“No need, sir, no need…” Clow began again, but again I interrupted.
“You see, Mr Clow… Joseph… it is as Mrs G——’s employer of long standing that I speak to you now. Perhaps she told you that she has been in my employ for many years now.”
“Yes,” said Clow.
We were interrupted by the arrival of the waiter, who recognised me and greeted me effusively. Realising that Clow was at a loss to choose from the menu items, I ordered for both of us.
“Yes,” I continued, “even though Mrs G—— is still quite young, she and her daughter have been in my employ for many years. In truth, ever since Harriet—that is her daughter—was a small child. How old are you, Mr Clow?”
“Twenty-six, sir.”
“Please do me the honour of calling me Wilkie,” I said expansively. “And you shall be Joseph.”
The thin-faced young man blinked rapidly at this. He was obviously not accustomed to crossing class barriers.
“You realise, Joseph, that I have nothing but the highest regard for Mrs G——, and nothing but absolute respect for my obligation to look out for her and her delightful daughter.”
“Yes, sir.”
The wine arrived, was approved, and I made sure that Clow’s glass was filled to the brim.
“When she told me of her affection for you, Joseph, I was surprised.… I admit to being surprised, since Caroline… Mrs G——… has not spoken so highly of any gentleman during all the years she has been in my employ. But her feelings and amibitions are of the highest priority to me, Joseph. Of this you can be sure.”
“Yes, sir,” Clow said again. He looked like a man who had been struck on the head by one of his heavier plumber’s instruments.
“Mrs G—— is a young woman, Joseph,” I went on. “She was little more than a girl when she came into my service. Despite her many duties and responsibilities in my household, she is a young woman still, of an age very similar to your own.”
In truth, Caroline would be thirty-eight on her next birthday on 3 February, less than two months away.
“Of course her father’s dowry is considerable, and I would be more than pleased to add to it,” I said. “This is in addition to her modest inheritance, of course.” Her father had died in Bath in January of 1852 and there was no dowry, no inheritance, and I had no intention of adding a ha’penny to those cumulative zed sums.
“Well, sir… Wilkie, sir… it was only a late dinner because Mrs G—— said I’d worked so hard to get the plumbing done, sir,” said Clow. Then the food began arriving, his eyes widened at the quality and quantity of it, and our conversation grew even more one-sided as I continued filling his glass and pressing my strange, subtle, seemingly selfless, and totally insincere point.
MY MOTHER WAS ALSO COMPLAINING and making demands on my time at this point. She had begun suffering, she said, from various indeterminate but excruciating pains. One resisted the urge to tell her that at age seventy-seven, indeterminate (and perhaps even occasionally excruciating) pains were part of the price of longevity.
My mother had always complained and my mother had always been healthy: healthier than her husband, who had died young; healthier than her son Charles, who was racked for years with stomach pains that would turn out to be cancer; healthier, certainly, than her poor son Wilkie, who suffered from a rheumatical gout that periodically blinded him with pain.
But Mother was complaining and asking—almost demanding— that I spend several days around Christmas with her down in Tunbridge Wells. This was impossible, of course, and not for the least reason that Caroline was also demanding that I spend Christmas or several days around Christmas at home with her and Carrie. This was also impossible.
The premiere of No Thoroughfare had been set for Boxing Day—the day after Christmas.
On 20 December I wrote to my mother:
My dear Mother,
I scratch one line—in the midst of the turmoil of the play—to say that you may rely on my coming to you on Christmas Day—if not before.
The delays and difficulties of this dramatic work have been dreadful. I have had to write a new 5th Act—which has been completed to-day—and the play must be performed on Thursday next, with a Sunday and Christmas Day between!
If I can write again, I will. If not, let us leave it that I certainly will come on Christmas Day. And, if I am not wanted on the next Monday’s or Tuesday’s Rehearsal that I come before. Your much-bothered son has hardly got a minute he can call his own. But the writing of the play is at last complete—so my principal worry is at an end. How I shall enjoy a little quiet with you!
Send me a line between this and Christmas Day. I have got your heart-burn lozenges—and some chocolate for you which Charley brought from Paris. Can I bring anything else which will go into my hand-bag?
Yours ever afftly WC
Charley proposes crossing to you from Gadshill on Friday in
Christmas week.
As it was, I spent part of Christmas Day afternoon and evening with Mother in her cottage in Tunbridge Wells—she spent most of our time together complaining of her nerves and her heartburn, and also of ominous strangers in the neighbourhood—and then I returned to London on the earliest possible train the next morning.
Fechter was his usual first-night ruin in the hours before the curtain opened. His vomiting due to stage fright was almost continuous in the last two hours, so that his poor dresser was absolutely worn out from running to and fro with his basin.
Finally I suggested a few drops of laudanum to calm the anxious actor. Unable to speak, Fechter answered by putting out his tongue. The colour of it had turned, under the nervous terror that possessed him, to the metallic blackness of the tongue of a parrot.
Once the curtain went up, however, Fechter found his voice and stride as the unspeakable villain Obenreizer.
I should report that I felt no anxiety whatsoever. I knew that the play was to be a triumph, and it was.
