Forgetting that I still held the pistol, I pushed the door shut with a hollow thud and went back to my bedroom. Behind me, just audible through the closed study doors, the talk began again, but not in whispers now.
Did I hear soft laughter before I closed and locked my bedroom door? I shall never be sure.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
That same summer of 1867 came close to seeing Caroline, Carrie, our three servants (George, Besse, and Agnes), and me without a home. We were almost turned out onto the street.
We had known that the lease on 9 Melcombe Place was expiring, of course, but I had been confident that the terms of the lease could be and would be renewed for another year or two, at the very least, despite my frequent quarrels with the landlord there. My confidence turned out to have been misplaced. So July was given to much rushing around London trying to find a place to live.
It hardly bears saying that I was so busy with The Moonstone up through June—I had the first three numbers written to show Dickens by then—and so busy after June with another project that Dickens had brought to me, that it was Caroline who had to do the rushing about.
While she rushed, I retired to the peace of my club to complete work on the first three numbers of The Moonstone.
On the last two days of June, I spent the weekend at Gad’s Hill and read the completed chapters to Dickens, who was so delighted with what he heard that he agreed on the spot to pay about £750 so that All the Year Round would have the rights, with publication of the first number slated for 15 December. I immediately used this news to get the Harper brothers in the United States to match that amount for serial rights there.
When I returned to London on 1 July, Caroline was buzzing around my head like a hungry fly, asking me to go see various possible homes that she had found for lease or sale. I did so and all were obviously a waste of my time except for the possibility of one place on Cornwall Terrace. I chastised Caroline for looking at places outside of Marylebone, since I had grown fond of that neighbourhood. (Also, of course, I needed any new residence with Caroline and Carrie to remain within easy distance of Bolsover Street, where “Mrs Dawson” had all but taken up permanent residence.)
My quarrelsome landlord at Melcombe Place now insisted that we have the house there vacated by the first of August—a demand that I met with equanimity and was willing to ignore when the time came, but one which gave Caroline severe headaches and provoked days of even more frenzied searching and long evenings of voluble complaining.
In May, Dickens had invited me to collaborate with him on a long tale for the Christmas 1867 issue of All the Year Round and I had agreed, but only after long and sometimes almost comically bitter negotiations on payment with Wills at the magazine (Dickens, prudently, avoided all financial negotiations with me). I had demanded the very high rate of £400 for my half of the tale, although I confess to you, Dear Reader, that this sum had come to mind only because it was precisely ten times what I had been paid for my first successful submission to Dickens’s magazine—a story called “Sister Rose”—in 1855. I finally agreed to £300 not out of weakness or failure of nerve, but because I wanted to associate myself publicly with Dickens again and, in private, bind up any minor wounds that might have been inflicted over the Drood affair that month.
Dickens was, throughout that summer, in the best of spirits. I was ready to return to work on The Moonstone for the rest of July, but during my weekend at Gad’s Hill Dickens convinced me that we should begin the collaboration on the Christmas tale immediately. He had suggested a story based upon our journey across the Alps in 1853—happier times for both of us in many ways—and had contributed the title, No Thoroughfare.
Caroline was delighted to hear that I was putting The Moonstone on the shelf for a while; she was furious to hear that I would be spending much of the next several months at Gad’s Hill.
That same Monday upon my return from Gad’s Hill—with Caroline locked in her room crying and snivelling accusations about my abandoning her to find a home for us with no help from me—I received a note from Dickens, who had come into town to work at his offices at the magazine:
This is to certify that I, the undersigned, was (for the time being) a drivelling ass when I declared the Christmas Number to be composed of Thirty-two pages. And I do hereby declare that the said Christmas Number is composed of Forty-eight pages, and long and heavy pages too, as I have heretofore proved and demonstrated with the sweat of my brow.
This then was the bantering mood that Charles Dickens was in that July of 1867.
Martha R—— was in a much better mood than Caroline G—— that summer, and most days, after I finished my work at the Athenaeum Club, I found myself heading to Bolsover Street to dinner and to spend the night. Since I did keep a room at my club from time to time and since I was also frequently taking the train out to Gad’s Hill to confer with Dickens on No Thoroughfare and would sometimes spend the night there as well, Caroline asked no questions.
Then one evening, just as I was finishing an early dinner at my club, I looked up to see Inspector Charles Frederick Field striding across the dining room. Without asking permission, he pulled a chair up to my solitary table and sat down.
My first temptation was to say, “Only gentlemen are allowed in this club, I fear, Inspector,” but seeing his visage creased by a very uncommon smile, I merely dabbed a napkin at my lips, raised an eyebrow in interrogation, and waited.
“Good news, my dear Mr Collins, and I wanted to be the first to tell you.”
“You caught…” I looked around at the few other diners in the large room. “. . . the subterranean gentleman?”
“Not yet, sir. Not yet. But soon enough! No, this concerns your current problem of acquiring new lodgings.”
I had not told Inspector Field about our losing our lease, but I was far beyond being surprised at any information the man might have in his possession. I continued waiting.
“You remember the obstacle that Mrs Shernwold was presenting,” he said softly, glancing around as if we were two conspirators.
