Drood

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Mother died on the nineteenth of March.

I was not there when she died. Since I was not able to attend the funeral, I asked my friend Holman Hunt, with whom I’d gone to the theatre just the week before to see my No Thoroughfare again, to go in my place, writing—“I am sure it will be a comfort to him…” by which I meant my brother, Charles, “… to see the face of a dear old friend whom my mother loved, and whom we love.”

In truth, Dear Reader, I have no idea if Mother loved Holman Hunt or if he had any serious affection for her, but he had taken dinner with her a few times in my presence, so I saw no reason that he could not fill that missing presence at Harriet Collins’s funeral.

You may think me cold or unfeeling for not going to my own mother’s funeral, when my illness may have—would have—allowed me to, but you would not think this if you had known my heart and mind at this time. It was all too terribly logical. If I went to Mother’s cottage with Charley to view the body, what reaction would her scarab and mine have to the other’s proximity? The thought of that beetle lurching and digging and scrabbling in Mother’s dead body was too much for me to bear.

And—before the funeral, when the casket was still in the parlour of her cottage and open so that friends could pay their respects—what would happen to me if I saw (especially if I were the only one who could see) those scarab pincers and that beetle head and carapace slowly creeping out from between Mother’s dead white lips? Or what if it exited some other way—through her ear, or eye, or throat?

My sanity could not have borne it.

And for the funeral itself, as her coffin was lowered into the frozen hole next to our father’s grave, I would have been the only one leaning forward and waiting, and listening, and waiting and listening more, even after the first clods of dirt struck the lid of the casket.

Who knew better than I that there were tunnels everywhere under London and terrible things moving in those tunnels? Who knew what awful impulses and manners and means of Droodish control the burrowing scarab, now almost certainly grown as large as Mother’s brain had been after the chitinous creature had consumed all the dying and dead brain matter, was subject to?

So I stayed home, in bed, suffering.

BY LATE FEBRUARY I had begun writing again, composing The Moonstone at my desk in my study when I was able, writing while propped up in bed more often than not. When I was working alone in my study or bedroom, the Other Wilkie often joined me, staring silently at me in an almost reproachful way. It had crossed my mind that he might have been planning to replace me (in writing this book and the next, in receiving plaudits for it, in Caroline’s bed, in society at large) should I die. Who would ever know? Had I not recently planned to replace Charles Dickens in much the same way?

I realised that the suddenly revealed illness (and even more sudden death) of one of my characters—the much-loved and much-respected Lady Verinder, never a central character but always a reassuring and noble offstage presence—almost certainly came from the deeper parts of my creative mind and were a way of honouring Mother’s death.

I should mention here that the scarab obviously could not read things through my eyes; each night that Frank Beard injected me with morphia, I continued to dream of the Neteru Gods of the Black Land and all their attendant and requisite ceremonies, but I never once became the scribe Drood had commanded me to become; I never once wrote about those dark and heathen gods.

The beetle in my brain seemed assuaged when I was writing, obviously fooled into thinking that I was recording my dreams of these ancient rituals. And all that time I was actually writing about curious old servant Gabriel Betteredge (and his obsession with Robinson Crusoe, a book I also venerated) and plucky (if stupidly headstrong) Rachel Verinder and heroic (if strangely duped) Franklin Blake and the misshapen and doomed-to-drown-in-quicksand servant Rosanna Spearman and the meddling, pious pamphleteer Miss Clack (whose hilarious malice was the Other Wilkie’s contribution) and, of course, the clever (but never central to the solution of the mystery) Sergeant Cuff. The parasite within me thought all this frenzied scribbling through my illness was the obedient work of a scribe.

Stupid scarab.

The early numbers of my serialised novel were being met with continued and rising enthusiasm. Wills reported more and more people flocking to the magazine’s offices on Wellington Street on the day each new issue was released. All the talk was of the Moonstone itself, the precious diamond, and who might have stolen it and how. No one knew, of course, the full extent of my ingenuity in providing that ending, but even before writing those chapters, I had full confidence that no one would guess the amazing revelation. Between this and the triumph of my play, I would have much to impress Charles Dickens with when he returned.

