“Who is it?” came a voice from within the study when Georgina knocked lightly.
I say “a voice” because it was not Charles Dickens’s voice. The novelist’s voice, as all who knew him long remembered, was low, quick, and burdened with a slight thickness which many mistook for a lisp and which had caused the writer, in recompense, to over-enunciate his vowels and consonants so that the rapid but very careful and rolling elocution sometimes sounded pompous to those who did not know him.
This voice was nothing like that. It was the reed-thin quaver of an old man.
“It’s Mr Collins,” said Georgina to the oak of the doorway.
“Tell him to go back to his sickroom,” rasped the old man’s voice from within.
I blinked at this. Since my younger brother, Charles, had married Kate Dickens five years earlier, he had suffered bouts of serious indigestion and occasional ill health, but—I was certain at the time—it was nothing serious. Dickens thought otherwise. The writer had opposed the marriage, had felt that his favourite daughter had married Charles—a sometimes illustrator of Dickens’s books—just to spite him, and obviously had convinced himself that my brother was dying. I’d recently heard on good authority that Dickens had said to Wills that my dear brother’s health rendered him “totally unfit for any function of this life,” and even had it been true—which it absolutely was not—it was a remarkably callous thing to say.
“No, Mr Wilkie,” Georgina said through the doors, glancing apprehensively over her shoulder as if in hopes that I had not heard.
“Oh,” came some oldster’s quavering syllable. “Why the deuce didn’t you say so?”
We heard vague scrambling and scrabbling sounds and then the turning of a key in the lock—which was extraordinary in itself, as Dickens had the odd habit of locking his study when he was not in it but never when he was—and then the doors were thrown open.
“My dear Wilkie, my dear Wilkie,” said Dickens in that odd rasp, throwing his arms open wide, then clasping my right shoulder with his left hand briefly before removing it to join the other hand that was enthusiastically shaking mine. I noticed that he was glancing at his watch on its chain. “Thank you, Georgina,” he added absently as he closed the doors behind us, not locking them this time. He led the way into his dark study.
Which was another oddity. As many times as I had visited Dickens in his sanctum sanctorum over the years, I had never seen the drapes drawn across the bow windows in the daytime. They were now. The only light came from the lamp on the table in the centre of the room; there was no lamp on the writing desk that faced those three windows and which was set into the small bay they created. Only a few of us had been privileged to see Dickens actually in the act of creation in this study, but all of us who had must have noted the mild irony that Dickens invariably faced the windows looking out into his garden and towards Gravesend Road but never saw anything of the scene before him when he looked up from his quill and paper. The writer was lost in the worlds of his own imaginings and effectively blind while working, except when glancing into a nearby mirror to see his own expressions while acting out the grimaces, grins, frowns, expressions of shock, and other caricature-like responses of his characters.
Dickens pulled me deeper into the dark room and waved me to a chair near his desk and sat in his cushioned work chair. Except for the closed drapes, the room looked as it always had—everything neat and orderly in an almost compulsive manner (and without a hint of dust, even though Dickens never allowed the servants to dust or clean in his study). There was the desk with its tilted writing surface, the little array of his carefully arranged tools, never out of order, arrayed like talismans on the flat part of the desk—a date calendar, ink-bottle, quills, a pencil with a nearby India rubber eraser that looked to have never been used, a pincushion, a small bronze statuette of two toads duelling, a paper-knife aligned just so, a gilded leaf with a stylised rabbit on it. These were his good-luck symbols—his “appurtenances,” Dickens called them, something, he once said to me, “for my eye to rest on during the intervals between writing”—and he could no more write at Gad’s Hill without them than he could without his goose quills.
Much of the study was lined with books, including shelves of false books—most with ironic titles of Dickens’s own invention—that he’d had made for Tavistock House and which now were set into the back of the door, and the real built-in bookcases that circled the room were broken up only by the windows and a handsome blue-and-white fireplace decorated with twenty Delft tiles.
Dickens himself looked almost shockingly aged this June-day afternoon, his encroaching baldness, deep-set eyes, and the wrinkles and lines in his face emphasised by the harsh light from the gas lamp on the table behind us. He kept glancing at his unopened watch.
“So good of you to come, my dear Wilkie,” rasped Dickens.
“Nonsense, nonsense,” I said. “I would have been here sooner had I not been out of town, as I trust my brother informed you. Your voice sounds strained, Charles.”
“Strange?” said Dickens with a flash of a smile.
“Strained.”
He barked a laugh. Very few conversations with Charles Dickens did not include a laugh from him. I had never met a man so given to laughter. Almost no moment or context was too serious for this author not to find some levity in it, as some of us had discovered to our embarrassment at funerals.
“Strange is more appropriate, I would venture,” said Dickens in that odd old-man’s rasp. “I most unaccountably brought someone else’s voice out of the terrible scene of the Staplehurst disaster. I do wish that person would return my voice and take back his own.… I find this ageing-Micawber tone not at all to my liking. It feels rather as if one is applying sandpaper simultaneously to vocal cords and vowels.”
“Are you otherwise uninjured, my friend?” I asked, leaning forward into the circle of lamplight.
Dickens waved away the question and returned his attention to the gold watch now in his hands. “My dear Wilkie, I had the most astonishing dream last night.”
“Oh?” I said sympathetically. I assumed I would be hearing his nightmares about the accident at Staplehurst.
“It seemed almost as though I were reading a book that I had written in the future,” he said softly, still turning the watch over and over in his hands. The gold caught the light from the single lamp. “It was a terrible thing… all about a man who mesmerised himself so that he, or his other self created by these mesmeric suggestions, could carry out terrible deeds, unspeakable actions. Selfish, lustful, destructive things that the man—for some reason in the dream I wanted to call him Jasper—would never consciously do. And there was another… creature… involved somehow.”
“Mesmerise himself,” I murmured. “That is not possible, is it? I defer to your longer involvement and training in the art of magnetic influence, my dear Charles.”
“I have no idea. I have never heard of it being done, but that does not necessarily mean it is impossible.” He looked up. “Have you ever been mesmerised, Wilkie?”
“No,” I said with a soft laugh. “Although a few have tried.” I did not feel it necessary to add that Professor John Elliotson, formerly of the University College Hospital and Dickens’s very own mentor and instructor in the art of mesmerism, had himself found it impossible to make me submit to the mesmeric influence. My will was simply too strong.
“Let us try,” said Dickens, dangling the watch by its chain and beginning to swing it in a pendulum motion.