“Of course.”
“Well, sir, the obstacle is no more.”
I was truly surprised at this. “The lady has changed her mind?” I said.
“The lady,” said Inspector Field, “is dead.”
I blinked several times and leaned forward myself, whispering even more conspiratorially than had the inspector. “How?” Mrs Shernwold was one of those skinny, crotchety crones in her sixties who showed every sign of living into her skinnier, even more crotchety nineties.
“She had the good grace to fall down a flight of stairs and break her neck, Mr Collins.”
“Shocking!” I said. “Where?”
“Well, in the house at Number Ninety Gloucester Place, it is true, but on the servants’ stairway. No place you would have to be reminded of her misfortune should you move there.”
“The servants’ stairway,” I repeated, thinking of my lady of the green skin and ivory tusks. “What on earth was Mrs Shernwold doing on the servants’ stairs?”
“We shall never know,” cackled the inspector. “But the timing could not be more fortuitous, could it, Mr Collins? Nothing stands in the way of you making an offer for the house now.”
“The missionary son,” I said. “Surely he will return from Africa or wherever he is and…”
Inspector Field waved this consideration away with one calloused hand. “It turns out that the mortgage on Number Ninety Gloucester Place was never paid off by poor Mrs Shernwold. The house was never hers to give away, sir.”
“Who has the paper on it, then?”
“Lord Portman. It turns out that the house was always under the control of Lord Portman.”
“I have met Lord Portman!” I cried, loudly enough that several of the diners turned to stare. In a much lower voice, I said, “I know him, Inspector. A reasonable man. I believe that he owns much of the property there around Portman Square… on Baker Street as well as Gloucester Place
.”
“I believe that you are correct, Mr Collins,” said Field with that satisfied and strangely evil grin.
“Do you have any idea what he is asking for the place?” I said.
“I did take the liberty of enquiring,” said Inspector Field. “Lord Portman says that he would agree to a twenty-year lease on the property for eight hundred pounds. That includes those lovely stables in the mews, of course. One could sublet those to offset the rent.”
My mouth went dry and I sipped some port. £800 was a fortune—more than I had free at the time—but I also knew that upon the event of my mother’s death, Charley and I would inherit, in equal shares, some £5,000 left to her by her aunt, even though—due to the terms of our father’s will—the rest of the capital in his estate and hers would remain tied up. And the inspector was undoubtedly right about the prospect of subletting the rather handsome stables.
Inspector Field had removed two suspiciously dark cigars from his jacket pocket. “I presume your club’s policies allow smoking in the dining hall,” he said.
“Of course.”
He clipped off the ends of both cigars, handed me one, lit his, puffed happily, and held the match out to light mine. I bent forward and allowed him to do so.
Inspector Field waved over Bartles, the oldest and most dignified of the club’s waiters, and said, “My good man, be so kind as to bring me a glass of what Mr Collins is drinking. Thank you.”
As Bartles hurried away—frowning slightly at this indifferently dressed stranger’s peremptory tone—I marvelled, not for the first time, at how my destinies had become so intertwined with this strange, imperious policeman’s.
“Good cigar, don’t you think, Mr Collins?”
It tasted like something grown and harvested in a mouldering boot in a forgotten cellar. “First-rate,” I said.
The inspector’s wine arrived and the always-aware and always-conservative parsimonious part of my mind added it, reluctantly, to my already significant tab here at the club.
“To your very good turn of fortune, sir,” said Inspector Field, lifting his glass.
I lifted mine and touched crystal to crystal, thinking as I did so that perhaps Caroline would now—finally—quit complaining and caterwauling. I confess that not once then or in the coming days did I think of poor Mrs Shernwold and her ironic fate, except when I lied to Caroline about where and how the old lady had met her demise.
I BELIEVE THAT this is time, Dear Reader from my posthumous future, for me to tell you a little bit about the Other Wilkie.
I have to presume that until now you have believed this Other Wilkie to be either a figment of my imagination or a function of the laudanum I am forced to take. He is neither.
All my life I have been haunted by a second self. As a very young child I was sure that I had a twin as a playmate and often told my mother about him. As a boy, I would hear my father speak of giving drawing lessons “to Wilkie” and know that I had not been in the house at the time. It was my Doppelgänger who had benefited from those lessons. As a very young man of fifteen, encountering my first experience of physical love with an older woman, I was not surprised to look over into the shadowed corner and see the Other Wilkie—as young and bright-eyed and unbearded as myself—watching with great interest. In my early adulthood, this second self seemed to recede into the grey realm from which he had come. For several years, I was sure that I had left him behind.
