Drood (30 page)

A special train had been laid on to bring wedding guests down from London. I remember chatting with Thomas Beard, the understated gentleman who had served as Charles Dickens’s best man two decades earlier. Beard had the odd distinction of being the only person at Kate’s wedding who had also been at the wedding of the bride’s father, although in one brief, ad hoc toast, Dickens himself spoke ironically—almost bitterly, I thought—of “a similar ceremony performed in a metropolitan edifice some four and twenty years ago.”

Kate’s mother, Catherine, was not in attendance, of course. Nor was Elizabeth Dickens, the Inimitable’s elderly but still-surviving mother. Georgina Hogarth was the only member of the bride’s mother’s side of the family present. Few seemed to notice the absences.

After the wedding ceremony, the mob of guests returned to Gad’s Hill for a huge wedding breakfast. Again, everything on and around the table was decorated with white flowers. The wedding breakfast, while sumptuous, took only an hour. The host had promised everyone that there would be no speeches and there were none. I noticed that the bride and groom sat down at the table for a moment, then disappeared while the guests played games on the lawn. My mother, who sanctioned the match no more than did Charles Dickens, needed constant attendance that morning. When Charley and Kate reappeared, dressed for travel, the bride wore black. Katey broke down and cried bitterly on her father’s shoulder. Charley’s face grew more and more pale until I was afraid he was going to faint.

Mother and I gathered with the other thirty or so guests on the gravel path to kiss the newlyweds, shake hands all around, and to throw old shoes. After the carriage had departed, Mother announced that she was not feeling well. I left her seated in the shade just long enough to go inform Dickens of our departure, but could find him nowhere on the lawn amidst the young people playing nor in the parlour downstairs nor in the billiards room or study.

I saw Mamie coming downstairs, went up to Katey’s bedroom— what had been Katey’s bedroom until that morning—and found Dickens on his knees on the floor, his face buried in his daughter’s wedding gown. The Inimitable was sobbing like a child. He looked up at me, his face streaming with tears, perhaps seeing only my silhouette in the doorway and perhaps thinking me still to be his daughter Mamie, and he cried out in a broken voice—“But for me, Katey would not have left home!”

I said nothing. I turned, went downstairs and out onto the lawn, fetched my mother, and called for the carriage to take us back to the station and thence to London.

C
HARLES AND KATEY
were to have no children. The rumour spread—perhaps started by Dickens, but also perchance from Katey herself—that the marriage had never been consummated. It certainly was true that by the summer of Dickens’s railway accident in 1865, Katey was an unhappy and flirtatious woman, obviously searching for a lover. There were many men around who would not have shown scruples at making love to a married woman, had it not been for the ferocity and constant vigilance of her father.

Charley’s chronic illnesses and stomach aches also became a problem within the Dickens household. I was sure they were only ulcers, and when my brother, Charles, finally died of stomach cancer in 1873, it was only slight consolation that Charles Dickens had preceded him in death.

Dickens said sharply to me that odd autumn of 1865—“Your brother brings a death’s head to my table every breakfast here, Wilkie.” It was obvious to all that Dickens was certain that Charley was dying and that he—the Inimitable, never acknowledging his own illnesses nor allowing for even the possibility of his own death—thought that Charley should get it over with sooner rather than later.

A
ND SO WE RETURN,
Dear Reader, to the dismal state of my own health that winter of 1865–66.

My father had suffered from rheumatism that had concentrated itself behind his left eye, making it all but impossible for him to paint in his final years. My rheumatical gout inevitably migrated to my right eye, all but blinding me and causing me to squint out of my left eye as I wrote. The pain moved into my arm and hand to the point that I had to shift the quill from my right hand to my left to get a dip of ink.

Eventually I would be unable to write at all and would dictate some of my future books from the couch where I lay, but only after training my young secretary—first Harriet but then someone infinitely more ominous—to ignore my screams of pain and to listen only for the dictated sentences between the cries of agony.

