Drood (47 page)

Dickens laughed again, but I remained uncharmed and unmoved. Inside the now-lighted cathedral, a choir was singing, “Tell me shep-herds, te-e-ell me.…”

“You know, Wilkie,” said Dickens, still in good humour despite the late hour and growing chill as a breeze came up around us, stirring the brittle leaves across the flat headstone we had dined on only hours earlier, “I believe I know the name of that choirmaster.”

“Yes?” I said, allowing my tone to convey my total lack of interest in this fact.

“Yes. I do believe his name is Jasper. Jacob Jasper, I believe.
No,
John Jasper. That is it. Jack to his beloved and loving nephew.”

It was not like Dickens to babble on like this, at least not with such banal content. “You don’t say?” I said, using the tone I used with Caroline when she prattled at me while I was reading a newspaper.

“I do say,” said Dickens. “And do you know Mr Jasper’s secret, my dear Wilkie?”

“How could I?” I said with some small asperity. “I did not even know of the choirmaster’s existence until a second ago.”

“Indeed,” said Dickens, rubbing his hands together. “Mr John Jasper’s secret is that he is an opium addict.”

The skin on my face prickled and I found myself standing very straight. I do not believe I breathed for half a minute or so.

“The worst kind of opium addict,” continued the Inimitable. “No laudanum or tincture of opium for Mr John Jasper, the way a civilised white man uses the drug for medicinal purposes. Oh, no! Mr John Jasper takes himself to the worst parts of London, then to the worst slums in those worst parts, and seeks out the worst—that is, to him, the
best
—opium den.”

“Does he?” I managed. I could feel the rising damp stealing up through my bones to my brain and tongue.

“And our choirmaster Jasper is also a murderer,” said Dickens. “A cold-blooded, calculating murderer, who, even in his opium dreams, plans to take the life of someone who loves and trusts him.”

“Dickens,” I said at last, “what in the blazes are you talking about?”

He clapped me on the back as we began walking across the graveyard towards the road where his carriage had just returned. “A fiction, of course,” he said with a laugh. “That ghost of a glimmer of a shade of an idea—a character, a hint of a story. You know how such things happen, my dear Wilkie.”

I managed to swallow. “Of course. Is that what this afternoon and evening have been about then, my dear Dickens? Preparation for one of your books? Something for
All the Year Round,
perhaps?”

“Not preparation for
my
book!” cried Dickens. “For
your
book, my dear Wilkie! For your
Serpent’s Tooth
.”

“
The Eye of the Serpent,
” I corrected. “Or perhaps,
The Serpent’s Eye.
”

Dickens waved away the difference. It was becoming difficult to see him in the growing darkness. The lamps on the carriage were lit.

“No matter,” he said. “The idea is the
tale,
my friend. You have your wonderful Sergeant Cuff. But even the best detective requires a mystery to solve if he is to be of any use or interest to your readers.
That
is what I hoped would come of our luncheon and Dradles outing today.”

“A mystery?” I said stupidly. “What mystery was there today?”

Dickens opened his hands and arms to take in the dark cathedral, the darker graveyard, and the many tombs and headstones. “Imagine a villain so devilish and clever, my dear Wilkie, that he murders someone simply to have had the experience of murder. Not murder a family member, as was the way of it in the Road Case in which you and I were both so interested—no, but to murder a stranger, or near-stranger. A murder with no motive whatsoever.”

“Why on earth would any human being do that?” I asked. Dickens was making no sense to me whatsoever.

“I just explained,” he said with perhaps some small exasperation. “
To have the experience of having murdered someone.
Imagine what a boon that would be to an author such as yourself—or to me. To any writer of imaginative prose, much less the sensationalist imaginative prose for which you are known, my dear Wilkie.”

“Are you talking about preparation for reading a Murder in your upcoming tour?” I asked.

“Good heavens, no. I have my poor Nancy waiting to be done in by that ultimate villain, Bill Sikes, someday. Not now. Already I have jotted down improvements on the method and description of that bloody massacre. I am talking about
your
tale, my friend.”

“But my tale is about a diamond that brings bad luck to the family that…”

“Oh, bother the diamond!” cried Dickens. “That was just an early draft of an idea. The Koh-i-noor diamond was a disappointment to everyone who went out of their way to see it at the Great Exhibition. Its color was a sickly, urine yellow—no real diamond to the English eye. Toss away your worthless gem, Wilkie, and follow the path of this new tale!”

