Drood

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

There was the glowing sphere… no, not quite a sphere, an elongated glowing blue-white oval… and there was the black streak against the dark background.

The streak was on the ceiling and was the result of so many years of smoke rising. The glowing blue-white oval was in front of me, closer, a part of me, an extension of my thoughts.

It was also a moon, a pale satellite in thrall to me. I turned to my left, rolled slightly to my left, and beheld the sun—a sun, orange and white rather than blue and white, flickering out rays into the black cosmos. As the glowing blue-white oval was moon to me, so was I satellite to this burning sun in the darkness of space and time.

Something eclipsed my sun. I felt rather than saw the blue-white oval and long pipe connecting it to me snatched away.

“Here, Hatchery, pluck him out of there. Get him on his feet and support him.”

“ ’Ere, ’ere, ’ere,” shrieked an utterly alien and totally familiar voice. “The gen’lmum paid for ’is night and product, all undisturbed-like-to-be. Don’t be presumin’ to…”

“Shut up, Sal,” bellowed another familiar voice. A lost giant’s voice. “One more peep out of you and the inspector here will have you in the blackest hole in Newgate before the sun comes up.”

There were no more peeps. I had been floating above the cloud tops of shifting colours even as I wheeled in space around the spitting, hissing star-sun, my blue-white satellite—now gone—wheeling about me in turn, but now I felt strong hands pulling me down from the cosmic aether to lumpy, muddy, straw-strewn earth.

“Keep him on his feet,” rasped the voice I associated with imperious forefingers. “Lift him when you have to.”

I was floating again, between dark cribs set into dark walls, the hissing sun receding behind me. A thin colossus rose before me.

“Sal, get Yahee out of the way or I’ll snap his smoke-clotted bones clean out of his rotted old flesh and sell them as three’a-penny flutes to the Wild Boys.”

“ ’Ere, ’ere,” I heard again. Shadows merged. One was laid back in his coffin. “That’s a good, Yahee. Rest easy. ’Ib, Your ’Ighness, this ’ere gen’lmum hasn’t paid in full yet. You’re pickin’ my pocket if you ’aul ’im out o’ ’ere.”

“You lie, crone,” said the dominant of the two men’s voices. “You just said he’d paid for the night and drug in full. There was enough in his pipe to keep him addled ’til dawn. But give her another two coins, Detective Hatchery. Anything small.”

Then we were out into the night. I noted on the coldness of the air—it smelt of snow not yet fallen—and I noted the absence of my topcoat and my missing top hat and cane and the small miracle of the fact that my feet did not touch the cobblestones as I floated above them towards a distant, rocking streetlamp. Then I realised that the larger of the two shapes still escorting me was carrying me under his arm as if I were a prize pig won at a country fair.

I was recovering from the pipe fumes sufficiently to protest, but the dark form leading the way—I never doubted for a second that it was my nemesis Inspector Field—said, “Hush, now, Mr Collins, there’s a public house nearby that will open for us despite the hour and we’ll order something for you that will set you right.”

A public house that would be open at this hour? As foggy as my sight might have been (and, I realised, as foggy as the cold air itself was this night), no such place could be open in this terrible hour just before dawn on such a harsh, wintry, early-spring morning.

I heard and half-saw Field pounding on a door under a dangling sign: Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters. I knew now, however much my middle hurt from being carried like a country fair pig by Detective Hatchery, that I was not really out here in the cold and dark with these two men at all. I had to be back in my crib-bunk at Opium Sal’s, enjoying the last of my blue-bottle smoke.

“Hold your horses!” came a female voice barely audible over the throwing open of various bolts and the creak of an ancient door. “Oh, it’s you, Inspector! And you, Detective Hatchery. Both out on so terrible a night? And is that a drowned man you have there, Hib?”

“No, Miss Abbey,” said the giant carrying me. “Just a gentleman in need of restoration.”

I was carried into the red-curtained tavern and appreciated the warmth—there were still embers in the fire here in the public space—even as I knew this was all a dream. The Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters and its proprietress, Miss Abbey Potterson, were fictions from Dickens’s d— ned Our Mutual Friend. No public house with that name existed down here near the docks, although there were many that Dickens could have used for reference.

“They burn sherry very well here,” said Inspector Field as Miss Abbey lighted various lamps and had a sleepy-eyed boy add more fuel to the small fire. “Perhaps the gentleman might like a bottle?”

I was sure that this dialogue was also straight from Our Mutual Friend. Who had said it that my opiated mind might structure this fantasy so? The “Mr Inspector,” I realised, was yet another Dickens interpretation of this very same Inspector Field who took his place in a cosy booth.

