Drood (6 page)

“To Limehoussse,” he hissed, acting out the Drood in his former tale. “Whitechapel. Ratcliff Crossss. Gin Alley. Three Foxesss Court. Butcher Row and Commercial Road. The Mint and other rookeriessss.”

I admit that the hair stood on the back of my neck. Charles Dickens was first, as a lad, even before he began to write, such a mimic that his father would take him to public houses to imitate locals they had encountered on their walks. At this moment I began to believe that there was such a creature as Drood.

“When?” I asked.

“Sssoooon,” hissed Dickens, but smiling now, himself again. “We’ve taken such excursions into Babylon before, my dear Wilkie. We have seen the Great Oven at night.”

We had. He had always been fascinated with this underbelly of our city. And “Babylon” and “the Great Oven” were the author’s pet expressions for the worst slums in London. Some of my nocturnal ventures with Dickens into these dark lanes and tenement hovels in earlier years still bothered my dreams.

“I am your man, my dear Dickens,” I said with enthusiasm. “I will report for duty tomorrow night, if that is your pleasure.”

He shook his head. “I have to recover my voice, my dear Wilkie. I am behind schedule on the last numbers of
Our Mutual Friend.
There are other things to be seen to in the coming days, including the recovery of the Patient. Are you spending the night, sir? Your room is ready, as always.”

“Alas, I cannot,” I said. “I have to get back to the city this afternoon. There are business affairs there that must be attended.” I did not tell Dickens that those “business affairs” consisted primarily of buying more laudanum, a substance which I could not do without, even then in 1865, for so long as a day.

“Very good,” he said, rising. “Could you do me a great favour, my dear Wilkie?”

“Anything in the world, my dear Dickens,” I said. “Command me, my friend.”

Dickens glanced at his watch. “It’s too late for you to catch the next train in from Gravesend, but if Charley gets the pony cart out, we can get you to Higham in time for the express to Charing Cross Station.”

“I am going to Charing Cross?”

“You are, my dear Wilkie,” he said, clasping me firmly on the shoulder as we came out of the gloom of his study into the brighter light of the entry hall. “I shall tell you why as I accompany you to the station.”

G
EORGINA DID NOT COME
out of the house with us, but the Inimitable’s oldest son, Charley, had come down to spend a few days with his father and was sent round to hitch up the basket cart. The front yard at Gad’s Hill was as tidy as everything else under the man’s control: Dickens’s favourite flower, scarlet geraniums, planted in precise rows; the two large cedars of Lebanon just beyond the neatly trimmed lawn and now throwing their shadows to the east along the road.

Something about the rows of geraniums we were walking between as we approached Charley and the basket cart bothered me. In fact, they made my heart pound faster and my skin go cold. I became aware that Dickens had been talking to me.

“. . . I took him on the emergency train straight to Charing Cross Hotel immediately after the crash,” he was saying. “I have paid two nurses to be with him so that he is not alone night or day. I would very much appreciate if you could look in on him this evening, my dear Wilkie, to give him my compliments and let him know that as soon as I am able to come into town again—most probably tomorrow—I will look in on him myself. If the nurses tell you that his injuries have worsened in any way, I would take it as a personal favour if you would send a messenger out to Gad’s Hill with the information as soon as possible.”

“Of course, Charles,” I said. I dimly realised that he must have been talking about the young man he had helped extricate from the wreckage at Staplehurst and then had personally put up in the hotel at Charing Cross. A young man named Dickenson. Edmond or Edward Dickenson, I seemed to recall. A rather extraordinary coincidence when one thinks about it.

As we came down the drive and away from the scarlet geraniums, the sense of panic left me as quickly and curiously as it had arrived.

The cart was small but Dickens insisted on squeezing into it with Charley and me as the young man urged the pony out to Gravesend and then on to the Rochester Road towards Higham Station. We had enough time.

At first Dickens was at ease, chatting with me about small publishing details at
All the Year Round,
but as the pony and cart picked up speed, moving along with carriages on the road—the Higham Station almost within sight—I saw the writer’s face, still sun darkened from his time in France, grow first paler and then the colour of lead. Beads of perspiration stood out on his temples and cheeks.

