He closed the bolt and locked the door, part of my aching brain was trying to tell me. He… it… can affect things in the physical world.
Of course he could. Hadn’t the green-skinned wench with the tusk teeth left livid marks on my neck?
The Other Wilkie waited.
Between moans and the occasional cry of pain, I began—
“FIRST NARRATIVE—all capitals for that—Contributed by MISS CLACK— capitals on the name as well, mind you—colon after the name—niece of the late Sir John Verinder… triple spaces… CHAPTER ONE, in Roman numeral… double space… I am indebted to my dear parents, who are now both dead… no, change that… begin parenthesis, both now in Heaven, end parenthesis… for having had habits of order and regularly instilled into me at a young… no, Miss Clack was never young, make that… at a very early age, full stop, begin new paragraph.”
I moaned and collapsed further back into the sweat-soaked pillow. The other Wilkie, pencil poised, waited patiently.
I HAD MANAGED only two or three nightmare-riddled hours of sleep when there came a pounding on my bedroom door. I fumbled my watch off the nightstand and saw that it was almost eleven AM. The pounding resumed along with Caroline’s stern but concerned voice, “Wilkie, let me in.”
“Come in,” I said.
“I cannot. The door is locked.”
It took me a few minutes to gather the energy to throw back the covers and stagger over to throw the bolt.
“Why on earth was this locked?” asked Caroline as she bustled in and fluttered around me. I went back to bed and drew the bedclothes across my legs.
“I was working,” I said. “Writing.”
“Working?” She saw the small stack of pages still on the wooden chair and picked them up. “These are in pencil,” she said. “When have you ever written in pencil?”
“I can hardly use a pen while lying here on my back.”
“Wilkie…” said Caroline, looking at me strangely over the sheaf of papers “. . . this is not your hand.” She gave me the pages.
It certainly was not my handwriting. The hastily pencilled words slanted the wrong way (as befitted a left-handed writer, I realised), the letters were formed differently—sharper, more spiked, almost aggressive in the indecorous bluntness—and even the spacing and use of margins were alien to my style. After a moment I said, “You saw that the door was locked. The pain kept me awake most of the night, so I wrote. Neither you nor Carrie nor any of the spineless amanuenses you brought here could take my dictation, so I have no choice but to write it myself. The new numbers will be due in both America and Wills’s office in a week. What choice do I have but to work through the night, using my left hand to write with the pencil when my right hand fails me? It’s a wonder that the hand is legible at all.”
This was the longest speech I had given since I’d been discovered unconscious on our doorstep on 22 January, but Mrs G—— did not seem impressed.
“It’s more legible than your usual manuscript,” said Caroline. She looked around. “Where is the pencil you used?”
Absurdly, I blushed. The Other Wilkie must have carried it off with him when he left sometime after dawn. Through the locked door and solid walls. I said, “I must have dropped it. It may have rolled under the bed.”
“Well… I have to say from the few paragraphs I’ve just read,” said Caroline, “that neither this terrible new illness nor your mother’s illness has dulled your writing ability. Just the opposite, from the short bits here. This narrative of Miss Clack is wildly funny. I had thought you were going to make her more pathetic and dour, a mere caricature—but on this first page or two she seems a truly comic character. I look forward to reading the rest soon.”
When she left to direct the girl in the preparation of my breakfast tray, I looked through the surprisingly thick sheaf of pages. The first sentence was precisely as I had dictated it. Nothing else was.
Caroline had been correct in her hasty assessment: this “Miss Clack”—the insufferable old busybody religious pamphleteer—had been sketched in with great energy and dexterity. The paragraphs and descriptive passages, all seen from the old woman’s distorted view of herself, of course, since she was the narrator, moved with a much greater authorial assurance and light comic hand than had the longer, more convoluted and heavy-handed passages I had dictated during the night.
D——n his eyes! The Other Wilkie was writing The Moonstone and there was nothing I could do about it.