“The gentleman would like to be turned upright and put down,” I said in the dream. The blood was rushing to my head now and it was not a totally pleasant sensation.

Hatchery lifted me, righted me, and placed me gently on a bench opposite the inspector. I looked around as if fully expecting to see Mr Eugene Wrayburn and his friend Mortimer Lightwood, but with the exception of the seated inspector, the standing Hatchery, the hustling boy, and the hovering Miss Abbey, the public house was empty.

“Yes, the special sherry, please,” said Field. “For the three of us. To take away the chill and the fogs.” Miss Abbey and the boy hurried into the back room.

“It won’t do,” I said to the inspector. “I know this is all a dream.”

“Now, now, Mr Collins,” said Field, pinching the back of my hand until I yelped, “Opium Sal’s is no place for a gentleman such as yourself, sir. If Hatchery and I had not escalpated you when we did, they would’ve had your wallet and gold teeth in another ten minutes, sir.”

“I have no gold teeth,” I said, taking care to enunciate each word correctly.

“A figure of speech, sir.”

“My topcoat,” I said. “My hat. My cane.”

Hatchery magically produced all three items and set them in the empty booth across from us.

“No, Mr Collins,” continued Inspector Field, “a gentleman such as yourself should contain your opium usage to laudanum as what is sold legally by such upstanding corner apothecaries as Mr Cowper. And leave the opium dens down along the dark docks to the heathen Chinee and the dusky Lascar.”

I was not surprised that he knew the name of my principal supplier. This was, after all, a dream.

“It has been some weeks since I have heard from you, sir,” continued Field.

I leaned my aching head on my hands. “I’ve had nothing to say,” I said.

“That is a problem, Mr Collins,” sighed the inspector. “In that it violates both the spirit and specific wording of our agreement.”

“Bugger our agreement,” I muttered.

“Now, sir,” said Field. “We’ll get some burned sherry into you so you remember your duties and behaviour as a gentleman.”

The boy, whose name, I was certain, was Bob, returned with a huge sweet-smelling jug. In his left hand, Bob carried an iron model of a sugar-loaf hat—Dickens had described this, I remember, and I had paid attention to the written description just as if he and I had not shared a thousand such specialities—into which he emptied the contents of the jug. He then thrust the pointed end of the brimming “hat” deep into the embers and renewed fire, leaving it there while he disappeared, only to reappear again with three clean drinking glasses and the proprietress.

“Thank you, Miss Darby,” said Inspector Field as the boy set the glasses in place and plucked the iron vessel from the fire. He gave it a delicate twirl—the thing hissed and steamed—and then poured the heated contents into the original jug. The penultimate part of this small sacrament was when Bob held each of our bright glasses up over the steaming jug, opaquing them to some degree of foggy perfection known only to the boy, and then filled them all to the applause of the inspector and his detective-henchman.

“Thank you, William,” said Field.

“William?” I said, confused, even as I put my face forward the better to inhale the warm effulgence emanating from my glass. “Miss Darby? Don’t you mean Bob and Miss Abbey? Miss Abbey Potterson?”

“I certainly do not,” said Field. “I mean William—as in the good boy Billy Lamper you saw before you just a second ago—and his mistress, Miss Elisabeth Darby, who has owned and run this establishment for twenty-eight years.”

“Is this not the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters?” I asked, taking a careful sip of my drink. My entire body seemed to be tingling as if it were a leg or an arm I had allowed to fall asleep. Except for my head, which was aching.

“I know of no such establishment by that name in London,” laughed Inspector Field. “This is the Globe and Pigeon, and has been for years and years. Christopher Marlowe probably dipped his learned wick in a back room here, if not across the street in the riskier White Swann. But the White Swann is not a gentleman’s inn, Mr Collins, not even for a gentleman so adventurous as yourself, sir. Nor would the proprietor have opened the door for us and heated our sherry as my lovely Liza has. Drink up, sir, but pray tell me why you’ve had aught to report as you do so.”

The heated drink was slowly clearing my clouded mind. “I tell you again that there’s nothing to tell you, Inspector,” I said a trifle sharply. “Charles Dickens is preparing for his triumphant tour of the provinces and—the few times I’ve seen him—there’s been no mention of your shared phantom Drood. Not since Christmas Day night.”

Inspector Field leaned closer. “When you say Drood levitated outside Mr Dickens’s first-floor window.”

It was my turn to laugh. I regretted it at once. Stroking my aching forehead with one hand, I lifted the glass with the other. “No,” I said, “when Mr Dickens said that he saw Drood’s face levitating outside his window.”

