I left the front door unlocked and the windows open wide for burglars—if there were any who would dare burgle a home that the Master Drood had honoured with his visit—and the candles and kerosene lamps and the fire in the fireplace all burning downstairs. I had not even replaced the fireplace screen after burning Bleak House.
Whatever else I knew that night of 14 June, 1870, I knew beyond any doubt that my fate was not to burn to death in a house fire.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
It was on the fourth day of July, 1870, my little daughter Marian’s first birthday, that I finished work early (I was adapting Man and Wife to the stage) and took the early-evening train to Rochester. I carried with me a small embroidered sofa pillow that Martha had made for me before she first came down to London. Some children in the carriage noticed the pillow I carried along with my leather portfolio and pointed and laughed—an old man of forty-six years and almost seven months, with balding head and greying beard and weakening eyes, carrying his own pillow probably for physical reasons too absurd for Youth even to enquire into—and I smiled and waggled my fingers at them in return.
In Rochester I walked the mile or so from the station to the Cathedral. Dickens’s most recent instalment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood was out, and this city and cathedral and adjoining churchyard—as poorly disguised as “Cloisterham” and “Cloisterham Cathedral” as Dick Datchery was within the same pages with the great wig he kept forgetting he was wearing—had already taken on literary and mystery resonances for the careful reader.
It was just after sunset and I waited with my pillow and my valise as the last visitors—two clergymen oddly holding hands (they had obviously come to trace headstone inscriptions with charcoal)—left through the open gate and disappeared towards the town centre and distant station.
I could hear two voices from the distant rear of the graveyard, but actual sight of the two people was obscured by the rise and fall of the cemetery fields, by the trees, by the thick hedges that shielded that poorer area near the marsh grasses, and even by the taller headstone monuments erected by such arrogant but insecure people as Mr Thomas Sapsea, still alive and walking and pontificating and enjoying his wife’s long headstone-monument epitaph (written by him and about him, of course, and carved into stone by the colourful stonemason, chiefly in the monumental line, named Durdles). Still alive and walking and pontificating, I should point out, only in the pages of the serialised novel now hurtling towards its premature discontinuance as surely as the 2.39 tidal train from Folkestone had hurtled unstoppably towards the breach in trestle rails at Staplehurst some five years and a little less than a month before.
“This is an idiot’s idea,” bellowed a man’s voice.
“I thought it might be gay,” came a woman’s voice. “A sort of evening picnic by the sea.”
I stopped less than twenty feet away from the bickering couple but remained hidden behind a tall, thick marble monolith—a sort of Sapsea-esque obelisk to some local functionary whose name, never much remembered anyway, had been all but erased by the salt and rain and sea breezes.
“A d— ned picnic in a d— ned boneyard!” shouted the man. It was obvious to even the most disinterested (and distant) overhearing ear that this was a man who was never embarrassed by his own shouting.
“See how nicely this—piece of stone—serves as a table,” came the weary woman’s voice. “Just sit and relax a moment while I open your beer.”
“My beer be d— ned!” bellowed the man. There came the sound of brittle china shattering after being thrown upon eternal—or at least monumental—stone. “Pack up these things. ’Ere, give me the glass and pail of beer first. You stupid cow. It’ll be hours before I’m fed now. And you’ll earn and pay back the railway fare or… Say, who are… what are you doing ’ere? What’s that in your hands? A pillow?”
I kept smiling until I got within two feet of the man, who’d barely had time to struggle to his feet while trying not to spill his pail and goblet of beer.
Still smiling, I pressed the pillow tight against the man’s sallow chest and pulled the trigger on the pistol I was holding behind that pillow. The gunshot was strangely muffled.
“What!?…” cried Joseph Clow. He staggered backwards a few steps. It appeared that he could not decide between looking at me, still holding the pillow—which was smoking slightly—or down at his own chest.
A single scarlet geranium flower had blossomed on his cheaply woven but immaculately white shirtfront. His grimy-nailed hands rose to his open waistcoat and he clawed weakly at that blossoming shirt, ripping buttons off.
I thrust the pillow against his now-bare and hairless flesh, just half a hand-span above his sternum, and fired twice more. Both cartridges fired true.
Clow stumbled backwards another few paces until his heels caught the edge of a low, horizontal stone similar to the one they had been prepared to dine at. He tumbled over backwards then, rolled once, and lay there on his back.
He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound emerged except for a sort of bubbling and gurgling which was coming—I realised—not from his throat but from his newly perforated lungs. His eyes rolled wide and white as he searched for help. His long legs were already twitching and spasming.
Caroline hurried over, crouched next to her husband, and took the small pillow from my steady hands. Kneeling, she used both hands to press the smoking pillow firmly down over Joseph Clow’s open, straining mouth and bulging eyes.
“You have one bullet left,” she said to me. “Use it. Now.”
I pressed the pistol into the pillow with such ferocity that it felt as if I were using the barrel to cram the feathers and fabric down Clow’s gaping maw as if to strangle him. His moans and attempts at a scream were completely muffled now. I squeezed the trigger and the faithful gun fired a final time. This time there came a familiar (to me at least, from my morphia dream) sound of the back of a skull splintering open like some huge walnut being cracked.
I stamped the smouldering pillow out.
Caroline was staring down at the white-and-red face with its shattered but now eternally frozen expression. Her own expression was absolutely unreadable, even by someone who had known her as long as I had.
Then we both looked around, waiting to hear shouts and running feet. I half-expected to see Minor Canon Crisparkle come loping manfully over the grassy hillocks separating us from the cathedral and street.
But there was no one. Not even a distant shout of enquiry. The wind blew out that evening, towards the sea rather than from it. The marsh grasses writhed in unison with one another.
“Get his feet,” I said softly. I wrapped a towel around Clow’s shattered head to prevent leaving a trail of blood and brain matter. I then donned the long yellow apron from my valise that Caroline had written to remind me to bring; she had even told me in which drawers in the Gloucester Place kitchen to find the towel and apron. “We don’t want to have his heels leave ruts in the sod,” I said. “What on earth are you doing there?”
“I am picking up his shirt buttons,” said Caroline from where she crouched. She spoke very calmly, her long fingers, educated by sewing and by playing card games, dancing nimbly in the grass as they retrieved the small horned circles. She did not rush.
Then we were carrying the body of Joseph Clow the sixty feet or so to the quick-lime pit. This was quite possibly our riskiest moment (I was carrying him under his arms and thankful for the apron that was absorbing the smeared contents of the back of his head, although how Caroline had known this would be a problem I had no idea; she carried his feet by the ankles), but although I kept swivelling my head, I could see no other person in the graveyard or beyond. I even glanced apprehensively at the sea, knowing that nautical types almost always carried small telescopes or other spyglasses. Suddenly she began laughing and I was so startled by the sound that I almost dropped our burden.