Drood (23 page)
“But your gout is not in your legs, is this not true, my dear Wilkie?”
“That is largely true,” I said, unwilling to tell him that this gout hurt every part of my person when it spread as it had threatened to that morning. Without the early double doses of laudanum, I would have been in bed. “It tends to afflict my eyes and head the most.”
“Very well,” sighed Dickens. “I had hoped for a walking partner today—the Forsters are my guests this weekend and John has given up all exertion since coming into his wife’s fortune, as I am sure you know—but we shall make a short outing of it, you and I, just over to Chatham and Fort Pitt, through Cooling Marsh and home. I shall make up the difference this evening, alone.”
I nodded, although still without enthusiasm. That would be six miles and more with Dickens’s unrelenting pace of four miles per hour exactly. My head and joints throbbed in anticipation.
I
T WAS NOT
as bad as I had feared. The afternoon was so pleasant, the air so cool, the scents so invigorating, that I kept up with Dickens as he led the way down the road to a lane, from lane to path, from path to grassy ruts along a canal, from the canal tow path through autumn fields of grain—taking care never to tread on a farmer’s crop—and from the field to shady forest trail, then back to the roadside again and onward.
During the first half hour of silent walking—or rather,
my
silent walking, since Dickens chatted amiably the whole way, discussing Forster’s increased Podsnapperies, the problems within the Guild, details of his son Alfred’s business ineptitude and his daughter Mary’s diminishing prospects for marriage, grousings about the Negro uprising in Jamaica that still rankled him, observations on his youngest son Plorn’s apparent laziness and lack of intellectual depth—I spent my time nodding and thinking of how to trick the information desired by Inspector Field out of Charles Dickens.
Finally I surrendered that approach and said, “Inspector Field came to visit me yesterday.”
“Oh, yes,” Dickens said casually, his blackthorn rising and falling with his stride. “I assumed that to be the case.”
“You’re not surprised?”
“Hardly, my dear Wilkie. The wretched man was here at Gad’s Hill on Thursday. I assumed that you would be his next victim. Did he threaten you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“With what, may I ask? He was quite clumsy and heavy-handed with his minor attempts to blackmail me.”
“He threatened me with public exposure of… my domestic situation.” The only thing I was secure about at the moment was that Dickens did not know—could not have known—about the existence of Miss Martha R——. Inspector Field obviously knew, but it would not have been in his interest to tell the Inimitable.
Dickens laughed easily. “Threatened to tell the world about your Landlord and Butler, eh? Much as I had guessed, Wilkie. Much as I had guessed. Mr Field is a bully but—as is true of so many bully boys—not the ripest grape on the vine. How little he knows of your free spirit and disregard for society’s opinions if he thinks that such a revelation would cause you to turn traitor. All of your friends know that you have skeletons in your closet—two delightful and witty female skeletons, to be precise—and none of your friends gives a fig for the fact.”
“Yes,” I said. “But why is he so eager to have this information on Drood? He acts as if his life depends upon it.”
We passed from the road to a path that wound its way through and around Cooling Marsh.
“In a very real sense, our Mr Field’s life
does
depend on discovering whether Mr Drood is real and where to find him if he is,” said Dickens. “And you notice that I refer to our blackmailing friend as
Mr
Field, not
Inspector
Field.”
“Yes,” I said as we stepped gingerly from stone to stone in an especially swampy part of the path. “Field mentioned to me that his title was honourary now that he does his detective work in private life.”
“A self-appointed honour that the Detective Bureau of Scotland Yard and of the Metropolitan Police do not appreciate, my dear Wilkie. I’ve kept some tabs on our
Mr
Field since I—if you forgive the immodesty—immortalised him as Inspector Bucket in
Bleak House
or even earlier, in my admiring little essay about him, “On Duty With Inspector Field,” in our
Household Words
in 1851. He left his official capacity shortly after that, you know… 1853, I do believe.”
“But you admired him then,” I said. “At least enough to create a fascinating character out of him.”
Dickens laughed again as we turned back around the marsh towards distant Gad’s Hill. “Oh, I admire
many
people for their potential as characters, my dear Wilkie, yourself not excluded. How else could I have suffered the Podsnapperies of Forster all these years? But there has always been the pungent scent of the schoolhouse bully hovering about our dear Mr Field, and bullies always tend to overreach and be called to task.”
