Drood

CHAPTER FOUR

Three weeks passed and according to my brother, Charley (who, with his wife, Kate, Dickens’s daughter, was staying at Gad’s Hill Place), the author was slowly recovering from his terrible ordeal. He was working every day on Our Mutual Friend, meeting people for dinner, frequently disappearing—almost certainly to call on Ellen Ternan—and even performing readings for select groups. A reading by Charles Dickens was the most exhausting performance I have ever witnessed, and the fact that he was up to it, even if he collapsed afterwards, as Charley reported he frequently did, suggested the reservoirs of energy remaining in the man. It still bothered him to ride in a train but, Dickens being Dickens, he forced himself to travel into town by rail almost daily for precisely that reason. Charley reported that when there was the slightest vibration in the carriage, Dickens’s face would turn grey as flannel and great beads of sweat would pop out on the writer’s forehead and furrowed cheeks and he would fiercely grip the seat ahead of him, but with a sip of brandy he soldiered on, refusing to show any other sign of his inner turmoil. I was sure that the Inimitable had forgotten all about Drood.

But then, in July, the hunt for the phantom began in earnest.

This was the hottest, most feverish time of the hot, feverish summer. The excrement of three million Londoners stank in open sewers, including that greatest of our open sewers (despite this year’s engineering attempt to open an elaborate system of underground sewers)—the Thames. Tens of thousands of Londoners slept on their porches or balconies just waiting for rain. But when the rain fell, it was like a hot shower bath, simply adding a layer of wetness to the heat. July lay over London this summer like a heavy, wet layer of decomposing flesh.

Twenty thousand tons of horse manure per day were gathered from the reeking streets and dumped in what we politely and euphemistically called “dust heaps”—huge piles of feces that rose near the mouth of the Thames like an English Himalaya.

The overcrowded cemeteries around London also stank to high heaven. Grave diggers had to leap up and down on new corpses, often sinking to their hips in rotting flesh, just to force the reluctant new residents down into their shallow graves, these new corpses joining the solid humus of festering and overcrowded layers of rotting bodies below. In July, one knew immediately when one was within six city blocks of a cemetery—the reeking miasma drove people out of surrounding homes and tenements—and there was always a cemetery nearby. The dead were always beneath our feet and in our nostrils.

Many dead bodies lay uncollected in the poorest streets of this Great Oven, decomposing next to the rotting garbage that also was never picked up. Not just trickles and rivulets but actual rivers of raw sewage flowed down these streets past and through the garbage and dead bodies, sometimes finding a sewer opening but more often simply accumulating in puddles and ponds that mottled the cobblestones. This brown water flowed into basements, accumulated in cellars, contaminated wells, and always ended up—sooner or later—in the Thames.

Shops and industry shovelled out tons of hides, flesh, boiled bones, horse meat, catgut, cow hooves and heads and guts, and other organic detritus every day. It all went to the Thames or was stacked up in giant piles along the banks of the Thames, waiting to go into the water. Shops and homes along the river sealed their windows and soaked their blinds with chloride, and the city officials dumped ton after ton of lime into the Thames. Pedestrians walked with perfume-soaked handkerchiefs covering their mouths and noses. It did not help. Even carriage horses—many of which would soon die from the heat and add to the problem—vomited from the smell.

The air this steaming July night was almost green with the heated effusions of three million human beings’ excrement and the effluvia of the urban and industrial slaughter that was the hallmark of our era. Dear Reader, perhaps it is worse in your day, but I confess I do not see how.

Dickens had sent a note for me to meet him at eight PM at the Blue Posts tavern on Cork Street, where he would host me to a meal. The note also told me to wear serious boots for a “late-night excursion related to our friend Mr D.”

Even though I had been feeling indisposed earlier in the day—the gout often is aggravated by such heat—I arrived on time at the Blue Posts. Dickens threw his arms around me in the entrance to the tavern and cried out, “My dear Wilkie, I am so happy to see you! I have been terribly busy at Gad’s Hill these past weeks and have missed your company!” The meal itself was extensive, slow, and excellent, as were the ale and wine we enjoyed with it. The conversation was mostly from Dickens, of course, but was as animated and higgledy-piggledy as most conversations with the Inimitable. He said that he hoped to finish Our Mutual Friend by early September and that he had every confidence that the last numbers would boost sales of our All the Year Round.

After dinner we took a cab to a police station house in Leman Street.

“Do you remember Police Inspector Charles Frederick Field?” Dickens asked as our cab rumbled towards the police station.

“Of course,” I said. “Field was in the Detective Department at Scotland Yard. You spent time with him when you were obtaining background material for Household Words years ago, and he escorted us that time we toured the… ah… less appealing areas of Whitechapel.” I did not mention that I’d always felt sure that Dickens had used Inspector Field as his template for “Inspector Bucket” in Bleak House. The overly assured voice, the sense of easy dominance over obvious criminals and brigands and women of the street who had crossed our path that long night in Whitechapel, not to mention the big man’s ability to take one’s elbow in an iron grip one could not escape and which would then move one in directions one had not planned on going… all of Inspector Bucket’s rough skills had described the real Inspector Field to a “T,” as they say.

I said, “Inspector Field was our protective angel during our descent into Hades.”

“Precisely, my dear Wilkie,” said Dickens as we exited the cab in front of the Leman Street police station. “And while Inspector Field has gone on to retirement and new endeavours, it is my sincerest pleasure to introduce you to our new protective angel.”

