Drood (84 page)

“You shall know when you have sounded them out through a few more readings, my dear Charles,” I had said that night. “You shall know when the time is right. You always do.”

Dickens had simply acknowledged the compliment with a nod of his head and a distracted sip of wine.

Then I heard, through Dolby, that I was to be a special guest—along with a hundred and fifteen or so other “special guests”—at a private reading (it was during the campaign hiatus) at St James’s Hall on Saturday, 14 November.

Dickens was finally going to slaughter Nancy.

E
ARLY ON THE AFTERNOON
of his reading, I went to Rochester. Mr Dradles met me in front of the cathedral and I went through my usual ritual of gift giving. The brandy that I was buying for this dusty old man was more expensive than that which I usually purchased for myself and special guests.

Dradles accepted it with a grunt and quickly tucked it away somewhere in his voluminous layers of thick canvas and flannel coats and moleskin and flannel waistcoats. He was so flannelly bulky and moleskin-and-canvas bulbous to begin with that I couldn’t even make out the bulge where the bottle had gone.

“Dradles says, this way, Guv’ner,” he said and led me back around the cathedral and tower to the crypt entrance. He was carrying a bullseye lantern with its cover down and set it down briefly as he patted himself for the proper key. The countless pockets on his person gave up countless keys and rings of keys before he found the right one.

“Watch yer ’ead, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins,” was all he said when he lifted the blindered lantern as we entered the dark labyrinth. The November day was overcast enough that almost no light filtered down through the glassless trapezoids fitted into the groined ceiling. Tree roots, shrubs, and in some places actual sod had covered over the spaces that had been meant by the long-dead cathedral builders as skylights for this necropolis. I followed him mostly by sound, finding my way by sliding my hand across the slick-slate stone.
The rising damp.

TIP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TIP-TIP-TAP. Dradles seemed to have found an echo he liked. He unshrouded the lantern and showed me a joining of masonry where the corridor curved and followed narrow steps lower into the crypt.

“Does Mr Billy W. C. see?” he asked. His breath filled the cold space between us with rum fumes.

“It’s been taken down, newer stones set in place, and remortared,” I said. I had to work to keep my teeth from chattering. Caves are said to be warmer—with their constant temperature in the fifties or whatever—than the cold November wind outside this day. But not this crypt-cave.

“Aye, by Dradles ’imself not two year ago,” he breathed at me. “No one there is, not the rector, not the choirmaster, nor even ’nother mason, would notice—after a day or three—if the new mortar were newer. Not if Dradles done it.”

I nodded. “And this wall opens directly into a crypt?”

“Nay, nay,” laughed the flannelled mason. “Be two more walls ’tween us an’ the ol’ ’un. This ’ere wall opens just to the first space ’tween it an’ the older wall. Eighteen inches, at the most.”

“Enough?” I asked. I could not finish the sentence properly with
“for a body?”

Dradles’s rheumy red eyes gleamed at me in the lantern light. He seemed very amused, but he also seemed to be reading my mind perfectly. “No’ for no body, no,” he said far too loudly. “But for mere bones, vertebrae, pelvis, ’tarsals, a watch or chain or gold teeth or two, an’ for a nice, clean, smiling skull… more ’n ’nough room, sir. More ’n ’nough room. The ol’ ’un farther in won’t begrudge the new lodger ’is space, nosir, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins, sir.”

I felt my gorge rising. If I didn’t leave this place soon, I would be sick right across the headstone carver’s filthy undifferentiated boots. But I stayed long enough to ask, “Is this the same spot you and Mr Dickens chose for any bones he’s to bring?”

“Oh, no, sir. No, sir. Our Mr Charles Dickens, famous author, ’e chose a darker, deeper spot for the bones ’e’ll bring Dradles, right down them stairs there, sir. Would the Wilkie gen’mun like to see?”

I shook my head and—without waiting for the little lantern light to follow—fought my way up and out and into the air.

T
HAT EVENING,
as I sat in St James’s Hall with about a hundred of Charles Dickens’s closest friends, I wondered how many times the Inimitable had stood on that stage and performed—either theatrically or as the first of a new breed of authors who read their works. Hundreds of times? At least. He
was
—or had been—that “new breed of authors.” And no one seemed to be equalling or replacing him.

