Drood

CHAPTER FIVE

Imust pause in my narrative here for a moment, Dear Reader, to explain how and why I had chosen to follow Charles Dickens into absurd and dangerous situations before this. There was the time, for instance, when I followed him up Mount Vesuvius. And the more serious incident in Cumberland, where he almost got me killed on Carrick Fell.

Vesuvius was just one of the minor adventures of the 1853 trip around Europe which Dickens and I shared with Augustus Egg. Strictly speaking, there were only two bachelors in that three-man travelling party, and both were younger than the Inimitable, but Dickens certainly acted as carefree and boyish as any young bachelor with the majority of his life and career ahead of him as we gambolled about Europe that autumn and winter. Visiting most of Dickens’s old haunts on the Continent, we eventually headed for Lausanne, where the author’s eccentric old friend Reverend Chauncey Hare Town-shend lectured us on ghosts, jewelry, and—one of Dickens’s favourite topics—mesmerism, and then we were off to Chamonix and climbing the Mer de Glace, where we looked down into glacial crevasses a thousand feet deep. In Naples, which I had hoped would be a respite from all the adventure, Dickens immediately insisted that we climb Vesuvius.

He was disappointed, deeply disappointed I would say, that there was no fire belching and blazing from the volcano. Evidently a major eruption in 1850 had taken some of the energy out of the mountain; there was much smoke while we were there, but no flames. To say that Dickens was crestfallen would be an understatement. Nonetheless, Dickens quickly put a climbing party together, including the archaeologist and diplomat Austen Henry Layard, and we promptly threw ourselves at the smoking mountain.

Eight years before our climb, on the night of 21 January, 1845, Dickens had found all the Vesuvian fire and sulphur that someone as indifferent to danger as he might ask for.

It was the Inimitable’s first trip to Naples and the volcano was very active indeed. With his wife, Catherine, and sister-in-law Georgina in tow, Dickens set off with six saddle horses, an armed soldier for a guard, and—because the weather was harsh and the volcano very treacherous then—no fewer than twenty-two guides. They began their ascent around four PM with the women being carried in litters while Dickens and the guides led the way. The walking stick that the author used that evening was taller and thicker than the bird-beaked cane he was clacking against cobblestones this night in the slums of Shadwell. I am sure that his pace that first time on Vesuvius was no slower than it was tonight on such flat ground at sea level. Charles Dickens’s response to an intimidating slope—as I have witnessed to my chagrin and fatigue many times—was to double his already too-quick pace.

Near the top of the cinder cone that is Vesuvius’s summit, no one would go on save for Dickens and a single guide. The mountain was in eruption. Flames shot hundreds of feet into the sky above them and sulphur, cinders, and smoke belched from every crevice in the snowfields and rockfields. The author’s friend Roche, who had climbed to within a few hundred feet of the crater but who could not go farther towards the fiery maelstrom, screamed that Dickens and his guide would be killed if they ventured closer.

Dickens insisted on climbing right to the brink of this crater, on the windy and most dangerous side—the fumes alone have been known to kill people miles below this level—and looking, as he wrote his friends later, “down into the crater itself… into the flaming bowels of the mountain.… It was the finest sight conceivable, more terrible than Niagara.…” The American waterfalls had been his previous exemplar of transcendence and awe in Nature on this world. Equal, he wrote “… as fire and water are.”

All the other members of the party that night, including the horrified and exhausted Catherine and Georgina (who had ridden up the mountainside), attested that Dickens came down the cinder cone “alight in half a dozen places and burnt from head to foot.” The author’s remaining rags of clothing smouldered during the long night’s descent—and the descent was also harrowing. On an endless and exposed ice slope where some of the party had to rope up for safety and guides had to chip footsteps in the ice, one guide slipped and fell screaming down into the darkness, followed a minute later by one of the Englishmen who had joined the party. Dickens and the others descended through the night without learning the fates of these men. The writer later told me that the Englishman had survived; he never learned the status of the guide.

Twelve years before this Drood-quest in London, Dickens had dragged Egg and me up Vesuvius, but, thank God and the volcano’s relative quiet, it was a far less taxing and dangerous outing. Dickens and Layard pressed ahead at high speed, which allowed Egg and me to rest, discreetly, whenever we felt the need. In truth, it was beautiful as we watched the sun setting towards Sorrento and Capri from our vantage point near the mouth of the crater, the sphere of the sun growing huge and blood red through the pall of smoke and vapour from Vesuvius. We descended easily by torchlight with a new moon rising above us and all of us singing English and Italian songs.

