“It was during his first year in Cairo that Forsyte met the young Egyptian widow who would become Drood’s mother. She lived near the quarter where the English and French engineers and other contractors were essentially quarantined away from proper society—Forsyte’s lodgings were in a converted carpet warehouse—and the woman spoke English, came from a wealthy and ancient Alexandrian family (her late husband had been a merchant in Cairo), and attended various dinners and gatherings arranged by the English engineering company. Her name was Amisi, meaning ‘flower,’ and many Englishmen and Frenchmen and Egyptian men told Forsyte that her quiet beauty earned her the right to the name.
“Despite the Mohammadan prejudice against Franks and Christians, the courtship with the young widow was simple—several times Amisi had “accidentally” allowed Forsyte to see her face without a veil near the bathing place where the local women gathered, which was any Egyptian woman’s tacit acceptance of engagement—and they were married under Mohammadan law without elaborate ceremony. In truth, it took only a single sentence muttered by Drood’s future mother to seal the marriage.
“The boy whom we now call Drood was born ten months later. His father named the boy Jasper, which meant nothing to the mother, neighbours, or the poor lad’s future playmates, who tended to beat the halfbreed lad like a rented mule. For almost four years, Forsyte raised the boy as a future English gentleman, demanded that only English be spoken in the home, tutored his son in his spare time, and announced that the boy’s future education would be at fine schools in England. Amisi had no say in the matter. But—luckily for young Jasper John Forsyte-Drood’s future survival—his father was gone more often than he was home, working on engineering projects that took him great distances from Cairo and his wife and child. On the street, young Jasper John Forsyte travelled in rags by his mother’s side—it was important, Amisi knew, that the other adults and children not know how well-off young Jasper truly was. His playmates, or even Egyptian adults, might have murdered the light-skinned boy had they known the extent of his infidel father’s wealth.
“Then, as suddenly as whim had brought him to Egypt, John Frederick Forsyte’s Egyptian engineering work ended and he followed whim back to England and a new life. He left his Mohammadan wife and mixed-breed child behind without so much as a letter of regret. They never heard from him again.
“Drood’s mother was now twice disgraced—firstly for marrying a Christian and secondly for being abandoned by him. Her friends, neighbours, and relatives blamed her for both tragedies. One day while with the other women bathing, Amisi was dragged away by several men whose faces were hidden behind scarves, made to stand trial before a court of other faceless men, sentenced to be paraded through the streets on a high-saddled ass surrounded by the local police and by howling mobs of men, and then stoned to death by yet another crowd of men while ululating women in their black robes and veils looked on with satisfaction from rooftops and doorways.
“But when the police arrived to seize the dead woman’s child at Forsyte’s former home in the Old Quarter near the river warehouses, the boy was gone. Servants, neighbours, and relatives denied sheltering him. Homes were searched, but no trace of the child was found. Even his clothes and toys had been left behind, as if the boy had simply stepped out into the courtyard and been carried into the sky or dragged into the river by animals. It was assumed that upon hearing of Amisi’s execution for the crime of immorality, some well-meaning neighbour or servant had told four-year-old Jasper to run and he had simply found his way to the desert and perished.
“But this was obviously not the case.
“You see, Wilkie, a wealthy and important uncle of Amisi’s, a rug merchant named Amun who lived in Alexandria—a man who had always doted on his niece and had been sad when her first marriage had taken her away to Cairo and even sadder when he had heard she had married an infidel—also had heard of the Englishman’s abandoning her and had made the trip to Cairo to urge Amisi to bring her child and to return to Alexandria with him. Amun, whose name meant “the hidden one,” was almost an old man, but he had young wives. Besides being a rug merchant by day, Amun was by night a priest from one of the secret temples celebrating the old religion—the ancient, pagan, pharaonic, pre-Mohammadan religion of Egyptians before they had all been converted under the scimitar to Mohammadanism—and had been determined to convince Amisi to join him.
