“Belief in Drood?” I snapped. “Must I remind you, my dear Dickens, that it was your story of your meeting with him at Staplehurst and your later stories of meeting with the monster in Undertown that got me involved in all this in the first place? It’s a little late, I would say, for you to tell me to cease believing in him, as if he were the ghost of Marley or Christmas Yet to Come.”
I thought Dickens would laugh at this last broadside, but he only looked sadder and more weary than before and said, as if to himself, “Perhaps it is too late, my dear Wilkie. Or perhaps not. But it is definitely too late this particular Sunday. I must go in and prepare to enjoy one of the last meals I may ever share with dear James and Annie.…”
His voice had become so soft and sad by the end of that sentence that I had to strain to hear the words over the sound of the fox hunters riding away from the Falstaff Inn.
“We shall speak of this another time,” said Dickens as he rose. I noticed that his left leg seemed unable to support his weight for a moment and that he steadied himself with his right hand on the table, getting his balance and teetering there a moment with his left hand and leg flailing uselessly, like a toddling infant taking his first steps, before he smiled again—ruefully this time, I thought—and hobbled out the door and down the stairs as we headed back to the main house.
“We shall speak of this another time,” he said again.
And we did, Dear Reader. But too late, as you will see, to avoid the tragedies to come.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Through the final autumn, winter, and spring of Charles Dickens’s life, he continued writing his novel and I continued writing mine.
Dickens—being Dickens—insisted, of course, on the suicidal folly of using Drood’s name in the title of his new work, even though I heard through Wills, Forster, and that ponce-twit Percy Fitzgerald (who had all but taken my place in the offices of All the Year Round and in Dickens’s confidences) that the Inimitable’s earlier ideas for titles had included The Loss of James Wakefield and Dead? Or Alive? (He had obviously never seriously considered using Edmond Dickenson’s name, as he’d mentioned to me the previous spring—that had been just to bait me.)
I had begun my book months before Dickens had started his, and thus had sold and was to start serialising Man and Wife in Cassell’s Magazine in January of 1870 and had also sold serial rights to my old stalwart, Harper’s Magazine, in New York and—to avoid piracy—had arranged for Harper’s to publish their instalments a fortnight earlier than did Cassell’s. Dickens’s first instalment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, serialised in green wrappers from Chapman and Hall, was not to see print until April. Meant for a dozen monthly instalments, it would end after six.
My brother, Charley, was hired to be the artist for this ill-fated novel, and although it would turn out that he would be too ill to finish his labours, Dickens’s impulse must have been to give his son-in-law (and thus his daughter) some income. I could also imagine Dickens making the commission simply to give Charley something to do other than lie around his home or Gad’s Hill Place, unemployed and in pain. It had come to the point where even the sight of my brother seemed to incense Charles Dickens.
By continuing to work on the instalments, Dickens was breaking his previously inviolable rule—i.e., never to be working on a novel at the same time he was doing public readings or preparing for readings—since the time for the twelve “farewell readings” he had begged and bullied for was to begin in January.
For my own part, the instalments of Man and Wife were flowing easily, aided substantially by the now-monthly letters from Caroline in which she documented the torrent of abuse that her plumber was pouring down upon her. A jealous sort, Joseph Clow would lock her in the coal cellar when he was gone for any extended periods. A drunkard, he would kick and beat her after hours of drinking. A braggart, he would have his friends over for bouts of drinking and gambling and say crude and vulgar things about Caroline and laugh with the other louts as his bride blushed and attempted to flee to her room. (But Clow had taken the door off their tiny bedroom precisely so she could not hide in there.) A mother’s-boy, he allowed Caroline’s mother-in-law to insult her incessantly and would cuff my former lover if she cast so much as a defiant glance at the old woman.
To all these missives of misery, I replied with nothing more than a polite acknowledgement of receipt and the vaguest commiserations— sending the letters, as always, through Carrie (and assuming that Caroline would burn them after reading, since Clow might kill her if he discovered that she was receiving letters from me)—but the details and tone all went into my Man and Wife.
My seducer—Geoffrey Delamayn—was (and remains to my literary eye) a delightful character: a long-distance runner of superb physique and tiny brain, a player of many sports, an Oxford-educated ignoramus, a brute, a blackguard, a monster.
Critics of even the early instalments of Man and Wife would call my novel a bitter and angry book. And I acknowledge to you, Dear Reader, that it was that. It was also very sincere. I was pouring into Man and Wife not only my fury at the very idea of someone being trapped into marriage—trapped the way Caroline had attempted to trap me and the way that Martha R—, “Mrs Dawson,” even at that moment was scheming to trap me—but also my righteous anger at the treatment that Caroline was receiving at the grimy hands and fists of the lower-class brute she had succeeded finally in trapping.
Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood was not an angry or bitter novel, but the truths and personal revelations that he was pouring into it, as I would understand only much later, were far more astounding than those I thought I was being so candid about in my own book.
When the last autumn of Dickens’s life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?
Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute?
I WAS NOT invited to Gad’s Hill Place for Christmas.
My brother went down with Kate, but Charley was in even worse favour than usual with the Inimitable, and they came back to London shortly after Christmas Day. Dickens had finished the second instalment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood by the end of November and was trying to hurry the artwork for the cover and early interior illustrations, but after sketching that cover based on Dickens’s sometimes vague outline of the shape of the tale, Charley decided in December that he could not draw at such a rate without further harming his health. Showing his impatience—and perhaps even disgust—Dickens hurried up to London and conferred with his publisher Frederick Chapman, and they decided as a replacement on a young man new to illustration, a certain Luke Fildes.