This was as to nothing compared to our near-fatal—to me—adventure on Carrick Fell shortly after our last performance of The Frozen Deep in Manchester in 1857.

Dickens was filled then, as he was this night in the Shadwell slums, with a terrible and unquenchable energy, arising, it seemed, from a soul-deep dissatisfaction. He told me some weeks after the play closed that he was going mad, that—if I remember his words correctly—“the scaling of all the mountains in Switzerland, or the doing of any wild thing until I dropped, would be but a slight relief.” In a note he sent me one morning after we had been dining, drinking, and discussing things both solemnly and with wild humour the night before, Dickens said, “I want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable—indescribable—my misery amazing.” And I could tell that besides being amazing, his misery was very real and very deep. I thought at the time that it had only to do with his failing marriage to Catherine; I know now that it had even more to do with his new love for the eighteen-year-old child-woman named Ellen Ternan.

In 1857, Dickens announced to me suddenly that we were leaving immediately for Cumberland to get inspiration for some jointly penned articles about the North of England for our magazine Household Words. He was to call the piece The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices. Even as co-author—in truth primary author, I may tell you, Dear Reader—I have to say that what resulted was an unoriginal and uninspired series of travel essays. It was only later that I realised that Dickens had little interest in Cumberland, other than climbing that damned Carrick Fell, and almost no interest at all in writing travel articles.

Ellen Ternan and her sisters and mother were appearing on stage in Doncaster, and that, I know now, was the real purpose for our wild travels north.

How ironic it would have been if I had died on Carrick Fell because of Charles Dickens’s covert passion for an eighteen-year-old actress who had absolutely no awareness of his feelings for her.

We took the train from London to Carlisle and the next day we rode to the village of Heske, at the base of this “Carrock or Carrick Mountain or Carrock or Carrick Fell I have read about, my dear Wilkie. The spellings are unreliable.”

So it was at Carrick Fell that I fell.

Dickens’s burning frustration and energy demanded a mountain, and for some reason known to no one—not even to himself, I am sure—Carrick or Carrock Fell was to be the mountain we were to throw ourselves against.

There were no guides in tiny Heske to lead us to or up this hill. The weather was terrible: cold, windy, rainy. Dickens finally convinced the landlord of the rather sad little inn where we were staying to be our guide, even though the older man confessed to “havin’ never bin oop or doon that partic’lar hill, sirrr.”

We managed to find Carrick Fell, its summit disappearing in the lowering evening clouds. We began to climb. The innkeeper hesitated frequently but Dickens usually pushed on, guessing at our course. A bone-chilling wind rose up around nightfall—more a mere dimming of the twilight into deeper darkness as mist and fog rolled in—yet still we climbed. We soon were lost. The landlord confessed to having no idea even of which side of the mountain we were on. As dramatically as when he played the wandering Richard Wardour on stage, Dickens produced a compass from his pocket, pointed the way, and we pressed on into the gloom.

Within thirty minutes, Dickens’s city-bought compass was broken. The rain poured harder and we were soon soaked through and shivering. Darker and darker came on the northern night while we wound our way round and round the rocky fell. We found what could have been its summit—a slippery, rocky ridge set amidst a plethora of identical slippery, rocky ridges all disappearing into the fog and night—and we started down, having not the slightest sense of which way lay our village, our inn, our dinner, our fire, or our beds.

For two hours we wandered so with the rain terrific, the fog thick, and the darkness now approaching some Stygian absolute. When we came to a roaring stream that blocked our path, Dickens greeted it as if it were a long-lost friend. “We follow it down to the river at the base of the peak,” Dickens explained to the shivering, miserable wretch of a landlord and to his equally miserable co-author. “The perfect guide!”

This guide may have been perfect, but it was treacherous. The sides of the gully became steeper and steeper, the rocks along the sides ever more treacherous with rain and incipient ice, the torrent beneath us wilder. I fell behind. My foot slipped, I fell heavily, and I felt something twist terribly in my ankle. Lying half in the stream, hurting and shivering, starving and weak, I had to call into the darkness for help, hoping that Dickens and the trembling innkeeper had not descended beyond earshot. If they had, I knew I was a dead man. I could not even put weight on the ankle while using my walking stick. I would have had to crawl down the streambed itself some miles to the river, then—if I somehow guessed the proper direction to the village—crawl miles more along the river’s bank that night. I am a city man, Dear Reader. Such exertions are not in my physical vocabulary.

