“He was robbed the second night he was here. Robbed on the docks by British sailors and slashed viciously with a blade—it is there that he lost his eyelids, ears, nose, and part of his tongue and fingers—and thrown into the Thames like the corpse he almost was. It was some of the residents of Undertown who found him floating in the river and brought him below to die. But Drood did not die, Wilkie. Or if he did, he resurrected himself. Even as he was being robbed and slashed and beaten and stabbed by the unnamed English thugs in the night, Drood had deeply mesmerised himself, balancing his soul—or at least his mental being—between life and death. The scavengers from Undertown did find a lifeless body, but his Magnetic-induced slumber was broken by the sound of concerned human voices, just as he had commanded himself under mesmeric self-control. Drood lived again. To repay those wretched souls who had saved him, Drood built his library—cum—Temple of Sleep in their underground warren. There, to this day, he heals those he can heal, helps those he can help through his ancient rites, and eases the pain and passing of those he cannot save.”
“You make him sound like a saint,” I said.
“In some ways, I believe he is.”
“Why did he not just go home to Egypt?” I asked.
“Oh, he does, Wilkie. He does. From time to time. To visit his students and colleagues there. To help with certain ancient ceremonies.”
“But he continues to return to England? After all these years?”
“He still has not found his cousins,” said Dickens. “And yes, he feels England is as much his home now as Egypt ever was. After all, he is half English.”
“Even after killing the goat that bore his English name?” I said.
Dickens did not answer.
I said, “Inspector Field tells me that your Mr Drood—healer, master of Magnetic science, Christ figure, and secret mystic—has killed more than three hundred people in the past twenty years.”
I waited for the laughter.
Dickens did not change expression. He was still studying me. He said, “Do you believe that the man I spoke to has killed three hundred people, Wilkie?”
I held his gaze and returned its noncommital blankness. “Perhaps he mesmerises his minions and sends them out to do the dirty work, Charles.”
Now he did smile. “I am certain that you are aware, my dear friend, through the teachings of Professor John Elliotson if not through my own occasional writings on the topic, that a subject under the influence of mesmeric slumber or mesmeric trance can do nothing that would violate his or her morals or principles if that subject were fully conscious.”
“Then perhaps Drood mesmerised killers and cutthroats to go out and do the killings that Inspector Field described,” I said.
“If they were already killers and cutthroats, my dear Wilkie,” Dickens said softly, “he would not have had to mesmerise them, would he? He simply could have paid them in gold.”
“Perhaps he did,” I said. The absurdity of our conversation had reached some point where it was now unsustainable. I looked around at the grassy field shimmering in the afternoon autumn light. I could actually see Dickens’s chalet and the mansard roof of his Gad’s Hill Place home through the trees.
I put my hand on the Inimitable’s shoulder before he could begin walking again. “Is increasing your knowledge and skill in mesmerism the reason you disappear into London at least one night a week?” I asked.
“Ah, so there is a spy in my family circle. One with frequent digestion problems, might I guess?”
“No, it is not my brother, Charles,” I said a trifle sharply. “Charles Collins is a man who keeps confidences and is fiercely loyal to you, Dickens. And he will someday be the father of your grandchildren. You should hold him in higher esteem.”
Something flickered across the writer’s face then. It was not quite a shadow—perhaps an instant of revulsion, although whether it was at the thought of my brother married to his daughter (a union of which he never approved) or another reminder of Dickens himself being old enough to be a grandfather, I will never know.
“You are correct, Wilkie. I apologise for my jesting, although the jests have been made with familial affection. But some quiet voice tells me that there will be no grandchildren issued from the union of Katey Dickens and Charles Collins.”
Now what the deuce did he mean by that? Before we came to blows or resumed walking in silence again, I said, “It was Katey who told me about your weekly trips to the city. She and Georgina and your son Charles are worried about you. They know that the accident still haunts and afflicts you. Now they fear that I have introduced you to some foul abomination in the fleshpots of London to which you are, if you will pardon the expression, magnetically drawn at least one full night a week.”
Dickens threw his head back and laughed.
“Come, Wilkie. If you cannot stay for the delectable dinner Georgina has planned, at least you must stay long enough to enjoy a cigar with me as we look in on the stables and watch the children and John Forster at play on the lawn. Then I’ll have little Plorn take you by cart to the station for the early-evening express.”
THE DOGS RUSHED us as we came up the drive.
Dickens almost always kept dogs chained near the gate, since too many surly vagabonds and unkempt vagrants exercised the habit of wandering off Dover Road to ask for unmerited handouts at the back or front door of Gad’s Hill Place. First to welcome us this afternoon was Mrs Bouncer, Mary’s tiny little Pomeranian, for whom Dickens adopted a special, childish, almost squeaky voice for all his communications. A second later bounded up Linda, the ambling, bouncing, rolling Saint Bernard who always seemed to be in a perpetual tumbling match with the great mastiff named Turk. Now these three entered into an absolute ecstasy of leaping and licking and tail-wagging at the greeting of their master, who—I freely admit—did have an extraordinary way with animals. As with so many people, dogs and horses seemed to understand that Charles Dickens was the Inimitable and needed to be revered as such.
As I was trying to pat the Saint Bernard and pet the frolicking mastiff and avoid the leaping little Pomeranian, all of whom kept abandoning me to return to Dickens in their transports of delight, a new dog—one unknown to me, a large Irish bloodhound—came broiling around the curve of the hedge and ran at me, growling and snarling as if it were going to rip my throat out. I confess that I raised my stick and took several steps backwards down the drive.
“Stop, Sultan!” shouted Dickens, and the attacking dog first froze a mere six paces from me and then crouched in pure canine guilt and submission as his master chided him in his equally pure dog-chiding voice. Then Dickens scratched behind the miscreant’s ears.
I stepped closer, and the bloodhound growled and showed his fangs again. Dickens ceased scratching. Sultan showed guilt, shrank lower into the drive’s gravel, and set his muzzle against Dickens’s boots.
“I don’t know this dog,” I said.
Dickens shook his head. “Percy Fitzgerald made a gift of Sultan to me only a few weeks ago. I confess that at times the dog reminds me of you, Wilkie.”
“How is that?”
“First of all, he is absolutely fearless,” said Dickens. “Secondly, he is absolutely loyal… he obeys only me but he obeys me completely. Thirdly, he is contemptuous of all public opinion as regards his behaviour; he hates soldiers and attacks them on sight; he hates policemen and has been known to chase them down the highway; and he hates all others of his kind.”
“I do not hate all others of my kind,” I said softly. “And I have never attacked a soldier or chased a policeman.”