Moving to my right, I stood on tip-toes to peer over the hedges and lower clipped cedars to see between white curtains. The bow windows of Dickens’s study were dark, but that did seem to be the only unlighted room in the house. I saw a woman’s head—Georgina? Mamie? Katey? — pass by one of the front windows. Was she moving with some haste, or was this observation merely a function of my taut nerves?
I took several steps back so that I could better see the upper lighted windows and removed the heavy pistol from my pocket.
An anonymous assassin’s bullet crashing through the window glass, murdering the most famous author in all of… What idiocy was that? Dickens had not only to die; he had to disappear. Without a trace. And tonight. And as soon as he stepped out that door, belatedly remembering his meeting with me, he would. This I swore not only to God, but to all the Gods of the Black Lands.
Suddenly I was seized from behind by many hands and half-dragged, half-lifted as I was pulled backwards on my heels and away from the house.
This sentence does not do justice to the violence that was inflicted upon my person at that moment. There were several men’s hands and they were strong. And the owners of those rough hands had no scruples whatsoever about my well-being as they dragged me through a hedge, through low branches of a tree, and threw me down onto the stones and sharp-twigged flower bed of closely packed geraniums.
The red geraniums! They filled my vision—along with flashing stars following my skull’s impact with the ground—and the red of the blossoms struck me clearly, impossibly, even in the darkness.
Dickens’s red geraniums. Blossoms of blood. A gunshot’s flower blossoming on the white field of a formal shirt. The red geranium flower of Nancy’s Murder as Bill Sikes bashed her brains out.
My nightmares had been premonitions, perhaps powered by the opium that also fueled my creativity when all else failed.
I tried to rise, but the strong hands forced me back down into the mud and loam. Three white faces floated above me as I caught a hint of crescent moon sliding between quickly moving black clouds.
As if to prove my prescience, Edmond Dickenson’s face thrust itself into my field of vision just a foot from my face. His teeth had indeed been sharpened into tiny white daggers. “Easssy there, Mr Collinsss. Easy doesss it. No fireworksss tonight, sir. Not thisss night.”
As if to explain that cryptic statement, other strong hands removed the pistol from my twitching hand. I had forgotten it was there.
Reginald Barris’s face took the place of Dickenson’s. The powerful man was smiling or grimacing horribly—I could not tell the difference—and I realised that it had not been dental decay that had shown dark places in his smile when I had seen him last in that narrow alley. Barris had filed his teeth down to sharp points as well. “Thisss iss our night, Mr Collinsss,” the pale face hissed.
I struggled to no avail. When I looked up again, Drood’s face was floating above me.
I use the word “floating” advisedly here. All of Drood seemed to be floating above me, his arms outstretched rather as would be those of one entering deep water, his face looking down at me, his black-cloaked body levitating on invisible supporting currents and hovering parallel to mine only five or six feet above the Earth.
The places where Drood’s eyelids and nostrils should have been were so red-raw that they looked to have been cut away with a scalpel only minutes earlier. I had almost forgotten how the Drood-thing’s long tongue flicked in and out like a lizard’s.
“You can’t kill Dickens!” I gasped. “You can’t kill Dickens. It must be I who…”
“Hussssshhh,” said the floating, hovering, expanding white skull-face. Drood’s breath carried the stench of grave dirt and the sewer-sweetness of dead, bloated things floating in an Undertown river. His wide eyes were rimmed and rivuleted with blood. “Hussssh, now,” hissed Drood, as if soothing a demon-child. “It’sss Charlesss Dickens’sss sssoul we take tonight. You can have whatever isss left, Mr Billy Wilkie Collinssssss. Whatever isss left, isss yourssss.”
I opened my mouth to scream, but at that second the floating Drood removed a redolent black silk handkerchief from his operacape pocket and pressed it down over my straining face.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Iwas wakened in late morning by Caroline’s daughter, Carrie, even though—as I mentioned earlier—she was supposed to be travelling out of the city with the Wards, the family for whom she served as governess. She was weeping as she knocked repeatedly and then, when I did not answer, came into my bedroom.
Groggily, I sat up in bed and pulled the bedcovers up. All I could think of in my half-waking state was that somehow Carrie had come home early and gotten into the locked box in the locked lower dresser drawer where I kept her mother’s letters. Caroline’s most recent letter to me—received and read only three days earlier—reported that she had complained of one of her husband Joseph’s late-night drinking parties with his sports-loving friends and she had come to consciousness the next day locked in the cellar with one of her eyes swollen shut and with a sure sense of having been violated by more than one man.
But this was not the reason for Carrie’s weeping.
“Wilkie, Mr Dickens… Charles Dickens, your friend… he is dead!”
Through sobs, Carrie explained that her patrons, my friends Edward and Henrietta Ward, had been in transit to Bristol when they heard word of Dickens’s death from a friend they met at the station, and they had immediately turned around and come back to the city so that Carrie could be with me.
“To… to think… of how many times Mr Dickens… was a guest at our ta… table… when Mother lived here…” Carrie was sobbing.
I rubbed my aching eyes. “Go on downstairs like a good girl,” I said at last. “Have Besse put on coffee and prepare a late breakfast.…”
“George and Besse are gone,” she said. “I had to use the key we hide in the arbour to get in.”
“Ah, yes,” I said, still rubbing my face. “I gave them last night and today off… so that I could sleep. I finished my book last night, Carrie.”
She did not seem properly impressed by this fact and made no comment. She was weeping again, although why she felt such a personal loss at the reported death of an old gentleman who hadn’t visited the house in many months and who had called her “the Butler” for years, I had no idea. “Go around the block, then, and bring the cook back with you,” I said. “But be a good girl and put the coffee and tea on first, please. Oh, and Carrie, go to the tobacco shop beyond the square and bring back every newspaper you can find. Go on, now!”
When she was gone, I threw off the covers and looked down. Carrie hadn’t seemed to have noticed through her tears, but I was wearing a soiled white shirt and trousers rather than pyjamas. My boots were still laced, and the sheets were smeared with mud that looked—and smelled—far too much like excrement.
I rose and went off to bathe and change before Carrie returned.
AS THE DAY WENT ON, more and more pieces of reliable information clicked into place.
After starting his day on the eighth of June by chatting over breakfast with Georgina, Dickens had violated his usual rules and work habits by working in the chalet all day, only returning to the house at about one PM for lunch before heading back to his eyrie to write again late into the day.
I later saw the final page for The Mystery of Edwin Drood that he’d written that day. The lines showed fewer corrections and crossings-out than the normal Charles Dickens first-draft page to which I was accustomed. It included this passage and obviously was describing a beautiful morning in Rochester very similar to the lovely morning he had just experienced at Gad’s Hill. It began with “A brilliant morning shines on the old city…” and moved on to—