Dan Simmons - Drood

After my father died, I believe that Charley and I both would have enjoyed living with my mother in her wonderful home at Hanover Terrace for the rest of our lives. My liaison with Caroline G— took me away from that safe haven. And yet, for months and even years after I moved in with Caroline and her daughter, Harriet—how I loved the coincidence of that name! — I would return to my mother’s home to write and address letters to our mutual friends (my mother’s and mine) from there even as I wrote to other friends from my new home. Mother did not know of Caroline’s existence, of course; or if she did know, she never let on that she did. It was true that I regaled her with many tales of my bachelor life apart from her, never mentioning any woman, much less the widowed Caroline, but it was also true that my mother never once suggested that she visit my various homes during all the years I shared them with Mrs G— and Harriet.

I was still living with Mother when I met Dickens in 1851. As a reporter later wrote of Dickens and me during that early period—“Both were lively men, passionate about the theatre, keen on drinks and company and excursions, on being intensely gay, relaxing strenuously, responding vehemently.” And after our excursions and strenuous relaxations and vehement responses, Dickens would return home to his increasingly bovine wife and I would return home to my mother.

Charley would have lived with our mother until her death and perhaps remained in her home until his own death, I am quite sure, if it had not been for his marriage to Kate Dickens.

None of us shall ever know all the reasons for Charley’s sudden proposal to Kate in the late spring of 1860. In truth, from what I can gather, it was Kate who proposed marriage to Charley that spring. It was certainly Kate who hurried their wedding along to mid-summer—despite her father’s outspoken and vehement opposition, not only to the date of the wedding but to the fact of it.

Charley had not had a long history of courtship and wooing. In fact, up to his thirty-second year (which was to be the year of his marriage), he had continued to avoid women. Whispers abounded that spring and summer that Katey Dickens had fallen in love with and had been pursuing Edmund Yates, a younger friend of the Inimitable who had helped promote the falling-out between Dickens and Thackeray by writing a profoundly unflattering profile of the old writer. A contemporary had described Yates as “… very fascinating too. Superficially, mind you.”

Superficially fascinating or not, Kate Dickens had fallen in love with him and when Yates refused to notice the infatuation, despite the young man’s frequent visits to Tavistock House and then to Gad’s Hill Place and despite Katey’s obvious flirtations—obvious to everyone, including Charles Dickens and me—the headstrong young woman (she had just turned twenty) proposed to my Charley.

A few months before the wedding, after a visit to Gad’s Hill, where Katey’s redirected matrimonial attentions were again obvious to everyone, I wrote to my mother, “… Charley is still trying hard to talk himself into believing he ought to be married.”

Years later, after my younger brother’s death from the constant stomach ulcers that had proved cancerous, I did ask Kate why she had pulled him into marriage. “I had to get away from that house,” she replied. “I had to get away from my father.”

Dickens did not hide his disapproval of the match. Despite that, Katey was his favourite child and he could not deny her anything, even this folly of a marriage.

On 17 July, 1860, St Mary’s Church in Higham—the church’s steeple would be visible from the writing room in Dickens’s chalet when the latter structure was assembled five years later—was almost buried in white flowers. The lower-class neighbours had created floral arches that showed the way to the church. The night before, the villagers had fired off guns in honour of the nuptials, but a cranky and concerned Charles Dickens had come out onto the lawn of Gad’s Hill in his nightshirt, shotgun in his hands, and said only, “What the devil is all that about?”

A special train had been laid on to bring wedding guests down from London. I remember chatting with Thomas Beard, the understated gentleman who had served as Charles Dickens’s best man two decades earlier. Beard had the odd distinction of being the only person at Kate’s wedding who had also been at the wedding of the bride’s father, although in one brief, ad hoc toast, Dickens himself spoke ironically—almost bitterly, I thought—of “a similar ceremony performed in a metropolitan edifice some four and twenty years ago.”

Kate’s mother, Catherine, was not in attendance, of course. Nor was Elizabeth Dickens, the Inimitable’s elderly but still-surviving mother. Georgina Hogarth was the only member of the bride’s mother’s side of the family present. Few seemed to notice the absences.

After the wedding ceremony, the mob of guests returned to Gad’s Hill for a huge wedding breakfast. Again, everything on and around the table was decorated with white flowers. The wedding breakfast, while sumptuous, took only an hour. The host had promised everyone that there would be no speeches and there were none. I noticed that the bride and groom sat down at the table for a moment, then disappeared while the guests played games on the lawn. My mother, who sanctioned the match no more than did Charles Dickens, needed constant attendance that morning. When Charley and Kate reappeared, dressed for travel, the bride wore black. Katey broke down and cried bitterly on her father’s shoulder. Charley’s face grew more and more pale until I was afraid he was going to faint.

Mother and I gathered with the other thirty or so guests on the gravel path to kiss the newlyweds, shake hands all around, and to throw old shoes. After the carriage had departed, Mother announced that she was not feeling well. I left her seated in the shade just long enough to go inform Dickens of our departure, but could find him nowhere on the lawn amidst the young people playing nor in the parlour downstairs nor in the billiards room or study.

I saw Mamie coming downstairs, went up to Katey’s bedroom— what had been Katey’s bedroom until that morning—and found Dickens on his knees on the floor, his face buried in his daughter’s wedding gown. The Inimitable was sobbing like a child. He looked up at me, his face streaming with tears, perhaps seeing only my silhouette in the doorway and perhaps thinking me still to be his daughter Mamie, and he cried out in a broken voice—“But for me, Katey would not have left home!”

I said nothing. I turned, went downstairs and out onto the lawn, fetched my mother, and called for the carriage to take us back to the station and thence to London.

CHARLES AND KATEY were to have no children. The rumour spread—perhaps started by Dickens, but also perchance from Katey herself—that the marriage had never been consummated. It certainly was true that by the summer of Dickens’s railway accident in 1865, Katey was an unhappy and flirtatious woman, obviously searching for a lover. There were many men around who would not have shown scruples at making love to a married woman, had it not been for the ferocity and constant vigilance of her father.

Charley’s chronic illnesses and stomach aches also became a problem within the Dickens household. I was sure they were only ulcers, and when my brother, Charles, finally died of stomach cancer in 1873, it was only slight consolation that Charles Dickens had preceded him in death.

Dickens said sharply to me that odd autumn of 1865—“Your brother brings a death’s head to my table every breakfast here, Wilkie.” It was obvious to all that Dickens was certain that Charley was dying and that he—the Inimitable, never acknowledging his own illnesses nor allowing for even the possibility of his own death—thought that Charley should get it over with sooner rather than later.