I have mentioned that laudanum was my one relief from the pain. I may also have mentioned that it was traditional to take three to five
drops
of the liquid opium in a glass of wine, but by this time—the winter of 1865–66—I required two to three
glasses
of the medicine to allow me to work or sleep.

There were the drawbacks I mentioned. The feelings of always being followed and persecuted. The hallucinations. (At first I had assumed the woman with the green skin and tusks for teeth was such an hallucination; but then, after she assaulted me on the stairs in the dark, I awoke several times with deep scratches on my neck.)

One night I was working in my study—writing my novel
Armadale
—when I realised that a man was sitting in a chair only inches to my left. He was also writing. The man was my
Doppelgänger.
Or rather, he was I—wearing the same clothes, holding the same pen, turning towards me with the same dull but shocked expression which I must have been presenting to him.

He reached for my blank page.

I could not let him write my book. I could not let that page, my page, become
his
.

We scuffled. Chairs were knocked over. A lamp was dashed out. In the darkness, I pushed him away and stumbled out into the hall and off to my bedroom.

In the morning I went into my study and found the wall, sections of the window and sill, one corner of the expensive Persian carpet, my chair, its cushion, and two shelves of books absolutely dalmatianed with spattered ink. Six more pages of my novel had been written in a hand that was almost, but not quite, my own.

I burned them in the fireplace.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I
n December of 1865, Inspector Field reported to me, using hulking Detective Hatchery as his messenger, that Dickens’s “patient,” Ellen Ternan, felt well enough not only to attend a Christmas ball hosted by the brother of her sister’s soon-to-be husband, Anthony Trollope, but was sufficiently recovered from her June injuries at Staplehurst to
dance
at this party.

With scarlet geraniums in her hair.

By Christmas of that year, Inspector Field was actively complaining to me that he was providing
me
far more information than I was giving
him.
It was true. Although Dickens had invited me out to Gad’s Hill several times in the autumn and although he and I had dined in the city and attended various functions together all through that season of his slow recovery from the Staplehurst disaster, we never truly discussed the topic of Drood. It was as if Dickens were somehow aware that I had entered into a covenant of betrayal with the scheming Inspector Field. And yet, if that were true, why would the Inimitable continue to invite me to his home, write me newsy letters, and meet me for dinner at some of our favourite London haunts?

At any rate, Inspector Field had informed me only the week after I had repeated Dickens’s tale of his meeting with Drood, almost word for word, that the writer had lied to me.

If this was true, I realised, then there was no tributary to the buried river of the sort Dickens had described to me. No tunnel leading to another river, no underground rookeries filled with hundreds of the poor driven underground, no Egyptian temple along the banks of this unfound subterranean Nile. Either Dickens had lied to me to protect the real route to Drood’s lair or he had made up the entire encounter.

Inspector Field was not pleased. Obviously he and his men had spent hours or entire nights and days exploring the catacombs and caverns and sewers down there… all to no avail. At this rate, he let me know during our infrequent and sullen meetings, he would never apprehend Drood and would die of old age before pleasing his former superiors at the Metropolitan Police headquarters to the degree that they would reinstate his pension and rehabilitate his good name.

Nonetheless, Field continued to share information with me through the winter. During those autumn months after finishing work on
Our Mutual Friend
and presumably while having the pleasure of watching its final instalments appear in
All the Year Round,
Dickens had leased a house for himself in London at 6 Southwick Place, near Hyde Park. There was little mystery in this; he had rented a similar house just around the corner from this one two years before so as to have a convenient place in Tyburnia for his London social engagements, and this new place near Hyde Park was meant to allow his daughter Mamie to come into town whenever she wished for her own society needs (such as they were, since Society seemed to be shunning both Katey and Mamie to a great degree at that time).

So there was no mystery to the lease of a house near Hyde Park. But—as Inspector Field would indicate some weeks later with a wink and a touch of his nose with his corpulent finger—there was significantly more mystery involved in Dickens’s lease of two small homes in the village of Slough: one called Elizabeth Cottage in the High Street, and another one on Church Street only a quarter of a mile away. Although this revelation still lay in the future as the Christmas holiday arrived, I would later learn through Inspector Field that Dickens leased both of these properties under the name of Tringham—Charles Tringham for the Elizabeth Cottage and John Tringham for the house on Church Street.

