Drood (85 page)

And then Mrs Keeley took in a long, ragged breath, expelled it, and stood there as if speechless.

Dickens bowed low, took her hand, and kissed it.

Charley Dickens came up with an empty oyster shell in his hand.

“Well, Charley,” said Dickens, “and what do you think of it now?” (Charley had been among those closest to Dickens who had advised against it.)

“It is even finer than I expected, Father,” said Charley. “But I still say,
don’t do it
.”

Dickens blinked in what looked to be real surprise.

Edmund Yates came up carrying his second glass of champagne.

“What do you think of this, Edmund?” said Dickens. “Here is Charley, my own son, saying it is the finest thing he has ever heard but who also persists in telling me, without giving any reason, not to do it!”

Yates glanced at Charley and—in serious, almost funereal tones—said, “I agree with Charley, sir. Do
not
do it.”

“Dear heavens!” cried Dickens with a laugh. “I am surrounded by unbelievers. You… Charles!” he cried, pointing to Kent standing next to me. Neither of us had yet availed himself of refreshments. The crowd noise around us was growing louder and less restrained by the moment.

“And Wilkie,” added Dickens. “What do my two old friends and professional accomplices think? Do you agree with Edmund and Charley that I should never repeat this performance?”

“Not a bit of it,” said Kent. “My only objection is of a technical nature.”

“Oh?” said Dickens. His voice was level enough, but I knew how little he cared for “objections of a technical nature” when it came to his readings or theatrical work. Dickens considered himself a master of stagecraft and technical effects.

“You end the reading… performance… with Sikes dragging the dog from the murder room and locking the door behind him,” said Charles Kent. “I believe that the audience is ready for more.… Perhaps Sikes’s flight? Almost certainly Sikes’s fall from the rooftop on Jacob’s Island. The audience wants… it
needs
to see Sikes punished.”

Dickens frowned at this. I took his silence as an invitation.

“I agree with Kent,” I said. “What you have given us is astounding. But the ending is… truncated? Premature? I cannot speak for the women in the audience, but we men are left lusting for Sikes’s blood and death as much as he was lusting to kill poor Nancy. Adding ten minutes would move the ending from the current blank state of horror into a fierce and passionate rush for the end!”

Dickens clasped his arms across his chest and shook his head. I could see that his starched shirtfront had been soaked through with perspiration and that his hands were shaking.

“Trust me, Charles,” he said, addressing Kent, “no audience on earth could be held for ten minutes— or five!—after the girl’s death. Trust me to be right on this. I stand there…” He gestured to the lectern and low reading platform. “. . . and I
know
.”

Kent shrugged. Dickens’s tone of absolute certainty—the Master’s voice, often used by him to settle discussions of things literary or theatrical—had spoken. But I knew then, and was not surprised later to see, that Dickens would brood over this suggestion and later lengthen the reading, adding at least three pages of narrative to the performance, to do precisely as Kent had suggested.

I went to get oysters and champagne and joined George Dolby, Edmund Yates, Forster, Charley Dickens, Percy Fitzgerald, Charles Kent, Frank Beard, and others standing farther back on the stage, just out of the rectangle of brilliant light. Dickens was now surrounded by ladies whom he’d invited to the event, and they seemed as emotionally overwrought and positively eager about his Murdering Nancy in the future as the actresses had been. (Dickens had told me to bring the Butler—meaning Carrie—but I had not passed on the invitation and was glad that she’d not been there. Many of us, in crossing the stage with our drinks and oysters, unconsciously looked down to make sure that we were not placing our polished black pumps in the pools of Nancy’s blood.

“This is madness,” Forster was saying. “If he does this for any significant part of his remaining seventy-nine performances, he will kill himself.”

“I agree,” said Frank Beard. The usually jovial physician was glowering at the glass flute in his hand as if the champagne had gone bad. “This would be suicide for Dickens. He will not survive it.”

