Dan Simmons - Drood

This suggests that Dickens’s profits from the American readings in 1867–68 should have amounted to a small fortune—a serious fortune for any of us in the writing trade—but he had chosen to do his tour only three years after the Americans’ Civil War had ended. That war had lowered the value of the dollar everywhere, and by early summer of 1868, the American currency had yet to go back to its earlier and more normal exchange value. Katey had explained to me that if her father had simply invested his American Tour earnings in securities in that country and waited for the dollar to regain its old level, his profits would have been almost £38,000. Instead, he had paid a 40 percent tariff for converting his dollars to gold at the time. “My profit,” he had bragged to his daughter, “was within a hundred or so of twenty thousand pounds.”

Impressive, but not reflective of the travel, labour, exhaustion, and diminishment of his authorial vigour that the tour had demanded.

So perhaps his current deal with Chappell was, after all, as much about simple greed as it was about his theoretical vampiric needs.

Or perhaps he was attempting suicide by reading tour.

I admit, Dear Reader, that this final possibility not only occurred to me and made sense to me, but confused me. At this point, I wanted to be the one to kill Charles Dickens. But perhaps it would be tidier if I merely helped him commit suicide this way.

DICKENS HAD BEGUN his tour in his favourite venue of St James’s Hall in London back on 6 October, but without the Murder as part of it. He knew that there would be a necessary hiatus in his travels and readings—the national general election was to be held in November, and he would have to set aside his tour during that campaign if for no other reason than the fact that there would be no suitable public halls or theatres to rent while the politicians were on the rampage. (It was no secret that the Inimitable supported Gladstone and the Liberal Party, but more—his closer friends knew—because he had always detested Disraeli than for any great hopes he had in the Liberals’ carrying out the sort of reform that he, Dickens, had always advocated in his fiction, non-fiction, and public advocacy.)

But even the easier, Murder-less October readings—London, Liverpool, Manchester, London again, Brighton, London—took a great toll on him.

In early October, Dolby had told me of the Chief’s high spirits and joy at renewing his readings, but two weeks into the actual tour and Dolby was admitting that his beloved boss was not sleeping on the road, suffered terrible bouts of melancholy, and was terrified every time he boarded a railway carriage. The slightest bump or swerve, according to Dolby, would cause the Chief to cry out in terror for his life.

More to Frank Beard’s concern, Dickens’s left foot was swelling again—always a sign of more serious troubles—and his old problems of kidney pain and bleeding bowels had returned more fiercely than ever.

Even more telling, perhaps, were the reports through Katey via my brother that Dickens was weeping frequently and was on occasion almost inconsolable during these early travels. It was true that Dickens had suffered enough personal losses during the summer and early autumn.

His son Plorn—now almost seventeen—had sailed in late September to join his brother Alfred in Australia. Dickens had broken down weeping at the station, which was totally unlike the coolness the Inimitable usually showed at family partings.

In late October, as his tour began wearing so heavily on him, Dickens learned that his brother Frederick, from whom he had been estranged for many years, had died. Forster told me that Dickens had written him—“It was a wasted life, but God forbid that one should be hard upon it, or upon anything in this world that is not deliberately and coldly wrong.”

To me, during a rare dinner shared at Vérey’s in London during a gap in his reading schedule, Dickens said simply, “Wilkie, my heart has become a cemetery.”

By the first of November, with Nancy’s Murder looming in two weeks, my brother reported Katey overhearing the Inimitable telling Georgina, “I cannot get right internally and have begun to be as sleepless as sick.”

And he had again written Forster, “I have not been well and have been heavily tired. However, I have little to complain of—nothing, nothing; though, like Mariana, I am weary.”

Forster, who was weary himself in those days, had shared the note in confidence—the conceit was that there was a circle of us, Dickens’s closest friends, who were monitoring his health with concern—but admitted to me that he could not immediately place the “Mariana” reference.

I could and did. And it was hard to suppress a smile as I recited to Forster Mariana’s lines from Tennyson’s poem to which I was certain Dickens was referring—

“… I am aweary, aweary,

Oh God, that I were dead!”

During one of his October London readings at St James’s Hall to which I had gone without telling Dickens that I would be in attendance, I saw him begin the reading with his usual energy and with every appearance of personal delight at revisiting The Pickwick Papers —either a fact or an illusion that always delighted audiences—but within minutes he seemed to find it impossible to say “Pickwick.”

“Picksnick,” he called his character and then paused, almost laughed, and tried again. “Peckwicks… I apologise, ladies and gentlemen, I meant to say, of course… Picnic! That is, Packrits… Pecksniff… Pickstick!”

After several more such embarrassing tries, he stopped and looked down at his friends in the front seats reserved for them (I was far back in the balcony on this night), and showed something like amusement in his expression. But it was also a look of some small desperation, I thought, as if he were asking them for help.

And—even far back in the laughing, loving mob—I could all but smell his sudden rush of panic.

Through all these weeks, Dickens had been honing his reading script for Nancy’s Murder but had not used it. As he confided to me at Vérey’s, “I simply am afraid to read it, my dear Wilkie. I have no doubt that I could perfectly petrify an audience with it… with reading one-eighth of it!.. but whether the impression would be so horrible, so completely terrifying, as to keep them away from my readings another time, is what I cannot satisfy myself upon.”

“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.

EARLY 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.