Dan Simmons - Drood

Ellen Ternan arrived early in the afternoon, about the time Katey returned.

Earlier that spring, on a visit during a brief layover between his readings, Dickens had shown me his newly constructed conservatory, which opened from the dining room. He showed me how it allowed sunlight and moonlight into what had been rather dark rooms and—seemingly most important to him when he was showing it off with all the delight of a boy sharing a new toy with a friend—how it now would fill the house with the mixed scent of his favourite flowers there. The ubiquitous scarlet geraniums (the same flower he had worn in his lapel during readings whenever he could) had no real scent from the flower, of course, but the leaves and stems gave off an earthy, musky scent, as did the stalks of the blue lobelias. This ninth day of June was lovely and mild, and all the windows in Gad’s Hill Place were open wide, as if offering escape to the soul still caged in the failed body on the sofa, there where the dining room opened onto the green plants and crimson flowers of the conservatory.

But it was the scent of syringa that was heaviest in the air that day. Dickens would almost certainly have commented on the smell if he had been conscious and going about his business of killing Edwin Drood. As it was, his son Charley—who spent most of the day sitting with his sister Kate outside on the steps, where the syringa-scent was that much stronger—later could never bear having that flower anywhere near him.

As if he were deeply inhaling that scent which his son would hate for the rest of his life, Dickens’s breathing grew louder and less regular as the afternoon faded into early evening. Across the highway—where traffic passed in ignorance of the drama playing out in the fine and quiet home—the shadows of the twin cedars fell across the Swiss chalet in which no pages had been written that day. (Nor ever would be again.)

Inside the main house, no one, it seems, was scandalised when Ellen Ternan took and held the unconscious man’s hand. At about six PM, Dickens’s breathing grew fainter. Embarrassingly—at least it would have been for me had I been there—the unconscious Inimitable began to make sobbing noises. His eyes remained closed and he returned no pressure to Ellen’s hopeful, hopeless hand, but at about ten minutes after six, a single tear welled from his right eye and trickled down his cheek.

And then he was gone.

Charles Dickens was dead.

My friend and foe and competitor and collaborator, my mentor and my monster, had lived precisely four months and two days past his fifty-eighth birthday.

It was, of course, almost to the hour, the fifth anniversary of the railway accident at Staplehurst and his first meeting with Drood.

Those who knew me at the time commented to one another later that I reacted rather coolly to Dickens’s death.

For instance, in spite of the public knowledge of the estrangement between Dickens and myself, I had recently suggested to my publisher William Tindell that Man and Wife might be advertised by inserting a slip of coloured paper into the July number of Edwin Drood then being serialised. I had added in a postscript to Tindell— “Dickens’s circulation is large and influential.… If private influence is wanted here I can exert it.”

Tindell had replied on June 7, the day before Dickens collapsed, that he was not in favour of the idea.

On 9 June, I wrote him (and mailed it on 10 June)—

You are quite right. Besides, since you wrote, he is gone. I finished ‘Man and Wife’ yesterday—fell asleep from sheer fatigue—and was awakened to hear the news of Dickens’s death.

The advertising at the Stations is an excellent idea.

On another occasion, my brother showed me a graphite sketch done by John Everett Millais on June tenth. As was the tradition in our era when Great Men passed (as I surmise it still may be in your era, Dear Reader), the family had rushed in an artist (Millais) and a sculptor (Thomas Woolner) to record Dickens’s face as the corpse lay there. Both Millais’s drawing that Charley was showing me and the death mask done by Woolner (according to my brother) showed a visage made younger by the slow fading of the deep lines and wrinkles that care and pain had brought. In Millais’s drawing, the inevitable large bandage or towel is tied under Dickens’s chin so that the jaw will not sag open.

“Does he not look calm and dignified?” said Charley. “Does he not look merely asleep—as during one of his short naps—and ready to wake and spring up with his characteristic bound and begin writing again?”

“He looks dead,” I said. “As dead as a post.”

AS I HAD PREDICTED, a national—nay, a near global— hue and cry for Dickens to be buried in Westminster Abbey began before rigor mortis had relaxed its grip.

The London Times, long an enemy of Dickens’s and an opponent to every political and reform suggestion the Inimitable had ever made in public (not to mention a publication that had condescendingly dismissed almost all of his more recent novels), cried out in its bannered editorial—

Statesmen, men of science, philanthropists, the acknowledged benefactors of their race, might pass away, and yet not leave the void which will be caused by the death of Dickens.… Indeed, such a position is attained by not even one man in an age. It needs an extraordinary combination of intellectual and moral qualities… before the world will consent to enthrone a man as their unassailable and enduring favourite. This is the position which Mr Dickens has occupied with the English and also with the American public for a third of a century… Westminster Abbey is the peculiar resting place of English literary genius; and among those whose sacred dust lies there, or whose names are recorded on the walls, very few are more worthy than Charles Dickens of such a home. Fewer still, we believe, will be regarded with more honour as time passes, and his greatness grows upon us.

How I moaned at reading this! And how Charles Dickens would have roared with laughter if he could have read his old newspaper enemy grovelling so in its editorial hypocrisy.

The Dean of Westminster, far from being deaf to such outcries, sent word to the Dickens family that he, the Dean, was “prepared to receive any communication from the family respecting the burial.”

But Georgina, Katey, Charley, and the rest of the family (Harry had rushed home from Cambridge too late to see his father alive) had already been informed that the little graveyard at the foot of Westminster Castle was overcrowded and thus closed to further burials. Dickens had, upon occasion, expressed the thought that he might like to be buried at the churches of Cobham or Shorne, but it turned out that these graveyards were also closed to future interments. So after the offer came from the Dean and Chapter of Rochester to lay Dickens’s remains to rest inside the Cathedral itself—a grave had already been prepared in St Mary’s Chapel there—the Inimitable’s family had tentatively accepted when the note from Dean Stanley of Westminster arrived.

Oh, Dear Reader, how I adored the irony of the idea of Dickens’s corpse being encrypted for all Eternity mere yards from where I had planned to slide his skull and bones into the rubble-strewn wall of the Rochester crypt. I still had the copy of the crypts’ key that Dradles had made for me! I still had the short pry bar that Dradles had given to me (or sold to me for £300 and a lifetime annuity of £100 might be a more accurate way of thinking about it) with which I was to slide back the stone into the wall.

How wonderful! How totally delicious! I read all this in my morning letter from Charley and wept over my breakfast.