Dan Simmons - Drood

“Wonderful! I’ve just finished my morning’s work on the last of the introductions and my Christmas story and was about to set out on my walk. Join me, dear friend!”

The thought of a twelve- or twenty-mile hike at Charles Dickens’s pace on this windy, snow-threatening November day caused a headache to start its throbbing behind my right eye. “I wish I could, my dear Dickens. But as you mentioned Christmas… well, that was one of the things that I wished to talk to you about.”

“Really?” He paused. “ You —the original ‘Bah! Humbug!’ Wilkie Collins—interested in Christmas? ” he said and threw back his head for a true Dickens laugh. “Well, now I can say that I have lived long enough to see all improbabilities come to pass.”

I forced another smile. “I was just wondering if you were having one of your usual galas this year. The day is not too far distant, you know.”

“No, no, no, it isn’t,” said Dickens. Suddenly he was calmly and coolly appraising me. “And no, no gala this year, I fear. The new round of readings begins in early December, you may recall.”

“Ah, yes.”

“I shall be home for a day or two for Christmas itself,” said Dickens, “and of course you shall be invited. But it shall be a modest affair this year, I’m sorry to tell you, my dear Wilkie.”

“No worry, no worry,” I said hurriedly, improvising my little scene in a way that I felt would do justice to the yet-to-be-created Sergeant Cuff. “I was just curious… will you be inviting Macready this year?”

“Macready? No, I think not. I believe his wife is indisposed this season anyway. And Macready travels less and less these days, you remember, Wilkie.”

“Of course. And Dickenson?”

“Who?”

Aha! I thought. Charles Dickens, the Inimitable, the novelist, the man with the iron memory, would not, could not, ever forget the name of the young man whom he’d saved at Staplehurst. This was a murderer’s—or soon-to-be-murderer’s—dissembling!

“Dickenson,” I said. “Edmond. Surely you remember last Christmas, Charles! The somnambulist!”

“Oh, of course, of course,” said Dickens even while he waved away the name and the memory. “No. We shan’t be inviting young Edmond this Christmas. Just family this year. And the closest friends.”

“Really?” I feigned surprise. “I thought that you and young Dickenson were rather close.”

“Not at all,” said Dickens while he pulled on his expensive and far-too-thin-for-such-a-day kid gloves. “I merely looked in on the young man from time to time during his first months of recovery. He was, you remember, Wilkie, an orphan.”

“Ah, yes,” I said, as if I could have forgotten this essential clue as to why Dickens had chosen him as his murder victim. “Actually, I had rather looked forward to chatting with young Dickenson on a couple of topics we were discussing last Christmas. Do you remember his address by any chance, Charles?”

Now he was looking at me most queerly. “You wish to pick up a conversation you were having with Edmond Dickenson almost a year ago?”

“Yes,” I said in what I hoped was my most authoritative Sergeant Cuff manner.

Dickens shrugged. “I’m quite sure I don’t remember his address, if I ever knew it. Actually, I believe he moved around quite a bit… restless young bachelor, always changing quarters and so forth.”

“Hmmm,” I said. I was squinting against the cold wind out of the north that was rustling Dickens’s winter-pruned hedges and driving the last of the sere leaves from the trees in his front yard, but I might as well have been squinting through the suspicion I felt.

“In fact,” Dickens said brightly, “I believe I remember young Dickenson left England last summer or autumn. To go make his fortune in southern France. Or South Africa. Or Australia. Some promising place like that.”

He’s playing with me, I thought with an electric surge of Sergeant Cuff—ish certainty. But he does not know that I am playing with him.

“Too bad,” I said. “I would have enjoyed seeing young Edmond again. But there’s nothing for it.”

“There isn’t,” agreed Dickens, his voice muffled by the thick red scarf he’d pulled up over his lower face. “Are you sure you won’t join me for the walk? It’s a perfect day for it.”

“Another day,” I said and shook his hand. “My cart and driver are waiting.”

But I waited until the writer was out of sight and the tap of his stick out of earshot and then I rapped at the door, handed my hat and scarf to the servant who answered, and went quickly to the kitchen, where Georgina Hogarth was seated at the servants’ table going over menus.

“Mr Wilkie, what a pleasant surprise!”

“Halloo, Georgina, halloo,” I said affably. I wondered if I should have wore a disguise. Detectives often wore disguises. I’m sure that Sergeant Cuff did upon occasion, despite his uniquely tall and ascetic appearance. Sergeant Cuff was almost certainly a master of disguises. But then, that ageing Scotland Yard detective did not suffer the handicaps of my disguise-proof shortness, full beard, receding hairline, weak eyes that demanded spectacles, and oversized, bulbous forehead.

“Georgina,” I said easily, “I just ran into Charles on his way off to his walk and popped in because my friends and I are planning a small dinner party—a few artists and literary people—and I thought that young Dickenson might enjoy such an evening. But we don’t have his address.”

“Young Dickenson?” Her expression was blank. Was she an accomplice? “Oh,” she said, “you mean that boring young gentleman who sleepwalked here Christmas Day night last.”

“Precisely.”

“Oh, he was terribly boring,” said Georgina. “Hardly worth inviting to your wonderful party.”

“Possibly not,” I agreed, “but we thought he might enjoy it.”

“Well, I do remember sending out the Christmas invitations last year, so please follow me into the drawing room to the secretary where I keep my files.…”

Ahah! cried the successful ghost of the unborn Sergeant Cuff.

GEORGINA HOGARTH’S FEW NOTES from Dickens to Edmond Dickenson had all been mailed to (and presumably then fowarded by) a barrister by the name of Matthew B. Roffe of Gray’s Inn Square. I knew this area well, of course, since I had also studied for the law—indeed, I once described myself as “a barrister of some fifteen years’ standing, without ever having had a brief, or ever having even so much as donned a wig and gown.” My own studies had taken place at the nearby Lincoln’s Inn, although I confess that my “study” there consisted much more of attending to meals provided than to studying, although I do remember reading seriously for the Bar for six weeks or so. After that, my interest in law books waned even as my interest in the meals persisted. At that time, my friends were mostly painters and my own efforts mostly literary. But the Bar was more generous to gentlemen with vague legal aspirations then, and somehow, despite my lack of attendant effort, I became licensed as a barrister in 1851.

I had never heard of Mr Matthew B. Roffe and—based upon the dinginess of his small, cluttered, dusty, and remote third-storey office near Gray’s Inn—neither had any clients. There was no clerk present in the low-ceilinged little closet of an outer office and no bell to announce me. I could see an old man wearing clothing twenty years out of date, eating a chop at his desk piled high with folders, testaments, volumes, and bric-a-brac, and I cleared my throat loudly to gain his attention.

He pressed a pair of pince-nez into place on his hook of a nose and stared out of that papered cavern with much blinking of his small and watery eyes. “Eh? What’s that? Who’s there? Enter, sir! Advance and be recognised!”