“So you are saying,” I said, “that the respected former Chief of Detectives whom we both knew, Charles Frederick Field, was insane by the end.”
“As mad as a hatter,” said Dickens. “For many years. His idée fixe had become an obsession, the obsession a fantasy, the fantasy a nightmare from which he could not awaken.”
“It’s all very neat, Charles,” I said softly. This was such nonsense that it had not even caused my pulse to speed up. “But you forget the others who have seen Drood.”
“Which others?” Dickens asked softly. “Besides those thugs from decades ago and your mesmeric hallucinations, my dear Wilkie, I can think of no other instances of persons who ever believed in the Drood phantom—with the possible exception of Field’s son.”
“His son?”
“He had a boy out of wedlock by a young West Indies woman he had been seeing for some years. She lived not far from Opium Sal’s den that you and I got to know so well—you better than I, I believe. The inspector’s wife never learned of the woman (who died, I learned, shortly after childbirth, probably from an opium overdose) nor of the boy, but Field did right by the lad, paying to have him raised by a good family far from the docks, then sending him to fine public schools, and finally to Cambridge, or so I hear.”
“What was the boy’s name?” I asked. My mouth was suddenly very dry. I wished that I had brought water rather than laudanum in my flask.
“Reginald, I believe,” said Dickens. “I did enquire about him in the past year, but the young man seems to have disappeared after his father died. Perhaps he went to Australia.”
“And how do you think Inspector Charles Frederick Field died, Charles?”
“A heart attack, my dear Wilkie. Just as the papers reported. We have discussed that.”
I slid down from the stone and stood on legs that were tingling from lack of circulation. Not caring if Dickens watched, I drank deeply from my flask. “I need to get back,” I said thickly.
“Surely you will stay for dinner. Your brother and Katey are down for the weekend. Percy Fitzgerald and his wife are coming by and…”
“No,” I interrupted. “I have to get back to town. I need to work. I need to finish Man and Wife.”
Dickens had to use his cane to get to his feet. I could tell that his left foot and leg were putting him through agony, although he refused to show it. He took his watch and chain from his waistcoat.
“Let me mesmerise you, Wilkie. Now. At this moment.”
I took a step away from him. My laugh sounded frightened even to my own ears. “You have to be joking.”
“I have never been more serious, my dear friend. I had no idea when I mesmerised you in June of eighteen sixty-five that the post-trance suggestions would—or could—go on for so long. I underestimated both the power of opium and the power of a novelist’s imagination.”
“I do not wish to be mesmerised,” I said.
“I should have done it years ago,” said Dickens. His voice was also thick, as if he were close to weeping. “If you remember, my dear Wilkie, I tried to mesmerise you again on more than one occasion—so that I could cancel the mesmeric suggestions and have you wake from this endlessly constructed dream you’re in. I even tried to teach Caroline how to mesmerise you, giving her the single command code word I had implanted in your unconsciousness. Upon hearing that key word when you are in a mesmeric trance, you will awaken at long last from this extended dream.”
“And what is the command… the code word?” I asked.
“ ‘Unintelligible,’ ” said Dickens. “I chose a distinctive word you would not hear every day. But for it to work, you must be in mesmeric sleep.”
“ ‘Unintelligible,’ ” I repeated. “A word you said you used on the day of the Staplehurst accident.”
“I did use it then,” said Dickens. “It was my response to the horror.”
“I believe it is you who is mad, Charles,” I said.
He shook his head. He was weeping. The Inimitable, weeping in a grassy field in the sunlight. “I do not expect you to forgive me, Wilkie, but for God’s sake—for your own sake—let me put you under magnetic influence now and release you from this accidental curse I put upon you. Before it is too late!”
He took a step towards me, both arms raised, the watch in his right hand glinting goldly in the sunlight, and I took two steps backwards. I could only guess what his real game was, and all those guesses were dark indeed. Inspector Field had once said that this was all a chess game between himself and Drood. I had once seen it as a three-way game with Dickens. Now I had taken the inspector’s place as a player in this very real game of life or death.
