But in that autumn of 1866, I could hear the Other Wilkie breathing and occasionally shuffling his feet outside my closed study doors even in daylight. I would tip-toe to those doors—hoping that it might be a servant, or Caroline or Carrie playing a prank on me—and throw open a door, only—and always—to see nothing in the hallway. But—always—I could hear the echo of shoes my own size thudding down the dark servants’ stairway on which also waited the Woman with Green Skin.
I knew then that it would be just a matter of time before the Other Wilkie would appear in the study with me during the daytime. Thus I began carrying my notes and writing material to the Athenaeum Club, where I would find a comfortable leather chair and table near a tall window and work in peace.
The problem was, I had little to work on. For the first time in some years at least, since Charles Dickens had first hired me on the staff to write for Household Words ten years earlier (some five years after I had met him), ideas were not coalescing into plots. I had jotted down notes after my rambling discussion with Dickens about the supernatural-adventure novel I was thinking of calling The Serpent’s Eye, but except for copying out some relevant entries on jewels from India from my club’s library edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica—the eighth edition, 1855—I had made no progress. I went back to my earlier idea of writing about a former police detective now given to private enquiries—Inspector Field in the form of my detective Sergeant Cuff—but my understandable reluctance to spend more time with Field than I had to, combined with an aversion to the entire insidious idea of a detective’s intrusive investigations, retarded that research as well.
Part of me simply was in no mood to write. I much preferred Thursday nights, with the escorted trip to St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery and the hours upon hours of ecstasy and soaring insight that followed. The great frustration was that this godlike insight could never be put down on paper—by anyone, no matter how gifted the wordwright, not even, I was certain during my Thursday-night / Friday-morning flights, by Shakespeare or Keats, should either genius reincarnate in a London opium den without warning. Certainly not by so timid a man and unimaginative a writer as Charles Dickens. Each week I could see in King Lazaree’s dark-eyed look his absolute knowledge of both my growing divinity and growing frustration at not being able to share my new knowledge via the dead bulk of inert letters being set down and pushed around on a white page like so many inky-carapaced and quill-prodded beetles. These clumsy written symbols were merely shorthand, I now understood, for the plaintive sounds that lonely apes make and have been making since the Earth and her sister Moon were young.
Everything else whirling around me that late autumn of 1866 seemed too absurd to be of consequence: the ongoing nonsense of Drood or not-Drood; the endless chess game for power between Inspector Field, the Inimitable, and me; the sweet allurings and caterwaulings of the women in my life; my inability to find an entrance into the cave under the paper for my next book; my unspoken and definitely unsettled competition with Charles Dickens…
But all that was to change when, one Friday morning in late November, after a long, sweet night in King Lazaree’s tomb, I returned home with my suit still reeking of opium to find Dickens in the sitting room with Caroline. Her eyes were closed, her head was tilted back, and there was a look of something like uncommonly rare rapture on her face. Dickens was making mesmeric passes around and above her head, pausing only to touch her temples and to whisper to her.
Before I could speak, both heads turned in my direction, Caroline opened her eyes, and Dickens leapt to his feet and cried, “My dear Wilkie! Just the man I came to fetch. We must leave for the railway station this very minute. There is something astounding I have to show you in Rochester and someone there I want you to meet.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ineed to murder someone,” said Dickens.
I nodded but said nothing. The train to Rochester had passed Gad’s Hill already.
“I am quite sure I need to murder someone,” said Dickens. “It is the one thing missing from the readings. Every other emotion is included in the greater list of excerpts I have prepared for this upcoming tour. All but… murder.” He leaned on his stick and looked at me. “What do you think, my dear Wilkie? A modified and intensified version of Bill Sikes murdering Nancy perhaps?”
“Why not?” I said.
“Why not indeed,” chuckled Dickens, patting his jacket. “It is only a human life.”
He was garrulous in part because he had thrice imbibed of brandy during the ride. Each time the carriage shook or jolted, Dickens would either grasp the seat ahead of him with a death-grip or feel in the pocket of his coat for the small flask.
