Dan Simmons - Drood

I could certainly surprise Dickens and the Fieldses and whoever the Inimitable’s other guests were this weekend by describing my new baby daughter Marian’s presumably cute facial antics and burbles and other such ten-for-a-’apenny common baby anecdotes, but that would most definitely be too much of a revelation. (The less Charles Dickens and his entourage and sycophants knew of my private life, the better.)

What to amuse him with, then?

I would almost certainly inform everyone of how well my book Man and Wife was coming along. If Dickens was my only interlocutor, I might tell him about the letters that Mrs Harriette (Caroline) Clow was now sending me almost monthly—details of emotional estrangement and physical punishment from her plumber-lout of a husband. It made for wonderful research. All I had to do was substitute the Oxford-athlete lout for the almost illiterate plumber-lout—there was really very little difference in the two classes of men when one thought about it—and the beatings and occasions of being locked in the cellar that Caroline was suffering instantly became the plight of my highbred but poorly wed heroine.

What else?

I could, if we had an extended period alone and any renewal of our old sense of intimacy, tell Charles Dickens about my late-night visit on 9 June from the young man he had pulled from the wreckage at Staplehurst four years earlier to the day—our Mr Edmond Dickenson.

DICKENSON HAD NOT ONLY taken possession of my writing chair behind my desk and set his unclean boots on my extruded lower drawer, but the impertinent whelp had somehow got upstairs to my bedroom, unlocked the closet, and brought down the eight hundred pages of my dreams of the Gods of the Black Lands scrawled in the Other Wilkie’s tight, slanting script.

“What is the meaning of this intrusion?” I snapped. My attempt at masterly command may have been weakened somewhat by the fact that even with the cape-coat on I was as soaked through as a wet-slick alley cat and now dripping puddles onto my own study floor and Persian carpet.

Dickenson laughed and relinquished my chair (although not the manuscript). The two of us circled the desk as cautiously as knife-fighting adversaries in a New Court tavern.

I sat in my writing chair and slid the lower drawer shut, and Dickenson dropped into the guest’s chair without asking permission. My coat made wet, squishy sounds beneath me.

“You look thoroughly miserable, if you don’t mind my saying so,” said Dickenson.

“Never mind that. Give me back my property.”

Dickenson looked at the stack of papers in his hands and showed a caricature of surprise. “ Your property, Mr Collins? You know that neither your dreams of the Black Land nor these notes are your property.”

“They are. And I want them back.” I brought Hatchery’s pistol out of my coat pocket, set the base of the heavy stock or grip or handle or whatever it is called against the surface of my desk, and used both hands to pull back the resisting hammer until it clicked and cocked. The muzzle was aimed directly at Edmond Dickenson’s chest.

The insufferable youth laughed. Once again I could see the strangeness of his teeth: they had been white and healthy when I had seen him during Christmas of 1865. Had they decayed or been filed down to these stumps and points since then?

“Is this your writing, Mr Collins?”

I hesitated. Drood had met with the Other Wilkie two years ago this very night. Drood’s emissary here would certainly know about that.

“I want the pages back,” I said. My finger was now on the trigger.

“And you intend to shoot me if I do not give them to you?”

“Yes.”

“And why would you do that, Mr Collins?”

“Perhaps to ascertain that you are not the spectre you pretend to be,” I said softly. I was very tired. It seemed like weeks, rather than a mere dozen hours or so, since I had watched Dickens take his guests out to luncheon at Cooling Cemetery.

“Oh, I will bleed if you shoot me,” said Dickenson in that same maddeningly happy tone with which he’d infuriated me at Gad’s Hill so long ago. “And die, if your aim is good enough.”

“It will be,” I said.

“But to what purpose, sir? You know that these documents are the property of the Master.”

“By ‘Master’ you mean Drood.”

“Who else? There is no doubt that I will leave with these pages—I would rather face your pistol at three paces than the Master’s slightest displeasure at a thousandfold-greater distance—but, since you have me at this disadvantage, perhaps there is something you wish to know before I leave?”

“Where is Drood?” I said.

Dickenson merely laughed again. Perhaps it was the sight of those teeth that made me ask the next question.

“Do you eat human flesh at least once a month, Dickenson?”

The laugh and smile disappeared. “And where have you heard that, sir?”

“Perhaps I know more about your… Master… and his slaves than you give me credit for.”

“Perhaps you do,” said Dickenson. He had lowered his chin and now looked at me with eyes raised and brow lowered in a strangely disturbing way. “But you should know,” he added, “that there are no slaves… only disciples and those who love and volunteer to serve the Master.”

It was my turn to laugh. “You’re speaking to someone with one of your accursed Master’s scarabs in his brain, Dickenson. I can think of no worse form of slavery.”

“Our mutual friend Mr Dickens can,” said Dickenson. “That is why he has chosen to work with the Master towards their shared goal.”

“What in the world are you gabbling about?” I snapped. “Dickens and Drood have no common goals.”

The young man—formerly round faced to the point of being cherubic, now actively gaunt—shook his head. “You were in New Court and Bluegate Fields and the surrounding areas tonight, Mr Collins,” he said softly.

How does he know I was there? I thought in some panic. Have they caught and tortured poor mad Barris?

“Mr Dickens understands that such social evil has to end,” Dickenson continued.

“Social evil?”

“The poverty, sir,” said Dickenson with some heat. “The social injustice. The children forced onto the streets with no parents. The mothers who have become… women of the street… out of sheer desperation. Those ill children and women who will never receive treatment, the men who will never find work in a system that…”

“Oh, spare me this communistic talk,” I said. Water dripped from my beard onto my desk top, but the aim of the pistol did not waver. “Dickens has been a reformer for most of his life, but he is no revolutionary.”

“You are wrong, sir,” Dickenson said very softly. “He works with our Master precisely because of the revolution our Master will bring first to London and then to the rest of the world where children are left to starve. Mr Dickens will help our Master bring a New Order into being—one in which the colour of one’s skin or the amount of money one has will never stand in the way of justice.”

Again, I was forced to laugh and again my laughter was sincere. Four years earlier, in autumn of 1865, a mob of Jamaican blacks had attacked the Court House in Morant Bay. Our governor there, Eyre, had overseen 439 of those blacks being shot or hanged and another 600 flogged. Some of our more deluded liberals had opposed Governor Eyre’s behaviour, but Dickens had told me that he’d wished the retaliation and punishment could have gone further. “I am totally opposed,” he’d said at the time, “with that platform-sympathy with the black—or the Native or the Devil—and believe it is morally and totally wrong to deal with Hottentots as if they were identical with men in clean shirts at Camberwell.…”