“Even after killing the goat that bore his English name?” I said.
Dickens did not answer.
I said, “Inspector Field tells me that your Mr Drood—healer, master of Magnetic science, Christ figure, and secret mystic—has killed more than three hundred people in the past twenty years.”
I waited for the laughter.
Dickens did not change expression. He was still studying me. He said, “Do you believe that the man I spoke to has killed three hundred people, Wilkie?”
I held his gaze and returned its noncommital blankness. “Perhaps he mesmerises his minions and sends them out to do the dirty work, Charles.”
Now he did smile. “I am certain that you are aware, my dear friend, through the teachings of Professor John Elliotson if not through my own occasional writings on the topic, that a subject under the influence of mesmeric slumber or mesmeric trance can do nothing that would violate his or her morals or principles if that subject were fully conscious.”
“Then perhaps Drood mesmerised killers and cutthroats to go out and do the killings that Inspector Field described,” I said.
“If they were already killers and cutthroats, my dear Wilkie,” Dickens said softly, “he would not have had to mesmerise them, would he? He simply could have paid them in gold.”
“Perhaps he did,” I said. The absurdity of our conversation had reached some point where it was now unsustainable. I looked around at the grassy field shimmering in the afternoon autumn light. I could actually see Dickens’s chalet and the mansard roof of his Gad’s Hill Place home through the trees.
I put my hand on the Inimitable’s shoulder before he could begin walking again. “Is increasing your knowledge and skill in mesmerism the reason you disappear into London at least one night a week?” I asked.
“Ah, so there is a spy in my family circle. One with frequent digestion problems, might I guess?”
“No, it is not my brother, Charles,” I said a trifle sharply. “Charles Collins is a man who keeps confidences and is fiercely loyal to you, Dickens. And he will someday be the father of your grandchildren. You should hold him in higher esteem.”
Something flickered across the writer’s face then. It was not quite a shadow—perhaps an instant of revulsion, although whether it was at the thought of my brother married to his daughter (a union of which he never approved) or another reminder of Dickens himself being old enough to be a grandfather, I will never know.
“You are correct, Wilkie. I apologise for my jesting, although the jests have been made with familial affection. But some quiet voice tells me that there will be no grandchildren issued from the union of Katey Dickens and Charles Collins.”
Now what the deuce did he mean by that? Before we came to blows or resumed walking in silence again, I said, “It was Katey who told me about your weekly trips to the city. She and Georgina and your son Charles are worried about you. They know that the accident still haunts and afflicts you. Now they fear that I have introduced you to some foul abomination in the fleshpots of London to which you are, if you will pardon the expression, magnetically drawn at least one full night a week.”
Dickens threw his head back and laughed.
“Come, Wilkie. If you cannot stay for the delectable dinner Georgina has planned, at least you must stay long enough to enjoy a cigar with me as we look in on the stables and watch the children and John Forster at play on the lawn. Then I’ll have little Plorn take you by cart to the station for the early-evening express.”
THE DOGS RUSHED us as we came up the drive.
Dickens almost always kept dogs chained near the gate, since too many surly vagabonds and unkempt vagrants exercised the habit of wandering off Dover Road to ask for unmerited handouts at the back or front door of Gad’s Hill Place. First to welcome us this afternoon was Mrs Bouncer, Mary’s tiny little Pomeranian, for whom Dickens adopted a special, childish, almost squeaky voice for all his communications. A second later bounded up Linda, the ambling, bouncing, rolling Saint Bernard who always seemed to be in a perpetual tumbling match with the great mastiff named Turk. Now these three entered into an absolute ecstasy of leaping and licking and tail-wagging at the greeting of their master, who—I freely admit—did have an extraordinary way with animals. As with so many people, dogs and horses seemed to understand that Charles Dickens was the Inimitable and needed to be revered as such.