This public Murder of Nancy would be yet another unprecedented departure for a man of letters.

Forster had told me that it was he who had convinced Dickens to ask the Chappells their opinion on this—to Forster’s mind—calamitous idea of including Nancy’s Murder in the reading programme. And it had been the Chappells who had suggested this private audience to test the reaction to such a grim and grisly reading.

Just prior to the performance, I overheard a very famous London physician (not our dear friend Beard) say to the Inimitable—“My dear Dickens, you may rely upon it that if only one woman cries out when you murder the girl, there will be contagion of hysteria all over the place.”

Dickens had only modestly lowered his head and given a smile that anyone who knew him would have classified as more wicked than mischievous.

Taking my place in the second row next to Percy Fitzgerald, I noticed that the stage was set a little differently than for Dickens’s usual readings. Besides his regular personalised frame of directed gas lighting and the violet-maroon screen that set him off to such advantage on a darkened stage, Dickens had added two flanking screens of the same dark colour and even similarly hued curtains behind them, the effect of which was to narrow and focus the wide stage to the tiny, dramatically lighted space immediately surrounding him.

I admit that I had expected Dickens to open the reading with something less sensational—probably an abbreviated version of his perennial and always popular Trial Scene from
The Pickwick Papers
(“Calling Sam Weller!”)—so as to lead up to the
Sturm und Drang
of Nancy’s Murder and to give us all a sense of how the sensationalist finale would be somewhat ameliorated by the other readings in a full evening’s presentation.

But he did not do this. He went straight to Nancy.

I know, Dear Reader, that I have described the Inimitable’s own notes on an early summer draft of his reading script for this scene, but I cannot tell you how inadequate those notes—or my own poor powers of description, as honed by writing prose as they may be—are in describing the next forty-five minutes.

Perhaps, Dear Reader, in your incredibly distant future of the late twentieth or early twenty-first century (if you still even bother measuring time in terms of Years of Our Lord), you have, in your advanced scientific alchemy, created some looking glass that can peer back through time so that you can watch and listen to the Sermon on the Mount or Pericles’ orations or Shakespeare’s original performances of his plays. If so, I would suggest that you add to your list of Historical Orations Not to Be Missed a certain Charles Dickens’s presentation of Bill Sikes murdering Nancy.

He did not leap immediately to the details of the Murder, of course.

You may remember my earlier descriptions of Dickens’s readings—the calm demeanor, the open book held in one hand although never truly referred to, the element of theatricality coming primarily through the wide range of voices, dialects, and postures as Dickens recited. But never before had he fully
acted out the scene he was reading.

With the Murder, Dickens began slowly but with much more theatricality than I had ever seen from him (or any author reading his work). Fagin, that evil Jew, came alive as never before—wringing his hands in a way that suggested both eager anticipation of money stolen and guilt, as if he were trying to wash away the blood of Christ even as he schemed. Noah Claypole came across even more cowardly and stupid than he had in the novel. Bill Sikes’s entrance made the audience shudder in anticipation—rarely had male brutality been so conveyed through a few pages of dialogue and the dramatic portrayal of the drunkard thief and bully’s demeanor.

Nancy’s terror was palpable from the beginning, but by the time of her first of many shrieks, the audience was pale and totally absorbed.

As if showing us the boundary between all of his previous readings over the decades (not to mention the weak and inferior efforts by his imitators) and this new era of sensationalism for him, Dickens tossed aside his book of reading script, left his reading stand, and literally leaped into the scene he was depicting for us.

Nancy shrieked her entreaties.

Bill Sikes growled his relentless fury. There would be no mercy despite her cries—
“Bill! Dear Bill! For God’s sake, Bill! For God’s sake!”

Dickens’s voice filled St James’s Hall so thoroughly that even Nancy’s final, whispered, dying entreaties could be heard as if each of us in the audience were on stage. During the few (but terrible) silences, one could have heard a mouse stirring in the empty balcony behind us. We could actually hear Dickens panting from the exertion of bringing his invisible (all too visible!) club down on the dear girl’s skull… again! Again! Again!