“He was only an hour late. Arriving in the neighbourhood just in time to see the execution of his niece but with no chance to stop it, he rushed to Amisi’s house—the servants were sleeping in the heat of the day; the neighbours were off enjoying the stoning—and he stole young Jasper John Forsyte out of his bed and left Cairo immediately with the tiny boy clinging frantically around his waist on horseback. Young Jasper would not have known that Amun was his great-uncle or that his mother was dead, imagining in his four-year-old child’s mind that he was being kidnapped by a desert bandit. Together, old man and young boy, they galloped Uncle Amun’s white stallion out through the gates of Cairo and down the desert road to Alexandria.
“There in his home city, within the walls of his fortress of a compound guarded by his clan’s well-armed circle of guards, fellow priests, and loyal Alexandrian assassins, Uncle Amun took Jasper in as one of his own without ever revealing the boy’s identity to anyone. The morning after young Jasper John Forsyte awoke in his strange new surroundings, Uncle Amun took him out to a pen and told him to choose a goat. Young Drood took his time the way only a four-year-old boy can, Wilkie, and finally chose the largest and silkiest white goat, one with the Devil’s own vertically slitted eyes. Uncle Amun nodded and smiled, told the boy to take the goat from the pen, and led the bleating animal and the boy to a private courtyard deep within the sprawling compound. There Uncle Amun, no longer smiling, pulled a long, curved dagger from his belt, handed it to the boy, and said, ‘This goat is all that there remains of the boy once known as Jasper John Forsyte, son of the English infidel John Forsyte and the shamed woman called Amisi. Jasper John Forsyte dies here, now, this morning, and none of these names shall ever be mentioned again—not by you, upon pain of your death, not by anyone else, upon pain of death.’
“And then Uncle Amun put his powerful hand over little Jasper John’s hand on the hilt of the dagger and quickly slashed the goat’s throat. The still-thrashing animal bled to death in seconds. Droplets of blood spattered the four-year-old’s white trousers and shirt.
“ ‘From this moment forward, your name is Drood,’ said Uncle Amun.
“Drood was not Amun’s family name, Wilkie. It was not even a common Egyptian name. Its meaning was, in fact, lost in the mists of time and secret religious rites.
“In the years that followed, Uncle Amun introduced the boy to the secret world Amun and some of his acolytes inhabited. Mohammadans by day—little Drood learned to recite the Koran and say his prayers five times a day as any worthy believer in Islam must do—Amun and the other Alexandrians in Amun’s secret circle followed the Old Ways, the ancient religious ways and rites, at night. Drood followed his uncle and these other priests into Pyramids by torchlight, and into hidden rooms deep beneath other such sacred sites as the Sphinx. Before he reached his adolescent years, young Drood had travelled with his uncle and other secret priests to Cairo, to the isle called Philae and to ancient ruins of necropoli far up the Nile, including a valley where the long-dead Egyptian kings—pharaohs, I am sure you remember they were called, Wilkie—lay buried in elaborate tombs carved into cliffsides and hidden beneath the stone of the valley floors.
“In these hidden places the ancient Egyptian religion and its thousands of years of arcane knowledge flourished. There the boy Drood was initiated into the mysteries of that religion and taught the same secret rituals that Moses had mastered.
“Uncle Amun’s speciality turned out to be in sacred healing sciences. He was—and Drood was trained to be—a high priest in the Temples of Sleep dedicated to Isis, Osiris, and Serapis. This so-called heali
ng sleep, my dear Wilkie, went back in Egyptian lore and practise for more than ten thousand years. The priests who had the power to induce such healing sleep also gained power and control over their patients. Today, of course, we call this practise by its scientific name of mesmerism and know its magical effects as the induction of magnetic sleep.
“You are aware that I have an ability of my own—some say a rare talent—in this art, Wilkie. I have told you of my training with Professor John Elliotson at the University College Hospital in London, of my own private investigations into the power, and of my own use of Magnetic power to help poor, phantom-afflicted Madame de la Rue—at her husband’s insistence—over a period of many months in Italy and Switzerland some years ago. I would have completely cured her, I am certain of this, if Catherine had not intervened because of her insane and baseless jealousy.
