Dan Simmons - Drood

“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.

In 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.