“You do not believe in levitation, Mr Collins?”

“I find it very… unlikely,” I said sullenly.

“Yet it seems you express a quite different view on the subject in your papers,” said Inspector Field. He made a move of his corpulent forefinger, and the lad Billy hurried to refill both of our still-steamed glasses.

“What papers?” I said.

“I believe they were gathered under the title ‘Magnetic Evenings at Home’ and were each clearly signed ‘W.W.C.’—William Wilkie Collins.”

“Dear God!” I cried too loudly. “Those things must have appeared… what? — fifteen years ago.” The series of papers he was referring to had been written for the sceptic G. H. Lewes’s Leader sometime in the early fifties. I had simply reported on various drawing-room experiments that had been much in vogue then: men and women being magnetised, inanimate objects such as glasses of water being magnetised by a mesmerist, “sensitives” reading minds and foretelling the future, attempts to communicate with the dead, and… yes, I remembered now through the opium and alcohol and headache… one woman who had levitated herself and the high-backed chair upon which she sat.

“Have you had reason to change your opinion since you observed these things, Mr Collins?” I found Field’s soft but somehow peremptory and insinuating voice as irritating as I always did.

“They were not my opinions, Inspector. Simply my professional observations at the time.”

“But you no longer believe that a man or woman—say, someone trained in ancient arts of a long-forgotten society—could levitate ten feet in the air to peer in Charles Dickens’s window?”

Enough. I had had enough of this.

“I never believed in such a thing,” I said harshly, my voice rising. “Fourteen or fifteen years ago, as a much younger man, I reported on the… events… of certain drawing-room mystics and on the credulity of those gathered to watch such things. I am a modern man, Inspector Field, which in my generation translates to ‘a man of little belief.’ For instance, I no longer believe that your mysterious Mr Drood even exists. Or, rather, to state it more positively and in the affirmative, I believe that both you and Charles Dickens have used the legend of such a figure for your own different and disparate purposes, even while you have each endeavoured to use me as some sort of pawn in your game… whatever that game may be.”

It was too long a speech for a man in my condition, at this hour of the morning, and I buried my face in the glass of steaming sherry.

I looked up as Inspector Field touched my arm. His florid, veined face was set in a serious expression. “Oh, there’s a game all right, Mr Collins, but it’s not being played at your expense. And there are pawns—and more important pieces—being put into play, but you ain’t a pawn, sir. Although it’s almost certain that your Mr Dickens is.”

I withdrew my sleeve from his grasp. “What are you talking about?”

“Have you wondered, Mr Collins, exactly why I have placed so much importance on finding this Drood?”

I could not resist a smirk. “You want your pension back,” I said.

I thought this would anger the inspector and therefore was surprised by his quick, easy laugh. “Bless you, Mr Collins, that’s true. I do. But that’s the least of my goals in this particular chess match. Your Mr Drood and I are on the verge of becoming old men and we’ve each decided to put an end to this cat-and-mouse game what we’ve been playing these twenty years and more. Each of us has enough pieces left on the board to make our final move, it’s true, but what I believe you do not appreciate, sir, is that the end of this game must… must… result in the death of one or t’other of us. Either Drood dead or Inspector Field dead. There’s no other way for it, sir.”

I blinked several times. Finally I said, “Why?”

Inspector Field leaned closer again and I could smell the warm sherry on his breath. “You may have thought I was exaggerating, sir, when I said that Drood has been responsible, personally and through those mesmerised minions he sends out, for the deaths of three hundred people since he come here from Egypt more than two decades ago. Well, I was not exaggerating, Mr Collins. The actual count is three hundred and twenty-eight. This has to end, sir. This Drood has to be put a stop to. So far, all these years, in my service to the Metropolitan Police and out of it, I’ve been skirmishing with the Devil—we’ve each sacrificed pawns and rooks and better in this long game—but this is the true End Game, Mr Collins. Either the Devil checkmates my king or I check his. There’s no other way for it, sir.”

I stared at the inspector. For some time I had been doubting Charles Dickens’s sanity; now I knew for certain that there was another insane man affecting my life.

“I know that I’ve asked for your help with no other offer in recompense than my assistance in keeping the knowledge of Miss Martha R— from your lady Caroline, sir,” said Inspector Field. I thought that was a very polite way to describe his blackmailing of me. “But there are other things that I can offer in exchange for your help, sir. Substantial things.”

“What?” I said.

“What is your biggest problem in life at the moment, Mr Collins?”

I was tempted to say “You” and have done with it, but I surprised myself by uttering another syllable. “Pain.”