If he lived long enough to return.

More and more, Wills and I were receiving, through a variety of sources (but especially through candid notes from George Dolby to Dickens’s daughters, as relayed to me by Charley), news that Dickens’s health was failing alarmingly. Influenza caught during his almost daily travels through the American provinces required him to stay in bed until the afternoon and not eat anything until three o’clock or later. All of us were amazed to read that Dickens—who always insisted on staying in hotels during his tours and never at private homes—had been so ill in Boston that he had been forced to stay with his friends the Fieldses rather than at the Parker House as planned.

Besides the worsening influenza and catarrh, exhaustion and a return of swelling in his left foot seemed close to doing Dickens in. We were hearing that Dolby had to help “the Chief” onto the stage for each reading, although as soon as he was beyond the curtain, Dickens would stride to his reading stand with a perfect imitation of his old alertness and spryness. And during the intermission and after the reading, Dolby and others would have to catch the totally exhausted author to keep him from fainting. Mrs Fields wrote Dickens’s daughter Mamie that during his last reading in Boston on 8 April, Dickens had boasted of a return of his old powers but still had not been able to change his clothes after the readings, but simply lay on the sofa for thirty minutes “in a state of the greatest exhaustion” even before allowing himself to be helped back to his room.

And—I took notice of this—Dolby had written in an almost offhand manner that because of the Inimitable’s inability to sleep, he had begun again to take laudanum—although only a few drops per glass of wine—each night.

Was there an insatiable scarab in America that also needed sedating?

At any rate, Dickens’s daughters and son Charles were worried about their father, even though the Inimitable’s own letters home were filled with optimism and bragging about crowds and adoration from his eager public at each American city in which he read. But as March and April passed and I slowly, slowly showed improvement and began to overcome some of the pain and debilitation (although setbacks would send me to bed again for days on end), I began to believe either that Charles Dickens would never return from America or that he would return a broken, dying man.

IT WAS DIFFICULT communicating with Martha R— during my illness. I did manage to send one message to her via my servant George early in my crisis and during Mother’s deathwatch, under the guise of enquiring about rental properties on Bolsover Street, but that was far too risky to continue.

Three times in February I did tell Caroline and Carrie that I was going to Tunbridge Wells with Charley to see Mother and turned back at the station, telling Charley I was simply not well enough to go on and would take a hansom cab home. Two of those three times I spent the night (or nights) with Martha—although I was too ill to enjoy the time properly—but that stratagem was also too risky, since Charles might, at any time, mention to Caroline or in Caroline’s presence the occasions I was not able to travel all the way to Mother’s.

Martha could have written me during this interval (using a false return address on the envelopes), but she preferred not to write letters. In point of fact, my Martha was close to being illiterate at this time, although later I would tutor her to the point she could read simple books and write basic letters.

Once I was ambulatory again by late March, I did work out ways to see her, explaining to Caroline and even to my doctor that I had to take solitary carriage rides (I was not up to pretending that I was walking for hours) to help me ruminate on my novel, or claiming that I must spend time at my club in its wonderful library, seeking out more books for my research. But these visits to “Mrs Dawkins” at Bolsover Street gave us, at most, a few stolen hours, and satisfied neither Martha nor me.

But Martha R—’s compassion for me during this most difficult time was sincere and palpable, in contrast to Caroline’s grudging and often suspicious care.

MAAT GIVES MEANING to the world. Maat bestows order upon the chaos of creation in the First Times and maintains order and balance throughout all time. Maat controls the movement of the stars, oversees the rising and setting of the sun, governs the flooding and flow of the Nile, and lays her cosmic body and soul beneath all laws of nature.

Maat is the goddess of justice and truth.

