Dan Simmons - Drood

In the meantime, I had found Carrie pleasant employment as a part-time governess with a good family I knew. She loved the work and enjoyed having some money of her own, but the best part was that the family often introduced her to society almost as if she were their daughter. Between her contact with the best people in the arts and literature at my table, and introductions to some of England’s most notorious nobility and denizens of the political and business class at her adopted home’s salon , young Carrie was doing an excellent job of preparing to come out.

Carrie was turning seventeen and Martha R— was not quite twenty-three. Martha was much happier now that I felt well enough to drop by and see her from time to time—as her returning travelling husband, “Mr Dawson,” of course—at her rooms on Bolsover Street. Martha had been aware of Caroline and probably aware that Caroline had been more than the housekeeper listed on my annual census forms, but Martha showed no emotion and offered no comments when I told her that “Mrs G—” had moved out and was planning to be married in the autumn.

Martha’s passion, always very strong, seemed to blossom that late spring and summer. She did say that she wanted a child, but I laughed that away for the time being by joking that “poor Mr Dawson” had to be on the road so frequently to earn a living for his darling wife that it would hardly be fair for him to have a family at home when he could not be there to enjoy it.

Come, Isis, Queen of Heaven! Order that this child shall be conceived in the flames of Nebt-Het, holy Nepthys, Goddess of that death which is not eternal. Hide thyself with the child of Osiris, God of our Fathers. Nourish and sustain this child as you nourished and sustained Horus, Lord of Things to Come, in the hidden place among the reeds. This infant’s limbs will grow strong, as will her body and mind, and she shall be placed upon the altar of her father and serve the Temple which carries the truth of the Two Lands. Hear us, O Osiris! You, whose breath is life! Hear us!

I awakened from my morphia dreams to find this and similar pages left on the table by my bedside. The hand was that of the Other Wilkie. I had no memory of dictating them. The words, without memory of the dreams, made little sense.

But my scarab seemed placated.

On the first day I found such pages, I made a fire in my bedroom fireplace and consigned the text to the flames. I was in bed screaming with pain for two days after that. From then on, each morning after the dreams from one of Frank Beard’s evening morphia injections, I would gather up the tight-writ pages and set them in a locked box on a high shelf in my study closet. Then I would lock the closet. Someday they would all be consigned to the flames, but perhaps after my death. I had no illusions that the scarab could hurt me then.

IT OCCURRED TO ME sometime in May of that year, 1868, that being out of touch with Inspector Charles Frederick Field was working more to my disadvantage than to his.

As terrible as that final night on the Undertown river had been—I still had nightmares about the Wild Boy pitching face forward into filthy waters, and there was a scar near my hairline where Reginald Barris had clubbed me with the barrel of his pistol—there remained the fact that when I had been in touch with Inspector Field, I received much more information from him (about Dickens, about Drood, about Ellen Ternan, about what was going on around us) than the inspector had ever received from me. Now that I was approaching what I was certain would be the final confrontation between Dickens and me (after which there would be no doubt to anyone that I was his equal or superior), I realised that I needed precisely the sort of information that Inspector Field had provided until January.

So in May I began looking for him.

As an ex-newspaper reporter, I knew that the most certain approach would be to contact someone in authority from the Metropolitan Police or their Detective Bureau. Despite Field’s being retired, there was no doubt that someone there would know both his personal address and the whereabouts of his Private Enquiry Bureau office. But there were compelling reasons not to ask the police. First of all, there was the fact of Field’s ongoing feud with the Police Force over his pension, over his meddling in the Palmer poisoning case years earlier, and over other problems. Secondly, I was concerned that Inspector Field himself might be in trouble with the police after the January mob scenes and burnings and shootings I had witnessed in Undertown. I had no wish to associate myself with such illegal behaviour.

Finally, and most compelling, I knew that both Drood and Dickens had their contacts with the Metropolitan Police Force and I had no intention of letting them know that I was seeking Inspector Field.

I then considered going to the Times or other newspaper; if anyone knew where the old inspector’s offices might be, I was sure that some enterprising street reporter would.

But here again, the negative points outweighed the positive aspects of such an approach. As little as I wanted the police to associate me with Inspector Charles Frederick Field, I wanted the newspapers to do so even less. I had been away from reporting so long that I no longer had any contact with the papers or magazines that I could trust.

So that left searching myself. Throughout May, I did this as best I could—walking the streets when I was well enough to do so, taking a cab through the downtown at other times, and sending my servant George into promising buildings and alleys to look for Field’s office. Perhaps because of our walk up the Strand and through Lincoln’s Inn Fields (or perhaps because young Edmond Dickenson’s ancient barrister’s office was there), or perhaps because of our repeated meetings on Waterloo Bridge, I had carried away the distinct impression that the old detective’s offices had been between Charing Cross and Fleet Prison, quite probably within the warren of old buildings and legal offices between Drury and Chancery Lanes.

But weeks of searching there turned up not the slightest hint. I then dropped the word at my club that I was seeking (for literary research purposes) the former policeman whom Dickens had written about in the mid-1850s, but although many remembered that Field had been the template for Inspector Bucket (none had yet come to associate him with Sergeant Cuff, who was currently so popular in my still-serialised novel), no one at the club knew where he might be found. In truth, most of those to whom I spoke were under the impression that Inspector Field had died.

I still firmly believed that Field would be back in touch with me before the summer was out. As chagrined as he might have been about his subordinate’s pistol-whipping of me in January—my guess was that Field was afraid that I might sue for damages—I was certain that he still wanted information from me. Sooner or later, one of his street urchins or an otherwise non-descript man in a brown suit (although I seriously doubted that he would used Reginald Barris as his agent for such a service) would approach me on the street and I would resume my relationship with the obsessed inspector.

Until then, I realised, I would have to use my own spies to prepare for my confrontation with Charles Dickens.

BY EARLY JUNE, Dickens was writing to me almost daily from the Hôtel du Helder, where he was staying in Paris. Fechter had joined him there to oversee rehearsals, but the true stage manager—as he had promised—was Dickens himself. The French were calling my play L’Abîme (“The Abyss”), and it was scheduled to premiere on 2 June. He also reported to me that the French version of No Thoroughfare (according to Fechter and Didier, Dickens’s translator there, as well as his Parisian friends and actors) was an immense improvement over the London version and was bound to be a success. He also reported that he would, in all probability, stay in Paris until mid-June.