Dan Simmons - Drood

“I promise to ask you about that someday, Charles. You were saying about the cherries?”

The shade of the trees was welcome. I walked on. Dickens hobbled on.

“Cherries? Oh, yes… When I was a rather difficult London youth so long ago, I found myself walking down the Strand one day behind a workingman carrying a rather homely big-headed child on his shoulders. I presumed the boy was the workingman’s son. I had used almost the last of my pence to purchase this rather large bag of ripe cherries, you see…”

“Ah,” I said, wondering if Dickens might have had a sunstroke. Or a real stroke.

“Yes, cherries, my dear Wilkie. But the delightful thing was, you see, that the child looked back at me in a certain way… a certain, singular way… and I began popping cherries into the boy’s mouth, one after the other, and the big-headed child would spit out the pits most silently. His father never heard nor turned. He never knew. I believe I fed that big-headed boy all of my cherries—every single last one. And then the workingman with the boy on his shoulders turned left at a corner and I continued on straight and the father was never the wiser, but I was the poorer—at least for cherries—and the big-headed boy was the fatter and happier.”

“Fascinating, Charles,” I said.

Dickens tried hobbling more quickly, but his foot could bear no weight at all now. He had to rest all of his weight on his cane at each painful step. He glanced at me. “Sometimes, my dear Wilkie, I feel that my entire career as a writer has been nothing more than an extension of those minutes popping cherries into the mouth of that big-headed boy on his father’s shoulders. Does that make sense to you?”

“Of course, Charles.”

“You promise that you will allow me to mesmerise you and release you from my cruelly inflicted magnetic suggestions?” he said suddenly, sharply. “On Wednesday night, eight June? I have your word on that?”

“My word of honour, Charles.”

By the time we reached the stream with its small, arched bridge, I was whistling the tune I remembered from my dream.

Ifinished my novel Man and Wife early in the afternoon of Wednesday, 8 June, 1870.

I told George and Besse—who would not, in any case, continue in my employ much longer—that I needed the house quiet so I could sleep and sent them away for a day to visit whomever they chose.

Carrie was gone for the week, travelling with the Wards.

I sent a note to my editor at Cassell’s Magazine and another to my soon-to-be book publisher, F. S. Ellis, reporting that the manuscript was finished.

I sent a note to Dickens telling him that I had finished my book and reminding him of our appointment the next day, on the afternoon of 9 June. We did not have an appointment for 9 June, of course—our appointment was for that night of 8 June—but I was confident that the note would not arrive until the next morning, so it would serve as what those of us trained in the law call by its Latin name—an “alibi.” I also sent friendly notes to the Lehmanns, the Beards, and others, crowing that I had finished Man and Wife and—after a long night of welcomed and well-earned sleep—planned to celebrate the completion by a visit to Gad’s Hill Place the next afternoon, on the ninth.

Late that afternoon, dressed in black travelling clothes with a cape and broad hood thrown back, I took a rented carriage down to Gad’s Hill and parked under the oldest trees next to the Falstaff Inn as the sun set and the darkness sent out fingers from the forest behind that establishment.

I had not succeeded in finding a Hindoo sailor ready to leave England (never to return) in ten days. Nor a German or American or even English sailor ready to be my coachman. Nor had I found the black coach of my opium- and morphia-assisted imaginings. So I drove myself that night—I had little experience in handling coaches or carriages and crept along to Gad’s Hill far more slowly than my careering fantasy-Hindoo driver would have—and the rented vehicle I was driving was a tiny open carriage hardly larger than the pony cart in which Dickens used to fetch me.

But I set the small bullseye lantern under the single seat behind me and had Hatchery’s pistol—all four cartridges unfired and nestled in place—in my jacket pocket next to the burlap sack for metal objects, just as I had planned. In truth, this arrangement wherein I drove myself made much more sense: no driver, Hindoo or otherwise, could ever be a blackmail threat this way.

The evening also was not the perfect June night I had envisioned.

It rained hard during the tiring drive out and between the showers and the splashes onto the absurdly low box this miniature carriage offered, all of me was soaked through by the time I arrived at the Falstaff Inn just after sunset. And the sunset itself was more of a grey, smudged, watery afterthought to the day than the beautiful scene I had painted in my mind.

I tucked the single (ancient) horse and wobbly carriage as far back under the trees to the side of the inn as I could, but the rain showers still soaked me when they blew in, and after they departed, the trees continued to drip on me. The footwell in the tiny carriage space was actually filling up with puddles.

And Dickens did not come.

We had set the rendezvous time for thirty minutes after sunset (and he could be forgiven for not noticing the exact time of that cloudy anticlimax of a sunset), but soon it was an hour after sunset and still no sign of Dickens.

Perhaps, I thought, he could not see my dark carriage and black, dripping horse and black, soaked self there in the darkness under the trees. I considered lighting one of the lamps on the side of the carriage.

There were no lamps on the side or back of this cheap carriage. I considered lighting the bullseye lantern and setting it on the box next to me. Dickens might be able to see me from the house or his front yard then, I realised, but so would everyone coming or going from the Falstaff Inn or even those just passing by on the highway.

I considered going into the inn, ordering a hot buttered rum, and sending a boy over to Gad’s Hill Place to let Dickens know I was waiting.

Don’t be an idiot, whispered the trained-lawyer as well as the mystery-book-writer parts of my brain. And there rose again the odd word but necessary concept— alibi.

Ninety minutes after sunset and still no sign of Charles Dickens, perhaps the most punctual fifty-eight-year-old man in all of England. It was approaching ten PM. If we did not start out soon for Rochester, the entire trip might be lost.

I secured the dozing horse to a branch, made sure the pitiful example of a carriage’s brake was set, and I moved through the edge of the trees towards Dickens’s Swiss chalet. Every time the chilly night wind came up, the fir and deciduous branches dumped more Niagaras of water on me.

I’d seen at least three carriages turn into Dickens’s driveway in the past ninety minutes and two were still visible there. Was it possible that Dickens had forgotten—or simply decided to ignore—our mystery-trip appointment? (For a moment I had the chilled certainty that my false note reminding him of our appointment tomorrow had somehow arrived here at Gad’s Hill this afternoon, but then I remembered that I had deliberately posted it late in the day. No mail courier in the history of England would have delivered the message so quickly; in truth, it would be a stroke of unusual competence if Gad’s Hill Place saw the delivery of that reminder by late Friday—and this was Wednesday night).

I touched the pistol in my outer pocket and decided to approach the house through the tunnel.