Luckily, Dickens heard my calls. He came back and found me lying in the stream, my ankle already swollen to more than twice its normal size.

At first he merely assisted me as I hopped down the treacherous slope with him, but eventually he actually carried me. I knew without any doubt that Dickens was imagining himself as the hero Richard Wardour carrying his rival, Frank Aldersley, across the Arctic wastes to safety. As long as he did not drop me, I did not care what fantasies he indulged in.

Eventually, we found the inn. The landlord—shaking and muttering and cursing under his breath—woke his wife to cook us some late-night supper or early-morning breakfast. Servants stoked the fires in the public room and in our rooms. There was no doctor in Heske—there really was no Heske in Heske—so Dickens iced and bound my swollen ankle as best he could until we reached civilisation.

We went on to Wigton and then to Allonby and then to Lancaster and then to Leeds—continuing the charade that we were gathering material for a travel tale, even though I could not walk without the aid of two sticks and spent all my time in the hotels—and then finally went on to Doncaster, which had been our true and secret (or rather, Charles Dickens’s secret) destination all along.

There we saw several plays, including the one in which Ellen Ternan had a brief appearance. The next day, Dickens went on a picnic with the family and—I am certain now—also on a long, private walk with Ellen Ternan. Whatever transpired on that walk, whatever thoughts or feelings were expressed and rejected, remains a mystery to this day, but I know for a fact that the Inimitable returned from Doncaster in a foul and murderous mood. When I tried to arrange times at the Household Words office for us to finish our writing and editing of the weak Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices essays, Dickens sent me an unusually personal reply in which he said, “… the Doncaster unhappiness remains so strong upon me that I can’t write and (waking) can’t rest, one minute.”

As I said, I did not then know and do not now know the precise nature of that Doncaster unhappiness, but it was soon to change all of our lives.

I share this, Dear Reader, because I suspected that night in July of 1865, and I suspect more firmly now as I write this some years later, that our search for the mysterious Drood that hot, reeking night was not so much for the resurrected phantom Drood as it was for whatever Charles Dickens sought out in Ellen Ternan in Doncaster in 1857—and in the eight mystery-filled years since then up until Staplehurst.

But as was true of Carrick or Carrock Fell, such obsessions can have their terrible price for other people through no planning of the obsessor: other people can end up just as injured or dead as if it had all been premeditated.

WE WALKED FOR about twenty minutes through even darker and more reeking slums. At times there were signs of crowded human habitation in the sagging tenements, whispers and catcalls rising out of the thick darkness on both sides of the narrow lanes, and at other times the only sound was that of our boots and Dickens’s cane tapping on the cobblestones of those few lanes that had cobblestones. I was reminded that night of a passage in Dickens’s most recent—and still uncompleted—book, Our Mutual Friend, one of the first numbers to be serialised in the past year, in which our author has two young men riding in a carriage down to the Thames to identify a body found drowned and dragged out of the river by a father and daughter who do that daily for a living—

The wheels rolled on, and rolled down by the Monument, and by the Tower, and by the Docks; down by Ratcliffe, and by Rotherhithe; down by where accumulated scum of humanity seemed to be washed from higher grounds, like so much moral sewage, and to be pausing until its own weight forced it over the bank and sunk it in the river.

In truth, like the dissolute young characters in the coach in Dickens’s tale, I had been paying little attention to the direction we were going; I merely followed the large shadow of Detective Hatchery and the lithe shadow of Dickens. I was later to regret my inattention.

Suddenly the constant background stench changed its flavour and grew in intensity. “Pfah!” I cried to my shadowy companions ahead. “Are we nearing the river again?”

“Worse, sir,” said Hatchery over his wide shoulder. “It’s burial grounds, sir.”

I looked around. For some time I had been under the general but contradictory impression that we were approaching either Church Street or the London Hospital area, but this dark avenue had opened instead on our right onto a sort of field encircled by walls and an iron fence and a gate. I saw no church nearby, so this was no churchyard cemetery, but rather a municipal cemetery of the kind that had become so common in the past fifteen years.

You see, Dear Reader, in our time, the almost-three-million of us in London lived and walked above the corpses of at least that many of our common dead, and almost certainly more. As London grew and devoured its surrounding suburbs and villages, those graveyards were also subsumed, and it was to them that the hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands of rotting bodies of our beloved dead were consigned. St Martin-in-the-Fields churchyard, for instance, was only about two hundred feet square, but by 1840, some twenty-five years before this eventful night, it was estimated to contain the remains of between 60,000 and 70,000 of our London departed. There are many more there now.

