The house smelled of cooking—pot roast and other beefs simmering, some sort of rich bouillabaisse getting started—and the urge to vomit rose in me again.
Caroline swept out of the dining room.
“Wilkie! Where on earth have you been? Do you think you can just disappear every night and not… Good Lord—where did you get those atrocious rags? Where are your real clothes? What is that smell?”
I ignored her and bellowed for our parlourmaid. When she rushed in, face flushed from the kitchen steams, I said brusquely, “Draw a hot bath for me—immediately. Very hot. Hurry on, now.”
“Wilkie,” huffed Caroline, “are you going to answer my questions and explain?”
“You explain,” I growled, waving at the draped ribbons everywhere. “What is all this trash? What’s going on?”
Caroline blinked as if slapped. “What is going on? In a few hours is your very important pre-theatre dinner party. Everyone is coming. We have to dine early, of course, as you specified, since we all must leave for the theatre by…” She paused and lowered her voice so the servants would not hear. What emerged was a steam kettle hiss. “Are you drunk, Wilkie? Are you addled by your laudanum?”
“Shut up,” I said.
This time her head snapped back and colour rose to her cheeks as if she had been slapped.
“Call it off,” I said. “Send the boy… send messengers… tell everyone the party is off.”
She laughed almost hysterically. “That is quite impossible, as you well know. The cook has begun dinner. People have arranged transportation. The table is already set with the complimentary theatre tickets at each place. It would be quite impossible to…”
“Call it off,” I said and brushed past her to go upstairs and take five glasses of laudanum, give the wretched clothes to our servant Agnes to burn, and bathe.
I SHOULD HAVE slept in the steaming water had it not been for the crawling in my skull.
The pressure from the scarab was so great that three times I leapt from the bath to stand in front of the looking glass. Adjusting the candles for maximum light, I opened my mouth wider than I thought possible—my jaw muscles actually groaned in protest—and the third time I did it I was sure that I saw light gleam on a black carapace as the huge insect scuttled back out of sight, away from the light.
I turned and vomited into the basin, but there was nothing left in my stomach to bring up, and the beetle was back in my skull by then. I got back into the bath, but each time I approached sleep I relived the inside of the crypt, the grey gleaming, the abattoir stink of the place, and over that I smelled incense and heard the chanting and saw the huge black bug burrowing into my belly as if flesh were sand.…
There came a rap on the door.
“Go away!”
“There is a telegram come for you,” said Caroline through the door. “The boy said it was important.”
Cursing, I rose dripping from the bath—which was growing cold at any rate—pulled on my robe, and opened the door long enough to grab the flimsy from Mrs G——’s thin white fingers.
I assumed the note was from Fechter or someone else at the theatre—they had the profligate habit of sending telegrams as if a simple messenger-borne note might not suffice. Or perhaps it was from Dickens. In a flash of revelation, I imagined him confessing to his own scarab and acknowledging that he somehow knew that I had gained mine.
I had to read the actual six words and signature four times over before the meaning sank into my exhausted, inhabited brain.
MOTHER IS DYING. COME AT ONCE. CHARLEY
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
My mother’s face made me think of a newly dead corpse from which the silent soul was still trying frantically to escape.
Her eyes, showing mostly whites with only a hint of dark iris under the heavy and reddened lids, strained and bulged as if from some terrible internal pressure. Her mouth was open wide but her lips, tongue, and palate looked as pale and dry as old leather. She could not speak. She made no sounds except for a strange rasping, hissing sound emanating from her chest. I do not think she could see us.
Charley and I embraced in horror in full view of her sightless gaze and I gasped, “Dear God, how did this come to be?”
My beloved brother could only shake his head. Mrs Wells hovered nearby, her arthritic hands flapping from the folds of her black lace shawl, and somewhere in the far corner of the room waited Mother’s long-time elderly physician from Tunbridge Wells, Dr Eichenbach.
