We crossed the brow of the first low hill so that Gad’s Hill Place, the highway, and its attending line of trees all fell behind. The path wound parallel to the tree line here for a way and then crossed a little bridge.
“Do you mind if we stop for a moment, Charles?”
“Not in the least, my dear Wilkie. Not in the least!”
I leaned on the little arched bridge’s railing and took three sips from my silver flask. “An uncomfortably warm day, today, is it not?”
“You think so? I find it close to perfect.”
We headed off again, but Dickens was either tiring or walking slowly for my benefit.
“How is your health, Charles? One hears so many things. As with our dear Frank Beard’s ominous rumblings, one doesn’t know what is true. Are you recovered from your tours?”
“I feel much better these days,” said Dickens. “At least some days I do. Yesterday I told a friend that I was certain I should be living and working deep into my eighties. And I felt as if this were true. Other days… well, you know about the hard days, my friend. Other days, one does what one must to honour commitments and to honour the work itself.”
“And how is Edwin Drood coming along?” I asked.
Dickens glanced at me before replying. With the terrible exception of Dickens’s savaging of The Moonstone, we rarely, either one of us, offered to discuss work in progress with the other. The ferruled base of his cane swung with a sweet, summery swish-swish against the tall grass to either side of the path.
“Drood is coming along slowly but well, I think,” he said at last. “It is a much more complicated book, in terms of plot and twists and revelations, than most I have attempted in the past, my dear Wilkie. But you know that! You are the master of the mystery form! I should have submitted all my novice’s problems to you for a Virgil’s guidance in the ways of mystery and suspense long before this! How goes your Man and Wife?”
“I look to finish it in the next two or three days.”
“Marvellous!” cried Dickens once again. We were out of sight of the brook now, but its soft sounds followed us as we passed through more trees and then came out into another open field. The path continued winding towards the distant sea.
“When I do finish it, I wonder if you would do me a great favour, Charles.”
“If it is within my poor and failing powers, I shall certainly attempt to do so.”
“I believe it is within our powers to solve two mysteries on the same night… if, that is, you’re willing to go on a secret outing with me on Wednesday or Thursday night.”
“A secret outing?” laughed Dickens.
“The mysteries would have a greater chance of being solved if neither you nor I told anyone—no one at all—that we were going anywhere that evening.”
“Now that does sound mysterious,” said Dickens as we came to the brow of a hill. There were large barrow stones—Druid stones, the children and farmers called them, although they were nothing of the sort—scattered and heaped there. “How could keeping our outing a secret improve the chances at success of that outing?”
“I promise that if you join me when I come to fetch you a half hour or so after sunset on Wednesday or Thursday night, odds are great that you will discover the answer to that question, Charles.”
“Very well, then,” said Dickens. “Wednesday or Thursday night, you say? Thursday is the ninth of June. I may have a commitment for that evening. Would Wednesday suit you?”
“Perfectly,” I said.
“Very good, then,” said Dickens. “Now I have something that I have been waiting to discuss with you, my dear Wilkie. Shall we find a relatively comfortable perch on one of these great fallen stones? It should only take a few moments, but it is the reason I asked you here today and it truly is of some importance.”
Charles Dickens stop and sit down during a walk? I thought. I never believed the day would come. But since I was soaked through with perspiration from our stroll and wheezing like a lung-shot warhorse, I welcomed it.
“I am your obedient servant, sir,” I said and gestured for him to lead on and choose our fallen stone.
FIRST OF ALL, Wilkie, I owe you a deep and sincere apology. Several apologies, actually, but one above all for a certain treatment of you that is so unfair and so wrong that I truly do not know where to begin.”
“Not at all, Charles. I cannot imagine anything that…”
Dickens stopped me with a raised palm. From where we sat on the high barrow stone, Kent stretched out and rolled away in all directions. I could see the haze of London in the pure light and the Channel to our left. The tower of Rochester Cathedral was like a grey tent spike in the distance.