“Aye, sir… you’ve mentioned the rheumatical gout you’re suffering from. And it’s visible in your eyes, if I may be so bold as to mention it, Mr Collins. Constant pain is no trifling thing for any man, but especially for an artist such as yourself. Detectives depend on deduction, as you well know, sir, and my deduction is that you’ve come this awful March night to Opium Sal’s and this filthy neighbourhood just in some hope of further assuaging your pain. Is that not so, Mr Collins?”

“Yes,” I said. I did not bother telling Field that Frank Beard, my doctor, had recently suggested to me that the “rheumatical gout” I’d long suffered from might very well be a virulent form of a venereal disease.

“It bothers you even as we speak, Mr Collins?”

“My eyes feel like bags of blood,” I said truthfully. “I feel that every time I open them, I run the risk of haemorrhaging pints of blood down my face and into my beard.”

“Terrible, sir, terrible,” said Inspector Field, shaking his head. “I don’t blame you for a moment for seeking some relief from your laudanum or the opium pipe. But if you don’t mind me telling you so, sir, the grade of product at Opium Sal’s simply will not do the trick.”

“What do you mean, Inspector?”

“I mean that she dilutes the opium far too much for someone who is in your level of discomfort, Mr Collins. And it is not a pure product to begin with. It is true that a judicious combination of your laudanum and the opium pipe might have salutary—perhaps even miraculous—effects on your affliction, but these Bluegate Fields and Cheapside opium dens simply don’t have the quality of drug to help you, sir.”

“Where, then?” I asked, but even as I spoke, I knew what he would say.

“King Lazaree,” said Inspector Field. “The Chinaman’s secret den down in Undertown.”

“Down in the crypts and catacombs,” I said dully.

“Yes, sir.”

“You simply want me to go back to Undertown,” I said, meeting the older man’s gaze. There was a dim, cold light filtering through the red-curtained windows of the Globe and Pigeon. “You want me to try again to lead you to Drood.”

Inspector Field shook his balding and grey-cheekwhiskered head. “No, we’ll not find Drood that way, Mr Collins. Mr Dickens undoubtedly told you the truth last autumn when he said that he’s been returning regular to Drood’s lair, but he’s not gone back through the nearby cemetery. We’ve had men posted there for months. Drood has told him of some other route to his underground world. Either that or the Egyptian Devil is living aboveground all this time and has revealed one of his locations to your Mr Dickens. So your writer friend don’t need to enter Undertown by that route any longer, Mr Collins, but you can if you wish the relief of King Lazaree’s pure opium.”

My glass was empty. I looked up at the inspector through eyes suddenly grown watery. “I cannot,” I said. “I’ve tried. I cannot move the heavy bier in the crypt in order to gain access to the stairs.”

“I know, sir,” said Inspector Field, his voice as professionally smooth and sad as an undertaker’s. “But Hatchery will be most glad to help you whenever you wish to go down there, day or night. Won’t you, Hib?”

“Most glad, sir,” said Hatchery from where he stood nearby. I confess that I had almost forgotten that the other man was present.

“How would I get word to him?” I asked.

“The boy is still waiting on your street, Mr Collins. Send word through my Gooseberry, and Detective Hatchery will be there within the hour to escort you through the dangerous neighbourhoods, open the way to the staircase for you, and wait upon your return.” The infernal inspector smiled. “He will even loan you his revolver again, Mr Collins. But you should have nothing to fear from King Lazaree and his patrons. Unlike Opium Sal’s shifty clientele, Lazaree and his living mummies down there know that they are allowed to exist only upon my sufferance.”

I hesitated.

“Is there something else we can help you with in exchange for your help in finding Drood through your Mr Dickens?” asked Field. “Some problem at home, perhaps?”

I glanced askance at the old man. What would he know of my problems at home? How could he know that my daily and nightly fights with Caroline had sent me to Sal’s as surely as my need to lessen the pain from my gout?

“I’ve been married for more than thirty years, Mr Collins,” he said softly, as if having read my mind. “My speculation is that your lady is, even after all this time, demanding marriage… even as your other lady in Yarmouth is demanding to return to London to be near you.”

“D— n you, Field,” I cried, banging my fist down on the heavy, worn planks of the table. “None of this is any of your business.”

“Of course not, sir. Of course not,” said the inspector in his oiliest voice. “But such problems can be a distraction to your work as well as to our common goals. I am trying to see how I could be of help… as a friend would.”

“There’s no help for this,” I growled. “And you are no friend.”

Inspector Field nodded his understanding. “Still, sir, if you don’t mind advice from an old married man, sometimes a change of place buys a period of peace and quiet in such domestic disagreements.”