The man waiting for us there under the gas lamp outside the police station seemed more wall than man. Despite the heat, he wore a full coat—rather like the loose, long sort that Australian or American cowboys are so often shown wearing in illustrations for penny-dreadful novels—and his massive head was topped with a bowler hat set firmly on a mop of tight, curly hair. The man’s body was absurdly wide and stolidly square—a sort of granite pedestal to the square block of stone that was his head and face. His eyes were small, his nose a blunt rectangle seemingly carved out of the same stone as his face, and his mouth appeared to be little more than a thin sculpted line. His neck was as wide as the brim of his bowler. His hands were at least thrice the size of mine.

Charles Dickens stood five foot nine inches tall. I was several inches shorter than Dickens. This square hulk of a man in the grey cowboy duster looked to be at least eight inches taller than Dickens.

“Wilkie, please meet former sergeant Hibbert Aloysius Hatchery,” said Dickens, grinning through his beard. “Detective Hatchery, I am pleased to introduce my most valued associate and talented fellow writer and fellow seeker of Mr Drood this night, Mr Wilkie Collins, Esquire.”

“Pleasure, sir, indeed,” said the wall looming above us. “You may call me Hib if it pleases you, Mr Collins.”

“Hib,” I repeated stupidly. Luckily, the giant had merely tipped his bowler hat in greeting. The thought of that huge hand enveloping my own and crushing all the bones of my hand made me feel weak about the knees.

“My father, a wise man but not a learned one, if you follow my meaning, sir,” said Detective Hatchery, “was sure that the name Hibbert was in the Bible. But, alas, it weren’t. Not even as a resting place for the Hebrews in the wilderness.”

“Detective Hatchery was a sergeant in the Metropolitan Police Force for several years but is currently on… ah… leave and is privately employed as an investigative detective,” said Dickens. “He may decide to rejoin Scotland Yard’s Detective Bureau in a year or so, but it appears that being privately employed pays more.”

“A privately employed detective,” I muttered. The idea had wonderful possibilities. I filed it away at that moment and the result—as perhaps you know, Dear Reader from my future, if I might be so immodest—would later become my novel The Moonstone. I said, “Are you on holiday, Detective Hatchery? Some form of police sabbatical?”

“In a way as you might say, sir,” rumbled the giant. “I was asked to take a year off because of irregularities in my treatment of a blackguard felonious sort in the pursuance of my duties, sir. The press made a row. My captain thought it might be better for the Bureau and myself if I went into private practice, a leave of absence as you might say, for a few months.”

“Irregularities,” I said.

Dickens patted me on the back. “Detective Hatchery, in arresting the aforementioned blackguard—a presumptuous daytime burglar who specialised in preying upon elderly ladies right here in Whitechapel— accidentally snapped the worthless thief’s neck. Strangely, the thief lived, but now has to be carried around in a basket by his family. No loss to the community and all a proper part of the job, as Inspector Field and others in the profession have assured me, but some of the oversensitive Punch group, not to mention the lesser newspapers, decided to make a fuss. So it is our great fortune that Detective Hatchery is free to escort us into the Great Oven tonight!”

Hatchery removed a bullseye lantern from beneath his coat. The lantern seemed like a pocket watch in his huge hand. “I shall follow you, gentlemen, but will endeavour to remain silent and invisible unless called upon or needed.”

IT HAD RAINED while Dickens and I were dining, but it only served to make the hot night air around us thicker. The Inimitable led the way, setting his usual absurd walking pace—never less than four miles per hour, which he could maintain hour after hour, I knew from painful experience—and once again I struggled to keep up. Detective Hatchery flowed along ten paces behind us like a silent wall of solidified fog.

We left the wider highways and streets, and with Dickens leading, we entered into a maze of increasingly dark and narrow byways and alleyways. Charles Dickens never hesitated; he knew these terrible streets by heart from his many midnight rambles. I knew only that we were somewhere east of Falcon Square. I retained vague memories of this area from my previous expeditions into the underbelly of London with Dickens—Whitechapel, Shadwell, Wapping, all parts of the city a gentleman would avoid unless looking for the lowest sort of woman—and we seemed to be headed towards the docks. The stench of the Thames grew worse for every gloomy, narrow block we advanced into this rats’ maze. The buildings here looked as if they went back to the medieval period, when London lay fat and dark and diseased within its high walls, and, indeed, the ancient structures on either side of the sidewalk-free streets here overhung us so as almost to shut out the night sky.

“Do we have a destination?” I whispered to Dickens. This particular street was empty of people, but I could feel the eyes watching us from the shuttered windows and filthy alleys on either side. I did not want to be overheard, although I knew that even my whisper would carry like a shout through this thick, silent air.

“Bluegate Fields,” said Dickens. The brass-shod tip of his heavy walking cane—one he carried only on such nocturnal descents into his Babylon, I had noticed—clacked on the broken pavement stones at every third step of his.

“We sometimes calls it Tiger Bay, sir,” came a voice from the darkness behind us.

I admit that I was startled. I had all but forgotten that Detective Hatchery was with us.

We crossed a wider thoroughfare—Brunswick Street, I believe—but it was no cleaner or more illuminated than the rotting slums on either side. Then we were back in the narrow, overhanging labyrinth again. The tenements here crowded high and close except for the few that were total ruins, merely collapsed heaps of masonry and wood. Even there, in those tumbled or charred absences, I could sense dark shadows moving and stirring and watching us. Dickens led us over a narrow, rotted footbridge that crossed a reeking tributary to the Thames. (This was the year, I should point out to you, Dear Reader, that the Prince of Wales officially turned the wheel that opened the Main Drainage Works at Crossness, the first great step in chief engineer Joseph Bazalgette’s attempt to bring a modern sewage system to London. The cream of England’s nobility and high clergy attended that ceremony. But, setting all delicacy aside, I should also remind you that the Main Drainage Works—and all future sewer systems as well as the myriad of old tributaries and ancient sewers—still drained unfiltered shit into the Thames.)