But a few years before the period I write of in this memoir, when the rheumatoid gout became too persistently painful to endure without the help of tincture of opium, the Other Wilkie returned. While my personality had become softer, more convivial, friendly to all, that of the Other Wilkie seemed to have grown harsher and more aggressive during our absence from one another. Years earlier, when I had first met Percy Fitzgerald (before Fitzgerald had become such a favourite of Dickens), I confided to the younger man how I “was subject to a curious ghostly influence, having often the idea that ‘someone is standing behind me.’ ”
I was never dismissive of the effect that the laudanum had on summoning this Other Wilkie. As Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater and a friend to both my parents, once wrote—“If a man ‘whose talk is full of oxen,’ should become an Opium-eater, the probability is, that (if he is not too dull to dream at all)—he will dream about oxen.” My obsession, in both my writing and my life, has been about double identity—of a Doppelgänger hovering just beyond the hazy boundaries of day-to-day reality—so there is little wonder that the opium I consumed daily, a drug so frequently and effectively used to open doors to other realities, should have summoned the Other Wilkie who had been my nursery-room playmate.
Should you know my writings, Dear Reader, you would be aware that this question of identity has permeated most of my stories and all of my novels, beginning with Antonina, which I began when I was only twenty-two years of age. Doubles, often representing good and evil, wander the pages of my tales. Frequently my characters (I think of Laura Fairlie in my Woman in White and Magdalen Vanstone in my more recent No Name) have their identities cruelly and violently taken from them so that they must go inhabit the hollow husks of other names, other minds, other skins.
Even when my characters are permitted to retain their own identities, more often than not in my novels they must conceal those identities, assume the identities of others, or face the loss of that identity through injury to their sight, hearing, speech, or because of loss of limbs. New personalities are constantly surfacing within my characters, a transformation brought about more and more frequently by the use of drugs.
Charles Dickens despised this aspect to my writing, but my readers apparently loved it. And I should mention that I was not the only writer to be obsessed with the questions of “the other self” and of dual, twin, or confused identities: a certain scribbler with the name of William Shakespeare had included such themes and conventions in his work far more frequently than I.
I often wondered—even before the nightmare period of Drood began—if I was a lesser man because of the traits missing in me but presumably present in the Other Wilkie. There is, for instance, the matter of my name. Or, rather, other people’s use of my name.
I seemed to be “Wilkie” to everyone: not “Mr Collins” (although Inspector Field and his operatives had gone out of their way to use the honourific) nor even “Collins” (as in the way I might call Charles Dickens “my dear Dickens” to his face)… merely “Wilkie.” It was as if I had always remained a child to others, even to children. Carrie grew up calling me Wilkie. Dickens’s many children, during all the years of their growth, called me Wilkie unless ordered otherwise by Dickens or Catherine or Georgina. Men at my club, who would never address their peers with their Christian names, even though they may have known these others for decades, felt free to call me Wilkie almost immediately after our introductions.
It was a curious thing.
The morning after I peered in on Dickens speaking with Drood and the Other Wilkie in my study—and then hastily retreated—I confessed to the Inimitable over breakfast that I had had a strange dream about such a meeting.
“But it was real!” cried Dickens. “You were there, my dear Wilkie! We spoke for hours.”
“I remember none of the content of the discussion,” I said, feeling my skin prickle with icy needles.
“That is perhaps for the best,” said Dickens. “Drood sometimes uses his magnetic influence to erase some or all memory of a meeting, should he think that such a memory would put him or his interlocutor in danger. Such mesmeric erasure does not work with me, of course, since I am a co-practitioner of the mesmeric arts.”
Are you indeed? I thought sarcastically. Aloud, I said, “If my dream was real, if the meeting was real, how did Drood get into the house? I happen to know that the building was securely locked.”
Dickens smiled as he applied marmalade to a second piece of toast. “He did not enlighten me on that topic, my dear Wilkie. My
impression over the past two years has been that there are few places that Drood cannot go if he wishes to go there.”
“You’re saying that he is some kind of ghost.”
“Not at all, my dear Wilkie. Not at all.”
“Will you tell me, then,” I said with some asperity, “the content of our ‘hours’ of discussion… a content that this phantom has ordered me to forget?”
Dickens hesitated. “I shall,” he said at last. “But I believe it might be best if I wait to do so. There are imminent events that may not be in your interest to know about at the present time, my dear Wilkie. And other facts that it is in your interest not to be aware of in terms of your own honour… so, for instance, you can be truthful when you tell Inspector Charles Frederick Field that you did not meet with Drood and have no knowledge of the phantom’s plans.”
“Then why did he—or you—tell me about them last night?” I pressed. I had not taken my morning laudanum yet and my body and brain ached for it.
“To receive your permission,” said Dickens.
“Permission for what?” I was close to becoming angry.
Dickens smiled again and patted my arm in an insufferable way. “You shall see soon enough, my friend. And when these things come to pass, I shall tell you all the details of our long conversation last night. You have my word on this.”
I had to settle for this, even though I was far less than convinced that there had been any meeting of Drood, Dickens, and the Other Wilkie. It seemed far more likely that Dickens was taking advantage of my laudanum dream for his own inscrutable purposes.
Or that the Other Wilkie had his own secret purposes and plans. This possibility made my skin grow even colder.
WE MOVED TO Number 90 Gloucester Place in early September of 1867. I had been forced to raise a loan through my solicitors for the £800 purchase of the lease, but Inspector Field had been correct about the prospect of renting the stables on the mews behind the house; I sublet them to a woman with four horses for £40 a year, although I was to have a devil of a time getting her to pay on time.