“What tale?”

Dickens sighed. He ticked off the elements on the fingers of his gloved hand. “Element the first—the idea of someone murdering a near-stranger simply for the experience of having murdered. Element the second—the perfect way to dispose of a body. Your Sergeant Cuff will have a devil of a time figuring that out!”

“What are we speaking of?” I said. “I encountered no sure-fire way of disposing of a body in our bizarre luncheon or more-bizarre tour with the drunken Dradles.”

“But of course you did!” cried Dickens. “First there is the quick-lime. Certainly you have not forgotten that Pit!”

“My eyes and nose have not.”

“Nor should they, my dear Wilkie! Imagine your readers in terror as they come to understand that your murderer—your casual, random murderer, like Iago, moved by a motiveless malignancy—has dissolved the body of some poor chap in a pit of quick-lime. Everything down to the last few bones and pearl buttons and perhaps a watch. Or a skull.”

“There would still be those remaining last bones. And the watch and skull,” I said sullenly. “And the pit would be right there in the open for Sergeant Cuff and the police to discover.”

“Not for a minute!” cried Dickens. “Did you not understand the gift I gave you in Dradles? Your villain shall enlist—knowingly or unknowingly shall be up to your novelistic judgement, of course—just such a
character
as Dradles to help him inter the poor, pitiful remnants of his murder victim in just such a tomb or vault as we saw, or heard, rather, this evening. The last bits of the murdered man—or woman, if you truly want a sensational novel, my friend—shall be interred alongside the old ’uns, and that will be an end to him—until your clever Sergeant Cuff works it all out through a series of clues that only Wilkie Collins could provide.”

We stood there for a moment in a silence broken only by the shifting of the two carriage horses and the more furtive shifting of the cold servant on the driver’s box. Finally I said, “All very wonderful… very Dickens-like, I am sure… but I believe I prefer my original idea of a fabled gem sacred to the Hindoos or other heathens, bringing bad luck to some illustrious English family.”

Dickens sighed. “Oh, very well. Have it the way you insist. Look a gift horse in the withers, if you must.” But I heard him say much more softly, “Even though the gem and the Hindoos were my idea, which I have now seen to be too weak to bear the tale.”

More loudly, he said, “May I drop you at the station?”

Dickens’s uncharacteristic omission of an invitation to Gad’s Hill for supper told me what I already knew—that he would be dining with Ellen Ternan and that he had no intention of returning to Gad’s Hill Place that night.

“That would be fine,” I said. “Caroline will be waiting for me.”

As he held the carriage door for me, Dickens said softly, presumably so the coachman would not hear, “Before you dine with the lovely Landlady or the delightful Butler tonight, my dear Wilkie, I would advise a change of raiments and perhaps a warm bath.”

I paused with one foot on the step, but before I could say something related to opium or to anything else, Dickens added innocently, “The crypts do leave an echo of the rising damp on one, you know… as our friend Dradles illustrated so wonderfully this evening.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

C
harles Dickens is going to murder Edmond Dickenson.”

It was the second time in eighteen months that I had sat straight up in bed out of a deep laudanum sleep and shouted those words.

“No,” I said into the dark, still half-claimed by dream but also imbued with the complete deductive certainty of my yet-to-be created Detective Sergeant Cuff, “Charles Dickens has
already
murdered Edmond Dickenson.”

“Wilkie, darling,” said Caroline, sitting up next to me and seizing my arm, “what are you going on about? You’ve been talking in your sleep, my dearest.”

“Leave me alone,” I said groggily, shaking off her hand. I rose, pulled on my dressing gown, and went to the window.

“Wilkie, my dear…”

“Silence!” My heart was pounding. I was trying not to lose the clarity of my dream-revelation.

I found my watch on the bureau and looked at it. It was a little before three in the morning. Outside, the paving stones were slick with a light sleet falling. I looked at the streetlamp and then searched the small porch on the abandoned house on the corner opposite that lamp until I saw the shadow huddled there. Inspector Field’s messenger—a boy with strange eyes whom the inspector called Gooseberry—was still there, more than a year after I had first spied him waiting.

