Dan Simmons - Drood

Dickens told me that last morning in Edinburgh—laughing as he said it—that he no longer felt secure lifting his own hands to his head, especially his rebellious left hand, and soon might have to hire someone to comb his few remaining hairs before he went out in public.

After Chester, however, he went on to read in Blackburn and then at Bolton, Murdering Nancy as he went.

By 22 April, Dickens had broken down. But I get ahead of myself, Dear Reader.

IT WAS SOMETIME AFTER I RETURNED from Edinburgh that I received a letter. It was from Caroline. There was no pathos or bathos in her note—she wrote almost unemotionally, as if cataloguing the behaviour of sparrows in her garden—but she informed me that in the six months of their marriage, her husband, Joseph, was failing to earn a living for them, that they lived off crumbs from his mother (actually from his father’s small estate, doled out grudgingly), and that he beat her.

I read this with mixed emotions, the primary one being—I admit—some small satisfaction.

There was no request from her for money or help of any sort, not even for a return letter, but she signed it, “Yr Very Old and True Friend.”

I sat for a while in my study, contemplating what a false friend might be if Caroline G—, now Mrs Harriett Clow, were an example of a true friend.

That same day, a letter arrived for George and Besse, who had each been grieving in his or her own way—quietly, to be sure, but Besse had been hurt especially hard by Agnes’s departure (more so than by the death of her parents, who left them no money at all)—and I had not seen the envelope when it arrived or the handwriting (laborious printing, actually) would have certainly caught my eye.

But the next day, George appeared at my study door, cleared his throat, and entered with an apologetic expression.

“Excuse me, sir, but since you showed such a kind interest in the fate of our daughter, dear Agnes, I thought ye’d want to see this, sir.” He handed me a small piece of what turned out to be embossed hotel stationery.

DeaRe Mum an DaD—I Am welle and hop to Find you the Same in This Misiv. My Oportunyty has Turned out Very Well. Corpal MacdonalD, my Belovd, and I Plan to Marrye on Nin Jun. I Shall Write you agane After this Happye Event. W/ love and Afecton, yr. Dauter, AGNES

For a moment after reading this, my face, lips, and muscles were as numb and frozen as they had been on the very few occasions when I dosed myself with too much morphia or laudanum. I looked up at George but found that I could not speak.

“Yes, sir,” he said brightly. “It’s grand news, ain’t it?”

“This Corporal MacDonald is the chap she ran away with?” I eventually managed. My voice sounded, even to my shock-dulled ear, as if it had been poured through a strainer.

I had to have known that. George must have told me that. I was sure that he had. Hadn’t he?

“Aye, sir. And I may amend my ’arsh judgement of the lad if ’e makes an honest woman out o’ our sweet Agnes.”

“I certainly hope this will prove to be the case, George. This is very happy news. I am overjoyed to hear that Agnes is safe and well and happy.” I handed him back the note. The heading at the top of the cheap paper was from an Edinburgh hotel, but not the one I had stayed at while visiting Dickens.

Hadn’t we walked over to another hotel to dine that evening after Dickens complained of the beef in the hotel in which we were staying being inferior? I was sure we had. Was it this one whose stationery I was still staring at as George tucked it into his moleskin waistcoat? I was almost certain it was. Had I picked up some of the stationery in the lobby while I was there—perhaps so. Quite possibly so.

“Just thought you’d be interested in ’earing our good news, sir. Thank ye, sir.” George bowed awkwardly and backed out.

I looked down at the letter I had been writing to my brother, Charley. In my agitation, I had spilled a huge blob of ink across my last paragraph.

After the argument between Dickens and Dolby that night, I had used an unusually large amount of my laudanum. We went to dinner. I remembered little of the evening after our first drinks and glasses of wine. Did I return to my room and pen “Agnes’s” letter? Certainly I knew her patterns of misspellings from the note she had copied from my dictation in January. Had I then gone down in the night and posted the letter to George and Besse at the front counter?

Possibly.

I must have.

That was the only explanation and it was a simple one.

I had done other things under the influence of opium and laudanum which I had forgotten about the next day and in days after. Thus the solution to The Moonstone.

But had I known the d— ned Scottish corporal’s name?

Suddenly feeling dizzy, I walked quickly to the window and pulled up the sash. The early-spring air came in, carrying with it taints of coal and horse dung and the distant Thames and its tributaries already beginning to stink in the tentative spring sunlight. I gulped it in and leaned on the sill.

There was a man in an absurd opera cape on the sidewalk opposite the house. His skin was parchment white and his eyes seemed as sunken as a corpse’s. Even from this distance I could see him smile at me and could make out the strange darkness between teeth preternaturally sharpened to points.

Edmond Dickenson.

Or the walking-dead servant of Drood who had once been young Edmond Dickenson.

The figure tipped his tall, shiny, out-of-style top hat and moved on down the sidewalk, looking and smiling back at me only once before making the turn at Portman Square.

The premiere of my play Black and White was on a Sunday, 29 March, 1869. I hovered backstage in an advanced stage of nerves, too agitated even to gauge the audience response by the sound or absence of laughter and applause. All I could hear was the beating of my heart and the pounding of my pulse in my aching temples. My stomach revolted frequently in the carefully calculated ninety-one minutes that the play ran (not so long as to bore the audience, not so brief as to make them feel short-changed, all according to the accursed, hovering Fechter’s calculations). Borrowing an idea from Fechter—who had called for the same boy earlier, before the curtain went up—I had the lad follow me around with a basin. I was forced to resort to it several times before the end of Act III.

Peeking out through the curtains, I could see my family and friends crowding the author’s box—Carrie looking especially lovely in a new gown given to her by the Ward family (for whom she still worked); my brother, Charley, and his wife, Katey; Frank Beard and his wife; Fred and Nina Lehmann; Holman Hunt (who had attended Mother’s funeral in my place); and others. In the lower omnibus-box closer to the stage was Charles Dickens and all of his family that was not scattered to Australia or India or to lonely exile (Catherine)—Georgina, his daughter Mamie, his son Charley and his wife, his son Henry, home for a break from Cambridge, and more.

I could not bear to watch their reaction. I went back to cowering backstage, the boy with the basin scrambling to stay close.

Finally the last curtain came down, the Adelphi Theatre exploded with wild applause, and Fechter and his leading lady, Carlotta Leclercq, went out to take their bows and then to summon out the rest of the cast. Everyone was smiling. The ovation continued unabated and I could hear the cries of “Author! Author!”

Fechter came back to lead me out, and I strode onto the stage with as much an appearance of modest aplomb as I could muster.