In the 1850s, about the time of the Great Stink and the worst of the terrible cholera epidemics, it was becoming apparent to all of us that these overcrowded churchyards were creating a health risk to those unlucky enough to live nearby. Every burial place in the city was—and remains—overcrowded to the point of overflow. Thousands of bodies were buried in shallow pits beneath chapels and schools and workplaces and in empty lots and even behind and beneath private homes. So the Burial Act of 1852—a piece of legislation which Dickens had spoken for—demanded that the General Board of Health establish some cemeteries open to all the dead regardless of their religion.

Perhaps you also know, Dear Reader, that until recently in my lifetime, all those to be buried in England had to receive Christian burial in parish churchyards. There were few exceptions. It was as late as 1832 that an act of Parliament put an end to the common practice of my fellow Englishmen burying suicides in public highways with a stake driven through the dead sinner’s heart. The Act—a paragon of modern thought and philanthropy—allowed the corpses of suicides to be buried in churchyards with Christians, but only if the dead one was interred between the hours of nine PM and midnight, and always then without the rites of the Church. And I should mention that the compulsory dissection of murderers’ corpses was also abolished in 1832—that enlightened year! — and even murderers may be found in Christian cemeteries in this liberal era.

Many—I should say most—of those graves remain unmarked. But not necessarily undiscovered. Those men digging new graves each day or night here in London invariably sink their spades into rotting flesh—layers of it, I am told—and then into unnamed skeletons beneath. Some churchyards hire men to check the grounds each morning for chunks of decaying parishioners that have risen to the surface—especially after heavy rains—in too-eager anticipation of the Final Trumpet Call. I have seen these workers carrying arms and hands and other, less distinguishable parts, in wheelbarrows while in the pursuit of their rounds, rather like a diligent gardener on an estate will carry off fallen limbs and branches after a storm.

These new interment areas were called “burial grounds” as distinct from parish “churchyards” and they had been very popular. The first burial grounds were commercial ventures (and as was still the custom in so many places on the Continent, if the family fell behind on payment on their loved ones’ graves, the bodies were dug up and tossed aside, the beautiful headstones used to pave retaining walls or walkways, and the earth sold to a more reliable customer), but since the 1850s Acts enforcing the closure of many overflowing London churchyards, most of our new cemeteries were of the municipal variety, with separate seating, as it were, for religious Conformists (complete with chapels and consecrated ground) and a different area for Dissenters. One wonders if they were uncomfortable spending Eternity within a cricket pitch’s distance of one another.

The burial ground we were approaching now in the dark looked to have been an ancient churchyard at some point—until the church was abandoned as the neighbourhoods here got too dangerous for decent people, then its structure burned down in order to raise more tenements so that landlords could squeeze more money out of immigrants with nowhere else to light—but the churchyard itself had remained and been used… and used… and used… perhaps taken over by Dissenters a century or two ago, then converted to a bury-for-profit graveyard some time in the last twenty years.

As we approached the sweating walls and black iron fence of the place, I wondered who would pay even a penny to be buried here. There had once been large trees within the churchyard, but these were only calcified skeletons now, dead for generations, with their amputated arms rising towards the black buildings leaning over the site on every side. The stench from within this walled and fenced space was so terrible that I reached for my handkerchief before remembering that Dickens had taken it earlier in the night to drape across the dead babies. I half expected to see an actual green cloud of miasma hanging over this place and—in truth—there was a sick glow to the mist that had arrived to serve as harbinger for the next warm-blanket of rain.

Dickens reached the high, closed, black iron gate first and tried to open it, but it was locked with a massive padlock.

Thank God, I thought.

But Detective Hatchery reached under his coat and brought a heavy ring of keys from his impossibly burdened belt. He had Dickens hold the bullseye lantern while he fumbled through the clanking keys before finding the one he wanted. It fit in the lock. The huge gate, all black arches and scallops, opened slowly with such a creaking that it seemed as if it had been decades since anyone had paid to open it to rid themselves of a loved one’s corpse.

We walked between the dark headstones and sagging sepulchres, passing under the dead trees and down uneven paving stones on narrow lanes between ancient vaults. I could tell by the spring in his step and the clack of his cane that Dickens was enjoying every second of this. I was concentrating on not retching from the stink and not stepping, in the darkness, on anything soft and yielding.