When I die, my heart will be torn from my body and carried to the Judgement Hall of the Tuat, where it will be weighed against Maat’s feather. If my heart is mostly free from the terrible weight of sin—sin against the Gods of the Black Land, sin against my duties as outlined by Drood and enforced by the sacred scarab—I will be allowed to travel on and perhaps join the company of the gods themselves. If my sinful heart outweighs Maat’s feather, my soul will be devoured and destroyed by the demon-beasts of the Black Land.

Maat gave meaning to the world and still gives meaning to the world. My Day of Judgement in the Hall of the Tuat is coming, as is yours, Dear Reader. As is yours.

MORNINGS WERE VERY BAD for me. Now that I had quit dictating The Moonstone to the treacherous scribe of the Other Wilkie through the lowest-ebb hours of the night, I often awoke from my laudanum or laudanum-and-morphine dreams between two and three AM and simply had to moan and writhe my way through to the spring dawn.

I usually was able to get myself down to my large study on the ground floor by early afternoon, where I would write until four PM, when Caroline or Carrie or both would take me outside, at least to the garden, to get some air. As I wrote to one friend who wanted to come visit me that April—“If you are to come, it should be before four o’clock, because I am carried out to be aired at4.”

It was one such afternoon in mid-April, precisely two months to the day since Mother had died, that Caroline entered my study behind me.

I had paused in my writing and—pen still in my hand—was staring out the wide windows at the street. I confess that I was wondering how I might get in contact with Inspector Field. Though I remained certain that Field’s operatives must be watching me, I had never seen one, despite my cleverest efforts to catch one out. I wanted to know what was happening with Drood. Had Field and his hundred-plus vigilantes burned the Egyptian murderer out, shot him down like a dog in the sewer the way Barris had shot the Wild Boy in front of me? And what of Barris? Had Inspector Field disciplined the blackguard for pistol-whipping me?

But it had occurred to me just the day before that I had no idea where Inspector Field’s offices might be situated. I remembered that the first time he had visited me at 9 Melcombe Place, the inspector had sent up a card—certainly his business address would be on it—but after rummaging through my desk and finally finding it, the card read only:

INSPECTOR CHARLES FREDERICK FIELD

Private Enquiry Bureau

Besides wanting to know what had happened in Undertown, I also wished to engage the inspector and his operatives on some work of my own: I wished to know when and where Caroline was meeting the plumber Joseph Charles Clow (for I had no doubt they were meeting secretly).

It was with these thoughts in my mind and my gaze turned to the street that I heard Caroline clearing her throat behind me. I did not turn.

“Wilkie, my dear, there is something I have been waiting to discuss with you. It has been a month now since your dear mother passed on.”

This required no comment and I gave none. Outside, a junk waggon rumbled by. The old nag’s flanks were covered with scabs, and even now the grizzled driver laid the whip on. Why, I wondered, would a rag-and-bone waggon have to hurry anywhere?

“Lizzie is reaching that age where she is ready to be introduced to society,” continued Caroline. “Ready to find a gentleman to be her husband.”

I’d noted over the years that whenever Caroline wished to talk about her daughter—Elizabeth Harriet G— as her daughter, she was “Lizzie.” When she talked about her as our shared concern, she was “Carrie”—the name the girl actually preferred.

“It will be so much easier for Lizzie, in terms of matrimonial prospects and social acceptance, if she comes from an established and stable family,” Caroline went on. I still had not turned towards her.

On the sidewalk across the street, a young man in a suit too light in colour and thinness of wool for the fickle spring season, paused, looked over at our house, checked his watch, and moved on. It was not Joseph Clow. Could it have been one of Inspector Field’s agents? I doubted if any of the inspector’s men would be so brazen, especially since I was quite visible sitting in the ground floor bow windows.

“She should bear the name of her father,” said Caroline.

“She does bear the name of her father,” I said tonelessly. “Your husband gave her that even if he granted neither of you anything else.”

I’ve mentioned to you, Dear Reader, that Caroline was indeed my inspiration for The Woman in White. When, in the summer of 1854, my brother, Charley, and my friend John Millais came upon this apparition in white robes rushing from the garden of a North London villa in the moonlight—it was Caroline, of course, fleeing from her brute of a husband, who had, she told me at the time, been keeping her prisoner by mesmeric means—I, alone of the three of us men, had pursued her. And I had believed her about her drunken thug of a wealthy husband, a certain George Robert G—, and about how her life with one-year-old Carrie had been one of imprisonment and mental torture.

