The lightning flashed and there was no lag between the flash and thunder now. The storm was upon us. “And does a stroke of the brain leave a silken rope knotted twice, Mr Collins?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I am talking about the calling card of the Hindoo Thuggee who smothered poor Charles Frederick Field in his sleep, sir. Or in this case, three or four Thuggees. One to hold the pillow over my employer and friend’s straining face and at least two—I would guess three, since Field was a powerful man despite his age—to hold him down as the noose was tightened. He died hard, Mr Collins. Very hard.”
I could think of nothing to say.
“And the inspector had seven full-time operatives, including me, working for his agency,” continued Barris. “These men—myself included—were some of the finest and most professional ex-policemen in all of England. Five have died under mysterious circumstances since January. The other has left his family and fled to Australia, the little good that will do him. Drood has agents in every port on Earth. I have survived only by going to ground here in Drood’s own foul turf—and I have still had to kill three of his assassins who’ve come at me in the past six months. When I sleep at all, I sleep with one eye open, I assure you, sir.”
As if remembering something, Barris reached into his pocket and handed Hatchery’s pistol back to me.
Scarab-pain flared behind my throbbing right eye and the thought occurred to me that I could shoot Barris this moment and his corpse would lie here undiscovered for weeks or months until Drood’s followers returned to this place. Would that earn me some sympathy with them?
Blinking with pain to the point of vertigo, I put the idiot weapon away in my cape-coat pocket.
“Why did you bring me here?” I rasped.
“To see, first of all, whether you had become… one of them,” said Barris. “My estimate is that you have not.”
“You did not have to drag me up to these filthy heathen attics to discover that,” I shouted over the thunder.
“Actually, I did,” said Reginald Barris. “But more importantly, I wanted to give you a warning.”
“I need no more warnings,” I said dismissively.
“This one is not for you, sir,” said Barris. For half a moment there was silence—the first long lack of thunder since we had left Opium Sal’s tenement—and the silence was somehow more terrifying than the preceding storm noises.
“It is for Charles Dickens,” continued Barris.
I had to laugh. “You said that Dickens met with Drood this morning before dawn. If he’s one of Drood’s… what did you call them?… beetle-slaves already, what could he have to fear?”
“I believe he is not a slave, Mr Collins. I believe that your friend has made some sort of Faustian deal with Drood—of what particular nature, I cannot guess.”
I remembered Dickens once telling me that he had promised to write Drood’s biography, but this was too silly even to consider, much less mention.
“At any rate,” continued Barris, who suddenly looked exhausted under his scrim of dirt, “I learned from one of the assassins that Drood sent after me that Dickens will die in eighteen seventy.”
“I thought you killed all the assassins Drood sent after you,” I said.
“I did, Mr Collins. Indeed I did. But I urged two of them to talk to me before they shuffled off their mortal coils.”
The thought of this made my skin grow clammy. I said, “Eighteen seventy is a year away.”
“Actually just a little over six months away, sir. The assassin did not tell me when in the year they would move against Mr Dickens.”
At that instant and as if on theatrical cue, the storm struck with full ferocity. We both flinched as rain suddenly pounded the old shingles just above us with incredible force. Barris’s relit lantern beam danced wildly over the walls as he leaped back and then caught his balance. I saw a blur of the carved hieroglyphics and somehow my scarab or mind translated—“. . . give soundness to our limbs, O Isis, and be the charm which shall ensure our justification in the Judgement soon to come.”
I WAS DRENCHED by the time I got home. Carrie met me in the foyer, and I noticed that she was still fully dressed, not in her robe, at such a late hour and that she looked concerned.
“What is it, my dear girl?”
“There is a man here to see you. He arrived before nine PM and has insisted on waiting all this time. If George and Besse had not been home, I never would have let him in—his countenance is fearful—and he did not have a card. But he said it was urgent.…”
Drood, I thought. I was too tired even to feel fear. “There is nothing to be alarmed about, Carrie,” I said softly. “Probably some tradesman after a bill we forgot to pay. Where did you put him?”
