Drood (77 page)
Luckily, my previous reconnoitering had shown me a solution to these difficulties.
Behind Peckham Station, between the depot and the road that ran into the suburban village and to 16 Linden Grove, was a small public park consisting of little more than indifferently tended gardens, a central fountain, and a few gravel paths, including one that traced the perimeter of the park. To give privacy to the park and its occasional visitors (presumably travellers bored of waiting within the station or on the platform), the Peckham town fathers had planted a hedge that completely bordered the little space and was at its highest—about seven feet tall—between the park and the modest highway. The park itself, although opening onto the platform area via a path passing under a trellis, faced only the blind, largely windowless back of the station proper.
A traveller whiling away time in this pocket park would be far less noticeable than someone lounging on the platform for many hours. Especially if the traveller were a respectable, bespectacled gentleman sitting in the sunlight and working on a manuscript—in this case, the galley proof pages for the final number of
The Moonstone
.
Two of the stone benches were in the shade of young trees, but also—fortuitously—set close to the hedgerow bordering the road. Here even the fact that the garden was indifferently tended served my purpose: there were narrow gaps in the hedge through which a waiting gentleman might watch the road from Peckham without revealing his own presence to those approaching on foot or via carriage.
So that became my final plan—to wait for Charles Dickens in the pocket park behind Peckham Station, to allow him to board before slipping aboard myself, and thence to run into him, quite by “accident,” and then to convince him to join me for dinner in London.
By the morning of Tuesday, 9 June, I was sick with worry and convinced that my plan would lead to nothing and that it would be another year, at least, before Dickens might lead me to Drood. More than that, this dinner itself and its attendant conversation were overdue. This was the night that I planned to end forever the image of Wilkie Collins as an amenable and amiable but supplicating protégé to the Literary Master that was Charles Dickens. This was the night that Dickens would have to acknowledge my equality, if not my superiority.
But what if he did not come to town that night after all? But what if he were no longer staying with the Ternans and took the train from New Cross? Or what if he did indeed travel from Peckham but I somehow missed him at the station or… worse… he saw me watching him there and confronted me?
A hundred times I pondered these factors and a hundred times I changed my plans, only to revert to the Peckham Station plan each time. It was far from perfect but it seemed my best chance.
That afternoon of 9 June was pleasant. After days of rain, the sun shone, the flowers in my own garden gleamed, and the air was brisk, promising summer but not yet bringing the oppressive heat and humidity of a full London summer.
For my ride out to Peckham and my wait of unknown length, I packed in my old leather portmanteau—which I carried with a shoulder strap—the proofs of my last number of
The Moonstone;
a portable pen-and-ink writing set; a copy of Thackeray’s most recent novel (should I finish reading my own work); a light lunch and a late-afternoon snack consisting of cheese, biscuits, a few slices of meat, and a hard-boiled egg; a flask of water; another flask of my laudanum; and the deceased Detective Hatchery’s pistol.
I had succeeded in checking the revolving cylinder. At first I was surprised to see all the cartridges in place, their round brass circles remaining in their cubicles, and wondered if I had only dreamt firing the weapon in the servants’ stairwell. But then I realised that the bases of the brass cartridges remained in this sort of pistol after their lead bullets had been fired.
Five of the nine cartridges had been fired. Four remained.
I pondered whether to remove the spent cartridges or to leave them in place—I simply did not know the proper protocol—but in the end I chose to take the empty cartridges out of the weapon (disposing of them secretly) and remembered only later that I should make sure that the remaining cartridges be in place to fire when I next pulled the trigger. This was achieved simply by rotating the cylinder back to the position it had been in before I removed the empty cartridges.
I wondered if four workable bullets would be enough for my purposes that night. But the point tended to be academic, since I had no clue as to where I might find new bullets to purchase for this odd pistol.