Some years later, Caroline had informed me that George Robert G— had died. How she received this information I did not know nor ask (even while recognising how improbable it was that she had received it at all, since she had been living in my home all those years since the night she’d fled weeping across Charlton Street in the moonlight). But I accepted the news as fact and never asked her about it. For all these years, we had both pretended that she was Mrs Elizabeth G—— I had given her the name Caroline when she had come under my care—who had been victimised by her husband with both mesmerism and a fireplace poker.

The probable truth, I had thought at the time—and had no reason to change my mind about the matter now fourteen years later—was that Caroline had been fleeing from a pimp or client turned violent that summer night in 1854.

“You see the advantages to Carrie over the next few years if our girl can say and show that she is from an established family,” Caroline went on, speaking to my back. Her voice had a slight quaver to it now.

The “our girl” made me angry. I had always treated Carrie with the same love and generosity as if she had been my daughter. But she was not. She never would be. This was a sort of blackmail going on, a strategy I had reason to believe that Caroline had known well in the time before I rescued her, and I would have none of it.

“Wilkie, my dearest, you must admit that I have always been understanding when you have told me that your frail and aged mother was the absolute encumbrance to you marrying.”

“Yes,” I said.

“But with Harriet’s passing, you are free now?”

“Yes.”

“Free to marry if you like?”

“Yes.” I kept my face turned to the window and the street.

She waited for me to say something else. I did not. After a long moment in which I could clearly hear every swing of the pendulum in the tall clock in the hallway beyond, Caroline turned and left my study.

But I knew this was not the end of the conversation. She had another and final card to play—one she thought foolproof. And I knew she would play it soon. What she did not know was that I had a full hand of cards to play myself. And more up my sleeve.

SCRABBLINGS. THERE ARE scrabblings.”

“What?”

I had been wakened much earlier than usual—a check of my watch showed it to be not yet nine o’clock—and I was alarmed by the phalanx of faces hovering over me: Caroline, Carrie, my servant George, George’s wife, Besse, who acted as our parlourmaid.

“What?” I said again, sitting up in bed. This invasion of my bedchamber before breakfast was intolerable.

“There are scrabbling sounds,” repeated Caroline.

“What are you talking about? Where?”

“In h’our stairs, sir,” said George, his face red with embarrassment at being brought into my bedroom. This was obviously Caroline’s doing.

“The servants’ staircase?” I said, rubbing my eyes. The previous night had not been a morphine-assisted one, but my head ached anyway. Abominably.

“They’ve been hearing it on every storey of the house,” said Caroline. Her voice was as loud and grating as a Welsh calliope. “Now I’ve heard it as well. It’s as if there’s a great rat in there. Scrabbling up and down.”

“Rat?” I said. “We had the exterminators here last autumn when we did all the work on the house and updated the plumbing.” I put deliberate emphasis on the last word.

Caroline had the good grace to blush, but she did not desist. “There’s something in the servants’ staircase.”

“George,” I said, “haven’t you looked into this?”

“Aye, sir, Mr Collins, I ’ave. I went in, sir, and oop and doon following the noise, sir. But each time I got close, it… I haven’t found it, sir.”

“Do you think it’s rats?”

George was always a little slow, but he had rarely looked as completely half-witted as he did while wrestling with this question. “It sounds like one great ’un, sir,” he said at last. “Not rats so much, sir, as… a single bloody great rat, beggin’ your pardon, misses.”

“This is absurd,” I said. “Everyone get out. I will dress and be down in a minute and find and kill this ‘single bloody great rat’ of yours. And then perhaps you’ll all be so kind as to let a sick man get his rest.”

I CHOSE TO enter the stairway on the kitchen level so she could not get below me.

