BECAUSE IT WAS BAD WEATHER, I was taking a cab home from Wellington Street that afternoon when I saw Dickens’s daughter Mary walking along the Strand in the rain. I immediately had the driver stop the cab, ran to her side, and discovered that she was walking alone and unprotected in the rain (returning to the Milner Gibson house after a luncheon downtown) because she had been unable to hail a cab. Helping her into my coach, I rapped on the ceiling with my cane and called up to the driver, “Five Hyde Park Place, driver, across from the Marble Arch.”
As Mamie dripped onto the upholstery—I had offered two clean handkerchiefs for her to dry her face and hands at the very least—and as I saw her reddened eyes, I realised that she had been crying. We talked as the cab moved slowly north through traffic and while she mopped at herself. The rain on the roof of the cab had a particularly insistent sound that afternoon.
“You are so kind,” began the distraught young woman (although, at the advanced age of thirty-two, she was hardly still a young woman). “You have always been so kind to our family, Wilkie.”
“As I shall always be,” I muttered. “After having received unlimited kindness from the family over the years.” The driver above us in the rain was shouting and cracking his whip not at his own poor horse but at some dray waggon driver who had crossed in front of him.
Mamie did not seem to be listening to me. Handing back my now-sodden handkerchiefs, she sighed and said, “I went to the Queen’s Ball the other night, you know, and had ever so much fun! It was so gay! Father was to have been my escort, but at the last minute he was unable to go…”
“Not because of his health, I hope,” I said.
“Yes, sadly, yes. He says that his foot—and these are his words, so you must forgive me—is a mere bag of pain. He can barely hobble to his desk to write each day.”
“I am dismayed to hear that, Mamie.”
“Yes, yes, we all are. The day before the Queen’s Ball, Father had a visitor—a very young girl with literary aspirations, someone Lord Lytton had recommended visit Father and sent over—and while Father was explaining to her the enjoyment he was having in writing this Drood book for serialisation, this upstart of a girl had the temerity to ask, ‘But suppose you died before all the book was written?’ ”
“Outrageous,” I muttered.
“Yes, yes. Well, Father—you know sometimes in a conversation he smiles but how his gaze suddenly becomes focused on something very far away—he said, ‘Ah-h! That has occurred to me at times.’ And the girl became flustered.…”
“As well she should have been,” I said.
“Yes, yes… but when Father saw that he had embarrassed her, he spoke very softly in his kindest voice and said to her, ‘One can only work on, you know—work while it is day.’ ”
“Very true,” I said. “All of us writers feel the same on this issue.”
Mamie began fussing with her bonnet, setting her wet hair and sagging curls to rights, and I had a moment to contemplate the rather sad future for both of Dickens’s daughters. Katey was married to a very sick young man and was currently a social outcast both because of her father’s separation from her mother and because of Kate’s own flirtations and behaviour. Her tongue had always been too sharp for either Society’s ear or that of most men who might have been marriage partners. Mamie was less intelligent than Kate, but her sometimes frenzied efforts towards social acceptance were always carried out at the fringes of society, usually within a maelstrom of malicious gossip, again because of her father’s political attitudes, her sister’s behaviour, and her own spinsterhood. Mamie’s last serious marriage possibility had been Percy Fitzgerald, but—as Katey had said last New Year’s Eve—Percy had settled on that “simpering charmer” and forgone his last opportunity of marrying into the Dickens fold.
“We shall be so glad to be back in Gad’s Hill Place,” Mamie said suddenly as she finished flouncing her wilted skirts and setting damp bodice lace to a semblance of propriety.
“Oh, you’re leaving the Milner Gibson house so soon? I was under the impression that Charles had leased it for a longer period.”
“Only until the first of June. Father is very impatient to get back to Gad’s Hill for the summer. He wants us to be there with the house all opened up and happy and us all settled by the second or third of June. He shall have very little reason to come into town then, for the rest of the summer, you know. The rail travel is so hard on Father these days, Wilkie. Also, it will be easier for Ellen to visit there than it has been here in the city.”
