I blinked at that. “But why Drood?” I asked at last. “What will it gain him if he finds this phantom Drood?”
“It may gain him his pension,” said Dickens as we resumed our walk. “Or so he thinks. At this very moment, Home Secretary Sir George Grey is reviewing Field’s suspension of payments, after the long growling from Field’s solicitor—not a cheap undertaking that, I can assure you! — and I am quite sure that Mr Field, in his aged delusions…”
I did not interrupt here to remind him that Charles Frederick Field was only some seven years older than Dickens himself.
“… has concocted a deus ex machina plot in his own mind in which, when he tracks down and captures this criminal mastermind Drood… a spectral figure who evaded Chief Inspector Field some twenty years ago… the Home Secretary and Scotland Yard Detective Bureau and all of his former friends and indifferent successors at the Metropolitan Police shall not only forgive him, and reinstate his pension, but be forced to crown him with laurel leaves and carry him to Waterloo Station on their burly shoulders.”
“And is he a criminal mastermind?” I asked softly. “This Drood? Field told me last night that Drood murdered some three hundred persons over the years…”
Dickens glanced at me again. I noticed that the wrinkles and furrows in his face had grown deeper over the summer. “Do you believe that figure to be reliable, my dear Wilkie?”
“I… have no idea,” I said. “It does sound preposterous, I admit. I do not remember hearing of any three hundred unsolved murders, in Whitechapel or anywhere else. But that was an uncanny place we went to, Dickens. Uncanny. And you never told me what occurred after you left me in that absurd boat.”
“No, I have not,” said Dickens. “And I promised you that night that I would tell you someday soon, my friend. And two months have passed. I am sorry for that delay.”
“The delay is no matter,” I said. The headache was returning even as the laudanum glow around everything faded. “But I would like to know what occurred that night. I would like to know what you have learned about this Drood we spent the night chasing.”
Dickens glanced at me again. “And I would have no concern about our mutual friend Field blackmailing this information out of you?”
I stopped. “Dickens!”
He did not stop with me, but he walked backwards, twirling his blackthorn and smiling. “I am joking, my dear Wilkie. Joking. Come… catch up to me; don’t falter our pace at this advanced point. Catch up to me and walk alongside and pray quiet your wheezing to a mere bellows roar and I shall tell you all about that night after I left you on the brick quay in the sewers beneath the catacombs in Undertown.”
CHAPTER NINE
After I left you sitting there on the quay,” said Dickens, “I attempted to pay some attention to that rather absurd little boat I was in.
“The craft rather reminded me of my character Hexam Gaffer’s miserable little boat from which he tows corpses and other found things from the Thames, but in this case as if some demented carpenter had decided to turn it into a parody of a Venetian gondola. As I studied the two tall, silent figures, one at the tiller or sweep in the stern, the other poling from the raised bow, they became less and less attractive to me, Wilkie. Their gold-dust-bedangled domino masks and smoked glasses disguised little more than their eyes, so I could tell they were male, but only nominally so. You know how angels portrayed in frescoes in the great Papist cathedrals on the Continent are disturbingly androgynous, my dear Wilkie? Well, my companions in this tiny boat were decidedly more so, and that androgyny was emphasised rather than diminished by the absurd medieval tights and tunics they were wearing. I decided to think of the castrato in the bow as Venus and the eunuch at the stern as Mercury.
“We poled down the broad stream of sewage for some hundred yards or more. I glanced back, but I do not believe you ever looked my way before our gondola-scull went around a bend and we were lost to each other’s view, you and I. The small lanterns dangling from iron rods near the bow and stern did little to illuminate the rushing waterway. My primary impression was of lantern light reflected from the moist and dripping arch of bricks above us.
“I dare say I do not have to remind you, Wilkie, of the terrible stench of that first tributary. I was not sure that I could tolerate it for long without becoming physically sick. But luckily, after a few hundred yards of that reeking Styx, the masked form at our tiller turned us into a side tunnel so narrow that I was sure it was nothing more than a sewer pipe. Both Mercury and Venus had to bow low—I did as well—as they moved us along by pressing their gloved palms to the bricks of the low ceiling and encroaching sides. Then the way opened into a wider stream—and I say ‘stream’ advisedly, Wilkie, since this was less a sewer than a bricked and contained underground river, as wide as any aboveground tributary to the Thames. Did you know that some rivers have been partially or completely covered over in London… the Fleet, for instance? Of course you did. But one never thinks of their subterranean sections.
“My androgynous escorts piloted our little craft downstream for a long while and here—I must warn you, my dear Wilkie—the narrative becomes fantastical.
“Our first escort that night, Detective Hatchery, had called this subterranean world ‘Undertown,’ as had the Chinese opium apparition King Lazaree, but now I saw that this connected labyrinth of cellars, sub-cellars, sewers, caverns, side caverns, buried ditches, abandoned mines from some age before our city existed, forgotten catacombs, and partially constructed tunnels was quite literally a city beneath the city, a sort of terrible London beneath London. A true Undertown.
“We rode the slow current for some time, and as my eyes adapted to the darkness along the sides of this wider stream, I realised that I was seeing people. People, my dear Wilkie. Not merely more of the Wild Boys, who were like the feral dogs or real wolves that once circled the outskirts of some medieval village, but actual people. Families. Children. Cooking fires. Crude hovels and stretched canvases and mattresses and even some stoves and discarded, sagging furniture set in amongst the niches in the brick walls and in the side caverns and on wide, muddy banks along this part of the tunnel.
“Here and there blue flames rose from the mud and ooze itself, rather like the flames which flicker on a Christmas pudding, Wilkie, and some of these wretched human forms huddled near these gaseous eruptions for light and warmth.
“And then, just as I thought Venus and Mercury were going to keep poling us down these dark, watery avenues forever, the way widened, and we came to an actual landing… broad stone steps carved into the rock wall of the tunnel with bright torches blazing on either side. Mercury tied us up. Venus helped me step out of the bobbing boat. Both of them stayed aboard the boat, motionless and silent, as I climbed those steps towards a brass door.
“There were large Egyptian statues carved from the stone on both sides of this staircase, Wilkie, and more carvings above the door, the kinds of ancient forms one sees in the British Museum and perhaps feels uncomfortable about being amongst on a winter’s evening shortly before closing time. There were black bronze bodies of men with jackal heads or the heads of birds. There were forms holding staffs, sceptres, and curved crooks. The stone lintel above the broad doorway was carved with the sorts of picture-writing—hieroglyphics, they are called—one sees in illustrations of obelisks in books about Napoleon’s adventures along the Nile. It was like a child’s version of writing featuring carved wavy lines and birds and eyeballs… many bird-shapes.