Dan Simmons - Drood

Dickens, still reading without missing a word or gesture, calmly showed Dolby two fingers behind his back.

The distraught stage manager did not know what this meant. Was the Chief telling him that he would be finished in two minutes or that the wire would be parting in two seconds? Dolby and Barton, the gas man, could do nothing but shuttle back and forth offstage, bringing sand and buckets of water and preparing for the worst.

Dickens, it turned out, had seen the wire heating in the middle of his reading and had coolly calculated how long it would take for the copper to burn through. Working from those quick mental calculations, the Inimitable had improvised instant alterations to the rest of his reading—editing and conflating as he went—and reached the end only seconds before the wire would have melted and parted. (Dickens had figured when Dolby signalled him that he had two minutes left before the reflector would have come crashing down.) The curtain closed, Barton ran out and turned off the misplaced flame, and Dolby—according to his later testimony to Wills—came close to fainting as Dickens patted him on his wide back, whispered, “There was never any real danger,” and calmly went out to take his curtain call.

All these breathless reports from Dickens’s tour were of little interest to me. None mentioned Drood, and I had my own literary work to do (more important, in my humble opinion, than reading one’s old work to audiences of bumpkins in the provinces).

As I’ve mentioned, I settled into doing my preliminary reading and researching at my club, the Athenaeum. The club was most helpful—moving my favourite wing chair to a place by the window where the weak winter and spring light would be at its best, providing a small table for my materials, and appointing several of the servants to seek out the volumes I needed from the club’s expansive libraries. I also appropriated Athenaeum stationery for my notes and kept these in a series of large white letter envelopes.

My first job was to gather information, and here my years as a journalist served me well (even as that profession had equally served Dickens, although I might remind you, Dear Reader, that I had been a true journalist and Dickens had written primarily as a mere court reporter).

For weeks I copied out pertinent entries on India, on various Hindoo cults, and on gems from Encyclopaedia Britannica, the eighth edition, copyright 1855. I also found a new book by a certain C. W. King, The Natural History of Gems, published in 1865, very helpful. For my specific India backgrounds that I thought might open The Serpent’s Eye (or possibly The Eye of the Serpent ), I consulted J. Talboys Wheeler’s newly published The History of India from the Earliest Ages and both 1832 volumes of Theodore Hook’s The Life of General Sir David Baird . The diligent servants at the club also sought out and provided relevant articles in recent issues of Notes and Queries.

And thus the early outlines of my magnum opus began to take shape.

I had known for some time that the plot would revolve around the mysterious disappearance, in England, of a beautiful but cursed diamond brought from India—a diamond sacred to some Hindoo thuggee sort of cult—and that the mystery would unfold in a series of accounts from various viewpoints (rather as Dickens had done in Bleak House, but, more pertinently, as I had done to better effect in The Woman in White ). Because of my preoccupation—“distraction” might be the better word—with the whole Drood issue at this time, the story would hinge upon such themes as Eastern mysticism, mesmerism, the power of mesmeric suggestion, and opium addiction. The solution to the theft (as I knew from an early point in my envisioning of the tale) would be so shocking, so unexpected, so clever, and so unprecedented in the nascent field of detection fiction that it would astonish all English and American readers, including such supposed practitioners of such sensationalist serial authorship as Charles Dickens himself.

As is true of all writers of Dickens’s and my level of accomplishment, I was never free to pursue just one writing project. (Dickens, while he prepared for and then travelled on tour, had written his usual Christmas novella, was editing All the Year Round, was completing elaborate forewords for the special edition of his works, and was generating ideas for novels even while writing actual stories such as his strange “George Silverman’s Explanations,” kindled, he told me later, by Dolby’s and his coming across the ruins of Hoghton Towers between Preston and Blackburn. That ruined old manse happened to crystallise all the disparate, floating fragments of ideas Dickens had been playing with for some time, but rather than support a novel—which he needed in order to offer something for serialisation in All the Year Round —it provoked this strange story of a neglected childhood so very similar to Dickens’s own. [Or at least to what he thought of as his childhood of neglect and want.]

So it was with my own multiple and often overlapping literary and dramatic efforts that spring of 1867. My rewritten The Frozen Deep had failed the previous autumn at the Olympic Theatre, this despite the fact that my revised version was, I believe, much improved, after I had rewritten the character and passions of Richard Wardour, the character Dickens had—I was about to write “played” but “occupied” might be a more precise word—making the man both more adult and believable, freeing the character from Dickens’s pathos and overly sentimental gestures.) But my hopes for a theatrical breakthrough remained high, and that spring—when my health and research commitments allowed—I travelled back and forth to Paris to consult with François-Joseph Régnier (whom I’d met through Dickens more than a decade earlier) of the Comédie-Française, who was eager to adapt The Woman in White to the stage there. (It was already the rage in Berlin.)

My own goal was to sell Régnier and the French theatre-goers (and thence English theatre-goers) on an adaptation of Armadale, which I was certain would be warmly and enthusiastically received, despite what Dickens had considered its controversial aspects.

Caroline, who loved Paris beyond her limited means of expressing such emotion, all but begged to go with me, but I was firm: it was a business trip and there would be no time for shopping, explorations, or any social engagements outside the strict regimen of theatre business.

That month I wrote to Mother from my hotel in Paris— “I have breakfasted this morning on eggs and black butter, and pig’s feet à la Sainte Mènéhould! Digestion perfect. St Mènéhould lived to extreme old age on nothing but pig’s trotters.”

Régnier and I attended a new opera at which the theatre was packed, the intensity was astounding, and the experience was electrifying. Also electrifying were those “very special little periwinkles”—as Dickens and I used to call the attractive young actresses and demimondaines so available in a culture where the night life was as rich and varied as the food—and with a bit of guidance from Régnier and his friends, I blush to say that I did not have to spend an evening or night alone (or even with the same periwinkle) the whole time I was in Paris. Before returning to London I remembered to pick up a handpainted card of the city for Martha—she loved such trifles—and a lovely chiffon robe for Carrie. I also purchased some spices and sauces for Caroline’s kitchen.

My second night back at Melcombe Place after my return from Paris, I may have taken too much (or too little) laudanum, for I found it difficult to sleep. I was tempted to go to my study to work, but the inevitable confrontation with the Other Wilkie (even though he had shown no recent signs of violence in his attempts to seize my papers or pens) dissuaded me. Instead, I was standing at the window of my bedroom (Caroline had found reasons to sleep in her own room) when I saw a familiar shadow near the lamp post at the end of the street near the square.