Dan Simmons - Drood

“Still, my dear Wilkie, laudanum is laudanum. Opium is opium.”

“How many minims did you use?” I asked as I still paced back and forth, from open window to open window. Perhaps it was my own increased laudanum use that morning that kept me so excitable.

“Minims?” said Dickens.

“Drops of the opiate distillate in your wine,” I said. “How many drops?”

“Oh, I have no idea. Dolby handled the ministrations the few evenings I tried that medicinal approach. I would say two.”

“Two minims… two drops?” I repeated.

“Yes.”

I said nothing for a minute. That very day, as a guest at Gad’s Hill Place and having brought only a flask and a small refill jug in my baggage for the long weekend, I had drunk at least six hundred minims and possibly twice that. Then I said, “But you cannot convince me—or anyone who has actually researched the drug as I have, my dear Charles—that you dreamt of elephants and scimitars and golden domes.”

Dickens laughed. “My dear Wilkie, just as you said you… ‘tested,’ I believe your word was… your Moonstone character Franklin Blake’s ability to enter his fiancée’s bedroom while she was sleeping…”

“Sitting room next to her bedroom,” I corrected. “My editor insisted on it for propriety’s sake.”

“Ah, yes,” said Dickens with a smile. He had been that editor, of course. “Enter into his fiancée’s bedroom’s sitting room to steal a diamond, all while he was asleep, merely under the influence of laudanum he hadn’t known he’d taken…”

“You’ve expressed your doubts as to the realism of that more than once,” I said sourly. “Even though I’ve told you that I did experiment with similar situations under the influence of the drug.”

“Exactly my point, my dear Wilkie. You stretched the point to serve your plot. And so my caparisoned pachyderms and flashing scimitars—to serve the greater story.”

“This is not the point, Charles.”

“What is, then?” Dickens looked sincerely curious. He also looked sincerely exhausted. Those days, when the Inimitable wasn’t reading to others or at play, he tended to look like the old man he had suddenly become.

“The point is that Drood will kill you if you publish this book,” I said. “You told me yourself that he wants a biography, not a sensationalist novel filled with opium, mesmerism, all things Egyptian, and a weak character named Drood…”

“Weak but important to the story,” interrupted Dickens.

I could only shake my head. “You won’t heed my warning. Perhaps if you had seen the face of poor Inspector Field the morning after he was murdered…”

“Murdered?” said Dickens, suddenly sitting up straight. He removed his spectacles and blinked. “Who said that Charles Frederick Field was murdered? You know very well that the Times said he had died in his sleep. And what is this talk of having seen his face? You certainly could not have, my dear Wilkie. I remember you were in bed ill for weeks at the time and didn’t even know that poor Field had died until I told you many months later.”

I hesitated, considering whether to tell Dickens then about Reginald Barris’s explanation of Inspector Field’s true demise. But then I would have to explain Barris and why and where I saw him and all about the Overtown temples.…

While I was hesitating, Dickens sighed and said, “Your belief in Drood is enjoyable in its own dark way, Wilkie, but perhaps it is time it drew to a close. Perhaps it was a mistake for it ever to have begun.”

“Belief in Drood?” I snapped. “Must I remind you, my dear Dickens, that it was your story of your meeting with him at Staplehurst and your later stories of meeting with the monster in Undertown that got me involved in all this in the first place? It’s a little late, I would say, for you to tell me to cease believing in him, as if he were the ghost of Marley or Christmas Yet to Come.”

I thought Dickens would laugh at this last broadside, but he only looked sadder and more weary than before and said, as if to himself, “Perhaps it is too late, my dear Wilkie. Or perhaps not. But it is definitely too late this particular Sunday. I must go in and prepare to enjoy one of the last meals I may ever share with dear James and Annie.…”

His voice had become so soft and sad by the end of that sentence that I had to strain to hear the words over the sound of the fox hunters riding away from the Falstaff Inn.

“We shall speak of this another time,” said Dickens as he rose. I noticed that his left leg seemed unable to support his weight for a moment and that he steadied himself with his right hand on the table, getting his balance and teetering there a moment with his left hand and leg flailing uselessly, like a toddling infant taking his first steps, before he smiled again—ruefully this time, I thought—and hobbled out the door and down the stairs as we headed back to the main house.

“We shall speak of this another time,” he said again.

And we did, Dear Reader. But too late, as you will see, to avoid the tragedies to come.

Through the final autumn, winter, and spring of Charles Dickens’s life, he continued writing his novel and I continued writing mine.

Dickens—being Dickens—insisted, of course, on the suicidal folly of using Drood’s name in the title of his new work, even though I heard through Wills, Forster, and that ponce-twit Percy Fitzgerald (who had all but taken my place in the offices of All the Year Round and in Dickens’s confidences) that the Inimitable’s earlier ideas for titles had included The Loss of James Wakefield and Dead? Or Alive? (He had obviously never seriously considered using Edmond Dickenson’s name, as he’d mentioned to me the previous spring—that had been just to bait me.)

I had begun my book months before Dickens had started his, and thus had sold and was to start serialising Man and Wife in Cassell’s Magazine in January of 1870 and had also sold serial rights to my old stalwart, Harper’s Magazine, in New York and—to avoid piracy—had arranged for Harper’s to publish their instalments a fortnight earlier than did Cassell’s . Dickens’s first instalment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood , serialised in green wrappers from Chapman and Hall, was not to see print until April. Meant for a dozen monthly instalments, it would end after six.

My brother, Charley, was hired to be the artist for this ill-fated novel, and although it would turn out that he would be too ill to finish his labours, Dickens’s impulse must have been to give his son-in-law (and thus his daughter) some income. I could also imagine Dickens making the commission simply to give Charley something to do other than lie around his home or Gad’s Hill Place, unemployed and in pain. It had come to the point where even the sight of my brother seemed to incense Charles Dickens.

By continuing to work on the instalments, Dickens was breaking his previously inviolable rule—i.e., never to be working on a novel at the same time he was doing public readings or preparing for readings—since the time for the twelve “farewell readings” he had begged and bullied for was to begin in January.

For my own part, the instalments of Man and Wife were flowing easily, aided substantially by the now-monthly letters from Caroline in which she documented the torrent of abuse that her plumber was pouring down upon her. A jealous sort, Joseph Clow would lock her in the coal cellar when he was gone for any extended periods. A drunkard, he would kick and beat her after hours of drinking. A braggart, he would have his friends over for bouts of drinking and gambling and say crude and vulgar things about Caroline and laugh with the other louts as his bride blushed and attempted to flee to her room. (But Clow had taken the door off their tiny bedroom precisely so she could not hide in there.) A mother’s-boy, he allowed Caroline’s mother-in-law to insult her incessantly and would cuff my former lover if she cast so much as a defiant glance at the old woman.