I blinked at this and then took off my spectacles to wipe them on one of the soggy handkerchiefs in order to hide my reaction.
“Miss Ternan still visits there?” I said offhandedly.
“Oh, yes, Ellen has been a regular visitor over the past few years—certainly your brother or Katey has told you that, Wilkie! Come to think of it, it’s odd that you haven’t been a guest there during the periods that Ellen has come to stay. But then—you are so busy!”
“Yes,” I said.
So Ellen Ternan was still a frequent guest at Gad’s Hill. This was a surprise. I was sure that Dickens had sworn his daughters into secrecy on this—another reason for Society to shun all of them—but that light-headed Mamie had forgotten. (Or assumed that I was still such a close friend of her father’s that he would have told me.)
I realised at that moment that none of us—none of Dickens’s friends or family or even his biographers in some future era such as yours, Dear Reader—would ever know the real story of his strange relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan. Had they actually buried a child in France, as I had surmised after overhearing that one snippet of conversation between them at Peckham Station? Were they now living merely as brother and sister, their passion—should they ever have acted on it in the first place—put behind them forever? Or had that passion resumed in a new form, edging towards being made public—perhaps a very scandalous divorce and second marriage for the ageing novelist? Would Charles Dickens ever find that happiness with a woman that had seemed to elude him throughout his passionate, naive, romance-haunted life?
The novelist in me was curious. The rest of me did not give a d—— n for the answers. The old friend in me vaguely wished that Dickens had found that happiness in his lifetime. The rest of me recognised that Dickens’s lifetime needed to be over and that he needed to be gone—missing, lost, expunged, eradicated, his corpse never found—so that the adulatory mobs could not bury him in Westminster Abbey or its churchyard. That was very important.
Mamie was babbling on about something—going on about someone she had danced and flirted with at the Queen’s Ball—but suddenly the coach stopped and I peered out through the rain-streaked window and saw the Marble Arch.
“I shall walk you to your door,” I said, stepping out and waiting to help the silly spinster down.
“Oh, Wilkie,” she said, taking my hand, “you truly are the kindest of men.”
I WAS WALKING home alone from the Adelphi Theatre several nights after this chance meeting when someone or something hissed at me from a darkened alley.
I stopped, turned, and lifted my bronze-headed walking stick as any gentleman would do when threatened by a ruffian in the night.
“Misster Collinssss,” hissed the figure in the narrow aperture.
Drood, I thought. My heartbeat raced and my pulse pounded in my temples. I felt frozen, unable to run. I grasped the stick in both hands.
The dark shape took two steps closer to the opening of the alley but did not emerge fully into the light. “Mister Collinsss… it’s I, Reginald Barrisss.” He gestured me closer.
I would not enter the alley, but from the opening to that stinking black crevice, I could see a trapezoid of light from the distant streetlamp falling on the dark form’s face. There was the same dirt, the same wild beard, the same hooded eyes of a hunted man always flicking one way then another. I saw only a glimpse of his teeth in the dim light, but they appeared to have decayed. The once
handsome and confident and burly Detective Reginald Barris had become this shadowy, fearful form whispering at me from an alley.
“I thought you dead,” I whispered.
“I am not far from it,” said the shadow-figure. “They hunt me everywhere. They do not give me time to ssleep or eat. I musst move consstantly.”
“What news do you have?” I demanded. I still held my heavy stick at the ready.
“Drood and his minionss have set a date on which to take your friend Dickenss,” he hissed at me. His breath was foul, even from three feet away. I realised that his missing teeth must be causing this Droodish hiss.
“When?”
“Nine June. Not quite three weeks from now.”
The fifth anniversary, I thought. It made sense. I asked, “What do you mean they will take him? Kill him? Kidnap him? Take him down to Undertown?”