“Please slow down a bit, Charley. And cease swaying the cart from side to side. It is very distracting.”

“Yes, Father.” Charley pulled on the reins until the pony was no longer trotting.

I saw Dickens’s lips become thinner and thinner until they were little more than a bloodless slash. “Slower, Charley. For heaven’s sake, less speed.”

“Yes, Father.” Charley, in his twenties, looked as apprehensive as a boy when he glanced towards his father, who was now clutching the side of the basket cart with both hands and leaning unnecessarily to his right.

“Slower, please!” cried Dickens. The cart was now moving at a slow walking pace, certainly not at the steady four-miles-per-hour stride that Dickens could—and did—keep up for twelve and sixteen and twenty miles per day.

“We shall miss the train…” began Charley, glancing forward at the distant steeples and depot tower, then back to his watch.

“Stop! Let me out,” commanded Dickens. His face was now as grey as the pony’s tail. He staggered out of the cart and quickly shook my hand. “I shall walk back. It is a nice day for walking. Have a safe trip and please do send a communication to me this evening if young Mr Dickenson needs anything at all.”

“I shall, Charles. And I shall see you again soon.”

My last sight of Dickens from the back seemed to be of a much older man, not striding with his usual confident and extraordinary pace at all, but almost feeling his way along the side of the road, leaning heavily on his walking cane as he headed back towards Gad’s Hill.

CHAPTER THREE

C
annibalism.

As I rode the train to Charing Cross Station I thought about that odd, barbaric word and reality—cannibalism—and how it had already affected Charles Dickens’s life. (I had no idea at that time how terribly—and soon—it would affect mine.)

There had always been something in Charles Dickens’s make-up that reacted especially strongly to the idea of cannibalism and of being consumed in any manner. During the time of his public separation from Catherine and the scandal that he had done the most to publicise and bring about—although he would never recognise that fact—the writer had said to me more than once, “They’re eating me alive, Wilkie. My enemies, the Hogarths, and the misinformed public who wish to believe the worst are devouring me a limb at a time.”

Many had been the time in the past decade when Dickens would invite me to join him on a trip to London’s Zoological Gardens—a place in which he always took great delight—but as much as he loved the hippopotamus family and aviaries and lions’ den, it was the reptile house feeding time that was the central purpose and destination for his visit. Dickens would not miss it and hurried me so that we would never be late. They fed the reptiles, most specifically the snakes, a diet of mice and larger rats and the spectacle seemed to mesmerise Dickens (who, a mesmerist himself, absolutely refused to allow anyone to mesmerise him). He would stand transfixed. Several times—riding somewhere together, waiting for a play to begin, even when sitting in his parlour at home—Dickens would remind me of how, frequently, two snakes would begin devouring the same rat at exactly the same time until the head and tail and hindquarters of the rodent were invisible in the snakes’ gullets, while the struggling rat was still alive, hind and forelegs scrabbling in the air even as the powerful jaws advanced on them.

Only a few months before the Staplehurst accident, Dickens had confided in me that he was seeing the legs of furniture in his house—his bathtub, the serpentine table and chair legs in various rooms, even the heavy cords for the drapes—as snakes slowly consuming the tabletops and draperies and tub. “When I am not looking, the house is devouring itself, my dear Wilkie,” he’d said to me over rum punch. He also told me that often at a banquet—most frequently a banquet in his honour—he would look down the long table and see his peers and friends and colleagues filling their faces with veal or mutton or chicken, and for a moment, just for a single, terrible second, he would imagine that the utensils lifted to those mouths were wriggling appendages. But not of mice or rats, he said—of men. He said that he found the frequent illusion… unsettling.

But it was actual cannibalism—or at least the rumour of it—that had changed the course of Charles Dickens’s life eleven years ago.

In October of 1854, all of England was shocked to read Dr John Rae’s report on what he had discovered during his search for the missing Franklin Expedition.

