Drood (72 page)
I hesitated. This must be some sort of trap. If I did not offer to begin dictating the details and ceremonies of the Gods of the Black Lands, would the scarab begin tunnelling its way out through my skull or face? Would the last thing I ever saw or felt be the huge pincers cutting their way out of my cheek or eye?
“
The Moonstone,
” I said. “But I will write it myself.”
I was too weak to rise. A half-minute of struggling only got me propped awkwardly higher on my pillows. But the scarab did not assassinate me. Perhaps, I thought hopefully, it did not understand English.
“We should lock the door,” I whispered. “I’ll do it.” But again I did not have the strength to rise.
The Other Wilkie got up, shot the bolt home, and resumed his seat, his pencil poised. I saw that he wrote with his left hand. I was right-handed.
He closed the bolt and locked the door,
part of my aching brain was trying to tell me.
He… it… can affect things in the physical world.
Of course he could. Hadn’t the green-skinned wench with the tusk teeth left livid marks on my neck?
The Other Wilkie waited.
Between moans and the occasional cry of pain, I began—
“
FIRST NARRATIVE
—all capitals for that—
Contributed by MISS CLACK—
capitals on the name as well, mind you—colon after the name—
niece of the late Sir John Verinder
… triple spaces…
CHAPTER ONE,
in Roman numeral… double space…
I am indebted to my dear parents, who are now both dead
… no, change that… begin parenthesis,
both now in Heaven,
end parenthesis…
for having had habits of order and regularly instilled into me at a young
… no, Miss Clack was never young, make that…
at a very early age,
full stop, begin new paragraph.”
I moaned and collapsed further back into the sweat-soaked pillow. The other Wilkie, pencil poised, waited patiently.
I
HAD MANAGED
only two or three nightmare-riddled hours of sleep when there came a pounding on my bedroom door. I fumbled my watch off the nightstand and saw that it was almost eleven AM. The pounding resumed along with Caroline’s stern but concerned voice, “Wilkie, let me in.”
“Come in,” I said.
“I cannot. The door is locked.”
It took me a few minutes to gather the energy to throw back the covers and stagger over to throw the bolt.
“Why on earth was this locked?” asked Caroline as she bustled in and fluttered around me. I went back to bed and drew the bedclothes across my legs.
“I was working,” I said. “Writing.”
“Working?”
She saw the small stack of pages still on the wooden chair and picked them up. “These are in pencil,” she said. “When have you ever written in pencil?”
“I can hardly use a pen while lying here on my back.”
“Wilkie…” said Caroline, looking at me strangely over the sheaf of papers “. . . this is not your hand.” She gave me the pages.
It certainly was not my handwriting. The hastily pencilled words slanted the wrong way (as befitted a left-handed writer, I realised), the letters were formed differently—sharper, more spiked, almost aggressive in the indecorous bluntness—and even the spacing and use of margins were alien to my style. After a moment I said, “You saw that the door was locked. The pain kept me awake most of the night, so I wrote. Neither you nor Carrie nor any of the spineless amanuenses you brought here could take my dictation, so I have no choice but to write it myself. The new numbers will be due in both America and Wills’s office
in a week
. What choice do I have but to work through the night, using my left hand to write with the pencil when my right hand fails me? It’s a wonder that the hand is legible at all.”
This was the longest speech I had given since I’d been discovered unconscious on our doorstep on 22 January, but Mrs G—— did not seem impressed.
“It’s more legible than your usual manuscript,” said Caroline. She looked around. “Where is the pencil you used?”
Absurdly, I blushed. The Other Wilkie must have carried it off with him when he left sometime after dawn.
Through the locked door and solid walls.
I said, “I must have dropped it. It may have rolled under the bed.”
“Well… I have to say from the few paragraphs I’ve just read,” said Caroline, “that neither this terrible new illness nor your mother’s illness has dulled your writing ability. Just the opposite, from the short bits here. This narrative of Miss Clack is wildly funny. I had thought you were going to make her more pathetic and dour, a mere caricature—but on this first page or two she seems a truly comic character. I look forward to reading the rest soon.”
