Dan Simmons - Drood

“Wilkie, do you ever wonder about whether Father is right?”

No, I thought. Never. I said, “About what, my dear?”

“About your brother.”

I felt some alarm course through me. “About the seriousness of his illness, you mean?”

“About everything.”

I could not believe that she was asking me this. Rumours that Kate and Charley had never consummated their marriage continued, fueled by Charles Dickens’s malicious comments. If her father’s insinuations were to be believed, my brother was either a closet sodomite or impotent or both.

This line of questioning certainly would not do.

I patted her hand. “Your father hated losing you above all things, Katey. You have always been the closest to him. Any suitor or husband would have fallen under his wrath.”

“Yes,” agreed Katey. Modesty was never one of her more salient charms. “But Charley and I spend so much time here at Gad’s Hill Place that it is almost as if I never left home.”

I had nothing to say to that. Especially since everyone knew that it was her choice to live here when Charley was so ill—which was almost all of the time now.

“Do you ever wonder, Wilkie, what it would be like if you and I had married rather than your brother and me?”

I almost stopped walking. My heart, already accelerated by my mid-day liberal application of laudanum, began pounding against my ribs.

There was a time when I had considered courting the young Kate Dickens. During what everyone but the Dickenses thought of as “the divorce”—the terrible and permanent separation when Charles Dickens effectively sent his wife, Catherine, into permanent exile—young Kate, of all the children, seemed the most hurt and disoriented by the sudden dissolution of what most had thought of as the perfect English family. She was eighteen when all of the confusion and dislocation was going on—she became engaged to my brother when she was twenty—and I admitted to finding her attractive in some subtle way. Even then I sensed that she would not, as would her sister Mamie, put on the plumpness and matronly aspect of her mother.

But before I could even explore my interest in Katey, she had fallen in love—or at least become smitten—with Dickens’s and my friend Percy Fitzgerald. When Fitzgerald rather coldly rejected her maidenly advances, Katey had suddenly turned to my brother, Dickens’s illustrator and a frequent visitor to Gad’s Hill at the time.

I may have mentioned previously, Dear Reader, that this romantic interest on Kate’s part astounded all of us. Charley had only moved away from our mother’s home some weeks earlier and had never shown any serious interest in girls or courting.

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.

MY 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.