“I am so glad,” I said.
“I expect to go home tomorrow,” burbled the young man. “I shall never be able to repay Mr Dickens for his generosity. He truly saved my life! And he has invited me to his home at Gad’s Hill for Christmas and New Year’s!”
It was 12 June. “How wonderful,” I said. “I am sure that Charles appreciates the value of the life he helped save. You say you go home tomorrow, Mr Dickenson… may I enquire as to where that home is?”
Dickenson babbled on. It seemed he was an orphan—Charles Dickens’s favourite sort of human being, if one is to believe Oliver Twist or David Copperfield or Bleak House or any of a dozen other of his tales—but had been left money in a Jarndyce-and-Jarndyce manner of labyrinthine inheritance, and had been appointed an elderly Guardian who lived in a Northamptonshire estate that might well have been the model for Chesney Wold. Young Dickenson, however, preferred to live in modest rented rooms in London, where he lived alone, had few (if any) friends, and studied the occasional instrument and apprenticed for the occasional profession, with no real intention of mastering or practising in any of them. The interest on his inheritance allowed him to purchase food and books and theatre tickets and the occasional holiday to the seashore—his time was his own.
We discussed theatre and literature. It turned out that young Mr Dickenson, a subscriber to Dickens’s previous journal Household Words as well as to the current All the Year Round, had read and admired my story “A Terribly Strange Bed” that had appeared in the former magazine.
“Good heavens, man,” I exclaimed. “That was published almost fifteen years ago! You must have been all of five years old!”
Young Dickenson’s blush began in his shell-like ears, migrated quickly to his cheeks, and rose like pink climbing ivy through the vault of his temples to the long curve of his pale forehead. I could see the blush spreading even under his thinning, straw-coloured hair. “Seven years old, actually, sir,” said the orphan. “But my Guardian, Mr Watson—a very liberal M.P. — had leather-bound copies of both Punch and such journals as Household Words in his library. My current devotion to the written word was formed and confirmed in that room.”
“Really,” I said. “How interesting.”
My joining the staff of Household Words years earlier had meant another five pounds a week to me. It seems to have meant the world to this orphan. He could almost recite my book After Dark from memory and was dutifully amazed when I told him that the separate tales which formed the volume had been based in large part upon my mother’s diaries and a more formal manuscript in which she had reminisced about being the wife of a famous painter.
It turned out that the eleven-year-old Edmond Dickenson had travelled up to Manchester with his Guardian to see The Frozen Deep in the huge New Free Trade Hall there on 21 August, 1857.
ACT II OFTHE FROZEN DEEP is set in the Arctic regions where Dickens-Wardour and Wardour’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Commander Crayford, are discussing their slim chances of survival in the face of cold and starvation.
“Never give in to your stomach, and your stomach will end in giving in to you,” the veteran explorer advises Crayford. Such determination—a will that would accept no master—came not only from the pen of Charles Dickens, but from his very soul.
Wardour goes on to explain that he loves the Arctic wastes precisely “because there are no women here.” In the same act he exclaims—“I would have accepted anything that set work and hardship and danger, like Ramparts, between my misery and me… Hard work, Crayford, that is the true Elixir of our life!” And finally, “… the hopeless wretchedness in this world, is the wretchedness that women cause.”
It was, nominally, my play. My name was listed on the playbill as author (as well as my listing there as an actor), but almost all of Richard Wardour’s lines had been written or rewritten by Charles Dickens.
These were not the words of a man happy in his marriage.
At the end of Act II, two men are sent out across the ice as the trapped crews’ last chance for rescue. These men must cross a thousand miles of the frozen deep. The two men, of course, are Richard Wardour and his successful rival for Clara Burnham’s hand, Frank Aldersley. (Perhaps I have already mentioned that Dickens and I both grew beards for our roles.) The second act ends with Wardour discovering that the injured, starved, weakened Aldersley is his worst enemy, the man he swore to murder on sight.
DID YOU HAPPEN TO SEE the gentleman named Drood at the accident site?” I asked Edmond Dickenson when the young fool finally stopped talking and the nurse was out of the room.
“A gentleman named Drood, sir? In faith, I am not sure. There were so many gentlemen there helping me, and—other than our wonderful Mr Dickens—I learned so few of their names.”
“It seems this gentleman has a rather memorable appearance,” I said and listed some specifics of Dickens’s description of our Phantom: the black silk cape and top hat, the missing fingers and eyelids and attenuated nose, the pallor and baldness and brittle fringe of hair, the terrible stare, his odd way of seeming to glide rather than walk, the sibilant hiss and foreign accent in his speech.
“Oh, good heavens, no,” cried young Dickenson. “I surely would have remembered seeing or hearing such a man.” Then his gaze seemed to turn inward, much as Dickens’s had several times in his darkened study. “Even in spite of the incredibly terrible sights and sounds everywhere around me that day,” he added.
“Yes, I am sure,” I said, resisting the impulse to tap the bedclothes above his bruised leg in a minor show of sympathy. “So you’ve never heard the name Drood or heard others talking about him… on the train that day, perhaps?”
“Not to my knowledge, Mr Collins,” said the young man. “Is it of some importance to Mr Dickens to find the man? I would do anything for Mr Dickens, if it were in my power.”
“Yes, I am sure you would, Mr Dickenson,” I said. This time I did tap at his knee under the blankets. “Mr Dickens specifically charged me with asking you if there were any additional service that he might offer,” I said and checked my watch. “Any want or lack or pain that the nurses or our mutual friend might remedy?”
“Nothing at all,” said Dickenson. “Tomorrow I should be able to walk well enough to leave this hotel and begin living on my own again. I do have a cat, you know.” He laughed softly. “Or rather, she has me. Although, as is the nature of so many of her species, she comes and goes at will, hunts for her own meals, and certainly will not be inconvenienced by my absence.” Again there came that sense of his gaze turning inward, staring at the death and dying at Staplehurst just three days earlier. “Actually, Pussy would not be unduly inconvenienced had I died. No one would have missed me.”
“Your guardian?” I prompted, not wishing to bring on a torrent of self-pity.
Dickenson laughed easily. “My current Guardian, a gentleman of the law who had known my grandfather, would have mourned my passing, Mr Collins, but our… relationship… is more of a business nature. Pussy is about the only friend I have in London. Or elsewhere.”
I nodded briskly. “I shall check on you again in the morning, Mr Dickenson.”
“Oh, but there is no need…”
“Our mutual friend Charles Dickens feels otherwise,” I said quickly. “And, his health permitting, he may come tomorrow to see you and enquire in person about your recovery.”
The boy blushed again. It was not unbecoming, although it did make him somehow appear all the softer and sillier in the late-afternoon June sunlight filtering in through the hotel drapes and curtains.