When she left to direct the girl in the preparation of my breakfast tray, I looked through the surprisingly thick sheaf of pages. The first sentence was precisely as I had dictated it. Nothing else was.
Caroline had been correct in her hasty assessment: this “Miss Clack”—the insufferable old busybody religious pamphleteer—had been sketched in with great energy and dexterity. The paragraphs and descriptive passages, all seen from the old woman’s distorted view of herself, of course, since she was the narrator, moved with a much greater authorial assurance and light comic hand than had the longer, more convoluted and heavy-handed passages I had dictated during the night.
D——n
his eyes! The Other Wilkie was writing
The Moonstone
and there was nothing I could do about it.
And he was the better writer.
M
other died on the nineteenth of March.
I was not there when she died. Since I was not able to attend the funeral, I asked my friend Holman Hunt, with whom I’d gone to the theatre just the week before to see my
No Thoroughfare
again, to go in my place, writing—
“I am sure it will be a comfort to him…”
by which I meant my brother, Charles,
“. . . to see the face of a dear old friend whom my mother loved, and whom we love.”
In truth, Dear Reader, I have no idea if Mother loved Holman Hunt or if he had any serious affection for her, but he had taken dinner with her a few times in my presence, so I saw no reason that he could not fill that missing presence at Harriet Collins’s funeral.
You may think me cold or unfeeling for not going to my own mother’s funeral, when my illness may have—
would
have—allowed me to, but you would not think this if you had known my heart and mind at this time. It was all too terribly logical. If I went to Mother’s cottage with Charley to view the body, what reaction would her scarab and mine have to the other’s proximity? The thought of that beetle lurching and digging and scrabbling in Mother’s dead body was too much for me to bear.
And—before the funeral, when the casket was still in the parlour of her cottage and open so that friends could pay their respects—what would happen to me if I saw (especially if I were the only one who could see) those scarab pincers and that beetle head and carapace slowly creeping out from between Mother’s dead white lips? Or what if it exited some other way—through her ear, or eye, or throat?
My sanity could not have borne it.
And for the funeral itself, as her coffin was lowered into the frozen hole next to our father’s grave, I would have been the only one leaning forward and waiting, and listening, and waiting and listening more, even after the first clods of dirt struck the lid of the casket.
Who knew better than I that there were tunnels everywhere under London and terrible things moving in those tunnels? Who knew what awful impulses and manners and means of Droodish control the burrowing scarab, now almost certainly grown as large as Mother’s brain had been after the chitinous creature had consumed all the dying and dead brain matter, was subject to?
So I stayed home, in bed, suffering.
B
Y LATE FEBRUARY
I had begun writing again, composing
The Moonstone
at my desk in my study when I was able, writing while propped up in bed more often than not. When I was working alone in my study or bedroom, the Other Wilkie often joined me, staring silently at me in an almost reproachful way. It had crossed my mind that he might have been planning to replace me (in writing this book and the next, in receiving plaudits for it, in Caroline’s bed, in society at large) should I die. Who would ever know? Had I not recently planned to replace Charles Dickens in much the same way?
I realised that the suddenly revealed illness (and even more sudden death) of one of my characters—the much-loved and much-respected Lady Verinder, never a central character but always a reassuring and noble offstage presence—almost certainly came from the deeper parts of my creative mind and were a way of honouring Mother’s death.
I should mention here that the scarab obviously could not read things through my eyes; each night that Frank Beard injected me with morphia, I continued to dream of the Neteru Gods of the Black Land and all their attendant and requisite ceremonies, but I never once became the scribe Drood had commanded me to become; I never once
wrote
about those dark and heathen gods.
The beetle in my brain seemed assuaged when I was writing, obviously fooled into thinking that I was recording my dreams of these ancient rituals. And all that time I was actually writing about curious old servant Gabriel Betteredge (and his obsession with
Robinson Crusoe,
a book I also venerated) and plucky (if stupidly headstrong) Rachel Verinder and heroic (if strangely duped) Franklin Blake and the misshapen and doomed-to-drown-in-quicksand servant Rosanna Spearman and the meddling, pious pamphleteer Miss Clack (whose hilarious malice was the Other Wilkie’s contribution) and, of course, the clever (but never central to the solution of the mystery) Sergeant Cuff. The parasite within me thought all this frenzied scribbling through my illness was the obedient work of a scribe.