“You may not be able to forgive me, my dear Wilkie,” he continued. “I would not… could not… forgive you should the tables somehow be turned.”
“What on earth are you going on about, Charles?”
Dickens gestured towards the distant treetops of the highway and his home as if that explained something. “For almost five years now—five years this week—you and I have jested back and forth about a creature named Drood.…”
“Jested?” I said with some impatience. “Hardly ‘jested,’ I would say.”
“That is precisely the point of my apology, my dear friend. There is, of course, no Drood… no Egyptian Temple in Undertown…”
What was he up to? What game was Dickens playing with me now? I said, “So all your tales of Drood, going back to the accident, were lies, Charles?”
“Precisely,” said Dickens. “Lies for which I apologise abjectly and totally. And with a shame it is impossible even for me to express… and I have known shame.”
“You would not be human if you had not,” I said drily. Again I could but wonder what game he was at now. If I had been a simpleton depending upon Dickens’s tales for my knowledge that Drood was real—as real as that white sail we both could see at that moment as we looked towards the sea—then perhaps the Inimitable would have something to apologise for.
“You don’t believe me,” said Dickens, looking warily at me.
“I don’t understand you, Charles. You are not the only one who has seen Drood and suffered from his actions, you know. You forget that I have seen other living men and women who have become slaves of the Egyptian. What about the Undertown river gondola and the two masked men who piloted it that night we descended far below the crypts and catacombs? Are you trying to tell me that the gondola and those men who took you away were mere phantasms?”
“No,” said Dickens. “They were my gardeners, Gowen and Smythe. And the ‘gondola,’ as you call it, was a mere Thames river barque with the roughest wooden adornments painted and hammered on fore and aft. It would not have passed muster in the crudest amateur theatrical—or any place that had lights. As it was, Gowen and Smythe had the Devil’s own time carrying that leaking barque down endless flights of sewer-access stairs—they never did bring it back up, merely abandoned it there.”
“You went off to Drood’s Temple with them,” I said.
“I sat there as we paddled around the bend of that stinking sewer until we were out of sight and then spent hours finding my way back through adjoining tunnels,” said Dickens. “I almost became lost for good that night. It would have served me right if I had.”
I laughed at this. “Listen to yourself, Charles. Someone would have to be out of his mind to plan and carry out such an elaborate charade. It would be not only cruel, but actively mad.”
“Sometimes I agree with you on that point, Wilkie,” sighed Dickens. “But you must remember that the descent into Undertown and the gondola were meant to be the last scene of the last act of this particular pretence, at least as far as I was concerned. How was I to know that your novelist’s deeper consciousness and vast quantities of opium would keep the play going on in your head for years more?”
I shook my head. “Drood’s men on the gondola were not the only others involved in this. What about Detective Hatchery? Did y
ou even know that poor Hatchery was dead?”
“I did,” said Dickens. “I heard about it upon my return from America and made it my business to enquire at the Metropolitan Police Force Detective Bureau to discover what had happened to him.”
“And what did they tell you?”
“That former detective Hibbert Hatchery had been murdered in the same crypt in Saint Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery where I had led you sometime earlier in our faux expedition into the underground world there.”
“I fail to see what was ‘faux’ about that descent into Hell,” I said. “But that is irrelevant right now. Did they tell you how Hatchery died?”
“He was struck unconscious during an attempted robbery and then they disemboweled him,” Dickens said softly. The words seemed to give him pain. “I guessed at the time that you were almost certainly there—down in Lazaree’s den—and I know that coming upon his corpse when you emerged must have been horrible.”
I had to smile. “And who is the they that the Detective Bureau thought responsible, Charles?”
“Four Hindoo sailors who had jumped ship. Thugs. Evidently they had followed you and Hatchery to the crypt—the police did not know it, of course, Wilkie, but I assumed that you were down in King Lazaree’s den below and knew nothing of this—waited until the huge detective was sleeping in the crypt sometime before dawn, and attempted to rob him. Evidently they wanted his watch and the money he had in his pocket.”