The more terrible the streets and neighbourhoods became, the more crowded they became. Groups of men—clusters of shadows, actually—were now visible on street corners, in doorways, in empty lots. Dickens strode on, keeping to the centre of the broken streets so that he could better see and avoid the holes and reeking pools of filthy water, his gentleman’s cane clicking on cobblestones. He seemed indifferent to the murmurings and angry imprecations from the men we were passing.

Finally a group of such ragged shadows detached itself from the darkness of an unlighted building and moved to block our way. Dickens did not hesitate but continued striding towards them as if they were children come to ask for his autograph. But I could see him change his grip upon his walking stick so that the heavy brass head of it—a bird’s beak, I believe—was aimed outwards.

My heart was pounding and I almost faltered as Dickens led me towards that black wall of angry ruffians. Then another wall—a grey one with a bowler hat atop it—moved briskly past me, catching up to Dickens, and Hatchery’s voice said softly, “Move along now, boyos. Go back to your ’oles. Let these gentlemen pass without so much as another glance from you. Now.”

There was just enough light from the private detective’s shaded bullseye lantern for me to be able to see that his right hand had disappeared within his loose coat. What did he carry there? A pistol? I thought not. Almost certainly a leaded club though. Perhaps handcuffs. The ruffians ahead of us and behind us and to the sides of us would know.

The circle of men shuffled away as quickly as it had coalesced. I expected heavy stones or at least gobs of refuse to be thrown at us as we passed, but when we moved on, nothing stronger than a muffled curse was flung in our direction. Detective Hatchery faded into the darkness behind us and Dickens continued his rapid cane-tapping march to what I believed to be the south.

Then we entered the area ruled by prostitutes and their owners.

I seemed to remember having come here in my student days. The street was actually more respectable in appearance than most of those we had traversed in the past half hour or so. Dim lights shone through closed blinds on the upper windows. If one did not know better, it would be easy to think that these dwellings belonged to hard-working factory hands or mechanics. But the stillness was too oppressive. On the steps and balconies and on the cracked slabs of what passed for sidewalks gathered groups of young women—we could see them by the lamplight escaping from the unshuttered lower windows—most of them appearing no older than eighteen. Some looked to be fourteen or younger.

Rather than scatter at the sight of Detective Hatchery, they called out to him in soft, mocking girl-voices—“Hey, ’Ibbert, bringing us some business, eh?” or “Come in and relax a bit, Hib old cock.” Or “No, no, the door’s not shut, Inspector H, no neither are our room doors neither.”

Hatchery laughed easily. “Your doors are never shut, Mary, although well they should be. Watch your manners now, girls. These gentlemen don’t want none of your wares this ’ot evening.”

That was not necessarily true. Dickens and I paused near one young woman, perhaps seventeen years of age, as she leaned over a railing and studied us in the dim light. I could see that her figure was full, her dark skirt high, and her bodice low.

She noticed Dickens’s interest and gave him a wide smile that showed too many missing teeth. “Are you searching for bacca, dear-ie?” she asked the writer.

“Bacca?” said Dickens and gave me a sideways glance filled with mirth. “Why no, my dear. What makes you think I have come in search of tobacco?”

“’Cause if you want it, I’ve got it,” said the girl. “Screws and arf ounces of it, an’ cigars and all other sorts what you may want and you may well have it of me if you wish. You only ’ave to come inside.”

Dickens’s smile faded slightly. He set both his gloved hands on his cane. “Miss,” he said softly, “have you given thought to the very real possibility of changing your life? Of giving up…” His white glove was visible in the dark as he gestured to the silent buildings, silent gatherings of girls, shattered street, and even the distant line of rough men waiting like a pack of forest wolves beyond the circle of pale light. “Of giving up this life?”

The girl laughed through her broken or rotted teeth, but it was not a girl’s laugh. It was a bitter presage of a diseased crone’s dry rattle. “Give up my life, sweetie? Why not give up yours then, eh? All you ’ave to do is walk back up there where Ronnie and the boys is waitin’.”

“Yours has no future, no hope,” said Dickens. “There are homes for fallen women. Why, I myself have helped commission and administrate one in Broadstairs where…”

“I ain’t about to fall,” she said. “Unless it’s on my back for the right bit o’ payment.” The girl turned to stare at me. “What about you, little man? You look like you ’ave some life left in you. You want to come inside for a screw of bacca before ol’ ’Atchery ’ere turns sour on us?”

I cleared my throat. To be honest with you, Dear Reader, I found some allure hovering about the wench, despite the heat and stench of the night, my male companions’ gazes, and even her ruined smile and ignorant language.

“Come,” said Dickens, turning and striding off into the night. “We are wasting our time here, Wilkie.”

DICKENS,” I said as we crossed yet another creaking, narrow bridge over yet another reeking, foetid stream, the lanes ahead of us mere alleys, the dark buildings there more medieval than any we’d yet seen, “I have to ask, does this… excursion… really have anything to do with your mysterious Mr Drood?”

He stopped and leaned on his stick. “Absolutely, my dear Wilkie. I should have told you at dinner. Mr Hatchery has done more for us in this regard than merely escort us through this… unseemly… neighbourhood. He has been in my employ for some time now and has put his detective abilities to good use.” He turned to the large shape that had come up behind us. “Detective Hatchery, would you be so kind as to inform Mr Collins of your discoveries to date?”

