Drood (41 page)

“These characters and changes are as real for me as they are for the audience,” Dickens had told me before this particular reading tour began. “So real are my fictions to myself that I do not recall them but see them done again before my very eyes, for it all happens before me. And the audience sees this reality.”

I certainly did that night. Whether it was because of the consumption of oxygen by the gas flames or because of the literally mesmeric quality of Dickens’s face and hands illuminated so starkly against the dark maroon background due to the unique lighting, I constantly felt the author’s eyes on me—even when those eyes belonged to one of his characters—and, with that audience, I entered into a kind of trance.

When he was Dickens again, reading narration and description rather than character-inhabited dialogue, I could hear the unfaltering certainty in his voice, sense the enjoyment revealed in the gleam of his eye, and perceive a real hint of aggression—masked as confidence to the majority of the crowd, I was sure—coming from his own knowledge that he could mesmerise so many for so long.

Then the Christmas tale and bit of
Oliver Twist
were finished, the longer, ninety-minute segment of the evening finished, the interval in the evening’s performance arrived at, and Dickens turned and left the platform, as seemingly oblivious of the crowd’s wild applause as he had been when first coming on stage.

I shook my head as if awakening from a dream and went backstage.

Dickens was sprawled on a couch and appeared to be too exhausted to rise or move. Dolby bustled in and out, supervising a waiter who was setting out a glass of iced champagne and a plate with a dozen oysters. Dickens stirred himself to sip the champagne and suck down the oysters.

“It’s the only thing the Chief can eat in the evening,” Dolby whispered to me.

Hearing the whisper, Dickens looked up and said, “My dear Wilkie… how splendid of you to pop in during the interval. Did you enjoy the first part of the evening’s fare?”

“I did,” I said. “It was… extraordinary… as always.”

“I believe I told you that we shall be replacing the ‘Doctor Marigold’ parts should I accept more such engagements in the autumn or winter,” said Dickens.

“But the audience loved it,” I said.

Dickens shrugged. “Not as much as they love Dombey or Scrooge or Nickleby, which I shall read in a few minutes.”

I was sure that the programme had listed the Trial from
The Pickwick Papers
as the thirty-minute reading scheduled for after the interval—Dickens always preferred to end the evenings with sentiment and laughter—but I was not about to correct him.

The ten minutes were almost up. Dickens rose with some effort, cast his heat-wilted scarlet geranium into the trash, and set a new one in his buttonhole.

“I shall see you after the reading,” I said and went back out to join the eager multitudes.

A
S THE APPLAUSE DIED,
Dickens took up his book and pretended to read aloud, “Nicholas Nickleby at Mr Squeers’s School… Chapter the First.” So it was to be Nickleby.

None of the exhaustion I had glimpsed backstage was evident now. Dickens seemed even more energetic and animated than he had been during the first ninety minutes. The power of his reading once again reached out like a magnetic current to fix and align the audience’s attention as if their eyes and minds were so many needles on a compass. Once again, the Inimitable’s gaze seemed to settle on each and every one of us.

Despite that powerful magnetic attraction, my mind began to wander. I began to think of other things—the publication of my novel
Armadale
in two volumes would be a fact within the week—and it occurred to me that I had to settle on a plot and theme for my next book. Perhaps something shorter and even more sensationalist, although with a simpler plot than the labyrinthine
Armadale
…

Suddenly I snapped back to attention.

Everything had changed in the huge hall. The light seemed thicker, slower, darker, almost gelatinous.

It was silent. Not the attention-silence of more than two thousand people that had existed an instant earlier—with coughs being stifled, laughter punctuating the silence, the stirrings of so many after more than two hours of listening—but now it was an
absolute
silence. It was as if twenty-one hundred people had suddenly died. There was not the slightest hint of breathing or movement. I realised that I could not hear or feel my own breathing, nor sense my own heartbeat. The Birmingham hall had turned into a giant crypt and was just that silent.

