Dan Simmons - Drood

I made a noncommittal noise. In truth, I was close to falling asleep to the rocking of the railway carriage and the metronomic sound of its wheels on rails. It had been a long night in King Lazaree’s den and I could not say that I had actually slept. Luckily, although the November day was unusually pleasant, there had been a brisk wind and most of the telltale scent of the pipe had been removed from my clothing during our fast walk to the station.

“You say we’re meeting someone in Rochester?” I asked.

“Precisely,” said Dickens, clasping both hands on the brass head of his cane. “Two ladies. An old friend for me and a lady companion for you, my dear Wilkie. We are having a luncheon there in a splendid place. I understand that the service is exemplary.”

The splendid place with exemplary service, as it turned out, was the graveyard behind the huge old heap of grey stone that was Rochester Cathedral. The two ladies were Dickens’s not-very-secret love, Ellen Ternan, and Miss Ternan’s mother. Logic dictated that Mrs Ternan was to be my “lady companion” for this outing.

As I stood there amidst the headstones while nodding, bowing, and making small talk with the two women in the weak November afternoon sunlight, I seriously considered the possibility that Dickens had lost his mind.

But no, the answer to Charles Dickens’s behaviour was never that simple. I realised as the four of us strolled into the graveyard—Mrs Ternan and Ellen had explained that they were visiting Ellen’s uncle in Rochester and could only stay a short while—that this meeting made sense from Dickens’s tortured, twisted, self-exculpating way of looking at the world. His liaison with Ellen Ternan was something he was hiding from almost everyone in the world—my brother, Charles, had told me that Dickens had brought his daughters and Georgina somewhat further into the conspiracy after Mamie had stumbled across her father walking with Miss Ternan in London one Sunday, and Inspector Field had informed me that Ellen had visited Gad’s Hill Place on several occasions—but Dickens obviously felt that I was harmless to his intrigues. Whom would I tell? Not only did Dickens know from experience that I would keep the confidence, but he also knew that because of my own domestic arrangement (which had become even more complicated in the past week as Martha R— had returned to London for an extended visit), I was such a social outcast that I could never publicly look down on Dickens’s own arrangements, in print or through gossip.

Perhaps Mrs Ternan knew of my situation with Caroline G—, for the old lady seemed very cool during our picnic. The former actress (I understood that both she and Ellen were now giving elocution lessons from their new home in Slough that Dickens paid for) obviously had accumulated more pretensions of gentility since I had gotten to know the two women during and after the performances of The Frozen Deep . Mrs Ternan carried her acquired gentility with her like an ageing sloop with a hull heavy with barnacles.

The four of us walked slowly through the graveyard until Dickens had found a flat gravestone to his liking. This long marble block was surrounded on either side by lower flat stones. Dickens disappeared behind a nearby stone wall—one that was about five feet high and beyond which stood the rented carriage (with a liveried servant on the box)— we could see only the Inimitable’s head as he conferred with the driver and as both then repaired to the boot of the carriage. Then Dickens returned with four cushions, set them on the flat gravestones on either side of the longest one, and bade us to sit.

We did so. Ellen and Mrs Ternan were obviously disconcerted by this unusual—not to say ghoulish—introduction of cushioned comfort to such surroundings. A tall tree to the west of us drew the ink-scrabble shadows of its bare branches across us and our chosen gravestones. None of us could manage any small talk as Dickens hurried to the gate and trotted around behind the wall to confer with his servant again.

In a flash, Dickens was back, carrying one long chequered cloth— which he proceeded to drape across the longest gravestone, transforming it into a caricature of a domestic dinner table—and with another white napkin draped over his free arm in the manner of self-important waiters since Adam’s day. A few seconds later he was out of sight and—with little help from his man—had laid a row of plates atop the wall. I must say that it all felt very familiar—rather as if we were at a Parisian sidewalk dining establishment. Then Dickens bustled back into sight, napkin still in place, the very image of a first-class headwaiter, and one by one he served each of us, beginning, of course, with the ladies.

Out of a large hamper set atop the wall, Dickens magically produced fried sole and whiting with shrimp sauce, crackers and pâté, a brace of well-grilled birds which I first thought were squab but which I soon realised were delightful little pheasants (to which Waiter Dickens applied the sauce with a flourish), then ladles full of roast haunch of mutton with stewed onions and browned potatoes, all followed by pound puddings. Along with the food came a chilled white wine—which Dickens, now turned sommelier, uncorked and poured with much ado while awaiting our judgement with batting eyes and pursed lips—and then a large bottle of champagne still in its bucket of ice.

Dickens was having such fun playing waiter and wine steward that he had little time to eat. By the time he had produced the pound puddings—offering a rich sauce, which the ladies declined but which I accepted at once—his face was flushed and he was perspiring despite the November afternoon’s slow cooling into evening.

At rare times in one’s life, Dear Reader, even the most gentle person is given a tool—a weapon, actually—without wishing it, sometimes having it thrust into his hand, by which he can bring down an entire edifice with a single sentence. Such was my situation during our strange repast in the Rochester graveyard, for I had recognised much of the luncheon’s menu from a book popular some fifteen years earlier. The book was titled What Shall We Have for Dinner? and the recipes therein had been accumulated, according to the publishers, by a certain pseudonymous Lady Maria Clutterbuck.

Oh, how the Ternan ladies, miss and missus, now gay from the wine and champagne, would have sobered instantly to learn that their delightful (if ghoulish) graveyard luncheon menu had been planned by none other than Catherine Dickens, the rejected and exiled wife. Although Catherine had been completely abandoned (my brother, Charley, told me that she had written Dickens an imploring letter about their son only a month earlier, requesting a conversation in person about Plorn’s problems, to which Dickens refused even to pen a reply, instructing Georgina to send a cold, curt note in his stead), but quite obviously her incarnation as Lady Clutterbuck (Catherine had not yet become so heavy when she’d collected and published the menus in 1851) was still very welcome at Gad’s Hill. Or at least her recipes were.

During the meal and the inconsequential conversation, I studied Ellen Ternan even as she ignored me. It had been eight years since I had spent any time in her presence. The years had not enhanced her beauty. She had been youthfully attractive as an eighteen-year-old ingenue but now qualified only as “handsome.” She was the kind of woman with sad, soulful eyes (which did little for me, since such sad eyes usually hinted at a poetic character given to melancholy and a rigidly defended virginity), descending brows, a long nose, and a wide, thin-lipped mouth. (I prefer just the opposite in my young women—tiny noses and full lips, the latter preferably curved upward in an inviting smile.) Ellen had a strong chin, but where that edifice had suggested a certain perky strength in her youth, it now implied only the prideful stubbornness of a woman beyond her mid-twenties who had not yet married. Her hair was attractive, not terribly long and receding in artfully sculpted waves from a high, clear forehead, but the hairdo exposed ears that were much too large for my taste. Her earrings, which hung down like three bullseye lanterns, hinted of the underlying vulgarity of her former profession. Her carefully elocuted but somehow terminally empty sentences suggested stilted conversation arising from a simple lack of education. Her lovely vowels and precise, theatrically honed cadences could not conceal an underlying ignorance that should have instantly disqualified this ageing ingenue from being the consort of England’s most honoured writer. Nor did I perceive from her the slightest hint of a hidden passionate nature that could have made up for her obvious shortcomings… and my Wilkie-antennae were highly sensitive to any such subtle sub-rosa erotic transmissions from even the most proper and upstanding ladies.