“Mrs Wells said that she was well—no, not well, hurting, coughing some, but well enough to eat with an appetite and enjoy her tea of an afternoon and to be read to and to chat with Mrs Wells—yesterday evening,” managed Charley. “And this morning… I came from London to surprise her… and discovered this.”
“This is oft the case with the old waiting and willing and wanting to depart this world,” muttered Dr Eichenbach. “No warning. No warning.”
As Eichenbach, who was more deaf than not, was chatting in the corner with Mrs Wells, I whispered urgently to Charley, “I want my doctor to see her. Frank Beard will come at once.”
“I have been trying to get in touch with her most recent physician, Dr Ramseys,” Charley said softly.
“What was that?” called Dr Eichenbach from his corner near the fire. “You’re calling Dr… who?”
“Ramseys,” said Charley with a sigh. “Evidently a new local physician who took it upon himself to call on Mother in the past few weeks. I am quite sure that Mother had no reason to go to him… that is, to go outside your circle of excellent advice and care.”
Eichenbach was frowning. “Dr Ramsey?”
“Ramseys,” said Charley with the loud over-articulation so preferred by the frustrated speaking to the near-deaf.
Eichenbach shook his head. “No Ramsey or Ramseys practising around Tunbridge Wells,” he said. “Nor in London, as far as I know, except for old Charles Bierbont Ramsey, and his practice now is restricted to Lord Leighton’s family. Besides, his speciality is venereal diseases—it’s all he’s interested in—and I hardly doubt that Mrs Collins called him out here for that sort of consultation. And what kind of name is Ramseys? He sounds like a committee.”
Charley sighed again. “I believe that Dr Ramseys was visiting family in Tunbridge Wells when he heard of Mother’s illness. Isn’t that right, Mrs Wells?”
The old woman looked flustered and her gnarled hands flapped again from her shawl. “Truly, I do not know, Master Charles. I only heard about Dr Ramseys from your dear, dear mother. I never spoke to him.”
“But you saw him?” I asked. The scarab stirred in my skull at the same instant a cold hand closed around my heart.
“Only once,” said the sincere old woman. “And from a distance. He was leaving one afternoon last week while I came down the path across the meadow.”
“What did he look like?” I asked.
“Oh… I certainly could not say, Master Wilkie. I just glimpsed a tall, thin man walking away from me down the lane. He dressed very formally but rather—I should be one to speak!—rather in an old-fashioned manner, as the young people would say. He wore a black cut-away and had a top hat on of the older sort, if you understand what I mean.”
“I am not certain I follow your meaning, Mrs Wells,” I said in what I hoped was a steady voice. “How was the top hat old-fashioned?”
“Oh, you know what I mean, Master Wilkie. The sort with a slightly wider brim, a lower crown—more of the kind of riding hat one saw on gentlemen when I was a girl. And quite obviously made of beaver, not silk.”
“Thank you, Mrs Wells,” said Charley.
“Oh… and his veil, of course,” added Mrs Wells. “Even from a distance, I could see the veil. Your mother mentioned it later.”
“Actually, she did not mention it to me,” said Charles. “Why was Dr Ramseys wearing a veil?”
“Because of the burns, of course. Terrible burns, said Harriet… that is, Mrs Collins. Your dear mother. Dr Ramsey
s did not want to frighten people on the street.”
I turned my head and closed my eyes for a minute. When I opened them, I could see only Mother’s straining face and the gaping, moistureless mouth in which her dry tongue lolled like a misplaced bit of rope. Her bulging white eyes looked like two eggs pressed beneath human eyelids by some terrible exertion of force.
“Mrs Wells,” Charley said softly, “would you be so kind as to go fetch the neighbour boy who sometimes runs errands for Mother? We need to send a telegram to Dr Frank Beard in London. Wilkie shall write it out here and the boy will carrry it.”
“This late, Master Charles? The telegraph office will close in less than an hour.”
“Then we need to hurry, don’t we, Mrs Wells? Thank you for your help. Mother would thank you if she could.”