“I know this place,” Dickens said suddenly. His voice in the darkness was loud enough to make me leap a small distance into the air. “I have seen it in daylight. I have written about it in The Uncommercial Traveller. But I was not within its gates before tonight. I called it the ‘City of the Absent’ and this particular place ‘Saint Ghastly Grim’s.’ ”

“Aye, sir,” said Hatchery. “It once were exactly that.”

“I did not see the skulls and crossbones decorating the iron spikes on the gate,” said Dickens, his voice still far too loud for the circumstances.

“They are still there, Mr Dickens,” attested Hatchery. “I did not feel it politick to shine my light up on ’em. ’Ere we are, sirs. Our entrance to Undertown.”

We had stopped before a narrow, sealed crypt.

“Is this a joke?” I asked. My voice may have sounded a bit brittle to my companions. I was overdue for an application of my medicinal laudanum; the gout was causing many parts of my body to hurt and I could feel a terrible headache tightening like a metal band around my temples.

“No, Mr Collins, no joke, sir,” said Hatchery. He was fumbling at his key ring again and now he set yet another massive key into an ancient lock on the metal door of the crypt. The tall door groaned inward when he leaned his weight against it. The detective shone the light inside and waited for Dickens or me to enter.

“This is absurd,” I said. “There can be no Undertown or underground anything here. Our boots have been squelching in the reeking muck of the Thames for hours. The water table here must be shallower than these graves around us.”

“That does not prove to be the case, sir,” whispered Hatchery.

“This part of the East End lies over rock, my dear Wilkie,” said Dickens. “Ten feet down and it is solid rock. Certainly you know the geology of your city! That is why they chose to build them here.”

“Build what?” I asked, attempting, without total success, to keep the asperity I felt out of my voice.

“The catacombs,” said Dickens. “The ancient underground spaces of a monastery crypt. The Roman loculi before that, even deeper here, almost certainly beneath the Christian catacombs.”

I did not choose to ask what “loculi” meant. I had the sense that I would learn its dark etymology soon enough.

Dickens entered the crypt, then did the detective, then I. The cone of light from the bullseye moved over and around the tiny interior. The pedestal bier in the centre of the small mausoleum, just long enough to hold a coffin or sarcophagus or shrouded body, was empty. There were no obvious niches or other places for bodies.

“It’s empty,” I said. “Someone’s pilfered the corpse.”

Hatchery laughed softly. “Bless me, sir. There was never a corpse ’ere. This partic’lar house o’ the dead is—’as always been—just an entrance to the land o’ the dead. If you’ll move aside, Mr Collins.”

I stepped back against the sweating stone wall at the rear of the crypt as the detective bent low, set his shoulder to the cracked marble bier, and shoved. The sound of stone scraping across solid stone was extremely unpleasant.

“I noticed the arcs gouged into the old pavers as we came in,” Dickens commented to the still-labouring detective. “As clear a clue as the grooves the post of a sagging gate makes in the mud.”

“Aye, sir,” panted Hatchery, still shoving. “But usually leaves and dirt an’ such in ’ere hide that, even in direct lantern light. You’re very observant, Mr Dickens.”

“Yes,” said Dickens.

I was sure that the screech and moans of the slowly shifting bier were loud enough to bring mobs of curious ruffians into the graveyard. Then I remembered that Hatchery had locked the cemetery gate behind us. We were locked in. And since the door of the crypt itself had taken much of Hatchery’s considerable bulk and strength to open—he had shouldered it shut after we entered—we might as well have been locked into this tomb as well. As steep stone stairs became visible in the black wedge beneath the floor now growing wider as the bier was moved, the sense of that weight being set back in place, essentially entombing us below the stone beneath the locked tomb within the locked cemetery, I felt cold shivers running down my back despite the thick heat of the night.

Finally Hatchery stopped pushing and stood upright. The triangular wedge of the dark opening was not large, little more than two feet wide, but when Dickens shone the bullseye down into it, I could see very steep stone steps descending.

Dickens’s face was lighted from below by the lantern as he looked at the detective and said, “You’re sure you will not come down with us, Hatchery?”

“No, sir, thank you, sir,” said the big man. “I have agreed not to.”

“Agreed not to?” Dickens’s tone was one of mild curiosity.

“Aye, sir. An old arrangement that many of us former and current constables and inspectors ’ave with those in Undertown. We don’t go down to complicate their lives, sir; they don’t come up to complicate ours.”

“Rather like the arrangement most of the living attempt to make with the dead,” Dickens said softly, his gaze returning to the dark hole and steep steps.