“Certainly, sir,” said the huge detective. He took off his bowler, rubbed his scalp under the explosion of tight curls, and squeezed the hat into place again. “Sir,” he said, addressing me now, “in the past ten days I ’ave made enquiries of the various railway ticket takers at Folkestone and other possible stops along the way—although the tidal express did not make no stops along the way—as well as discreet enquiries of other passengers, the guards on the train that afternoon, the conductors, and others. And the fact is, Mr Collins, that nobody named Drood or resembling the very odd description Mr Dickens gave me of this Mr Drood had a ticket to ride or was in one of the passenger carriages at the time of the accident.”

I looked at Dickens in the dim light. “So either your Drood was a local there at Staplehurst,” I said, “or he didn’t exist.”

Dickens only shook his head and gestured for Hatchery to continue.

“But in the second mail carriage,” said the detective, “there was three coffins being transported to London. Two of them had been loaded at Folkestone and the third had come over on the same ferry what brought Mr Dickens and… his party. The railway papers showed that this third coffin, the one what had come from France that day—no record of from where in France—was to be released to a Mr Drood, no Christian name listed, upon arrival in London.”

I had to think about this for a minute. There came muted shouts from the direction of the “dress lodgers’ ” houses far behind us. Finally, I said, “You think Drood was in one of those coffins?” I looked at Dickens as I posed the question.

The author laughed, almost delightedly, I thought. “Of course, my dear Wilkie. As it turns out, that second mail carriage derailed, displacing all of the parcels and bags and… yes… coffins, but it was not thrown into the ravine below. That explains why Drood was descending the hillside with me a few minutes later.”

I shook my head. “Why would he choose to travel by… my God… by coffin? It would cost more than a first-class ticket.”

“A little less, sir, a little less,” interposed Hatchery. “I checked into that. Cargo rates for transporting the deceased is a little less than first class, sir. Not much, but a few shillings lighter.”

I still could make no sense of it. “But certainly, Charles,” I said softly, “you’re not suggesting that your bizarre-looking Mr Drood was a… what? A ghost? A ghoul of some sort? The walking dead?”

Dickens laughed again, even more boyishly this time. “My dear Wilkie. Really. If you were a criminal, Wilkie—known to the port police as well as to London police—what would be the easiest and most effective way that you could get from France back to London?”

It was my turn to laugh, but not with any delight, I can assure you. “Not by coffin,” I said. “All the way from France? It’s… unthinkable.”

“Hardly, my dear boy,” said Dickens. “Merely a few hours of discomfort. Hardly more uncomfortable than normal ferry and rail travel today, if one must be perfectly candid. And who bothers to inspect a coffin with a week-old corpse rotting in it?”

“Was his corpse a week old?” I asked.

Dickens only flicked the white fingers of his glove at me, as if I had made a jest.

“So why are we going towards the docks tonight?” I asked. “Does Detective Hatchery have some information on where Mr Drood’s coffin has floated?”

“Actually, sir,” said Hatchery, “my enquiries in this part of town has led us to some folks who say they know Drood. Or knew him. Or have done business with ’im, as it were. That’s where we’re ’eaded now.”

“Then let’s press on,” said Dickens.

Hatchery held up a huge hand as if he were stopping carriage traffic on the Strand. “I feel it my duty to point out, gentlemen, that we are now entering Bluegate Fields proper, although there is precious little proper about it. It ain’t even on most city maps, officially speaking, nor New Court, where we’re ’eaded, neither. It’s a dangerous place for gentlemen, gentlemen. There’s men where we’re going as will kill you in a minute.”

Dickens laughed. “As would those ruffians we encountered a while ago, I presume,” he said. “What is the difference with Bluegate Fields, my dear Hatchery?”

“The difference is, gov’ner, that them what we met a while ago, they’d take you for your purse and leave you beat senseless by the road, p’hraps even to the point of death, aye. But them what’s up ahead… they’ll slit your throat, sir, just to see if their blade still ’as an edge.”

I looked at Dickens.

“Lascars and Hindoos and Bengalees particular and Chinamen by the gross,” continued Hatchery. “Also Irishmen and Germans and other such flotsam, not to mention the scum o’ the earth sailors ashore a’hunting for women and opium, but it’s the Englishmen ’ere in Bluegate Fields you have to fear most, gentlemen. The Chinee and other foreigners, they don’t eat, don’t sleep, don’t talk mostly, just live for their opium… but the Englishmen ’ereabouts, they are an uncommonly rough crew, Mr Dickens. Uncommonly rough.”

Dickens laughed again. He sounded as if he had been drinking heavily, but I know he only had some wine and port with dinner. It was more the carefree laugh of a child. “Then we will just have to entrust our safety to you once again, Inspector Hatchery.”

I’d noticed that Dickens had just given the private detective a promotion in rank, and from the way the huge man shuffled modestly from foot to foot, it appeared that Hatchery had interpreted it that way as well.

“Aye, sir,” said the detective. “With your pardon, I’ll take the lead now, sir. And it might be’oove you gentlemen to stay close for a while now.”

MOST OF THE STREETS we had already passed through were not marked and the maze of Bluegate Fields was even less delineated, but Hatchery seemed to know exactly where he was going. Even Dickens, striding next to the huge detective, seemed to have a sense of his destination, but the detective answered my whispered question by listing, in his normal tone of voice, some of the places we had been or were soon to see: the church of St Georges-in-the-east (I had no memory of passing it), George Street, Rosemary Lane, Cable Street, Knock Fergus. Black Lane, New Road, and Royal Mint Street. I had noticed none of these names posted on signs.

