Drood (103 page)

“This is their first venture,” I said. “They will be selling on commission and I will be receiving ten percent on every copy sold.”

“Marvellous!” said Dickens. “You seem somewhat restless—perhaps even agitated—today, my dear Wilkie. Would you care to join me in a walk?”

“
Can
you walk, Charles?” I was eyeing his new cane, which was indeed a
cane,
of the long-handled type one saw being carried by lame old men, rather than the sort of dashing walking stick preferred by young men such as myself. (As you may remember, Dear Reader, I was 46 in this summer of 1870, while Dickens was 58 and showed every year and month and more of that advanced age. But then, several people had recently commented on the grey in
my
beard, my ever-increasing girth, my problems catching my breath, and a certain hunched-over quality my tired body had assumed of late, and some had been so impertinent as to suggest that
I
was looking much older than my years.)

“Yes, I can walk,” said Dickens, taking no offence at my comment. “And I try to every day. It is getting late, so I do not suggest a serious walk to Rochester or some other daunting destination, but we might manage a stroll through the fields.”

I nodded and Dickens led the way down, leaving—one presumes—the portfolio with his unfinished manuscript of
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
there on his chalet worktable where anyone might come in off the highway and filch it.

W
E CROSSED THE ROAD
towards his house but then went around the side yard, past the stables, through the rear yard where he had once consigned his correspondence to a bonfire, and out into the field where Sultan had died some autumns earlier. The grasses here that had been dead and brown then were green and high and stirring in the breeze today. A well-worn path led off towards the rolling hills and a scrim of trees that marked the path of a broad stream that ran towards the river that ran to the sea.

Neither of us was running this day, but if Dickens’s walking pace had been diminished, I could not discern it. I was huffing and puffing to keep up.

“Frank Beard tells me that you’ve had to add morphine to your pharmacopoeia in order to sleep,” said Dickens, the cane in his left hand (he had always carried his stick in his right hand before) quickly rising and falling. “And that, although you’ve told him you discontinued the practice, a syringe he lent you some time ago has gone missing.”

“Beard is a dear man,” I said, “who often lacks discretion. He was keeping the world informed as to your pulse rate during your final reading tour, Charles.”

My walking partner had nothing to say to that.

Finally I added, “The daughter of my servants, George and Besse—still servants of mine for the time-being at least—had been pilfering things. I had to send her away.”

“Little Agnes?” cried Dickens. “Stealing? Incredible!”

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.

F
IRST 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 you 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.