I left the bedroom and started for my study but paused on the landing. It was night. The Other Wilkie would be in there, waiting, most probably sitting at my desk and watching the door with unblinking eyes. I went downstairs instead to the small secretary in the parlour, where Caroline and Carrie kept their writing materials. Setting my glasses firmly in place, I wrote—

Inspector Field:

I have good reason to believe that Charles Dickens has murdered a young man who survived the Staplehurst train wreck, a Mr Edmond Dickenson. Please meet me at ten AM at Waterloo Bridge so that we can discuss the evidence and prepare a way of trapping Dickens into admitting to the murder of young Dickenson.

Yr. Obedient Servant,
William Wilkie Collins

I looked at the missive for a long moment, nodded, folded it, set it in a thick envelope, used my father’s stamp to seal it, and placed it in an inner pocket of my dressing gown. Then I took some coins from my purse, found my overcoat in the hall closet, pulled on rubbers over my slippers, and went out into the night.

I had just reached the streetlamp on my side of the street when a shadow on the porch opposite separated itself from the deeper shadow of the porch overhang. In an instant the boy had crossed the street to meet me. He had no coat on and was shivering violently in the rain and cold.

“You are Gooseberry?” I asked.

“Yessir.”

I put my hand on the letter but for some reason did not draw it out. “Is Gooseberry your last name?” I asked.

“No, sir. Inspector Field calls me that, sir. Because of my eyes, you see.”

I did see. The boy’s eyes were distinguished not only by their absurd prominence but by the fact that they rolled to and fro like two bullets in an egg cup. My fingers tightened on the letter to his master, but still I hesitated.

“You’re a crossing sweeper, Gooseberry?”

“I
was
a crossing sweeper, sir. No longer.”

“What are you now, lad?”

“I’m in training with the great Inspector Field to be a detective, is what,” said Gooseberry with pride, but with no hint of boasting. Between shivers he coughed. It was a deep cough—the kind that had given my mother the horrors whenever any similar sound emerged from Charles or me when we were young—but the urchin had the manners to cover his mouth when he coughed.

“What is your real name, boy?” I asked.

“Guy Septimus Cecil,” said the boy through slightly chattering teeth.

I let go of the letter and brought five shillings out, dropping them into Guy Septimus Cecil’s hurriedly raised palm. I am not sure that I have ever seen another person quite so surprised, with the probable exception of the thugs Mr Reginald Barris had clubbed down in the alley in Birmingham.

“There’ll be no message from me to your master tonight or for the next three days and nights, Master Guy Septimus Cecil,” I said softly. “Go get a hot breakfast. Rent a room—a
heated
room. And with whatever you have left over, buy a coat… something made of good English wool to go over those rags. You’ll be no good to either Inspector Field or to me if you catch your death of cold out here.”

The boy’s gooseberry eyes wandered, although they never seemed to fix on me.

“Go on, now!” I said sternly. “Don’t let me see you back here until Tuesday next!”

“Yessir,” Gooseberry said dubiously. But he turned and trotted back across the street, hesitated by the porch, and ran on down the street towards the promise of warmth and food.

H
AVING DECIDED TO DO
the hard detective work related to the murder of Edmond Dickenson myself, I set about it with a will the next morning. Fortifying myself with two-and-a-half cups of laudanum (about two hundred minims, if one were applying the medicine drop-by-drop), I took the mid-day train to Chatham and hired a cart to whisk me—although “plod me” would be a better choice of verb given the age and indifference of both the horse and cart-driver—to Gad’s Hill Place.

As I approached the important interview with Dickens, I began to see more clearly the to-this-point-amorphous idea of my fictional detective in
The Eye of the Serpent
(or perhaps
The Serpent’s Eye
), Sergeant Cuff. Rather than the brusque, stolid, and gruff Inspector Bucket of Dickens’s
Bleak House
—an unimaginative character in the most literal sense, I thought, since he was based so clearly on the younger version of the actual Inspector Field—my Sergeant Cuff would be tall, thin, older, ascetic, and rational. More than anything else, rational, as if addicted to ratiocination. I also imagined my ascetic, grey-haired, hatchet-faced, ratiocinated, pale-eyed and clear-eyed Sergeant Cuff as nearing retirement. He would be looking forward, I realised, to devoting his post-detective life to beekeeping. No, not beekeeping—too odd, too eccentric, and too difficult for me to research. Perhaps— growing roses. That was the ticket… roses. I knew something about roses and their care and breeding. Sergeant Cuff would know… everything about roses.