“Drood told me that he sensed my control of such Magnetic mesmeric power the moment he saw me on the hillside above the accident carnage at Staplehurst. Drood said that he recognised the gods-given ability in me instantly, the same way Uncle Amun had recognised the latent abilities in him when he was a boy of four so many decades earlier.
“But I digress.
“For the rest of his boyhood and young manhood in Egypt, Drood pursued mastery of his powers through the rituals and knowledge of the ancients. Did you know, for instance, my dear Wilkie, that no less an historian than Herodotus tells us that the great king Rameses, Pharaoh of all Egypt, once became so seriously ill that there was no hope for him and he, in Herodotus’ words but also the words of Drood’s uncle and teachers, ‘descended into the mansion of death’? But Rameses then returned to the light, cured. This pharaoh’s return has been celebrated for thousands of years, and continues to be celebrated in Islam-dominated Egypt today. And Wilkie, do you know the mechanism for Rameses’ miraculous return from the dark mansion of death?”
Here Dickens paused for dramatic effect until I was finally forced to ask, “What was it?”
“That magical power was mesmeric magnetism,” he said. “Rameses had been mesmerised, according to ritual and method, at the Temple of Seag, was allowed to die as a man, but was brought back—cured of his fatal disease—as something more than a man.
“Tacitus tells us of the celebrated Temple of Sleep in Alexandria. This is where young Drood did most of his midnight studies and where he emerged as a practitioner of this ancient art of Magnetic Influence.
“That night in his temple-library in Undertown, Drood explained to me—actually showed me the parchments and books—that Plutarch reported that both the prophetic and curative sleep induced in the temples of Isis and Osiris utilised a mesmeric incense called Kyphi, which is used even today—Drood let me smell it from a vial, Wilkie—as well as the music of the lyre to bring on such mesmeric sleep. The Pythagoreans also used this Kyphi incense and the lyre in their secret cave and temple ceremonies, since they believed as the ancient Egyptians did that such Magnetic Influence, properly directed, can free the soul from its body and create a full rapport with the spiritual world.
“Don’t look at me that way, my dear Wilkie. You know I am no believer in mere ghosts and spirit-rappings. How many have I exposed in my talks and essays? But I am an expert in Magnetic Influence, and I hope to become a greater expert in the science very soon.
“According to Herodotus and Clemens Alexandrinus, this prayer and mesmeric control of a dying man have been used for ten thousand years at all important Egyptian funerals—
“ ‘Deign, ye gods, who give life to men, to give a favourable judgement of the soul of the deceased, that it may pass to the eternal gods.’
“But you see that some souls they do not release, Wilkie. Some souls they hold under their Magnetic Influence and bring back. Such it was with the Pharaoh Rameses. Such it was with the man you and I know as Drood.”
DICKENS STOPPED WALKING and I stopped next to him. We were less than half a mile from Gad’s Hill now, although we had been walking at something less than Dickens’s usual frenzied pace. I confess that I had been half-mesmerised by the sound and tone and drone of Charles Dickens’s voice for the past twenty minutes or so and had noticed almost nothing of our surroundings.
“Have you found this boring, Wilkie?” he asked, his dark eyes sharp and challenging.
“Don’t be absurd,” I said. “It’s fascinating. And fantastic. It’s not everyone who is permitted to, or every day that one is allowed to, hear an Arabian Nights tale from Charles Dickens.”
“Fantastic,” repeated Dickens, smiling thinly. “Do you find it too fantastic to be true?”
“Charles, are you asking me whether I think Drood was telling you the truth with this story or whether you are telling me the truth?”
“Either,” said Dickens. “Both.” His intense gaze never left my face.
“I have no idea whether this Drood spoke a word of truth,” I said. “But I trust that you are telling me the truth in your narration of what he said.”
I was lying, Dear Reader. The story was too absurd either for me to accept it or to believe that Dickens had accepted it. I remembered that Dickens had once told me that 1001 Arabian Nights had been his favourite book when he was a child. I wondered now if the accident at Staplehurst had released some childhood strain in his character.