As I was trying to pat the Saint Bernard and pet the frolicking mastiff and avoid the leaping little Pomeranian, all of whom kept abandoning me to return to Dickens in their transports of delight, a new dog—one unknown to me, a large Irish bloodhound—came broiling around the curve of the hedge and ran at me, growling and snarling as if it were going to rip my throat out. I confess that I raised my stick and took several steps backwards down the drive.
“Stop, Sultan!” shouted Dickens, and the attacking dog first froze a mere six paces from me and then crouched in pure canine guilt and submission as his master chided him in his equally pure dog-chiding voice. Then Dickens scratched behind the miscreant’s ears.
I stepped closer, and the bloodhound growled and showed his fangs again. Dickens ceased scratching. Sultan showed guilt, shrank lower into the drive’s gravel, and set his muzzle against Dickens’s boots.
“I don’t know this dog,” I said.
Dickens shook his head. “Percy Fitzgerald made a gift of Sultan to me only a few weeks ago. I confess that at times the dog reminds me of you, Wilkie.”
“How is that?”
“First of all, he is absolutely fearless,” said Dickens. “Secondly, he is absolutely loyal… he obeys only me but he obeys me completely. Thirdly, he is contemptuous of all public opinion as regards his behaviour; he hates soldiers and attacks them on sight; he hates policemen and has been known to chase them down the highway; and he hates all others of his kind.”
“I do not hate all others of my kind,” I said softly. “And I have never attacked a soldier or chased a policeman.”
Dickens did not appear to be listening as he knelt to pat Sultan’s neck, the other three dogs leaping and roiling around him in spasms of jealousy. “Sultan has swallowed Mary’s Mrs Bouncer Pomeranian only once and did have the good grace to spit her out when commanded to, but all of the kittens in the neighbourhood—especially the new batch born to the pussy who lives in the shed behind the Falstaff Inn—have mysteriously gone missing since Sultan arrived.”
Sultan eyed me with an eager gaze clearly showing his willingness to eat me if the opportunity presented itself.
“And despite his loyalty, companionship, courage, and amusing traits,” concluded Dickens, “I fear that our friend Sultan may have to be put down someday and that I shall be the one who has to do it.”
I TOOK THE train back to London, but rather than walk home to Melcombe Place, I took a cab to 33 Bolsover Street. There Miss Martha R——, who was registered with the landlord there as Mrs Martha Dawson, met me at the rear and separate door to her small apartment that consisted of a tiny sleeping room and a slightly larger sitting room with rudimentary cooking facilities. I was arriving hours later than I had promised, but she had been listening for my step on the stairs.
“I made chops and kept the supper warm,” she said as she closed the door behind me. “If you want to eat now. Or I could re-warm them later.”
“Yes,” I said. “Re-warm them later.”
Now, Dear Reader from my distant future, I can almost—not quite, but almost—imagine a time such as yours when memoirists or even novelists do not draw a discreet curtain over the personal events that might follow here, the, let us say, intimate moments between a man and a woman. I hope your age is not so debauched that you speak and write without restraint about such totally private moments, but if you search for such shameless exposures here, you shall be disappointed.
I can say that if you were to somehow see a photograph of Miss Martha R——, you might not be kind enough to see the beauty I find in her every time I am near her. To th
e mere eye, or camera lens (and Martha told me that she had a photograph taken of her, paid for by her parents, when she turned nineteen more than a year ago), Martha R—— is a short, somewhat stern-looking woman with a narrow face, almost Negroid lips, severely parted straight hair (to the point she seems bald along the crown of her head), deep-set eyes, and a nose and complexion that might have had her in the fields picking cotton in the American South.
There is nothing in a photograph of Martha R—— that could show her energy and eagerness and sensuality and physical generosity and adventurousness. Many women—I live with one most of the time—can simulate and broadcast physical sensuality to men in public, can dress for it and paint themselves for it and bat their eyelashes for it, even while they feel little or none of it. I believe they do so out of sheer habit. A few women, such as young Martha R——, sincerely embody such a passionate nature. Finding a woman like that amidst the herd of half-feeling, half-caring, half-responding females in our society of 1860s England was not so much like finding a diamond in the rough as it was like finding a warm, responsive body amidst the cold, dead forms on slabs in the Paris Morgue that Dickens had so enjoyed taking me to.