“He asked if he could wait in your study. I said yes.”
D—— n, I thought. The last place I wanted Drood was in my study. But I patted her cheek and said, “You go on up to bed now, that’s a good girl.”
“May I hang up your coat for you?”
“No, I want to leave it on for a while,” I said, not explaining to Carrie why I would want to keep on the thoroughly soaked-through cheap cape-coat.
“Won’t you be wanting any dinner? I had cook make your favourite French beef before she went home.…”
“I’ll find it and warm it myself, Carrie. Now you go on up for the night. I’ll call George if I need anything.”
I waited until her footsteps had faded up the main stairway and then went down the hall and through the parlour and opened the doors to my study.
Mr Edmond Dickenson, Esquire, was sitting not in the leather guest’s chair but behind my desk. He was insolently smoking one of my cigars and his feet were up on an opened lower drawer.
I went in and closed the doors tightly behind me.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
In early October, Dickens invited me to spend a few days at Gad’s Hill during the Fieldses’ last visit there before they returned to Boston. It had been some time since I had been invited to spend the night at Dickens’s home. In truth, after Dickens’s show of support at my March premiere of Black and White, intercourse between us had been somewhat rare and decidedly formal (especially in comparison to our intimacy of earlier years). While we continued to sign our letters “affectionately yours,” there seemed to be little affection left on either side.
As I travelled to Gad’s Hill, I stared out the railway carriage window and wondered both about the real reasons for the Inimitable’s invitation and also what I might tell him that would surprise him. I rather enjoyed surprising Dickens.
I could have described my Overtown excursion four months earlier on 9 June while he and Fields and Dolby and Eytinge went slum-hopping under the protection of their policeman, but that would have been too much of a revelation. (And I had no excuse for following them through the first part of that night.)
I could certainly surprise Dickens and the Fieldses and whoever the Inimitable’s other guests were this weekend by describing my new baby daughter Marian’s presumably cute facial antics and burbles and other such ten-for-a-’apenny common baby anecdotes, but that would most definitely be too much of a revelation. (The less Charles Dickens and his entourage and sycophants knew of my private life, the better.)
What to amuse him with, then?
I would almost certainly inform everyone of how well my book Man and Wife was coming along. If Dickens was my only interlocutor, I might tell him about the letters that Mrs Harriette (Caroline) Clow was now sending me almost monthly—details of emotional estrangement and physical punishment from her plumber-lout of a husband. It made for wonderful research. All I had to do was substitute the Oxford-athlete lout for the almost illiterate plumber-lout—there was really very little difference in the two classes of men when one thought about it—and the beatings and occasions of being locked in the cellar that Caroline was suffering instantly became the plight of my highbred but poorly wed heroine.
What
else?
I could, if we had an extended period alone and any renewal of our old sense of intimacy, tell Charles Dickens about my late-night visit on 9 June from the young man he had pulled from the wreckage at Staplehurst four years earlier to the day—our Mr Edmond Dickenson.
DICKENSON HAD NOT ONLY taken possession of my writing chair behind my desk and set his unclean boots on my extruded lower drawer, but the impertinent whelp had somehow got upstairs to my bedroom, unlocked the closet, and brought down the eight hundred pages of my dreams of the Gods of the Black Lands scrawled in the Other Wilkie’s tight, slanting script.
“What is the meaning of this intrusion?” I snapped. My attempt at masterly command may have been weakened somewhat by the fact that even with the cape-coat on I was as soaked through as a wet-slick alley cat and now dripping puddles onto my own study floor and Persian carpet.
Dickenson laughed and relinquished my chair (although not the manuscript). The two of us circled the desk as cautiously as knife-fighting adversaries in a New Court tavern.
I sat in my writing chair and slid the lower drawer shut, and Dickenson dropped into the guest’s chair without asking permission. My coat made wet, squishy sounds beneath me.
