Dickens laughed much this ninth of June in the Year of Our Lord 1867. It seemed at that dinner that he had no concerns and nothing on his mind.
After dinner, we went up to my study for brandy and cigars. I admit to being a bit concerned about going into the study so close to dark—the evenings were long in this time in June, and though the weather had turned and it was cool and pouring rain outside, dim light still came in through the drapes—but I comforted myself with the knowledge that I rarely saw the Other Wilkie this early at night. Nor had I ever seen the Other Wilkie when anyone else was around, even though—and perhaps I should have told you before this, Dear Reader—I have been haunted, in one way or the other, by the sensed and then-visible presence of the Other Wilkie since I was a small boy.
But not this night.
Dickens excused himself to visit the water closet, and I took my brandy and went over to part the drapes and look out into the darkness.
The rain still poured down. I smiled slightly, thinking of Inspector Field and his twenty-three operatives—most of them hired on just for tonight, I’d learned this week, since, surprisingly, Field’s own private investigations agency had only seven men working full-time—out there now somewhere, unseen but also certainly uncomfortable in the rain and unseasonable cold. Carrie and our girl Agnes had got a fire going strong in my study and it felt quite cosy.
It had amused me, only the day before, when I had been required to get Caroline, Carrie, and the three servants all out of the house on various ruses so that Field, Barris, and several of his men could go through our Melcombe Place home from cellar to attic.
Inspector Field had insisted on this and I could do nothing but walk behind him as they inspected all doors and windows—estimating aloud how impossible a jump would be from the nearby roofs to these upstairs windows and deciding upon various vantage points in the neighbourhood from which to watch the alley, back yard, and nearby sidestreets. Finally they had gone through the cellar with a sort of fanatical intensity, even going so far as to move half a ton or so of coal in my coal-cellar. There, where the coal was always piled several feet high near the back wall, they had discovered a hole in the stone wall… a hole not ten inches wide.
The detectives shined their bullseye lanterns down the hole, but the corrugated tunnel so revealed simply curved down out of sight into stone and soil.
“Where does that go?” demanded Inspector Field.
“How could I know?” I said. “I have never seen it before.”
Field then called for Barris and his men, who—unbelievably! — had brought bricks, mortar, and the tools with which they could close up such an innocuous aperture. They did so in less than ten minutes, with Barris himself laying the bricks and applying the trowel. I noticed the easy expertise with which he worked and could imagine the reasons for those massive forearms. However much Mr Reginald Barris might sport an Oxford or Cambridge accent, his background was decidedly that of a lower-class craftsman.
“Are you protecting Dickens and me from rats?” I asked with a smile.
The inspector aimed that corpulent and strangely ominous finger at me. “Mark my words, Mr Collins. Either Mr Dickens will strive to see Drood tomorrow, this important anniversary of their meeting at Staplehurst, or Drood will find a way to see Dickens. Either way, sir, you are in danger if that meeting takes place here.”
I’d laughed and pointed to the tiny hole, now fully and redundantly bricked over. “You expect Drood to somehow slide his way through that?” I showed with my hands how narrow the aperture had been; a child oiled with grease could not have slithered through.
Field did not smile in return. “The thing that you call Drood can enter in through smaller apertures than that, alas, Mr Collins. If once invited, that is.”
“Well, there you have it, Inspector,” I said, still laughing softly. “I have never invited Mr Drood into my home.”
“No, but perhaps Mr Dickens has,” said Inspector Field. Then the men went on to inspect every square inch of the rest of my cellar.
I AM GOING to America,” said Dickens.
We were relaxing with the last of our brandy and cigars, the fire hissing and spitting at our feet and the rain pounding at the windows. Dickens was as quiet and sombre in my study now as he had been jovial and talkative at our dinner table an hour earlier.
“You can’t be serious,” I said.
“I am.”
“But…” I began and had to pause. I was about to say, But surely your health will not allow this, but discretion caught me in time. I had heard the serious state of Dickens’s health from several sources, including Frank Beard, my brother, Charley, and Dickens’s daughter Kate (often through Charley), as well as through other mutual friends, but it would only infuriate Dickens if I brought up my awareness of his several serious infirmities: among which were an increasing fatigue that had caused him to collapse between performances during his spring tour of Scotland and England, increasing trouble with his left leg and left kidney, difficulties with digestion, flatulence, and accompanying headaches, and—perhaps most visible to all of us—his rapid ageing.
I said aloud, “But surely your dislike of America and the Americans would preclude you from returning there. You certainly made your disdain clear in American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit.”
“Pfah,” said Dickens with a wave of his hand. “I visited America twenty-five years ago, my dear Wilkie. Even such a backward place has had to reform in twenty-five years. They certainly have in terms of respect of copyright and payment to English authors for serialised works—as you must know, to your great benefit.”
This last was true. I had made an excellent deal with the Americans for Armadale and had almost completed negotiations for an even better arrangement for The Moonstone, which I had just begun writing.
“Besides,” continued Dickens, “I have many friends there, some of whom are too old or timid to make the Crossing. I should like to see them a final time before they or I die.”
Dickens’s talk of death made me anxious. I sipped the last of my brandy and stared into the fire, again imagining foolish Inspector Field and his small legion of men huddling out there in the rain somewhere. If Dickens was going to do what Field had insisted he might—plead some forgotten meeting somewhere and slip out of my house rather than spend the night—he had better hurry. It was getting late.
“At any rate,” said Dickens, settling deeper into the leather cushions of his wing chair, “I’ve decided to send Dolby over in early August to investigate the lay of the land, as the Americans like to say. He’ll be carrying my two new stories, ‘George Silverman’s Explanation’ and ‘A Holiday Romance.’ They were commissioned by American publishers, and I believe the latter is appearing there in a children’s magazine called Our Young Folks or something similar.”
“Yes,” I said. “You showed me ‘A Holiday Romance’ at Gad’s Hill a few weekends ago, you might remember… told me that the tales in it were written by children, as was their whimsical conceit. And I believed you.”
“I was not sure whether to be flattered or insulted, my dear Wilkie.”
“Neither, of course, Charles,” I said. “A mere statement of fact. As always, when you set out to do a thing with words, it is done in its convincing entirety. But I do remember you telling me that your strength was almost broken twenty-five years ago under the travel and labour of your first American tour. And Forster says to this day that the Americans were unworthy of a man of genius such as yourself. Are you certain, Charles, that you wish to put yourself under such a strain once again?”