Dan Simmons - Drood

And in these first chapters, Fields and I heard that Dickens had made his Drood—the boy-man Edwin Drood—a young engineer who is going off to change Egypt. And he will be, says some silly woman at the orphanage where Rosa lives (why, oh why must Dickens’s young virgins always be orphans!), buried in the Pyramids.

“But don’t she hate Arabs, and Turks, and Fellahs, and people?” asks Rosa, speaking of the fictional perfect mate for “Eddy” Drood.

“ ‘Certainly not.’ Very firmly.

‘At least she must hate the Pyramids? Come, Eddy.’

‘Why should she be such a little—tall, I mean—goose as to hate the Pyramids, Rosa?’

‘Ah! You should hear Miss Twinkleton,’ often nodding her head and much enjoying the Lumps, ‘bore about them, and then you wouldn’t ask. Tiresome old burying-grounds! Isises and Ibises, and Cheopses, and Pharaohses; who cares about them? And then there was Belzoni, or somebody, dragged out by the legs, half-choked with bats and dust. All the girls say: Serve him right, and hope it hurt him, and wish he had been quite choked.’ ”

And I could see that Dickens was headed towards a continued and almost certainly elaborated comparison of the dust of the crypts and graves in Cloisterham—which is to say Rochester and its very real cathedral—with the real explorers of Egyptian tombs such as Belzoni, “half-choked with bats and dust.”

His third chapter—which is as far as he read to us that day—ended with his coquettish (but still uninterested, in Edwin at least) Rosa saying to this “Drood”—

“ ‘Now say, what do you see?’

‘See, Rosa?’

‘Why, I thought you Egyptian boys could look into a hand and see all sorts of phantoms. Can’t you see a happy Future?’

For certain, neither of them sees a happy Present, as the gate opens and closes, and one goes in, and the other goes away.”

It was as if Dickens were me writing about what I had seen of Ellen Ternan and him at Peckham Station.

When Dickens set down the last page of his short manuscript—his reading had been quiet, professional, cool, as opposed to the overheated acting of his recent reading tours and especially that of his Murder—James Fields burst into applause. The American looked to be close to weeping. I sat in silence and stared.

“Capital, Charles! Absolutely capital! A wonderful beginning! A marvellous, provocative, intriguing, and beguiling beginning! Your skills have never been more on display.”

“Thank you, my dear James,” Dickens said softly.

“But the title! You’ve not told us. What do you intend to call this wonderful new book?”

“Its title shall be The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ” said Dickens, peering over his reading spectacles at me.

Fields applauded his approval and did not notice my sudden sharp intake of breath. But I am certain that Charles Dickens did.

FIELDS HAD GONE upstairs to change for dinner when I followed Dickens back to his study and said, “We need to talk.”

“Do we?” said the Inimitable as he slipped the fifty or so manuscript pages into a leather portfolio and locked the portfolio into one of his desk drawers. “Very well, let us step outside away from the press and eager ears of family, friends, children, servants, and dogs.”

It had been a warm October and it was a warm early evening as Dickens led me to his chalet. Usually by this time of the year the chalet was sealed for the coming wet winter, but not this year. Yellow and red leaves skittered across the lawn and were captured by bushes or the bloomless red geraniums planted along the drive as Dickens led me not down into the tunnel but straight across the highway. There was no traffic this Sunday afternoon, but I could see rows of high-spirited and well-bred horses tied or being tended outside the Falstaff Inn. A fox group had come by for refreshment after the hunt.

Upstairs on the first floor of his chalet, Dickens waved me to the spare Windsor chair and then sprawled in his own. I could see by the neatly arranged boxes of blue and cream paper, pens, ink pots, and his small statues of fencing frogs that Dickens had been writing out here recently.

“Well, my dear Wilkie, what do you feel we need to talk about?”

“You know very well, my dear Dickens.”

He smiled, took his spectacles out of a case, and set them on his nose, as if he were going to read some more. “Let us assume I do not know and proceed from there. Is it that you did not like the beginnings of my new book? I have written more, you know. Perhaps another chapter or two and your interest would have been engaged.”

“This is dangerous stuff, Charles.”

“Oh?” His surprise did not appear fully feigned. “What is dangerous? Writing a tale of mystery? I told you some months ago that I was sufficiently intrigued by the elements of your Moonstone —the opium addiction, the mesmerism, the Oriental villains, the central mystery of theft—that I might try my own hand at such a novel. So now I am. Or at least I have made a start.”

“You’re using Drood’s name, ” I said so softly that it came out as an urgent whisper. I could hear male voices rising in a drinking song from the inn nearby.

“My dear Wilkie,” sighed Dickens. “Would you not agree that it’s time that we—or you—got over this fear of all things Droodish?”

What could I say to that? For a moment I was speechless. I had never told Dickens about Hatchery’s death—the grey glistening cords in the crypt. Or about my night at Drood’s Temple. Or of Inspector Field’s invasion of Undertown and what I now understood of its dire consequences to Field and his men. Or of Reginald Barris—filthy, bearded, living in rags and on scraps, hiding in fear—or of the Overtown temple-hideouts Barris had shown me just four months earlier…

“If I had time this evening,” said Dickens, as if musing to himself, “I would cure you of that obsession. Release you from it.”

I got to my feet and began pacing impatiently back and forth in the small room. “You’ll release yourself from your life if you publish this book, Charles. You once told me that Drood had requested you write a biography of him… but this is a parody .”

“Not in the least,” laughed Dickens. “It shall be a very serious novel which explores the layers and levels and contradictions of the criminal’s mind—in this case, the mind of a murderer, but also an opium addict and both master and victim of mesmerism.”

“How can one be both a master and victim of mesermism, Charles?”

“Be so kind as to read my book when it is finished, my dear Wilkie, and you shall see. Much will be revealed… and not only of the mystery, but perhaps of some of your own dilemma.”

I ignored that, since it made no sense. “Charles,” I said earnestly, leaning on his table and looking down at him as he sat, “do you really believe that smoking opium causes one to dream of flashing scimitars, scores of dancing girls, and—what was it? — ‘countless elephants careering in various gorgeous colours’?”

“ ‘… white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in numbers and attendants,’ ” corrected Dickens.

“Very well,” I said and stepped back and removed my spectacles to clean them with my handkerchief. “But do you really believe that any number of caparisoned or careering elephants and flashing scimitars are the stuff of an actual opium dream?”

“I have taken opium, you know,” Dickens said quietly. He seemed almost amused.

I confess to having rolled my eyes at this news. “So Frank Beard told me, Charles. A tiny bit of laudanum, and that just a few times, when you could not sleep on one of your last reading tours.”