The novelist in me was curious. The rest of me did not give a d— n for the answers. The old friend in me vaguely wished that Dickens had found that happiness in his lifetime. The rest of me recognised that Dickens’s lifetime needed to be over and that he needed to be gone—missing, lost, expunged, eradicated, his corpse never found—so that the adulatory mobs could not bury him in Westminster Abbey or its churchyard. That was very important.
Mamie was babbling on about something—going on about someone she had danced and flirted with at the Queen’s Ball—but suddenly the coach stopped and I peered out through the rain-streaked window and saw the Marble Arch.
“I shall walk you to your door,” I said, stepping out and waiting to help the silly spinster down.
“Oh, Wilkie,” she said, taking my hand, “you truly are the kindest of men.”
I WAS WALKING home alone from the Adelphi Theatre several nights after this chance meeting when someone or something hissed at me from a darkened alley.
I stopped, turned, and lifted my bronze-headed walking stick as any gentleman would do when threatened by a ruffian in the night.
“Misster Collinssss,” hissed the figure in the narrow aperture.
Drood, I thought. My heartbeat raced and my pulse pounded in my temples. I felt frozen, unable to run. I grasped the stick in both hands.
The dark shape took two steps closer to the opening of the alley but did not emerge fully into the light. “Mister Collinsss… it’s I, Reginald Barrisss.” He gestured me closer.
I would not enter the alley, but from the opening to that stinking black crevice, I could see a trapezoid of light from the distant streetlamp falling on the dark form’s face. There was the same dirt, the same wild beard, the same hooded eyes of a hunted man always flicking one way then another. I saw only a glimpse of his teeth in the dim light, but they appeared to have decayed. The once handsome and confident and burly Detective Reginald Barris had become this shadowy, fearful form whispering at me from an alley.
“I thought you dead,” I whispered.
“I am not far from it,” said the shadow-figure. “They hunt me everywhere. They do not give me time to ssleep or eat. I musst move consstantly.”
“What news do you have?” I demanded. I still held my heavy stick at the ready.
“Drood and his minionss have set a date on which to take your friend Dickenss,” he hissed at me. His breath was foul, even from three feet away. I realised that his missing teeth must be causing this Droodish hiss.
“When?”
“Nine June. Not quite three weeks from now.”
The fifth anniversary, I thought. It made sense. I asked, “What do you mean they will take him? Kill him? Kidnap him? Take him down to Undertown?”
The filthy figure shrugged. He pulled his tattered hat brim lower so that his face went back to darkness.
I said, “What shall I do?”
“You can warn him,” rasped Barris. “But there iss no place he can hide—no country where he would be ssafe. Once Drood decidesss a thing, it is done. But perhapsss you can tell Dickensss to get his affairss in order.”
My pulse still raced. “Can I do anything for you?”
“No,” said Barris. “I am a dead man.”
Before I could ask anything else, the dark figure backed away and then seemed to be melting down into the filthy stones of the alley. There must have been a basement stairway there that I could not see, but to my eye the shadowy figure simply melted vertically out of sight in the dark alley until it was gone.
Nine June. But how to arrange things with Dickens myself before that date? He would be back at Gad’s Hill Place soon, and we were both working hard on our respective novels. How could I lure him away—especially to where I needed to take him—so that I could do what I had to? And before the ninth of June, that anniversary of Staplehurst that Dickens had always set aside in order to meet with Drood?
I had written a formal and rather cold letter to Wills demanding the reversion of copyrights for all of my stories and novels that had ever appeared in All the Year Round, and Dickens himself wrote me back in that last week of May 1870.
Even the business part of the letter was surprisingly friendly—he assured me that papers were being drawn up at that moment and that, even though we had not contractually arranged such returns of copyright, all such rights were to be returned to me at once. But it was his brief peroration that seemed wistful, almost lonely.
“My dear Wilkie,” he wrote, “I don’t come to see you because I don’t want to bother you. Perhaps you may be glad to see me by and by. Who knows?”
This was perfect.
I immediately wrote Dickens a friendly note asking if we could meet “at your earliest convenience, but preferably before the anniversary you honour each year at this time.” If Dickens did not burn this note, as was his habit, this wording might prove sufficiently cryptic to anyone who read it later.
When a warm and affirmative response came back from Dickens by the first of June, I completed the last of my preparations and set the Act III finale into motion.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Where am I?
Gad’s Hill. But not Gad’s Hill Place, merely Gad’s Hill, the site where Falstaff attempted to rob the coach but was set upon by “thirty ruffians”—actually just Prince Hal and a friend—and was all but robbed himself before he fled in panic.
My black coach is parked to one side of the Falstaff Inn. The hired coach looks rather like a hearse, which is fitting. It is almost invisible in the shadows under the tall trees as the last of the evening’s twilight begins to fade. The driver up on the box is no driver, but a Hindoo sailor I have hired for this one night, paying him the equal of six months’ salary for a real driver. He is a poor driver but he is also a foreigner. He speaks no English (I communicate with him through our mutual schoolboy bits of German and some sign language) and knows nothing of England or its famous people. He will be at sea again in ten days and may never return to English shores. He is curious about nothing. He is a terrible driver—the horses sense his lack of skill and show him no respect—but he is the perfect driver for this night.
When is it?
It is the gentle evening of 8 June, 1870, twenty minutes after the sun has set. Swallows and bats dart through the shadows and into the open, the wings of the bats and the forked tails of the swallows showing as flattened V’s against the flat, clear pane of paling water-colours that is the twilight.
I see Dickens trotting across the road—or trying to trot, since he is hobbling slightly. He is wearing the dark clothing that I had suggested he don for this outing and has some sort of soft slouch hat on. Despite his obviously sore foot and leg, he carries no cane with him this evening. I open the door and he hops up into the coach to sit next to me.
“I told no one where I was going,” he says breathlessly. “Just as you requested, my dear Wilkie.”
“Thank you. Such secrecy will be necessary this one time only.”
“This is all very mysterious,” he says as I rap the ceiling of the coach with my heavy cane.
“It is meant to be,” I say. “Tonight, my dear Charles, we shall each find the answer to a great mystery—yours being the greater.”
He says nothing to this and only comments once as the coach careers and wobbles and jolts and lurches its way east along the highway. The sailor-driver is working the horses far too hard, and his crashing into holes and wild swerves from the slightest oncoming object threaten to spill the coach and us into the watery ditch from moment to moment.