Whatever else I knew that night of 14 June, 1870, I knew beyond any doubt that my fate was not to burn to death in a house fire.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
It was on the fourth day of July, 1870, my little daughter Marian’s first birthday, that I finished work early (I was adapting Man and Wife to the stage) and took the early-evening train to Rochester. I carried with me a small embroidered sofa pillow that Martha had made for me before she first came down to London. Some children in the carriage noticed the pillow I carried along with my leather portfolio and pointed and laughed—an old man of forty-six years and almost seven months, with balding head and greying beard and weakening eyes, carrying his own pillow probably for physical reasons too absurd for Youth even to enquire into—and I smiled and waggled my fingers at them in return.
In Rochester I walked the mile or so from the station to the Cathedral. Dickens’s most recent instalment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood was out, and this city and cathedral and adjoining churchyard—as poorly disguised as “Cloisterham” and “Cloisterham Cathedral” as Dick Datchery was within the same pages with the great wig he kept forgetting he was wearing—had already taken on literary and mystery resonances for the careful reader.
It was just after sunset and I waited with my pillow and my valise as the last visitors—two clergymen oddly holding hands (they had obviously come to trace headstone inscriptions with charcoal)—left through the open gate and disappeared towards the town centre and distant station.
I could hear two voices from the distant rear of the graveyard, but actual sight of the two people was obscured by the rise and fall of the cemetery fields, by the trees, by the thick hedges that shielded that poorer area near the marsh grasses, and even by the taller headstone monuments erected by such arrogant but insecure people as Mr Thomas Sapsea, still alive and walking and pontificating and enjoying his wife’s long headstone-monument epitaph (written by him and about him, of course, and carved into stone by the colourful stonemason, chiefly in the monumental line, named Durdles). Still alive and walking and pontificating, I should point out, only in the pages of the serialised novel now hurtling towards its premature discontinuance as surely as the 2.39 tidal train from Folkestone had hurtled unstoppably towards the breach in trestle rails at Staplehurst some five years and a little less than a month before.
“This is an idiot’s idea,” bellowed a man’s voice.
“I thought it might be gay,” came a woman’s voice. “A sort of evening picnic by the sea.”
I stopped less than twenty feet away from the bickering couple but remained hidden behind a tall, thick marble monolith—a sort of Sapsea-esque obelisk to some local functionary whose name, never much remembered anyway, had been all but erased by the salt and rain and sea breezes.
“A d—— ned picnic in a d—— ned boneyard!” shouted the man. It was obvious to even the most disinterested (and distant) overhearing ear that this was a man who was never embarrassed by his own shouting.
“See how nicely this—piece of stone—serves as a table,” came the weary woman’s voice. “Just sit and relax a moment while I open your beer.”
“My beer be d—— ned!” bellowed the man. There came the sound of brittle china shattering after being thrown upon eternal—or at least monumental—stone. “Pack up these things. ’Ere, give me the glass and pail of beer first. You stupid cow. It’ll be hours before I’m fed now. And you’ll earn and pay back the railway fare or… Say, who are… what are you doing ’ere? What’s that in your hands? A pillow?”
I kept smiling until I got within two feet of the man, who’d barely had time to struggle to his feet while trying not to spill his pail and goblet of beer.
Still smiling, I pressed the pillow tight against the man’s sallow chest and pulled the trigger on the pistol I was holding behind that pillow. The gunshot was strangely muffled.
“What!?…” cried Joseph Clow. He staggered backwards a few steps. It appeared that he could not decide between looking at me, still holding the pillow—which was smoking slightly—or down at his own chest.
A single scarlet geranium flower had blossomed on his cheaply woven but immaculately white shirtfront. His grimy-nailed hands rose to his open waistcoat and he clawed weakly at that blossoming shirt, ripping buttons off.
I thrust the pillow against his now-bare and hairless flesh, just half a hand-span above his sternum, and fired twice more. Both cartridges fired true.
Clow stumbled backwards another few paces until his heels caught the edge of a low, horizontal stone similar to the one they had been prepared to dine at. He tumbled over backwards then, rolled once, and lay there on his back.
He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound emerged except for a sort of bubbling and gurgling which was coming—I realised—not from his throat but from his newly perforated lungs. His eyes rolled wide and white as he searched for help. His long legs were already twitching and spasming.
Caroline hurried over, crouched next to her husband, and took the small pillow from my steady hands. Kneeling, she used both hands to press the smoking pillow firmly down over Joseph Clow’s open, straining mouth and bulging eyes.
“You have one bullet left,” she said to me. “Use it. Now.”
I pressed the pistol into the pillow with such ferocity that it felt as if I were using the barrel to cram the feathers and fabric down Clow’s gaping maw as if to strangle him. His moans and attempts at a scream were completely muffled now. I squeezed the trigger and the faithful gun fired a final time. This time there came a familiar (to me at least, from my morphia dream) sound of the back of a skull splintering open like some huge walnut being cracked.
I stamped the smouldering pillow out.
Caroline was staring down at the white-and-red face with its shattered but now eternally frozen expression. Her own expression was absolutely unreadable, even by someone who had known her as long as I had.
