“What do I have to do, Inspector?”
“Nothing more than we have already discussed, Mr Collins. Use your good offices with Charles Dickens to find out where Drood is and what he is up to.”
I shook my head. “Dickens is completely absorbed in his preparations for his imminent reading tour. I am sure he’s had no contact with Drood since Christmas. Besides being frightened by what he thought he saw outside his window that night, Dickens is buried now in details. You have no idea the amount of preparation such a tour involves.”
“I am sure I do not, Mr Collins,” said Inspector Field. “But I do know that your friend will begin his tour with an opening night reading in a week, on the twenty-third of March, at the Assembly Rooms in Cheltenham. Then, on the tenth of April, he will appear at St James’s Hall here in London, followed immediately by readings in Liverpool, then Manchester, then Glasgow, then Edinburgh.…”
“Do you have the entire itinerary?” I interrupted.
“Of course.”
“Then you would know how impossible it would be for me to get Charles Dickens’s attention during the tour. All authors’ public readings are exhausting for the author. A Dickens reading is exhausting for the author and for everyone around him. There is simply nothing in the world like a Charles Dickens reading, and he promises this tour to be even more intense.”
“So I have heard,” Inspector Field said softly. “Somehow, Drood is involved in this reading tour of your friend’s.”
I laughed. “How could he be? How could a man of such appearance travel with Dickens or be seen at his readings without comment?”
“Drood is a man of infinite guises,” Field said. His voice was hushed, as if Hatchery or Miss Darby or the boy Billy could be the Egyptian criminal in disguise. “I guarantee that your friend Dickens is—consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or as an instrument of Drood—carrying out that Devil’s purposes on this tour.”
“How could he…” I began and stopped, remembering Dickens’s odd insistence that he would be magnetising the entire audience during each reading. Mesmerising them. But to what dark purpose?
This was all absurd.
“Still,” I said wearily, “you know Dickens’s schedule. And you know he has only a small entourage travelling with him.”
“Mr Dolby,” said Inspector Field. “His agent Mr Wills.” Field went on to name the gas man and lighting expert and even those agents sent in advance to inspect the theatres and arrange for ticketing prices, advertising, and such. “But surely, Mr Collins, Dickens would enjoy seeing his dear friend during such an exhausting tour. I know that he plans to see Macready at the Cheltenham opening. Could you not arrange to spend a few days of travel with your famous friend, attend one or two of his readings?”
“That’s all you want of me?”
“Your help in these small things—a simple matter of observing and chatting and reporting—could be invaluable,” purred Inspector Field.
“How on earth do you plan to make ninety Gloucester Place available to us, even by next year, if Mrs Shernwold is reserving it for her missionary son and absolutely refuses to sell?” I asked.
The inspector smiled. I half-expected to see canary feathers protruding from between those liver-coloured lips. “That will be my problem, sir, although I expect no problems at all. It is a privilege to help someone aiding us in the public service of ridding London of its least notorious but most successful serial murderer.”
I sighed and nodded. If Inspector Field had extended his hand then to seal our dark deal, I’m not sure if I could have touched him. Perhaps he sensed as much, for he merely nodded—the deal was set—and looked around.
“Would you like Miss Darby and the boy to burn us some more sherry, sir? It’s a wonderful preparation for sleep.”
“No,” I said, trying to get to my feet and suddenly feeling Hatchery’s huge hand on my arm, effortlessly lifting me out of the booth. “I want to go home.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Ichose to join Dickens for a few days well into his tour.
Inspector Field had been correct in saying that Dickens would welcome the idea of my joining him for a bit of time on the road. I sent a note to Wills, who—exhausted as he must have been from travelling every day with the Inimitable—flitted back to London every few days from the tour to carry on his own and Dickens’s business affairs at the magazine with Forster (who disapproved of the entire idea of the reading tour), and within a day I received back that rarest of things for me—a telegram—which read,
MY DEAR WILKIE THE TOUR IS SUCH FUN! OUR DOLBY HAS TURNED OUT TO BE THE PERFECT TRAVEL COMPANION AND MANAGER. YOU WILL ENJOY HIS ANTICS. I CERTAINLY DO. JOIN US AT ANY TIME AND TRAVEL WITH US AS LONG AS YOU WISH. AT YOUR OWN EXPENSE, OF COURSE. LOOKING FORWARD TO YOUR COMPANY! C. DICKENS
I had wondered how the Staplehurst accident was affecting the Inimitable’s almost daily railway journeys, and I discovered this a few minutes after we had departed the station in Bristol on our way to Birmingham.
I was sitting directly across from Dickens in the compartment. He was sitting alone on his bench. George Dolby and Wills occupied the seat beside me but they were chatting, and perhaps I alone could see that the author was becoming more agitated as our carriage got up to speed. Dickens’s hands fiercely gripped first the head of his walking stick and then the sill of the window. He would glance out the window as the vibrations increased, then look away quickly, then glance out again. His face, usually darker than most Englishmen’s due to the effects of the sun during his daily walks, grew paler and was moist with perspiration. Then Dickens removed his travelling flask from his pocket, took a long pull of brandy, breathed more deeply, took a second pull, and put the flask away. Then he lit a cigar and turned to chat with Dolby, Wills, and me.
The Inimitable preferred an interesting—even eccentric, possibly even dashing—wardrobe for his travel: a pea jacket over which he tossed an expensive Count D’Orsay cloak; his grizzled and weary visage, his lined skin bronzed by sun (the pallor had faded with the brandy and was now almost gone), peeking out from beneath a felt hat worn rather jauntily to one side. I’d overheard the bearlike Dolby tell the scarecrow-thin Wills at the Bristol station that the hat “makes the chief look like a modernised gentlemanly pirate with eyes in which lurk the iron will of a demon and the tender pity of an angel.”
I think Dolby had also been partaking of some brandy that morning.
The conversation was lively—we were the only passengers in this first-class compartment, the rest of the small entourage having gone on to Birmingham before us. I had heard from Dickens that during the first days of the tour, Wills had put Dolby through very thorough cross-examinations on how the business manager would handle his work. During those first city readings, Dolby had gone ahead with the gas and lighting men and only Wills had travelled each day with Dickens. Now, with Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Bristol behind them—and no major problems in any of those cities, so thorough was Dolby’s work—the big business manager was travelling with Dickens, much to the Inimitable’s obvious delight. The rest of the tour consisted of Birmingham, Aberdeen, Portsmouth, and then home to the final performances in London.
Dolby, whom a later client—an American writer named Mark Twain—would describe as “a gladsome gorilla,” reached into the large wicker basket he had brought aboard, set linen on the tiny folding table he had thought to provide for the centre of our compartment, and proceeded to present a buffet luncheon of hard-boiled-egg sandwiches with anchovy, salmon mayonnaise, cold fowl and tongue, and pressed beef, with Roquefort cheese and cherry tart for our dessert. He also set out a rather good red wine and kept a gin punch chilled by filling the compartment’s washstand with ice. As the rest of us finished this repast, Dolby warmed coffee over a spirit lamp. Whatever else the huge, whiskered man with his infectious laugh and rather endearing stammer might be, he was certainly efficient.