“Exactly, sir,” said the detective. “I knew you would understand.”

“Well, we should be going down,” said Dickens. “Will you be able to find your way home without a lantern, Detective? We’ll obviously need this one below.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” said Hatchery. “I ’ave another one on my belt should I need it. But I won’t be going ’ome yet. I’ll wait here until dawn. If you’re not back by then, I’ll go straight to Leman Street Station and report two gentlemen missing.”

“That’s very kind of you, Detective Hatchery,” said Dickens. He smiled. “But as you said, the constables and inspectors won’t go below to look for us.”

“Oh, I don’t know, sir,” said the detective, shrugging. “What with you both being famous authors an’ fine gentlemen, perhaps they’d see fit to make an exception in this case. I just ’ope we don’t have to find out, sir.”

Dickens laughed at this. “Come along, Wilkie.”

“Mr Dickens,” said Hatchery, reaching under his coat and coming out with a huge pistol of the revolver variety. “Perhaps you should take this with you, sir. Even if just for the rats.”

“Oh, posh,” said Dickens, waving the weapon away with his white gloves. (You need to remember, Dear Reader, that in our era—I have no idea of the custom in yours—none of our police carried firearms of any sort. Nor did our criminals, for the most part. Hatchery’s talk of “agreements” between the underworld and law enforcement was true in many unspoken ways.)

“I will take it,” I said. “And gladly. I hate rats.”

The pistol was as heavy as it looked and it filled my right jacket pocket. I felt strangely off balance with the massive thing pulling me down on one side. I told myself that I might soon feel far more off balance should I need such a weapon and not have one.

“Do you know how to fire a pistol, sir?” asked Hatchery.

I shrugged. “I assume that the general idea is to aim the end with the opening at one’s target and to pull the trigger,” I said. I was hurting all over now. In my mind’s eye, I could see the jug of laudanum on my locked kitchen’s cupboard shelf.

“Yes, sir,” said Hatchery. His bowler was pulled down so tight that it seemed to be compressing his skull. “That is the general idea. You may have noticed it ’as two barrels, Mr Collins. An upper one and a larger lower one.”

I had not taken notice of this. I tried to pull the absurdly heavy weapon from my pocket, but it snagged on the lining, ripping the cloth of my expensive jacket. Cursing softly, I managed to extricate it and study it in the lamplight.

“Ignore the lower one, sir,” said Hatchery. “It’s made for grapeshot. A form of shotgun. Nasty thing. You won’t be needin’ that, I ’ope, sir, and I have no ammunition for it anyway. My brother, who was in the army until recently, bought the gun from an American chap, although it was made in France… but not to worry, there are good English proof marks on it, sir, from our very own Birmingham Proof ’ouse. The cylinder for the smoothbore barrel is loaded, sir. There are nine shots in the cylinder.”

“Nine?” I said, putting the huge, heavy thing back in my pocket while taking care not to rip the lining any worse than it had been. “Very good.”

“Would you like more bullets, sir? I ’ave a bag of them an’ caps in my pocket. I’d ’ave to show you ’ow to use the ramrod, sir. But it’s fairly simple, as such skills go.”

I almost laughed then, thinking of all the things that might be in Detective Hatchery’s pockets and on his belt. “No, thank you,” I said. “Nine balls should suffice.”

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

I shuddered at that.

“We’ll see you before dawn, Hatchery,” said Dickens, tucking his watch into his waistcoat and leading the way down the very steep steps, the bullseye lantern held low. “Come, Wilkie. We have less than four hours before the sun rises.”

WILKIE, DO YOU know Edgar Allan Poe?”

“No,” I said. We were ten steps down with no end of the steep shaft in sight. The “steps” were more like pyramid blocks, at least three feet from one level down to the next, each step and slab slick with trickles of underground moisture, the shadows thrown by the small lantern ink black and deceptive, and if either of us stumbled here, it would certainly result in broken bones and most probably a broken neck. I half-stepped, half-jumped to the next step down, panting as I tried to keep up with the tiny cone of bobbing light emanating from Dickens’s hand. “A friend of yours, Charles?” I asked. “An expert on crypts and catacombs, perhaps?”

Dickens laughed. The echo was wonderfully awful in the steep stone shaft. I hoped with all my heart that he would not do it again.

“A definitive ‘no’ to your first question, my dear Wilkie,” he said. “Quite possibly a ‘yes’ to the second surmise.”