“You really want to mesmerise me, Charles?” I said in a friendly and reasonable voice.
“I must, my dear Wilkie. It is the only way I can begin to make amends to you for what is the cruelest joke I have ever—however inadvertently—played on anyone. Just stand there and relax and I shall…”
“Not now,” I said, taking another step back but holding both palms out towards him in a calm, placating manner. “I am too disturbed and agitated to be a successful subject now anyway. But Wednesday night…”
“Wednesday night?” said Dickens. He suddenly seemed confused, battered, like a prizefighter who has gone rounds beyond his stamina but who is still standing out of sheer reflex, yet unable to protect himself from further blows. I watched him hop, using the cane, unable to put any weight on his obviously swollen and throbbing left foot and leg. “What is Wednesday night, Wilkie?”
“The secret outing you agreed to accompany me on,” I said softly. I stepped closer, took the watch from his hand—the metal was very hot—and tucked it into his waistcoat pocket for him. “You agreed to go with me on a short adventure during which I promised that we would solve at least two mysteries together. Remember the time we went to investigate that haunted house in Cheshunt?”
“Cheshunt,” repeated Dickens. “You and Wills went ahead in a brougham. John Hollingshead and I walked to the village.”
“Sixteen miles, if I remember correctly,” I said, patting his shoulder. “It was long ago.” Dickens was suddenly and irrevocably an old man.
“But we found no ghosts, Wilkie.”
“No, but we had a wonderful time, did we not? Great fun! And so we shall on this coming Wednesday night, the eighth of June. But you must tell no one that you are going with me.”
We had started walking back, Dickens hobbling painfully, but suddenly he stopped and looked at me. “I shall go on this… expedition… if you promise me, my dear Wilkie… if you promise me now, and give your word of honour… that you shall let me mesmerise you first thing that night. Mesmerise you and release you from this cruel delusion I foisted upon you through my sheer arrogance and lack of common sense.”
“I promise, Charles,” I said. And when he continued to stare, “Our first item of business shall be you mesmerising me and me helping you in that endeavour. You can say your magic word… ‘Unintelligible’… to your heart’s content and we shall see what happens. You have my word of honour.”
He grunted and we continued the slow hobble back towards Gad’s Hill Place. I had left the Swiss chalet in the company of a middle-aged man filled with guilt, creative energy, and enthusiasm for life. I was returning in the company of a dying cripple.
“Wilkie,” he muttered as we approached the shade of the trees. “Did I ever tell you about the cherries?”
“Cherries? No, Charles, I don’t believe you did.” I was listening to a confused old man gather wool, but I wanted to keep him moving, keep him hobbling forward. “Tell me about the cherries.”
“When I was a difficult London youth long ago… it must have been after the awful Blacking Factory… yes, definitely after the Blacking Factory.” He feebly touched my arm. “Remind me to tell you about the Blacking Factory someday, my dear Wilkie. I have never told anyone in my life the truth about the Blacking Factory in my childhood, although it was the most horrible
thing that…” He seemed to drift off.
“I promise to ask you about that someday, Charles. You were saying about the cherries?”
The shade of the trees was welcome. I walked on. Dickens hobbled on.
“Cherries? Oh, yes… When I was a rather difficult London youth so long ago, I found myself walking down the Strand one day behind a workingman carrying a rather homely big-headed child on his shoulders. I presumed the boy was the workingman’s son. I had used almost the last of my pence to purchase this rather large bag of ripe cherries, you see…”
“Ah,” I said, wondering if Dickens might have had a sunstroke. Or a real stroke.
“Yes, cherries, my dear Wilkie. But the delightful thing was, you see, that the child looked back at me in a certain way… a certain, singular way… and I began popping cherries into the boy’s mouth, one after the other, and the big-headed child would spit out the pits most silently. His father never heard nor turned. He never knew. I believe I fed that big-headed boy all of my cherries—every single last one. And then the workingman with the boy on his shoulders turned left at a corner and I continued on straight and the father was never the wiser, but I was the poorer—at least for cherries—and the big-headed boy was the fatter and happier.”
