Drood (81 page)

Now this. It did not escape my awareness there in that concealing tunnel that Katey must have known, if only via her father’s love of gossip, that I had sent Caroline G—— away from my home and was now (to their knowledge) a prosperous and somewhat famous bachelor living alone with my servants and sometimes “niece” Carrie.

I smiled to show that I knew Kate was jesting and said, “It would have been a most interesting partnership, I am sure, my dear. Between your inimitable will and my unceasing intransigence, our quarrels would have been legendary.”

Katey did not smile. The end of the tunnel was an arc of light when she stopped and looked at me. “I sometimes believe that we all end up with the wrong people in our lives—Father and Mother, Charles and me, you and… that woman—perhaps everyone but Percy Fitzgerald and that simpering lady of his.”

“And William Charles Macready,” I said in a pleasant, teasing tone. “We must not forget the ancient thespian’s second wife. It truly seems a marriage made in heaven.”

Katey laughed. “One woman who found happiness,” she said and took my arm and led me out into the light and let me go.

M
Y DEAR WILKIE!
How wonderful of you to come!” cried Dickens as I came up into the chalet’s airy first storey. He leaped to his feet, came around his simple desk, and clasped my hand in both of his. I half-recoiled in terrible anticipation of a hug. It was as if our night at Vérey’s a month and some ago had never happened.

The Inimitable’s chalet summer workroom was as pleasant as ever, especially with this breeze blowing in from the distant sea and rustling all of the two cedar trees’ branches outside the open windows. Dickens had added a bent-back cane chair on the opposite side of his desk and now he waved me to it as he went back to his comfortable-looking heavy writing chair. He waved to boxes and a carafe on his desk. “Cigar? Some iced water?”

“No, thank you, Charles.”

“I cannot tell you how glad I am that all is forgiven and forgotten,” he said warmly. He did not specify who had had to do the forgiving and forgetting.

“I feel the same way.”

I glanced at the stacks of pages on his desktop. Dickens saw my glance and handed me several of them. I had seen this method before. He had torn pages out of one of his books—in this case,
Oliver Twist
—mounted the pages on stiff pasteboard, and was busy scrawling changes, additions, deletions, and marginal comments. He would then send these to his printers and have a final version printed up—three lines of white space between the oversized text, wide margins in which to add more stage and reading comments, and notes in very large script. This would be his reading text for the coming tour.

The changes to the text were interesting enough, turning a novel meant to be read into a script meant to be heard, but it was the stage directions jotted in the margins that caught my eye:

“Beckon down… Point… Shudder… Look Round with Terror… Murder coming…”

And on the next pasteboard sheet:

. . . he beat it
twice
upon the upturned face
that almost touched his own… seized a heavy club,
and
struck her down!!… the pool of gore that quivered and danced in the sunlight on the ceiling…
but
such
flesh,
and so much blood!!!… The very feet of the dog were bloody!!!!… dashed out his brains!!!!

I blinked at this.
His
brains. I had forgotten that Sikes killed both Nancy and the dog.

“Terror to the End!”
was scrawled at least five times on the various page margins.

I set them back on the desk and smiled at Dickens. “Your Murder at last,” I said.

“At last,” agreed Dickens.

“And I thought that I was the novelist of sensation, Charles.”

“This Murder shall serve more than sensation, my dear Wilkie. I wish to leave behind in those who attend my final, farewell round of readings a sense of something very passionate and dramatic, something done with simple means yet to a complex emotional end.”

“I see,” I said. What I actually saw was that Dickens intended to shock the everlasting sensibilities out of his audience. “Is it truly then to be a farewell round of readings?”

“Hmmm,” grunted Dickens. “So our friend Beard tells me. So Dolby tells me. So the special physicians in London and even Paris tell me. So even does Wills tell me, although he never approved of the reading tours in the first place.”

“Well, Charles, we can somewhat discount dear Wills. His opinions these days are filtered through the constant sound of doors slamming in his skull.”

Dickens chuckled but then said, “Alas, poor Wills, I knew him, Horatio.”

