“Please read this,” I said, handing her a letter I had written the night before on my best stationery.
The heavy cream paper vibrated in her hands as she read—slowly, her lips moving as she silently sounded out the words. Finally she finished and tried to hand it back to me. “That is… very kind of you… sir. Very kind.”
At least the d—— ned stutter was gone.
“No, you keep it, my child. That is your letter of reference and an excellently worded one, if I do say so myself. I have chosen the family you will work for. They have an estate near Edinburgh. I have sent word to them that you are coming and that you will begin your duties there tomorrow.”
Her eyes widened and continued to widen. I thought she might faint.
“I don’t know nothing about governessin’, Mr Collins.”
Nothink.
I smiled paternally. I was tempted to lean forward and pat her shaking hands, but was afraid she might bolt if I did so. “That doesn’t matter at all, Agnes. Miss Carrie knew nothing about being a governess before she began her employment. And look how wonderfully that has worked out.”
Agnes’s eyes darted down to her folded hands. When I stood suddenly, she physically flinched. I began to understand at that moment why thuggish men beat their women; when someone acted as a puppy acted, the urge to beat them like a puppy was very strong. I was too aware of the heavy iron poker by the fireplace.
I parted the drapes. “Look out here, please,” I commanded.
Her head came up, but her eyes were wide and wild.
“Stand up, Agnes. That’s a good girl. Look out here. What do you see?”
“A closed carriage, sir.”
“That’s a cab, Agnes. It’s waiting for you. The driver shall take you to the railway station.”
“I ain’t ever ridden in a cab, sir.”
“I know,” I sighed, allowing the heavy drapes to swing closed. “There are all sorts of new experiences waiting for you, my dear child. This will be the first of many wonderful new things.”
I went to the nearby table and returned with a writing board, a page of stationery, and a pencil for her. In her current state, I did not trust her with pen and ink.
“Agnes, you are now going to write a short note to your parents, telling them that a wonderful employment opportunity has arisen and that you have left London to pursue it. You will give them no details… simply tell them that you will write them once you have begun employment there.”
“Sir… I… I cannot… I do not…”
“Just write what I dictate to you, Agnes. Now take up the pencil. That’s a good girl.”
I made the note short—four sentences as simple as this dull child would write—and I looked it over when she had finished. The clumsy letters were formed in a spidery, nervous hand, the capitalisation was random, and several simple words were misspelled, but that would have been true in any case.
“Very good, Agnes. Now sign it. Add your love and sign it.”
She did so.
I put the writing board and pencil back and folded the note, slipping it into my pocket.
I set the £300 on the ottoman between us.
“This is for you, my child. The family to whom I have recommended you will pay you, of course… pay you very well, in truth, even more than Miss Carrie is currently earning (old families in Scotland can be very generous)… but this amount, which you must admit is also very generous, will allow you to purchase new clothes, more fitting for your new employment and responsibilities, upon your arrival in Edinburgh. Even that shall leave adequate funds for your first year or two.”
I had never noticed the girl’s freckles. When she looked up at me now, her round face was so pale that those freckles stood out in bold relief. “Me mum…” she said. “Me dad… I can’t… they…”
“They will be delighted,” I said heartily. “I shall explain it all to them as soon as they return and they will almost certainly come to visit you as soon as they are able. Now go on upstairs and pack everything you want to bring to this new life. Do not forget your prettiest dresses. There will be parties and balls.”
She continued sitting.
“Go!” I commanded. “No! Come back! Take the money with you. Now go!”
Agnes scurried up the stairway to pack her clothing and few pitiful personal items.
I followed her upstairs to check that she was complying. Then I went down to the basement to the workbench and toolbox that George kept in order there. Selecting the large hammer with its pry jaws and a heavy pry bar, I went back upstairs.
DEAR READER from another time, if at this point you are tempted to judge me, I would ask you not to. If you knew me in real life as opposed to through these mere words, you would know that I am a gentle man.
I have always been gentle in demeanour and actions. My fiction is—was—sensationalist, but my life is—was—a testimonial to quiet gentleness. Women always sensed this about me, which is why a short, bespectacled, slightly rotund gentleman such as myself was so popular with the ladies. Even our friend Charles Dickens used to joke about my gentleness, as if a lack of aggression were a reason to be made fun of.
During my ride home from Martha’s, I’d realised again that I was incapable of harming a hair on young Agnes’s head, no matter how devastating her inevitable indiscretion would be to my life and career. I had never raised my hand against anyone in anger.
But ah!, you say, Dear Reader, what of your plans to shoot Drood and Dickens?
May I remind you that Drood is not a human being as we estimate people as being human. He has murdered scores, if not hundreds, of innocents. He is a creature of and from the Black Lands I dream about every time Frank Beard injects me with morphia.
And Dickens… I have shown you what Dickens has done to me. You may be the jury there, Dear Reader. How many years of arrogance and condescension would you have tolerated from this man… this self-named Inimitable… before you finally raised a hand (or weapon) in righteous anger?
But you must understand that I would never raise a hand to a poor dull child like Agnes.
