The red geraniums! They filled my vision—along with flashing stars following my skull’s impact with the ground—and the red of the blossoms struck me clearly, impossibly, even in the darkness.
Dickens’s red geraniums. Blossoms of blood. A gunshot’s flower blossoming on the white field of a formal shirt. The red geranium flower of Nancy’s Murder as Bill Sikes bashed her brains out.
My nightmares had been premonitions, perhaps powered by the opium that also fueled my creativity when all else failed.
I tried to rise, but the strong hands forced me back down into the mud and loam. Three white faces floated above me as I caught a hint of crescent moon sliding between quickly moving black clouds.
As if to prove my prescience, Edmond Dickenson’s face thrust itself into my field of vision just a foot from my face. His teeth had indeed been sharpened into tiny white daggers. “Easssy there, Mr Collinsss. Easy doesss it. No fireworksss tonight, sir. Not thisss night.”
As if to explain that cryptic statement, other strong hands removed the pistol from my twitching hand. I had forgotten it was there.
Reginald Barris’s face took the place of Dickenson’s. The powerful man was smiling or grimacing horribly—I could not tell the difference—and I realised that it had not been dental decay that had shown dark places in his smile when I had seen him last in that narrow alley. Barris had filed his teeth down to sharp points as well. “Thisss iss our night, Mr Collinsss,” the pale face hissed.
I struggled to no avail. When I looked up again, Drood’s face was floating above me.
I use the word “floating” advisedly here. All of Drood seemed to be floating above me, his arms outstretched rather as would be those of one entering deep water, his face looking down at me, his black-cloaked body levitating on invisible supporting currents and hovering parallel to mine only five or six feet above the Earth.
The places where Drood’s eyelids and nostrils should have been were so red-raw that they looked to have been cut away with a scalpel only minutes earlier. I had almost forgotten how the Drood-thing’s long tongue flicked in and out like a lizard’s.
“You can’t kill Dickens!” I gasped. “You can’t kill Dickens. It must be I who…”
“Hussssshhh,” said the floating, hovering, expanding white skull-face. Drood’s breath carried the stench of grave dirt and the sewer-sweetness of dead, bloated things floating in an Undertown river. His wide eyes were rimmed and rivuleted with blood. “Hussssh, now,” hissed Drood, as if soothing a demon-child. “It’sss Charlesss Dickens’sss sssoul we take tonight. You can have whatever isss left, Mr Billy Wilkie Collinssssss. Whatever isss left, isss yourssss.”
I opened my mouth to scream, but at that second the floating Drood removed a redolent black silk handkerchief from his operacape pocket and pressed it down over my straining face.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Iwas wakened in late morning by Caroline’s daughter, Carrie, even though—as I mentioned earlier—she was supposed to be travelling out of the city with the Wards, the family for whom she served as governess. She was weeping as she knocked repeatedly and then, when I did not answer, came into my bedroom.
Groggily, I sat up in bed and pulled the bedcovers up. All I could think of in my half-waking state was that somehow Carrie had come home early and gotten into the locked box in the locked lower dresser drawer where I kept her mother’s letters. Caroline’s most recent letter to me—received and read only three days earlier—reported that she had complained of one of her husband Joseph’s late-night drinking parties with his sports-loving friends and she had come to consciousness the next day locked in the cellar with one of her eyes swollen shut and with a sure sense of having been violated by more than one man.
But this was not the reason for Carrie’s weeping.
“Wilkie, Mr Dickens… Charles Dickens, your friend… he is dead!”
Through sobs, Carrie explained that her patrons, my friends Edward and Henrietta Ward, had been in transit to Bristol when they heard word of Dickens’s death from a friend they met at the station, and they had immediately turned around and come back to the city so that Carrie could be with me.
“To… to think… of how many times Mr Dickens… was a guest at our ta… table… when Mother lived here…” Carrie was sobbing.
I rubbed my aching eyes. “Go on downstairs like a good girl,” I said at last. “Have Besse put on coffee and prepare a late breakfast.…”
“George and Besse are gone,” she said. “I had to use the key we hide in the arbour to get in.”
