“Go on, lean ’n’ peer in, make your acquaintance wi’ the old ’uns there,” cackled the stonemason. He took another drink from his ever-present jug as I held the lantern to the aperture and attempted to peer inside.
From what I could see, it still looked too small for my purposes. Less than a foot of space separated this outer wall from the first inner wall of an old crypt, and although I could see that this narrow gap dropped a foot or two below the level of the outer walkway and floor where we crouched, much of this cavity stretching away on both sides of the hole we’d made was half-filled with broken stones, ancient bottles, and other rubbish.
I heard Dradles chuckle to my left. He must have seen my appalled expression in the lamplight.
“Y’er thinkin’ it’s too narrow, ain’t you, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins? But it ain’t. It’s perfect. Shove aside ’ere.”
I held the lantern as Dradles squat-walked forward. He patted his bulging pockets and suddenly there was an animal’s long leg bone in his right hand.
“Where did that come from?” I whispered.
“One of yer bigger test dogs in the lime pit, ’course. It’s me who does the rakin’ out there, now, in’t it? Now watch and learn.”
Dradles pushed the long canine femur or whatever it was sideways through the small aperture and tossed it in with a flick of his fingers. I heard it clatter on the rubbish below and several feet to one side.
“You could get a kennel ’o dogs’ skeletons in ’ere,” he said too loudly. “But it ain’t dogs we’re thinkin’ of to join the old ’uns with their crooks ’ere, is it?”
I said nothing.
Dradles patted at his layers of filthy, dusty garments again and suddenly he was holding a human skull missing only its jawbone.
“Who is… who was that?” I whispered. I hated it that my voice sounded like it was trembling in this narrow but echoing space.
“Oh, aye, names are important for the dead ’uns, though not for them, but for us quick ’uns, eh?” laughed Dradles. “Let us call ’im Yorick.”
Once again, the old man must have seen my expression in the lantern light, for he laughed loudly—the echo of that drunken bark coming back from groined vaults on the level above us and from the walls of the curved and descending staircase-corridor we were in and from unimagined rooms and tunnels and pits in the absolute darkness far below.
“Mr Billy Wilkie Collins mustn’t think that masons of stone don’t know and can’t recite the Bard,” whispered the old man. “’Ere, let us see the last of Poor Yorick.” And with that he fitted the skull carefully through the tight space, held it in one hand, and flicked it to the left and out of sight into the narrow cavity. The noise it made upon hitting the stone and bottles and rubbish below was memorable.
“Skulls is always the ’ardest part,” Dradles said happily. “Spines, e’en wi’ all the vertebrae intact, you can twist in like a petrified snake an’ it don’t matter if some o’ the parts chip off. Where the skull can go though, there can go the whole man. Or ten whole men. Or a ’undred. Seen enough, Mr Billy Wilkie?”
“Yes.”
“Be a good lad, then, and ’elp me lift this stone back in place. When you’re done wi’ your business down ’ere, you let old Dradles know and I’ll touch up the grout ’ere so no one can ever tell that this wall ain’t have been untouched since Noah’s day.”
Outside in the chilly March wind, I gave the old stonemason £300 in various-size bills. As I counted them out, Dradles’s long, dry tongue kept flicking out like a Galapagos lizard’s, licking his own dusty-stubbled cheeks and upper lip in startling pink-and-grey stabs.
“And there will be another hundred pounds each year,” I whispered. “As long as you live.”
He squinted at me. His voice, when he spoke, was much, much too loud. “Mr Billy Wilkie Collins ain’t thinkin’ that old Dradles’s silence ’as to be bought, now, does he? Dradles can be as silent as the next good man. Or the next bad ’un, for that matter. If one who’s done what you plan to do goes to thinkin’ about payin’ for silence, ’e might go to thinkin’ about doin’ more of what he done to make sure o’ that silence. That’d be a mistake, Mr Billy Wilkie. It surely would. I’ve told me apprentice all about this ’ere business and sworn ’im to keep silence on pain of death by Dradles’s wrath, but ’e knows, sir. ’E knows. An’ ’e would let others know if something untowards-like were to ’appen to his good, stalwart old Dradles.”
I thought a moment about his apprentice—an idiot deaf-mute, if I remembered correctly. But I said, “Nonsense. Think of it as an annuity. And annual payment in exchange for service and your investment in our common…”
“Dradles knows what an annuity is, sure as he knows ol’ Yorick we left back there was a man of infinite jest, young ’Oratio. Just let Dradles know when you wants the stone, which looks perfectly fine and old now, grouted and mortared up for all of ’ternity.” And with that he turned on his worn heel and walked away, touching his finger to what could have been a brim of what might have been a hat, without looking back.
MONTHLY SALES OF THE SERIALISED Man and Wife were not as impressive as had been The Moonstone’s. No long lines waited for the monthly release of instalments. Critical reaction was tepid, even hostile. The English reading public was, as I had anticipated, angered by my careful and accurate description of the abuses and self-abuses of the Muscular Christian athlete. Word from the Harper brothers in New York indicated that the American reading public had limited interest in and even less outrage over the unfairness of our English marriage laws, which allowed—even encouraged—entrapment of one member of the couple into an unwanted matrimony.
None of these facts bothered me in the least.
If you have not read my Man and Wife there in the future, Dear Reader (although I sincerely hope it is still in print a century and more hence), let me give you a taste of it here. In this scene from Chapter the Fifty-fourth (page 226 in the first edition), I have my poor Hester Dethridge come upon a terrifying (to me, at least) encounter:
The Thing stole out, dark and shadowy in the pleasant sunlight. At first I saw only the dim figure of a woman. After a little it began to get plainer, brightening from within outwards—brightening, brightening, brightening, till it set before me the vision of MY OWN SELF—repeated as if I was standing before a glass: the double of myself, looking at me with my own eyes.… And it said to me, with my own voice, “Kill him.”
Cassell’s Magazine had paid me an advance of £500 and a total payment of £750. I had made arrangements to publish Man and Wife in three volumes, with the initial release date being 27 January, with the firm F. S. Ellis. Despite the moderate sales in America, Harper’s was so delighted with the quality of the early instalments that they sent me a totally unexpected cheque for £500. Also, I had written the novel Man and Wife with both eyes firmly set on its stage adaptation—in some ways, it and my ensuing novels would be theatrical scripts in shorthand—and I looked forward to further income from that very quick translation to both the London and American stage.
Compare all this to Charles Dickens’s lack of literary production in the past year and more.
Thus it was all the more galling one day in May when I stepped into the Wellington Street offices of All the Year Round to discuss (demand) reversions of my copyrights with Wills or Charley Dickens—only to find both of them absent to lunch—and, wandering from office to office as was my old habit there, came across an open letter of accounting from Forster and Dolby.