SHE CAME DOWNSTAIRS dressed in her best cheap outfit and wearing an overcoat that would not keep her warm for ten minutes out of doors in England, less than two minutes in Scotland. She was carrying two cheap valises. And she was weeping.
“Now, now, my dear young friend, none of that,” I said and patted her back. Again she flinched from me. I said, “Would you check to see that the cab is still waiting?”
She looked out through the blinds that covered the lights on either side of the front door. “It is, sir.” She began weeping again. “I don’t know how t-t-to pay the man who d-d-drives the cab. I d-d-don’t know how to find my carriage at the st-station. I don’t know how to d-do anything.” The miserable child was working herself towards hysterics.
“There, there, Agnes. The driver has already been paid. And I have paid him extra to help you find your carriage and your seat. He will make sure you are on the right train, in the correct carriage, and comfortable in your seat before he leaves you. I asked him to watch and make sure you are safe until the coach actually departs. And I have telegraphed members of the fine family you will be serving.… They will meet you at the Edinburgh station.”
“My mum ’n’ dad…” she began again through her tears.
“Will be delighted that you were brave enough to rise to this singular and wonderful opportunity.” I started to open the door and then stopped. “I had forgotten. There is one thing I would like you to help me with before you leave.”
She stared at me with red, wide eyes, but I saw the sense of hope stirring there as well. Perhaps, she was thinking, this was a reprieve.
“This way,” I said and led her back to the kitchen.
At first she did not notice that the boards and nails had been removed from the door to the servants’ stairs, but when she did, she stopped in her tracks.
“I have decided to use this back staircase again, Agnes, a
nd need the candles lit on all the landings going up. But my tired old eyes have trouble seeing in the dim light within.…” I was smiling at her.
She shook her head. Her cheap valises dropped to the floor. Her mouth was open and her expression was—to speak frankly—very close to that of the kind of female idiot they lock away in asylums.
“No… sir,” she said at last. “Dad said that I mustn’t…”
“Oh, there are no rats or mice in there now!” I interrupted with a laugh. “Long gone! Your father knows that I am opening up the stairway. It shan’t take more than a minute to light the candles in their sconces on each landing and then you’re off on your adventure.”
She only shook her head.
I had already lit a candle. Now I put it in her hand and stepped behind her. “Don’t be stubborn, Agnes,” I whispered in her ear. I wondered even at the time if my voice sounded a bit like Drood’s hiss and lisp. “Be a good girl.”
I moved forward and she had to move ahead of me to avoid my touch. She did not try to resist until the door was open and I had herded her into the black rectangle.
She balked then, and turned, her eyes as certain and sad and unbelieving as Dickens’s Irish bloodhound Sultan’s on that last walk he’d taken with us.
“I won’t…” she began.
“Light every candle, Agnes dear, and knock when you want out,” I said and pushed her in and locked the door.
Then I fetched the hammer and lumber and nails from where I had stored them on the counter and began pounding everything back the way it had been, making sure that the nails were driven into the same holes in the door frame so that everything would look undisturbed when George and Besse got home.
She screamed, of course. Very loudly, although the walls at Number 90 Gloucester Place were very thick and so were the doors. Her screams were just barely audible in the kitchen a few feet away and certainly could not be heard, I trusted, from the sidewalk or street outside.
She banged at the other side of the thick oak door, then clawed (from the sounds of it), then stopped about the time I had got the last board nailed into place at the bottom. This would have cut off any tiny bit of light that came from the kitchen under the door and into that dark stairwell.
I set my ear to the wood of the boards and thought I could hear ascending footsteps—slow and hesitant—as she started up the stairs. Part of her must have been certain even then that this was a cruel game on my part and that when she had lit the candles on each landing, I would let her out.
The final screams, when they came, were very loud. But they did not go on for long. They ceased—as I had known they would—suddenly and terribly and in mid-cry.
I went upstairs then and looked in her room. I looked carefully, not worrying about how late it was getting or about the coach driver I was paying to wait outside. When I was certain that the girl had not left a note in either her room or her parents’ room or anyplace else in the house, I made sure that all of her important clothes and belongings had been packed in her two cheap valises.
On her carefully made bed, under the coverlet, there was a shapeless and now eyeless little rag doll. Would she have taken that to her new life in Edinburgh? I decided that she might have and brought it downstairs and crammed it into the larger of her two bags.
There was no sound whatsoever from the sealed-up servants’ staircase.
Taking the hammer and pry bar, I went back down to the cellar. Once there, I put on the long rubber apron that George used when he did messy tasks down there. I also borrowed his heavy work gloves.
It took me only a few minutes to shovel coal clear of the back wall of the half-filled coal cellar. The blocked-up crack in that wall was still visible, but the mortar was loose between the bricks and stone blocks. Using the pry bar, I began to work the bricks loose.
It took longer than I had expected, but again, I did not rush. Eventually the gap that I had always known Drood had come through that ninth of June two years earlier was revealed. I extended a candle through the hole.
The flame flickered to distant and damp currents but did not quite go out. Everything beyond the circle of light was blackness and a long drop into more blackness.