At New Court, we left the stinking street, passed into a dark courtyard—Hatchery’s bullseye lantern was our only illumination— and proceeded on through a gap that was more hole in the wall than formal gateway into a series of other dark courtyards. The buildings seemed abandoned, but my guess was that the windows were merely heavily shuttered. When we stepped off pavement, the ooze of the river or seeping sewage squelched underfoot.

Dickens paused by what had once been a broad window but which now, with all the glass gone, was merely a ledge and black hole in the blinded side of a black building.

“Hatchery,” he cried, “your lamp.”

The cone of light from the bullseye lantern illuminated three pale, whitish, indistinct lumps on the broken stone sill. For a moment I was sure that three skinned rabbits had been left there. I stepped closer and then stepped quickly back, raising my handkerchief to my nose and mouth.

“Newborns,” said Hatchery. “The one in the middle was stillborn, is my guess. The two others died shortly after birth. Not triplets. Born and died different times from the look of the maggots and rat nibblings and other signs.”

“Dear God,” I said through my handkerchief. Bile rose high in my throat. “But why… leave them here?”

“’Ere’s as good a place as any,” said the detective. “Some of the mothers try to bury ’em. Dress ’em up in what rags they may have. Put little caps on ’em before dropping the wee things into the Thames or burying ’em in the courtyards ’ere. Most don’t bother. They ’ave to get back to work.”

Dickens turned towards me. “Still tempted by the wench who wanted to take you inside for ‘bacca,’ Wilkie?”

I did not answer. I took another step back and concentrated on not vomiting.

“I’ve seen this before, Hatchery,” said Dickens, his voice strangely flat, calm, and conversational. “Not just here in the Great Oven during my walks, but as a young child.”

“Have you indeed, sir?” said the detective.

“Yes, many times. When I was very young, before we moved from Rochester to London, we had a servant girl named Mary Weller who would take me with her, my tiny hand trembling in her large calloused one, to countless lyings-in. So many that I have often wondered if my true profession should not have been that of midwife. More often than not, the babies died, Hatchery. I remember one terrible multiple birth—the mother did not survive either—where there were five dead infants—I believe it was five, as astounding as that sounds, although I was very young, it might have been four—all laid out side by side, on a clean cloth on a chest of drawers. You know what I thought of at my tender age of four or five, Hatchery?”

“What, sir?”

“I thought of pigs’ feet the way they are usually displayed at a neat tripe-shop,” said Charles Dickens. “It’s hard not to think of Thyestes’ feast when encountering such an image.”

“Indeed, sir,” agreed Hatchery. I was sure the detective had no idea of the classical reference to which Dickens was referring. But I did. Again the bile and vomit rose in my throat and threatened to explode.

“Wilkie,” Dickens said sharply. “Your handkerchief, if you please.”

After a pause, I handed it over.

Taking out his own larger, more expensive silk handkerchief, Dickens carefully laid both cloths over the three rotting and partially eaten infant bodies, weighting down the ends with loose bricks from the broken sill.

“Detective Hatchery,” he said, already turning away, his walking cane clicking on stone, “you shall see to the disposition?”

“Before daybreak, sir. You may count on it.”

“I am sure we can,” said Dickens, lowering his head and holding his top hat as we stepped through another aperture into yet an even darker, smaller, more pestilential courtyard. “Come, come, Wilkie. Keep up to the light.”

The open doorway, when we finally reached it, was no more distinguished than the last three dozen shadowy doorways we had passed. Just inside, shielded from view from without, set into its own deep niche, was a small blue lantern. Detective Hatchery grunted and led the way up the narrow black stairs.

The first-storey landing was dark. The next flight of stairs was narrower than the first, though not quite as dark, since there was the dim glow of a single fluttering candle above us on the next landing. The air was so thick here, the heat so intense, and the stench so overpowering that I wondered how the candle managed to continue burning.

Hatchery opened a door without knocking and we all filed in.

We were in the first and largest of several rooms, all visible through open doorways. In this room two Lascars and an old woman sprawled over a sprung bed that seemed heaped with discoloured rags. Some of the rags stirred and I realised that there were more people on the bed. The whole scene was lit by a few burned-down candles and one red-glassed lantern that cast a bloody hue over everything. Eyes peeped furtively at us from beneath rags in the adjoining rooms even as I realised that there were more bodies—Chinese, Occidental, Lascar—sprawled on the floors and in corners. Some tried to crawl away like roaches exposed to a sudden light. The ancient crone on the bed immediately before us, its four posts carved with years of idle knives, its draperies hanging down like rotted funeral cloths, was blowing at a kind of pipe made of an old penny ink-bottle. The thickness of smoke and harsh, aromatic stink in the room, blended with the sewer-Thames stench wafting in through the close-slatted blinds, caused my gout-hounded stomach to lurch again. I wished then that I had imbibed a second glass of my medicinal laudanum before joining Dickens this evening.

Hatchery prodded the old woman with a wooden police club he had smoothly retrieved from his belt. “’Ere, ’ere, old Sal,” he said harshly. “Wake up and talk to us. These gentlemen have questions for you, and by my oath, you’re going to answer them to my satisfaction.”

“Sal” was a wrinkled ancient, missing teeth, lacking colour in her cheeks and lips, and showing no light of character other than the debauchery visible in her weak, watery eyes. She squinted at Hatchery and then at us. “’Ib,” she said, recognising the giant through her daze, “are you back on the force? Do I need to pay thee?”