On 27 December I wrote—from the offices of All the Year Round at No. 26 Wellington Street:
My dear Mother,
I have a moment to tell you that the Play last night was an immense success. The audience were delighted—and the actors were excellent.
I have got the proofs which you sent me back quite safe.
Charley is, I suppose, with you today.
If you can write, tell me how you are, and what day next week I may come back to you? I sincerely hope and trust you are not suffering so much as when I was with you.
Love to Charley.
Ever yours affly
WC
The night of the play was the only Thursday of 1867 on which I had been forced to miss my weekly excursion to King Lazaree’s subterranean den. But I had made prior arrangements to make up for it on that Friday, 27 December—which is one reason I wrote to Mother from Dickens’s rooms at the magazine, since I had told Caroline and Martha both that I would be spending the night there—and Detective Hatchery had been kind enough to shift his night of work for me from Boxing Day to the Friday following.
CAROLINE G—— WANTED marriage. This I would not consider. Martha R——, on the other hand, wanted only a baby. (Or babies, plural.) She made no demands for marriage, since the fiction of “Mr and Mrs Dawson”—her world-travelling merchant of a husband who rarely spent time at his home on Bolsover Street—was sufficient for her.
It was about this time, during the success of No Thoroughfare and near my completion of The Moonstone, and especially after a second secret meeting with Mr Joseph Clow at a slightly less expensive London restaurant, that I began considering the possibility of agreeing to Martha’s wishes.
The first two weeks of 1868 were quite frenetic for me and I suspect that I was happier then than at any time in my life. My letters to Mother (and scores of other friends and associates) were not exaggerations; No Thoroughfare was indeed—despite Charles Dickens’s long-distance dismissal of it—a bona fide success. I continued making at least bi-weekly
visits to Gad’s Hill Place, enjoying the meals with Georgina, Charley and Katey (when Charley was there), Dickens’s son Charley and his wife, Bessie (who were there often), Dickens’s daughter Mamie (who was always there), as well as such occasional visitors as Percy Fitzgerald or William Macready and his lovely second wife.
I invited all of them to come to London to see No Thoroughfare. Through my many letters, I invited others such as William Holman Hunt, T. H. Hills, Nina Lehmann, Sir Edward Landseer, and John Forster.
I invited all of these people and more to dine with me at Number 90 Gloucester Place on Saturday, 18 January—not in evening costume, I emphasised—and to go from there to the theatre and to sit in the spacious author’s box with me to enjoy the play. Caroline was delighted and began setting the three servants to with a metaphorical whip getting the huge house ready. She also spent hours conversing with the French cook.
Mother wrote—actually, she had dictated the letter to Charley, who had stopped in at Tunbridge Wells for the day—to say that she had been visited by a certain Dr Ramseys, a physician visiting a family in the village who had heard of Mother’s problems and who, after a thorough examination, diagnosed her symptoms as heart congestion, gave her three medicines for the problem (which, she said, did seem to help), and recommended that she move out of the cottage in the village because of all the hammering going on there during renovations. When she told him about her beloved Bentham Hill Cottage nearby in the country outside the village, Dr Ramseys urged her to move there immediately. Charley added a note telling me that Mother had also invited her former housekeeper and cook and sometime neighbor, Mrs Wells, to join her at Bentham Hill Cottage, which was a relief to both Charley and me, since someone would then always be there to watch over her while she recovered from these minor problems.
Mother added that Dr Ramseys said that she required absolute rest and that—in both his medications and future ministrations—he would do everything in his power to provide it for her. In a postscript she added that poor Dr Ramseys himself had suffered terrible burns in a fire many years before, that the pains and scars were ever with him, and thus had dedicated his life to alleviating the pain of others.
OUR HOPES OF A GLORIOUS SALE of theatrical rights for No Thoroughfare to an American producer were dashed forever when a letter arrived from Dickens: “Pirates are producing their own wretched versions in all directions.”
Dickens insisted that he had done everything in his power to place my script, or at least the rights to our collaboration, in honest hands—to the point that he registered No Thoroughfare as the property of Ticknor and Fields, his Boston publishers, but I had my doubts about the sincerity (or at least urgency) of his efforts. His earlier letters had, after all, condemned my final script as “far too long” and, even more irritating, as “perhaps crossing the line into mere melodrama,” so I half-suspected Dickens of waiting until he himself could revise the play… or create a new adaptation from scratch. (This suspicion was borne out the following June when Dickens did precisely that, writing a new version of the play with Fechter’s help for a premiere in Paris. It failed.)
At any rate, Dickens went on to say in his letter that the Museum Theatre in Boston had rushed a theatrical adaptation of our story onto the stage an astonishing ten days after the original tale arrived in the United States. This was pure piracy, of course—and Dickens insisted that he had prodded Ticknor and Fields into threatening an injunction—but the pirates, knowing that, given Americans’ easy acceptance of such piracy, there would be an outcry against Dickens if he persisted, called the publisher’s bluff and went on with their abominably bad version. “Then,” continued Dickens in his letter, “the noble host of pirates rushed in, and it is being done, in some mangled form or other, everywhere.”
