At the end of October, the tall house at Number 90 Gloucester Place was finished to my satisfaction—even the plumbing—and Caroline and I gave a house-warming dinner that also served as a farewell party for Dickens, who was scheduled to sail for America on 9 November. I hired an excellent French cook for the affair—she was to work for us on a semi-permanent basis in the coming years, although she did not live in the house—and took an active part in preparing the menu and overseeing the preparation.
The party was a great success and the first of many at the Gloucester Place home.
A few days later, on 2 November, I was one of the stewards at a huge and much more formal farewell banquet for Dickens that we held at the Freemasons’ Hall. There were 450 invited guests, the crème of London’s art, literary, and dramatic universe—all male of course—crowding the main body of the hall, while some 100 women (including the duplicitous but lovely Caroline G— as well as Dickens’s sister-in-law Georgina and daughter Mary) sat sequestered up in the Ladies Gallery, though the women were allowed to join the men for coffee afterwards. Caroline’s daughter, Carrie, now almost seventeen, was also there that night. In my nervousness, I had written the organisers twice to make sure that my request for tickets for the two ladies had been honoured.
The Grenadier Guards’ band played from another balcony that night. One surprise guest was Dickens’s son Sydney, a sailor whose ship had just docked in Portsmouth two nights before. British and American flags bedecked the main dining hall, and panels above twenty arches honoured with golden laurels each bore the title of one of Charles Dickens’s works. Lord Lytton, now sixty-four years of age but looking twice that, was the chairman for the evening and hovered over the proceedings like a gimlet-eyed bird of prey in all-black formal dress.
When Dickens finally rose to speak after a series of increasingly hyperbolic speeches of praise, my collaborator at first faltered and then began to weep. When he finally could speak, his words were eloquent but not, many agreed afterwards, as eloquent as his tears.
I confess to sitting at the main table that night, my head spinning with wine and an extra fortifying round of laudanum, and wondering what all these famous guests—Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, Sir Charles Russell, Lord Houghton, a veritable gaggle of Royal Academicians, the Lord Mayor of London—might say if they could have seen Dickens descending into the sewers of Undertown as I had. Or if they had any suspicion of the probable fate of a lonely young man named Edmond Dickenson.
Perhaps it would not have mattered to them.
On 9 November, I went up to Liverpool with Caroline and Carrie to see Dickens off as he departed for America.
The author had been given the Second Officer’s spacious cabin on the deck of the Cuba. (Carrie later asked me where the Second Officer might be sleeping during the crossing, and I had to admit that I had no idea.) Unlike most accommodations on the ship, the cabin had both a door and a window that could be opened to take advantage of the fresh sea air.
Dickens was fretful and distracted during our short visit and only I knew why. And I knew why only because of my continued association with Inspector Field.
Despite his first-hand knowledge of the Puritanical conservative nature of Americans from a quarter of a century earlier, Dickens somehow had not yet surrendered his plan to bring Ellen Ternan to America so that she could share the tour with him, perhaps in the disguise of an assistant to Dolby. This would never come to pass, of course, but Dickens was truly a hopeless romantic when it came to such fantasies.
I was not supposed to know about it, but the Inimitable had arranged with Wills at the magazine office to forward a coded telegram to the young actress in which she would be instructed on what to do once Dickens arrived in the New World. A message of “All well” would have her speeding on the next ship to America, all expenses paid through an account Dickens had left under Wills’s supervision. A reluctant code of “Safe and well” would mean that she would remain on the Continent, where she and her mother were currently vacationing while she waited word on her fate.
In his heart—or perhaps “in his rational mind” would be more appropriate—Dickens must have known that fair day of 9 November, as I had known when I first heard of the foolish scheme through Inspector Field, that the message “Safe and well,” meaning “Lonely but very, very much in the scowling, prying, judging, public American eye,” would be the one sent to Ellen via Wills.
Our own goodbyes were emotional. Dickens was aware of how much work he had left for me to finish—the proofings and revisions of No Thoroughfare as well as the scripting and staging with Fechter—but there was more to the emotion than that. After Carrie, Caroline, and I had descended the gangplank, I returned to the airy Second Officer’s cabin under the pretext of having forgotten one of my gloves. Dickens was expecting me.
“I pray God that Drood will not follow me to America,” he whispered as we again clasped hands in farewell.
“He will not,” I said with a certainty I did not feel.
As I turned to leave, thinking that it was possible—even probable—that I would never see my friend Charles Dickens again, he stopped me.
“Wilkie… in the conversation with Drood in your study on nine June, the discussion you do not remember… I feel it necessary to warn you…”
I could not move. I felt as if my blood had turned to ice and that the ice had invaded my very cells.
“You agreed to be Drood’s biographer if something happened to me,” said Dickens. He looked seasick even though the Cuba was still firmly tied to the wharf in Liverpool Harbour and was not rocking in the least. “Drood threatened to kill you and all of your family if you reneged on this promise… just as he has threatened, repeatedly, to kill me and mine. If he finds out that I went to America to escape him rather than to speak to publishers there about his biography…”
After a minute I found that I could blink. In another minute I could speak. “Think nothing of it, Charles,” I said. “Have a good reading tour in America. Return to us safe and healthy.”
I went out of the cabin and down the gangplank to a waiting Carrie and a sulking, worried Caroline.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
In the month after Dickens left for America I felt rather as if my father had died again. It was not an altogether unpleasant sensation.
I had never been busier. Dickens had not only left me the revisions and proofs of No Thoroughfare, but had also put me in charge of editing the entire Christmas Issue of All the Year Round. This nonplussed our friend William Henry Wills—the Inimitable’s second-in-command at the magazine, who had been unalterably opposed to Dickens’s going to America in the first place—but Wills, always the obedient soldier, soon settled into his position of second-in-command to me. I spent more and more time at the magazine’s offices as November went on and—since Dickens had also requested that I check regularly on Georgina, Mary, and Katey at Gad’s Hill (and since I found it easier to edit and work on The Moonstone there and since my brother, Charley, was also there much of the time), I was soon living more in Charles Dickens’s life than in Wilkie Collins’s.
Caroline tended to agree with that assessment, although not with the good grace and humour I had anticipated, and tended to begin arguments with me whenever I did spend a few days at Number 90 Gloucester Place. As we moved towards December, I spent fewer and fewer days at my new London house and more time at Gad’s Hill or eating in Dickens’s sparse rooms and sleeping in his comfortable bed above the magazine offices.