“You look thoroughly miserable, if you don’t mind my saying so,” said Dickenson.
“Never mind that. Give me back my property.”
Dickenson looked at the stack of papers in his hands and showed a caricature of surprise. “Your property, Mr Collins? You know that neither your dreams of the Black Land nor these notes are your property.”
“They are. And I want them back.” I brought Hatchery’s pistol out of my coat pocket, set the base of the heavy stock or grip or handle or whatever it is called against the surface of my desk, and used both hands to pull back the resisting hammer until it clicked and cocked. The muzzle was aimed directly at Edmond Dickenson’s chest.
The insufferable youth laughed. Once again I could see the strangeness of his teeth: they had been white and healthy when I had seen him during Christmas of 1865. Had they decayed or been filed down to these stumps and points since then?
“Is this your writing, Mr Collins?”
I hesitated. Drood had met with the Other Wilkie two years ago this very night. Drood’s emissary here would certainly know about that.
“I want the pages back,” I said. My finger was now on the trigger.
“And you intend to shoot me if I do not give them to you?”
“Yes.”
“And why would you do that, Mr Collins?”
“Perhaps to ascertain that you are not the spectre you pretend to be,” I said softly. I was very tired. It seemed like weeks, rather than a mere dozen hours or so, since I had watched Dickens take his guests out to luncheon at Cooling Cemetery.
“Oh, I will bleed if you shoot me,” said Dickenson in that same maddeningly happy tone with which he’d infuriated me at Gad’s Hill so long ago. “And die, if your aim is good enough.”
“It will be,” I said.
“But to what purpose, sir? You know that these documents are the property of the Master.”
“By ‘Master’ you mean Drood.”
“Who else? There is no doubt that I will leave with these pages—I would rather face your pistol at three paces than the Master’s slightest displeasure at a thousandfold-greater distance—but, since you have me at this disadvantage, perhaps there is something you wish to know before I leave?”
“Where is Drood?” I said.
Dickenson merely laughed again. Perhaps it was the sight of those teeth that made me ask the next question.
“Do you eat human flesh at least once a month, Dickenson?”
The laugh and smile disappeared. “And where have you heard that, sir?”
“Perhaps I know more about your… Master… and his slaves than you give me credit for.”
“Perhaps you do,” said Dickenson. He had lowered his chin and now looked at me with eyes raised and brow lowered in a strangely disturbing way. “But you should know,” he added, “that there are no slaves… only disciples and those who love and volunteer to serve the Master.”
It was my turn to laugh. “You’re speaking to someone with one of your accursed Master’s scarabs in his brain, Dickenson. I can think of no worse form of slavery.”
“Our mutual friend Mr Dickens can,” said Dickenson. “That is why he has chosen to work with the Master towards their shared goal.”
“What in the world are you gabbling about?” I snapped. “Dickens and Drood have no common goals.”
The young man—formerly round faced to the point of being cherubic, now actively gaunt—shook his head. “You were in New Court and Bluegate Fields and the surrounding areas tonight, Mr Collins,” he said softly.
How does he know I was there? I thought in some panic. Have they caught and tortured poor mad Barris?
“Mr Dickens understands that such social evil has to end,” Dickenson continued.
“Social evil?”
“The poverty, sir,” said Dickenson with some heat. “The social injustice. The children forced onto the streets with no parents. The mothers who have become… women of the street… out of sheer desperation. Those ill children and women who will never receive treatment, the men who will never find work in a system that…”
“Oh, spare me this communistic talk,” I said. Water dripped from my beard onto my desk top, but the aim of the pistol did not waver. “Dickens has been a reformer for most of his life, but he is no revolutionary.”
“You are wrong, sir,” Dickenson said very softly. “He works with our Master precisely because of the revolution our Master will bring first to London and then to the rest of the world where children are left to starve. Mr Dickens will help our Master bring a New Order into being—one in which the colour of one’s skin or the amount of money one has will never stand in the way of justice.”
