Dan Simmons - Drood

Kent shrugged. Dickens’s tone of absolute certainty—the Master’s voice, often used by him to settle discussions of things literary or theatrical—had spoken. But I knew then, and was not surprised later to see, that Dickens would brood over this suggestion and later lengthen the reading, adding at least three pages of narrative to the performance, to do precisely as Kent had suggested.

I went to get oysters and champagne and joined George Dolby, Edmund Yates, Forster, Charley Dickens, Percy Fitzgerald, Charles Kent, Frank Beard, and others standing farther back on the stage, just out of the rectangle of brilliant light. Dickens was now surrounded by ladies whom he’d invited to the event, and they seemed as emotionally overwrought and positively eager about his Murdering Nancy in the future as the actresses had been. (Dickens had told me to bring the Butler—meaning Carrie—but I had not passed on the invitation and was glad that she’d not been there. Many of us, in crossing the stage with our drinks and oysters, unconsciously looked down to make sure that we were not placing our polished black pumps in the pools of Nancy’s blood.

“This is madness,” Forster was saying. “If he does this for any significant part of his remaining seventy-nine performances, he will kill himself.”

“I agree,” said Frank Beard. The usually jovial physician was glowering at the glass flute in his hand as if the champagne had gone bad. “This would be suicide for Dickens. He will not survive it.”

“He invited reporters,” said Kent. “I’ve heard them talking. They loved it. They will write it up wonderfully in the papers tomorrow. Every man, woman, and child in England, Ireland, and Scotland will be selling their teeth to get a ticket.”

“Most of them have already sold whatever teeth they had left,” I said. “They will have to find something else to bring to the Jews’ pawnshops.”

The men around me laughed politely, but most went back to frowns in the silence that followed.

“If the reporters praise it,” rumbled Dolby, that bear of a man, “then the Chief will do it. At least four times a week until next summer.”

“That will kill him,” Frank Beard said again.

“Many of you have known Father for much longer than I have,” said Charley Dickens. “Do you know of any way to dissuade him once he realises the sensation he has created and can create with this?”

“None, I fear,” said Percy Fitzgerald.

“Never,” said Forster. “He will not listen to sense. The next time we meet may be at Westminster Abbey for Dickens’s state funeral.”

I almost spilled my champagne at this.

For some months now, since Dickens had first declared his intention of performing Nancy’s Murder in the majority of his proposed winter and spring readings, I had considered such suicide a mere means to an end for which I already devoutly wished. But Forster had made me realise something that was almost certainly true—however Dickens died, either through suicide-by-readings or by being run over by a dray waggon tomorrow on the Strand, there would be a huge public demand for a state funeral. The London Times or some other rag that had been Charles Dickens’s political opponent and literary scold for so many years would lead the way in demanding that the Inimitable be interred in Westminster Abbey. The public—sentimental as always—would rally around the idea.

The crowds would be stupendous. Dickens would end up lying with the other most-loved bones of English literary genius.

The certainty of all this made me want to scream right there on the stage.

Dickens had to die, that was certain. But I realised now what my deeper, darker mind must already have known and begun advance planning for months earlier— Dickens not only had to die, he had to disappear.

There could be no state funeral, no burial in Westminster Abbey. That idea was simply intolerable to me.

“What do you think, Wilkie?” asked Yates.

Lost in the horror of my revelation, I had not been following their conversation closely, but I vaguely knew that they were still discussing ways and means of dissuading Dickens from murdering Nancy scores more times in public.

“I think that Charles will do what he believes he has to do,” I said softly. “But it is up to us—his dearest friends and family—to keep him from being buried in Westminster Abbey.”

“Soon, you mean,” said Fitzgerald. “Buried there soon, you mean.”

“Of course. That is precisely what I meant.” I excused myself to get more champagne. The crowd was growing a little thinner now, but also more boisterous. The corks continued to pop and the waiter continued to pour.

A movement backstage, where the crew had been moving the lectern and equipment, caught my eye and made me stop.

It was not the crew moving now. A single figure stood there, all but cloaked in darkness, his silly opera cape catching the slightest gleam of reflected light from the stage. He was wearing an old-fashioned top hat. His face was absolutely white, as were his strangely long-fingered hands.

Drood.

My heart leapt to my throat and the scarab in my brain surged to its favourite viewing place behind my right eye.

But it was not Drood.

The figure bowed theatrically in my direction and swept off the top hat. I saw the blond, thinning hair that was growing back and recognised Edmond Dickenson.

Certainly Dickens did not invite Dickenson to this trial reading? How could he have found him? Why would he have…

The figure straightened up and smiled. It looked, even from this distance, that young Dickenson’s eyelids were missing. And that his teeth had been filed to sharp points.

I wheeled to see if Dickens or the others had seen this apparition. No one else appeared to have noticed.

When I turned back, the form in the black opera cape was gone.

Islept until noon on New Year’s Day and awoke alone and in pain. The week before this first day of 1869 had been strangely warm, with no snow, no clouds, little sense of the season, and finally—for me—far too little human companionship. But this day was cold and dark.

My married servants, George and Besse, had asked my permission to go to Besse’s ancestral home in Wales for at least a week. It seemed that both her senile father and—until recently—healthy mother were choosing to die at the same time. It was unheard-of (and ridiculous) to release my entire staff at once for so long a time—I assumed that their dull-witted and homely seventeen-year-old daughter, Agnes, would be accompanying them—but I let them go out of the kindness of my heart (after informing them, of course, that they would not be paid during their Welsh vacation). Because of a party I had planned for Gloucester Place on New Year’s Eve, I made them delay their travels for a week; they finally left on New Year’s Day, two days after I returned from my week at Gad’s Hill Place.

Carrie had been staying with me for most of December (her time with her mother and new stepfather, who, she whispered to me, drank heavily, had lasted less than two weeks), but her employer family (who still treated her more like a guest than a governess) were going to the country on Christmas Eve for at least two weeks and I’d urged her to go along with them. There would be parties and masked balls and fireworks on New Year’s midnight, there would be sleigh excursions, there would be ice skating in the moonlight, there would be young gentlemen.… I could offer none of those things.

There was very little that I felt I could offer anyone that New Year’s Day of 1869.

After Caroline’s marriage, I had avoided the five-storey empty home at Number 90 Gloucester Place as much as I could, staying with the Lehmanns and the Beards in November as long as those kind people would have me. I had even spent time with Forster (who disliked me very much) at his ridiculous (but comfortable) mansion at Palace Gate. Forster had grown more pretentious and tiresome than ever after his marriage into wealth, and his dislike of me (or jealousy, I should say, since Forster had always competed angrily with anyone who was closer to Dickens than he) had grown apace with his wealth and girth, but he was still too much the presumed and assumed gentleman to turn me out or ask why I had chosen to come visit him at that time. (If he had asked, I could have answered honestly in three words— your wine cellar .)