced to crown him with laurel leaves and carry him to Waterloo Station on their burly shoulders.”

“And is he a criminal mastermind?” I asked softly. “This Drood? Field told me last night that Drood murdered some three hundred persons over the years…”

Dickens glanced at me again. I noticed that the wrinkles and furrows in his face had grown deeper over the summer. “Do you believe that figure to be reliable, my dear Wilkie?”

“I… have no idea,” I said. “It does sound preposterous, I admit. I do not remember hearing of any three hundred unsolved murders, in Whitechapel or anywhere else. But that was an uncanny place we went to, Dickens. Uncanny. And you never told me what occurred after you left me in that absurd boat.”

“No, I have not,” said Dickens. “And I promised you that night that I would tell you someday soon, my friend. And two months have passed. I am sorry for that delay.”

“The delay is no matter,” I said. The headache was returning even as the laudanum glow around everything faded. “But I would like to know what occurred that night. I would like to know what you have learned about this Drood we spent the night chasing.”

Dickens glanced at me again. “And I would have no concern about our mutual friend Field blackmailing this information out of you?”

I stopped. “Dickens!”

He did not stop with me, but he walked backwards, twirling his blackthorn and smiling. “I am joking, my dear Wilkie. Joking. Come… catch up to me; don’t falter our pace at this advanced point. Catch up to me and walk alongside and pray quiet your wheezing to a mere bellows roar and I shall tell you all about that night after I left you on the brick quay in the sewers beneath the catacombs in Undertown.”