“Ah, yes,” I said, still rubbing my face. “I gave them last night and today off… so that I could sleep. I finished my book last night, Carrie.”
She did not seem properly impressed by this fact and made no comment. She was weeping again, although why she felt such a personal loss at the reported death of an old gentleman who hadn’t visited the house in many months and who had called her “the Butler” for years, I had no idea. “Go around the block, then, and bring the cook back with you,” I said. “But be a good girl and put the coffee and tea on first, please. Oh, and Carrie, go to the tobacco shop beyond the square and bring back every newspaper you can find. Go on, now!”
When she was gone, I threw off the covers and looked down. Carrie hadn’t seemed to have noticed through her tears, but I was wearing a soiled white shirt and trousers rather than pyjamas. My boots were still laced, and the sheets were smeared with mud that looked—and smelled—far too much like excrement.
I rose and went off to bathe and change before Carrie returned.
AS THE DAY WENT ON, more and more pieces of reliable information clicked into place.
After starting his day on the eighth of June by chatting over breakfast with Georgina, Dickens had violated his usual rules and work habits by working in the chalet all day, only returning to the house at about one PM for lunch before heading back to his eyrie to write again late into the day.
I later saw the final page for The Mystery of Edwin Drood that he’d written that day. The lines showed fewer corrections and crossings-out than the normal Charles Dickens first-draft page to which I was accustomed. It included this passage and obviously was describing a beautiful morning in Rochester very similar to the lovely morning he had just experienced at Gad’s Hill. It began with “A brilliant morning shines on the old city…” and moved on to—
Changes of glorious light from moving boughs, songs of birds, scents from gardens, woods and fields—or, rather, from the one great garden of the whole cultivated island in its yielding time—penetrate the Cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and preach of the Resurrection and the Life. The cold stone tombs of centuries ago grow warm; and flecks of brightness dart into the sternest marble corners of the building, fluttering there like wings.
The last words he ever wrote of The Mystery of Edwin Drood that afternoon were—“. . . and then falls to with an appetite.”
Dickens left the chalet late and went to his study before dinner. There he wrote two letters (according to Katey, who much later told my brother about them, who later informed me)—one to Charles Kent in which he, Dickens, said that he would be in London the following day (9 June) and would like to meet Charles at three o’clock that afternoon. Although, he added, “If I can’t be—why, then I shan’t be.”
The other letter was to a clergyman, and it was in this letter that the Inimitable quoted Friar Laurence’s warning to Romeo—“These violent delights have violent ends.”
Then Dickens went in to dinner.
Georgina later told my brother that just as they sat down together to dine, she looked at him across the table and became very alarmed at the expression on the Inimitable’s face.
“Are you ill, Charles?” she asked.
“Yes, very ill. I have been… ill… for the last hour.”
Georgina wanted to send for a doctor at once, but Dickens waved her back to her seat and insisted that they go on with the meal. “We must dine,” he said as if
distracted, “for I must leave immediately after dinner. I must go… to London… at once. After dinner. I have… an… appointment tomorrow, today, tonight.”
Suddenly he began to writhe as if in the midst of a violent fit. Georgina described it to Katey as if “there were some spirit trying to invade his body and poor Charles were trying to resist the possession.”
Dickens was saying words that made no sense to Georgina. Suddenly he cried, “I must go to London at once!” and pushed back his crimson-damasked chair.
He rose but would have fallen if Georgina had not rushed forward and caught him. “Come into the parlour,” she said, terrified by his ashen face and fixed expression. “Come and lie down.”
She tried to help him to a sofa, but he could not walk and his body quickly grew heavier and heavier in her arms. Never before, she later told Katey, had she truly understood the term “dead weight.”
Georgina gave up the attempt of getting him to a sofa and lowered him to the floor. There he placed both palms on the carpet, sank heavily on his left side, and murmured very faintly—“Yes. On the ground.” Then he fell unconscious.
At this time, I had been leaving the last of London traffic on the highway to Gad’s Hill and cursing the rain. But it was not raining there. Not yet.