“On a hunt,” I said, feigning sadness. As if on cue, a rider in fox hunt red, white breeches, and gleaming high boots sitting astride a huge grey-dappled high-prancer straining at the bit passed on Graves-end Road below. A dray waggon filled with manure rumbled past immediately after that noble image. Dickens and I glanced at each other and laughed at the same instant. It was like the old days.

Except for the fact that I now wished him dead.

When our laughter died, Dickens said, “I have been thinking more about your
Moonstone,
Wilkie.”

My entire body tensed. But I managed a wan smile.

Dickens held both his hands out and up, palms towards me. “No, no, my dear friend. I mean in totally admiring and professionally respectful ways.”

I held the smile in place.

“You may not have been aware of it, my dear Wilkie, but it is possible that with that sensationalist novel you may have created an entirely new genre of fiction.”

“Of course I am aware of it,” I said stiffly. I had no idea what he was talking about.

Dickens did not seem to have heard me. “The idea of an entire novel revolving around a single mystery, with an interesting and three-dimensional detective character—perhaps a private enquiry detective rather than a formal police detective—in a central position, and with all character development and nuance of daily verisimilitude flowing from the side-effects and after-effects of whatever crime was the mainspring for the novel’s central tale… why, it is revolutionary!”

I nodded humbly.

“I have decided to take a whack at it myself,” said Dickens, using one of the more execrable American expressions he had picked up on his last tour there.

At that moment I hated the man without reservation. “Do you have a title for this theoretical work yet?” I heard myself ask in a normal-enough voice.

Dickens smiled. “I was thinking of something straightforward, my dear Wilkie… something like
The Mystery of Edmond Dickenson
.”

I confess that I started in my chair. “Have you heard from young Edmond, then?”

“Not at all. But your questions about him last year made me think that the idea of a young man simply disappearing, with no clue as to his whereabouts or reasons for leaving, might lead to some interesting complications if murder were involved.”

I felt my heart pounding and wished that I could take a steadying drink of the laudanum from my flask in my jacket’s chest pocket. “And do you think that young Edmond Dickenson was murdered?” I asked.

I remembered Dickenson with his shaved head and sharp teeth and fanatic’s eyes, wearing a hooded robe and chanting at the ceremony in which Drood had loosed the scarab into my vitals. At the very memory of it, the scarab stirred and shifted in the back of my brain.

“Not a bit of it!” laughed Dickens. “I had every reason to believe young Edmond when he said that he was taking his money and travelling, perhaps relocating in Australia. And I certainly would change the character’s name and the title. It was merely to give an idea of the overall story.”

“Interesting,” I lied.

“And mesmerism,” said Dickens, steepling his fingers as he sat back and smiled at me.

“What about it, Charles?”

“I know you are interested in it, Wilkie. Your interest in it is almost as old as mine, although you have never practised it as I have. And you introduced it, subtly, into
The Moonstone,
although more as a metaphor than reality, but you failed to use it properly.”

“How so?”

“The solution to your so-called mystery,” said Dickens in that maddening, schoolmaster’s tone he used with me so frequently. “You have Mr Franklin Blake stealing the diamond in his opium-dream sleep but not
knowing
that he has stolen it.…”

“As I said before,” I said coolly, “this is most feasible and totally possible. I have researched it myself and…”

Dickens waved that away. “But, my dear Wilkie, the discerning reader—perhaps all readers—must ask, Why did Franklin Blake steal his beloved’s diamond?”

“And the answer is obvious, Charles. Because he was
afraid
that someone might steal it and therefore, under the dream-influence of opium he did not know he had ingested, he walked in his sleep and… stole it.” I heard the lameness in my own voice.

Dickens smiled. “Precisely. It strains credulity and endangers verisimilitude. But if you had one of your characters
mesmerise
Franklin Blake and
order
him to steal the diamond, and add to that the mischievous use of opium in his wine (although I would have had both the mesermism and the opium a
deliberate
part of the plot, a conspiracy rather than mere accident)… well, everything falls into place, doesn’t it, my dear Wilkie?”

