Dan Simmons - Drood

Then, tingling and hurting all over as a limb does after falling asleep unbeknownst to its owner, I was able to take that first clumsy step down. I had to rely on my walking stick to keep my balance.

“Are you coming, Wilkie?” came Dickens’s accursedly excited voice up the black stairwell.

“Yes!” I called down, adding a silent God d— n your eyes . “I’m coming, Dickens.”

Imust pause in my narrative here for a moment, Dear Reader, to explain how and why I had chosen to follow Charles Dickens into absurd and dangerous situations before this. There was the time, for instance, when I followed him up Mount Vesuvius. And the more serious incident in Cumberland, where he almost got me killed on Carrick Fell.

Vesuvius was just one of the minor adventures of the 1853 trip around Europe which Dickens and I shared with Augustus Egg. Strictly speaking, there were only two bachelors in that three-man travelling party, and both were younger than the Inimitable, but Dickens certainly acted as carefree and boyish as any young bachelor with the majority of his life and career ahead of him as we gambolled about Europe that autumn and winter. Visiting most of Dickens’s old haunts on the Continent, we eventually headed for Lausanne, where the author’s eccentric old friend Reverend Chauncey Hare Town-shend lectured us on ghosts, jewelry, and—one of Dickens’s favourite topics—mesmerism, and then we were off to Chamonix and climbing the Mer de Glace, where we looked down into glacial crevasses a thousand feet deep. In Naples, which I had hoped would be a respite from all the adventure, Dickens immediately insisted that we climb Vesuvius.

He was disappointed, deeply disappointed I would say, that there was no fire belching and blazing from the volcano. Evidently a major eruption in 1850 had taken some of the energy out of the mountain; there was much smoke while we were there, but no flames. To say that Dickens was crestfallen would be an understatement. Nonetheless, Dickens quickly put a climbing party together, including the archaeologist and diplomat Austen Henry Layard, and we promptly threw ourselves at the smoking mountain.

Eight years before our climb, on the night of 21 January, 1845, Dickens had found all the Vesuvian fire and sulphur that someone as indifferent to danger as he might ask for.

It was the Inimitable’s first trip to Naples and the volcano was very active indeed. With his wife, Catherine, and sister-in-law Georgina in tow, Dickens set off with six saddle horses, an armed soldier for a guard, and—because the weather was harsh and the volcano very treacherous then—no fewer than twenty-two guides. They began their ascent around four PM with the women being carried in litters while Dickens and the guides led the way. The walking stick that the author used that evening was taller and thicker than the bird-beaked cane he was clacking against cobblestones this night in the slums of Shadwell. I am sure that his pace that first time on Vesuvius was no slower than it was tonight on such flat ground at sea level. Charles Dickens’s response to an intimidating slope—as I have witnessed to my chagrin and fatigue many times—was to double his already too-quick pace.

Near the top of the cinder cone that is Vesuvius’s summit, no one would go on save for Dickens and a single guide. The mountain was in eruption. Flames shot hundreds of feet into the sky above them and sulphur, cinders, and smoke belched from every crevice in the snowfields and rockfields. The author’s friend Roche, who had climbed to within a few hundred feet of the crater but who could not go farther towards the fiery maelstrom, screamed that Dickens and his guide would be killed if they ventured closer.

Dickens insisted on climbing right to the brink of this crater, on the windy and most dangerous side—the fumes alone have been known to kill people miles below this level—and looking, as he wrote his friends later, “down into the crater itself… into the flaming bowels of the mountain.… It was the finest sight conceivable, more terrible than Niagara.…” The American waterfalls had been his previous exemplar of transcendence and awe in Nature on this world. Equal, he wrote “… as fire and water are.”

All the other members of the party that night, including the horrified and exhausted Catherine and Georgina (who had ridden up the mountainside), attested that Dickens came down the cinder cone “alight in half a dozen places and burnt from head to foot.” The author’s remaining rags of clothing smouldered during the long night’s descent—and the descent was also harrowing. On an endless and exposed ice slope where some of the party had to rope up for safety and guides had to chip footsteps in the ice, one guide slipped and fell screaming down into the darkness, followed a minute later by one of the Englishmen who had joined the party. Dickens and the others descended through the night without learning the fates of these men. The writer later told me that the Englishman had survived; he never learned the status of the guide.

Twelve years before this Drood-quest in London, Dickens had dragged Egg and me up Vesuvius, but, thank God and the volcano’s relative quiet, it was a far less taxing and dangerous outing. Dickens and Layard pressed ahead at high speed, which allowed Egg and me to rest, discreetly, whenever we felt the need. In truth, it was beautiful as we watched the sun setting towards Sorrento and Capri from our vantage point near the mouth of the crater, the sphere of the sun growing huge and blood red through the pall of smoke and vapour from Vesuvius. We descended easily by torchlight with a new moon rising above us and all of us singing English and Italian songs.

This was as to nothing compared to our near-fatal—to me—adventure on Carrick Fell shortly after our last performance of The Frozen Deep in Manchester in 1857.

Dickens was filled then, as he was this night in the Shadwell slums, with a terrible and unquenchable energy, arising, it seemed, from a soul-deep dissatisfaction. He told me some weeks after the play closed that he was going mad, that—if I remember his words correctly—“the scaling of all the mountains in Switzerland, or the doing of any wild thing until I dropped, would be but a slight relief.” In a note he sent me one morning after we had been dining, drinking, and discussing things both solemnly and with wild humour the night before, Dickens said, “I want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable—indescribable—my misery amazing.” And I could tell that besides being amazing, his misery was very real and very deep. I thought at the time that it had only to do with his failing marriage to Catherine; I know now that it had even more to do with his new love for the eighteen-year-old child-woman named Ellen Ternan.

In 1857, Dickens announced to me suddenly that we were leaving immediately for Cumberland to get inspiration for some jointly penned articles about the North of England for our magazine Household Words. He was to call the piece The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices. Even as co-author—in truth primary author, I may tell you, Dear Reader—I have to say that what resulted was an unoriginal and uninspired series of travel essays. It was only later that I realised that Dickens had little interest in Cumberland, other than climbing that damned Carrick Fell, and almost no interest at all in writing travel articles.

Ellen Ternan and her sisters and mother were appearing on stage in Doncaster, and that, I know now, was the real purpose for our wild travels north.

How ironic it would have been if I had died on Carrick Fell because of Charles Dickens’s covert passion for an eighteen-year-old actress who had absolutely no awareness of his feelings for her.