Had I been there in the darkness under the trees where I would soon be waiting, I would have seen one of the young servants (perhaps Smythe or Gowen, the gardener-gondoliers according to Dickens) riding Newman Noggs, the pony who had so often trotted me from the station to the house, hell-bent for leather to summon the local doctor.
That physician, Mr Steele, arrived at 6.30 PM, still well before I had reached Gad’s Hill, to find Dickens “lying on the floor of the dining-room in a fit.”
Other servants carried a long sofa down to the dining room, and Mr Steele supervised placement of the unconscious but twitching author on it. Then Steele applied clysters and “other remedies” to the patient, but with no effect.
Georgina, meanwhile, had been firing off telegrams like a three-decker warship firing broadsides. One came to Frank Beard, who set off at once and arrived late that night, perhaps when I was being driven away—as unconscious as Dickens—in my own hired carriage.
I wondered then and wonder now who drove me into the city that night, rifled my pockets to find the key to my home, carried me to bed, and tucked me in. Not Drood, obviously. Dickenson? Reginald Barris-Field? Some other walking-dead lackey whom I had never even seen during the attack on me in the darkness?
Whoever it was had stolen nothing. I even found my pistol—Hatchery’s pistol—still loaded with the final four cartridges and locked away in the drawer where I always kept it.
How had they known where I kept it?
And what, I wondered, had become of my hired carriage? Even my novelist’s fecund imagination could not picture one of Drood’s black-opera-cloaked assistant monsters returning it to the carriage-hire place in Cripplegate where I had rented it. Of course I had gone far from home in that hiring and used an assumed name for the transaction—Dickens’s favourite assumed name, actually, “Charles Tringham”—but the loss of that damage deposit came at a hard time for me financially. And it had been a miserable little carriage in the first place.
And I never recovered the bullseye lantern either.
When Kate Dickens, my brother, Charles, and others summoned by Georgina’s telegram barrage arrived very late that night, they found Dickens still unconscious on the sofa and unable to respond to their queries or touches. (The three carriages I had seen in the driveway had been only the beginning of the invasion.)
All through the long night—well, short night, to be more accurate, since it was so very close to the summer solstice—all through the short night, his family and Beard and my brother took turns holding the Inimitable’s hand and setting heated bricks against his feet.
“Even by the early hour of midnight,” my brother later told me, “Dickens’s hands and feet had become the cold appendages of a corpse.”
Early in the morning, Dickens’s son telegraphed for a more famous London doctor, Russell Reynolds, who read the name “Dickens” and left London at once on the earliest express, arriving at Gad’s Hill under the rising spring sun. But Dr Russell Reynolds’s verdict was identical to that of Mr Steele and Frank Beard—the writer had suffered a massive “paralytic stroke” and there was nothing that could be done for him.
Katey was sent to London to break the news to her mother and to prepare her for worse news. No one I spoke to ever noticed or reported the reaction of Catherine Dickens, the Inimitable’s banished wife of twenty-two years and the mother of his ten children. I know for a certainty that Dickens himself would not have cared or asked.
Ellen Ternan arrived early in the afternoon, about the time Katey returned.
Earlier that spring, on a visit during a brief layover between his readings, Dickens had shown me his newly constructed conservatory, which opened from the dining room. He showed me how it allowed sunlight and moonlight into what had been rather dark rooms and—seemingly most important to him when he was showing it off with all the delight of a boy sharing a new toy with a friend—how it now would fill the house with the mixed scent of his favourite flowers there. The ubiquitous scarlet geraniums (the same flower he had worn in his lapel during readings whenever he could) had no real scent from the flower, of course, but the leaves and stems gave off an earthy, musky scent, as did the stalks of the blue lobelias. This ninth day of June was lovely and mild, and all the windows in Gad’s Hill Place were open wide, as if offering escape to the soul still caged in the failed body on the sofa, there where the dining room opened onto the green plants and crimson flowers of the conservatory.
