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.
DID 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 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.
ACT III OFTHE 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 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.