So four would have to be enough. At least three for Drood. I remembered Detective Hatchery once telling me, after our Thursday-night visit to a public house and while on our way to St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery, that even for such a large-calibre pistol as the one he had given me (and I had no idea what “calibre” indicated), those very few detectives who carried pistols were taught to aim and fire at least two shots at the centre torso of their human target. Hatchery had added in a whisper, “And we boys on the street add one for the ’ead.”
The words had made me shiver in revulsion on the night I heard them. Now I took them as advice from the grave.
At least three for Drood. Two for centre torso and one for that odd, balding, pale, repulsive, and reptilian head.
The fourth and final bullet…
I would decide later that night.
T
he early parts of my plan worked perfectly.
I spent my afternoon and early evening sitting in ever-more-slanting sunlight in the small park between Peckham Station and the rural thoroughfare. Carriages and pedestrians came and went. A single glance through the hedge from where I sat usually told me all I needed to know to certify the arrivals were not my quarry. The only sidewalk from the station driveway to the station platform ran directly past the trellised entrance to my little park, not thirty steps from my bench, and I found that I could keep pace along my side of the hedge and clearly hear the conversation between any pedestrians approaching the station along that walkway.
As I had hoped and planned, this hedge offered me both concealment and the ability to observe through thin gaps that were rather like vertical gun slits. In the parlance of our day, borrowed from English hunters of good Scottish goose on the wing or Bengal tiger in the jungle, Dear Reader, I was in a blind.
The pleasant afternoon passed into pleasant evening. I finished my lunch and my snack and two-thirds of the laudanum in my flask. I had also finished the proofing of the last instalment of
The Moonstone
and set the long galleys away in my valise with my apple core, cake crumbs, eggshell shards, and pistol. I should have been racked with anxiety as the hours slipped away, torn by the certainty that Dickens had used the New Cross Station or was not going to London at all that day.
But the longer I waited, the more calm I became. Not even the painful shifting of the scarab, which seemed to have burrowed down close to the base of my spine that day, disrupted the rising certainty that calmed my nerves more surely than any opiate. I had never been so sure of anything in my life than that Dickens would come this way this evening. Again, I thought of the experienced hunter of tigers on his raised and camouflaged shooting platform somewhere in India, his oiled, deadly weapon nested secure in the crook of his steady arm. He
knew
when his dangerous prey was approaching, even though he could not have told the non-white hunter
how
he knew.
And then, about eight PM, when the June evening shade was turning into cool twilight, I set down the Thackeray that was not holding my interest, peeked out through the hedge, and there he was.
S
URPRISINGLY, DICKENS WAS
not alone. He and Ellen Ternan were walking slowly on the park side of the dusty thoroughfare. She was dressed as if for an afternoon outing and, despite the fact that the lane was in full shadow from trees and homes on the west side, carried a parasol. Behind the two of them and on the opposite side of the street, a carriage was creeping along—now stopping, now moving forward slowly—and I realised that it must be one that Dickens had hired to carry Ellen back to Linden Grove from the station. The lovebirds had decided to walk to the station together so that she could see Dickens off.
But there was something wrong. I could sense it in the halting, almost pained way that Dickens was walking and by the strained distance between the two of them. I could tell it by the way that Ellen Ternan would now lower the useless parasol, close it, grip it tightly with both hands, and then open it again. These were not two lovebirds. They were two injured birds.
The carriage stopped a final time and waited along the opposite kerb thirty yards from the entrance drive to the railway station.
As Dickens and Ellen came alongside the high hedge, I was suddenly frightened into immobility. The dying evening light and hedge-shadow should have worked in my favour, making the sometimes sparse hedge seem solid and dark to anyone walking beyond it, but for an instant I was certain that I was clearly visible to the two. In a few seconds Dickens and his mistress would see a familiar small man with a high forehead, tiny glasses, and a voluminous beard huddled on a bench less than two feet from the walkway they would be passing. My heart pounded so wildly that I was sure that
they
would be able to hear it. My hands were half-raised towards my face—as if I had been about to try to hide behind them—and set into the position in which they had frozen. I would appear to Dickens like a soft, pale, wide-eyed, and bearded rabbit caught in the beam of a hunter’s lantern.
