“Cannibalism!” For the first time I wondered if the accident had mentally unhinged my famous friend. It was true that during his narration of the accident, I’d held serious doubts about the description and even the actual existence of this “Drood”—the man seemed more a character out of a sensationalist novel than any human reality that could be encountered on the tidal train from Folkestone—but I had ascribed that possibility of hallucination to the same sense of shock and disorientation that had robbed Dickens of his voice. But if Dickens were imagining cannibalism, it was quite possible that the accident had robbed him of his reason as well as his voice.
He was smiling at me again and the intensity of his gaze was precisely the kind that made so many first-time interlocutors believe that Charles Dickens could read their minds. “No, my dear Wilkie, I am not deranged,” he said softly. “Mr Drood was as corporeal as you or I and even stranger—in some indefinable way—than I have described. Had I conceived of him as a character for one of my novels, I would not have described him as I met him in reality—too strange, too threatening, too physically grotesque for fiction, my dear Wilkie. But in reality, as you well know, such phantom figures do exist. One passes them on the street. One finds them during nocturnal walks through Whitechapel or other parts of London. And often their stories are stranger than anything a mere novelist could devise.”
It was my turn to smile. Few had ever heard the Inimitable refer to himself as “a mere novelist” and I was quite sure that he had not done so now. He was speaking of other “mere novelists.” Myself, perhaps. I asked, “So what do you propose we do to find this Mr Drood, Charles? And what do we do with the gentleman once we’ve located him?”
“Do you remember when we investigated that haunted house?” asked the writer.
I did. Several years ago, Dickens—as head of his new magazine, All the Year Round, that had supplanted his former Household Words after a spat with his publishers—had become embroiled in debates with various spiritualists. The 1850s had been a mad time for table rapping, seances, mesmerism—some of which Dickens not only did believe in but in which he was an eager practitioner—and other such fascination with invisible energies. As much as Dickens believed in and relied upon mesmerism, sometimes called animal magnetism, and as superstitious as I knew him to be at heart (he truly believed that Friday was his lucky day, for instance), he had chosen (as editor of his new journal) to pick a quarrel with various spiritualists. When one of his adversaries in the debate, a spiritualist named William Howitt, was giving details of a haunted house in Cheshunt, near London, to prop up his arguments, Dickens immediately decided that we—the editors and managers of All the Year Round—should set up an expedition to investigate the hauntings.
W. H. Wills and I had gone ahead in a brougham, but Dickens and one of our contributors, John Hollingshead, walked the sixteen miles to the village. After some trouble finding the house in question (luckily Dickens had sent along a repast of fresh fish with Wills and me, since he would not trust the local fare), we finally found a villa that was said to be on the property of the so-called haunted house and spent the rest of our afternoon and evening questioning neighbours, nearby tradesmen, and even passers-by, but in the end we decided that Howitt’s “ghosts” consisted of rats and a servant named Frank who enjoyed poaching rabbits in odd hours of the night.
Dickens had been brave enough on that outing, in the daylight and in the company of three other men, but I’d heard that on another ghost expedition, this one at night and investigating a reputedly haunted monument near Gad’s Hill Place, the writer had brought his male servants and a loaded shotgun along. According to the author’s youngest son, called Plorn by the family, his father had been quite nervous and had announced, “… if anybody is playing tricks and has got a head, I’ll blow it off.” And they did hear an unearthly wailing, moaning, “terrific noise—human noise—and yet superhuman noise.”
It turned out to be an asthmatic sheep. Dickens restrained himself from blowing its head off. He treated everyone—servants and children all—to rum-and-water when they returned to the house.
“We knew where the haunted house was,” I pointed out to Dickens this June day in his dark study. “How do we find Mr Drood? Where do we look, Charles?”
Suddenly Dickens’s expression and physical stance changed. His face seemed to lengthen and crease and grow even paler. His eyes widened until it seemed he had no eyelids and the whites of those eyes glowed in the lamplight. His posture became that of a crooked old man, or a lurking gravedigger, or a buzzard. His voice, still raspy, became high and reedy and afflicted with a hiss as his long, pale fingers stabbed at the air like a dark magician’s.
“To Limehoussse,” he hissed, acting out the Drood in his former tale. “Whitechapel. Ratcliff Crossss. Gin Alley. Three Foxesss Court. Butcher Row and Commercial Road. The Mint and other rookeriessss.”
I admit that the hair stood on the back of my neck. Charles Dickens was first, as a lad, even before he began to write, such a mimic that his father would take him to public houses to imitate locals they had encountered on their walks. At this moment I began to believe that there was such a creature as Drood.
“When?” I asked.
“Sssoooon,” hissed Dickens, but smiling now, himself again. “We’ve taken such excursions into Babylon before, my dear Wilkie. We have seen the Great Oven at night.”
We had. He had always been fascinated with this underbelly of our city. And “Babylon” and “the Great Oven” were the author’s pet expressions for the worst slums in London. Some of my nocturnal ventures with Dickens into these dark lanes and tenement hovels in earlier years still bothered my dreams.
“I am your man, my dear Dickens,” I said with enthusiasm. “I will report for duty tomorrow night, if that is your pleasure.”
He shook his head. “I have to recover my voice, my dear Wilkie. I am behind schedule on the last numbers of Our Mutual Friend. There are other things to be seen to in the coming days, including the recovery of the Patient. Are you spending the night, sir? Your room is ready, as always.”
“Alas, I cannot,” I said. “I have to get back to the city this afternoon. There are business affairs there that must be attended.” I did not tell Dickens that those “business affairs” consisted primarily of buying more laudanum, a substance which I could not do without, even then in 1865, for so long as a day.
“Very good,” he said, rising. “Could you do me a great favour, my dear Wilkie?”
“Anything in the world, my dear Dickens,” I said. “Command me, my friend.”
Dickens glanced at his watch. “It’s too late for you to catch the next train in from Gravesend, but if Charley gets the pony cart out, we can get you to Higham in time for the express to Charing Cross Station.”
“I am going to Charing Cross?”
“You are, my dear Wilkie,” he said, clasping me firmly on the shoulder as we came out of the gloom of his study into the brighter light of the entry hall. “I shall tell you why as I accompany you to the station.”
GEORGINA DID NOT COME out of the house with us, but the Inimitable’s oldest son, Charley, had come down to spend a few days with his father and was sent round to hitch up the basket cart. The front yard at Gad’s Hill was as tidy as everything else under the man’s controclass="underline" Dickens’s favourite flower, scarlet geraniums, planted in precise rows; the two large cedars of Lebanon just beyond the neatly trimmed lawn and now throwing their shadows to the east along the road.