Drood (79 page)
“Your Mrs Jellyby from
Bleak House
…” I began.
Dickens held up one hand. “Spare us comparisons with Mrs Jellyby. They simply won’t do, dear boy. They simply won’t do.”
I looked at my food.
“And your character of Ezra Jennings, who springs from nowhere to solve all outstanding questions in the final chapters,” continued Dickens, his voice as flat and steady and relentless as one of the tunnel-boring machines working along Fleet Street.
“What about Ezra Jennings? Readers believe him to be a most fascinating character.”
“Fascinating…” said Dickens with that terrible smile. “And familiar.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you think I would not remember him?”
“I have no idea what you are talking about, Charles.”
“I am talking about the physician’s assistant we encountered during our northern walking tour in September 1857—dear me, almost eleven years ago—when we climbed Carrick Fell and you slipped and sprained your ankle and I had to carry you down the mountain and then take you by cart to the nearest village, where that physician bandaged your ankle and leg. His assistant had precisely that incredible piebald hair and skin which graces your monster called ‘Ezra Jennings.’ ”
“Do we not compose from real life?” I asked. My voice sounded plaintive in my own ears, and I hated that.
Dickens shook his head. “From real life, yes. But it cannot have escaped your attention that I had already created your Ezra Jennings in the form of Mr Lorn, the albino and piebald assistant to Dr Speddie in our collaborative
Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices
in the Christmas Issue that same year.”
“I fail to see the similarities,” I said stiffly.
“Do you really? How odd. The tale of Mr Lorn—the dead man in the bed who came back to life in the young Dr Speddie’s shared room in the overcrowded inn—took up the bulk of that rather forgettable short novel. The same tragic past. The same haunted expression and manner of speaking. The same albino complexion and piebald hair. I clearly remember writing those scenes.”
“Ezra Jennings and Mr Lorn are two quite different characters,” I said.
Dickens nodded. “They are certainly different in texture. Mr Lorn had a tragic past and character. Your Ezra Jennings, of all the diseased and unnatural characters you have created in your quest for the sensational, is the most repellent and disturbing.”
“Disturbing in what way, may I ask?”
“You may ask and I will tell you, my dear Wilkie. Ezra Jennings, besides being the worst sort of opium addict—a trait shared by so
many
of your characters, my dear boy—shows every sign of inversion.”
“Inversion?” I had lifted a forkful of something minutes earlier, but it had yet to reach my mouth.
“Not to mince words,” Dickens said softly, “it is obvious to everyone reading
The Moonstone
that Ezra Jennings is a sodomite.”
My fork stayed raised; my mouth remained open. “Nonsense!” I said at last. “I meant no such implication!”
Or had I? I realised that—as with the Miss Clack chapters—the Other Wilkie had written most of the Ezra Jennings numbers when I was attempting to dictate while in the deepest throes of my morphine and laudanum.
“And your so-called Quivering Sands…” began Dickens.
“Shivering Sands,” I corrected.
“As you wish. They do not exist, you must know.”
Here I had him.
Here
I had
him!
“They do indeed,” I said, voice rising. “As any yachtsman such as myself would know. There’s a shoal just like the Shivering Sands on the Thames Estuary, nine miles north of Herne Bay.”
“Your Quivering Sands do not exist along the coast of Yorkshire,” said Dickens. He was, I realised, calmly cutting and eating his meat. “Everyone who has ever visited Yorkshire knows that. Anyone who has ever
read
about Yorkshire knows that.”
I opened my mouth to speak—to speak bitingly—and could think of nothing to say. It was at this point that I remembered the loaded revolver in my valise sitting next to me on the banquette.
“And many believe, as I do, as Wills does, that the scene with your Quivering Sands shivering is also indecent,” said Dickens.
“For God’s sake, Dickens, how could a shoal, a strand, a beach stretch, of quicksand be considered
indecent
by any sane person?”
“Perhaps,” said Dickens, “through the author’s choice of language and insinuation. And I quote from memory—and from your poor, doomed Miss Spearman’s observation—
‘The brown face of it heaved slowly, and then dimpled and quivered all over.’