When I had confronted Dickens about the scene I had come upon of him mesmerising Caroline, he’d laughed and explained that my dearest had been upset and telling him of my pain from rheumatical gout, my increasing difficulty in getting to sleep, and what she saw as my growing dependency upon laudanum. Dickens had assured her that magnetic influence would whisk me off to slumber without any of the harmful side-effects of laudanum, and he had been in the process of teaching her the art when I’d entered.
“She was an adept pupil,” he said now as the train rumbled and jolted on towards Rochester, passing the marshes around which Dickens and I had walked more than a few times. “You must allow her to attempt the mesmeric influence tonight. I guarantee it will allow you to sleep without opiate dreams or morning fatigue.”
I made a noncommittal noise. In truth, I was close to falling asleep to the rocking of the railway carriage and the metronomic sound of its wheels on rails. It had been a long night in King Lazaree’s den and I could not say that I had actually slept. Luckily, although the November day was unusually pleasant, there had been a brisk wind and most of the telltale scent of the pipe had been removed from my clothing during our fast walk to the station.
“You say we’re meeting someone in Rochester?” I asked.
“Precisely,” said Dickens, clasping both hands on the brass head of his cane. “Two ladies. An old friend for me and a lady companion for you, my dear Wilkie. We are having a luncheon there in a splendid place. I understand that the service is exemplary.”
The splendid place with exemplary service, as it turned out, was the graveyard behind the huge old heap of grey stone that was Rochester Cathedral. The two ladies were Dickens’s not-very-secret love, Ellen Ternan, and Miss Ternan’s mother. Logic dictated that Mrs Ternan was to be my “lady companion” for this outing.
As I stood there amidst the headstones while nodding, bowing, and making small talk with the two women in the weak November afternoon sunlight, I seriously considered the possibility that Dickens had lost his mind.
But no, the answer to Charles Dickens’s behaviour was never that simple. I realised as the four of us strolled into the graveyard—Mrs Ternan and Ellen had explained that they were visiting Ellen’s uncle in Rochester and could only stay a short while—that this meeting made sense from Dickens’s tortured, twisted, self-exculpating way of looking at the world. His liaison with Ellen Ternan was something he was hiding from almost everyone in the world—my brother, Charles, had told me that Dickens had brought his daughters and Georgina somewhat further into the conspiracy after Mamie had stumbled across her father walking with Miss Ternan in London one Sunday, and Inspector Field had informed me that Ellen had visited Gad’s Hill Place on several occasions—but Dickens obviously felt that I was harmless to his intrigues. Whom would I tell? Not only did Dickens know from experience that I would keep the confidence, but he also knew that because of my own domestic arrangement (which had become even more complicated in the past week as Martha R—— had returned to London for an extended visit), I was such a social outcast that I could never publicly look down on Dickens’s own arrangements, in print or through gossip.
Perhaps Mrs Ternan knew of my situation with Caroline G——, for the old lady seemed very cool during our picnic. The former actress (I understood that both she and El
len were now giving elocution lessons from their new home in Slough that Dickens paid for) obviously had accumulated more pretensions of gentility since I had gotten to know the two women during and after the performances of The Frozen Deep. Mrs Ternan carried her acquired gentility with her like an ageing sloop with a hull heavy with barnacles.
The four of us walked slowly through the graveyard until Dickens had found a flat gravestone to his liking. This long marble block was surrounded on either side by lower flat stones. Dickens disappeared behind a nearby stone wall—one that was about five feet high and beyond which stood the rented carriage (with a liveried servant on the box)— we could see only the Inimitable’s head as he conferred with the driver and as both then repaired to the boot of the carriage. Then Dickens returned with four cushions, set them on the flat gravestones on either side of the longest one, and bade us to sit.
We did so. Ellen and Mrs Ternan were obviously disconcerted by this unusual—not to say ghoulish—introduction of cushioned comfort to such surroundings. A tall tree to the west of us drew the ink-scrabble shadows of its bare branches across us and our chosen gravestones. None of us could manage any small talk as Dickens hurried to the gate and trotted around behind the wall to confer with his servant again.
