Dan Simmons - Drood

Dickens, Dolby, Georgina, Mary, and the usual travelling entourage were returning from Belfast to catch the mail boat to Kingston when something went terribly wrong. They were riding in the first-class carriage immediately behind the engine when suddenly there was an incredible crash along the roof of their carriage and they looked outside just in time to see what appeared to be a huge, free-flying scythe of iron cutting through telegraph poles as if they were mere reeds.

“Down!” cried Dickens and everyone dived for the floor of the carriage. A fusillade of huge splinters, gravel, mud, stones, and water struck the windows on the side they had been riding. The carriage shuddered as if they had hit something solid and then there was a series of shocks so great that Dickens later admitted that he was sure they had once again derailed and were hurtling over an incomplete trestle.

The carriage came to a halt and the only sounds breaking the sudden silence were the steam-panting of the great engine and a few screams from the lower-class carriages. Dickens was the first to his feet and outside and immediately began talking quietly to the engineer as Dolby and other men with their wits about them gathered round.

The engineer, who (according to Dolby writing Forster) was far more agitated than Dickens, his hands shaking, explained that the metal tire on the huge driving-wheel had fractured—exploded—and sent its fragments flying into the air and scything through the telegraph poles. It had been the large section of that wheel that had crashed into the roof of Dickens’s carriage. “If it’d been a little larger,” said the engineer, “or travelling a little lower or faster, it would have cut down through the roof of your carriage for sure, doing to you poor passengers what its other parts did to those telegraph poles.”

Dickens had calmed Mary and Georgina and the other passengers that day—even Dolby admitted to being deeply shaken, and it took much to shake George Dolby—but the next evening, after the Inimitable had Murdered Nancy yet again, Dolby had to help the Chief off stage at the end of the evening.

Dickens had arranged his schedule to read in Cheltenham just so that his dear and ageing friend Macready might hear the Murder. Afterwards, the failing seventy-five-year-old came backstage, shakily leaning on Dolby’s arm, and was unable to speak until he had two glasses of champagne. The old man was so emotional after seeing the Murder that Dickens tried to make light of it, but Macready would have none of that. A hint of his old stage fury returning in that ruined voice, he bellowed out, “No, Dickens—er—er—I will NOT—er—er—have it—er—put aside. In my—er—best times—er—you remember them, my dear boy—er—gone, gone! — no!” And here the bellow became a roar. “It comes to this—er—TWO MACBETHS!”

This last was so loud and so emotional that Dickens and Dolby could do nothing but stare at the old actor who had made Macbeth his signature role and who was more proud of nothing else, not even his wife and lovely grown daughter. And he seemed to be saying that in terms of pure horror and emotion, Dickens’s Murder of Nancy had been the equivalent—in acting as well as in effect—of the best of his best Macbeths.

Then the old giant stood there glaring at Dolby as if the manager (who had not said a word) had contradicted him. And then Macready simply… went away. His body was still there, the third glass of champagne still in his hand, the great jaw and profile both still jutting upwards and outwards in defiance, but Macready himself was gone, leaving behind, as Dickens later told Dolby and Forster, only a clever, pale optical illusion of himself.

In Clifton, the Murder brought about what Dickens gleefully called a contagion of fainting. “I should think we had from a dozen to twenty ladies borne out, stiff and rigid, at various times. It became quite ridiculous.” The Inimitable loved it.

In Bath, it was Dickens who seemed close to fainting, as the place literally haunted him. “The place looks to me like a cemetery which the Dead have succeeded in rising and taking,” he told Dolby. “Having built streets out of their old gravestones, they wander about scantily trying to ‘look alive.’ A dead failure.”

Percy Fitzgerald let slip to me in February that after Georgina and Mary returned to Gad’s Hill, Ellen Ternan was with Dickens again. Or so I surmised (Percy would never be so indiscreet as to say it outright). But Fitzgerald was getting married, at long last, and when he breathlessly told this to Dickens at the station, the writer said, “I must tell this to the one who is with me.” The one who is with me … Dickens hardly would have used this circumlocution to describe Dolby or his lighting or gas man. Was Ellen staying in the same hotel as Dickens, but as a sister now, rather than a lover? One can only imagine the added torments this gave to the Inimitable.

I say “added torments” quite deliberately, since there was no doubt now that it was more than bad health that was tormenting Charles Dickens. Despite his gleeful reports about dozens of women fainting, the Murder of Nancy was obviously taking a terrible toll on his psyche as well as his body. Everyone I spoke to—Fitzgerald, Forster, Wills, everyone—agreed that the Inimitable’s letters were filled with the Murder and nothing but the Murder. He was reading it at least four times a week, mixed in with his usual most popular readings, and he seemed obsessed not just with turning each hall in which he read into a Theatre of Terror, but in feeling Bill Sikes’s guilt at the murders.

“I am murdering Nancy.…”

“My preparations for a certain murder…”

“I think often of my fellow criminals.…”

“I commit the murder again, and again, and again.…”

“I have a vague sensation of being ‘wanted’ as I walk about the streets.…”

“I imbue my hands once again with innocent blood.…”

“I still have a great deal of murdering ahead of me and little time in which to do it.…”

All these phrases and more poured out to those of us left behind in London. Dolby wrote Forster that Dickens could no longer abide staying in the town or city where he had done the reading, long-planned railway schedules had to be changed, tickets exchanged, new fees paid out, so that the exhausted Inimitable, barely capable of walking to the station, could flee the city that night, like a wanted man.

“People look at me differently after I have Murdered Nancy,” Dickens told the vacant-headed Wills during one of his stops in London. “They fear me, I believe. They leave a distance in the room… not one of shyness towards someone famous, but rather the distance of fear and, perhaps, loathing or disgust.”

Another time, Dolby told Forster that he came backstage after a performance to say that the carriage was waiting for departure to the station, only to find that Dickens had been washing his hands for fifteen minutes or more. “I cannot get the blood off, Dolby,” said the exhausted writer, looking up with haunted eyes. “It stays beneath my nails and in the skin.”

To London, to Bristol, to Torquay, to Bath—Dickens knew the hotels and stations and halls and even the faces in the audiences by heart by now—and then to London again in preparation to go on to Scotland. But now Dickens’s left foot was so swollen that Frank Beard absolutely forbade the Scotland tour, which was postponed briefly. But five days later, Dickens was travelling again, despite urgent pleas not to from Georgina, his daughters, his son Charley, and friends such as Fitzgerald and Wills and Forster.

I DECIDED TO go to Edinburgh to see Dickens Murder Nancy. And, possibly, to see the Murder murder Charles Dickens.