The filthy figure shrugged. He pulled his tattered hat brim lower so that his face went back to darkness.
I said, “What shall I do?”
“You can warn him,” rasped Barris. “But there iss no place he can hide—no country where he would be ssafe. Once Drood decidesss a thing, it is done. But perhapsss you can tell Dickensss to get his affairss in order.”
My pulse still raced. “Can I do anything for you?”
“No,” said Barris. “I am a dead man.”
Before I could ask anything else, the dark figure backed away and then seemed to be melting down into the filthy stones of the alley. There must have been a basement stairway there that I could not see, but to my eye the shadowy figure simply melted vertically out of sight in the dark alley until it was gone.
Nine June. But how to arrange things with Dickens myself before that date? He would be back at Gad’s Hill Place soon, and we were both working hard on our respective novels. How could I lure him away—especially to where I needed to take him—so that I could do what I had to? And before the ninth of June, that anniversary of Staplehurst that Dickens had always set aside in order to meet with Drood?
I had written a formal and rather cold letter to Wills demanding the reversion of copyrights for all of my stories and novels that had ever appeared in All the Year Round, and Dickens himself wrote me back in that last week of May 1870.
Even the business part of the letter was surprisingly friendly—he assured me that papers were being drawn up at that moment and that, even though we had not contractually arranged such returns of copyright, all such rights were to be returned to me at once. But it was his brief peroration that seemed wistful, almost lonely.
“My dear Wilkie,” he wrote, “I don’t come to see you because I don’t want to bother you. Perhaps you may be glad to see me by and by. Who knows?”
This was perfect.
I immediately wrote Dickens a friendly note asking if we could meet “at your earliest convenience, but preferably before the anniversary you honour each year at this time.” If Dickens did not burn this note, as was his habit, this wording might prove sufficiently cryptic to anyone who read it later.
When a warm and affirmative response came back from Dickens by the first of June, I completed the last of my preparations and set the Act III finale into motion.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Where am I?
Gad’s Hill. But not Gad’s Hill Place, merely Gad’s Hill, the site where Falstaff attempted to rob the coach but was set upon by “thirty ruffians”—actually just Prince Hal and a friend—and was all but robbed himself before he fled in panic.
My black coach is parked to one side of the Falstaff Inn. The hired coach looks rather like a hearse, which is fitting. It is almost invisible in the shadows under the tall trees as the last of the evening’s twilight begins to fade. The driver up on the box is no driver, but a Hindoo sailor I have hired for this one night, paying him the equal of six months’ salary for a real driver. He is a poor driver but he is also a foreigner. He speaks no English (I communicate with him through our mutual schoolboy bits of German and some sign language) and knows nothing of England or its famous people. He will be at sea again in ten days and may never return to English shores. He is curious about nothing. He is a terrible driver—the horses sense his lack of skill and show him no respect—but he is the perfect driver for this night.
When is it?
It is the gentle evening of 8 June, 1870, twenty minutes after the sun has set. Swallows and bats dart through the shadows and into the open, the wings of the bats and the forked tails of the swallows showing as flattened V’s against the flat, clear pane of paling water-colours that is the twilight.
I see Dickens trotting across the road—or trying to trot, since he is hobbling slightly. He is wearing the dark clothing that I had suggested he don for this outing and has some sort of soft slouch hat on. Despite his obviously sore foot and leg, he carries no cane with him this evening. I open the door and he hops up into the coach to sit next to me.
“I told no one where I was going,” he says breathlessly. “Just as you requested, my dear Wilkie.”
“Thank you. Such secrecy will be necessary this one time only.”
“This is all very mysterious,” he says as I rap the ceiling of the coach with my heavy cane.
“It is meant to be,” I say. “Tonight, my dear Charles, we shall each find the answer to a great mystery—yours being the greater.”