“You’re saying that he is out of favour with Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police,” I said.
“Quite so, Wilkie. Did you happen to follow the notorious Palmer poisoning case some time ago… my, a decade ago now. How time, to coin a phrase, does fly. At any rate, did you follow that in the papers or at the Club?”
“No. I can’t say that I did.”
“No matter,” said Dickens. “Let us just say that our retired Inspector Field was involved with the sensational murder case, was quite popular with the press, and insisted on using the title
Inspector
Field. In truth, Wilkie, I believe our corpulently digited friend actively encouraged the press and populace to believe that he was still affiliated with the Metropolitan Police. And his successors there, the real police detectives and inspectors, did not appreciate it, Wilkie. Not one small smattering did they appreciate it. So they stopped his pension.”
I stopped in my tracks. “His
pension?
” I cried. “His bloody
pension?
The man interrogates you and tries to blackmail me, all for a… bloody…
pension?
”
Dickens obviously was irked to be thrown off his walking rhythm, but he stopped, hacked at some weeds with his blackthorn, and actually smiled. “Yes, for his pension. Our
faux
inspector acquaintance has his Private Enquiry Bureau and makes some money through it—indeed, I paid a pretty penny for our hulking friend Hatchery’s one night of effort on our behalf—but you may remember me once telling you, Wilkie, how… avaricious is not too strong a word, I think… avaricious this former policeman named Field was, is, and ever shall be. He cannot abide not receiving his pension. I do believe he would murder to get it back.”
I blinked at that. “But why Drood?” I asked at last. “What will it gain him if he finds this phantom Drood?”
“It may gain him his pension,” said Dickens as we resumed our walk. “Or so he thinks. At this very moment, Home Secretary Sir George Grey is reviewing Field’s suspension of payments, after the long growling from Field’s solicitor—not a cheap undertaking that, I can assure you!—and I am quite sure that Mr Field, in his aged delusions…”
I did not interrupt here to remind him that Charles Frederick Field was only some seven years older than Dickens himself.
“. . . has concocted a
deus ex machina
plot in his own mind in which, when he tracks down and captures this criminal mastermind Drood… a spectral figure who evaded
Chief
Inspector Field some twenty years ago… the Home Secretary and Scotland Yard Detective Bureau and all of his former friends and indifferent successors at the Metropolitan Police shall not only forgive him, and reinstate his pension, but be forced to crown him with laurel leaves and carry him to Waterloo Station on their burly shoulders.”
“And is he a criminal mastermind?” I asked softly. “This Drood? Field told me last night that Drood murdered some three hundred persons over the years…”
Dickens glanced at me again. I noticed that the wrinkles and furrows in his face had grown deeper over the summer. “Do you believe that figure to be reliable, my dear Wilkie?”
“I… have no idea,” I said. “It does sound preposterous, I admit. I do not remember hearing of any three hundred unsolved murders, in Whitechapel or anywhere else. But that was an uncanny place we went to, Dickens. Uncanny. And you never told me what occurred after you left me in that absurd boat.”
“No, I have not,” said Dickens. “And I promised you that night that I would tell you someday soon, my friend. And two months have passed. I am sorry for that delay.”
“The delay is no matter,” I said. The headache was returning even as the laudanum glow around everything faded. “But I would like to know what occurred that night. I would like to know what you have learned about this Drood we spent the night chasing.”
Dickens glanced at me again. “And I would have no concern about our mutual friend Field blackmailing this information out of you?”
I stopped. “Dickens!”
He did not stop with me, but he walked backwards, twirling his blackthorn and smiling. “I am joking, my dear Wilkie. Joking. Come… catch up to me; don’t falter our pace at this advanced point. Catch up to me and walk alongside and pray quiet your wheezing to a mere bellows roar and I shall tell you all about that night after I left you on the brick quay in the sewers beneath the catacombs in Undertown.”
A
fter I left you sitting there on the quay,” said Dickens, “I attempted to pay some attention to that rather absurd little boat I was in.
