Dan Simmons - Drood

Dickens used the powerful lighting to amazing effect. Now he is on one knee as Nancy, the lighting showing only the bent-back head and two pale hands raised in useless imploring. Now he is rearing back as Bill—the club raised behind his shoulders and his body suddenly, impossibly, larger and burlier and taller than Dickens had ever been, the deep shadows filling his eye sockets except for the terrifying whites of Sikes’s not-sane eyes.

Then the beating—and clubbing—and beating again—and worse clubbing. The dear girl’s dying voice, growing duller and fainter as both life and hope departed, caused the breathless audience to gasp. One woman sobbed.

When Nancy’s pleading ceased, there was an instant of relief—even hope—that her entreaties had been listened to by the brute, that some small bit of life would be left to the battered form, but even as many in the audience chose that second to open their eyes, then Dickens roared out Sikes’s loudest and most insane bellows and began clubbing the dying girl again, then the dead girl, then the shapeless mass of battered and bleeding flesh and hair beneath him.

When he was finished, crouched over the body in the same terrible attitude that his son and my brother had first glimpsed in the meadow behind Gad’s Hill Place, Dickens’s laboured gasping for air filled the hall like the bellows of some deranged steam machine. I had no idea whether the panting was real or only part of his performance.

He finished.

Women in the audience were sobbing. At least one was hysterical. Men sat rigid, pale, with their fists clenched and jaw muscles working. I realised that Percy Fitzgerald next to me on one side and Dickens’s old friend Charles Kent on the other were both struggling to take in a breath.

As for me, the stag beetle scarab behind my eyes had gone crazy during the reading, turning and burrowing and boring from one part of my brain to another. The pain had been beyond description, yet still I could not close my eyes or block my ears to shut out the Murder, so mesmerising had it been. As soon as Nancy was well and truly dead, I pulled out my silver flask and took four long drinks of laudanum. (I noticed that other men were drinking from similar flasks.)

The audience was silent for a long moment after Dickens finished, returned to his lectern, straightened his lapels and cravat, and bowed slightly.

For that moment, I thought there would be no applause and that the obscenity that was the Murder of Nancy would never be perpetrated on stage again. The Chappells would hear their verdict in the shocked silence. Forster, Wills, Fitzgerald, and all of Dickens’s other friends who had advised against this will have been justified.

But then the applause began. And rose in volume. And continued to rise as people began to stand throughout the hall. And would not end.

Soaked with sweat but smiling now, Dickens bowed more deeply, stepped out from behind his high reading table, and gave a magician’s gesture.

Members of his stage crew trotted out and the screens were whisked aside in an instant. The maroon-violet curtains pulled back.

On the stage was revealed a long, shining banquet table piled high with delicacies. Bottles of champagne lay cooling in countless silver buckets of ice. A small army of formally attired waiters stood ready to open oysters and send the champagne corks flying. Dickens gestured again and called his invitation (over a second round of enthusiastic applause) for everyone to come up on stage and partake of refreshments.

Even this part of the evening had been carefully staged. As the first men and women filed shakily onto the stage, the powerful gaslights illuminated their flushed faces and the men’s gold studs and the women’s colourful dresses in a wonderful manner. It was as if the performance were still under way but now all of us were to be included in it. With a terrible but darkly thrilling shock, we realised that we were all attending the wake of the murdered Nancy.

Finally on stage myself, I stood back from the banquet and eavesdropped on what people were saying to Dickens, who was all smiles behind a flurry of his handkerchief as he continued mopping his wet brow and cheeks and neck.

Actresses such as Mme Celeste and Mrs Keeley were among the first to reach him.

“You are my judge and jury,” Dickens said happily to them. “Should I do it or not?”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes, oui, yes,” breathed Mme Celeste. She looked to be close to fainting.

“Why, of course do it!” cried Mrs Keeley. “Having got at such an effect as that, it must be done. It must be. But I must say…” And here the actress rolled her large black eyes very slowly, very dramatically, and enunciated the rest of her line with elaborate slowness, “… the public have been looking for a sensation these last fifty years or so, and by heaven they have got it!”

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 .”