The changes to the text were interesting enough, turning a novel meant to be read into a script meant to be heard, but it was the stage directions jotted in the margins that caught my eye:
“Beckon down… Point… Shudder… Look Round with Terror… Murder coming…”
And on the next pasteboard sheet:
. . . he beat it twice upon the upturned face that almost touched his own… seized a heavy club, and struck her down!!… the pool of gore that quivered and danced in the sunlight on the ceiling… but such flesh, and so much blood!!!… The very feet of the dog were bloody!!!!… dashed out his brains!!!!
I blinked at this. His brains. I had forgotten that Sikes killed both Nancy and the dog.
“Terror to the End!” was scrawled at least five times on the various page margins.
I set them back on the desk and smiled at Dickens. “Your Murder at last,” I said.
“At last,” agreed Dickens.
“And I thought that I was the novelist of sensation, Charles.”
“This Murder shall serve more than sensation, my dear Wilkie. I wish to leave behind in those who attend my final, farewell round of readings a sense of something very passionate and dramatic, something done with simple means yet to a complex emotional end.”
“I see,” I said. What I actually saw was that Dickens intended to shock the everlasting sensibilities out of his audience. “Is it truly then to be a farewell round of readings?”
“Hmmm,” grunted Dickens. “So our friend Beard tells me. So Dolby tells me. So the special physicians in London and even Paris tell me. So even does Wills tell me, although he never approved of the reading tours in the first place.”
“Well, Charles, we can somewhat discount dear Wills. His opinions these days are filtered through the constant sound of doors slamming in his skull.”
Dickens chuckled but then said, “Alas, poor Wills, I knew him, Horatio.”
“On a hunt,” I said, feigning sadness. As if on cue, a rider in fox hunt red, white breeches, and gleaming high boots sitting astride a huge grey-dappled high-prancer straining at the bit passed on Graves-end Road below. A dray waggon filled with manure rumbled past immediately after that noble image. Dickens and I glanced at each other and laughed at the same instant. It was like the old days.
Except for the fact that I now wished him dead.
When our laughter died, Dickens said, “I have been thinking more about your Moonstone, Wilkie.”
My entire body tensed. But I managed a wan smile.
Dickens held both his hands out and up, palms towards me. “No, no, my dear friend. I mean in totally admiring and professionally respectful ways.”
I held the smile in place.
“You may not have been aware of it, my dear Wilkie, but it is possible that with that sensationalist novel you may have created an entirely new genre of fiction.”
“Of course I am aware of it,” I said stiffly. I had no idea what he was talking about.
Dickens did not seem to have heard me. “The idea of an entire novel revolving around a single mystery, with an interesting and three-dimensional detective character—perhaps a private enquiry detective rather than a formal police detective—in a central position, and with all character development and nuance of daily verisimilitude flowing from the side-effects and after-effects of whatever crime was the mainspring for the novel’s central tale… why, it is revolutionary!”
I nodded humbly.
“I have decided to take a whack at it myself,” said Dickens, using one of the more execrable American expressions he had picked up on his last tour there.
At that moment I hated the man without reservation. “Do you have a title for this theoretical work yet?” I heard myself ask in a normal-enough voice.
Dickens smiled. “I was thinking of something straightforward, my dear Wilkie… something like The Mystery of Edmond Dickenson.”
I confess that I started in my chair. “Have you heard from young Edmond, then?”
“Not at all. But your questions about him last year made me think that the idea of a young man simply disappearing, with no clue as to his whereabouts or reasons for leaving, might lead to some interesting complications if murder were involved.”
I felt my heart pounding and wished that I could take a steadying drink of the laudanum from my flask in my jacket’s chest pocket. “And do you think that young Edmond Dickenson was murdered?” I asked.
I remembered Dickenson with his shaved head and sharp teeth and fanatic’s eyes, wearing a hooded robe and chanting at the ceremony in which Drood had loosed the scarab into my vitals. At the very memory of it, the scarab stirred and shifted in the back of my brain.
“Not a bit of it!” laughed Dickens. “I had every reason to believe young Edmond when he said that he was taking his money and travelling, perhaps relocating in Australia. And I certainly would change the character’s name and the title. It was merely to give an idea of the overall story.”
“Interesting,” I lied.
“And mesmerism,” said Dickens, steepling his fingers as he sat back and smiled at me.
“What about it, Charles?”
“I know you are interested in it, Wilkie. Your interest in it is almost as old as mine, although you have never practised it as I have. And you introduced it, subtly, into The Moonstone, although more as a metaphor than reality, but you failed to use it properly.”
“How so?”
“The solution to your so-called mystery,” said Dickens in that maddening, schoolmaster’s tone he used with me so frequently. “You have Mr Franklin Blake stealing the diamond in his opium-dream sleep but not knowing that he has stolen it.…”
“As I said before,” I said coolly, “this is most feasible and totally possible. I have researched it myself and…”
Dickens waved that away. “But, my dear Wilkie, the discerning reader—perhaps all readers—must ask, Why did Franklin Blake steal his beloved’s diamond?”