“I’m here to ’ave some answers,” said Hatchery, prodding her again on the rags above her sunken chest. “And we’ll ’ave them before we leave.”

“Ask away,” said the woman. “But give me leave first to refill old Yahee’s pipe, that’s a good copper.”

For the first time I noticed what appeared to be an ancient mummy reclining on pillows in the corner of the room behind the large bed.

Old Sal reached to a tumbler in the centre of the room, on a japan tray, that appeared to be half-filled with something like treacle. Lifting some of the thick treacle with a pin, she carried it to the mummy in the corner. As he turned towards the light, I saw that old Yahee was attached to an opium pipe and had been since we had entered. Without fully opening his eyes, he took the bit of treacle in his yellowed, long-nailed fingers, rolled it and rolled it until it was a little ball hardly larger than a pea, and then set it into the bowl of his already smoking pipe. The old mummy’s eyes closed and he turned away from the light, his bare feet tucked under him.

“There’s four pennies more to my own modest coffers,” said Sal as she returned to our small circle of red light near the lantern. “Yahee, you should well know, ’Ib, is more nor eighty years old and been a’smoking the opium through sixty nor more of those years. It’s true ’e don’t sleep, but ’e’s wonderfully ’ealthy and clean. In the morning, after a night o’ smoking, ’e buys his own rice and fish and vegetables, but only after a’scrubbin’ and a’cleanin’ ’is house out and own person off. Sixty years o’ opium, and never a sick day. Ol’ Yahee ’as smoked his way ’ealthy through the last four London Fevers while those arounst ’im were fallin’ like flies, and…”

“Enough,” commanded Hatchery, silencing the crone. “The gentleman’s going to ask you a few questions now, Sal… and if you value this rat hole you call a ’ome and business and don’t want to see it shut down around your poxy ears, then by God you had better answer quick and honest.”

She squinted at us.

“Madam,” said Dickens, his tone as easy and cordial as if he were addressing a lady visitor to his parlour, “we are seeking out an individual named Drood. We know that he used to patronise your… ah… establishment. Could you tell us, please, where we might find him now?”

I saw the shock and sobriety hit the opiated woman as surely as if Dickens had thrown a bucket of freezing water on her. Her eyes widened for a few seconds, then closed in an even more narrow and suspicious squint. “Drood? I don’t know no Drood.…”

Hatchery smiled and prodded her harder with his stick. “That won’t wash, Sal. We know he was a customer ’ere.”

“Who says?” hissed the crone. A dying candle on the floor extended her hiss.

Hatchery smiled again but also prodded her again. The club pressed against her skeletal arm, harder this time.

“Mother Abdallah and Booboo both told me that they’ve seen someone you called Drood ’ere in years past… a white man, missing fingers, strange accent. Said he used to be a regular of yours. He smells of rotting meat, Mother Abdallah told me,” said the detective.

Sal attempted a laugh but it came out only as a wheezing rattle. “Mother Abdallah’s a crazy bitch. Booboo’s a lying Chinaman.”

“It may be.” Hatchery smiled. “But no more crazy nor lyin’ than you, my Puffer Princess. Somebody named Drood has been ’ere and you know it and you’ll tell us.” Still smiling, he brought the end of the weighted baton down on her long but arthritis-gnarled fingers.

Sal howled. Two heaps of rags in a corner began dragging themselves and their opium pipes into another room where the noise, should someone be murdered, would not disturb their dreams.

Dickens removed several shillings from his purse and jingled them in his palm. “Telling us everything you know about Mr Drood shall be to your advantage, madam.”

“And you’ll spend a few nights—maybe weeks—not just in my station cell but in the dankest pit in Newgate if you don’t tell us,” added Hatchery.

The impact of that struck me on a level that could not affect Dickens. I tried to imagine a few nights, much less weeks, without my laudanum. This woman obviously ingested much more of the pure opium than I ever had. My own bones ached at the mere idea of being deprived of my medicine.

There were real tears in the Puffer Princess’s watery eyes now. “All right, all right, leave off wi’ the bludgeonings and threatenings, ’Ib. I’ve always done right by you, ain’t I? I’ve always paid up when pay-up was due, ain’t I? ’Aven’t I always…”

“Tell the gentlemen about this Drood and shut your gob about anything else,” Hatchery said in his most quiet and threatening voice. He laid the length of his club along her quivering forearm.

“When did you know this Drood?” asked Dickens.

“Up to about a year ago,” breathed the Puffer Princess. “’E don’t come around no more.”

“Where does he live, madam?”

“I don’t knows. I swears I don’t knows. Chow Chee John Potter brought this Drood bird in for the first time about eight… maybe nine years ago. They smoked prodigious amounts of the product, they did. Drood always paid in gold sovereigns, so ’is credit was pure gold and all paid up for the sweet future, as it were. He never sung or shouted like the others… there, you ’ear one now in t’other room… ’e just smoked and sat there and looked at me. And looked at the others. Sometimes ’e’d leave first, long before t’others, sometimes ’e’d be the last t’leave.”

“Who is this Chow Chee John Potter?” asked Dickens.

“Jack’s dead,” she said. “He was an ol’ Chinee ship’s cook who had the Christian name ’cause he’d been christened, but he was never right in ’is head, sir. ’E was like a sweet child, ’e was… only a mean, vicious child if he drank rum. But never mean just from smokin’. No.”

“This Chow Chee was a friend of Drood’s?” asked Dickens.

Old Sal rattled another laugh. It sounded as if her lungs were almost gone from the smoke or consumption or both.