Stupid scarab.
The early numbers of my serialised novel were being met with continued and rising enthusiasm. Wills reported more and more people flocking to the magazine’s offices on Wellington Street on the day each new issue was released. All the talk was of the Moonstone itself, the precious diamond, and who might have stolen it and how. No one knew, of course, the full extent of my ingenuity in providing that ending, but even before writing those chapters, I had full confidence that no one would guess the amazing revelation. Between this and the triumph of my play, I would have much to impress Charles Dickens with when he returned.
If he lived long enough to return.
More and more, Wills and I were receiving, through a variety of sources (but especially through candid notes from George Dolby to Dickens’s daughters, as relayed to me by Charley), news that Dickens’s health was failing alarmingly. Influenza caught during his almost daily travels through the American provinces required him to stay in bed until the afternoon and not eat anything until three o’clock or later. All of us were amazed to read that Dickens—who always insisted on staying in hotels during his tours and never at private homes—had been so ill in Boston that he had been forced to stay with his friends the Fieldses rather than at the Parker House as planned.
Besides the worsening influenza and catarrh, exhaustion and a return of swelling in his left foot seemed close to doing Dickens in. We were hearing that Dolby had to help “the Chief” onto the stage for each reading, although as soon as he was beyond the curtain, Dickens would stride to his reading stand with a perfect imitation of his old alertness and spryness. And during the intermission and after the reading, Dolby and others would have to catch the totally exhausted author to keep him from fainting. Mrs Fields wrote Dickens’s daughter Mamie that during his last reading in Boston on 8 April, Dickens had boasted of a return of his old powers but still had not been able to change his clothes after the readings, but simply lay on the sofa for thirty minutes “in a state of the greatest exhaustion” even before allowing himself to be helped back to his room.
And—I took notice of this—Dolby had written in an almost offhand manner that because of the Inimitable’s inability to sleep, he had begun again to take laudanum—although only a few drops per glass of wine—each night.
Was there an insatiable scarab in America that also needed sedating?
At any rate, Dickens’s daughters and son Charles were worried about their father, even though the Inimitable’s own letters home were filled with optimism and bragging about crowds and adoration from his eager public at each American city in which he read. But as March and April passed and I slowly, slowly showed improvement and began to overcome some of the pain and debilitation (although setbacks would send me to bed again for days on end), I began to believe either that Charles Dickens would never return from America or that he would return a broken, dying man.
I
T WAS DIFFICULT
communicating with Martha R—— during my illness. I did manage to send one message to her via my servant George early in my crisis and during Mother’s deathwatch, under the guise of enquiring about rental properties on Bolsover Street, but that was far too risky to continue.
Three times in February I did tell Caroline and Carrie that I was going to Tunbridge Wells with Charley to see Mother and turned back at the station, telling Charley I was simply not well enough to go on and would take a hansom cab home. Two of those three times I spent the night (or nights) with Martha—although I was too ill to enjoy the time properly—but that stratagem was also too risky, since Charles might, at any time, mention to Caroline or in Caroline’s presence the occasions I was not able to travel all the way to Mother’s.
Martha could have written me during this interval (using a false return address on the envelopes), but she preferred not to write letters. In point of fact, my Martha was close to being illiterate at this time, although later I would tutor her to the point she could read simple books and write basic letters.
Once I was ambulatory again by late March, I did work out ways to see her, explaining to Caroline and even to my doctor that I had to take solitary carriage rides (I was not up to
pretending
that I was walking for hours) to help me ruminate on my novel, or claiming that I must spend time at my club in its wonderful library, seeking out more books for my research. But these visits to “Mrs Dawkins” at Bolsover Street gave us, at most, a few stolen hours, and satisfied neither Martha nor me.