Dickens used the powerful lighting to amazing effect. Now he is on one knee as Nancy, the lighting showing only the bent-back head and two pale hands raised in useless imploring. Now he is rearing back as Bill—the club raised behind his shoulders and his body suddenly, impossibly, larger and burlier and taller than Dickens had ever been, the deep shadows filling his eye sockets except for the terrifying whites of Sikes’s not-sane eyes.

Then the beating—and clubbing—and beating again—and worse clubbing. The dear girl’s dying voice, growing duller and fainter as both life and hope departed, caused the breathless audience to gasp. One woman sobbed.

When Nancy’s pleading ceased, there was an instant of relief—even hope—that her entreaties had been listened to by the brute, that some small bit of life would be left to the battered form, but even as many in the audience chose that second to open their eyes,
then
Dickens roared out Sikes’s loudest and most insane bellows and began clubbing the dying girl again, then the dead girl, then the shapeless mass of battered and bleeding flesh and hair beneath him.

When he was finished, crouched over the body in the same terrible attitude that his son and my brother had first glimpsed in the meadow behind Gad’s Hill Place, Dickens’s laboured gasping for air filled the hall like the bellows of some deranged steam machine. I had no idea whether the panting was real or only part of his performance.

He finished.

Women in the audience were sobbing. At least one was hysterical. Men sat rigid, pale, with their fists clenched and jaw muscles working. I realised that Percy Fitzgerald next to me on one side and Dickens’s old friend Charles Kent on the other were both struggling to take in a breath.

As for me, the stag beetle scarab behind my eyes had gone crazy during the reading, turning and burrowing and boring from one part of my brain to another. The pain had been beyond description, yet still I could not close my eyes or block my ears to shut out the Murder, so mesmerising had it been. As soon as Nancy was well and truly dead, I pulled out my silver flask and took four long drinks of laudanum. (I noticed that other men were drinking from similar flasks.)

The audience was silent for a long moment after Dickens finished, returned to his lectern, straightened his lapels and cravat, and bowed slightly.

For that moment, I thought there would be no applause and that the obscenity that was the Murder of Nancy would never be perpetrated on stage again. The Chappells would hear their verdict in the shocked silence. Forster, Wills, Fitzgerald, and all of Dickens’s other friends who had advised against this will have been justified.

But then the applause began. And rose in volume. And continued to rise as people began to stand throughout the hall. And would not end.

Soaked with sweat but smiling now, Dickens bowed more deeply, stepped out from behind his high reading table, and gave a magician’s gesture.

Members of his stage crew trotted out and the screens were whisked aside in an instant. The maroon-violet curtains pulled back.

On the stage was revealed a long, shining banquet table piled high with delicacies. Bottles of champagne lay cooling in countless silver buckets of ice. A small army of formally attired waiters stood ready to open oysters and send the champagne corks flying. Dickens gestured again and called his invitation (over a second round of enthusiastic applause) for everyone to come up on stage and partake of refreshments.

Even this part of the evening had been carefully staged. As the first men and women filed shakily onto the stage, the powerful gaslights illuminated their flushed faces and the men’s gold studs and the women’s colourful dresses in a wonderful manner. It was as if the performance were still under way but now all of us were to be included in it. With a terrible but darkly thrilling shock, we realised that we were all attending the wake of the murdered Nancy.

Finally on stage myself, I stood back from the banquet and eavesdropped on what people were saying to Dickens, who was all smiles behind a flurry of his handkerchief as he continued mopping his wet brow and cheeks and neck.

Actresses such as Mme Celeste and Mrs Keeley were among the first to reach him.

“You are my judge and jury,” Dickens said happily to them. “Should I do it or not?”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes,
oui,
yes,” breathed Mme Celeste. She looked to be close to fainting.

“Why, of course do it!” cried Mrs Keeley. “Having got at such an effect as that, it
must
be done. It must be. But I must say…” And here the actress rolled her large black eyes very slowly, very dramatically, and enunciated the rest of her line with elaborate slowness, “. . . the public have been looking for a sensation these last fifty years or so, and by heaven they have got it!”