Free Drood by Dan Simmons Page A

listed some specifics of Dickens’s description of our Phantom: the black silk cape and top hat, the missing fingers and eyelids and attenuated nose, the pallor and baldness and brittle fringe of hair, the terrible stare, his odd way of seeming to glide rather than walk, the sibilant hiss and foreign accent in his speech.
    “Oh, good heavens, no,” cried young Dickenson. “I surely would have remembered seeing or hearing such a man.” Then his gaze seemed to turn inward, much as Dickens’s had several times in his darkened study. “Even in spite of the incredibly terrible sights and sounds everywhere around me that day,” he added.
    “Yes, I am sure,” I said, resisting the impulse to tap the bedclothes above his bruised leg in a minor show of sympathy. “So you’ve never heard the name Drood or heard others talking about him… on the train that day, perhaps?”
    “Not to my knowledge, Mr Collins,” said the young man. “Is it of some importance to Mr Dickens to find the man? I would do
anything
for Mr Dickens, if it were in my power.”
    “Yes, I am sure you would, Mr Dickenson,” I said. This time I did tap at his knee under the blankets. “Mr Dickens specifically charged me with asking you if there were any additional service that he might offer,” I said and checked my watch. “Any want or lack or pain that the nurses or our mutual friend might remedy?”
    “Nothing at all,” said Dickenson. “Tomorrow I should be able to walk well enough to leave this hotel and begin living on my own again. I do have a cat, you know.” He laughed softly. “Or rather, she has me. Although, as is the nature of so many of her species, she comes and goes at will, hunts for her own meals, and certainly will not be inconvenienced by my absence.” Again there came that sense of his gaze turning inward, staring at the death and dying at Staplehurst just three days earlier. “Actually, Pussy would not be unduly inconvenienced had I died. No one would have missed me.”
    “Your guardian?” I prompted, not wishing to bring on a torrent of self-pity.
    Dickenson laughed easily. “My current Guardian, a gentleman of the law who had known my grandfather, would have mourned my passing, Mr Collins, but our… relationship… is more of a
business
nature. Pussy is about the only friend I have in London. Or elsewhere.”
    I nodded briskly. “I shall check on you again in the morning, Mr Dickenson.”
    “Oh, but there is no need…”
    “Our mutual friend Charles Dickens feels otherwise,” I said quickly. “And, his health permitting, he may come tomorrow to see you and enquire in person about your recovery.”
    The boy blushed again. It was not unbecoming, although it did make him somehow appear all the softer and sillier in the late-afternoon June sunlight filtering in through the hotel drapes and curtains.
    Nodding and fetching my walking stick, I left young Edmond Dickenson and went out through the sitting room past the silent nurse.
    A CT III OF
THE FROZEN DEEP
opens with Clara Burnham travelling to Newfoundland to search for news (much as the real Lady Franklin had hired her own ships and gone to the Far North with her niece Sophia Cracroft in search of her husband, Sir John). Into a remote ice cavern along that coast staggers a starved, exhausted man just escaped from the frozen sea. Clara sees that it is Wardour, and there are hysterical accusations that he has murdered—and perhaps eaten? the audience wonders—her fiancé, Frank Aldersley. Wardour—Dickens—rushes out and returns with Aldersley—me, in ragged clothes that left me more naked than not—in his arms and alive.
“Often,”
gasps Wardour,
“in supporting Aldersley through snow-drifts and ice-floes, have I been tempted to leave him sleeping.”
    Delivering that line, Dickens… Richard Wardour… collapses, his exertions, starvation, and exhaustion from keeping his rival alive on the ice for so long finally catching up to him. Wardour manages to