And he was the better writer.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Mother died on the nineteenth of March.
I was not there when she died. Since I was not able to attend the funeral, I asked my friend Holman Hunt, with whom I’d gone to the theatre just the week before to see my No Thoroughfare again, to go in my place, writing—“I am sure it will be a comfort to him…” by which I meant my brother, Charles, “. . . to see the face of a dear old friend whom my mother loved, and whom we love.”
In truth, Dear Reader, I have no idea if Mother loved Holman Hunt or if he had any serious affection for her, but he had taken dinner with her a few times in my presence, so I saw no reason that he could not fill that missing presence at Harriet Collins’s funeral.
You may think me cold or unfeeling for not going to my own mother’s funeral, when my illness may have—would have—allowed me to, but you would not think this if you had known my heart and mind at this time. It was all too terribly logical. If I went to Mother’s cottage with Charley to view the body, what reaction would her scarab and mine have to the other’s proximity? The thought of that beetle lurching and digging and scrabbling in Mother’s dead body was too much for me to bear.
And—before the funeral, when the casket was still in the parlour of her cottage and open so that friends could pay their respects—what would happen to me if I saw (especially if I were the only one who could see) those scarab pincers and that beetle head and carapace slowly creeping out from between Mother’s dead white lips? Or what if it exited some other way—through her ear, or eye, or throat?
My sanity could not have borne it.
And for the funeral itself, as her coffin was lowered into the frozen hole next to our father’s grave, I would have been the only one leaning forward and waiting, and listening, and waiting and listening more, even after the first clods of dirt struck the lid of the casket.
Who knew better than I that there were tunnels everywhere under London and terrible things moving in those tunnels? Who knew what awful impulses and manners and means of Droodish control the burrowing scarab, now almost certainly grown as large as Mother’s brain had been after the chitinous creature had consumed all the dying and dead brain matter, was subject to?
So I stayed home, in bed, suffering.
BY LATE FEBRUARY I had begun writing again, composing The Moonstone at my desk in my study when I was able, writing while propped up in bed more often than not. When I was working alone in my study or bedroom, the Other Wilkie often joined me, staring silently at me in an almost reproachful way. It had crossed my mind that he might have been planning to replace me (in writing this book and the next, in receiving plaudits for it, in Caroline’s bed, in society at large) should I die. Who would ever know? Had I not recently planned to replace Charles Dickens in much the same way?
I realised that the suddenly revealed illness (and even more sudden death) of one of my characters—the much-loved and much-respected Lady Verinder, never a central character but always a reassuring and noble offstage presence—almost certainly came from the deeper parts of my creative mind and were a way of honouring Mother’s death.
I should mention here that the scarab obviously could not read things through my eyes; each night that Frank Beard injected me with morphia, I continued to dream of the Neteru Gods of the Black Land and all their attendant and requisite ceremonies, but I never once became the scribe Drood had commanded me to become; I never once wrote about those dark and heathen gods.
The b
eetle in my brain seemed assuaged when I was writing, obviously fooled into thinking that I was recording my dreams of these ancient rituals. And all that time I was actually writing about curious old servant Gabriel Betteredge (and his obsession with Robinson Crusoe, a book I also venerated) and plucky (if stupidly headstrong) Rachel Verinder and heroic (if strangely duped) Franklin Blake and the misshapen and doomed-to-drown-in-quicksand servant Rosanna Spearman and the meddling, pious pamphleteer Miss Clack (whose hilarious malice was the Other Wilkie’s contribution) and, of course, the clever (but never central to the solution of the mystery) Sergeant Cuff. The parasite within me thought all this frenzied scribbling through my illness was the obedient work of a scribe.
Stupid scarab.
The early numbers of my serialised novel were being met with continued and rising enthusiasm. Wills reported more and more people flocking to the magazine’s offices on Wellington Street on the day each new issue was released. All the talk was of the Moonstone itself, the precious diamond, and who might have stolen it and how. No one knew, of course, the full extent of my ingenuity in providing that ending, but even before writing those chapters, I had full confidence that no one would guess the amazing revelation. Between this and the triumph of my play, I would have much to impress Charles Dickens with when he returned.
