Dan Simmons - Drood

I say, “There will be no funeral procession.”

“Obviously not,” says Dickens and infuriates me with another small smile. “All the more reason to grant me this one, last kindness before we part company forever.”

“To what purpose?” I ask at long last.

“You spoke of each of us solving a mystery tonight. Presumably my mystery to be solved is what—if anything—there might be after the instant of one’s death. But what is yours, Wilkie? What mystery did you wish to have solved this beautiful evening?”

I say nothing.

“Let me venture a guess,” says Dickens. “You would like to know how The Mystery of Edwin Drood was to have ended. And perhaps even learn how my Drood connects to your Drood.”

“Yes.”

He looks at his watch again. “It is only ninety minutes before midnight. I brought a flask of brandy—at your suggestion (although Frank Beard would be horrified to know this)—and I am sure you brought some refreshment for yourself. Why don’t we find a comfortable seat somewhere in this place and have one last conversation before the bells in that tower toll my appointed day?”

“You think that I will change my mind,” I say with a malicious smile.

“In truth, my dear Wilkie, I do not for a second believe that you will. Nor am I sure that I would want you to. I am very… weary. But I am not averse to a final conversation and taste of brandy in the night.”

With that Dickens turns on his heel and looks amidst the surrounding stones for some place to sit. My choice is either to follow his lead or shoot him there and drag his corpse the many yards to the waiting lime pit. I had hoped to avoid this last indignity for both of us. And, in truth, I do not mind the idea of sitting for a few minutes until this temporary light-headedness passes.

THE TWO FLAT GRAVESTONES he chooses for our chairs, separated by almost four feet of a longer, wider headstone that might be a low table, remind me of the day in this very churchyard when Dickens played waiter to Ellen Ternan, her mother, and me.

After receiving permission, Dickens removes his brandy flask from his jacket pocket and sets it on the table-stone in front of him and I do the same with my silver flask. I realise that I should have patted the Inimitable’s pockets when I first aimed my pistol at him. I know that Dickens keeps his own pistol in a drawer at Gad’s Hill Place, as well as the shotgun with which he murdered Sultan. Dickens’s apparent lack of surprise at the purpose of our “mystery outing” makes me think that he might have secreted a weapon on his person before coming out to the coach… and this might explain his otherwise inexplicable insouciance.

But it is too late now. I shall just keep a careful eye on him for the short time remaining.

We sit in silence for a while. Then the bells in the looming tower strike eleven, and my jagged nerves leap to the point that I almost accidentally pull the trigger on the pistol I am still aiming at Dickens’s heart.

He notes my reaction but says nothing as I lay the gun along my upper leg and knee, keeping it aimed at him but removing my finger from the inside of what Hatchery called, I believe, the “trigger guard.”

Dickens’s voice after the long silence makes me jump in my skin again. “That is the weapon that Detective Hatchery showed us once, is it not?”

“Yes.”

The wind rustles grasses for a moment. As if afraid of this silence, as if it is weakening my resolve, I force myself to say, “You know that Hatchery is dead?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And do you know how he died?”

“Yes,” says Dickens. “I do. Friends on the Metropolitan Police Force told me.”

We have nothing else to say on this topic. But it leads me to the questioning that is the only reason Charles Dickens remains alive this final, extra hour. “I was surprised that you used a character—obviously a detective in disguise with his huge head of false hair—named Datchery in Edwin Drood, ” I say. “Such parody of poor Hatchery, especially given the… ah… lamentable details of his death, hardly seems sensitive.”

Dickens looks at me. As my eyes have adapted to the churchyard darkness, so far from the nearest streetlamps or the windows of inhabited homes, the headstones around us—and especially the flat one of light marble lying between Dickens and me like a games table upon which we have laid our final hands in poker—seem to be reflecting the moonlight into Dickens’s face like weak imitations of the focused gaslights he had rigged for his readings.

“Not a parody,” he says. “An affectionate remembrance.”

I sip from my flask and wave that away. It is not important. “But your Drood tale is less than half done—only the four monthly instalments have seen print and your entire manuscript to date is completed to only half the length of the full book—and yet you have already murdered young Edwin Drood. Asking as one professional to another—and as one with decidedly more experience and perhaps greater expertise in writing about mysteries—how can you possibly hope to sustain interest, Charles, when you have committed the murder so early in the tale yet have only one logical choice for the murderer… the very clear villain, John Jasper?”

“Well,” says Dickens, “as one professional replying to another, we must remember that… wait!”

The pistol jerks up in my hand and I blink away distraction as I aim the muzzle at his heart some four feet away. Has someone entered the graveyard? Is he trying to distract me?

No. It appears that the Inimitable simply has been struck by a thought.

“How is it, my dear Wilkie,” continues Dickens, “that you know of Datchery’s appearance and even of poor Edwin’s murder when these scenes, those numbers even, have not yet appeared and… ahh… Wills. Somehow you got a copy of the finished work from Wills. William Henry is a dear man, a trusted friend, but he has not been the same since that accident, what with all those doors creaking and slamming in his head.”

I say nothing.

“Very well, then,” says Dickens. “You know of the murder of young Drood on Christmas Eve. You know of Crisparkle’s discovery of Edwin’s watch and tie-pin in the river, although no body is found. You know of the suspicion falling on the fiery-tempered young foreigner from Ceylon, Neville Landless, brother to the beautiful Helena Landless, and of the blood found on Landless’s stick. You know of Edwin’s engagement to Rosa having been broken off and you know of Edwin’s uncle, the opium-eater John Jasper, fainting after the murder when he first learns that there had been no engagement and that his obvious jealousy had been for naught. I currently have six of the contracted twelve instalments written. But what is your question?”

I feel the laudanum warmth in my arms and legs and I grow more impatient. The scarab in my brain is even more impatient than I. I can feel it scurry back and forth past the inside of the bridge of my nose, peering first from one eye, then from the other, as if jostling for a better view.

“John Jasper did the murder on Christmas Eve,” I say, waving the pistol just a trifle as I speak. “I can even name the murder weapon… that long black scarf you have taken pains to mention at least three times so far for little reason. Your clues are hardly subtle, Charles!”

“It was to be an overly long cravat or neck tie,” he says with another damning smile. “But I changed it to the scarf.”

“I know,” I say impatiently. “Charley told me that you emphasised that the cravat must be shown in the illustration and then told Fildes to change it to a scarf. Neck tie, scarf, it makes little difference. My question remains—how can you possibly hope to keep the readers engaged for the full second half of the book if we all know that John Jasper is to be revealed as the murderer?”