SOME HOURS LATER, at the little table she cleared off for our meals, by candlelight, we ate the dried chops—Martha was not yet a good cook and would never become one—and moved the cold and desiccated vegetables around with our forks. Martha had somehow chosen and paid for a bottle of wine. It was quite as terrible as the food.
I took her hand.
“My dear,” I said, “tomorrow you must pack your clothes in the early morning and take the eleven fifteen train to Yarmouth. There you must get your old job at the hotel back or, failing that, obtain a similar one. No later than tomorrow night you must visit your parents and brother in Winterton and tell them you are well and happy—that you used your savings for a little holiday in Brighton.”
To her credit, Martha did not whimper or simper. But she bit at her lip as she said, “Mr Collins, my love, have I done something to offend you? Is it the dinner?”
I laughed despite my fatigue and pain from the rising rheumatical gout in my eyes and limbs. “No, no, my dear. It’s simply that there’s a detective sniffing around and we must not give him reason to blackmail me—or you or your family, my dear. We must part for a short time until he tires of this game.”
“A policeman!” said Martha. She was imperturbable, but she was still a serving-class provincial. The police, especially London police, held terror for her kind.
I smiled again to allay her fears. “Not at all. No longer a policeman, Martha my dear. Merely a self-employed detective of the sordid sort hired by ageing lords to follow their young wives when they go out to do charity work. Nothing to worry about.”
“But must we part?” She looked around the room and I could tell that she was consigning the drab furniture and dreary prints on the walls to memory as surely as would some member of a royal family about to be banished from her ancestral castle.
“Only for a short time,” I said again, patting her hand. “I will deal with this detective and then we will make our plans anew. In fact, this very suite of rooms shall continue being let in the name of Mrs Dawson, in the certainty of your returning soon. Would you like that?”
“I should like that very much, Mr… Dawson. Can you spend the night tonight? This last night for a while?”
“Not tonight, my dearest. The gout is heavy on me tonight. I need to get home to take my medicine.”
“Oh, I wish you would leave a bottle of your medicine here, my love, so that it could alleviate your pain while I alleviate your other tensions and anxieties!” She squeezed my hand hard enough to send pain up my aching arm. There were tears in her eyes now, and I knew that they were for me and not due to her exile. Martha R—— had a sympathetic soul.
“The eleven fifteen train,” I said, setting bills and coins totalling six pounds on the top of the dresser as I rose and pulled on my coat. “Make sure that you leave nothing behind here, my dearest. Travel safely and I shall be in contact with you soon.”
FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD Harriet was asleep in her room, but Caroline was still awake when I arrived home at 9 Melcombe Place.
“Are you hungry?” she asked. “We had veal and I kept some for you.”
“No, only some wine, perhaps,” I said. “I’ve had the worst time with the gout today.” I went to the kitchen, unlocked my private cupboard with the key from my waistcoat, drank down three glasses of laudanum, and returned to Caroline in the dining room, where she had filled two glasses with a good Madeira. The taste of Martha’s wretched wine was still on my mouth and I sought to banish it.
“How was your day with Dickens?” she asked. “I did not expect you to stay so late.”
“You know how insistent he can be when he invites one to dinner,” I said. “He will not take no as an answer.”
“I do not really know that, actually,” said Caroline. “All of my meals with Mr Dickens have been with you and either at our home or in a private room at a restaurant. He has never insisted to me that I stay late at his table.”
I did not dispute the fact. I could feel the laudanum beginning to work on the pulsating pain of my terrible headache. The medicine gave me the odd feeling of bobbing up and down, as if the dining room table and chair were a small boat caught in the wake of a larger ship.