“Fascinating, Charles,” I said.
Dickens tried hobbling more quickly, but his foot could bear no weight at all now. He had to rest all of his weight on his cane at each painful step. He glanced at me. “Sometimes, my dear Wilkie, I feel that my entire career as a writer has been nothing more than an extension of those minutes popping cherries into the mouth of that big-headed boy on his father’s shoulders. Does that make sense to you?”
“Of course, Charles.”
“You promise that you will allow me to mesmerise you and release you from my cruelly inflicted magnetic suggestions?” he said suddenly, sharply. “On Wednesday night, eight June? I have your word on that?”
“My word of honour, Charles.”
By the time we reached the stream with its small, arched bridge, I was whistling the tune I remembered from my dream.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Ifinished my novel Man and Wife early in the afternoon of Wednesday, 8 June, 1870.
I told George and Besse—who would not, in any case, continue in my employ much longer—that I needed the house quiet so I could sleep and sent them away for a day to visit whomever they chose.
Carrie was gone for the week, travelling with the Wards.
I sent a note to my editor at Cassell’s Magazine and another to my soon-to-be book publisher, F. S. Ellis, reporting that the manuscript was finished.
I sent a note to Dickens telling him that I had finished my book and reminding him of our appointment the next day, on the afternoon of 9 June. We did not have an appointment for 9 June, of course—our appointment was for that night of 8 June—but I was confident that the note would not arrive until the next morning, so it would serve as what those of us trained in the law call by its Latin name—an “alibi.” I also sent friendly notes to the Lehmanns, the Beards, and others, crowing that I had finished Man and Wife and—after a long night of welcomed and well-earned sleep—planned to celebrate the completion by a visit to Gad’s Hill Place the next afternoon, on the ninth.
Late that afternoon, dressed in black travelling clothes with a cape and broad hood thrown back, I took a rented carriage down to Gad’s Hill and parked under the oldest trees next to the Falstaff Inn as the sun set and the darkness sent out fingers from the forest behind that establishment.
I had not succeeded in finding a Hindoo sailor ready to leave England (never to return) in ten days. Nor a German or American or even English sailor ready to be my coachman. Nor had I found the black coach of my opium- and morphia-assisted imaginings. So I drove myself that night—I had little experience in handling coaches or carriages and crept along to Gad’s Hill far more slowly than my careering fantasy-Hindoo driver would have—and the rented vehicle I was driving was a tiny open carriage hardly larger than the pony cart in which Dickens used to fetch me.
But I set the small bullseye lantern under the single seat behind me and had Hatchery’s pistol—all four cartridges unfired and nestled in place—in my jacket pocket next to the burlap sack for metal objects, just as I had planned. In truth, this arrangement wherein I drove myself made much more sense: no driver, Hindoo or otherwise, could ever be a blackmail threat this way.
The evening also was not the perfect June night I had envisioned.
It rained hard during the tiring drive out and between the showers and the splashes onto the absurdly low box this miniature carriage offered, all of me was soaked through by the time I arrived at the Falstaff Inn just after sunset. And the sunset itself was more of a grey, smudged, watery afterthought to the day than the beautiful scene I had painted in my mind.
I tucked the single (ancient) horse and wobbly carriage as far back under the trees to the side of the inn as I could, but the rain showers still soaked me when they blew in, and after they departed, the trees continued to drip on me. The footwell in the tiny carriage space was actually filling up with puddles.
And Dickens did not come.
We had set the rendezvous time for thirty minutes after sunset (and he could be forgiven for not noticing the exact time of that cloudy anticlimax of a sunset), but soon it was an hour after sunset and still no sign of Dickens.