But it was the scent of syringa that was heaviest in the air that day. Dickens would almost certainly have commented on the smell if he had been conscious and going about his business of killing Edwin Drood. As it was, his son Charley—who spent most of the day sitting with his sister Kate outside on the steps, where the syringa-scent was that much stronger—later could never bear having that flower anywhere near him.
As if he were deeply inhaling that scent which his son would hate for the rest of his life, Dickens’s breathing grew louder and less regular as the afternoon faded into early evening. Across the highway—where traffic passed in ignorance of the drama playing out in the fine and quiet home—the shadows of the twin cedars fell across the Swiss chalet in which no pages had been written that day. (Nor ever would be again.)
Inside the main house, no one, it seems, was scandalised when Ellen Ternan took and held the unconscious man’s hand. At about six PM, Dickens’s breathing grew fainter. Embarrassingly—at least it would have been for me had I been there—the unconscious Inimitable began to make sobbing noises. His eyes remained closed and he returned no pressure to Ellen’s hopeful, hopeless hand, but at about ten minutes after six, a single tear welled from his right eye and trickled down his cheek.
And then he was gone.
Charles Dickens was dead.
My friend and foe and competitor and collaborator, my mentor and my monster, had lived precisely four months and two days past his fifty-eighth birthday.
It was, of course, almost to the hour, the fifth anniversary of the railway accident at Staplehurst and his first meeting with Drood.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Those who knew me at the time commented to one another later that I reacted rather coolly to Dickens’s death.
For instance, in spite of the public knowledge of the estrangement between Dickens and myself, I had recently suggested to my publisher William Tindell that Man and Wife might be advertised by inserting a slip of coloured paper into the July number of Edwin Drood then being serialised. I had added in a postscript to Tindell—“Dickens’s circulation is large and influential.… If private influence is wanted here I can exert it.”
Tindell had replied on June 7, the day before Dickens collapsed, that he was not in favour of the
idea.
On 9 June, I wrote him (and mailed it on 10 June)—
You are quite right. Besides, since you wrote, he is gone. I finished ‘Man and Wife’ yesterday—fell asleep from sheer fatigue—and was awakened to hear the news of Dickens’s death.
The advertising at the Stations is an excellent idea.
On another occasion, my brother showed me a graphite sketch done by John Everett Millais on June tenth. As was the tradition in our era when Great Men passed (as I surmise it still may be in your era, Dear Reader), the family had rushed in an artist (Millais) and a sculptor (Thomas Woolner) to record Dickens’s face as the corpse lay there. Both Millais’s drawing that Charley was showing me and the death mask done by Woolner (according to my brother) showed a visage made younger by the slow fading of the deep lines and wrinkles that care and pain had brought. In Millais’s drawing, the inevitable large bandage or towel is tied under Dickens’s chin so that the jaw will not sag open.
“Does he not look calm and dignified?” said Charley. “Does he not look merely asleep—as during one of his short naps—and ready to wake and spring up with his characteristic bound and begin writing again?”
“He looks dead,” I said. “As dead as a post.”
AS I HAD PREDICTED, a national—nay, a near global—hue and cry for Dickens to be buried in Westminster Abbey began before rigor mortis had relaxed its grip.
The London Times, long an enemy of Dickens’s and an opponent to every political and reform suggestion the Inimitable had ever made in public (not to mention a publication that had condescendingly dismissed almost all of his more recent novels), cried out in its bannered editorial—
Statesmen, men of science, philanthropists, the acknowledged benefactors of their race, might pass away, and yet not leave the void which will be caused by the death of Dickens.… Indeed, such a position is attained by not even one man in an age. It needs an extraordinary combination of intellectual and moral qualities… before the world will consent to enthrone a man as their unassailable and enduring favourite. This is the position which Mr Dickens has occupied with the English and also with the American public for a third of a century… Westminster Abbey is the peculiar resting place of English literary genius; and among those whose sacred dust lies there, or whose names are recorded on the walls, very few are more worthy than Charles Dickens of such a home. Fewer still, we believe, will be regarded with more honour as time passes, and his greatness grows upon us.