Then we both looked around, waiting to hear shouts and running feet. I half-expected to see Minor Canon Crisparkle come loping manfully over the grassy hillocks separating us from the cathedral and street.
But there was no one. Not even a distant shout of enquiry. The wind blew out that evening, towards the sea rather than from it. The marsh grasses writhed in unison with one another.
“Get his feet,” I said softly. I wrapped a towel around Clow’s shattered head to prevent leaving a trail of blood and brain matter. I then donned the long yellow apron from my valise that Caroline had written to remind me to bring; she had even told me in which drawers in the Gloucester Place kitchen to find the towel and apron. “We don’t want to have his heels leave ruts in the sod,” I said. “What on earth are you doing there?”
“I am picking up his shirt buttons,” said Caroline from where she crouched. She spoke very calmly, her long fingers, educated by sewing and by playing card games, dancing nimbly in the grass as they retrieved the small horned circles. She did not rush.
Then we were carrying the body of Joseph Clow the sixty feet or so to the quick-lime pit. This was quite possibly our riskiest moment (I was carrying him under his arms and thankful for the apron that was absorbing the smeared contents of the back of his head, although how Caroline had known this would be a problem I had no idea; she carried his feet by the ankles), but although I kept swivelling my head, I could see no other person in the graveyard or beyond. I even glanced apprehensively at the sea, knowing that nautical types almost always carried small telescopes or other spyglasses. Suddenly she began laughing and I was so startled by the sound that I almost dropped our burden.
“What in heaven’s name do you find amusing?” I gasped. I was not out of breath because of carrying Clow—the dead plumber seemed to be hollow he was so light—but simply due to the walking.
“Us,” said Caroline. “Can you imagine how we appear—me all doubled over like a hunchback, you in your bright yellow apron, both of us turning our heads like mishandled marionettes.…”
“I fail
to see the humour,” I said when we got Clow to his temporary destination and as I set his upper half down gently—far more gently than the circumstances warranted, I am sure—next to the pit.
“You will someday, Wilkie,” said Caroline, brushing her hands together when she had released her share of the burden. “You take care of everything here. I will go pack the picnic things.” Before walking back, she looked out towards the water and then back and up at the tower. “This actually could be a pleasant place to picnic. Oh—do not forget the bag in your portfolio and the rings, watch, coins, pistol.…”
Despite my greater experience at all this (or what felt like it), I would have forgotten—and tumbled Clow into the pit with rings, a gold necklace and locket I would soon find (with a woman’s picture in it, but not Caroline’s), as well as his watch and many coins, all of which would have been very difficult or impossible to find in the quick-lime in a week or two when I returned—had it not been for her reminder. As it was, the metal objects, including Hatchery’s now emptied and impotent pistol (for which I had no nostalgia whatsoever), were in the burlap bag in a minute and Clow was out of sight under the surface of the quick-lime two minutes after that.
I tossed the metal rod that I’d kept there in the weeds for so long into the marsh and walked back to the erstwhile picnic site. “What are you doing now?” I asked, my voice sounding odd. I could not catch my breath, as though we were climbing to some place high in the Alps rather than standing in a churchyard at sea level.
“Finding and fitting all the pieces of the plate he broke. That was a nice plate.”
“Oh, for God’s sa…” I stopped as I heard voices raised in the direction of the highway. It was an open carriage going by on the road. A man, a woman, and two children were laughing and pointing towards the pink clouds where the sun had set, in the opposite direction from the Cathedral and graveyard. Their heads and gazes did not turn back in our direction as I watched.
“You need to do something with this,” said Caroline and handed me the stained, blackened, and still internally smouldering pillow.
It was my turn to laugh then, but I resisted the impulse, since I was not sure that I could stop once begun.
“And for heaven’s sake, Wilkie,” she said, “take off that bright apron!”
I did so, carrying the pillow and my leather lawyer’s portmanteau holding the coins and other items back to the quick-lime pit. There was no sight of Clow in the pit itself. I had learned through my experiments with various dog carcasses that even with the bloating and putrefaction of decay adding to the dead body’s buoyancy, once pressed far enough beneath the surface, anything deep in the thick lime tended to stay beneath the surface until raked out.
But what to do with the pillow? The quick-lime presumably would eat it away in a day or two, just as it had the various items of clothing I had tested here—buttons and belts (minus their brass buckles) and braces and laces and boot soles were the stubbornest of objects—but would the pillow stay submerged? And I had already tossed away the iron rod and had little wish to wade into the muck and reeds to retrieve it.
In the end I threw the brown embroidered thing as far out towards the sea as I could fling it. Were this in one of my sensationalist novels—or in Dickens’s—I am sure that it would have been a major clue and the key to my (and Caroline’s) undoing. Some more-clever version of Inspector Bucket or Sergeant Cuff or even of Dick Datchery, Detective, would find us out, and during Caroline’s and my walk up the thirteen steps to the gallows, each of us would be thinking, That d—— ned pillow! (Although I would never ascribe such language to a woman.)
But as it was, the miserable pillow—barely visible in the failing light, since the bright moon was yet to rise—merely arced far out over the reeds and cattails and then disappeared into the marsh and muck there.