I sat thinking about this for a moment. It was far too late to make changes. The last number of the serialised novel had already appeared in both
All the Year Round
and in the Harper brothers’ magazine in America and the complimentary leather-bound three-decker copies of the Tinsley edition were already completed and ready to be sent by messenger to Dickens and others.

I said, “But I still maintain that it violates the rules of mesmerism, Charles. You and I both know that Professor Elliotson and others taught that someone cannot do under the influence of the magnetic powers anything he or she would not do—in moral terms—when fully conscious.”

Dickens nodded. “Indeed, but Elliotson has shown—
I have shown
—that under the magnetic influence, the subject may alter his or her behaviour for extended periods of time because he or she has been told that something is true that is not.”

I did not understand this and said so.

“A woman might never carry her baby outside at night,” continued Dickens, “but if you were to mesmerise her and tell her that the house was on fire—or would
be
on fire, say, at nine PM—she would, either while in the mesmeric trance or much later under the influence of suggestion, seize up her baby and rush outside even when no flames were visible. In this way, your Hindoos in
The Moonstone
might have mesmerised Franklin Blake when he came upon them on the estate’s grounds, and your meddling doctor… Mr Sweets?”

“Mr Candy,” I supplied.

“Mr Candy then would have secretly administered the laudanum to poor Franklin Blake as part of a larger plot, not out of sheer random malice that should have seen him put in jail.”

“You’re saying that dear old Mr Candy was also under the mesmeric influence of the Hindoos?” I said. Suddenly I could see all these connections bringing together disparate and separate strands that I had left disparate and separate in my novel.

“That would have been elegant,” said Dickens, still smiling. “Or perhaps the vile drug addict, Ezra Jennings, was in on the plot to steal the Koh-i-noor.”

“The Moonstone,” I corrected absently. “But
my
Ezra Jennings is a sort of hero. He is the one who explains the mystery and then re-creates it for Franklin Blake in Blake’s aunt’s house in Yorkshire.…”

“A re-creation of events that is very handy to resolving your tale,” Dickens said quietly, “but which may strain the reader’s credulity more than any other element.”

“Why is that?”

“Because the conditions of the original night, the night the diamond was stolen, could
not be re-created,
my dear Wilkie. One essential element has been changed, and that would preclude all chance of the sleepwalking and theft occurring again.”

“What element is that?” I asked.

“In the so-called experiment, Mr Franklin Blake
knows
that he was drugged; he
knows
that Jennings believes he stole the diamond; he
knows
the sequence of events that took place and should take place again. That in itself would absolutely eliminate any chance that the same amount of opium…”

“I had Jennings use more in the wine than Mr Candy originally used,” I interrupted.

“Irrelevant,” said Dickens with another infuriatingly dismissive wave of his fingers. “The point is that the re-creation of events itself is impossible. And your Mr Ezra Jennings—probable sodomite, addicted opium eater… his adoration of De Quincey’s
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
comes close to being nauseating—is a poor hero-substitute for Franklin Blake. As it stands, Blake comes across as a sort of idiot. But if you had used the Hindoos properly to introduce
mesmerism
as part of the theft, included the administration of opium as a
means
to that conspiracy rather than as pure accident…”

Dickens broke off. I had nothing to say. A heavy waggon lumbered by out of sight on the highway below, pulled by four large horses by the sounds of it.

“But it is your use of the detective—Sergeant Cuff—that I find close to brilliant,” Dickens said suddenly. “
That
is what makes me consider writing my own novel of mystery, preferably with such a keen mind at the centre of it. Cuff is wonderful… his lean build, his cold, penetrating gaze, and his almost mechanically perfect mind. A wonderful invention!”

“Thank you, Charles,” I said softly.

“If only you had used him properly!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You draw him brilliantly, introduce him brilliantly, and he behaves brilliantly… right up to the place where he wanders off the track, disappears from the narrative for an aeon’s length, makes all the wrong assumptions despite so much evidence to the contrary, and then becomes unavailable, going off to Brighton to raise bees.…”