Perhaps, I thought, he could not see my dark carriage and black, dripping horse and black, soaked self there in the darkness under the trees. I considered lighting one of the lamps on the side of the carriage.
There were no lamps on the side or back of this cheap carriage. I considered lighting the bullseye lantern and setting it on the box next to me. Dickens might be able to see me from the house or his front yard then, I realised, but so would everyone coming or going from the Falstaff Inn or even those just passing by on the highway.
I considered going into the inn, ordering a hot buttered rum, and sending a boy over to Gad’s Hill Place to let Dickens know I was waiting.
Don’t be an idiot, whispered the trained-lawyer as well as the mystery-book-writer parts of my brain. And there rose again the odd word but necessary concept—alibi.
Ninety minutes after sunset and still no sign of Charles Dickens, perhaps the most punctual fifty-eight-year-old man in all of England. It was approaching ten PM. If we did not start out soon for Rochester, the entire trip might be lost.
I secured the dozing horse to a branch, made sure the pitiful example of a carriage’s brake was set, and I moved through the edge of the trees towards Dickens’s Swiss chalet. Every time the chilly night wind came up, the fir and deciduous branches dumped more Niagaras of water on me.
I’d seen at least three carriages turn into Dickens’s driveway in the past ninety minutes and two were still visible there. Was it possible that Dickens had forgotten—or simply decided to ignore—our mystery-trip appointment? (For a moment I had the chilled certainty that my false note reminding him of our appointment tomorrow had somehow arrived here at Gad’s Hill this afternoon, but then I remembered that I had deliberately posted it late in the day. No mail courier in the history of England would have delivered the message so quickly; in truth, it would be a stroke of unusual competence if Gad’s Hill Place saw the delivery of that reminder by late Friday—and this was Wednesday night).
I touched the pistol in my outer pocket and decided to approach the house through the tunnel.
What was I going to do if I peered through one of the windows of the new conservatory in back (just added this spring and Dickens’s delight) and saw the Inimitable still sitting at his dining table? Or reading a book?
I would rap on the conservatory glass, beckon him out, and kidnap him at gunpoint. It was that simple. And it had come to that.
As long as Georgina and the others who depended upon Dickens’s succour and income like sucking lampreys on a larger fish were not around. (And I had to include my brother, Charles, in
that Pisces-metaphor group.)
The tunnel was very dark and smelled of the spoor of wild creatures who may have evacuated their bowels in there. I felt like one of them that night and, soaked as I was, could not stop shivering.
Emerging from the tunnel, I avoided the noisy gravel of the main drive and walked through the low hedge into the front yard. I could see now that there were three carriages crowding the inner turnaround—although it was too dark for me to identify any of them—and one of the horses suddenly raised its head and snorted as it caught my scent. I wondered if it smelled a predator.
Moving to my right, I stood on tip-toes to peer over the hedges and lower clipped cedars to see between white curtains. The bow windows of Dickens’s study were dark, but that did seem to be the only unlighted room in the house. I saw a woman’s head—Georgina? Mamie? Katey?—pass by one of the front windows. Was she moving with some haste, or was this observation merely a function of my taut nerves?
I took several steps back so that I could better see the upper lighted windows and removed the heavy pistol from my pocket.
An anonymous assassin’s bullet crashing through the window glass, murdering the most famous author in all of… What idiocy was that? Dickens had not only to die; he had to disappear. Without a trace. And tonight. And as soon as he stepped out that door, belatedly remembering his meeting with me, he would. This I swore not only to God, but to all the Gods of the Black Lands.
Suddenly I was seized from behind by many hands and half-dragged, half-lifted as I was pulled backwards on my heels and away from the house.
This sentence does not do justice to the violence that was inflicted upon my person at that moment. There were several men’s hands and they were strong. And the owners of those rough hands had no scruples whatsoever about my well-being as they dragged me through a hedge, through low branches of a tree, and threw me down onto the stones and sharp-twigged flower bed of closely packed geraniums.