They did not look in my direction as they passed the hedge. Their voices were low, but I could hear them easily enough. The train had not arrived, the suburban thoroughfare was empty of traffic save for the parked carriage, and the only other sound was the soft coo of doves under the station’s eaves.
“. . . we can put our
sad history
behind us,” Dickens was saying.
The italics were obvious from his tone. So was an undertone of pleading that I had never… never… heard from Charles Dickens.
“Our
sad history
is buried in France, Charles,” Ellen said very softly. Her broad sleeves brushed the hedge as they moved past me. “But it shall never be behind us.”
Dickens sighed. It came out almost as a moan. The two stopped ten paces before the sidewalk reached the turn towards the station. They were not six paces past my blind. I did not stir.
“What is to be done, then?” he said. The words were so loaded with misery that they might have been extracted from a man being tortured.
“Only what we have discussed. It is the only honourable course remaining to us.”
“But I cannot!” exploded Dickens. It sounded as if he was weeping. I could have leaned my face six inches closer to the hedge and seen him, but that was impossible. “I have not the will!” he added.
“Then have the courage,” said Ellen Ternan.
There came a rustling, the small sound of her small shoes slightly scuffing pavement, the heavier sound of his. I pictured Dickens leaning towards her, she taking an involuntary step back, and Dickens resuming his strained distance from her.
“Yes,” he said at last. “Courage. I can summon courage where will fails me. And summon will when courage flags. That has been my life.”
“You are my dear good boy,” she said softly. I imagined her touching his cheek with her gloved hand.
“Let us both be courageous,” she went on, her voice lilting with a forced lightness that ill-befitted a mature woman in her late twenties. “Let us change to brother and sister from this day forth.”
“Never to be… together… as we have?” said Dickens. His voice was the calm monotone of a man ordered to the guillotine repeating the judge’s sentence.
“Never,” said Ellen Ternan.
“Never to be man and wife?” said Dickens.
“Never!”
There was a silence then that stretched for such a length that I was again tempted to lean forward and peek through the hedge to see if Dickens and Ellen had somehow dematerialised. Then I heard the Inimitable sigh again. His voice was louder, stronger, but infinitely hollow when he spoke.
“So it shall be. Adieu, my love.”
“Adieu, Charles.”
I was sure they did not touch or kiss, although how I was sure, I could not tell you, Dear Reader. I sat motionless as I listened to Dickens’s footsteps pass around the curve in the hedge. They paused once at that curve—I was certain he was looking back at her—and then resumed.
I did lean forward then and set my face to the branches of the hedge to watch Ellen Ternan cross the street. The carriage driver saw her and drove forward. Her parasol was folded once again and both her hands were lifted to her face. She did not look towards the station as she got into the carriage—the bewhiskered old driver helping her as she climbed up and took her seat and then softly closing the door behind her—and she did not look towards the station as the old man retook his seat and as the carriage made a slow, broad turn on the empty boulevard and headed back towards Peckham proper.
It was then that I turned my head to the left and looked through the open trellis.
Dickens had passed right in front of the opening, gone up the four steps to the platform level, and now he paused.
I knew what would happen next. He would turn to look out over the park and over the hedge to catch one final glimpse of Ellen Ternan’s open carriage disappearing up the street. He
had
to turn. The imperative was written in the tense bunching of his shoulders under his summer linen suit and in the pain of his lowered head and in the half-step pause of his body itself on the platform.
And when he turned—in two seconds, perhaps less—he would see his former collaborator and presumed friend, Wilkie Collins, hunched over from staring through the hedge like the cowardly
voyeur
he was, his bloodless, guilty face staring back blindly at Dickens, his eyes mere blank ovals where the spectacles would be reflecting the paling sky.
