Free Drood by Dan Simmons

with no real intention of mastering or practising in any of them. The interest on his inheritance allowed him to purchase food and books and theatre tickets and the occasional holiday to the seashore—his time was his own.
    We discussed theatre and literature. It turned out that young Mr Dickenson, a subscriber to Dickens’s previous journal
Household Words
as well as to the current
All the Year Round,
had read and admired my story “A Terribly Strange Bed” that had appeared in the former magazine.
    “Good heavens, man,” I exclaimed. “That was published almost fifteen years ago! You must have been all of five years old!”
    Young Dickenson’s blush began in his shell-like ears, migrated quickly to his cheeks, and rose like pink climbing ivy through the vault of his temples to the long curve of his pale forehead. I could see the blush spreading even under his thinning, straw-coloured hair. “Seven years old, actually, sir,” said the orphan. “But my Guardian, Mr Watson—a very liberal M.P.—had leather-bound copies of both
Punch
and such journals as
Household Words
in his library. My current devotion to the written word was formed and confirmed in that room.”
    “Really,” I said. “How interesting.”
    My joining the staff of
Household Words
years earlier had meant another five pounds a week to me. It seems to have meant the world to this orphan. He could almost recite my book
After Dark
from memory and was dutifully amazed when I told him that the separate tales which formed the volume had been based in large part upon my mother’s diaries and a more formal manuscript in which she had reminisced about being the wife of a famous painter.
    It turned out that the eleven-year-old Edmond Dickenson had travelled up to Manchester with his Guardian to see
The Frozen Deep
in the huge New Free Trade Hall there on 21 August, 1857.
    A CT II OF
THE FROZEN DEEP
is set in the Arctic regions where Dickens-Wardour and Wardour’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Commander Crayford, are discussing their slim chances of survival in the face of cold and starvation.
    “Never give in to your stomach, and your stomach will end in giving in to you,”
the veteran explorer advises Crayford. Such determination—a will that would accept no master—came not only from the pen of Charles Dickens, but from his very soul.
    Wardour goes on to explain that he loves the Arctic wastes precisely “because there are no women here.” In the same act he exclaims—“I would have accepted anything that set work and hardship and danger, like Ramparts, between my misery and me… Hard work, Crayford, that is the true Elixir of our life!” And finally, “. . . the hopeless wretchedness in this world, is the wretchedness that women cause.”
    It was, nominally, my play. My name was listed on the playbill as author (as well as my listing there as an actor), but almost all of Richard Wardour’s lines had been written or rewritten by Charles Dickens.
    These were not the words of a man happy in his marriage.
    At the end of Act II, two men are sent out across the ice as the trapped crews’ last chance for rescue. These men must cross a thousand miles of the frozen deep. The two men, of course, are Richard Wardour and his successful rival for Clara Burnham’s hand, Frank Aldersley. (Perhaps I have already mentioned that Dickens and I both grew beards for our roles.) The second act ends with Wardour discovering that the injured, starved, weakened Aldersley is his worst enemy, the man he swore to murder on sight.
    D ID YOU HAPPEN TO SEE the gentleman named Drood at the accident site?” I asked Edmond Dickenson when the young fool finally stopped talking and the nurse was out of the room.
    “A gentleman named Drood, sir? In faith, I am not sure. There were so many gentlemen there helping me, and—other than our wonderful Mr Dickens—I learned so few of their names.”
    “It seems this gentleman has a rather memorable appearance,” I said and