Dan Simmons - Drood

“I am just jotting down revisions to the last line or two of this year’s Christmas story,” he said with enthusiasm. “A thing called ‘Cheap Jack’ that I assure you, my dear Wilkie, will be a great hit with the readers. Very popular, is my prediction. Perhaps my best since ‘The Bells.’ The idea occurred to me in France. I shall finish in a minute and then I am yours for the afternoon and evening, my friend.”

“By all means,” I said and stepped back as Dickens returned to his table and quill, striking out with great flourishes and writing between the lines and in the margins. He reminded me of an energetic conductor in front of an attentive and obedient orchestra of words. I could almost hear the notes as his quill rose, swung, dipped, scratched, lifted, and swept down again.

I admired the view from Dickens’s “eyrie” and had to admit that it was wonderful. The chalet, standing between two tall, shading cedars that stirred now in the wind, had many windows that looked out over fields of ripened corn, forests, and more fields, and even allowed glimpses of the Thames, with the white movement of sails there. From the roof of Gad’s Hill Place across the road, I knew, one could easily see London in the distance, but from the chalet the view was more bucolic, with the distant river, a glimpse of the spire of Rochester Cathedral, and the yellowing and rustling fields of corn. Traffic was light today on the Rochester Road. Dickens had outfitted his eyrie with a bright brass telescope on a wooden tripod, and I could imagine him pondering the moon at night and the ladies in their yachts on the Thames on warm summer days. Where there were no windows, there were mirrors. I counted five mirrors. Dickens loved mirrors. Every bedroom in his Tavistock House and now at Gad’s Hill Place had always sported multiple mirrors and there were mirrors in hallways and foyers and a large one in his study. The effect up here in his chalet was to make one feel rather as if he were standing on an open platform—a child’s house in a tall tree, minus all walls—with sunlight and blue sky and foliage and yellow fields and far views reflected everywhere. The breezes that passed freely through the open windows carried the scent of foliage and flowers, of the fields beyond, of the smoke from someone burning leaves or weeds from a field nearby, and even the salt tang smell of the sea.

I could not help but think how totally opposite this world of Charles Dickens was from our night expedition to Opium Sal’s den and then the unmitigated nightmare of Undertown. All of that darkness seemed to be fading like the bad dream it had been. The daylight and clean scent of this world were real—as glowing and pulsing as it seemed through the pulse of my medicinal laudanum. I could not see how that reeking darkness of the catacombs and sewers, nor even the slums above, could co-exist with this clean reality.

“There,” cried Dickens. “Done. For now.” He blotted his last page and set it with others in a leather portfolio. He rose and took his favourite blackthorn walking stick from its place in a corner. “I’ve not had my walk today. Shall we away, my dear Wilkie?”

“By all means,” I said again, although with less conviction this time.

He surveyed me with eyes at once analytical, amused, and mocking. “I thought perhaps a quick trek past Cobham Wood and then to Chalk and Gravesend and home again.”

“Ah,” I said. That would be twelve hard miles. “Ah,” I said again and nodded. “But what about your guests? And children? Is this not the hour you usually play with them, amuse them, show the guests the stables?”

Dickens’s smile was mischievous. “Is there another invalid in the family today, my dear Wilkie?”

I knew that by “family” he meant the Collins family. It seemed he would never cease the harping on my younger brother’s presumed illness.

“A minor disposition,” I said brusquely. “The rheumatical gout which pursues me from time to time, as you know, my dear Dickens. It chooses to be a bit difficult today. A shorter romp would suit me.” A slow walk next door to the Sir John Falstaff Inn would have suited me perfectly was the message I intended to send.

“But your gout is not in your legs, is this not true, my dear Wilkie?”

“That is largely true,” I said, unwilling to tell him that this gout hurt every part of my person when it spread as it had threatened to that morning. Without the early double doses of laudanum, I would have been in bed. “It tends to afflict my eyes and head the most.”

“Very well,” sighed Dickens. “I had hoped for a walking partner today—the Forsters are my guests this weekend and John has given up all exertion since coming into his wife’s fortune, as I am sure you know—but we shall make a short outing of it, you and I, just over to Chatham and Fort Pitt, through Cooling Marsh and home. I shall make up the difference this evening, alone.”

I nodded, although still without enthusiasm. That would be six miles and more with Dickens’s unrelenting pace of four miles per hour exactly. My head and joints throbbed in anticipation.

IT WAS NOT as bad as I had feared. The afternoon was so pleasant, the air so cool, the scents so invigorating, that I kept up with Dickens as he led the way down the road to a lane, from lane to path, from path to grassy ruts along a canal, from the canal tow path through autumn fields of grain—taking care never to tread on a farmer’s crop—and from the field to shady forest trail, then back to the roadside again and onward.

During the first half hour of silent walking—or rather, my silent walking, since Dickens chatted amiably the whole way, discussing Forster’s increased Podsnapperies, the problems within the Guild, details of his son Alfred’s business ineptitude and his daughter Mary’s diminishing prospects for marriage, grousings about the Negro uprising in Jamaica that still rankled him, observations on his youngest son Plorn’s apparent laziness and lack of intellectual depth—I spent my time nodding and thinking of how to trick the information desired by Inspector Field out of Charles Dickens.

Finally I surrendered that approach and said, “Inspector Field came to visit me yesterday.”

“Oh, yes,” Dickens said casually, his blackthorn rising and falling with his stride. “I assumed that to be the case.”

“You’re not surprised?”

“Hardly, my dear Wilkie. The wretched man was here at Gad’s Hill on Thursday. I assumed that you would be his next victim. Did he threaten you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“With what, may I ask? He was quite clumsy and heavy-handed with his minor attempts to blackmail me.”

“He threatened me with public exposure of… my domestic situation.” The only thing I was secure about at the moment was that Dickens did not know—could not have known—about the existence of Miss Martha R—. Inspector Field obviously knew, but it would not have been in his interest to tell the Inimitable.

Dickens laughed easily. “Threatened to tell the world about your Landlord and Butler, eh? Much as I had guessed, Wilkie. Much as I had guessed. Mr Field is a bully but—as is true of so many bully boys—not the ripest grape on the vine. How little he knows of your free spirit and disregard for society’s opinions if he thinks that such a revelation would cause you to turn traitor. All of your friends know that you have skeletons in your closet—two delightful and witty female skeletons, to be precise—and none of your friends gives a fig for the fact.”

“Yes,” I said. “But why is he so eager to have this information on Drood? He acts as if his life depends upon it.”

We passed from the road to a path that wound its way through and around Cooling Marsh.