CAROLINE AND I had parted with harsh words.
Inexplicably, unbelievably, she had asked questions, demanded answers, and created obstacles to my going out the door even after I had shown her the telegram from my brother.
“Where were you last night?” she persisted. “Where did you get those terrible clothes that Agnes burned? What was that awful smell on them? When will you be back from Tunbridge Wells? What shall we do about the dinner party this evening? The theatre tickets? Everyone was counting on…”
“First, take down and throw away these damned garlands,” I snarled. “And have your dinner party. Go to the theatre with all my male friends. It certainly won’t be the first time you’ve entertained and been entertained at my expense when I could not be a part of it.”
“What does that mean, Wilkie? Do you not want me to honour our dinner obligations with your friends? Do you not want me to use those tickets to your play, after you have promised a dozen people that they would see it tonight from the author’s box? What would you have me do?”
“I would have you,” I growled, “go to the Devil.”
Caroline froze in place.
“My mother is dying,” I said flatly and harshly and finally. “And as far as the question of with whom you choose to dine and go to the theatre, you can go with the Devil as far as I am concerned.” I turned the full rage of my countenance on her. “Or with your plumber.”
Still frozen, Caroline G—— blushed from her hairline to her bodice. “What… do you mean, Wilkie?”
I threw open the door to the fog and cold and laughed in her face. “You know d—— ned well what I mean, my dearest. I mean Mr Joseph Charles Clow, son of the distiller on Avenue Road, one plumber by trade, seducer—or seducee—by avocation. The same Mr Clow whom you secretly fed at my table and with whom you’ve clandestinely met five times since Christmas Day.”
And I went out and slammed the door in her flushed and terrified face.
TUNBRIDGE WELLS HAD BEEN EERILY SILENT and snow covered and filled with disturbingly white, thick fog when Charley arrived in a sleigh to pick me up at the station that afternoon, and it was even more oppressively silent and foggy at ten o’clock that night when a heavily bundled Frank Beard materialised out of the freezing mist from the same sleigh, handled yet again by the always-ill but seemingly indefatigable Charley. I had stayed with Mother and the sleeping Mrs Wells as my brother went to pick up our friend and physician. Dr Eichenbach had long since gone home.
Frank Beard clasped my hand a moment in silent commiseration and proceeded to examine Mother while Charley and I waited in the other room. The fireplace had burned low and we decided not to light other candles or lamps. Mrs Wells slept on the divan in the far corner. Charley and I spoke in whispers.
“She wasn’t like this last week when you saw her last?” I asked.
Charley shook his head. “She complained of aches and pains and her breathing problems.… You know how she goes on, Wilkie… went on… but no, there was no hint of this terrible… whatever it is.”
Beard came out after a while and we woke Mrs Wells for what he had to say.
“Harriet appears to have had a very serious brain haemorrhage,” he said softly. “As you can see, she has lost her ability to speak, her control of voluntary muscles, and—quite possibly—her reason. Her heart also sounds compromised. Physically, she otherwise seems…”
Frank Beard paused and turned towards Mrs Wells. “Has Mrs Collins fallen recently? Injured herself with scissors or a kitchen knife or perhaps even a knitting needle?”
“Absolutely not!” cried the old woman. “Mrs Collins was not so active that any of those things could have happened, Doctor. Nor would I have allowed them to happen. And she would have told me if… No, no, no such injury could have occurred.”
Beard nodded.
“Why do you ask, Frank?” said Charley.
“Your mother has a recent cut here.…” said Beard, touching his diaphragm just beneath the sternum. “It is about two inches wide. Not serious and it is healing, but unusual for a person who has not been…” He shook his head. “But it does not matter. I am certain it has nothing to do with the brain haemorrhage and internal neuralgia that must have afflicted her sometime last night.”
I had been standing, but now my legs went so weak that I had to sit.
“The… prognosis?” asked Charley.