For a while, Inspector Field would later inform me, the Church Street home lay empty, but then it was occupied by a certain Mrs Ternan and her daughter Ellen.

“We don’t know why Mr Dickens used the name of Tringham,” Inspector Field would say after the New Year as we walked around Dorset Square near my home. “It doesn’t seem important, on the surface, you see, but in our business it always helps if we understand why someone chooses certain aliases under which to do his dirty work.”

Ignoring the “dirty work” allusion, I said, “There’s a tobacconist’s shop on Wellington Street near the offices where Dickens and I work on
All the Year Round
. The owner, well known to both Dickens and me, is a certain Mary Tringham.”

“Ahh,” said Inspector Field.

“But I do not believe that is the source of the name,” I added.

“No?”

“No,” I said. “Do you happen to know, Inspector, a certain story published in 1839 by Thomas Hood?”

“I don’t believe I do,” the inspector said sourly.

“It’s about village gossip,” I said. “And there’s a bit of a poem in it…

“. . . learning whatever there was to learn

In the prattling, tattling village of Tringham.”

“Ahhh,” said Inspector Field again, but with more conviction this time. “Well, Mr Dickens… or Mr Tringham, if he prefers… goes to great lengths to hide his presence in Slough.”

“How is that?” I said.

“He dates his letters from Eton, telling his friends that he was merely walking in the Park there,” said Inspector Field. “And he walks miles across back fields from Slough to the Eton railway station, as if he chose to be noticed—if he were noticed at all—waiting for the train to London there rather than in Slough.”

I stopped on our walk and asked, “How do you know what Mr Dickens tells his friends in his private letters, Inspector? Have you been steaming open his mail or interrogating his friends?”

Inspector Field only smiled.

But all of these revelations, Dear Reader, would come about by the spring of 1866, and I must return us now to that bizarrely memorable Christmas of 1865.

W
HEN DICKENS INVITED ME
up to Gad’s Hill Place for Christmas Day, suggesting in his note that I stay through New Year’s, I accepted at once. “The Butler and the Butler’s Mother shall understand,” he wrote in the same note, referring to Harriet (whom we called Carrie ever more frequently as she matured) and her mother, Caroline, in his usual bantering way. I am not sure Caroline and Carrie
did
fully understand or appreciate my absence that week, but that was of little concern to me.

As I took the short train ride to Chatham, I held the Christmas Issue of
All the Year Round
in my hands—the one I’d just contributed to and helped put out and the one that held Dickens’s Christmas story “Cheap Jack” in it—and I thought about the warp and woof of the Inimitable’s fiction these days.

Perhaps it takes a novelist (or some Future Literary Critic such as yourself, Dear Reader) to see what lies behind the words of another novelist’s fiction.

I shall start with Dickens’s most recent Christmas tale:

Cheap Jack, the eponymous hero of the Inimitable’s little fable and a common name in our time for the travelling salesman who moved from village to village with his inexpensive wares, was written about a man whose wife was no longer with him, whose child was dead, and who—for professional reasons—must hide his feelings from the world. Dickens’s character was “King of the Cheap Jacks” and happened to be taking a paternal interest in a young girl with “a pretty face and bright, dark hair.” Was this a twisted self-portrait by the author? Was the young girl Ellen Ternan?

Dickens being Dickens, of course, the girl with the pretty face and bright, dark hair also happens to be deaf and dumb. What would a Dickens Christmas tale be without pathos and bathos?

“See us on the footboard,” Cheap Jack tells us of his time in front of audiences, “and you’d give pretty well anything you possess to be us. See us off the footboard, and you’d add a trifle to be off your bargain.”

Is Charles Dickens telling us here about the great abyss between his gay public life and persona and his private sadnesses and bone-deep loneliness away from the public eye?