I was certain that I knew what had been making the noise. In truth, I wondered why I’d not seen the woman with green skin and tusks for teeth before this during the eight months we had been in the new house. The Other Wilkie had come along from Melcombe Place easily enough.

But why can the others now hear her?

In all the years the woman with the green skin had occupied my previous servants’ staircases in the dark, no one but I had ever heard or seen her. I was certain of that.

Are the Gods of the Black Lands making her more real the way they have the Other Wilkie?

I set that disturbing thought aside and lifted the candle from the table. I’d ordered the others not to come into the kitchen with me and to stay away from all of the doorways to the servants’ stairway on each storey of the tall house.

The woman with green skin and tusked teeth had drawn blood on my throat before this, long before Drood, the scarab, and the Gods of the Black Land had entered my life. I had no doubt that she could kill me now if I allowed her the proximity and opportunity. I had no intention of allowing her either.

Opening the door slightly, I removed Detective Hatchery’s heavy pistol from my jacket pocket.

With the door closed behind me, the servants’ staircase was almost absolutely dark. There were no windows along this side of the house, and the few candles in the wall sconces had not been lighted. The staircase was unusually—and disturbingly—steep and narrow, rising straight for three storeys before pausing on a short landing and continuing two storeys in the opposite direction to the attic.

I listened for a moment before starting up the stairs. Nothing. Candle in my left hand, pistol in my right, and stairway so narrow that my elbows on each arm brushed the walls, I moved quietly up the steps.

Halfway between the ground floor and first floor, I paused to light the first wall candle.

There was no candle there, although one of our parlourmaid’s daughter’s jobs was to replace them regularly. Leaning closer, I could see scratches and gouges on the firmly fixed old sconce, as if something had ripped the half-burned candle there out with claws. Or with teeth.

I paused to listen again. The softest of scuttling sounds came from somewhere above me.

The woman with green skin and tusked teeth had never made a loud sound before, I realised. She had always glided up and down stairs, towards or away from me, as if her bare feet barely touched the steps.

But that had been in my other houses. This servants’ stairway may have had more resonance for such malign spirits.

How had Shernwold died? She had fallen down these very steps and broken her neck, but why had she been in the servants’ staircase?

Investigating the sounds of rats?

And why had she fallen?

The candles missing from their sconces as if eaten?

I continued up to the first storey, paused in front of that doorway a moment—the doors were old and thick, and no sound came through, but there was a reassuring sliver of light at the bottom—and then I went on up the stairs.

The second candle was also missing from its sconce.

Something scuttled and scraped most audibly from not too far above me now.

“Hallo?” I called softly. I confess to feeling some sense of real power as I extended the pistol. If the woman with green skin had been corporeal enough to leave scratches on my neck—and she had—then she was corporeal enough to feel the effects of one of these bullets. Or several of them.

How many bullets were in the cylinder?

Nine, I remembered from that day Detective Hatchery had pressed the pistol into my hand, telling me as I went down to King Lazaree’s den that I should have something to defend myself from the rats. I even remembered what he had said about the calibre.…

“They’re forty-two calibre, sir. Nine should be more than sufficient for your average rat… four-legged or two-legged, as the case may be.”

I stifled the giggle that rose in my throat now.

At the second-storey door, the staircase behind and beneath me, only dimly illuminated by my flickering candle, seemed so steep as to be vertical. It—and perhaps lack of breakfast and the after-effects of my three glasses of morning laudanum—gave me a sense of vertigo.

Something sounding far too much like claws on plaster or wood scrabbled above me.

“Show yourself!” I cried into the darkness. I confess that this was mere bravado, a hope that George, Caroline, Besse, and the girl, Agnes, might hear me. But they were, presumably, two storeys below me now. And the doors were very thick.

I began climbing even more slowly, the pistol directly in front of me and swinging from side to side like an absurdly heavy weather vane in variable winds.

The scrabbling was not only louder now, but it seemed to have a direction. I could not tell if it came from the third-storey landing, where the staircase turned back in the opposite direction, or from somewhere between me and that landing. I made a mental note to have at least one window set into the thick brick-and-masonry outer wall there at the landing if no place else.