“Drood—if that was ’is name—didn’t have no friends, sir. Everyone was afraid of ’im. Even Chow Chee.”

“But the first time you saw him here—Drood—he came in with Chow Chee?”

“Aye, sir, he come with ’im, but I suspect that ’e’d just run into old Jack and had the old pleasant idiot show ’im the way to the nearest opium house. Jack would’ve done that for a kind word, much less for a shillin’.”

“Does Drood live around here?” asked Dickens.

Sal started to laugh again but then started coughing. The terrible noise went on for what seemed like an endless amount of time. Finally she gasped and said, “Live ’round ’ere? ’Round New Court or Bluegate Fields or the docks or Whitechapel? Nossir. No chance of that, sir.”

“Why not?” asked Dickens.

“We would’ve known, gov’ner,” rasped the woman. “Someone like Drood would’ve scared every man, woman, and child in Whitechapel and London and Shadwell. We all would’ve left town.”

“Why?” asked Dickens.

“Because of his Story,” hissed the crone. “His true and awful Story.”

“Tell us his story,” said Dickens.

She hesitated.

Hatchery ran the edge of his club up the outside of her arm and lightly rapped her on her bony elbow.

After her howling stopped, she told the story as she had heard it from the late Chow Chee John Potter, another opium dealer named Yahee, and yet another user named Lascar Emma.

“Drood’s not new to these ’ere parts; them what knows says ’e’s been a’haunting these neighbourhoods for forty years and more.…”

I interrupted with “What is this Mr Drood’s Christian name, woman?”

Hatchery and Dickens both scowled at me. I blinked and stepped back. It was the only question I was to ask the Puffer Princess that night.

Sal scowled at me as well. “Christian name? Drood ain’t got no Christian name. He ain’t no Christian and never was. It’s just Drood. That’s part of his Story. Do you want me to tell it or don’t you?”

I nodded, feeling the blush heat the skin between the lower rim of my spectacles and the beginnings of my beard.

“Drood’s just Drood,” repeated Old Sal. “Word from Lascar Emma was that Drood was a sailor once. Yahee, who’s older than Mother Abdallah and dirt combined, says he wasn’t no sailor, just a passenger on a sailing ship that come here long ago. Maybe sixty years ago—maybe a hundred. But them all agreed that Drood come from Egypt.…”

I saw Dickens and the huge detective exchange glances, as if the crone’s words were confirming something they already knew or suspected.

“’E was an Egyptian, and dark-skinned as all of ’is damned-to-hell Mohammadan race,” continued Sal. “Word was that ’e had ’air then, too, black as pitch. Some says ’e was handsome. But ’e was always an opium man. As soon’s ’e set foot on English soil, they says, ’e was puffing at the blue bottle pipe.

“First ’e spent all the money ’e had on it—thousands of pounds, if the story is true. He must’ve come from royalty there in Mohammadan Egypt. At the very least, ’e come from money. Or come by it some’ow shady. Chin Chin the Chinaman, the old Chinee dealer in the West End, stole Drood blind, charging him ten, twenty, fifty times what ’e charged ’is reg’lar customers. Then, when ’is own money runned out, Drood tried to work for the money—sweepin’ at crossin’s and doin’ magic tricks for the gents and ladies up at Falcon Square—but ’onest-come-by money didn’t buy ’im enough. It never does. So the ’gyptian became a cut-purse and then a cut-throat, robbin’ and a’killin’ sailors near the docks. That kept ’im in Chin Chin’s good graces and guaranteed the ’ighest-quality smoke, bought by the Chinaman from Johnny Chang’s establishment up at the London and Saint Katharine Coffee-’ouse on Ratcliff ’ighway.

“Drood gathered ’round him some others—most ’gyptians, some Malays, some Lascars, some free niggers off the ships, some dirty Irish, some mean Germans—but mostly, as I say, other ’gyptians. They’ve themselves sort of a religion and they live and worship in the old Undertown.…”

Not understanding but afraid of interrupting again, I looked first at Dickens and then at Hatchery. Both men shook their heads and shrugged.

“One day, or night it were, maybe twenty year ago,” continued Sal, “Drood went to waylay and sap a sailor; some say ’is name was Finn, but this Finn waren’t as drunk as ’e seemed nor as easy a target as Drood thought. The ’gyptian Drood used a skinning knife for ’is dark work—or maybe it was one of them curvy bonin’ knives you see up at them Whitechapel butchers, what with their cry of ‘prime and nobby jintes for to-morrer’s dinner at nine-a-half, and no bone to speak of’… and it was true, gentlemen and Constable ’Ib, that when Drood was a’finished with ’em on the docks, there was money for smoke in ’is purse and no bone to speak of for the sailor whose ’ollowed-out corpse was then dumped like so many fish guts into the Thames.…”

There came a low moaning from one of the adjoining rooms. I felt the hair on my neck rise, but this other-worldly moaning was no response to Old Sal’s story. Just a customer with a pipe in need of a refill. The crone ignored the moaning and so did her rapt audience of three.

“Not this night twenty years ago,” she said. “Finn—if Finn was ’is name—wasn’t no regular customer for Drood’s blade; ’e got Drood’s arm before it done ’im harm and then he got the bonin’ knife, or skinnin’ knife, whichever, and cut off the ’gyptian’s nose. Then ’e cut ’is would-be murderer open from crotch to collarbone, ’e did. Oh, Finn knew ’ow to wield a knife from his years ’afore the mast, is how ol’ Lascar Emma tells it. Drood, all slashed but still alive, yells no, no, mercy, no, and Finn cuts the blackguard’s tongue out of his mouth. Then ’e cuts off the heathen’s privy parts and offers to place ’em where the missin’ tongue had been. And then ’e done what ’e offered.”