Ah, well. I paid little heed to this distant disaster. As I had written to Mother on 30 December—“The play is bringing money. It is a real success—we shall all be rich.”
When I had visited her on the second of January, I brought legal papers for her to sign so that Charley and I might get our fair share of the £5,000 from Aunt Davis that was the source of her annual income— or be able to assign it to someone we chose—should Mother die before we did.
Everything proceeded at breakneck speed towards the gala dinner at Gloucester Place and theatre party immediately afterward. Caroline and Carrie had decorated the huge house as if there were to be a royal coronation there, and our food bill that week equalled six months of our regular purchases. No matter. It was a time to celebrate.
On a Thursday, I wrote:
90Gloucester Place
Portman Square W.
Jan 17th, 1868
My dear Mother,
It was a great relief to me and to Charley to hear that you had made the move, and established yourself again under Mrs Wells’s care. I am not surprised to hear that you are terribly fatigued by the exertion. But when you have rested I hope and trust you will begin to feel the benefit of this change. Let me hear—in two lines—how you go on—and how soon you will let me come (or let Charley come) and see you in the new place. Remember that the quiet and the freedom from London interruptions are sure to help me to get on with my work. Also—when you can write without too much trouble—let me hear when it will be convenient for me to send a small supply of brandy and wine to Bentham Hill Cottage.
The play goes on wonderfully. Every night the Theatre is crammed. This speculation on the public taste is paying, and promises long to pay me, from fifty to fifty-five pounds a week. So make yourself easy about money matters.
I am getting to nearly halfway through The Moonstone.
No more news at present. Goodbye.
Yours ever afftly WC
LITTLE DID I KNOW that this would be the last letter I should ever write to my dear mother.
That second week of the new year had been so congested with work on The Moonstone and theatrical-related labours that once again I had to move my night at King Lazaree’s from Thursday to Friday. Detective Hatchery did not seem to mind—he said it was easier to find the night away from his regular duties for Inspector Field on Friday than on Thursday—so once again I treated my huge bodyguard to an excellent dinner (this one at the Blue Posts tavern on Cork Street) before he led me into the darkness of the dockside slums and escorted me safely to that terrible place of cold granite and graves that Dickens had long since christened St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery.
Hatchery had a new book to read through that night of vigil—Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond, I noticed. Dickens had once mentioned to me that he liked the way Thackeray had arbitrarily divided the large novel into three “Books” and had borrowed the idea for all of his own subsequent books. But I did not mention that small professional item to Hatchery, since I was in a hurry to get below.
King Lazaree greeted me as warmly as always. (I had mentioned to him the week before that I might be coming on Friday rather than Thursday, and he had assured me in his perfect English that I would be welcome and expected any time.) Lazaree and his large Chinese guard showed me to my cot and handed me my opium pipe, prepared and lighted, as always. Filled with good feeling about the day and my life—knowing that this pleasurable sense of satisfaction would be enlarged a hundredfold during my hours under the pipe—I closed my eyes and allowed myself, for the hundredth time in the safety of that deep-sheltered cot, to drift up and away on the rising, curling smoke of amplified sensation.
That moment was the end of my life as I had known it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
You may wake now,” says Drood.
I open my eyes. No, that is not correct. My eyes were already open. Now, with his permission, I can see through them.
I cannot lift my head nor move it from side to side, but from where I lie supine on a cold surface, I can see enough to know that I am not in King Lazaree’s opium den.
I am naked—that much I am able to see without moving my head and can tell from the press of cold marble
on my back and buttocks that I am lying on what might be a block of stone or a low altar. I feel the movement of cold air across my belly and chest and genitals. Above me on the right, a giant black onyx statue, at least twelve feet tall, shows a man’s body naked to the waist with a short gold skirt wrapped around his middle, and his powerful arms ending in huge, muscled hands hold a golden spear or pike. The man’s body stops at the neck, and the head of a jackal completes the terrible black form. To my left, a similar lance-holding statue rises to the same height, but instead of a jackal’s visage, this one sports the head of some great curved-beaked bird. Both heads stare down at me.
Drood steps into my field of vision and also looks down on me in silence.
The creature is as pale and loathsome as I had dreamt of him in Birmingham and as I had glimpsed him in my home in June of the previous year, but otherwise he looks very little the same.
He is naked from the waist up, except for a wide, heavy collar that appears to be made of hammered gold with inset rubies and strips of lapus. On his naked, grub-white chest hangs a heavy gold figure that at first I take to be a Christian cross, but then notice the elongated loop at the top. I have seen similar items behind glass in the London Museum and even know it is called an ankh, but I have no idea of its significance.
Drood’s nose is still no more than two slits in a living skull’s face, his eyelids are still missing, but around his deep-set eyes he has painted whorls of dark blue—so dark as to appear almost black—that come to points like cat’s eyes at the sides of his temples. A stripe of blood-crimson rises from between where his eyebrows should be and then up over his forehead to bisect his bald, white, and seemingly skinless scalp.
He is carrying a jewel-encrusted dagger. Its tip has been freshly dipped into red paint or blood.