I confess to sitting at the main table that night, my head spinning with wine and an extra fortifying round of laudanum, and wondering what all these famous guests—Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, Sir Charles Russell, Lord Houghton, a veritable gaggle of Royal Academicians, the Lord Mayor of London—might say if they could have seen Dickens descending into the sewers of Undertown as I had. Or if they had any suspicion of the probable fate of a lonely young man named Edmond Dickenson.
Perhaps it would not have mattered to them.
On 9 November, I went up to Liverpool with Caroline and Carrie to see Dickens off as he departed for America.
The author had been given the Second Officer’s spacious cabin on the deck of the Cuba. (Carrie later asked me where the Second Officer might be sleeping during the crossing, and I had to admit that I had no idea.) Unlike most accommodations on the ship, the cabin had both a door and a window that could be opened to take advantage of the fresh sea air.
Dickens was fretful and distracted during our short visit and only I knew why. And I knew why only because of my continued association with Inspector Field.
Despite his first-hand knowledge of the Puritanical conservative nature of Americans from a quarter of a century earlier, Dickens somehow had not yet surrendered his plan to bring Ellen Ternan to America so that she could share the tour with him, perhaps in the disguise of an assistant to Dolby. This would never come to pass, of course, but Dickens was truly a hopeless romantic when it came to such fantasies.
I was not supposed to know about it, but the Inimitable had arranged with Wills at the magazine office to forward a coded telegram to the young actress in which she would be instructed on what to do once Dickens arrived in the New World. A message of “All well” would have her speeding on the next ship to America, all expenses paid through an account Dickens had left under Wills’s supervision. A reluctant code of “Safe and well” would mean that she would remain on the Continent, where she and her mother were currently vacationing while she waited word on her fate.
In his heart—or perhaps “in his rational mind” would be more appropriate—Dickens must have known that fair day of 9 November, as I had known when I first heard of the foolish scheme through Inspector Field, that the message “Safe and well,” meaning “Lonely but very, very much in the scowling, prying, judging, public American eye,” would be the one sent to Ellen via Wills.
Our own goodbyes were emotional. Dickens was aware of how much work he had left for me to finish—the proofings and revisions of No Thoroughfare as well as the scripting and staging with Fechter—but there was more to the emotion than that. After Carrie, Caroline, and I had descended the gangplank, I returned to the airy Second Officer’s cabin under the pretext of having forgotten one of my gloves. Dickens was expecting me.
“I pray God that Drood will not follow me to America,” he whispered as we again clasped hands in farewell.
“He will not,” I said with a certainty I did not feel.
As I turned to leave, thinking that it was possible—even probable—that I would never see my friend Charles Dickens again, he stopped me.
“Wilkie… in the conversation with Drood in your study on nine June, the discussion you do not remember… I feel it necessary to warn you…”
I could not move. I felt as if my blood had turned to ice and that the ice had invaded my very cells.
“You agreed to be Drood’s biographer if something happened to me,” said Dickens. He looked seasick even though the Cuba was still firmly tied to the wharf in Liverpool Harbour and was not rocking in the least. “Drood threatened to kill you and all of your family if you reneged on this promise… just as he has threatened, repeatedly, to kill me and mine. If he finds out that I went to America to escape him rather than to speak to publishers there about his biography…”
After a minute I found that I could blink. In another minute I could speak. “Think nothing of it, Charles,” I said. “Have a good reading tour in America. Return to us safe and healthy.”
I went out of the cabin and down the gangplank to a waiting Carrie and a sulking, worried Caroline.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
In the month after Dickens left for America I felt rather as if my father had died again. It was not an altogether unpleasant sensation.
I had never been busier. Dickens had not only left me the revisions and proofs of No Thoroughfare, but had also put me in charge of editing the entire Christmas Issue of All the Year Round. This nonplussed our friend William Henry Wills—the Inimitable’s second-in-command at the magazine, who had been unalterably opposed to Dickens’s going to America in the first place—but Wills, always the obedient soldier, soon settled into his position of second-in-command to me. I spent more and more time at the magazine’s offices as November went on and—since Dickens had also requested that I check regularly on Georgina, Mary, and Katey at Gad’s Hill (and since I found it easier to edit and work on The Moonstone there and since my brother, Charley, was also there much of the time), I was soon living more in Charles Dickens’s life than in Wilkie Collins’s.
Caroline tended to agree with that assessment, although not with the good grace and humour I had anticipated, and tended to begin arguments with me whenever I did spend a few days at Number 90 Gloucester Place. As we moved towards December, I spent fewer and fewer days at my new London house and more time at Gad’s Hill or eating in Dickens’s sparse rooms and sleeping in his comfortable bed above the magazine offices.
I happened to be there when the telegram “Safe and well” arrived for Wills and was duly sent on to Ellen Ternan in Florence, where she was staying with her mother and family. How Dickens had ever imagined that Ellen might travel alone from Italy across the Atlantic to America I cannot imagine. The fantasy was simply another sign of how lost in his romantic dreams Dickens was at this time. I did learn later from Wills, almost by accident, that Dickens had known before he set sail that Americans would not have countenanced the presence of this single woman in Dickens’s small entourage. Dolby had sounded things out after his arrival and sent his verdict on the propriety of Ellen’s presence in a single telegraphed syllable—“No.”
Dickens and I had agreed that the stage adaptation of No Thoroughfare should be produced at the Adelphi Theatre as close to Christmas Day as possible and that our mutual friend Charles Fechter should play the villain, Obenreizer. I had first been impressed with Fechter’s performances almost fifteen years earlier and had met him in 1860 when he was in London to play in Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas. By common impulse, immediately upon that meeting, Fechter and I had dispensed with the tentative formalities of acquaintance and had become fast friends.
Born in London of an English mother and a German father, raised in France but having now chosen London as his home again, Fechter was a man of incredible charm and loyalty—the gift of the complete Swiss chalet to Dickens two Christmases ago had been typical of his generosity and impetuousness—but he had no more business sense than a child.
Fechter’s home in London may have been the only salon less formal than my own. Whereas I had the habit of leaving guests in Caroline’s care at the table if I had to rush off for a theatre engagement or somesuch, Fechter had been known to greet guests in his dressing gown and slippers and to allow them to choose which bottle of wine they preferred and take it with them to their place at the table. He and I adored French cookery and twice we put the inexhaustible resources of gastronomic France to the test by dining on one article of food only, presented under many different forms. I remember that we once had a potato dinner in six courses and another time an egg dinner in eight courses.