In the quiet of my room—although I could hear squeals of delight from the children and Charles Dickens downstairs in the parlour as they played their games—I removed the jug of laudanum from its well-protected place in my valise and filled the clean glass that sat next to the constantly replenished jug of cool water by the hand basin. The evening, I was sure, would be a trial for me—physically as well as emotionally. I downed the first glass of medicine and filled the next.
You may be wondering, Dear Reader from my possibly judgemental future, why I had agreed to inform on Dickens to the inquisitive former policeman. I hope you have not thought less of me during the pages of memoir that have intervened here since I related consummating that conspiratorial deal.
The reasons I agreed to that Faustian bargain were threefold—
First, I believe that Dickens wanted me to tell former inspector Charles Frederick Field both everything that had happened that night we searched for Drood and everything the Inimitable had told me about Drood since that night. Why would Dickens want me to inform on him? you ask. I am not certain of all the reasons, but I am quite certain that the author wanted me to do so without actually requesting me to do so. Dickens knew that the private detective was querying me. He certainly knew that a man like Field would attempt to blackmail me beyond a mere threat to expose the very public nature of my relationship with Caroline. More to the point, Dickens would never have told me the story of Drood’s background or admitted to the fact of his—the writer’s—trips to London’s Undertown if Dickens had not anticipated, even wanted, me to forward the information to the bullying inspector.
What Dickens’s game was, I did not know. But the sense of silent collusion was thicker between the Inimitable and me than it was between the scheming Inspector Field and myself.
Second, I had my own strong reasons for using the inspector as my means to gather information about Charles Dickens and Ellen Ternan. There, I knew, in that aspect of his life, Dickens would never share information with me. His relationship with the actress, long before the expository intervention of the Staplehurst disaster, had changed every aspect of the Inimitable’s life and every relationship—including his with me—in that life. Yet the details and extent of that secret relationship and busy Second Life would, if Dickens were to have his way (and when did he not?), remain a mystery until and after the end of his life. I had reasons, which I may reveal to you later, Dear Reader, for needing to know those details. Inspector Field, with his proclivity for prying and his complete lack of a gentleman’s moral perspective and with the help of his far-flung group of busy detectives, was the perfect source of this information.
Third, I entered into the apparent conspiracy with Inspector Field out of my own need to rearrange elements of an intimate relationship with Charles Dickens that I had seen deteriorate over the past year, long before Staplehurst. In a real sense, I was transmitting the Drood information to the detective in order to help protect Charles Dickens at one of his most vulnerable times. I felt that a renewal of our endangered friendship—and the reassertion of my own eroded equality in it—was important if my friend Charles Dickens was to be helped and protected.
Twenty minutes had passed since I had drunk the laudanum, and I could feel the encroaching pain from rheumatical gout begin to release its vice around my aching head and bowels and extremities. A sense of deep equilibrium and mental alertness spread through my system.
Whatever the surprises Charles Dickens had for us at this Christmas Dinner, I now felt ready to face them with my usual and expected Wilkie Collins brand of poise and good humour.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
No—er—Dickens! I swear! Not this—er—er—not this, this Our Mutual Friend nonsense! No! It is—er—it is—Copperfield, by God! I swear to Heaven that, as a piece of passion and playfulness—er, ah—indescribably mixed up together, it does—No, really, Dickens! — Copperfield! — amaze me as profoundly as it—er—as it moves me. But as a piece of Art—and you know—er—that I—No, Dickens! By God! — have seen the best Art in a great time—it is incomprehensible to me. How it is got at—er—how it is done—er—how one man can—well! It lays me on my—er—back, and it is of no use talking about it.”
This was our Surprise Guest speaking and mopping at his huge, pale, perspiring forehead with his paisely silk handkerchief. Then the old man began mopping his rheumy eyes as they began leaking tears.
Our Mystery Guests were, of course, William Charles Macready, the Eminent Tragedian, and his new wife, Cecile.
I hope and pray that I do not sense a silence on your distant end of this memoir through time, Dear Reader, for if your era has forgotten William Charles Macready, what hope do I have that the name or work of little Wilkie Collins has survived?
William Charles Macready was the Eminent Tragedian of our age, inheriting Kean’s mantle and—according to many—surpassing that earlier giant of Shakespearean Theatre in both subtlety of interpretation and refinement of sensibility. Macready’s most memorable roles in his many decades of dominating the English stage were as Macbeth in that unnameable production and as King Lear. Born in 1793, if my arithmetic is correct, Macready was already a mature and recognised star of the stage and famous public man when young Dickens—the Inimitable Boz, as he was known in his first flush of success after The Pickwick Papers—was just a stagestruck lad. Macready’s unique mastery of pathos and remorse on stage, often at the expense of any sense of the nobility or greatness so often worn by Shakespearean actors, resonated strongly with the young writer’s own abilities in those areas.
Macready also was, as was Dickens, a complex, sensitive, and paradoxical man. As outwardly certain of everything as the Inimitable himself, Macready was—according to those who knew him best—also privately in doubt much of the time. Proud of his profession in the same way that Dickens was of his, he also was insecure (just as Dickens sometimes was) that such a profession could allow him to be a true gentleman. But from the late 1830s on, the rising star Dickens and his friends Macready, Forster, Maclise, Ainsworth, Beard, and Mitton composed an inner circle of talent and ambition rarely equalled in our little island’s history.
Of all these men, William Charles Macready was—until Dickens’s ultimate ascendency—by far the most famous.
For many years (decades actually), the Inimitable Boz wrote admiring reviews from the sidelines, especially cheering on (along with his co-writer and editor John Forster) such theatrical innovations as Macready’s production of Lear—which restored Shakespeare’s true and tragic vision after more than a century and a half in which audiences had no choice but to suffer through Nahum Tate’s abysmal “happy ending” adaptation. Macready had also reintroduced the Fool to the cast of Lear, an act of inspired salvage to which Charles Dickens’s sensibilities had resonated as if he had been a bell struck by a hammer. I once looked up Dickens’s writing on this particular matter, and beyond Dickens’s referring to the renewed presence of the Fool as “singular and masterly relief” to the overwhelming presence of the Lear character, the ecstatic Boz had called Macready’s production “magnificent” and had elaborated—
The heart, soul, and brain of the ruined piece of nature, in all the stages of its ruining, were laid bare before us.… The tenderness, the rage, the madness, the remorse, and sorrow, all come of one another, and are linked together in one chain.