At the same moment, I realised that up through the darkness rose hundreds of slender, white, barely perceptible cords, their ends tied to the middle finger on the right hand of every member of the audience. The air was so dark that I could not make out the point at which these twenty-one hundred cords converged above us, but I knew that they must be connected to a massive bell up there. We were, all of us, in the Dead House. The cords—silken ropes, I realised—were tied to us in case one of us might still be alive. The bell, whose tone and toll, I knew instinctively, would be too terrible to hear, was there to alert—someone, something—if any one of us stirred.

Knowing that I and that I alone was still alive out of these twenty-one hundred dead, I tried not to stir, and focused all of my attention on not tugging at the cord tied to the middle finger of my right hand.

Looking up, I realised that it was no longer Charles Dickens whose face and hands and fingers glowed in the thick, slow light of the gas lamps in the darkness on the stage.

Drood looked out at us.

I recognised at once the pale white skin, the brittle tufts of hair over the ravaged ears, the lidless eyes, the nose that was little more than two nictitating membranes above a hole in the skull, the long, twitching fingers, and the pale, constantly turning pupils.

My hands shook. A hundred feet above the heads of all the corpses in the audience, the bell vibrated audibly.

Drood’s head snapped around. His pale eyes locked with mine.

I began shaking all over. The bell rumbled, then rang. No other corpse there breathed or stirred.

Drood came out from behind Dickens’s reading table and then out from the rectangle of turgid light. He leaped down from the stage and began gliding up the aisle. My arms and legs shook now as if agued, but I could move no other part of my body—not even my head.

I could
smell
Drood as he approached. He smelled like the Thames near Tiger Bay where Opium Sal’s opium den rotted away in the general effluvium when the tide was out and the sewage high.

There was something in Drood’s hand. By the time he was twenty paces from me up the steep aisle, I could see that it was a knife, but unlike any knife I had ever held or used or seen. The blade was a dark steel crescent on which hieroglyphs were visible. The handle was mostly hidden behind the Egyptian’s pale and bony knuckles; the thin handle of the razor-crescent disappeared between Drood’s fingers so the curved blade, at least eight inches across in its thinly gleaming arc of edge, extended from his fist like a lady’s fan.

Run!
I ordered myself.
Escape! Scream!

I could not move a muscle.

Drood paused above me, at the farthest limit of my peripheral vision, and when he opened his mouth, a miasma of Thames-mud stench enveloped me. I could see his pale pink tongue dancing behind those tiny teeth.

“You ssseee,” he hissed at me, his right arm and the blade pulling back for the decapitation’s swing, “how easssssy it issss?”

He swung the blade in a flat, vicious arc. The razor-sharp edge of the crescent-blade sliced through my beard and cut through my cravat, collar, skin, throat, trachea, gullet, and spinal cord as if they were made of butter.

The audience began applauding wildly. The gelatin-thick air had lightened to normal. The silken cords were gone.

Dickens turned to leave the stage without acknowledging the applause, but George Dolby was standing at the edge of the curtain. A moment later, with applause still echoing, Dickens stepped back into the glow of the gaslights.

“My dear friends,” he said after his raised hands had silenced the huge hall, “it appears as if there has been an error. Actually, it appears that I have
made
an error. Our programme had called for the Trial from
Pickwick
to be read after the interval, but I mistakenly carried
Nickleby
out to the podium and went on to read it. You were most gracious in your acceptance of that error and more than generous in your applause. The hour is late—I see by my watch that it is just ten, the precise time scheduled for the conclusion of our evening together—but the Trial was promised and if the majority of you would like, and you can show by your hands or applause if you would so like, to hear the Trial read, I shall happily add it to the unscheduled reading you have just enjoyed.”

The audience
did
like. They applauded and cheered and shouted encouragement. No one left.

“Call Sam Weller!” bellowed Dickens in his judicial voice, and the crowd roared louder in its applause and cheers. As each classic character appeared—Mrs Gamp, Miss Squeers, Boots—the audience roared even louder. I put my hand to my temple and found my brow cold and covered with perspiration. As Dickens read on, I staggered out.