Again, I was forced to laugh and again my laughter was sincere. Four years earlier, in autumn of 1865, a mob of Jamaican blacks had attacked the Court House in Morant Bay. Our governor there, Eyre, had overseen 439 of those blacks being shot or hanged and another 600 flogged. Some of our more deluded liberals had opposed Governor Eyre’s behaviour, but Dickens had told me that he’d wished the retaliation and punishment could have gone further. “I am totally opposed,” he’d said at the time, “with that platform-sympathy with the black—or the Native or the Devil—and believe it is morally and totally wrong to deal with Hottentots as if they were identical with men in clean shirts at Camberwell.…”
During the Mutiny in India long before I had met him, Dickens had cheered on the British general whose answer to the rebellion had been to tie captured mutinous Indians across the muzzles of cannon and to blast them “homeward” in pieces. Dickens’s wrath and contempt, in Bleak House and a dozen other of his novels, had long been aimed more at the idiotic missionaries who were more concerned with the plight of native brown and black people abroad than with the problems of good Englishmen and Englishwomen and white children here at home.
“You’re a fool,” I said that night in June to young Edmond Dickenson. “Your Master is a fool if he thinks that Charles Dickens wants to plot against white men in favour of Lascars and Hindoos and Chinamen and Egyptian murderers.”
Dickenson smiled tightly and rose. “I need to deliver this instalment of the notes to my Master before dawn.”
“Stay,” I said and raised the pistol until it was aimed at the man’s face. “Keep the d—— ned papers, but tell me how to get this scarab out of my body. Out of my head.”
“It will leave when the Master commands it to leave or when you die,” said Dickenson with that hungry, happy cannibal’s look again. “Not before.”
“Not even if I were to kill an innocent person?” I said.
The young man’s light-coloured eyebrows rose. “You’ve heard of that ritual exception, have you? Very well, Mr Collins. You might try that. One cannot guarantee that it will work, but
you might try that. I shall show myself out. Oh, and be assured that the young lady who let me in tonight will not remember doing so tomorrow.”
And without another word he had swung on his heel and left.
And it turned out that Dickenson was right about Carrie not remembering his visit; when I asked her the next morning about what aspect of our visitor’s appearance had disturbed her, she looked at me oddly and said that she remembered no visitor, except for a bad dream about some stranger in the rain, beating at the door and demanding to be let in.
Yes, I thought as we pulled into the station where someone from Gad’s Hill Place would be meeting me with a carriage or pony cart, telling my story of the end of that busy night in June might surprise the Inimitable.
But then, I thought, how terrible it would be if it did not surprise him.
ON THE SUNDAY of my pleasant weekend visit at Gad’s Hill Place—and it is difficult for me, even now, to forget or overstate just how pleasant such convivial times at Dickens’s home truly were—I was in James Fields’s chambers talking with him about the literary life in Boston when there came a knock at the door. It was one of Dickens’s older servants, who stepped into the room as formally as a courtier to Queen Victoria, clicked his heels, and handed Fields a note written in a fine calligraphic hand on a scroll of rich parchment. Fields showed it to me and then read it aloud:
Mr Charles Dickens presents his respectful compliments to the Hon. James T. Fields (of Boston, Mass., U.S.) and will be happy to receive a visit from the Hon. J.T.F. in the small library as above, at the Hon. J.T.F.’s leisure.
Fields had chuckled, then coughed with embarrassment at having read it aloud, and said to me, “I am sure that Charles means for both of us to join him in the library.”
I smiled and nodded but was sure that Dickens had not meant the joking invitation for me. He and I had not shared two private words in the four days I had been at Gad’s Hill Place, and it was increasingly apparent that the Inimitable had no plans to alter that unhappy state of public politeness but private silence between us. Nonetheless, I followed Fields as the American hurried down to the small library.