“That’s absurd,” I said.
“Given the size of our late detective friend, I agree,” said Dickens. “And Hatchery did manage to break the neck of one of his four assailants. But this incensed the others, and after they knocked Hibbert unconscious with some sort of sap, they… did what they did to him.”
How very tidy, I thought. Scotland Yard would have an explanation for everything they did not understand. “And how did the Detective Bureau know that it was four Hindoo sailors?” I asked.
“Because they caught the three living ones,” said Dickens. “Caught them after the body of the fourth man was found floating in the Thames. Caught them and made them confess. They still had Hatchery’s inscribed watch, purse, and some of the money with them. The police were not gentle with them… many of the officers had known Hatchery.”
I had to blink at this. They are very thorough in their lies. “My dear Charles,” I said softly but with some irritation, “none of this was in the newspapers.”
“Of course it was not. As I said, the police did not deal gently with these Hindoo policeman-killers. None of the three survived to see trial. As far as the press was concerned, there had never been an arrest in the case of the murder of Hibbert Hatchery. Indeed, none of the details of the murder ever reached the press, Wilkie. The Metropolitan Police Force is, all in all, a good institution as government institutions go, but they have their dark side, as do we all.”
I shook my head and sighed. “And this is what you wanted to apologise to me about, Charles? Lying to me about Drood? Staging such a farce with the crypts and gondola? Not telling me about how—you believe—Detective Hatchery died?” I thought of the many times I had seen Drood, talked to Inspector Field about Drood, listened to Detective Barris talk about Drood, seen Edmond Dickenson after his conversion to Drood, and seen Drood’s minions in Undertown and his temples in Overtown. I had seen a note from Drood and seen Drood himself sitting and talking with Dickens in my own house. Dickens’s simple lie on this beautiful Sunday was not going to make me believe that I was mad.
“No,” he said, “that is not what I want to chiefly apologise for, although it is a subsidiary element of my larger apology. Wilkie, do you remember that first day you came to my home and office after the Staplehurst accident?”
“Of course. You told me all about your initial encounter with Drood.”
“Before that. When you first came into the room. Do you remember what I was doing and what we talked about?”
I had to work to recall this, but eventually I said, “You were fiddling with your watch and we talked for a moment about mesmerism.”
“I mesmerised you then, my dear Wilkie.”
“No, Charles, you did not. Can you not recall that you said you would like to and began to swing your watch, but that I simply waved it all away? You yourself agreed that my will was too strong to submit to magnetic control of any sort. And then you put away the watch and told me about the Staplehurst accident.”
“Yes, I said that your will was too strong to be mesermised, Wilkie, but that was after ten minutes of having you in a mesmeric trance.”
I laughed aloud at this. What game is he playing here? I adjusted my hat brim to keep the bright sun out of my eyes. “Charles, now you are lying… but to what purpose?”
“It was a sort of experiment, Wilkie,” said Dickens. He was literally hanging his head in a way that reminded me of Sultan. If I’d had his shotgun right then, I would have dealt with Dickens precisely the way that Dickens had dealt with Sultan.
“Even then,” continued Dickens, “even then, I had some vague notions of writing a novel in which a man carries out certain… actions… while under an incredibly extended period of mesmeric post-trance suggestion. I confess that I was especially interested in how such a suggestion of belief would affect a creative artist. That is, someone with a well-honed professional imagination to begin with and—I confess even more—such a creative person, a writer, who was, even then, using large quantities of opium, since opium was to be a leit motif in the mystery tale I had in mind.”
Here I not only laughed but I slapped my leg. “Very good! Oh, very good, Charles! And you’re telling me that you simply commanded me—via your mesmeric control—to believe in the Drood tale that you then told me when you awoke me from the trance?”
