W. H. Wills and I had gone ahead in a brougham, but Dickens and one of our contributors, John Hollingshead, walked the sixteen miles to the village. After some trouble finding the house in question (luckily Dickens had sent along a repast of fresh fish with Wills and me, since he would not trust the local fare), we finally found a villa that was said to be on the property of the so-called haunted house and spent the rest of our afternoon and evening questioning neighbours, nearby tradesmen, and even passers-by, but in the end we decided that Howitt’s “ghosts” consisted of rats and a servant named Frank who enjoyed poaching rabbits in odd hours of the night.
Dickens had been brave enough on that outing, in the daylight and in the company of three other men, but I’d heard that on another ghost expedition, this one at night and investigating a reputedly haunted monument near Gad’s Hill Place, the writer had brought his male servants and a loaded shotgun along. According to the author’s youngest son, called Plorn by the family, his father had been quite nervous and had announced, “… if anybody is playing tricks and has got a head, I’ll blow it off.” And they did hear an unearthly wailing, moaning, “terrific noise—human noise—and yet superhuman noise.”
It turned out to be an asthmatic sheep. Dickens restrained himself from blowing its head off. He treated everyone—servants and children all—to rum-and-water when they returned to the house.
“We knew where the haunted house was,” I pointed out to Dickens this June day in his dark study. “How do we find Mr Drood? Where do we look, Charles?”
Suddenly Dickens’s expression and physical stance changed. His face seemed to lengthen and crease and grow even paler. His eyes widened until it seemed he had no eyelids and the whites of those eyes glowed in the lamplight. His posture became that of a crooked old man, or a lurking gravedigger, or a buzzard. His voice, still raspy, became high and reedy and afflicted with a hiss as his long, pale fingers stabbed at the air like a dark magician’s.
“To Limehoussse,” he hissed, acting out the Drood in his former tale. “Whitechapel. Ratcliff Crossss. Gin Alley. Three Foxesss Court. Butcher Row and Commercial Road. The Mint and other rookeriessss.”
I admit that the hair stood on the back of my neck. Charles Dickens was first, as a lad, even before he began to write, such a mimic that his father would take him to public houses to imitate locals they had encountered on their walks. At this moment I began to believe that there was such a creature as Drood.
“When?” I asked.
“Sssoooon,” hissed Dickens, but smiling now, himself again. “We’ve taken such excursions into Babylon before, my dear Wilkie. We have seen the Great Oven at night.”
We had. He had always been fascinated with this underbelly of our city. And “Babylon” and “the Great Oven” were the author’s pet expressions for the worst slums in London. Some of my nocturnal ventures with Dickens into these dark lanes and tenement hovels in earlier years still bothered my dreams.
“I am your man, my dear Dickens,” I said with enthusiasm. “I will report for duty tomorrow night, if that is your pleasure.”
He shook his head. “I have to recover my voice, my dear Wilkie. I am behind schedule on the last numbers of Our Mutual Friend. There are other things to be seen to in the coming days, including the recovery of the Patient. Are you spending the night, sir? Your room is ready, as always.”
“Alas, I cannot,” I said. “I have to get back to the city this afternoon. There are business affairs there that must be attended.” I did not tell Dickens that those “business affairs” consisted primarily of buying more laudanum, a substance which I could not do without, even then in 1865, for so long as a day.
“Very good,” he said, rising. “Could you do me a great favour, my dear Wilkie?”
“Anything in the world, my dear Dickens,” I said. “Command me, my friend.”
Dickens glanced at his watch. “It’s too late for you to catch the next train in from Gravesend, but if Charley gets the pony cart out, we can get you to Higham in time for the express to Charing Cross Station.”
“I am going to Charing Cross?”
“You are, my dear Wilkie,” he said, clasping me firmly on the shoulder as we came out of the gloom of his study into the brighter light of the entry hall. “I shall tell you why as I accompany you to the station.”
GEORGINA DID NOT COME out of the house with us, but the Inimitable’s oldest son, Charley, had come down to spend a few days with his father and was sent round to hitch up the basket cart. The front yard at Gad’s Hill was as tidy as everything else under the man’s control: Dickens’s favourite flower, scarlet geraniums, planted in precise rows; the two large cedars of Lebanon just beyond the neatly trimmed lawn and now throwing their shadows to the east along the road.
Something about the rows of geraniums we were walking between as we approached Charley and the basket cart bothered me. In fact, they made my heart pound faster and my skin go cold. I became aware that Dickens had been talking to me.
“… I took him on the emergency train straight to Charing Cross Hotel immediately after the crash,” he was saying. “I have paid two nurses to be with him so that he is not alone night or day. I would very much appreciate if you could look in on him this evening, my dear Wilkie, to give him my compliments and let him know that as soon as I am able to come into town again—most probably tomorrow—I will look in on him myself. If the nurses tell you that his injuries have worsened in any way, I would take it as a personal favour if you would send a messenger out to Gad’s Hill with the information as soon as possible.”
“Of course, Charles,” I said. I dimly realised that he must have been talking about the young man he had helped extricate from the wreckage at Staplehurst and then had personally put up in the hotel at Charing Cross. A young man named Dickenson. Edmond or Edward Dickenson, I seemed to recall. A rather extraordinary coincidence when one thinks about it.
As we came down the drive and away from the scarlet geraniums, the sense of panic left me as quickly and curiously as it had arrived.
The cart was small but Dickens insisted on squeezing into it with Charley and me as the young man urged the pony out to Gravesend and then on to the Rochester Road towards Higham Station. We had enough time.
At first Dickens was at ease, chatting with me about small publishing details at All the Year Round, but as the pony and cart picked up speed, moving along with carriages on the road—the Higham Station almost within sight—I saw the writer’s face, still sun darkened from his time in France, grow first paler and then the colour of lead. Beads of perspiration stood out on his temples and cheeks.
“Please slow down a bit, Charley. And cease swaying the cart from side to side. It is very distracting.”
“Yes, Father.” Charley pulled on the reins until the pony was no longer trotting.
I saw Dickens’s lips become thinner and thinner until they were little more than a bloodless slash. “Slower, Charley. For heaven’s sake, less speed.”
“Yes, Father.” Charley, in his twenties, looked as apprehensive as a boy when he glanced towards his father, who was now clutching the side of the basket cart with both hands and leaning unnecessarily to his right.
“Slower, please!” cried Dickens. The cart was now moving at a slow walking pace, certainly not at the steady four-miles-per-hour stride that Dickens could—and did—keep up for twelve and sixteen and twenty miles per day.
“We shall miss the train…” began Charley, glancing forward at the distant steeples and depot tower, then back to his watch.
“Stop! Let me out,” commanded Dickens. His face was now as grey as the pony’s tail. He staggered out of the cart and quickly shook my hand. “I shall walk back. It is a nice day for walking. Have a safe trip and please do send a communication to me this evening if young Mr Dickenson needs anything at all.”