And so he read on for almost ninety minutes. James Fields was obviously enthralled. The longer I listened, the colder my skin and scalp and fingertips felt.
Chapter One was an impressionist (and sensationalist) description of an opium smoker coming up and out of his dreams in an opium den obviously based upon Opium Sal’s. Sal herself is there—properly described as “a haggard woman” with a “rattling whisper”—alongside a comatose Chinaman and a Lascar. The viewpoint character, obviously a white man awakening from his own opium dream, keeps muttering, “Unintelligible” as he listens to (and struggles with) the incoherent Chinaman and unconscious but muttering Lascar. He leaves, returning to a “Cathedral town” that is obviously Rochester (under the clumsy pseudonym of “Cloisterham”), and there in the second chapter we meet a cluster of the usual Dickens-style characters, including the Minor Canon, the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle, who is one of those kindly and dim-witted but well-meaning “Muscular Christians” of precisely the sort I was parodying in my own novel-in-progress.
It also becomes clear in this second chapter that the rogue opium-eater whom we’d glimpsed in the first chapter is a certain John Jasper, the lay precentor of the Cathedral. Jasper, we understand at once, has a beautiful voice (strangely more beautiful at some times than at others) and a dark, convoluted soul.
Also in this second chapter, we meet Jasper’s nephew, the shallow, callow, easygoing but obviously lazy and complacent Master Edwin Drood.… I admit that I jumped when Dickens actually read that name aloud.
In the third chapter we hear some rather well-written but gloomy descriptions of Cloisterham and its ancient history and then are introduced to yet another of Dickens’s near-infinite series of perfect, rosy-cheeked, virginal young heroine—romantic interests: this one with the cloyingly insipid name of Rosa Bud. Her few pages of presence did not make me want to strangle her immediately—as so many of his young, virginal, Dickens-perfect young characters such as “Little Dorrit” made me want to do—and by the time Edwin Drood and Rosa Bud take a walk together (we learn that they have been betrothed since childhood through the agencies of conveniently acquainted but deceased parents, but also that young Edwin is condescendingly complacent towards Rosa and the entire engagement, while Rosa simply wants out), I could feel the echoes of Dickens’s estrangement from Ellen Ternan as I’d heard it discussed between them outside the Peckham rail station that evening.
And in these first chapters, Fields and I heard that Dickens had made his Drood—the boy-man Edwin Drood—a young engineer who is going off to change Egypt. And he will be, says some silly woman at the orphanage where Rosa lives (why, oh why must Dickens’s young virgins always be orphans!), buried in the Pyramids.
“But don’t she hate Arabs, and Turks, and Fellahs, and people?” asks Rosa, speaking of the fictional perfect mate for “Eddy” Drood.
“ ‘Certainly not.’ Very firmly.
‘At least she must hate the Pyramids? Come, Eddy.’
‘Why should she be such a little—tall, I mean—goose as to hate the Pyramids, Rosa?’
‘Ah! You should hear Miss Twinkleton,’ often nodding her head and much enjoying the Lumps, ‘bore about them, and then you wouldn’t ask. Tiresome old burying-grounds! Isises and Ibises, and Cheopses, and Pharaohses; who cares about them? And then there was Belzoni, or somebody, dragged out by the legs, half-choked with bats and dust. All the girls say: Serve him right, and hope it hurt him, and wish he had been quite choked.’ ”
And I could see that Dickens was headed towards a continued and almost certainly elaborated comparison of the dust of the crypts and graves in Cloisterham—which is to say Rochester and its very real cathedral—with the real explorers of Egyptian tombs such as Belzoni, “half-choked with bats and dust.”
His third chapter—which is as far as he read to us that day—ended with his coquettish (but still uninterested, in Edwin at least) Rosa saying to this “Drood”—
“ ‘Now say, what do you see?’
‘See, Rosa?’
‘Why, I thought you Egyptian boys could look into a hand and see all sorts of phantoms. Can’t you see a happy Future?’
For certain, neither of them sees a happy Present, as the gate opens and closes, and one goes in, and the other goes away.”
It was as if Dickens were me writing about what I had seen of Ellen Ternan and him at Peckham Station.
When Dickens set down the last page of his short manuscript—his reading had been quiet, professional, cool, as opposed to the overheated acting of his recent reading tours and especially that of his Murder—James Fields burst into applause. The American looked to be close to weeping. I sat in silence and stared.
“Capital, Charles! Absolutely capital! A wonderful beginning! A marvellous, provocative, intriguing, and beguiling beginning! Your skills have never been more on display.”
“Thank you, my dear James,” Dickens said softly.
“But the title! You’ve not told us. What do you intend to call this wonderful new book?”
“Its title shall be The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” said Dickens, peering over his reading spectacles at me.
Fields applauded his approval and did not notice my sudden sharp intake of breath. But I am certain that Charles Dickens did.
FIELDS HAD GONE upstairs to change for dinner when I followed Dickens back to his study and said, “We need to talk.”
“Do we?” said the Inimitable as he slipped the fifty or so manuscript pages into a leather portfolio and locked the portfolio into one of his desk drawers. “Very well, let us step outside away from the press and eager ears of family, friends, children, servants, and dogs.”
It had been a warm October and it was a warm early evening as Dickens led me to his chalet. Usually by this time of the year the chalet was sealed for the coming wet winter, but not this year. Yellow and red leaves skittered across the lawn and were captured by bushes or the bloomless red geraniums planted along the drive as Dickens led me not down into the tunnel but straight across the highway. There was no traffic this Sunday afternoon, but I could see rows of high-spirited and well-bred horses tied or being tended outside the Falstaff Inn. A fox group had come by for refreshment after the hunt.
Upstairs on the first floor of his chalet, Dickens waved me to the spare Windsor chair and then sprawled in his own. I could see by the neatly arranged boxes of blue and cream paper, pens, ink pots, and his small statues of fencing frogs that Dickens had been writing out here recently.
“Well, my dear Wilkie, what do you feel we need to talk about?”
“You know very well, my dear Dickens.”
He smiled, took his spectacles out of a case, and set them on his nose, as if he were going to read some more. “Let us assume I do not know and proceed from there. Is it that you did not like the beginnings of my new book? I have written more, you know. Perhaps another chapter or two and your interest would have been engaged.”
“This is dangerous stuff, Charles.”
“Oh?” His surprise did not appear fully feigned. “What is dangerous? Writing a tale of mystery? I told you some months ago that I was sufficiently intrigued by the elements of your Moonstone—the opium addiction, the mesmerism, the Oriental villains, the central mystery of theft—that I might try my own hand at such a novel. So now I am. Or at least I have made a start.”
“You’re using Drood’s name,” I said so softly that it came out as an urgent whisper. I could hear male voices rising in a drinking song from the inn nearby.
“My dear Wilkie,” sighed Dickens. “Would you not agree that it’s time that we—or you—got over this fear of all things Droodish?”