If he lived long enough to return.
More and more, Wills and I were receiving, through a variety of sources (but especially through candid notes from George Dolby to Dickens’s daughters, as relayed to me by Charley), news that Dickens’s health was failing alarmingly. Influenza caught during his almost daily travels through the American provinces required him to stay in bed until the afternoon and not eat anything until three o’clock or later. All of us were amazed to read that Dickens—who always insisted on staying in hotels during his tours and never at private homes—had been so ill in Boston that he had been forced to stay with his friends the Fieldses rather than at the Parker House as planned.
Besides the worsening influenza and catarrh, exhaustion and a return of swelling in his left foot seemed close to doing Dickens in. We were hearing that Dolby had to help “the Chief” onto the stage for each reading, although as soon as he was beyond the curtain, Dickens would stride to his reading stand with a perfect imitation of his old alertness and spryness. And during the intermission and after the reading, Dolby and others would have to catch the totally exhausted author to keep him from fainting. Mrs Fields wrote Dickens’s daughter Mamie that during his last reading in Boston on 8 April, Dickens had boasted of a return of his old powers but still had not been able to change his clothes after the readings, but simply lay on the sofa for thirty minutes “in a state of the greatest exhaustion” even before allowing himself to be helped back to his room.
And—I took notice of this—Dolby had written in an almost offhand manner that because of the Inimitable’s inability to sleep, he had begun again to take laudanum—although only a few drops per glass of wine—each night.
Was there an insatiable scarab in America that also needed sedating?
At any rate, Dickens’s daughters and son Charles were worried about their father, even though the Inimitable’s own letters home were filled with optimism and bragging about crowds and adoration from his eager public at each American city in which he read. But as March and April passed and I slowly, slowly showed improvement and began to overcome some of the pain and debilitation (although setbacks would send me to bed again for days on end), I began to believe either that Charles Dickens would never return from America or that he would return a broken, dying man.
IT WAS DIFFICULT communicating with Martha R—— during my illness. I did manage to send one message to her via my servant George early in my crisis and during Mother’s deathwatch, under the guise of enquiring about rental properties on Bolsover Street, but that was far too risky to continue.
Three times in February I did tell Caroline and Carrie that I was going to Tunbridge Wells with Charley to see Mother and turned back at the station, telling Charley I was simply not well enough to go on and would take a hansom cab home. Two of those three times I spent the night (or nights) with Martha—although I was too ill to enjoy the time properly—but that stratagem was also too risky, since Charles might, at any time, mention to Caroline or in Caroline’s presence the occasions I was not able to travel all the way to Mother’s.
Martha could have written me during this interval (using a false return address on the envelopes), but she preferred not to write letters. In point of fact, my Martha was close to being illiterate at this time, although later I would tutor her to the point she could read simple books and write basic letters.
Once I was ambulatory again by late March, I did work out ways to see her, explaining to Caroline and even to my doctor that I had to take solitary carriage rides (I was not up to pretending that I was walking for hours) to help me ruminate on my novel, or claiming that I must spend time at my club in its wonderful library, seeking out more books for my research. But these visits to “Mrs Dawkins” at Bolsover Street gave us, at most, a few stolen hours, and satisfied neither Martha nor me.
But Martha R——’s compassion for me during this most difficult time was sincere and palpable, in contrast to Caroline’s grudging and often suspicious care.
MAAT GIVES MEANING to the world. Maat bestows order upon the chaos of creation in the First Times and maintains order and balance throughout all time. Maat controls the movement of the stars, oversees the rising and setting of the sun, governs the flooding and flow of the Nile, and lays her cosmic body and soul beneath all laws of nature.
Maat is the goddess of justice and truth.