In a flash, Dickens was back, carrying one long chequered cloth— which he proceeded to drape across the longest gravestone, transforming it into a caricature of a domestic dinner table—and with another white napkin draped over his free arm in the manner of self-important waiters since Adam’s day. A few seconds later he was out of sight and—with little help from his man—had laid a row of plates atop the wall. I must say that it all felt very familiar—rather as if we were at a Parisian sidewalk dining establishment. Then Dickens bustled back into sight, napkin still in place, the very image of a first-class headwaiter, and one by one he served each of us, beginning, of course, with the ladies.
Out of a large hamper set atop the wall, Dickens magically produced fried sole and whiting with shrimp sauce, crackers and pâté, a brace of well-grilled birds which I first thought were squab but which I soon realised were delightful little pheasants (to which Waiter Dickens applied the sauce with a flourish), then ladles full of roast haunch of mutton with stewed onions and browned potatoes, all followed by pound puddings. Along with the food came a chilled white wine—which Dickens, now turned sommelier, uncorked and poured with much ado while awaiting our judgement with batting eyes and pursed lips—and then a large bottle of champagne still in its bucket of ice.
Dickens was having such fun playing waiter and wine steward that he had little time to eat. By the time he had produced the pound puddings—offering a rich sauce, which the ladies declined but which I accepted at once—his face was flushed and he was perspiring despite the November afternoon’s slow cooling into evening.
At rare times in one’s life, Dear Reader, even the most gentle person is given a tool—a weapon, actually—without wishing it, sometimes having it thrust into his hand, by which he can bring down an entire edifice with a single sentence. Such was my situation during our strange repast in the Rochester graveyard, for I had recognised much of the luncheon’s menu from a book popular some fifteen years earlier. The book was titled What Shall We Have for Dinner? and the recipes therein had been accumulated, according to the publishers, by a certain pseudonymous Lady Maria Clutterbuck.
Oh, how the Ternan ladies, miss and missus, now gay from the wine and champagne, would have sobered instantly to learn that their delightful (if ghoulish) graveyard luncheon menu had been planned by none other than Catherine Dickens, the rejected and exiled wife. Although Catherine had been completely abandoned (my brother, Charley, told me that she had written Dickens an imploring letter about their son only a month earlier, requesting a conversation in person about Plorn’s problems, to which Dickens refused even to pen a reply, instructing Georgina to send a cold, curt note in his stead), but quite obviously her incarnation as Lady Clutterbuck (Catherine had not yet become so heavy when she’d collected and published the menus in 1851) was still very welcome at Gad’s Hill. Or at least her recipes were.
During the meal and the inconsequential conversation, I studied Ellen Ternan even as she ignored me. It had been eight years since I had spent any time in her presence. The years had not enhanced her beauty. She had been youthfully attractive as an eighteen-year-old ingenue but now qualified only as “handsome.” She was the kind of woman with sad, soulful eyes (which did little for me, since such sad eyes usually hinted at a poetic character given to melancholy and a rigidly defended virginity), descending brows, a long nose, and a wide, thin-lipped mouth. (I prefer just the opposite in my young women—tiny noses and full lips, the latter preferably curved upward in an inviting smile.) Ellen had a strong chin, but where that edifice had suggested a certain perky strength in her youth, it now implied only the prideful stubbornness of a woman beyond her mid-twenties who had not yet married. Her hair was attractive, not terribly long and receding in artfully sculpted waves from a high, clear forehead, but the hairdo exposed ears that were much too large for my taste. Her earrings, which hung down like three bullseye lanterns, hinted of the underlying vulgarity of her former profession. Her carefully elocuted but somehow terminally empty sentences suggested stilted conversation arising from a simple lack of education. Her lovely vowels and precise, theatrically honed cadences could not conceal an underlying ignorance that should have instantly disqualified this ageing ingenue from being the consort of England’s most honoured writer. Nor did I perceive from her the slightest hint of a hidden passionate nature that could have made up for her obvious shortcomings… and my Wilkie-antennae were highly sensitive to any such subtle sub-rosa erotic transmissions from even the most proper and upstanding ladies.
Ellen Ternan was simply a bore. She was as dull as the proverbial ditch water and soon would be a matronly bore to boot.
