Free Drood by Dan Simmons Page B

say,
“My sister, Clara!—Kiss me, sister, kiss me before I die!”
He then dies in Clara’s arms with Clara’s kiss upon his cheek and Clara’s tears streaming down his face.
    At our dress rehearsal, I was tempted to vomit on stage. But during all four performances at Tavistock House, I found myself weeping and heard myself whispering, “This is an awful thing.” You may, Dear Reader, interpret that in any way you wish.
    Dickens’s performances were powerful and… strange. William Makepeace Thackeray, one of our attendees the night of the first performance, later remarked of Dickens—“If that man would now go upon the stage, he would make his £20,000 a year.”
    This was wild hyperbole in 1857, but by the time of the Staplehurst accident, Dickens was making almost that much through his “acting” in his reading tours in the United States and throughout England.
    The audiences blubbered like children during the four performances of
The Frozen Deep
at Tavistock House. Professional reviewers whom Dickens had invited to the opening nights professed to be deeply impressed by Dickens’s performance and his strange immersion in the role of Richard Wardour. Indeed, it was the author’s terrible intensity—a sort of dark energy which filled the room and swept all viewers and listeners into its vortex—that
everyone
remarked upon.
    Dickens was depressed after the last performance of
The Frozen Deep.
He wrote to me of the “sad sounds” of the workmen “battering and smashing down” his schoolroom theatre.
    There was a clamour for Dickens to stage more performances of my play; many urged him to do so for profit. It was rumoured, correctly it turned out, that the Queen herself wanted to attend a performance. But Dickens resisted all such suggestions. None of us in the amateur production wished to be mere performers for money. But in June of that year, 1857, that fateful year in which Dickens’s domestic life would change forever, the writer was shocked to hear of the death of our mutual friend Douglas Jerrold.
    Dickens told me that just a few nights before the other author’s death, the Inimitable had dreamt that Jerrold had given him copy to edit but Dickens could not make sense of the words. This is every writer’s nightmare—the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us—but Dickens found it interesting that he had dreamt it just as Jerrold was, unbeknownst to any of us, on his deathbed.
    Knowing that Jerrold’s family would be left in dire financial circumstances (Douglas was much more the reformer radical than Dickens, despite his posturing, would ever be), Dickens came up with the idea for a series of benefit performances: T. P. Cooke in revivals of Jerrold’s two plays,
Black Eyed Susan
and
Rent Day;
Thackeray and the war correspondent William Howard Russell giving lectures; and Dickens himself doing afternoon and night readings.
    And, of course, a return of
The Frozen Deep
.
    Dickens’s goal was to raise £2,000 for Jerrold’s family.
    The Gallery of Illustration on Regent Street was rented for the series of performances. The Queen—always careful not to appear at a benefit for a single charity—not only gave her name in support of this effort, but sent word that she was intensely eager to see
The Frozen Deep
and suggested that Mr Dickens select a room in Buckingham Palace in which he could provide a private performance for Her Majesty and her guests.
    Dickens refused. His reasons were clear enough: his daughters, who appeared in the play, had never been introduced at Court and he did not want their first appearance before the Queen at the palace to be as actresses. He proposed that Her Majesty should come to a private performance at the Gallery of Illustration a week before subscription night and that she should bring her own gallery of guests. Faced with the iron will of the Indomitable, the Queen agreed.
    We performed before her on 4 July, 1857. Her Majesty’s