“Did you have a pleasant day of conversation with him?” pressed Caroline. She was wearing a red silk dressing gown a bit too flamboyant to be of the highest taste. The embroidered gold flowers on it seemed to throb and pulse in my vision.
I said, “I believe that Dickens threatened to kill me this afternoon if I did not follow his commands. To put me down like a disobedient dog.”
“Wilkie!” Her horror was real and her face went white in the low lamplight.
I forced a laugh. “Never mind, my dearest. Nothing of the sort actually happened, of course. Just another example of Wilkie Collins’s penchant for hyperbole. We had a delightful walk and chat this afternoon and more enjoyable conversation over the long dinner and brandy and cigars afterwards. John Forster and his new bride were there.”
“Oh, that bore.”
“Yes.” I removed my glasses and rubbed my temples. “I should go to bed.”
“Poor darling,” said Caroline. “Would it help to have your muscles rubbed?”
“Yes,” I said. “I believe it would.”
I do not know where Caroline G—— learned the art of muscular massage. I have never asked. As is true of so much of her life before I met her ten years earlier, that remains a mystery.
But the pleasure and relaxation her hands gave me were no mystery.
Some half an hour later in my bedroom, when she was finished, she whispered, “Shall I stay tonight, my darling?”
“Not tonight, my love. The gout is still very much with me—as pleasure ebbs, the pain flows back in, as you know—and I have serious work to do early tomorrow.”
Caroline nodded, kissed me on the cheek, took the candle lamp on the dresser, and went downstairs.
I considered writing then, working through the night as I had so often done on The Woman in White and earlier books, but a subtle noise from the first-floor landing beyond my bedroom door convinced me to stay where I was. The woman with green skin and tusk-teeth was growing more bold. For months after we moved here she had contained her prowlings to the steep and dark servants’ stairway, but now I frequently heard her bare feet on the rug and wood of the landing after midnight.
Or the noise could have come from my study. That would be worse, to go in there in the dark and see him writing in my place in the moonlight.
I stayed in my bedroom and crossed to the window, quietly parting the drapes.
Near the lamp post on the corner loitered a boy in rags. He was sitting with his back against a dustbin, possibly sleeping. Or possibly looking up towards my window. His eyes were in shadow.
I closed the drapes and went ba
ck to bed. Sometimes the laudanum keeps me awake all night; at other times, it carries me away to powerful dreams.
I was drifting off to sleep, banishing Charles Dickens and his phantom Drood from my thoughts, when my nostrils were filled with a cloying, almost sickening scent—rotting meat, perhaps—and images of scarlet geraniums, bundles and heaps and funeral-thick towers of scarlet geraniums, pulsed behind my eyelids like spurtings of blood.
“My God,” I said aloud, sitting up in the dark, filled with a certainty so absolute as to be a form of clairvoyance. “Charles Dickens is going to murder Edmond Dickenson.”
CHAPTER TEN
After making notes of my conversation with Dickens the next morning, I breakfasted late and alone at my club. I needed time to think.
Dickens had pressed me several times the preceding day on whether I believed him, but the truth is, I did not. At least not fully. I was not certain that he ever met with anyone named Drood down there in the sewers and labyrinths under London. I had seen the rowboat-gondola and its two odd men, Venus and Mercury, Dickens had called them, so that was something certain to begin with.
Or had I seen them? I remembered the boat arriving and Dickens boarding and disappearing around the bend with the masked figure poling near the bow and the other masked figure steering with the stern sweep… or did I? I had been exhausted and frightened and yet also sleepy. I had taken extra doses of my medicine before joining Dickens that night and then drunk more wine than I usually did at dinner. The entire experience of that evening, even before we went down through a crypt to find the Chinese Lazaree opium lord, all seemed dreamlike and unreal.
But what about Dickens’s biographical tale of Mr Drood?
What about it? Charles Dickens’s imagination could furnish a thousand such tales with only seconds of notice. In fact, the story of Drood’s childhood, English father, murdered Mohammadan mother… it all sounded contrived to a level far below Charles Dickens’s creative powers.