He says nothing to this and only comments once as the coach careers and wobbles and jolts and lurches its way east along the highway. The sailor-driver is working the horses far too hard, and his crashing into holes and wild swerves from the slightest oncoming object threaten to spill the coach and us into the watery ditch from moment to moment.
“Your driver appears to be in an unholy hurry,” says Dickens.
“He is foreign,” I explain.
Some time later, Dickens leans across me and looks out the left window at the approaching tower-spire of Rochester Cathedral rising like a black spike against the dimming sky. “Ah,” he says, but I believe I detect more confirmation than surprise in the syllable.
The coach grinds and squeals to a stop at the entrance to the churchyard and we climb out—me carrying a small unlighted lantern and both of us moving somewhat stiffly due to the jouncing and bouncing of the wild ride here—and then the driver applies his whip again and the black coach rumbles away into the deepening twilight.
“You don’t wish the coach to wait for us?” Dickens enquires.
“The driver will come back for me when it is time,” I say.
If he notices my use of “for me” rather than “for us,” he does not comment on it. We move into the graveyard. The church and this old part of the city and the cemetery are empty and silent. The tide has gone out and we can smell the decaying reek of the mudflats, but from somewhere beyond that there comes the fresh salt scent of the sea and the sound of slow breakers. The only illumination is from a waning crescent moon.
Dickens says softly, “What now, Wilkie?”
I pull the pistol from my jacket—fumbling a moment to get the protruding hammer and sight free of the pocket lining—and aim it at him.
“Ah,” he says again, and again there is no audible tone of surprise. To my ear, through the pounding of my pulse, the syllable sounds merely sad, perhaps even relieved.
We stand there like that for a moment, an odd and awkward tableau. The wind from the sea rustles the boughs of a pine tree close to where the graveyard wall hides us from the street. The hem and loose collars of Dickens’s long summer jacket swirl around him like black pennants. He raises a hand to hold on to the brim of his soft cap.
“It’s the lime pit, then?” asks Dickens.
“Yes.” I have to try twice before the word comes out properly. My mouth is very dry. I am dying for a drink from my laudanum flask, but I do not want to divert attention from Dickens for an instant.
I gesture with the pistol and Dickens begins walking towards the blackness that is the rear of the graveyard where the open pit waits. I foll
ow several feet behind, taking care not to get too close in case the Inimitable were to make some lunge for the gun.
Suddenly he stops and I do as well, taking another two paces away from him and raising and aiming the pistol.
“My dear Wilkie, may I make one request?” His voice is so soft that the words are all but lost to me under the hiss of the wind in the few trees and many marsh grasses.
“It hardly seems the time for requests, Charles.”
“Perhaps,” says Dickens, and I can see him smiling in the weak moonlight. I do not like him looking at me this way. I had hoped that he would keep his back turned until we reached the lime pit and the deed was done. “But I still have one,” he continues softly. Maddeningly, I cannot detect fear in his voice, which is far steadier than mine has been. “But only one.”
“What?”
“It may sound odd, Wilkie, but for some years now, I have had the strong premonition that I would die on the anniversary of the Staplehurst accident. May I reach in my waistcoat and look at my watch?”
To what purpose? I think dizzily. To prepare for the evening, I had drunk almost twice my usual allotment of laudanum and injected myself twice with the morphine, and now I feel the effects of these medicines not so much as reinforcment to my resolve but as a giddiness and odd light-headedness. “Yes, look, but quickly,” I manage to say.
Dickens calmly takes out his watch, peers at it in the moonlight, and winds it slowly and maddeningly before setting it back. “It is some minutes after ten,” he says. “The summer twilight lasts so late this time of year and we left late. It shan’t be long until midnight. I cannot explain why—since your goal is obviously for no one to know the means or location of my death or interment—but it would mean something to me if I were allowed to fulfil my various premonitions and leave this world on nine June rather than eight June.”
“You are hoping that someone comes along or that something arises to allow your escape,” I say in my new and shaky voice.