“Move, you mean? We’ve talked about it, Caroline and I.”

“I believe, Mr Collins, that you and the lady have several times walked to look at a fine home on Gloucester Place.”

I was no longer surprised or shocked to hear that Field’s men had followed us. I would not be surprised to learn that he had secreted a dwarf into the walls of our home on Melcombe Place in order to take notes on our quarrels.

“It is a fine home,” I said. “But the current resident, a Mrs Shernwold, does not wish to sell. And I’d be strapped to find the funds for it at this time anyway.”

“Both of these impediments could be eliminated, Mr Collins,” purred Inspector Field. “If we were working together again, I could all but guarantee that you and your lady and her daughter could be moved into that fine residence on Gloucester Place within a year or two, even while your Miss R— could be reinstated on Bolsover Street, if you wish, with our help in meeting her travel and other immediate expenses.”

I squinted at the old man. My head hurt. I wanted to go home to breakfast and then bed. I wanted to pull the bedcovers over my head and to sleep for a week. We had moved from blackmailing to bribery. On the whole, I believe I had been more comfortable with the blackmail.

“What do I have to do, Inspector?”

“Nothing more than we have already discussed, Mr Collins. Use your good offices with Charles Dickens to find out where Drood is and what he is up to.”

I shook my head. “Dickens is completely absorbed in his preparations for his imminent reading tour. I am sure he’s had no contact with Drood since Christmas. Besides being frightened by what he thought he saw outside his window that night, Dickens is buried now in details. You have no idea the amount of preparation such a tour involves.”

“I am sure I do not, Mr Collins,” said Inspector Field. “But I do know that your friend will begin his tour with an opening night reading in a week, on the twenty-third of March, at the Assembly Rooms in Cheltenham. Then, on the tenth of April, he will appear at St James’s Hall here in London, followed immediately by readings in Liverpool, then Manchester, then Glasgow, then Edinburgh.…”

“Do you have the entire itinerary?” I interrupted.

“Of course.”

“Then you would know how impossible it would be for me to get Charles Dickens’s attention during the tour. All authors’ public readings are exhausting for the author. A Dickens reading is exhausting for the author and for everyone around him. There is simply nothing in the world like a Charles Dickens reading, and he promises this tour to be even more intense.”

“So I have heard,” Inspector Field said softly. “Somehow, Drood is involved in this reading tour of your friend’s.”

I laughed. “How could he be? How could a man of such appearance travel with Dickens or be seen at his readings without comment?”

“Drood is a man of infinite guises,” Field said. His voice was hushed, as if Hatchery or Miss Darby or the boy Billy could be the Egyptian criminal in disguise. “I guarantee that your friend Dickens is—consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or as an instrument of Drood—carrying out that Devil’s purposes on this tour.”

“How could he…” I began and stopped, remembering Dickens’s odd insistence that he would be magnetising the entire audience during each reading. Mesmerising them. But to what dark purpose?

This was all absurd.

“Still,” I said wearily, “you know Dickens’s schedule. And you know he has only a small entourage travelling with him.”

“Mr Dolby,” said Inspector Field. “His agent Mr Wills.” Field went on to name the gas man and lighting expert and even those agents sent in advance to inspect the theatres and arrange for ticketing prices, advertising, and such. “But surely, Mr Collins, Dickens would enjoy seeing his dear friend during such an exhausting tour. I know that he plans to see Macready at the Cheltenham opening. Could you not arrange to spend a few days of travel with your famous friend, attend one or two of his readings?”

“That’s all you want of me?”

“Your help in these small things—a simple matter of observing and chatting and reporting—could be invaluable,” purred Inspector Field.

“How on earth do you plan to make ninety Gloucester Place available to us, even by next year, if Mrs Shernwold is reserving it for her missionary son and absolutely refuses to sell?” I asked.

The inspector smiled. I half-expected to see canary feathers protruding from between those liver-coloured lips. “That will be my problem, sir, although I expect no problems at all. It is a privilege to help someone aiding us in the public service of ridding London of its least notorious but most successful serial murderer.”

I sighed and nodded. If Inspector Field had extended his hand then to seal our dark deal, I’m not sure if I could have touched him. Perhaps he sensed as much, for he merely nodded—the deal was set—and looked around.

“Would you like Miss Darby and the boy to burn us some more sherry, sir? It’s a wonderful preparation for sleep.”

“No,” I said, trying to get to my feet and suddenly feeling Hatchery’s huge hand on my arm, effortlessly lifting me out of the booth. “I want to go home.”