“He invited reporters,” said Kent. “I’ve heard them talking. They loved it. They will write it up wonderfully in the papers tomorrow. Every man, woman, and child in England, Ireland, and Scotland will be selling their teeth to get a ticket.”

“Most of them have already sold whatever teeth they had left,” I said. “They will have to find something else to bring to the Jews’ pawnshops.”

The men around me laughed politely, but most went back to frowns in the silence that followed.

“If the reporters praise it,” rumbled Dolby, that bear of a man, “then the Chief will do it. At least four times a week until next summer.”

“That will kill him,” Frank Beard said again.

“Many of you have known Father for much longer than I have,” said Charley Dickens. “Do
you
know of any way to dissuade him once he realises the sensation he has created and can create with this?”

“None, I fear,” said Percy Fitzgerald.

“Never,” said Forster. “He will not listen to sense. The next time we meet may be at Westminster Abbey for Dickens’s state funeral.”

I almost spilled my champagne at this.

For some months now, since Dickens had first declared his intention of performing Nancy’s Murder in the majority of his proposed winter and spring readings, I had considered such suicide a mere means to an end for which I already devoutly wished. But Forster had made me realise something that was almost certainly true—however Dickens died, either through suicide-by-readings or by being run over by a dray waggon tomorrow on the Strand, there would be a huge public demand for a state funeral. The London
Times
or some other rag that had been Charles Dickens’s political opponent and literary scold for so many years would lead the way in demanding that the Inimitable be interred in Westminster Abbey. The public—sentimental as always—would rally around the idea.

The crowds would be stupendous. Dickens would end up lying with the other most-loved bones of English literary genius.

The certainty of all this made me want to scream right there on the stage.

Dickens had to die, that was certain. But I realised now what my deeper, darker mind must already have known and begun advance planning for months earlier—
Dickens not only had to die, he had to
disappear.

There could be no state funeral, no burial in Westminster Abbey. That idea was simply intolerable to me.

“What do you think, Wilkie?” asked Yates.

Lost in the horror of my revelation, I had not been following their conversation closely, but I vaguely knew that they were still discussing ways and means of dissuading Dickens from murdering Nancy scores more times in public.

“I think that Charles will do what he believes he has to do,” I said softly. “But it is up to us—his dearest friends and family—to keep him from being buried in Westminster Abbey.”

“Soon, you mean,” said Fitzgerald. “Buried there
soon,
you mean.”

“Of course. That is precisely what I meant.” I excused myself to get more champagne. The crowd was growing a little thinner now, but also more boisterous. The corks continued to pop and the waiter continued to pour.

A movement backstage, where the crew had been moving the lectern and equipment, caught my eye and made me stop.

It was not the crew moving now. A single figure stood there, all but cloaked in darkness, his silly opera cape catching the slightest gleam of reflected light from the stage. He was wearing an old-fashioned top hat. His face was absolutely white, as were his strangely long-fingered hands.

Drood.

My heart leapt to my throat and the scarab in my brain surged to its favourite viewing place behind my right eye.

But it was not Drood.

The figure bowed theatrically in my direction and swept off the top hat. I saw the blond, thinning hair that was growing back and recognised Edmond Dickenson.

Certainly Dickens did not invite Dickenson to this trial reading? How could he have found him? Why would he have . . .

The figure straightened up and smiled. It looked, even from this distance, that young Dickenson’s eyelids were missing. And that his teeth had been filed to sharp points.

I wheeled to see if Dickens or the others had seen this apparition. No one else appeared to have noticed.

When I turned back, the form in the black opera cape was gone.

CHAPTER FORTY

I
slept until noon on New Year’s Day and awoke alone and in pain. The week before this first day of 1869 had been strangely warm, with no snow, no clouds, little sense of the season, and finally—for me—far too little human companionship. But this day was cold and dark.

