Dan Simmons - Drood

But as some of us must labour while others adventure onward and outward, we still extend to you the heartiest of Christmas greetings—should these greetings catch up to you during your farflung peregrinations—and wish you the most prosperous of new years.

Yr. Most Obedient Servant and Former Fellow Traveller,

Chls. Dickens

I fairly dropped the letter in my amazement. Thrusting it at Charley, who read it with a quick glance, I spluttered, “What does this mean? Does Dickens somehow believe I have gone sailing somewhere?”

“You were in Rome in the autumn,” said my brother. “Perhaps Dickens believes you are still there.”

“I returned quickly to try to save the doomed production of The Frozen Deep at the Olympic Theatre,” I said with some asperity. “I saw Dickens after I got back. There is no possibility that he does not know I am in England.”

“He may believe you returned to Rome or Paris,” said Charley. “For there was some speculation about that in the clubs, after you had told acquaintances that you had some business to settle in Paris. Or perhaps Dickens is preoccupied, thinking mostly of his children. Katey, as you know, is despondent much of the time. Mamie has fallen out of favour in London society. And his youngest son has been a great disappointment. Dickens recently told Katey that he had decided that Plorn should be sent to Australia to become a farmer.”

“What the deuce does that have to do with my invitation to Christmas?” I cried.

Charley only shook his head. It was obvious that I had deliberately been left off Dickens’s Christmas guest-list this year.

“Wait here,” I said to my brother, who needed to catch the early train back to London. I went into Mother’s sewing room, found her stationery with the address of the Tunbridge Wells cottage on it, and began a quick missive—

My Dear Charles:

I am neither touring the world like Captain Cook nor visiting Rome or Paris. As you must already know, I am visiting my mother near Tunbridge Wells and I would be available for…

I stopped, crumpled the sheet, threw it in the fire, and found a blank sheet of stationery in my mother’s secretary.

My Dear Dickens,

I return your Christmas greetings—in my absence this Holiday, please give the ladies a bow from me, and the children sweets in my name—and regret that I shall not be able to see you until sometime in the New Year. Rather than cruising the world like Captain Cook or touring Scotland and Ireland like an itinerant juggler, I am—as you may know—deeply involved in an investigation into a Missing Person or Persons that may have the most profound consequences. I look forward to surprising you with the imminent results of this investigation.

All of my love and Christmas cheer to Georgina, Mamie, Katey, Plorn, the Family, and your Christmas guests.

Yr. Most Obedient Detective,

Wm. Wilkie Collins

I sealed and addressed the note and—when giving it to Charley, who was pulling on his travelling cloak—said with the utmost seriousness, “This must be delivered into Charles Dickens’s hands and his alone.”

CHRISTMAS AND MY BIRTHDAY were most happy occasions for me in Mother’s presence—and in the snug warmth of the Tunbridge Wells cottage, with its constant cooking smells and undemanding female company—but because both of those holidays fell on a Tuesday, I did not see Caroline until the Thursday of each of those weeks. (It was on Thursday the tenth of January that I returned to London with all of my luggage, work, and research materials, but since that was my night for King Lazaree and my pipe, I did not actually move back to the house on Dorset Square until the afternoon of Friday, 11 January.)

Caroline was not pleased with me and found innumerable small ways to show me her displeasure, but in my time away at Tunbridge Wells I had learned how to place less stock in Mrs G—’s pleasure or displeasure.

During the weeks that followed in early 1867, I spent more and more of my time at my club, using the Athenaeum’s wonderful library as my primary research centre, taking my meals there, frequently sleeping there, and generally spending less and less time at my Melcombe Place address, where Caroline and Carrie still resided full-time. (Martha R— remained in Yarmouth during this period.)

Since my business often brought me to the offices of All the Year Round (where, indeed, I still had an office of my own, albeit shared with other staff members and regular contributors from time to time), I heard much from Wills and others about Dickens’s new tour. Thick envelopes of galley proofs and other magazine materials were constantly being mailed out, chasing Dickens from Leicester to Manchester to Glasgow to Leeds to Dublin to Preston. Amazingly, Dickens managed to get back to London at least once a week to give a reading at St James’s Hall in Piccadilly and to come to the offices to deliver his own manuscripts, to check up on the books, and to work at editing the writing of others. He rarely got back to Gad’s Hill on these flying visits but would sleep in his rooms above the office here or, frequently, at his private address in Slough (near Ellen Ternan).

I did not happen to cross paths with Dickens during this time.

Various stories of woe, hardship, and Dickens’s amazing courage (or good luck) filtered back to the office and were repeated to me by Wills or Percy Fitzgerald or others.

It seemed that Dickens was still recovering from the discovery— this had been in the autumn, while I was briefly in Rome—that his personal servant and valet of the past twenty-four years, a dour and dyspeptic (I thought) but discreet shade of a man named John Thompson, had been regularly stealing from his master. Eight sovereigns had disappeared from these very offices at Wellington Street North, and when the theft was discovered, the sovereigns had quickly reappeared. But too late for Thompson, whose years of petty thefts from his employer had now come to light. Dickens sacked the man, of course, but could not bear to give the thief a “bad recommendation.” He sent Thompson off to future employment with a vague but not clearly negative letter. According to Percy Fitzgerald, Dickens had been almost distraught at this betrayal, although all the Inimitable had said to Percy about his emotions was “I have had to walk more than usual before I could walk myself into composure again.”

That composure seemed more and more rare if recent reports from Dolby to Wills were to be believed. Dickens was suffering more than ever from “nervous exhaustion,” brought on, no doubt, by the rail travel—his reaction to the Staplehurst accident seemed to grow more, rather than less, pronounced as the months went by—and early in the tour, on only his second night in Liverpool, Dickens became so faint by the end of the first part of his performance that he had to be physically helped to a sofa backstage, where he lay prostrate until it was time for him to put on a fresh boutonnière and go out for the final part of the strenuous reading.

During his reading in Wolverhampton (the first reports had this incident occurring in Birmingham proper rather than its smaller neighbour, so I had first pictured the old theatre there as I had seen it the night the illusion of Drood had threatened me), a wire holding one of the reflectors above Dickens’s head began to burn red-hot. The heavy bulb of this reflector projected out over the stalls and was suspended by a single, strong copper wire, but a new gas man only recently having joined the tour had mistakenly placed an open gas-jet beneath this supporting wire.

Dolby had seen the wire turning first red and then white and, shifting from foot to foot in his anxiety, had stage-whispered out to the reading Dickens, “How long shall you be?” while gesturing wildly at the heated wire. Dickens must have appreciated the danger: when the wire burned through, the heavy reflector would come crashing down to the stage, but not before careering through the maroon-cloth stalls and screens erected around the Inimitable. The result would be instant conflagration. The flammable screens themselves ran almost to the ancient cloth curtains above. Once the overheated wire parted, there was little doubt that the stage—and almost certainly the theatre—would go up in flames within minutes, if not seconds.