CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

In response to my letter replying to his “Perhaps you may be glad to see me by and by. Who knows?” overture, Dickens invited me down to Gad’s Hill Place on the fifth of June, a Sunday. I sent word that I would be there by three PM, after the Inimitable’s usual Sunday writing time, but actually took an earlier train and walked the last mile or so.

The beauty of the June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming was in bloom and blossom. The sunlight was a benediction. The breezes were so caressingly soft and intimate on the skin as to be embarrassing. A few white puffy clouds moved like aerial sheep above the green and rolling hills inland, but towards the water there was only more blue, more sunshine. The air was so clear that one could see the towers of London from twenty miles away. The farmlands beyond my carriage window and on either side of the dusty road as I walked the last mile or so were busy with playful little calves, running colts, and the occasional cluster of rural human children intent upon whatever games such a species pursues in early-summer fields and forests. It was almost enough to make a confirmed city-dweller such as myself want to buy a farm—but a jolt of laudanum followed by some brandy from a second, smaller flask cured that idiot’s passing impulse.

No one greeted me at the drive of Gad’s Hill Place this day, not even the pair of sentry dogs—sired by that assassinated Grendel-of-dogs, Sultan, I was sure—that Dickens usually kept chained there by the entrance pillars.

The red geraniums (still Dickens’s favourite flower, the annuals faithfully planted by the author’s gardeners every spring and left, at his command, as late into the autumn as possible) were everywhere—along the drive, in the sunny section near the bow windows outside Dickens’s office in the main house, paralleling the hedges, out along the road—and, as always and for reasons I did not yet understand, I recoiled from their serried ejaculations of red blotches with a sense of real horror.

Guessing that Dickens might be in his chalet on such a perfect day, I went down through the cool tunnel—although there was almost no traffic on the highway above it—and emerged near the outside stairway that led up to the first-storey office.

“Halloa the bridge!” I called up.

“Halloa the approaching sloop,” came down Dickens’s strong voice.

“Permission to come aboard?”

“What is the name of your ship, sirrah? And where are you from and where are you bound?”

“My poor barque is called the Mary Jane,” I called back up the staircase, putting on my best attempt at an American accent. “Set sail from Saint Looee and bound for Calcutta, by way of Samoa and Liverpool.”

Dickens’s laughter came down on the soft breeze. “Then by all means, Captain, you must come up!”

DICKENS HAD BEEN WRITING at his table and he was setting his manuscript pages into his oiled-leather portfolio as I came in. His left foot was propped up on a pillow which sat on a low stool, but he took his leg down as I entered. Although Dickens waved me to the only other chair in the room, I was too agitated to sit and contented myself with pacing from one window to the next and back.

“I am so delighted you chose to accept my invitation,” Dickens was saying as he secured his writing utensils and buckled the portfolio closed.

“It was time,” I said.

“You look a bit heavier, Wilkie.”

“You look thinner, Charles. Except for your foot, which seems to have put on a few pounds.”

Dickens laughed. “Our dear and mutual friend Frank Beard has warnings for both of us, does he not?”

“I see less of Frank Beard these days,” I said, moving from the east-facing window to the south-facing one. “Frank’s lovely children have declared war on me since I revealed the hypocrisies of Muscular Christianity.”

“Oh, I hardly think it is the revelation of hypocrisy that has made the children angry at you, Wilkie. Rather the heresy of impugning their various sports heroes. I have not had the time to read it myself, but I hear that the instalments of Man and Wife have ruffled quite a few feathers.”

“And sold more and more copies as it has done so,” I said. “Before this month is out, I plan to publish it in book form, in three volumes, with the firm of F. S. Ellis.”

“Ellis?” said Dickens, getting to his feet and reaching for a silver-headed cane. “I wasn’t aware that the Ellis firm published books. I thought it dealt with cards, calendars, that sort of thing.”

“This is their first venture,” I said. “They will be selling on commission and I will be receiving ten percent on every copy sold.”

“Marvellous!” said Dickens. “You seem somewhat restless—perhaps even agitated—today, my dear Wilkie. Would you care to join me in a walk?”

“Can you walk, Charles?” I was eyeing his new cane, which was indeed a cane, of the long-handled type one saw being carried by lame old men, rather than the sort of dashing walking stick preferred by young men such as myself. (As you may remember, Dear Reader, I was 46 in this summer of 1870, while Dickens was 58 and showed every year and month and more of that advanced age. But then, several people had recently commented on the grey in my beard, my ever-increasing girth, my problems catching my breath, and a certain hunched-over quality my tired body had assumed of late, and some had been so impertinent as to suggest that I was looking much older than my years.)

“Yes, I can walk,” said Dickens, taking no offence at my comment. “And I try to every day. It is getting late, so I do not suggest a serious walk to Rochester or some other daunting destination, but we might manage a stroll through the fields.”

I nodded and Dickens led the way down, leaving—one presumes—the portfolio with his unfinished manuscript of The Mystery of Edwin Drood there on his chalet worktable where anyone might come in off the highway and filch it.

WE CROSSED THE ROAD towards his house but then went around the side yard, past the stables, through the rear yard where he had once consigned his correspondence to a bonfire, and out into the field where Sultan had died some autumns earlier. The grasses here that had been dead and brown then were green and high and stirring in the breeze today. A well-worn path led off towards the rolling hills and a scrim of trees that marked the path of a broad stream that ran towards the river that ran to the sea.

Neither of us was running this day, but if Dickens’s walking pace had been diminished, I could not discern it. I was huffing and puffing to keep up.

“Frank Beard tells me that you’ve had to add morphine to your pharmacopoeia in order to sleep,” said Dickens, the cane in his left hand (he had always carried his stick in his right hand before) quickly rising and falling. “And that, although you’ve told him you discontinued the practice, a syringe he lent you some time ago has gone missing.”

“Beard is a dear man,” I said, “who often lacks discretion. He was keeping the world informed as to your pulse rate during your final reading tour, Charles.”

My walking partner had nothing to say to that.

Finally I added, “The daughter of my servants, George and Besse—still servants of mine for the time-being at least—had been pilfering things. I had to send her away.”

“Little Agnes?” cried Dickens. “Stealing? Incredible!”

We crossed the brow of the first low hill so that Gad’s Hill Place, the highway, and its attending line of trees all fell behind. The path wound parallel to the tree line here for a way and then crossed a little bridge.