Drood, I thought. I was too tired even to feel fear. “There is nothing to be alarmed about, Carrie,” I said softly. “Probably some tradesman after a bill we forgot to pay. Where did you put him?”
“He asked if he could wait in your study. I said yes.”
D— n, I thought. The last place I wanted Drood was in my study. But I patted her cheek and said, “You go on up to bed now, that’s a good girl.”
“May I hang up your coat for you?”
“No, I want to leave it on for a while,” I said, not explaining to Carrie why I would want to keep on the thoroughly soaked-through cheap cape-coat.
“Won’t you be wanting any dinner? I had cook make your favourite French beef before she went home.…”
“I’ll find it and warm it myself, Carrie. Now you go on up for the night. I’ll call George if I need anything.”
I waited until her footsteps had faded up the main stairway and then went down the hall and through the parlour and opened the doors to my study.
Mr Edmond Dickenson, Esquire, was sitting not in the leather guest’s chair but behind my desk. He was insolently smoking one of my cigars and his feet were up on an opened lower drawer.
I went in and closed the doors tightly behind me.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
In early October, Dickens invited me to spend a few days at Gad’s Hill during the Fieldses’ last visit there before they returned to Boston. It had been some time since I had been invited to spend the night at Dickens’s home. In truth, after Dickens’s show of support at my March premiere of Black and White, intercourse between us had been somewhat rare and decidedly formal (especially in comparison to our intimacy of earlier years). While we continued to sign our letters “affectionately yours,” there seemed to be little affection left on either side.
As I travelled to Gad’s Hill, I stared out the railway carriage window and wondered both about the real reasons for the Inimitable’s invitation and also what I might tell him that would surprise him. I rather enjoyed surprising Dickens.
I could have described my Overtown excursion four months earlier on 9 June while he and Fields and Dolby and Eytinge went slum-hopping under the protection of their policeman, but that would have been too much of a revelation. (And I had no excuse for following them through the first part of that night.)
I could certainly surprise Dickens and the Fieldses and whoever the Inimitable’s other guests were this weekend by describing my new baby daughter Marian’s presumably cute facial antics and burbles and other such ten-for-a-’apenny common baby anecdotes, but that would most definitely be too much of a revelation. (The less Charles Dickens and his entourage and sycophants knew of my private life, the better.)
What to amuse him with, then?
I would almost certainly inform everyone of how well my book Man and Wife was coming along. If Dickens was my only interlocutor, I might tell him about the letters that Mrs Harriette (Caroline) Clow was now sending me almost monthly—details of emotional estrangement and physical punishment from her plumber-lout of a husband. It made for wonderful research. All I had to do was substitute the Oxford-athlete lout for the almost illiterate plumber-lout—there was really very little difference in the two classes of men when one thought about it—and the beatings and occasions of being locked in the cellar that Caroline was suffering instantly became the plight of my highbred but poorly wed heroine.
What else?
I could, if we had an extended period alone and any renewal of our old sense of intimacy, tell Charles Dickens about my late-night visit on 9 June from the young man he had pulled from the wreckage at Staplehurst four years earlier to the day—our Mr Edmond Dickenson.
DICKENSON HAD NOT ONLY taken possession of my writing chair behind my desk and set his unclean boots on my extruded lower drawer, but the impertinent whelp had somehow got upstairs to my bedroom, unlocked the closet, and brought down the eight hundred pages of my dreams of the Gods of the Black Lands scrawled in the Other Wilkie’s tight, slanting script.
“What is the meaning of this intrusion?” I snapped. My attempt at masterly command may have been weakened somewhat by the fact that even with the cape-coat on I was as soaked through as a wet-slick alley cat and now dripping puddles onto my own study floor and Persian carpet.
Dickenson laughed and relinquished my chair (although not the manuscript). The two of us circled the desk as cautiously as knife-fighting adversaries in a New Court tavern.
I sat in my writing chair and slid the lower drawer shut, and Dickenson dropped into the guest’s chair without asking permission. My coat made wet, squishy sounds beneath me.
“You look thoroughly miserable, if you don’t mind my saying so,” said Dickenson.
“Never mind that. Give me back my property.”
Dickenson looked at the stack of papers in his hands and showed a caricature of surprise. “Your property, Mr Collins? You know that neither your dreams of the Black Land nor these notes are your property.”
“They are. And I want them back.” I brought Hatchery’s pistol out of my coat pocket, set the base of the heavy stock or grip or handle or whatever it is called against the surface of my desk, and used both hands to pull back the resisting hammer until it clicked and cocked. The muzzle was aimed directly at Edmond Dickenson’s chest.
The insufferable youth laughed. Once again I could see the strangeness of his teeth: they had been white and healthy when I had seen him during Christmas of 1865. Had they decayed or been filed down to these stumps and points since then?
“Is this your writing, Mr Collins?”
I hesitated. Drood had met with the Other Wilkie two years ago this very night. Drood’s emissary here would certainly know about that.
“I want the pages back,” I said. My finger was now on the trigger.
“And you intend to shoot me if I do not give them to you?”
“Yes.”
“And why would you do that, Mr Collins?”
“Perhaps to ascertain that you are not the spectre you pretend to be,” I said softly. I was very tired. It seemed like weeks, rather than a mere dozen hours or so, since I had watched Dickens take his guests out to luncheon at Cooling Cemetery.
“Oh, I will bleed if you shoot me,” said Dickenson in that same maddeningly happy tone with which he’d infuriated me at Gad’s Hill so long ago. “And die, if your aim is good enough.”
“It will be,” I said.
“But to what purpose, sir? You know that these documents are the property of the Master.”
“By ‘Master’ you mean Drood.”
“Who else? There is no doubt that I will leave with these pages—I would rather face your pistol at three paces than the Master’s slightest displeasure at a thousandfold-greater distance—but, since you have me at this disadvantage, perhaps there is something you wish to know before I leave?”
“Where is Drood?” I said.
Dickenson merely laughed again. Perhaps it was the sight of those teeth that made me ask the next question.
“Do you eat human flesh at least once a month, Dickenson?”
The laugh and smile disappeared. “And where have you heard that, sir?”
“Perhaps I know more about your… Master… and his slaves than you give me credit for.”
“Perhaps you do,” said Dickenson. He had lowered his chin and now looked at me with eyes raised and brow lowered in a strangely disturbing way. “But you should know,” he added, “that there are no slaves… only disciples and those who love and volunteer to serve the Master.”
It was my turn to laugh. “You’re speaking to someone with one of your accursed Master’s scarabs in his brain, Dickenson. I can think of no worse form of slavery.”