Dan Simmons - Drood

But, alas, it was not to be. It was too perfect to be true.

With Dickens’s corpse in the house beginning to moulder in the June heat, Forster (how he must have loved this primacy, at long last!) and Charley Dickens came up to London to confer with the Dean of Westminster.

They informed the Dean that Dickens’s will bound them, in no uncertain terms, to an absolutely private and unannounced funeral with no possibility whatsoever of any public homage. Dean Stanley agreed that the great man’s wishes should be obeyed to the letter—but allowed that the “desire of the nation” should also be obeyed.

Thus they went ahead with burying Charles Dickens at Westminster Abbey.

To add insult to injury in all this—as was almost always the case in my two decades of dealings with Dickens, Dear Reader—I had my allocated role in this unceremonious ceremony. On 14 June, I went to Charing Cross to meet the special train from Gad’s Hill and to “accept” the coffin bearing the mortal remains of Charles Dickens. The coffin was removed, as per the dead man’s instructions, to a bare hearse devoid of funeral trappings (pulled by horses devoid of black feathers). It might have been a delivery waggon for all the fuss this vehicle and its team showed.

Again in keeping with Dickens’s commands, only three coaches were permitted to follow this hearse to the Abbey.

In the first coach were the four Dickens children remaining in England—Charley, Harry, Mary, and Katey.

In the second coach were Georgina, Dickens’s (mostly-ignored-in-life) sister Letitia, his son Charley’s wife, and John Forster (who undoubtedly was wishing that he could be in the first coach, if not in the actual coffin alongside his master).

In the third coach rode Dickens’s solicitor, Frederic Ouvry, his ever-loyal (if not always discreet) physician Frank Beard, my brother, Charles, and me.

The bell of St Stephen’s was tolling half-past nine in the morning as our small procession reached the entry to the Dean’s Yard. No word of this burial had got out—a small triumph there of the Inimitable’s will over the habits of the press—and we saw almost no one lining the streets on the way. The public was banned from the Abbey that day.

As our carriages rolled into the courtyard, all the great bells began tolling. With help from younger men, we old friends carried the coffin through the western cloister door along the Nave and into the South Transept to the Poets’ Corner.

Oh, Dear Reader, if my fellow pallbearers and mourners could have read my thoughts as we set that simple oak box down in the Poets’ Corner. I have to wonder if such obscenities and imaginative curses had ever been thought in the Abbey of Westminster Cathedral, although some of the poets interred there certainly would have been up to the task had their brains been functioning rather than rotting to dust.

A few words were said. I do not recall who said them or what they were. There were no singers, no choir, but an unseen organist played the Dead March as the others turned away and filed out. I was the last to leave and I stood there alone for some time. The bass notes from the huge organ vibrated the very bones in my burly flesh, and it amused me to realise that Dickens’s bones were similarly vibrating inside his box.

I know you would have preferred to have those bones dropped unmarked into the wall of Dradles’s favourite old ’un’s crypt in Rochester, I thought to my friend and enemy as I looked down at his simple coffin. The good English oak was adorned only with the words CHARLES DICKENS.

This is still too much, I thought when I finally turned to leave and join the others outside in the sunlight. Far too much. And it is only the beginning.

It was very cool and properly dim under the high stone vaultings of the Abbey. Outside, the bright sunlight seemed cruel in comparison.

Friends were allowed to visit the still-open grave, and later that day, after many medicinal applications of laudanum and some of morphia, I returned with Percy Fitzgerald. By this time there was a wreath of roses on the flagstones at the foot of Dickens’s coffin and a huge bank of shockingly green ferns at his head.

In Punch, a few days later, the cloying elegy bellowed—

He sleeps as he should sleep—among the great

In the old Abbey; sleeps amid the few

Of England’s famous thousands whose high state

Is to lie with her monarchs—monarchs too.

And, I thought again as Percy and I came out into the evening shadows and June garden scents, it is only the beginning.

Dean Stanley had given permission for the grave to be left open for a few days. Even that first day, the afternoon papers brayed the news. They were on the story the way dear old Sultan used to leap upon any man in uniform—worrying, tearing, chewing, and worrying it some more.

By the time Percy and I left when the Abbey closed at a few minutes after six o’clock—five days almost to the minute from when Dickens had sobbed and wept a single tear and finally condescended to quit breathing—there were a thousand people who had not yet received admittance, silently and solemnly queued up.

For two more days the grave remained open and for two more days the procession too long and endless for anyone to find its tail kept filing past. Tears and flowers were dropped into the grave by the thousands. Even after the grave was finally closed and a great block of stone bearing Dickens’s name was slid into place above it—for months after this theoretical closure—the mourners kept coming, the flowers kept appearing, the tears kept falling. His headstone soon became invisible under a huge mound of fragrant, colourful blossoms and it would stay that way for years.

And it is only the beginning.

When Percy—who was blubbering as fiercely as had Dickens’s tiny granddaughter Mekitty when she had seen her “Wenerables” cry and speak in strange voices on stage the previous spring—and I left that evening of 14 June, I excused myself, found an empty and private area behind high hedges in the surrounding gardens, and bit into my knuckles until blood flowed in order to stop the scream rising in me.

And that was only the beginning.

LATE THAT NIGHT of 14 June I paced back and forth in my empty house.

George and Besse had returned from their twenty-four-hour vacation on 9 June and I had promptly fired them, sending them packing that evening. I gave neither reason for terminating their employment nor any letters of recommendation. I had not yet gotten around to hiring their replacements. Carrie would be stopping by the next day—a Wednesday, one week from the day that Dickens and I had agreed to meet after dusk outside the Falstaff Inn—but that would be a brief interruption before she went off for her monthly visit to her mother in Joseph Clow’s home.

In the meantime, I had the huge house to myself. The only sounds coming through the windows flung high for spring were the occasional rumbles of late-night traffic going by and the rustle of foliage as gentle breezes stirred the branches. Beneath that, there came the occasional scrape and scratch—like dry twigs or thorns brushing against thick wood—of whatever remained of poor little Agnes, clawing at the boarded-up doorway to the servants’ stairs.

On the first two days after I’d heard of Dickens’s death, the rheumatical gout pain had diminished astonishingly. Even more astonishing—and exciting to me—was the absence of any movement in my skull. I became certain that when Dickenson, Barris-Field, and Drood himself had somehow rendered me unconscious amidst the scarlet geraniums in Dickens’s flower bed six days ago this night, Drood had removed the scarab from my brain.