“Charles,” I said, chuckling but not amused, “whatever on earth for? I came to hear the details of your terrible accident, not to play parlour games with a watch and…”
“Humour me, my dear Wilkie,” Dickens said softly. “You know that I have had some success with mesmerising others—I have told you, I believe, of my long and rather successful mesmeric therapy with poor Madame de la Rue on the Continent.”
I could only grunt noncommittally. Dickens had told all of his friends and acquaintances about his long and obsessive series of treatments with “poor” Madame de la Rue. What he did not share with us, but which was common knowledge among his intimates, was that his sessions with the married and obviously insane lady, which occurred at odd times of the night as well as day, had made Dickens’s wife, Catherine, so jealous that—for perhaps the first time in her married life—she had demanded Dickens stop them.
“Please keep your eyes on the watch,” said Dickens as he swung the gold disk back and forth in the dim light.
“This won’t work, my dear Charles.”
“You are getting very drowsy, Wilkie… very drowsy.… It is difficult for you to keep your eyes open. You are as sleepy as if you had just taken several drops of laudanum.”
I almost laughed aloud at this. I had taken several dozen drops of laudanum before coming to Gad’s Hill, as I did every morning. And I was overdue in sipping more from my silver flask.
“You are getting… very… sleepy…” droned Dickens.
For a few seconds I tried to comply, just to humour the Inimitable. It was obvious that he was seeking distraction from the terrors of his recent accident. I focused on the swinging watch. I listened to Dickens’s droning voice. In truth, the heavy warmth of the closed room, the lowered lights, the single gleam of gold swinging back and forth, but mostly the amount of laudanum I had taken that morning, lured me—for the briefest of instants—into the briefest state of fuzzy-headedness.
If I would have allowed myself to, I might have fallen asleep then, if not into the mesmeric trance that Dickens would have so loved to induce in me.
Instead, I shook the fuzziness away before it took hold and said brusquely, “I am sorry, Charles. It simply does not work with me. My will is too strong.”
Dickens sighed and put away the watch. Then he walked over and opened the drapes a bit. The sunlight made both of us blink. “It’s true,” said Dickens. “The wills of real writers are too strong to be subdued by the mesmeric arts.”
I laughed. “Then make your character Jasper—if you ever write this novel based on your dream—something other than a writer.”
Dickens smiled wanly. “So I shall, my dear Wilkie.” He returned to his chair.
“How are Miss Ternan and her mother?” I asked.
Dickens did not hide a frown. Even with me, any discussion of that most personal and secret aspect of his life, however properly circumscribed it was in conversation and however much he needed to speak of her to someone, made him uncomfortable. “Miss Ternan’s mother escaped any real injury other than the shock to the system of someone her age,” rasped Dickens, “but Miss Ternan herself did suffer some rather serious bruises and what her doctor suggests was a slight cervical fracture or dislocation in her lower neck. She finds it very difficult to turn her head without serious pain.”
“I am very sorry to hear that,” I said.
Dickens did not say more about this. He asked softly, “Do you wish to hear the details of the accident and its aftermath, my dear Wilkie?”
“By all means, my dear Charles. By all means.”
“You understand that you shall be the only person to whom I shall reveal all of the details of this event?”
“I will be honoured to hear it,” I said. “And you can trust in my discretion until the grave and beyond.”
Now Dickens did smile—that sudden, sure, mischievous, and somehow boyish show of stained teeth from within the cumulus of beard he’d grown for my play The Frozen Deep eight years earlier and never shaven off. “Your grave or mine, Wilkie?” he asked.
I blinked in a second’s confusion or embarrassment. “Both, I assure you,” I said at last.
Dickens nodded and began rasping out the story of the Staplehurst accident.
DEAR GOD,” I whispered when Dickens was done some forty minutes later. And then again, “Dear God.”
“Exactly,” said the novelist.
“Those poor people,” I said, my voice almost as strained as Dickens’s. “Those poor people.”
“Unimaginable,” repeated Dickens. I had never heard him use this word before, but in this account he must have used it a dozen times. “Did I remember to tell you that the poor man whom we extricated from that truly extraordinary heap of dark ruins—he was jammed in upside down, you see—was bleeding from the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth as we searched frantically for his wife? It seems that a few minutes before the crash, this man had changed places with a Frenchman who disliked having the window down. We found the Frenchman dead. The bleeding man’s wife also dead.”
“Dear God,” I said yet again.
Dickens ran his hand over his eyes as if shielding them from the light. When he looked up again there was that intensity in his eyes that I confess I have never seen in another human being. As we shall see in this true tale I share with you, Dear Reader, the will of Charles Dickens was not to be denied.
“What did you think of my description of the figure that called itself Drood?” Dickens’s rasping query was soft but very intense.
“Quite incredible,” I said.
“Does that mean that you do not credit his existence or my description of him, my dear Wilkie?”
“Not at all, not at all,” I said hurriedly. “I am sure his appearance and behaviour were exactly as you described, Charles.… There is no more talented observer of individual human features and foibles either living or interred with all literary honours in Westminster Abbey than you, my friend… but Mr Drood is… incredible.”
“Precisely,” said Dickens. “And it is our duty now, my dear Wilkie—yours and mine—to find him.”
“Find him?” I repeated stupidly. “Why in heaven’s name should we do that?”
“There is a story in Mr Drood that must be unearthed,” whispered Dickens. “If you will pardon the grave overtones of that phrase. What was the man—if man he was—doing on the tidal train at this time? Why, when questioned by me, did he say that he was going to Whitechapel and the rookeries of the East End? What was his purpose among the dead and dying?”
I did not understand. “What could his purpose have been, Charles?” I asked. “Other than the same as yours—to help and console the living and to locate the dead?”
Dickens smiled again, but there was no warmth or boyishness in that smile. “There was something sinister afoot there, my dear Wilkie. I am sure of it. Several times, as I described to you, I saw this Drood… if that is the creature’s name… hovering near injured people, and when I later went to attend to those individuals, they were dead.”
“But you described how several of the people to whom you attended, Charles, also died when you returned to help them.”
“Yes,” rasped Dickens in that stranger’s voice, lowering his chin into his collars. “But I did not help them over to the other side.”
I sat back in shock. “Dear God. You’re suggesting that this operacaped, leprous-looking figure actually… murdered… some of the poor victims at Staplehurst?”
“I’m suggesting that some sort of cannibalism went on there, my dear Wilkie.”