We finished dining as the shadows of the afternoon were falling across us and as the chill from our gravestone chairs had begun to creep up through the cushions into our posterior regions. Tired of playing waiter, Dickens wolfed the last of his pudding, gulped the last of his champagne, and summoned his servant to tidy up. Plates, glasses, utensils, serving dishes, and finally the table cloth, napkins, and cushions all disappeared into hampers and then into the back of the carriage in a blur of liveried efficiency. Only crumbs remained as evidence of our graveyard feast.
We walked the Ternans to the carriage.
“Thank you for a lovely—if unusual—afternoon,” said Ellen Ternan, taking Dickens’s cold hand in her gloved one. “It was a great pleasure seeing you again, Mr Collins,” she said to me, her cool tone and curt nod belying the warm words. Mrs Ternan clucked similar sentiments while exerting even less effort to make them sound convincing. Then the servant was up on the box again, the whip was out, and the carriage clattered away into Rochester, presumably towards Ellen Ternan’s waiting uncle.
I could tell by the concupiscent gleam in Charles Dickens’s eyes that he knew he would be seeing Ellen that very evening, most probably in the privacy of his or her secret house in Slough.
“Well, my dear Wilkie,” he said in a tone of pure satisfaction, tugging his gloves back on, “what did you think of our luncheon?”
“I thought it delightful, in a terrifically morbid way,” I said.
“Mere prelude, my friend,” chuckled Dickens. “Mere prelude. Fortifying ourselves for the serious purpose of our day… or evening. Ah, here’s our man!”
THE MAN APPROACHING US there in the gathering gloom with his shapeless hat in hand was ragged, short, dirty, and drunk. He was clothed head to foot in layers of grimy grey flannel that seemed to have been liberally dusted with flakes of stone and a frosting of lime. At his feet he had dropped a heavy bundle tied in a grimy canvas cloth. I could smell the rum fumes flowing from him—from his pores, from his clothes, most probably from his very bones. At the same time I was sniffing him, he seemed to be sniffing me; perhaps he
could smell the opium on me through his own reek. We stood and stared and sniffed each other like two dogs in an alley.
“Wilkie,” said Dickens, “I would like to introduce Mr Dradles, who goes by just Dradles, although I have heard folks in Rochester say that his first name is Granite, which I have to assume is a nickname. Dradles is a stonemason—chiefly in a gravestone, tomb, and monument way—but he is also hired by the Cathedral for rough repairs and thus is the holder of all the keys for the Cathedral tower, crypt, side doors, and other such obvious and forgotten entrances. Mr Dradles, it is my honour to introduce you in turn to Mr Wilkie Collins.”
The stooped, bewhiskered figure in the rough flannel and chipped horn buttons grunted something that might have been a greeting. I bowed and offered a more polite salutation in return.
“Dradles,” I then said brightly. “What a marvellous name! Is it real or a by-product of your profession in some way?”
“Dradles is Dradles’s name,” growled the little man. “And Dradles wonders—is Collins your real name or made up some way? And Dradles don’t remember Wilkie as being no Christian name.”
I blinked and straightened, gripping my walking stick more tightly in pure manly reflex to this hint of an insult. “I am named after Sir David Wilkie, the famous Scottish painter,” I said stiffly.
“If you say so, gov’ner,” grunted Dradles. “Although I never heard of a Scotsman who could paint a stables right, much less a church or house.”
“Wilkie’s given first name is actually William,” said Dickens. He was smiling as if amused.
“Billy Collins,” grunted Dradles. “Dradles knew a Billy Collins when Dradles was a lad. A troublesome Irish boy with no more brains nor common sense than a sheep.”
I gripped my stick harder and looked at Dickens, sending the clear message—Must I stay here and suffer this from the local village drunkard?
Before Dickens—who was still smiling—could answer, we were both distracted by a missile that flew between us, barely missing Dickens’s shoulder and my ear, and which then bounced off the russet-coloured cap that Dradles was holding in his filthy right hand. A second small stone zipped by my left shoulder and hit the stonemason squarely in the chest.