The brown face, my dear Wilkie, the brown
skin,
dimpling and quivering all over and then, and I believe I quote,
sucking one down
—which is precisely what it does to poor Miss Spearman. An overt and clumsy description of what some might imagine a woman’s physical climax in the act of love to be like, no?”
Again, I could only stare with mouth agape.
“But it is the ending, your much-anticipated resolution to this much-admired mystery, that I find to be the apex and pinnacle of contrivance, my dear boy,” went on Dickens.
I realised that he might never stop talking. I imagined the dozens of diners in the other alcoves and in the larger room of Vérey’s all pausing in their meals, all listening, shocked but attentive.
“Do you
really
believe,” bored on Dickens, “or expect
us,
the readers, to believe that a man, motivated by a few drops of opium in a small glass of wine, would walk in his sleep, enter his fiancée’s sleeping room—a scene that was all but indecent for that impropriety alone—and go through her safe box and belongings, and then steal and secrete a diamond elsewhere, all
with no memory of the event afterwards?
”
“I am sure of it,” I said coldly, stiffly.
“Oh? How can you be sure of such a ridiculous thing, dear boy?”
“Every reference to behaviour under the ministrations of laudanum, pure opium, or other drugs in
The Moonstone
was carefully researched and experienced by me before I put pen to paper,” I said.
Dickens laughed then. It was a long, full, easy, and cruel laugh and it went on far too long.
I stood, threw down my linen napkin, lifted my valise, and opened it. The huge pistol was quite visible there beneath my curled galley sheets and the remnants of my lunch.
I closed the valise and stalked out, almost forgetting my hat and stick in my rush. I could hear Henry bustling into the alcove at the rear to enquire of “Mr Dickens” as to whether there was anything wanting with the food or service.
Three blocks from Vérey’s I stopped, still breathing hard, still clutching my walking stick as if it were a hammer, not noticing the traffic or the busy streets on this lovely June evening or even the ladies of the night who were watching me from the shadows of an alley across the way.
“God
d—
—
n
it!” I cried loudly, startling two ladies walking with an older, stooped gentleman.
“God d
——
n it!”
I turned and ran back to the restaurant.
This time all conversation
did
stop as I ran through the main room and threw back the curtains to the alcove.
Dickens was gone, of course. And my last chance on the third anniversary of Staplehurst to follow him to Drood’s lair was gone with him.
I
n July, my brother was staying at Gad’s Hill Place for an extended period because of his health. Charley had been very ill with terrible stomach cramps and had been vomiting for days on end. His wife, Katey, continued to find it easier to care for him at her father’s house than at their home in London. (I also believe she found it more comfortable for herself to be waited on there.)
On this particular day, Charley was feeling somewhat better and was in the library at Gad’s Hill, talking to the other Charley—Dickens’s son—who was doing some work in the library there. (I don’t believe I mentioned, Dear Reader, that in May, my editor and Charles Dickens’s indefatigable sub-editor at
All the Year Round,
William Henry Wills, had somehow contrived to fall off his horse during a hunt and put a serious crease in his skull. Wills recovered somewhat but announced that he continued to hear doors slamming all the time. This reduced his effectiveness as an editor, also as Dickens’s administrator, accountant, manager, marketing chief, and ever-faithful factotum, so Dickens—after asking me to come back to the magazine in May and receiving no positive reply—had put his rather ineffectual and disappointing son Charles in the position of filling at least some of Wills’s many duties while he, the Inimitable, took care of the rest. What this amounted to was that his son was answering letters at the office and at home, but even this required at least 110 percent of Charles Dickens Junior’s feeble capabilities.)
So on this July day at Gad’s Hill, my brother, Charley, was in the library there with Charley Dickens when suddenly both young men heard two people, a man and a woman, shouting and arguing, the rising racket coming from somewhere on the lawn out of sight below and behind the house. It was the unmistakable sound of a quarrel escalating into violence. The woman’s screams, my brother later told me, were terrifying.
