“Two large, silent, but living and breathing black men—the word ‘Nubians’ came to mind as I passed them—stood just outside these massive doors and opened them for me as I approached. They were dressed in black robes that left their huge arms and chests bare and they carried strange hooked staffs that looked to be made of iron.
“Based on the imposing entrance stairs from the subterranean river, making a guess based on the statuary and bas-reliefs outside, and judging from the men at the door, I expected that I was entering a temple, but although the echoing, lantern-lit interior did have something of the hushed air of a heathen temple about it, in truth it was more library than temple. Shelves in the first room I passed through and along the walls of rooms I glanced into held scrolls, tablets, and many much more mundane books. I glimpsed scholarly and reference titles such as one might find in any fine library. The rooms were sparsely furnished with a few tables illuminated by torches or hanging braziers and the occasional low, backless couch of the sort historians tell us were present in some patrician’s home in ancient Rome or Greece or Egypt. I could see various figures moving, sitting, or standing in these rooms, and most looked to be Lascar or Magyar or Hindoo or Chinese. But there were no ancient opium sleepers—no beds or bunks or opium pipes nor sign nor smell of the wretched drug. I noticed that most of the men in the various rooms, for whatever reason, had shaved their heads.
“Drood was waiting for me in the second room, Wilkie. He sat at a small table near a hissing lantern. Various books and scrolls covered the table, but I noticed that he was drinking tea from Wedgwood china. He was dressed in a tan robe that made him look quite different than my impression of him as a poorly tailored undertaker at Staplehurst—much more dignified—but his deformities were even more apparent in the lantern light: his scarred head almost devoid of hair, the missing eyelids, a nose that looked to have been mostly amputated in some terrible surgery, the slight harelip, and ears that were little more than stubs. He rose and offered his hand as I approached.
“ ‘Welcome, Mr Dickensss,’ he said with that hint of lisp and slide of sibilants which I have so unsuccesfully tried to reproduce for you. ‘I knew you would come,’ he said as he arranged the tea set.
“ ‘How did you know that I would come, Mr Drood?’ I asked, accepting his handshake and forcing myself not to flinch at the touch of his cold, white flesh.
“He smiled, Wilkie, and I was reminded that his teeth were small, oddly spaced, and very sharp, while his pink tongue seemed extraordinarily quick and busy behind them. ‘You are a man of great curiosity, Mr Dickensss,’ Drood said to me. ‘I know thiss from your many wonderful booksss and storiess. All of which I have admired very much indeed.’
“ ‘Thank you, sir, you are very kind’ was my reply. You can imagine the sense of oddness, my dear Wilkie, sitting in this underground Undertown temple-library with this odd man who already, since the Staplehurst terror, had become a fixture of my dreams, hearing him praise my books rather as if I had just completed a reading in Manchester.
“Before I could think of anything else to say, Drood poured tea into the lovely cup set before me and said, ‘I am sure that you have questionsss for me.’
“ ‘I do, indeed, Mr Drood,” I said to him. ‘And I hope you will not consider them impertinent or overly personal. There is in me, I confess, a great curiosity as to your background, how you came to be here in this… place, why you were on the tidal train from Folkestone that terrible day at Staplehurst… everything.’
“ ‘Then I shall tell you everything, Mr Dickensss,’ said my strange interlocutor.
“I spent the next half hour or so drinking tea and listening to his story, my dear Wilkie. Would you care to hear a summary of Drood’s biography now, or shall we save it for another day?”
I LOOKED AROUND. We were within a mile of Gad’s Hill Place. I realised I was panting from the speed and distance of our walk, but my headache had been all but forgotten while I was listening to this fantastical tale. I said, “By all means, Dickens. Let us hear the end of this story.”
“It is not the end, my dear Wilkie,” said Dickens, his blackthorn stick rising and falling with his every second stride. “More the beginning, if truth be told. But I shall tell you what Drood told me that night, albeit in summarised form, since I see our destination in sight.”
THE MAN WE CALL DROOD is the son of an English father and an Egyptian mother. His father, a certain John Frederick Forsyte, was born in the last century, graduated from Cambridge, and trained as a civil engineer, although the man’s real passion was exploration, adventure, and literature. I have checked this out, Wilkie. Forsyte himself was a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, but is remembered today as a teller of traveller’s tales. Part of his training was in Paris—this was after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when Englishmen felt free to return to France, of course—and there Forsyte met numerous scientists who had gone to Egypt with Napoleon’s expedition to that country. The tales he heard made him eager to see such exotic sights—the Sphinx that the French artillery had taken potshots at, successfully shooting off its nose, the Pyramids, the people, the cities, and, yes, the women. Forsyte was young and single, and some of the Frenchmen’s tales of alluring Mohammadan women with their veils and kohl-enhanced eyes inflamed his desire for something more than travel.
“Within the year, Forsyte had arranged to travel to Egypt with an English engineering company that had been contracted by a French company owned by someone John Frederick Forsyte had met socially in Paris, hired by Egypt’s young ruler, Mehemet Ali. It was Ali who first attempted to introduce Western knowledge and improvements into Egypt.
“As an engineer, Forsyte was staggered by the knowledge of the Egyptian ancients as evidenced in their Pyramids, colossal ruins, and networks of canals along the Nile. As an adventurer, the young man was exhilarated by Cairo and the other Egyptian cities, and even more so by his expeditions out of these cities to more remote ruins and sites up the Nile. As a man, Forsyte found the Egyptian women just as alluring as the Frenchmen’s tales had promised.
“It was during his first year in Cairo that Forsyte met the young Egyptian widow who would become Drood’s mother. She lived near the quarter where the English and French engineers and other contractors were essentially quarantined away from proper society—Forsyte’s lodgings were in a converted carpet warehouse—and the woman spoke English, came from a wealthy and ancient Alexandrian family (her late husband had been a merchant in Cairo), and attended various dinners and gatherings arranged by the English engineering company. Her name was Amisi, meaning ‘flower,’ and many Englishmen and Frenchmen and Egyptian men told Forsyte that her quiet beauty earned her the right to the name.
“Despite the Mohammadan prejudice against Franks and Christians, the courtship with the young widow was simple—several times Amisi had “accidentally” allowed Forsyte to see her face without a veil near the bathing place where the local women gathered, which was any Egyptian woman’s tacit acceptance of engagement—and they were married under Mohammadan law without elaborate ceremony. In truth, it took only a single sentence muttered by Drood’s future mother to seal the marriage.
“The boy whom we now call Drood was born ten months later. His father named the boy Jasper, which meant nothing to the mother, neighbours, or the poor lad’s future playmates, who tended to beat the halfbreed lad like a rented mule. For almost four years, Forsyte raised the boy as a future English gentleman, demanded that only English be spoken in the home, tutored his son in his spare time, and announced that the boy’s future education would be at fine schools in England. Amisi had no say in the matter. But—luckily for young Jasper John Forsyte-Drood’s future survival—his father was gone more often than he was home, working on engineering projects that took him great distances from Cairo and his wife and child. On the street, young Jasper John Forsyte travelled in rags by his mother’s side—it was important, Amisi knew, that the other adults and children not know how well-off young Jasper truly was. His playmates, or even Egyptian adults, might have murdered the light-skinned boy had they known the extent of his infidel father’s wealth.