I shoved both of Agnes’s overpacked valises through and listened for the splash or crash of impact, but none came. It was as if there were no bottom to the pit beneath my house.
It took me even longer to wrestle the stones and bricks back into place and to trowel new mortar between them. The simple masonry was a skill my uncle had shown me and I had been proud of it when I was a boy. It certainly came in handy now.
Then I shovelled the coal back into place, stowed all tools and the apron and gloves, went upstairs, washed up carefully, packed a week or two worth of clothes—including two of my freshly ironed evening dress shirts—into a steamer trunk, went into my study and packed all of the writing materials and resources I would need (including the manuscript holding the beginnings of Black and White), went up to Agnes’s tiny room and left her note where it would easily be found by her parents, made a final check of the house to be sure it was locked up with everything in its proper place—there still was no sound from the back stairway, of course, and, I trusted, never would be—and then I went outside with my large trunk and leather portfolio and locked the front door behind me.
The driver hurried off the cab to wrestle the trunk down the steps, over the kerb, and into place in the boot of the carriage.
“Thank you so much for waiting,” I said, out of breath myself but in a good mood. “I had no idea packing would take me so long. I hope the cold and inconvenience haven’t bothered you.”
“Not a bit, sir,” the driver said cheerily. “I had myself a bit o’ a nap up on the box, sir.” From the looks of his red cheeks and red nose, he’d availed himself of something more than a nap.
He held the door while I stepped up and into the carriage. Once in place above, he opened the trapdoor and called down, “And where to this afternoon, sir?”
“The Saint James Hotel,” I said.
It was a bit of a luxury—Charles Dickens put up guests such as Longfellow and the Fieldses there when they visited London, and he sometimes stayed there himself, but it was more than I usually wished to pay for mere rooms. But this was a special occasion.
The little trapdoor closed with a thud. I raised my gold-headed stick, rapped sharply on the ceiling of the cab, and we rolled away.
It later dampened my spirits only a little when I remembered that I had forgotten to take back the £300 before closing the servants’ staircase door forever.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
On Tuesday evening, 5 January, Dickens murdered Nancy in St James’s Hall for the first time in front of the paying public. Dozens of women screamed. At least four fainted. One older man was seen staggering out of the hall, gasping for air, helped out by two pale friends. I left before the riotous applause began, but it still chased me down the snow-covered street filled with carriages and cabs waiting for the audience to emerge. The breath of the muffled drivers huddled on their high boxes mixed with the larger clouds of exhalations from the horses to rise like steam into the cold glow of gas lamps.
THAT SAME AFTERNOON of 5 January, I had returned home from the hotel for the first time since my departure. No terrible stench from the servants’ stairway greeted me in the foyer. I had not expected there to be and not merely because I had been away for only three days.
There would be no bad smell from the stairway. I was sure of that. I had fired five bullets in that stairway, but it had been a useless, hopeless thing to do so. The target of those bullets cared nothing for bullets; it had already devoured the woman with green skin and tusks for teeth without leaving so much as a swatch of her dress material or a chip of ivory. There would be nothing of Agnes in there.
I was in my bedroom, packing some fresh shirts into my valise (I was returning to the hotel, where Fechter had joined me for the past few days), when I heard footsteps in the hall an
d the soft clearing of a throat.
“George? You’re back so soon? I’d forgotten when you were returning,” I said happily, looking at the man. His face was clouded with some emotion to the point of being grey.
“Yes, sir. The missus is staying on two more days. Her mother passed first—we was expecting her father to, but it was her mother. He was goin’ when I left, but we couldn’t just leave you here without your loyal domestics, sir, so I come home.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that, George, and…” I looked at the note he had in his hand. He was pointing it at me as if it were a pistol. “Why, what is that, George?”
“A note from our little Agnes, sir. You ’aven’t seen it?”
“Why, no. I thought Agnes was in Wales with you.”
“Aye, sir. I figured you ’adn’t seen our note to you on the mantel in the parlour, since it was still where we’d left it. You probably never knew Agnes was in the house with you that night, sir. That is, if she was in the house that night… if she left that morning, before you woke and left, and not during the night.”
“Left? Whatever on earth are you going on about, George?”
“’Ere, sir,” he said, thrusting the note at me.
I read it and feigned surprise, all the while thinking, Is this a trap? Has the stupid little girl managed to change her handwriting or do something in this note to alert her parents? But the words were just as I had dictated to her. The misspellings seemed sincere.
“Another opportunity?” I said, lowering the note. “Whatever does she mean, George? She’s gone and taken employment elsewhere without talking to me? Or to you and Besse?”
“No, sir,” George said solemnly. His dark-eyed stare seemed to bore into me. He did not blink. “That note isn’t what it seems, sir.”
“It’s not?” I put the last of my clean linen in the valise and snapped it shut.
“No, sir. They ain’t no t’other opportunity, Mr Collins. Who’d hire a lazy, clumsy child like our Agnes? That’s not right, sir. Not right at all.”
“Then what does this mean?” I asked, giving him back the note.