Drood (19 page)
“Except that King Lazaree warned us that some of these diners are cannibals,” I said.
As if in response to our witticisms, there came the squeak and scuttle of rats from one of the openings, although it was impossible to tell which. Perhaps from all.
“Do we turn back now?” I asked, perhaps a shade plaintively. “Now that we have discovered the heart of the mystery of Undertown?”
Dickens looked sharply at me. “Oh, I doubt very much that this is the heart of the mystery. Nor even the liver or lights of same. Come, this channel looks the widest.”
Fifteen minutes and five turnings and scratchings on the wall later, we emerged into a space that made the Wild Boys’ living area look like a minor
loculus.
This tunnel was a major thoroughfare compared to the low and mean sewers through which we had already passed: at least twenty-five feet across, fifteen feet high, the centre a river of quickly moving water—albeit a sludge-thick sorry excuse for water—rather than the mere oozes of mud and filth we had been scuttling past. The walls and brick path before us now, as well as the high vaulted arches, were built of gleaming new brick.
“This must be part of Bazalgette’s new works,” said Dickens, his voice sounding awed for the first time, the weakening beam of his bullseye playing across the wide thoroughfare and ceilings. “Although perhaps not officially opened yet.”
I could only shake my head, as much in weariness as in astonishment. “Which way now, Dickens?”
“No way from here, I believe,” he said softly. “Unless we swim.”
I blinked and realised what he meant. This brick walkway was wide—five feet wide at least, as clean and spotless as a new city sidewalk above—but it only extended fifteen feet or so in each direction from our tunnel opening.
“Do we retrace our steps?” I asked. The idea of entering one of those tiny pipes again made my skin crawl.
Dickens turned his light on a post two yards or so to our left. It was made of wood and held a small ship’s bell on it. “I think not,” he said. Before I could protest, he had rung the bell four times. The brash sound echoed up and down the broad bricked thoroughfare above the quickly flowing waters.
Dickens found an abandoned pole at the end of this strange brick dock we were on and he thrust it down into the current. “Seven feet deep at least,” he said. “Perhaps deeper. Did you know, Wilkie, that the French are preparing boat tours of their sewers? They are to be spotlit—women in the boats, men walking alongside for parts of the tour. A sort of bicycle apparatus will propel the flat-bottomed vessels while searchlights within the boat and others carried by
égoutiers
alongside will illuminate features of interest along the way.”
“No,” I said dully. “I didn’t know that.”
“There is talk of high society in Paris arranging rat-hunting tours.”
I had had enough of this. I turned back towards the tunnel from which we had emerged. “Come along, Dickens. It’s almost dawn. If Detective Hatchery goes to Leman Street Station and announces that we are lost, half the constables in London will be down here searching for the most famous writer alive today. King Lazaree and his friends would not want that.”
Before Dickens could reply, there was a sudden flurry and several clusters of rags floating around white, rodent-like faces exploded from the tunnel.
I fumbled out the pistol. At the moment, I was convinced that we were being attacked by gigantic grub-faced rats.
Dickens stepped between me and the surging, feinting forms. “They’re boys, Wilkie,” he cried. “Boys!”
“Cannibal boys!” I cried back, raising the pistol.
As if to confirm my statement, one of the pale faces—all tiny eyes and long nose and sharp teeth in the bullseye light—lunged at Dickens and snapped, as if he were attempting to bite off the author’s nose.
Dickens swatted away the face with his stick and made to seize the child, but his hand came away with a wad of rags and the naked boy was gone along with his two or three cohorts, skittering down the low, dark passage from which they—and we before them—had emerged.
“Dear God,” I gasped, still holding the heavy pistol high. I heard a sound behind me, from the water, and turned slowly, the pistol still raised. “Dear God,” I whispered again.
A long, narrow boat of no design I had ever seen before had glided up to our brick esplanade. There was a tall figure holding a pole in the bow and another at a sweep in the stern, although except for the high stern and bow and oarsmen and lanterns hanging fore and aft, the craft bore only a vague resemblance to an Italian gondola.