“And the answer is obvious, Charles. Because he was afraid that someone might steal it and therefore, under the dream-influence of opium he did not know he had ingested, he walked in his sleep and… stole it.” I heard the lameness in my own voice.
Dickens smiled. “Precisely. It strains credulity and endangers verisimilitude. But if you had one of your characters mesmerise Franklin Blake and order him to steal the diamond, and add to that the mischievous use of opium in his wine (although I would have had both the mesermism and the opium a deliberate part of the plot, a conspiracy rather than mere accident)… well, everything falls into place, doesn’t it, my dear Wilkie?”
I sat thinking about this for a moment. It was far too late to make changes. The last number of the serialised novel had already appeared in both All the Year Round and in the Harper brothers’ magazine in America and the complimentary leather-bound three-decker copies of the Tinsley edition were already completed and ready to be sent by messenger to Dickens and others.
I said, “But I still maintain that it violates the rules of mesmerism, Charles. You and I both know that Professor Elliotson and others taught that someone cannot do under the influence of the magnetic powers anything he or she would not do—in moral terms—when fully conscious.”
Dickens nodded. “Indeed, but Elliotson has shown—I have shown—that under the magnetic influence, the subject may alter his or her behaviour for extended periods of time because he or she has been told that something is true that is not.”
I did not understand this and said so.
“A woman might never carry her baby outside at night,” continued Dickens, “but if you were to mesmerise her and tell her that the house was on fire—or would be on fire, say, at nine PM—she would, either while in the mesmeric trance or much later under the influence of suggestion, seize up her baby and rush outside even when no flames were visible. In this way, your Hindoos in The Moonstone might have mesmerised Franklin Blake when he came upon them on the estate’s grounds, and your meddling doc
tor… Mr Sweets?”
“Mr Candy,” I supplied.
“Mr Candy then would have secretly administered the laudanum to poor Franklin Blake as part of a larger plot, not out of sheer random malice that should have seen him put in jail.”
“You’re saying that dear old Mr Candy was also under the mesmeric influence of the Hindoos?” I said. Suddenly I could see all these connections bringing together disparate and separate strands that I had left disparate and separate in my novel.
“That would have been elegant,” said Dickens, still smiling. “Or perhaps the vile drug addict, Ezra Jennings, was in on the plot to steal the Koh-i-noor.”
“The Moonstone,” I corrected absently. “But my Ezra Jennings is a sort of hero. He is the one who explains the mystery and then re-creates it for Franklin Blake in Blake’s aunt’s house in Yorkshire.…”
“A re-creation of events that is very handy to resolving your tale,” Dickens said quietly, “but which may strain the reader’s credulity more than any other element.”
“Why is that?”
“Because the conditions of the original night, the night the diamond was stolen, could not be re-created, my dear Wilkie. One essential element has been changed, and that would preclude all chance of the sleepwalking and theft occurring again.”
“What element is that?” I asked.
“In the so-called experiment, Mr Franklin Blake knows that he was drugged; he knows that Jennings believes he stole the diamond; he knows the sequence of events that took place and should take place again. That in itself would absolutely eliminate any chance that the same amount of opium…”
“I had Jennings use more in the wine than Mr Candy originally used,” I interrupted.
“Irrelevant,” said Dickens with another infuriatingly dismissive wave of his fingers. “The point is that the re-creation of events itself is impossible. And your Mr Ezra Jennings—probable sodomite, addicted opium eater… his adoration of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater comes close to being nauseating—is a poor hero-substitute for Franklin Blake. As it stands, Blake comes across as a sort of idiot. But if you had used the Hindoos properly to introduce mesmerism as part of the theft, included the administration of opium as a means to that conspiracy rather than as pure accident…”
Dickens broke off. I had nothing to say. A heavy waggon lumbered by out of sight on the highway below, pulled by four large horses by the sounds of it.
“But it is your use of the detective—Sergeant Cuff—that I find close to brilliant,” Dickens said suddenly. “That is what makes me consider writing my own novel of mystery, preferably with such a keen mind at the centre of it. Cuff is wonderful… his lean build, his cold, penetrating gaze, and his almost mechanically perfect mind. A wonderful invention!”
“Thank you, Charles,” I said softly.
“If only you had used him properly!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You draw him brilliantly, introduce him brilliantly, and he behaves brilliantly… right up to the place where he wanders off the track, disappears from the narrative for an aeon’s length, makes all the wrong assumptions despite so much evidence to the contrary, and then becomes unavailable, going off to Brighton to raise bees.…”
“To Dorking to breed roses,” I corrected with a strange surge of déjà vu.
“Of course. But the character of Sergeant Cuff—this idea, as I said, to have a private rather than public detective the centre of a novel of mystery—is wonderful. I believe that readers would resonate wonderfully to such a master of deduction, perhaps as lean and commanding as Cuff, eccentric, almost totally unemotional, if his background and character were fleshed out a bit more. I shall enjoy seeing whether I can create such a character for my Mystery of Edmond Dickenson, should I ever get around to writing such a thing.”
“You can bring back your Inspector Bucket from Bleak House,” I said morosely. “He was most popular. I believe we discussed the fact that there were images of Bucket on tobacco cards.”