Both Charleys rushed down and outside and around the house, Dickens’s son arriving a full half-minute before my convalescing brother.
There, in the meadow behind the long yard and barn where Dickens and I had seen young Edmond Dickenson sleepwalking several Christmases earlier, Charles Dickens was now striding up and down, speaking and shouting in two different voices, one male, one female, all the while gesticulating wildly and finally rushing an unseen victim and attacking… attacking
her
… with a great, invisible club.
Dickens had become the bully-thug Bill Sikes from
Oliver Twist
and was lost in the bloody act of murdering Nancy.
She tried to escape, crying out for mercy. No mercy, bellowed Bill Sikes. She cried out for God to help her. God did not answer, but Bill Sikes did, shouting and cursing and striking her down with his heavy club.
She tried to rise, holding her arm and hand up to ward off the blow. Dickens/Sikes struck again, and again, breaking her delicate fingers, smashing the bones of her upraised forearm, then bringing the full weight of the club down on her bloodied head. And again. And again.
Charley Dickens and Charley Collins could
see
the blood and brain tissue flying. They could
see
the pool of blood growing beneath the now prone dying woman as Bill Sikes continued clubbing her. They could
see
the blood spattering Sikes’s screaming, distorted face. The very paws and legs of Sikes’s dog were bloody!
And still he kept clubbing her, even after she was dead.
Still crouched over the imaginary woman’s corpse, the invisible club still held in two hands and poised above the battered and bloody form in the grass, Charles Dickens looked up at his son and my brother. His face was twisted and contorted in triumph. His eyes were wide, wild, and in no way sane. My brother, Charley, later said that he was sure he could see pure, murderous evil in the eyes of that twisted, gloating countenance.
The Inimitable had, at long last, found his Murder for his next round of public readings.
I
T WAS AT ABOUT THIS TIME
that I became certain that I had to kill Charles Dickens.
He would pretend to murder his imaginary Nancy on stage, in front of thousands. I would murder him in real life. We would see which ritual murder was more effective in driving the Drood-scarab out of a man’s brain.
To prepare the way, I wrote him a letter of apology, even though I had nothing to apologise for and Dickens had everything for which to beg forgiveness. It made no difference.
90
Gloucester Place Saturday,
18
July,
1868
My Dear Charles:
I write to offer my sincere and total apologies for the
contretemps
I provoked last month at our favourite place of dining, Vérey’s. My failure to consider that you were overtired from your many travels and exertions undoubtedly provoked the illusion of disagreement between us, and my not-unusual clumsiness in expression led to unfortunate consequences for which I again apologise and humbly ask your forgiveness. (Any accidental attempt on my part to compare my poor current literary efforts to your incomparable
Bleak House
were presumptuous and in error. No one shall ever confuse this humble
protégé
with
Cher Maître.
)
It is somewhat more difficult for me to entertain at home since Mrs Caroline G
——
left my home and service, but I still hope that you will be my guest at No.
90
Gloucester Place before too much more of the year passes. Also, as I am sure you have noticed despite your business with
All the Year Round
in our poor friend Wills’s absence, our wonderful success,
No Thoroughfare,
has finally closed at the Adelphi Theatre. I confess to have begun making rough notes about another play—I believe I shall call it
Black and White,
since it may be about a French nobleman who, for one reason or another, finds himself on the auction in Jamaica, being sold as a slave. Our dear mutual friend Fechter suggested the general idea some months ago—I plan to speak to him about it in detail in October or November—and Fechter would love to play the lead. In preparing this work I would be most grateful if I could avail myself of your advice and criticism so that I might avoid the more egregious errors so plentiful in my contributions to
No Thoroughfare.
In any case, I would consider it an honour if you and your entire family would be my guests at premiere night at the Adelphi should this modest effort ever succeed in being staged.
With final and abject apologies and most sincere wishes for a mending of this unforeseen and unwanted breach in the constant history of our cordial relationships, I remain . . .