“I did not command such belief,” Dickens said morosely. “I merely suggested it.”
I patted both knees with both hands. “Oh, very good. And now you will tell me that you made up the entire idea of our friend Drood from whole cloth, using that incredible Charles Dickens imagination and love of the macabre!”
“Not at all,” said Dickens. He looked towards the west and I could have sworn that there were tears in his eyes. “I had dreamt of Drood the night before—dreamt of the creature moving amongst the dead and dying at Staplehurst, just as I described to you, my dear Wilkie, mixing and interweaving the fantasy of Drood with the horror of the real experience.”
I could not keep from smiling broadly. I removed my spectacles, mopped my brow with a paisley handkerchief, and shook my head in admiration of the audacity of what he was telling me and of the game he was playing. “So now you say that you dreamt Drood into existence.”
“No,” said Dickens. “I had first heard the legend of Drood from Inspector Charles Frederick Field more than a decade before Staplehurst. Why I interwove the old inspector’s obsessive fantasy into my nightmare about what happened at Staplehurst, I shall never know.”
“Field’s fantasy?” I cried. “Now it is Inspector Field who invented Drood!”
“Before you and I first met, my dear Wilkie. You remember that I did a series of essays on crime and the city that were published by my old magazine Household Words as far back as eighteen fifty-two. I was actually introduced to Inspector Field by other actors who had known Field when he had been an amateur actor at the old Catherine Street Theatre more than a decade earlier. But it was indeed Police Detective Charles Frederick Field, during our long walks through the night streets of the Great Oven back in the early eighteen fifties, who told me about the spectre in his mind whom he called Drood.”
“Spectre,” I repeated. “You are telling me that Inspector Field was insane.”
“Not at first, I believe,” said Dickens. “I later spoke to many of his colleagues and superiors in the Detective Bureau about this—as well as with the man who succeeded Field as Chief of Detectives when the inspector actually did break down.”
“Broke down because of Drood,” I said sarcastica
lly. “Because of Field’s fantasy about an Egyptian occultist killer named Drood.”
“Yes. At first it was not a fantasy. There were a series of incredible murders about the time that Charles Frederick Field was becoming Chief of Detectives—all were unsolved. Some seemed to relate to cases that Inspector Field had been unable to solve in earlier years. Some of the Lascars and Malays and Chinamen and Hindoos that the police dragged in at the time tried to blame a spectral figure called Drood—the details were always hazy, but consistent at least on the basics that this monster was Egyptian, was a serial-murderer, could control other people by the powers of his mind and by the rituals of his ancient cult, and that he lived in some vast temple underground—or, according to some of the opium-eating villains, in a temple beneath the Thames itself.”
“Shall we walk back?” I said.
“Not yet, Wilkie,” said Dickens. He set his trembling hand upon my forearm for a moment but pulled it away when he saw my glare. “Do you see, though,” he went on, “how this became first an obsession with Field, then a fantasy? According to the many policemen and detectives I later spoke to, including Hatchery, it was when Lord Lucan was murdered so foully while under Charles Frederick Field’s personal protection, and the identity of the murderer never discovered that… what is funny, Wilkie?”
I simply could not stop laughing. This story, this plot, was so wonderfully baroque yet somehow so tidily logical. It was so, so… Dickensian.
“It was his fantasy about this make-believe master criminal, Drood, that eventually cost Field his job and then his pension,” said Dickens. “Inspector Charles Frederick Field simply could not believe that the terrible crimes which he saw and had reported to him every day of his working life could be so random… so meaningless. In his increasingly confused mind, there had to be a single master criminal behind all the terror and misery he saw and experienced. A single villain. A master criminal nemesis worthy of him, of the great Inspector Charles Frederick Field. And a nemesis who was not really human, but who—when caught (by Inspector Charles Frederick Field, of course)—would bring an end to the literally endless series of brutalities that he was spending his life observing.”