If you have never heard of the Franklin Expedition, Dear Reader from my future century, I need to tell you only that it was an attempt by Sir John Franklin and 129 men in 1845 to explore the northern Arctic in two ships provided by the Royal Navy’s Discovery Service—HMS
Erebus
and HMS
Terror.
They set sail in May of 1845. Their primary orders were to force the North-West Passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific north of our colony in Canada—England was always dreaming of new and shorter trade routes to the Far East—and Franklin, an older man, was a seasoned explorer. There was every possible expectation of success. The two ships were last seen in Baffin Bay in the late summer of 1845. After three or four years of no word from the expedition, even the Royal Navy became concerned and various rescue expeditions were organised. But the two ships, to this day, have not been found.

Both Parliament and Lady Franklin offered huge rewards. Search parties, not just British but from America and other nations, criss-crossed the Arctic searching for Franklin and his men. Or at the very least for some sign of their fate. Lady Franklin was outspoken in her belief that her husband and the crews were still alive, and few in government or in the Navy wished to contradict her, even when so many Englishmen had given up all hope.

Dr John Rae was an officer in the Hudson Bay Company who had gone north by land and spent several seasons exploring remote northern islands (consisting, it is said, of little more than frozen gravel and endless blowing snow) and the vast stretches of ocean ice into which
Erebus
and
Terror
had disappeared. Unlike the Royal Navy or the majority of searchers, Rae had lived with the various Esquimaux savages in the region, learned their crude languages, and—in his report—quoted testimony from many of them. He had also returned to England with various artefacts—brass buttons, caps, ships’ dishes bearing the crest of Sir John, writing instruments—that had belonged to Franklin or his men. Finally, Rae had discovered human remains, both in shallow graves and above ground, including two skeletons actually still seated in one of the ship’s boats tied to a sledge.

What shocked England, beyond this terrible proof of Franklin’s probable fate, was that according to the Esquimaux that Rae had interviewed, Franklin and his men had not only died but had resorted to cannibalism in their final days. The savages told Rae of coming across white men’s camps where there were chewed bones, stacks of hacked-off limbs, and even tall boots with feet and leg bones still within.

This horrified Lady Franklin, of course, and she rejected the report in its entirety (even going so far as to hire another ship, out of her own dwindling fortune, to resume the search for her husband). Dickens also was appalled—and fascinated—by the idea.

He began publishing articles on the reported tragedy then in his journal,
Household Words,
as well as in other magazines. At first he was simply doubtful, stating that the report was
“hasty… in the statement that they had eaten the dead bodies of their companions.”
Dickens told us that he had consulted “a wilderness of books”—although he cited no specific sources—to prove that
“the probabilities are all against poor Franklin’s people having dreamed of eating the bodies of their companions.”

As the rest of the nation either began to believe in Rae’s report (he did claim the government’s reward for conclusive proof of Franklin’s fate) or to forget, Dickens’s denial turned to serious anger. In
Household Words
he launched a scathing attack on “the savage”—his phrase for all non-whites, but in this case the scheming, lying, untrustworthy Esquimaux whom John Rae had lived with and interviewed. Dickens in our time was, of course, considered a radical liberal, but those credentials were not impeached when he spoke for the majority of Englishmen and wrote—
“. . . we believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel.”
It was simply impossible, he argued, that any of Sir John Franklin’s men had
“prolonged their existence by the dreadful expedient of eating the bodies of their dead companions.”

Then our friend did a very strange thing. From the “wilderness of books” he had consulted to support his opinion, he chose 1001
Arabian Nights
—one of the most important books from his childhood, as he had told me several times—to prove his point. He wrote in summary—
“In the whole wide circle of the
Arabian Nights,
it is reserved for ghoules, gigantic blacks with one eye, monsters like towers of enormous bulk and dreadful aspect, and unclean animals lurking on the sea shore…”
to resort to eating human flesh, or cannibalism.

So there you have it. Quod erat demonstrandum.

I
T WAS IN 1856
that Dickens took his campaign against the possibility of cannibalism amongst Sir John Franklin’s noble men to a new level… and one which would intimately involve me.