When I die, my heart will be torn from my body and carried to the Judgement Hall of the Tuat, where it will be weighed against Maat’s feather. If my heart is mostly free from the terrible weight of sin—sin against the Gods of the Black Land, sin against my duties as outlined by Drood and enforced by the sacred scarab—I will be allowed to travel on and perhaps join the company of the gods themselves. If my sinful heart outweighs Maat’s feather, my soul will be devoured and destroyed by the demon-beasts of the Black Land.
Maat gave meaning to the world and still gives meaning to the world. My Day of Judgement in the Hall of the Tuat is coming, as is yours, Dear Reader. As is yours.
MORNINGS WERE VERY BAD for me. Now that I had quit dictating The Moonstone to the treacherous scribe of the Other Wilkie through the lowest-ebb hours of the night, I often awoke from my laudanum or laudanum-and-morphine dreams between two and three AM and simply had to moan and writhe my way through to the spring dawn.
I usually was able to get myself down to my large study on the ground floor by early afternoon, where I would write until four PM, when Caroline or Carrie or both would take me outside, at least to the garden, to get some air. As I wrote to one friend who wanted to come visit me that April—“If you are to come, it should be before four o’clock, because I am carried out to be aired at4.”
It was one such afternoon in mid-April, precisely two months to the day since Mother had died, that Caroline entered my study behind me.
I had paused in my writing and—pen still in my hand—was staring out the wide windows at the street. I confess that I was wondering how I might get in contact with Inspector Field. Though I remained certain that Field’s operatives must be watching me, I had never seen one, despite my cleverest efforts to catch one out. I wanted to know what was happening with Drood. Had Field and his hundred-plus vigilantes burned the Egyptian murderer out, shot him down like a dog in the sewer the way Barris had shot the Wild Boy in front of me? And what of Barris? Had Inspector Field disciplined the blackguard for pistol-whipping me?
But it had occurred to me just the day before that I had no idea where Inspector Field’s offices might be situated. I remembered that the first time he had visited me at 9 Melcombe Place, the inspector had sent up a card—certainly his business address would be on it—but after rummaging through my
desk and finally finding it, the card read only:
INSPECTOR CHARLES FREDERICK FIELD
Private Enquiry Bureau
Besides wanting to know what had happened in Undertown, I also wished to engage the inspector and his operatives on some work of my own: I wished to know when and where Caroline was meeting the plumber Joseph Charles Clow (for I had no doubt they were meeting secretly).
It was with these thoughts in my mind and my gaze turned to the street that I heard Caroline clearing her throat behind me. I did not turn.
“Wilkie, my dear, there is something I have been waiting to discuss with you. It has been a month now since your dear mother passed on.”
This required no comment and I gave none. Outside, a junk waggon rumbled by. The old nag’s flanks were covered with scabs, and even now the grizzled driver laid the whip on. Why, I wondered, would a rag-and-bone waggon have to hurry anywhere?
“Lizzie is reaching that age where she is ready to be introduced to society,” continued Caroline. “Ready to find a gentleman to be her husband.”
I’d noted over the years that whenever Caroline wished to talk about her daughter—Elizabeth Harriet G—— as her daughter, she was “Lizzie.” When she talked about her as our shared concern, she was “Carrie”—the name the girl actually preferred.
“It will be so much easier for Lizzie, in terms of matrimonial prospects and social acceptance, if she comes from an established and stable family,” Caroline went on. I still had not turned towards her.
On the sidewalk across the street, a young man in a suit too light in colour and thinness of wool for the fickle spring season, paused, looked over at our house, checked his watch, and moved on. It was not Joseph Clow. Could it have been one of Inspector Field’s agents? I doubted if any of the inspector’s men would be so brazen, especially since I was quite visible sitting in the ground floor bow windows.
“She should bear the name of her father,” said Caroline.
“She does bear the name of her father,” I said tonelessly. “Your husband gave her that even if he granted neither of you anything else.”