I said, “I believe that Dickens threatened to kill me this afternoon if I did not follow his commands. To put me down like a disobedient dog.”
“Wilkie!” Her horror was real and her face went white in the low lamplight.
I forced a laugh. “Never mind, my dearest. Nothing of the sort actually happened, of course. Just another example of Wilkie Collins’s penchant for hyperbole. We had a delightful walk and chat this afternoon and more enjoyable conversation over the long dinner and brandy and cigars afterwards. John Forster and his new bride were there.”
“Oh, that bore.”
“Yes.” I removed my glasses and rubbed my temples. “I should go to bed.”
“Poor darling,” said Caroline. “Would it help to have your muscles rubbed?”
“Yes,” I said. “I believe it would.”
I do not know where Caroline G— learned the art of muscular massage. I have never asked. As is true of so much of her life before I met her ten years earlier, that remains a mystery.
But the pleasure and relaxation her hands gave me were no mystery.
Some half an hour later in my bedroom, when she was finished, she whispered, “Shall I stay tonight, my darling?”
“Not tonight, my love. The gout is still very much with me—as pleasure ebbs, the pain flows back in, as you know—and I have serious work to do early tomorrow.”
Caroline nodded, kissed me on the cheek, took the candle lamp on the dresser, and went downstairs.
I considered writing then, working through the night as I had so often done on The Woman in White and earlier books, but a subtle noise from the first-floor landing beyond my bedroom door convinced me to stay where I was. The woman with green skin and tusk-teeth was growing more bold. For months after we moved here she had contained her prowlings to the steep and dark servants’ stairway, but now I frequently heard her bare feet on the rug and wood of the landing after midnight.
Or the noise could have come from my study. That would be worse, to go in there in the dark and see him writing in my place in the moonlight.
I stayed in my bedroom and crossed to the window, quietly parting the drapes.
Near the lamp post on the corner loitered a boy in rags. He was sitting with his back against a dustbin, possibly sleeping. Or possibly looking up towards my window. His eyes were in shadow.
I closed the drapes and went back to bed. Sometimes the laudanum keeps me awake all night; at other times, it carries me away to powerful dreams.
I was drifting off to sleep, banishing Charles Dickens and his phantom Drood from my thoughts, when my nostrils were filled with a cloying, almost sickening scent—rotting meat, perhaps—and images of scarlet geraniums, bundles and heaps and funeral-thick towers of scarlet geraniums, pulsed behind my eyelids like spurtings of blood.
“My God,” I said aloud, sitting up in the dark, filled with a certainty so absolute as to be a form of clairvoyance. “Charles Dickens is going to murder Edmond Dickenson.”
CHAPTER TEN
After making notes of my conversation with Dickens the next morning, I breakfasted late and alone at my club. I needed time to think.
Dickens had pressed me several times the preceding day on whether I believed him, but the truth is, I did not. At least not fully. I was not certain that he ever met with anyone named Drood down there in the sewers and labyrinths under London. I had seen the rowboat-gondola and its two odd men, Venus and Mercury, Dickens had called them, so that was something certain to begin with.
Or had I seen them? I remembered the boat arriving and Dickens boarding and disappearing around the bend with the masked figure poling near the bow and the other masked figure steering with the stern sweep… or did I? I had been exhausted and frightened and yet also sleepy. I had taken extra doses of my medicine before joining Dickens that night and then drunk more wine than I usually did at dinner. The entire experience of that evening, even before we went down through a crypt to find the Chinese Lazaree opium lord, all seemed dreamlike and unreal.
But what about Dickens’s biographical tale of Mr Drood?
What about it? Charles Dickens’s imagination could furnish a thousand such tales with only seconds of notice. In fact, the story of Drood’s childhood, English father, murdered Mohammadan mother… it all sounded contrived to a level far below Charles Dickens’s creative powers.
But, oddly enough, it was the part of the story concerning Drood’s abilities with mesmerism and Magnetic Influence that made me want to believe the bulk of the Inimitable’s tale. It also explained why Dickens, terrified now of riding in trains and even carriages, would come into London from Gad’s Hill at least once a week.
He was a student… or perhaps “acolyte” was a better word… of the Master Mesmerist named Drood.
AS I HAD KNOWN even before he had tried (and failed) to mesmerise me shortly after Staplehurst, Dickens’s fascination with mesmerism went back almost thirty years, to the time when the writer was known everywhere primarily by his early nom de plume of “Boz.” All of England was interested in mesmerism at that time: the phenomenon had been imported from France, where a “magnetic boy” seemed to be able to tell time on people’s watches and read cards in a mesmeric trance even while his head and eyes were heavily bandaged. I did not know Dickens then, of course, but he had described more than once how he had attended as many demonstrations of mesmerism as he could find in London. But it was the professor Dickens had mentioned, a certain John Elliotson from University College Hospital, who most impressed the young Boz.
In 1838, Elliotson used his Magnetic Influence to place his subjects—some of them patients at his hospital in London—into a much deeper trance than most mesmerists could achieve. From the depths of those trances, his men and women, boys and girls, not only made strides towards cures of chronic conditions, but also could be induced into prophetic and even clairvoyant states. The Okey sisters, both epileptics, not only left their wheeled chairs to sing and dance while mesmerised by Professor Elliotson, but also showed strong evidence of second sight under what young Dickens had been convinced had been a controlled condition. Dickens was, in other words, a convert.
For a man with no real religious convictions, Dickens became a true believer in animal magnetism and in the mesmeric powers that controlled this energy. You must remember, Dear Reader, the context of our times: science was making huge strides in understanding the underlying and interrelated energies and fluids such as magnetism and electricity. The flow and control of mesmeric fluid common to all living things, but especially to the human mind and body, seemed to Dickens to be as scientific and as demonstrable as breakthroughs shown by Faraday when he generated electricity with a magnet.
The next year, 1839, when Elliotson resigned his position of Professor of Principles and Practices of Medicine at University College—due to pressure, everyone understood, because of the sensational nature of his mesmeric demonstrations—Dickens supported the doctor in public, loaned him money in private, arranged for Elliotson to attend to Dickens’s parents and other family members, and—some years later—attempted to help the distraught and despondent doctor when he became suicidal.
Dickens never allowed himself to be mesmerised, of course. Anyone who thought that Charles Dickens might surrender such control of himself to another person, even briefly, did not know Charles Dickens. It was the young Boz, soon to be the mature Inimitable, who invariably sought to control other people. Mesmerism became just one of the tools he used, but it was one he would be interested in for the rest of his life.