I realised that I was blinking rapidly and breathing shallowly. I had never heard a woman talk this way. One glance towards Dickens told me that the Inimitable was equally enthralled by the tale and the teller.

“So finally,” continued Sal, “this Finn—this sailor by any other name who knew ’is knife-work—cuts Drood’s ’eart out of ’is chest and dumps the ’gyptian’s dead body into the river from a dock not a mile from this ’ouse. So ’elp me God, gentlemen.”

“But wait,” interrupted Dickens. “This occurred more than twenty years ago? You said earlier that Drood was your customer here for seven or eight years, up until about a year ago. Are you so dazed with the drug that you are forgetting your own lies?”

The Puffer Princess squinted evilly at Dickens and showed her clawed fingers and arched her bowed back while her wild hair seemed to stick out farther from her head and for a minute I was certain that she was transmogrifying into a cat and would begin spitting and clawing within another second or two.

Instead, she hissed—“Drood’s dead is what I been tellin’ you. Been dead since ’e was carved and tossed into the Thames by the sailor nigh onto twenty year ago. But ’is band, ’is group, ’is followers, ’is co-religionists—them other ’gyptians, Malays, Lascars, Irishmen, Germans, Hindoos—they fished ’is rotting, bloated corpse out of the river some days after ’is murder and did their heathen ritules and brought Drood back to life again. Lascar Emma says it was down in Undertown, where ’e dwells to this day. Old Yahee, who knew Drood when ’e was alive, ’e says the restorrection was over across the river in the mountains o’ ’orse and ’uman shit what you gentlemen so politely call ‘dust ’eaps.’ But wherever they done it, ’owever they done it, they brought Drood back.”

I glanced at Dickens. There was something both thrilled and mischievous in the author’s eye. I may have mentioned earlier that Charles Dickens was not the man one wants to stand next to at a funeral service—the boy in the man could not resist a smile at the least appropriate time, a meaningful glance, a wink. Sometimes I thought that Charles Dickens would laugh at anything, sacred or profane. I was afraid that he would start laughing now. I say I was afraid that he would start laughing, not just because of the embarrassment of the situation, but because I had the most uncanny certainty at that moment that the entire opium den around us, all the poor wretches buried in rags and secreted in corners and hidden under blankets and draped on pillows, in all three filthy, dark rooms there, were listening with all of the attention that their drug-addled minds could command.

I was afraid that if Dickens started laughing, these creatures—Old Sal first among them, fully changed into a huge cat—would leap upon us and rend us limb from limb. Even huge Hatchery, I was sure in that instant of my fear, could not save us if it came to that.

Instead of laughing, Dickens handed the crone three gold sovereigns, setting the coins gently in her filthy yellow palm and closing her curled and twisted fingers around them. He said softly, “Where can we find Drood now, my good woman?”

“In the Undertown,” she whispered, clutching the coins with both hands. “Down in the deepest parts of Undertown. Down where the Chinee named King Lazaree provides Drood and t’others the purest pure opium in the world. Down in Undertown with the other dead things.”

Dickens gestured and we followed him out of the smoke-filled room and onto the narrow, dark landing.

“Detective Hatchery,” said the writer, “have you heard of this subterranean Chinese opium dealer named King Lazaree?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you know of this Undertown that Sal talks about with such trepidation?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is it within walking distance?”

“The entrance is, yes, sir.”

“Will you take us there?”

“To the entrance, yes, sir.”

“Will you go with us into this… Undertown… and continue being Virgil to our questing Dantes?”

“Are you asking if I’ll take you down into Undertown, Mr Dickens?”

“That I am, Inspector,” Dickens said almost gleefully. “That I am. For twice the rate we agreed upon, of course, since this is twice the adventure.”

“No, sir, I won’t.”

I could see Dickens blinking in amazement. He raised his stick and tapped the giant gently on the chest with the brass bird’s beak. “Come, come now, Detective Hatchery. All joking aside. For three times our agreed-upon sum, will you show Mr Collins and me to this and into this tantalising Undertown? Lead us to Lazaree and Drood?”

“No, sir, I won’t,” Hatchery said. His voice sounded ragged, as if the opium smoke had affected it. “I won’t go into Undertown under any circumstances. That’s my final word on that, sir. And I would beg you, if you value your souls and sanity, not to go down there yourselves.”

Dickens nodded as if considering this advice. “But you will show us the… what did you call it?… the entrance to Undertown.”

“Yes, sir,” said Hatchery. His low words came out like someone tearing thick paper. “I will show you… regretfully.”

“That’s good enough, Detective,” said Dickens, taking the lead down the dark stairway. “That’s fair and more than good enough. It is past midnight, but the night is young. Wilkie and I will press on—and down—by ourselves.”

The huge detective lumbered down the steps behind Dickens. It took me a minute to follow. The dense opium smoke in the closed room must have affected my nerves or muscles below the waist, because my legs felt heavy, leaden, unresponsive. In quite literal terms, I could not force my legs and feet to take the first step on the stairs.

Then, tingling and hurting all over as a limb does after falling asleep unbeknownst to its owner, I was able to take that first clumsy step down. I had to rely on my walking stick to keep my balance.

“Are you coming, Wilkie?” came Dickens’s accursedly excited voice up the black stairwell.

“Yes!” I called down, adding a silent God d— n your eyes. “I’m coming, Dickens.”