Remembering who had given me the embroidered nightmare as a gift, I did finally smile as I thought, This may be Martha R——’s greatest contribution to my future happiness.
Caroline was ready, the shards of her broken plate all retrieved and packed away in her picnic hamper, and we left the graveyard together. We would catch the same 9.30 express to London but we would not sit together—or even in the same carriage. Not yet.
“Are all your things packed and shipped?” I asked softly as we walked through the narrow old streets of Rochester towards the lights of the station.
She nodded.
“No need to go back?”
“None.”
“Three weeks,” I said. “And I have Mrs G——’s address at the little hotel near Vauxhall Gardens where she will be staying.”
“But no contact until the three weeks are up,” whispered Caroline as we came out onto a busier street. “Do you really believe that I shall be able to move back in by the first of September?”
“I am absolutely certain of it, my dear,” I said. And I was.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Ashort while ago as I write this, Dear Reader, a little after sunrise, just after I switched off the light next to the easy chair in which I rest, I wrote the following note to Frank Beard—“I am dying—come if you can.”
I didn’t believe I was actually dying when I wrote that, but I do feel worse now and may well begin that final dying any minute, and a good writer plans ahead. I may not have the energy to write the note later, you see, so I shall keep it on hand. I have not sent it yet, but since Caroline is elsewhere today, I may ask Marian or Harriet soon to send it along to Frank, who is as ancient and weary and worn-out as I. But he does not have far to come. I can see his home through my bedroom window here.
At this point you may well be asking—When are you writing this?
For the first time in our long voyage together, Dear Reader, I shall answer that question.
I am finishing this long manuscript to you in the third week of September of the year 1889. I was very ill this past summer—but still working towards finishing these memoirs—and then, as autumn approached, I was feeling much better. I wrote this note to Frederick Lehmann on September 3—
I have fallen asleep and the doctor forbids the waking of me. Sleep is my cure, he says, and he is really hopeful of me. Don’t notice the blots, my dressing gown sleeve is too large, but my hand is still steady. Goodbye for the present, dear old friend; we may really hope for healthier days.
But the week after I wrote that, I came down with a respiratory infection on top of my other ailments and I can tell that dear old Frank Beard—although he has not said so to my face—has given up hope for me.
I trust you will notice but forgive the same blots in the last chapters of this manuscript I have set aside for you. My dressing gown sleeve truly is too large and, to be honest with you in a way I hesitate to be with Frederick or Frank or Caroline or Harriet or Marian or William Charles, my eyesight and coordination are not what they once were.
As recently as this past May of 1889, when an inquisitive and impudent young correspondent asked me directly about the rumour of my long use of stimulants, I responded thusly—
I have been writing novels for the last five and thirty years and I have been regularly in the habit of relieving the weariness which follows on work of the brain—declared by George Sand to be the most depressing of all forms of mortal fatigue—by champagne at one time and brandy (old cognac) at another. If I live until January next, I shall be sixty-six years old, and I am writing another work of fiction. There is my experience.
Well, I believe on this cool day of 23 September that I shall not live ’til January next, when my birthday would have sent the bells tolling sixty-six times. But already I have lived five years longer than my teetotalling father did and some twenty years longer than my dear brother, Charles, who never used a stimulant stronger than the rare sip of whisky as long as he lived.
Charley died on 9 April, 1873. He died of cancer of the bowel and stomach, which was precisely what Dickens had always insisted that Charley was suffering from, despite all our prot
ests to the contrary. My only consolation is that Dickens had been dead almost three years by the time Charley finally succumbed and went under. I would definitely have had to murder Charles Dickens if I’d heard him gloating about the correctness of his diagnosis when it came to my dear brother.
Shall I summarize the nineteen years I have lived since the summer of the Inimitable’s death? It hardly seems worth the effort for either of us, Dear Reader, and lies outside the purpose and purview of this memoir. And equally outside your range of interest, I am sure. This was about Dickens and Drood, and there your curiosity lies, not in your modest and unworthy narrator.
Suffice it to say that Caroline G—— returned to my home at Number 90 Gloucester Place in the early autumn of 1870, just weeks after… weeks after Dickens died and after her husband of the time disappeared. (Since Joseph Clow’s mother had recently suffered a series of strokes, it was as if no one noticed that he had disappeared, and his wife with him. Enquiries were made by a few mildly interested parties, but all of Mr and Mrs Clow’s bills had been paid, all debts met, the rent for their tiny house paid to the end of July, and the house itself sealed up tidily and emptied of all clothing and personal possessions before the couple were found to be missing—and then the house and its few pieces of cheap furniture were taken over again by the party who had rented it to them—and the few people who had known the Clows at all assumed that the hard-drinking workingman and his unhappy bride had moved away. Most of his ruffian friends believed that the unlucky plumber and his accident-prone wife had moved to Australia, since after a few drinks Clow had always threatened precisely such a sudden departure.)
By March of 1871, I was once again legally listing Mrs Caroline G—— on the parish records as my housekeeper. Carrie was delighted to have her mother home and never—to my knowledge—asked a single question as to how Caroline had extricated herself from the bad marriage.