Dickens had stopped on a level area and now he turned the lantern to illuminate steep walls, a low ceiling ahead, and a corridor stretching off into the dark. Black rectangles on both sides of the corridor suggested open doorways. I jumped down onto the last step to join him. He turned to me and rested both hands and the bullseye on the brass beak of his stick.

“I met Poe in Baltimore during the last weeks of my 1842 tour in America,” he said. “I must say that the fellow forced first his book, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, on me, and then his attention. Freely conversing as if we were equals or old friends, Poe kept us talking—or kept himself talking, I should say—for hours, about literature and his work and my work and again about his work. I never did get around to reading his stories while I was in America, but Catherine did. She was quite enthralled. Evidently this Poe loved to write about crypts, corpses, premature burials, and hearts ripped out of living breasts.”

I kept peering into the darkness beyond the tiny circle of light from the bullseye. Straining so hard—my eyes are not strong—made the shadows everywhere coalesce and shift, like tall forms stirring. My headache grew worse.

“I presume that all this has some relevance, Dickens,” I said sharply.

“Only in the sense that I am receiving the distinct impression that Mr Edgar Allan Poe would be enjoying this outing more than you are at the moment, my dear Wilkie.”

“Well then,” I said a bit sharply, “I wish your friend Poe were here now.”

Dickens laughed again, the echo not so intense this time but even more unnerving as it bounced off unseen walls and niches in the dark. “Perhaps he is. Perhaps he is. I remember reading that Mr Poe died only six or seven years after I met him, quite young and under odd and perhaps unseemly circumstances. From our brief but intense acquaintanceship, this place seems to be exactly the kind of stone barrow his ghost would enjoy haunting.”

“What is this place?” I asked.

As if in answer, Dickens raised the lantern and led the way down the corridor. The doorways I had sensed on both sides were actually open niches. Dickens aimed the bullseye into the first niche on our right as we reached it.

About six feet into this space, an elaborate iron grille rose from the stone floor to stone ceiling; the grille was massive, its cross-members solid, but had openings in the shape of florettes. The blood-red-and-orange iron looked so ancient and rusted that I felt that it would crumble away if I stepped in and struck it with my fist. But I had no intention of stepping into the niche. Behind the iron grille were rows and columns of stacked coffins so solid that I guessed them to be lined with lead. I counted about a dozen in the shifting light and shadows.

“Can you read that plate, Wilkie?”

Dickens was referring to a white stone plaque set high on the iron grille. Another plaque had fallen into the accumulated dirt and heaps of rust on the floor of the niche and a third was lying on its side at the base of the grille.

I adjusted my glasses and squinted. The stone was streaked and stained white by the rising damp and was pockmarked with dark red from the rusted grille beneath and around it. The letters appeared to be—

E. I.

THE CAYA[obscured]OMB

OF

[missing]HE REV[obscured]D

L.L. B [stain obscured]

I read this to Dickens, who had stepped inside for a closer look, and then I said, “Not Roman, then.”

“These catacombs?” said Dickens in his distracted manner as he crouched to try to read the plate that had fallen into the dirt like a tumbled headstone. “No. They were built in the essential Roman manner—deep corridors lined on both sides with burial niches—but original Roman catacombs would be labyrinthine in layout. These were Christian, but very old, Wilkie, very old, and therefore designed, as some of our city is above, on the grid. In this case, it is laid out as a central cross surrounded by these burial niches and smaller passages. You notice the arched brick rather than stone above me here…” He aimed the lantern higher.

I did notice the arched brick vault then. And for the first time I realised that the reddish “dirt” on the floor, several inches deep in places, was detritus from the crumbling bricks and mortar falling from that vaulted ceiling.

“This was a Christian catacombs,” repeated Dickens. “Installed directly under the chapel above.”

“But there is no chapel above,” I whispered.

“Not for many years,” agreed Dickens, rising and trying to flick the dirt from his gloves while still holding the lantern and his stick. “But there was long ago. A monastery chapel would be my guess. Part of the Monastery of the Church of Saint Ghastly Grim’s.”

“You made that up,” I said accusingly.

Dickens looked at me oddly. “Of course I did,” he said. “Shall we move on?”

I hadn’t liked standing in the dark corridor with no light behind me, so I was grateful when Dickens emerged from the niche and prepared to press on. But first he shone the light back into the vault again, passing its beam over the rows and columns of coffins stacked behind the rusting grille.