“We did. There were,” chuckled Dickens. “He was perhaps the most popular character in the book, and I admit to enjoying his scenes very much. But Inspector Bucket was a man of the world and a man in the world… he lacked the mystery and appeal of your lean, cool, detached Sergeant Cuff. Besides, since the original for Bucket, Inspector Charles Frederick Field, is no longer among the living, I should, by all propriety, consign his copy to the grave as well.”
For what seemed like a long time I could not speak. I had to concentrate on breathing and not showing through my expression the riot of thoughts and emotions that was surging through me. At long last I said, as calmly as I could, “Inspector Field is dead?”
“Oh, yes! Died last winter while I was on tour in America. Georgina noticed it in the Times and clipped the obituary for me, knowing that I should like it in my files.”
“I’ve heard nothing of this,” I said. “Do you happen to remember the date of his death?”
“I do,” said Dickens. “It was nineteen January. Two of my sons—Frank and Henry—were born on fifteen January, you may recall, so I remembered the date for Field’s death.”
“Extraordinary,” I said, although I have no idea whether I was commenting on Dickens’s memory or Inspector Field’s death. “Did the obituary in the Times say how he died?”
“In bed, at home, of ill health, I believe,” said Dickens. The subject of the inspector obviously bored him.
January 19 would have been the day after—or perhaps the night of—our expedition into Undertown. I had been unconscious until 22 January and in no shape to read the newspapers carefully for some time after that. No wonder I had missed the notice. And no wonder I had never come into contact with Field’s men in the months since. Undoubtedly the inspector’s private investigations office had been closed, the agents disbanded and scattered to other work.
Unless Dickens was lying to me.
I remembered my insight the previous year that Dickens, Drood, and Inspector Field were all playing some complicated three-way game, with me caught as pawn in the middle. Could this be a lie as part of some ploy on Dickens’s part?
I doubted it. It would be too easy for me to check with someone I knew at the Times to see if the obituary was real. And if there had been a death in January, there was a grave for poor old Charles Frederick Field somewhere. I could check on that as well. For a mad moment I wondered if this were another ploy by Inspector Field himself—faking his own death so as to be safe from Drood’s minions—but that was too far-fetched even for the events of the past three years. I shook that idea out of my head.
“Are you well, my dear Wilkie? You suddenly look terribly pale.”
“Just this vicious gout,” I said. We both stood.
“You will stay for supper? Your brother has not been well enough to attend regular meals, but perhaps tonight, if you are here…”
I looked at my watch. “Another time, Charles. I need to get back to the city. Caroline is preparing something special for us tonight and we are going to the theatre.…”
“Caroline?” cried Dickens in surprise. “She has come back?”
I shook my head, smiled, and tapped my forehead with three fingers. “I meant Carrie,” I said. I was lying there as well. Carrie was spending the entire week with the family for which she governessed.
“Ah, well, another time soon,” said Dickens. He walked me outside and down the stairs and through the tunnel.
“I’ll have one of the servants drive you to the railway station.”
“Thank you, Charles.”
“I am glad you came to Gad’s Hill Place today, my dear Wilkie.”
“As am I, Charles. It has been most edifying.”
I DID NOT go directly back to London. At the station, I waited until Dickens’s man and his pony cart were out of sight and then I boarded the train to Rochester.
I had not brought any brandy so I waited until the cathedral graveyard seemed well and truly emp
ty—the afternoon summer shadows creeping long from the headstones—and then I strolled briskly back to the lime pit. There was no sign of the puppy on the turgid grey surface. A moment’s searching in the grass brought up the branch I had used before. Three or four minutes of stirring and poking brought up the remnants—mostly bone and teeth and spine and gristle, but also some hair and hide left. I found it difficult to bring what was left of the little carcass to the surface with the stick.
“Dradles thinks this mi’ be the instrooment Mr Billy Wilkie Collins needs,” said a voice directly behind me.
I jumped so violently that I almost tumbled forward into the pit of quick-lime.
Dradles steadied me with a rock-hard hand on my forearm. In his other hand, he was carrying a barbed iron staff that looked to be about six feet long. It may have once been part of the cathedral’s iron fence in front, or a decoration on a steeple, or a lightning rod from one of the spires.
Dradles handed it to me. “Stirs easier wi’ this, sir.”
“Thank you,” I said. Indeed, with its length and barbs, it worked perfectly. I turned the puppy’s carcass over, decided that five or six days in the lime pit would be required for a larger form, and used the iron staff to press what was left of the little shape back under the surface again. For a second I had an image of myself as some sort of grisly cook, stirring my broth, and I had to suppress the urge to giggle.
I handed the iron staff back to Dradles. “Thank you,” I said again.
“Dradles urges the ge’mun to think nothing of it,” said the filthy mason. His face seemed as red this cool evening as it had during the heat of the daytime labour some days before.
“I forgot brandy today,” I said with a smile, “but I wanted to treat you to a few drinks at the Thatched and Twopenny the next time you go.” I handed him five shillings.
He clinked the coins in his begrimed and calloused palm and smiled broadly at me. I counted four teeth.
“Thank ’ee, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins, sir. Dradles’ll be sure to drink your health when I go.”