My married servants, George and Besse, had asked my permission to go to Besse’s ancestral home in Wales for at least a week. It seemed that both her senile father and—until recently—healthy mother were choosing to die at the same time. It was unheard-of (and ridiculous) to release my entire staff at once for so long a time—I assumed that their dull-witted and homely seventeen-year-old daughter, Agnes, would be accompanying them—but I let them go out of the kindness of my heart (after informing them, of course, that they would not be paid during their Welsh vacation). Because of a party I had planned for Gloucester Place on New Year’s Eve, I made them delay their travels for a week; they finally left on New Year’s Day, two days after I returned from my week at Gad’s Hill Place.

Carrie had been staying with me for most of December (her time with her mother and new stepfather, who, she whispered to me, drank heavily, had lasted less than two weeks), but her employer family (who still treated her more like a guest than a governess) were going to the country on Christmas Eve for at least two weeks and I’d urged her to go along with them. There would be parties and masked balls and fireworks on New Year’s midnight, there would be sleigh excursions, there would be ice skating in the moonlight, there would be young gentlemen.… I could offer none of those things.

There was very little that I felt I could offer anyone that New Year’s Day of 1869.

After Caroline’s marriage, I had avoided the five-storey empty home at Number 90 Gloucester Place as much as I could, staying with the Lehmanns and the Beards in November as long as those kind people would have me. I had even spent time with Forster (who disliked me very much) at his ridiculous (but comfortable) mansion at Palace Gate. Forster had grown more pretentious and tiresome than ever after his marriage into wealth, and his dislike of me (or jealousy, I should say, since Forster had always competed angrily with anyone who was closer to Dickens than he) had grown apace with his wealth and girth, but he was still too much the presumed and assumed gentleman to turn me out or ask why I had chosen to come visit him at that time. (If he
had
asked, I could have answered honestly in three words—
your wine cellar
.)

But no one can visit friends forever, so for some of December it had been just Carrie and me in the large old place at Number 90 Gloucester Place, with George, Besse, and the shy Agnes all scuttling along busily in the background in an unsuccessful effort to avoid my surly moods.

When Dickens had sent word inviting me to come with Kate and Charley to spend yet another Christmas at Gad’s Hill Place, I hesitated—it had felt almost dishonest to accept such hospitality from someone you fully planned to murder as soon as the time was right—but in the end I acquiesced. When the house at Gloucester Place was empty, it was just
too
empty.

Dickens was home for the week resting up in preparation for the remainder of his reading tour—he’d planned his first Murder of Nancy in front of the paying public for 5 January, again in St James’s Hall—but was already exhausted and ailing from the limited readings he’d given in December. In a brief letter he’d written to me in December while travelling to Edinburgh on the “Flying Scotchman,” he’d penned—

My dear Wilkie,

Dolby is sleeping stentoriously nearby as we have just jolted over what felt to be several disaster-inducing gaps in the rails, causing not so much as the slightest pause in our ursine friend’s snores, so I have just taken a few minutes to calculate the amazing fact that travelling the distances required on a tour such as this involves more than thirty thousand distinct and separate shocks to the nerves. And my nerves, as you know, have not of recent been at their best. The memory of Staplehurst is never far from my mind, and when it does recede a bit, one of these shocks or jolts reminds me of it yet again. And even when I am stationary, there is no rest for the wicked. I said recently to our estimable American friend Mrs Fields that I spend most of the remaining and dwindling hours of my life travelling towards the tiring exposure to my special gas lamps on the platform and that the hour has almost come once more when I to sulphurous and tormenting gas must render up myself.

Dickens had found ways other than his tour and this convoluted syntax by which to exhaust himself. Although he had finally abolished the accursed “Christmas Issue” of
All the Year Round
(years after it should have been discontinued, to my way of thinking), he was still spending many hours a week at the Wellington Street offices, fiddling with the look and layout of the magazine, testing typography sizes on anyone who wandered by, and writing enthusiastic “Editor’s Notes” about the New Series he was launching, assuring any readers alarmed by the disappearance of the Christmas Issue that
“. . . my fellow labourers and I will be at our old posts, in company with those younger comrades whom I have had the pleasure of enrolling from time to time and whose number it is always one of my pleasantest editorial duties to enlarge…”