“I neglected to mention,” he said softly, “that as with their Roman originals, these burial niches are called loculi. Each loculus is reserved for a family or perhaps for members of a specific order of monks over many decades. The Romans tended to excavate their catacombs logically, all at one time, but these later Christian tunnels were dug out over a much longer period of time and tend to stray and wander. Do you know Garraway’s Coffee House?”

“On Exchange Alley?” I said. “Cornhill? But of course. I’ve had coffee there many a time while waiting for a sale to begin in the adjoining auction house.”

“There is a similar old monastery crypt under Garraway’s,” said Dickens, whispering now as if he were afraid some spectral form had joined us. “I have been in it, down there among the port wine. I have often wondered if Garraway’s is taking pity on the mouldy men who wait in its public-room all their lives by giving them that cool crypt down below to hold the rest of those gone missing from what fools call ‘real life’ up there on the surface.” He glanced at me. “Of course, my dear Wilkie, the catacombs of Paris—and you have been there, I know, since I took you there—the catacombs of Paris would not be large enough to hold the rest of the truly missing souls of London if we were all forced to go below, out of the light, down into the mouldy dark where we belong when we forget how to live well among upright men.”

“Dickens, what in the deuce are you going on about…” I stopped. There had been a stirring or footstep down the dark corridor, out of the weak glow of our single small lamp.

Dickens turned the bullseye but there was nothing in the cone of light but stone and shadows. The roof of the main passageway was flat stone, not arched brick. It went on for at least fifty yards. Dickens led the way down this corridor, pausing only to shine his beam in some of the niches that opened to the left and right of the passage. They were all loculi, niches holding stacks of massive coffins behind identical rusted-iron grilles. At the end of the passage Dickens passed his beam of light over the wall and even ran his free hand over the stone, pressing here and there as if searching for some spring-lever and secret passage. None opened to us.

“So…” I began. What was I going to say? You see? There’s no Undertown after all. No Mr Drood down here. Are you satisfied? Let us go home, please, Dickens, I need to take my laudanum. I said, “This seems to be all there is.”

“Not at all,” said Dickens. “Did you see that candle on the wall?”

I had not. We walked back to the next-to-last loculus and Dickens aimed the bullseye higher. It was there in a niche, a thick tallow candle burned to a stub.

“Left by the ancient Christians, perhaps?” I said.

“I believe not,” Dickens said drily. “Light it, please, my dear Wilkie. And walk ahead of me back towards the entrance.”

“Why?” I asked, but when he did not answer, I reached for the candle, fumbled matches out of my left pocket—the absurdly heavy pistol still weighed down my jacket on the right—and lit the thing. Dickens nodded, rather brusquely I thought, and I held the stub of candle in front of me as I walked slowly back the way we had come.

“There!” cried Dickens when we had covered about half the distance.

“What?”

“Didn’t you see the candle flame flicker, Wilkie?”

If I had, it hadn’t registered, but I said, “Just a draught from the entrance stairs, no doubt.”

“I think not,” said Dickens. His emphasis on the negative every time I spoke was beginning to annoy me.

Using his lantern, Dickens peered into the loculus on our left and then into the one on our right. “Ahhh!” he said.

Still holding the slightly flickering candle, I peered into the niche but saw nothing to evoke such an ejaculation of surprise and satisfaction.

“On the floor,” said Dickens.

I realised that the red dust there had been trod down into a sort of path that led to the iron grille and the coffins. “Some recent interment?” I said.

“I seriously doubt it,” said Dickens, continuing his string of negative assessments of my contributions. He led the way into the arched vault, handed me the lantern, and shook the iron grille with both gloved hands.

A section of the grille—its joints and edges and hinges invisible from even a few feet away—swung inward towards the stacks of coffins.

Dickens went through without a pause. In a second his lantern seemed to sink into the red dust beneath him. It took me a minute to realise that there were steps back there and that Dickens was descending them.

“Come along, Wilkie,” echoed the writer’s voice.

I hesitated. I had the candle. I had the pistol. I could be back at the base of the steps in thirty seconds and up them and out into the crypt above—under Detective Hatchery’s protection again—thirty seconds after that.

“Wilkie!” The lantern and the author were both out of sight now. I could see the brick ceiling still illuminated above the place where he had disappeared. I looked back towards the dark entrance to the loculus, then at the heavy coffins stacked atop their biers on either side of the path in the red dust, and then back towards the opening again.

“Wilkie, please hurry now. And snuff the candle but do bring it along. This bullseye does not have unlimited fuel.”

I walked through the open grille door and past the coffins and towards the still-not-visible stairs.