“I believe that you are correct, Mr Collins,” said Field with that satisfied and strangely evil grin.
“Do you have any idea what he is asking for the place?” I said.
“I did take the liberty of enquiring,” said Inspector Field. “Lord Portman says that he would agree to a twenty-year lease on the property for eight hundred pounds. That includes those lovely stables in the mews, of course. One could sublet those to offset the rent.”
My mouth went dry and I sipped some port. £800 was a fortune—more than I had free at the time—but I also knew that upon the event of my mother’s death, Charley and I would inherit, in equal shares, some £5,000 left to her by her aunt, even though—due to the terms of our father’s will—the rest of the capital in his estate and hers would remain tied up. And the inspector was undoubtedly right about the prospect of subletting the rather handsome stables.
Inspector Field had removed two suspiciously dark cigars from his jacket pocket. “I presume your club’s policies allow smoking in the dining hall,” he said.
“Of course.”
He clipped off the ends of both cigars, handed me one, lit his, puffed happily, and held the match out to light mine. I bent forward and allowed him to do so.
Inspector Field waved over Bartles, the oldest and most dignified of the club’s waiters, and said, “My good man, be so kind as to bring me a glass of what Mr Collins is drinking. Thank you.”
As Bartles hurried away—frowning slightly at this indifferently dressed stranger’s peremptory tone—I marvelled, not for the first time, at how my destinies had become so intertwined with this strange, imperious policeman’s.
“Good cigar, don’t you think, Mr Collins?”
It tasted like something grown and harvested in a mouldering boot in a forgotten cellar. “First-rate,” I said.
The inspector’s wine arrived and the always-aware and always-conservative parsimonious part of my mind added it, reluctantly, to my already significant tab here at the club.
“To your very good turn of fortune, sir,” said Inspector Field, lifting his glass.
I lifted mine and touched crystal to crystal, thinking as I did so that perhaps Caroline would now—finally—quit complaining and caterwauling. I confess that not once then or in the coming days did I think of poor Mrs Shernwold and her ironic fate, except when I lied to Caroline about where and how the old lady had met her demise.
I BELIEVE THAT this is time, Dear Reader from my posthumous future, for me to tell you a little bit about the Other Wilkie.
I have to presume that until now you have believed this Other Wilkie to be either a figment of my imagination or a function of the laudanum I am forced to take. He is neither.
All my life I have been haunted by a second self. As a very young child I was sure that I had a twin as a playmate and often told my mother about him. As a boy, I would hear my father speak of giving drawing lessons “to Wilkie” and know that I had not been in the house at the time. It was my Doppelgänger who had benefited from those lessons. As a very young man of fifteen, encountering my first experience of physical love with an older woman, I was not surprised to look over into the shadowed corner and see the Other Wilkie—as young and bright-eyed and unbearded as myself—watching with great interest. In my early adulthood, this second self seemed to recede into the grey realm from which he had come. For several years, I was sure that I had left him behind.
But a few years before the period I write of in this memoir, when the rheumatoid gout became too persistently painful to endure without the help of tincture of opium, the Other Wilkie returned. While my personality had become softer, more convivial, friendly to all, that of the Other Wilkie seemed to have grown harsher and more aggressive during our absence from one another. Years earlier, when I had first met Percy Fitzgerald (before Fitzgerald had become such a favourite of Dickens), I confided to the younger man how I “was subject to a curious ghostly influence, having often the idea that ‘someone is standing behind me.’ ”
I was never dismissive of the effect that the laudanum had on summoning this Other Wilkie. As Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater and a friend to both my parents, once wrote—“If a man ‘whose talk is full of oxen,’ should become an Opium-eater, the probability is, that (if he is not too dull to dream at all)—he will dream about oxen.” My obsession, in both my writing and my life, has been about double identity—of a Doppelgänger hovering just beyond the hazy boundaries of day-to-day reality—so there is little wonder that the opium I consumed daily, a drug so frequently and effectively used to open doors to other realities, should have summoned the Other Wilkie who had been my nursery-room playmate.
Should you know my writings, Dear Reader, you would be aware that this question of identity has permeated most of my stories and all of my novels, beginning with Antonina, which I began when I was only twenty-two years of age. Doubles, often representing good and evil, wander the pages of my tales. Frequently my characters (I think of Laura Fairlie in my Woman in White and Magdalen Vanstone in my more recent No Name) have their identities cruelly and violently taken from them so that they must go inhabit the hollow husks of other names, other minds, other skins.
Even when my characters are permitted to retain their own identities, more often than not in my novels they must conceal those identities, assume the identities of others, or face the loss of that identity through injury to their sight, hearing, speech, or because of loss of limbs. New personalities are constantly surfacing within my characters, a transformation brought about more and more frequently by the use of drugs.
Charles Dickens despised this aspect to my writing, but my readers apparently loved it. And I should mention that I was not the only writer to be obsessed with the questions of “the other self” and of dual, twin, or confused identities: a certain scribbler with the name of William Shakespeare had included such themes and conventions in his work far more frequently than I.
I often wondered—even before the nightmare period of Drood began—if I was a lesser man because of the traits missing in me but presumably present in the Other Wilkie. There is, for instance, the matter of my name. Or, rather, other people’s use of my name.
I seemed to be “Wilkie” to everyone: not “Mr Collins” (although Inspector Field and his operatives had gone out of their way to use the honourific) nor even “Collins” (as in the way I might call Charles Dickens “my dear Dickens” to his face)… merely “Wilkie.” It was as if I had always remained a child to others, even to children. Carrie grew up calling me Wilkie. Dickens’s many children, during all the years of their growth, called me Wilkie unless ordered otherwise by Dickens or Catherine or Georgina. Men at my club, who would never address their peers with their Christian names, even though they may have known these others for decades, felt free to call me Wilkie almost immediately after our introductions.
It was a curious thing.
The morning after I peered in on Dickens speaking with Drood and the Other Wilkie in my study—and then hastily retreated—I confessed to the Inimitable over breakfast that I had had a strange dream about such a meeting.
“But it was real!” cried Dickens. “You were there, my dear Wilkie! We spoke for hours.”
“I remember none of the content of the discussion,” I said, feeling my skin prickle with icy needles.
“That is perhaps for the best,” said Dickens. “Drood sometimes uses his magnetic influence to erase some or all memory of a meeting, should he think that such a memory would put him or his interlocutor in danger. Such mesmeric erasure does not work with me, of course, since I am a co-practitioner of the mesmeric arts.”