“Our mutual friend Mr Dickens can,” said Dickenson. “That is why he has chosen to work with the Master towards their shared goal.”
“What in the world are you gabbling about?” I snapped. “Dickens and Drood have no common goals.”
The young man—formerly round faced to the point of being cherubic, now actively gaunt—shook his head. “You were in New Court and Bluegate Fields and the surrounding areas tonight, Mr Collins,” he said softly.
How does he know I was there? I thought in some panic. Have they caught and tortured poor mad Barris?
“Mr Dickens understands that such social evil has to end,” Dickenson continued.
“Social evil?”
“The poverty, sir,” said Dickenson with some heat. “The social injustice. The children forced onto the streets with no parents. The mothers who have become… women of the street… out of sheer desperation. Those ill children and women who will never receive treatment, the men who will never find work in a system that…”
“Oh, spare me this communistic talk,” I said. Water dripped from my beard onto my desk top, but the aim of the pistol did not waver. “Dickens has been a reformer for most of his life, but he is no revolutionary.”
“You are wrong, sir,” Dickenson said very softly. “He works with our Master precisely because of the revolution our Master will bring first to London and then to the rest of the world where children are left to starve. Mr Dickens will help our Master bring a New Order into being—one in which the colour of one’s skin or the amount of money one has will never stand in the way of justice.”
Again, I was forced to laugh and again my laughter was sincere. Four years earlier, in autumn of 1865, a mob of Jamaican blacks had attacked the Court House in Morant Bay. Our governor there, Eyre, had overseen 439 of those blacks being shot or hanged and another 600 flogged. Some of our more deluded liberals had opposed Governor Eyre’s behaviour, but Dickens had told me that he’d wished the retaliation and punishment could have gone further. “I am totally opposed,” he’d said at the time, “with that platform-sympathy with the black—or the Native or the Devil—and believe it is morally and totally wrong to deal with Hottentots as if they were identical with men in clean shirts at Camberwell.…”
During the Mutiny in India long before I had met him, Dickens had cheered on the British general whose answer to the rebellion had been to tie captured mutinous Indians across the muzzles of cannon and to blast them “homeward” in pieces. Dickens’s wrath and contempt, in Bleak House and a dozen other of his novels, had long been aimed more at the idiotic missionaries who were more concerned with the plight of native brown and black people abroad than with the problems of good Englishmen and Englishwomen and white children here at home.
“You’re a fool,” I said that night in June to young Edmond Dickenson. “Your Master is a fool if he thinks that Charles Dickens wants to plot against white men in favour of Lascars and Hindoos and Chinamen and Egyptian murderers.”
Dickenson smiled tightly and rose. “I need to deliver this instalment of the notes to my Master before dawn.”
“Stay,” I said and raised the pistol until it was aimed at the man’s face. “Keep the d— ned papers, but tell me how to get this scarab out of my body. Out of my head.”
“It will leave when the Master commands it to leave or when you die,” said Dickenson with that hungry, happy cannibal’s look again. “Not before.”
“Not even if I were to kill an innocent person?” I said.
The young man’s light-coloured eyebrows rose. “You’ve heard of that ritual exception, have you? Very well, Mr Collins. You might try that. One cannot guarantee that it will work, but you might try that. I shall show myself out. Oh, and be assured that the young lady who let me in tonight will not remember doing so tomorrow.”
And without another word he had swung on his heel and left.
And it turned out that Dickenson was right about Carrie not remembering his visit; when I asked her the next morning about what aspect of our visitor’s appearance had disturbed her, she looked at me oddly and said that she remembered no visitor, except for a bad dream about some stranger in the rain, beating at the door and demanding to be let in.
Yes, I thought as we pulled into the station where someone from Gad’s Hill Place would be meeting me with a carriage or pony cart, telling my story of the end of that busy night in June might surprise the Inimitable.
But then, I thought, how terrible it would be if it did not surprise him.
ON THE SUNDAY of my pleasant weekend visit at Gad’s Hill Place—and it is difficult for me, even now, to forget or overstate just how pleasant such convivial times at Dickens’s home truly were—I was in James Fields’s chambers talking with him about the literary life in Boston when there came a knock at the door. It was one of Dickens’s older servants, who stepped into the room as formally as a courtier to Queen Victoria, clicked his heels, and handed Fields a note written in a fine calligraphic hand on a scroll of rich parchment. Fields showed it to me and then read it aloud:
Mr Charles Dickens presents his respectful compliments to the Hon. James T. Fields (of Boston, Mass., U.S.) and will be happy to receive a visit from the Hon. J.T.F. in the small library as above, at the Hon. J.T.F.’s leisure.
Fields had chuckled, then coughed with embarrassment at having read it aloud, and said to me, “I am sure that Charles means for both of us to join him in the library.”
I smiled and nodded but was sure that Dickens had not meant the joking invitation for me. He and I had not shared two private words in the four days I had been at Gad’s Hill Place, and it was increasingly apparent that the Inimitable had no plans to alter that unhappy state of public politeness but private silence between us. Nonetheless, I followed Fields as the American hurried down to the small library.
Dickens could not quite conceal his frown when he saw me enter, even though the expression crossed his features for only a fraction of a second—only an old friend who had known him for many years would have noticed the flicker of surprised displeasure—but he then smiled and cried out, “My dear Wilkie—how fortuitous! You have saved me from labouriously writing out my invitation to you. Penmanship was never my strongest quality, and I feared it would take me another half hour to produce the document! Come in, both of you! Sit down, sit down.”
Dickens was perched on the edge of a small reading table and there was a short stack of manuscript pages next to him. He had set out only two chairs where an audience might sit. For a slightly vertiginous moment I was sure that he was going to read notes from his own dreams of the Gods of the Black Land.
“Are we all the audience for… whatever this is?” asked the obviously delighted James T. Fields. The two men seemed to revel in each other’s presence, almost literally shed years as they carried out their boyish adventures, and I’d sensed a sadness in Dickens the last few days. Well, why not? I thought at that moment. When Fields and his wife leave England for America this week, it will be the last time the two men will ever see each other. Dickens will be long dead before Fields ever returns to England.
“The two of you, dear friends, are indeed the only audience for this reading,” said Dickens, who went to shut the door to the library himself and then returned to his easy perch on the edge of the thin-legged table.
“Chapter the First, The Dawn,” read Dickens.
“An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral tower be here! The well-known massive grey square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours…”