Dickens nodded as if I had answered the schoolmaster correctly. “I don’t need to remind you, my dear old friend, that all of this information is told in confidence.”
“Of course not.”
He smiled almost boyishly. “Even if our Inspector Field friend threatens to tell the world about the Landlady and the Butler?”
I waved that away. “You did not tell the heart of Drood’s story,” I said.
“I did not?”
“No,” I said flatly. “You did not. Why was he there at Staplehurst? Where had he come from? What was he doing with the injured and dying?… I believe that you once said it looked as if the Drood creature were stealing the souls of the dying there. And what on earth is he doing in a cave beneath the catacombs beyond a river in a tunnel?”
“Rather than continue the narration…” said Dickens even as he began walking again, “. . . since we are rather close to home, I shall just answer your questions, my dear Wilkie. But first of all, Hatchery was correct in his detective work and assumptions about Drood’s presence at Staplehurst. The man was in a coffin in the baggage car.”
“Good God!” I said. “Why?”
“For precisely the reasons we surmised, Wilkie. Drood has enemies in London and England who attempt to locate and harm him. Our Inspector Field is one of those enemies. Nor is Drood either a citizen of our nation or a welcome foreign visitor. In fact, in the eyes and files of all official sources, he has been dead for more than twenty years. So he was returning in a coffin from a trip to France… a trip in which he met others of his religion and expertise in the Magnetic Arts.”
“Extraordinary,” I said. “But what about his odd behaviour at the accident site, lurking and leaning over victims who were dead when you visited them next? ‘Stealing souls,’ you said.”
Dickens smiled and beheaded a weed, swinging his blackthorn stick like a broadsword. “It shows how mistaken even the trained and intelligent observer can be when deprived of all context, my dear Wilkie. Drood was not stealing the souls of those poor dying wretches. On the contrary, he was mesmerising them to ease the pain of their passage and saying the words of the ancient Egyptian funeral ceremony to help them on their journey, using some of the very words I quoted to you a few minutes ago. Rather as if he were a Catholic giving the Last Rites to the dying. Only with mesmeric Sleep Temple rites, he was certain he really was sending their souls on to their judgement by whatever gods they worshipped.”
“Extraordinary,” I said again.
“And as for his history here in England and the reasons for his presence in Undertown,” continued Dickens, “Drood’s arrival in England and his altercation with a sailor, knife and all, are alm
ost exactly as old Opium Sal related it. Except in reverse. Drood was sent to England more than twenty years ago to look up two cousins of his from Egypt—twins, a young man and young woman who had mastered another ancient Egyptian skill, the ability to read each other’s minds—and Drood arrived with thousands of pounds in English cash and more wealth in the form of gold in his luggage.
“He was robbed the second night he was here. Robbed on the docks by British sailors and slashed viciously with a blade—it is there that he lost his eyelids, ears, nose, and part of his tongue and fingers—and thrown into the Thames like the corpse he almost was. It was some of the residents of Undertown who found him floating in the river and brought him below to die. But Drood did not die, Wilkie. Or if he did, he resurrected himself. Even as he was being robbed and slashed and beaten and stabbed by the unnamed English thugs in the night, Drood had deeply mesmerised himself, balancing his soul—or at least his mental being—between life and death. The scavengers from Undertown did find a lifeless body, but his Magnetic-induced slumber was broken by the sound of concerned human voices, just as he had commanded himself under mesmeric self-control. Drood lived again. To repay those wretched souls who had saved him, Drood built his library–cum–Temple of Sleep in their underground warren. There, to this day, he heals those he can heal, helps those he can help through his ancient rites, and eases the pain and passing of those he cannot save.”
“You make him sound like a saint,” I said.
“In some ways, I believe he is.”
“Why did he not just go home to Egypt?” I asked.
“Oh, he does, Wilkie. He does. From time to time. To visit his students and colleagues there. To help with certain ancient ceremonies.”
“But he continues to return to England? After all these years?”
“He still has not found his cousins,” said Dickens. “And yes, he feels England is as much his home now as Egypt ever was. After all, he is half English.”