The male figures were not quite men—the faces were absolutely pale and not yet shaped into manhood—but neither did they look still to be boys. They were very thin and dressed in tights and tunics that almost seemed to be uniforms. Their hands and glimpses of their chests and midriffs between the ill-fitting costumes showed flesh as ghastly pale as their faces. Most strangely in the dimness of the wide sewer, each boy-man was wearing a pair of square smoked glasses over domino masks, as if they had ventured out of a midnight masked ball into brilliant sunlight.
“I believe that our ride has arrived, Wilkie,” whispered Dickens.
Glancing apprehensively over my shoulder at the black opening from whence I expected the wild boys to emerge again at any second, I crowded close to Dickens as he prepared to board the little boat. He paid the silent form in the bow two sovereigns, then paid the man at the sweep in the stern the same amount.
The two shook their heads and each handed one of the sovereigns back. They pointed at Dickens and nodded. Then they pointed at me and shook their heads again.
Clearly I was not invited.
“My friend must accompany me,” said Dickens to the silent pair. “I will not leave him.” He fumbled out more coins. The shadowy shape at the sweep and the one in the bow shook their heads almost in unison.
“Are you from Mr Drood?” asked the author. He repeated the question in French. The silent pair did not respond to either language. Finally the one at the stern pointed to Dickens again and motioned for him to board. The one in the bow pointed to me and then to the brick walkway I was on, telling me to stay. I felt that they were commanding me as if I were a dog.
“The blazes with this,” I said loudly. “Come back with me, Dickens.
Now.
”
The author looked at me, looked at the tunnel behind me—from which there were renewed scuttling sounds—looked at the boat, and craned to see up and down the underground river. “Wilkie…” he said at last. “After coming so far… after learning so much… I can’t… just… turn back.”
I could only stare. “Come back another night,” I said. “For now we must be away.”
He shook his head and handed me the bullseye lantern. “You have the pistol and… how many shots did Hatchery say?”
“Nine,” I said. Disbelief rose in me rather as one’s gorge might in a rough trailing sea. He
was
going to leave me behind.
“Nine shots and the lantern and the way back is clearly marked with three stripes the whole distance,” said Dickens. I noticed the lisp in his voice that others often had commented upon. I thought that perhaps it became more noticeable when he was carrying out an act of treachery.
“And if there are more than nine wild cannibal boys?” I said softly. I was amazed to hear how reasonable my voice sounded, although the echo in the large bricked space distorted it some. “Or legions of rats that come to dine after you are gone?”
“That boy was no cannibal,” said Dickens. “Only a lost child in rags so loose that they wouldn’t stay on his back. But if it comes to that, Wilkie… shoot one of them. The others will scatter.”
I laughed then. I really had no choice.
Dickens stepped aboard the little boat, bade the oarsman to wait a second, and consulted his watch by the lamp at the stern. “In another ninety minutes it will be too late to get back to Hatchery before the sun rises,” he said. “Wait for me here on this clean dock, Wilkie. Light the candle to give more light alongside the bullseye and wait for me. I shall insist that my interview with Mr Drood not exceed an hour. We shall go back up into the light together.”
I started to speak or laugh again, but no sound emerged. I realised that I was still holding the huge, heavy, idiotic pistol… and that it was aimed in the general direction of Dickens and his two boatmen. I did not need the grapeshot-shotgun barrel to send all three of them falling lifeless into the surging current of London’s sewage. All I had to do was pull the trigger thrice. That would leave six cartridges and balls for the Wild Boys.
As if reading my thoughts, Dickens said, “I would take you along if I could, Wilkie. But obviously Mr Drood has a private interview in mind. If you are here when I return—in less than ninety minutes, I assure you—we will go up and out together.”
I lowered the pistol. “And if I leave before you return—if you return,” I said hoarsely, “you will have a hard time of it finding your way to the surface without the bullseye.”
Dickens said nothing.
I lit the candle and sat between it and the lantern, my face to the tunnel opening, my back to Charles Dickens. I set the cocked pistol on my lap. I did not turn as the flat-bottomed boat slipped away from my tiny dock. The sweep and bow pole made such little noise that the sound of them was lost under the echoing rush of the underground river. To this day, I do not know if Dickens was carried upstream or down.