I went alone to the hotel and drank another cup of laudanum while waiting for the Inimitable and his entourage to arrive. My heart was pounding wildly. I was ravenous and shaken and would have welcomed a large meal sent up to the privacy of my own room, but although Dickens would eat nothing more this evening, he invited Wills, Dolby, and me to dine in his suite as he unwound. There he paced back and forth and talked about the next few days of the tour and about the offer he had received for another tour beginning about Christmastime.

I ordered pheasant, fish, caviar, pâté, asparagus, eggs, and dry champagne, but just before the waiter came in bringing this and Wills’s tiny meal and Dolby’s beef and mutton, Dickens turned from the fireplace where he had been standing and said, “My dear Wilkie! What on earth is that on your collar?”

“What?” I confess that I blushed. I had hurriedly carried out my ablutions before drinking my laudanum and coming up to Dickens’s suite. “What?” My hands rose beneath my bearded chin and touched something thick and crusted above the silk of my cravat.

“Here now, move your hands,” said Wills. He held the lamp closer.

“Good God,” said Dolby.

“Good heavens, Wilkie,” said Dickens in a voice that sounded more amused than alarmed. “There is dried blood all over your collar and neck. You look like Nancy after Bill Sikes has done with her.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

T
he summer of 1866 was tiring.

My novel
Armadale
was released on schedule in June and the reviews were much as I expected from the usual hide-bound and tiresome critics. In the
Athenaeum,
their ancient music-critic and reviewer H. F. Chorley opined—
“It is not pleasant to speak as we must of this powerful story; but in the interest of everything that is to be cherished in life, in poetry, in art, it is impossible to be over-explicit in the expression of judgement.”

His judgement was that the book was immoral.

The reviewer of
The Spectator
came to the same conclusion in terms that bypassed the mere strident in favour of the near-hysterical:

The fact that there are such characters as he has drawn, and actions such as he has described, does not warrant his over-stepping the limits of decency, and revolting every human sentiment. This is what
Armadale
does. It gives us for its heroine a woman fouler than the refuse of the streets, who has lived to the ripe age of
35
, and through the horrors of forgery, murder, theft, bigamy, gaol and attempted suicide, without any trace being left on her beauty.… This is frankly told in a diary which, but for its unreality, would be simply loathesome, and which needs all the veneer of Mr Wilkie Collins’s easy style and allusive sparkle to disguise its actual meaning.

This kind of critical attack meant nothing to me. I knew that the book would sell well. And perhaps I have told you, Dear Reader, that the publisher had paid me five thousand pounds—a record at the time and for many years after that—and paid it before a single word of the story had been written. I had serialised it in America in their magazine called
Harper’s Monthly
and not only had
Armadale
been wildly popular there, but the editor had written me that my tale had single-handedly saved their magazine from extinction. Its serialisation in England through
The Cornhill Magazine
had also been wildly popular, certainly causing some of the jealousy we had heard from Dickens the previous Christmas. I was certain that I could adapt
Armadale
to the stage and that this might well be a greater source of income than the book itself.

It is true that the great sum paid in advance by George Smith at Smith, Elder & Company had all but bankrupted the publisher despite the brisk sales of the two volumes, but that was little concern of mine. It did frustrate me somewhat, however, in the sense that for my next novel—whatever its contents—I would almost certainly have to return to Dickens’s magazine,
All the Year Round,
just as the author-editor had predicted during our Christmas dinner. The frustration was not merely because the monies in advance of publication would be less—Dickens, John Forster, and Wills were miserly when it came to paying writers
other
than Dickens—but rather the fact that Dickens would again be my editor.

Yet I remained serenely confident that the hostile reviews of the day meant nothing. Critics and bourgeois reviewers simply were not ready for the heroine of
Armadale,
my
femme fatale
Lydia Gwilt. Not only did Lydia dominate the book in a way that no female literary protagonist in my era had done, but she stood out from the pages in a way that no woman in all of Dickens’s fiction ever had or ever would. The full, three-dimensional portrait of this woman, as scheming and vicious as Lydia Gwilt may have seemed to the careless reader or clueless reviewer, was a
tour de force.