“There is no hope,” Beard said flatly. “The internal neuralgia and obstruction to the brain are too severe. She may regain consciousness—she may even become more clear in her mind before the end—but I am certain that there is no hope. It is just a matter of days or weeks now.”
Mrs Wells made as if to faint, and Charley and Frank helped her back to the divan.
I sat and stared at the fire. It was early afternoon in America. Somewhere comfortable and bright and clean, Charles Dickens was being treated like a king and was preparing for another evening of public adoration. In a recent note that Wills had shared with me, Dickens had written—“People will turn back, turn again and face me, and have a look at me… or will say to one another, ‘Look here! Dickens is coming!’ ” and talked about being recognised every time he rode in a carriage—“. . . in the railway cars, if I see anybody who clearly wants to speak to me, I usually anticipate the wish by speaking myself.”
What noblesse oblige! How unspeakably generous of my erstwhile collaborator and eternal competitor! There he was, condescending to speak to tens of thousands of adoring (if wilfully ignorant and terminally illiterate) Americans who worshipped the very ground he walked on, while I sat here in pain and misery and hopelessness, my mother dying horribly, a… scaraby thing… scrabbling in my skull like a…
“I’ll be leaving now. I’ll stay with friends in the village here and check on Harriet before taking the train back to London in the morning.” Frank Beard had been speaking. Some time had passed. Evidently Charley had shown the weeping Mrs Wells to her room and was now in his topcoat and heavy artist’s cap and waiting by the door to take Beard away. I jumped to my feet and shook my physician’s hand with both of mine and thanked him profusely.
“I will stay with Mother,” I told Charley.
“I shall sit up with her through the night when I return,” said my brother. “You look exhausted, Wilkie. Build up the fire so you can sleep on the long couch when I get back.”
I shook my head then, although whether to say that I would stay up with Mother through the night or that I was not exhausted or that I did not need a fire, I do not know. Then Charley and Frank Beard were gone, and I could hear the treacherously false happy winter sounds of the bells on the horses’ harnesses as they drove back into the village.
I went into Mother’s room and sat on the hard chair pulled up next to her bed. Her eyes were still open but apparently sightless, the lids fluttering from time to time. Her arms and wrists were bent like a small bird’s broken wings.
“Mother,” I said softly to her, “I am sorry that…”
I had to stop. I was sorry that… what? That I had killed her through my association with Drood. Had I killed her?
“Mother…” I began again and stopped again.
; For months I had written and spoken to her of little save for my own success. I had been too busy in writing of the play and rehearsals for the play and attending early presentations of the play to spend any time with her—even Christmas had been a grudging few hours before I’d rushed for the train back to the city. It seemed that every note I had written to her since last summer had been either about myself (although she dearly loved hearing about my successes) or about adjusting the terms of the inheritance that would come to Charley and me if she should die before us.
“Mother…”
Her eyelids fluttered wildly again. Was she trying to communicate? My mother always had been a busy, articulate, confident, capable, and socially secure person. For years, even after my father’s death, she had presided over a salon of artists and intellectuals. I had always associated her with competence, dignity, an almost regal self-possession.
And now this…
I do not, Dear Reader, know how long I sat there by Mother’s bedside. I do know that at some point I began sobbing.
Then, finally, I had to know. I set the candle closer. I bent over her insensate form and drew the bedclothes down.
Mother was in her nightgown, but there were only a few buttons at the neck—not enough for my purpose. Still weeping, wiping my streaming nose on my sleeve, I pulled the top sheet down to Mother’s pale, blue-veined, and swollen ankles, and—sobbing more loudly while holding the candle in one hand—slowly pulled up her flannel sleeping gown.
I covered my eyes with my left forearm, the candle singeing my brow and hair, so that I—her loving son—would not see her ultimate nakedness. But I confess that I had rolled the sweat-clammy nightgown too high before looking, still shielding my range of vision, so that her wrinkled and sagging breasts were visible.
And below them, below the sharp chevrons of her ribs pressing against the pale flesh, there was the red mark beneath her sternum.