T
he rest of that summer of 1865 remained hot. By early September the unusually warm and frequently stormy weather receded and London enjoyed clear skies, pleasant days, and cool nights.
I rarely saw Dickens during those intervening two months. His children, during the summer and school holidays, put out their own little paper—the
Gad’s Hill Gazette
—and my brother, Charles, dropped off a packet of these in August. There were articles about picnics, outings to Rochester, cricket matches, and note of the first correspondence from Alfred, Dickens’s son who had left for Australia in May to become a sheep farmer. Mentions of the Inimitable, other than the expected observations that he had presided over the picnics, Rochester outings, and cricket matches, merely confirmed that he was working hard on
Our Mutual Friend.
From our common friend Percy Fitzgerald I learned that Dickens had taken a relatively large party of friends and family up to Bulwer-Lytton’s estate, Knebworth, in order to celebrate the opening of the first homes for indigent artists and writers established by the Guild of Literature and Art. Dickens was in charge of the gathering and—according to Fitzgerald—“seemed to be his old, merry self.” The Inimitable had made an energetic and upbeat speech, at one point in conversation privately compared his too-pompous friend John Forster to Malvolio (in the company of several writers, knowing therefore that the comparison would get back to Forster), led a large group to drop in on a nearby tavern named Our Mutual Friend, and even took part in the open-air dancing before decamping back to London with his friends and family.
I was not invited.
It was also from my brother that I learned that Dickens was still suffering the after-effects of the Staplehurst disaster, including having to take the slow train whenever possible because rapid rail travel—and occasionally even travel by coach—would bring on the “shakes.” And Charles also informed me of the postscript that Dickens had added to
Our Mutual Friend
when he finished it in the first week of September—it was the first postscript that Dickens had ever added to one of his books—in which the author defended his rather unusual method of narration in the novel, then briefly described his experience at Staplehurst, expurgating the presence of the Ternans and Drood, of course, and ended with the mildly disturbing peroration—
“I remember with devout thankfulness that I can never be much nearer parting company with my readers for ever, than I was then, until there shall be written against my life, the two words with which I have this day closed this book—THE END.”
It is perhaps not telling you too much, Dear Reader, since you do reside in our future, that Charles Dickens would not live to ever again pen those two words—THE END—at the close of another novel.
I
T WAS ON A PLEASANT DAY
in early September that Caroline came up to my study where I was working and presented me with the card of a gentleman waiting on the landing. The card read in its entirety—
INSPECTOR CHARLES FREDERICK FIELD
Private Enquiry Bureau
Caroline must have seen my reaction in my expression, for she said, “Is there anything wrong? Shall I tell him to go away?”
“No, no… show him in. Be sure to close the door behind you after you do show him in, my dear.”
A minute later and Field was in the study, bowing slightly, pumping my hand, and chatting away before I could say a word. As he spoke, I remembered an early description in one of Dickens’s essays in
Household Words
about the inspector—
“. . . a middle-aged man of a portly presence, with a large, moist, knowing eye, a husky voice, and a habit of emphasising his conversation by the air of a corpulent fore-finger, which is constantly in juxta-position with his eyes or nose.”
Field was beyond middle age now—I realised he must be about sixty years old—and only a fringe of grey hair remained where I remembered a lion’s mane of darker curls over his ears, but the husky voice, knowing eye, and corpulent forefinger remained accurate and operative.
“Mr Collins, Mr Collins, it’s a pleasure to see you again, sir. And to see you prospering so obviously and delightfully, sir. What a lovely room this is, sir. So many books. And I believe that is a copy of your own
The Woman in White
there by the ivory tusk—yes, upon my soul, it is. A wonderful book, so I hear, although I’ve not yet found the time to read it, but my wife has. You may remember me, sir…”
“Yes, of course, you accompanied Charles Dickens and me…”
“On one of your expeditions into the darker parts of our fair city, indeed I did, Mr Collins. Indeed, I did. And perhaps you remember that I was present the first time you met Mr Dickens.”