I took three more steps.

I cannot tell you, Dear Reader, from where the apparition of my woman with green skin and yellow tusk-teeth had originally come from, only that she had been with me since my early childhood. I remember her entering our nursery when Charles was sleeping. I remember seeing her in the attic of my father’s house when I had been so imprudent as to explore that dark and cobwebbed space when I was nine or ten years of age.

They say that familiarity breeds freedom from fear, but that is not quite the case. The green-skinned wench—her face was not of any living woman I had ever known, although I sometimes thought that she reminded me a bit of the first governess Charley and I had ever had—gave me the shudders every time I encountered her, but I knew from experience that I could fight her off when she lunged at me.

But no one else has ever heard her before. She’s never made a sound before.

I took another three steps towards the third-storey landing and stopped.

The scraping and scurrying were much louder now. The sound seemed very close above me, although now the pale circumference of candlelight extended almost to the landing itself. But it was very loud and—I understood George’s fear now—very ratlike indeed. Scrabble-scrape. Silence. Scrabble scrabble scrabble scrape. Silence. Scrabble scrabble.

“I have a surprise for you,” I said, cocking the massive pistol one-handedly with some difficulty. I remembered Hatchery saying that the large bottom barrel was a sort of shotgun. I wished now that he’d given me shells for it.

Two more steps up and I could see the landing. It was empty.

The scrabbling came again. It seemed to be above and even behind me.

I raised the candle over my head and peered straight up.

The scrabbling had turned to wild screaming and I stood there, frozen, listening to the screaming for a full minute or more before realising that it was coming from me.

Turning to flee, I pounded down the stairs, reached the second- storey door, shook it while screaming, looked up over my shoulder, screamed again. I fired the pistol at least twice, knowing that it would do no good. It did not. Running and clattering down the stairs again—the first-storey door also locked from the other side—I screamed as something moist and foul dripped from… from above… and then I was hurtling down the stairway again, ricocheting from wall to wall. I dropped the candle and it went out. Something brushed my hair from above, curled along the back of my neck. Whirling in the absolute darkness, I fired the revolver twice more, tripped, fell headfirst down the last dozen steps.

I do not know to this day how I managed not to lose the pistol or shoot myself with it. Screaming more loudly now, I lay in a heap at the bottom of the steps and pounded at the ground-floor door.

Something strong and thin and very long wrapped itself around my right boot and ripped it off my foot. If I had buckled the boot properly before coming in, I would have been dragged back up the staircase with it.

Screaming again, I fired a final shot up into the darkness, tore open the door, and—blinded by the light—fell forward onto the long boards of the kitchen floor. Flailing wildly with both feet, I kicked the heavy door shut behind me.

George ran in despite my earlier commands for no one to be in the room. I could see Caroline’s and the other two female faces staring white and round and open-mouthed from the doorway to the hall.

I almost pulled George down to the floor as I fiercely grabbed his lapel and whispered wildly to him, “Lock it! Lock the door! Lock it! Now!”

George did so, throwing the totally inadequate tiny bolt home. There was no sound from the other side. My panting and gasping seemed to fill the kitchen.

Getting to my knees and then to my feet, the pistol still raised and cocked, I pulled George back tight against me and hissed in his ear, “Get as much lumber as you need and as many men as you need. I want all the staircase doors nailed shut and then boarded over within the half hour. Do you understand? Do… you… understand?”

George nodded, pulled himself free from my grip, and ran out to get what he needed.

I backed out of the kitchen, never taking my eyes from the far-too-frail door to the stairway.

“Wilkie…” began Caroline, setting her hand on my shoulder but then jerking it away as I jumped.

“It was rats,” I gasped, uncocking the pistol that was suddenly too heavy for me to hold. I tried to remember how many bullets I had fired but could not. I would count the remaining ones later. “It was only rats.”

“Wilkie…” Caroline began again.

I shook her off and went up to my bedroom to vomit into the basin and find my flask.