“The craft rather reminded me of my character Hexam Gaffer’s miserable little boat from which he tows corpses and other found things from the Thames, but in this case as if some demented carpenter had decided to turn it into a parody of a Venetian gondola. As I studied the two tall, silent figures, one at the tiller or sweep in the stern, the other poling from the raised bow, they became less and less attractive to me, Wilkie. Their gold-dust-bedangled domino masks and smoked glasses disguised little more than their eyes, so I could tell they were male, but only nominally so. You know how angels portrayed in frescoes in the great Papist cathedrals on the Continent are disturbingly androgynous, my dear Wilkie? Well, my companions in this tiny boat were decidedly more so, and that androgyny was emphasised rather than diminished by the absurd medieval tights and tunics they were wearing. I decided to think of the
castrato
in the bow as Venus and the eunuch at the stern as Mercury.
“We poled down the broad stream of sewage for some hundred yards or more. I glanced back, but I do not believe you ever looked my way before our gondola-scull went around a bend and we were lost to each other’s view, you and I. The small lanterns dangling from iron rods near the bow and stern did little to illuminate the rushing waterway. My primary impression was of lantern light reflected from the moist and dripping arch of bricks above us.
“I dare say I do not have to remind you, Wilkie, of the terrible stench of that first tributary. I was not sure that I could tolerate it for long without becoming physically sick. But luckily, after a few hundred yards of that reeking Styx, the masked form at our tiller turned us into a side tunnel so narrow that I was sure it was nothing more than a sewer pipe. Both Mercury and Venus had to bow low—I did as well—as they moved us along by pressing their gloved palms to the bricks of the low ceiling and encroaching sides. Then the way opened into a wider stream—and I say ‘stream’ advisedly, Wilkie, since this was less a sewer than a bricked and contained underground river, as wide as any aboveground tributary to the Thames. Did you know that some rivers have been partially or completely covered over in London… the Fleet, for instance? Of course you did. But one never thinks of their subterranean sections.
“My androgynous escorts piloted our little craft downstream for a long while and here—I must warn you, my dear Wilkie—the narrative becomes fantastical.
“Our first escort that night, Detective Hatchery, had called this subterranean world ‘Undertown,’ as had the Chinese opium apparition King Lazaree, but now I saw that this connected labyrinth of cellars, sub-cellars, sewers, caverns, side caverns, buried ditches, abandoned mines from some age before our city existed, forgotten catacombs, and partially constructed tunnels
was
quite literally a city beneath the city, a sort of terrible London beneath London. A true Undertown.
“We rode the slow current for some time, and as my eyes adapted to the darkness along the sides of this wider stream, I realised that I was seeing people.
People,
my dear Wilkie. Not merely more of the Wild Boys, who were like the feral dogs or real wolves that once circled the outskirts of some medieval village, but actual people. Families. Children. Cooking fires. Crude hovels and stretched canvases and mattresses and even some stoves and discarded, sagging furniture set in amongst the niches in the brick walls and in the side caverns and on wide, muddy banks along this part of the tunnel.
“Here and there blue flames rose from the mud and ooze itself, rather like the flames which flicker on a Christmas pudding, Wilkie, and some of these wretched human forms huddled near these gaseous eruptions for light and warmth.
“And then, just as I thought Venus and Mercury were going to keep poling us down these dark, watery avenues forever, the way widened, and we came to an actual landing… broad stone steps carved into the rock wall of the tunnel with bright torches blazing on either side. Mercury tied us up. Venus helped me step out of the bobbing boat. Both of them stayed aboard the boat, motionless and silent, as I climbed those steps towards a brass door.
“There were large Egyptian statues carved from the stone on both sides of this staircase, Wilkie, and more carvings above the door, the kinds of ancient forms one sees in the British Museum and perhaps feels uncomfortable about being amongst on a winter’s evening shortly before closing time. There were black bronze bodies of men with jackal heads or the heads of birds. There were forms holding staffs, sceptres, and curved crooks. The stone lintel above the broad doorway was carved with the sorts of picture-writing—hieroglyphics, they are called—one sees in illustrations of obelisks in books about Napoleon’s adventures along the Nile. It was like a child’s version of writing featuring carved wavy lines and birds and eyeballs… many bird-shapes.
