Hatchery lifted me, righted me, and placed me gently on a bench opposite the inspector. I looked around as if fully expecting to see Mr Eugene Wrayburn and his friend Mortimer Lightwood, but with the exception of the seated inspector, the standing Hatchery, the hustling boy, and the hovering Miss Abbey, the public house was empty.
“Yes, the special sherry, please,” said Field. “For the three of us. To take away the chill and the fogs.” Miss Abbey and the boy hurried into the back room.
“It won’t do,” I said to the inspector. “I know this is all a dream.”
“Now, now, Mr Collins,” said Field, pinching the back of my hand until I yelped, “Opium Sal’s is no place for a gentleman such as yourself, sir. If Hatchery and I had not escalpated you when we did, they would’ve had your wallet and gold teeth in another ten minutes, sir.”
“I have no gold teeth,” I said, taking care to enunciate each word correctly.
“A figure of speech, sir.”
“My topcoat,” I said. “My hat. My cane.”
Hatchery magically produced all three items and set them in the empty booth across from us.
“No, Mr Collins,” continued Inspector Field, “a gentleman such as yourself should contain your opium usage to laudanum as what is sold legally by such upstanding corner apothecaries as Mr Cowper. And leave the opium dens down along the dark docks to the heathen Chinee and the dusky Lascar.”
I was not surprised that he knew the name of my principal supplier. This was, after all, a dream.
“It has been some weeks since I have heard from you, sir,” continued Field.
I leaned my aching head on my hands. “I’ve had nothing to say,” I said.
“That is a problem, Mr Collins,” sighed the inspector. “In that it violates both the spirit and specific wording of our agreement.”
“Bugger our agreement,” I muttered.
“Now, sir,” said Field. “We’ll get some burned sherry into you so you remember your duties and behaviour as a gentleman.”
The boy, whose name, I was certain, was Bob, returned with a huge sweet-smelling jug. In his left hand, Bob carried an iron model of a sugar-loaf hat—Dickens had described this, I remember, and I had paid attention to the written description just as if he and I had not shared a thousand such specialities—into which he emptied the contents of the jug. He then thrust the pointed end of the brimming “hat” deep into the embers and renewed fire, leaving it there while he disappeared, only to reappear again with three clean drinking glasses and the proprietress.
“Thank you, Miss Darby,” said Inspector Field as the boy set the glasses in place and plucked the iron vessel from the fire. He gave it a delicate twirl—the thing hissed and steamed—and then poured the heated contents into the original jug. The penultimate part of this small sacrament was when Bob held each of our bright glasses up over the steaming jug, opaquing them to some degree of foggy perfection known only to the boy, and then filled them all to the applause of the inspector and his detective-henchman.
“Thank you, William,” said Field.
“William?” I said, confused, even as I put my face forward the better to inhale the warm effulgence emanating from my glass. “Miss Darby? Don’t you mean Bob and Miss Abbey? Miss Abbey Potterson?”
“I certainly do not,” said Field. “I mean William—as in the good boy Billy Lamper you saw before you just a second ago—and his mistress, Miss Elisabeth Darby, who has owned and run this establishment for twenty-eight years.”
“Is this not the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters?” I asked, taking a careful sip of my drink. My entire body seemed to be tingling as if it were a leg or an arm I had allowed to fall asleep. Except for my head, which was aching.
“I know of no such establishment by that name in London,” laughed Inspector Field. “This is the Globe and Pigeon, and has been for years and years. Christopher Marlowe probably dipped his learned wick in a back room here, if not across the street in the riskier White Swann. But the White Swann is not a gentleman’s inn, Mr Collins, not even for a gentleman so adventurous as yourself, sir. Nor would the proprietor have opened the door for us and heated our sherry as my lovely Liza has. Drink up, sir, but pray tell me why you’ve had aught to report as you do so.”
The heated drink was slowly clearing my clouded mind. “I tell you again that there’s nothing to tell you, Inspector,” I said a trifle sharply. “Charles Dickens is preparing for his triumphant tour of the provinces and—the few times I’ve seen him—there’s been no mention of your shared phantom Drood. Not since Christmas Day night.”
Inspector Field leaned closer. “When you say Drood levitated outside Mr Dickens’s first-floor window.”
It was my turn to laugh. I regretted it at once. Stroking my aching forehead with one hand, I lifted the glass with the other. “No,” I said, “when Mr Dickens said that he saw Drood’s face levitating outside his window.”
“You do not believe in levitation, Mr Collins?”
“I find it very… unlikely,” I said sullenly.
“Yet it seems you express a quite different view on the subject in your papers,” said Inspector Field. He made a move of his corpulent forefinger, and the lad Billy hurried to refill both of our still-steamed glasses.
“What papers?” I said.
“I believe they were gathered under the title ‘Magnetic Evenings at Home’ and were each clearly signed ‘W.W.C.’—William Wilkie Collins.”
“Dear God!” I cried too loudly. “Those things must have appeared… what? — fifteen years ago.” The series of papers he was referring to had been written for the sceptic G. H. Lewes’s Leader sometime in the early fifties. I had simply reported on various drawing-room experiments that had been much in vogue then: men and women being magnetised, inanimate objects such as glasses of water being magnetised by a mesmerist, “sensitives” reading minds and foretelling the future, attempts to communicate with the dead, and… yes, I remembered now through the opium and alcohol and headache… one woman who had levitated herself and the high-backed chair upon which she sat.
“Have you had reason to change your opinion since you observed these things, Mr Collins?” I found Field’s soft but somehow peremptory and insinuating voice as irritating as I always did.
“They were not my opinions, Inspector. Simply my professional observations at the time.”
“But you no longer believe that a man or woman—say, someone trained in ancient arts of a long-forgotten society—could levitate ten feet in the air to peer in Charles Dickens’s window?”
Enough. I had had enough of this.
“I never believed in such a thing,” I said harshly, my voice rising. “Fourteen or fifteen years ago, as a much younger man, I reported on the… events… of certain drawing-room mystics and on the credulity of those gathered to watch such things. I am a modern man, Inspector Field, which in my generation translates to ‘a man of little belief.’ For instance, I no longer believe that your mysterious Mr Drood even exists. Or, rather, to state it more positively and in the affirmative, I believe that both you and Charles Dickens have used the legend of such a figure for your own different and disparate purposes, even while you have each endeavoured to use me as some sort of pawn in your game… whatever that game may be.”
It was too long a speech for a man in my condition, at this hour of the morning, and I buried my face in the glass of steaming sherry.
I looked up as Inspector Field touched my arm. His florid, veined face was set in a serious expression. “Oh, there’s a game all right, Mr Collins, but it’s not being played at your expense. And there are pawns—and more important pieces—being put into play, but you ain’t a pawn, sir. Although it’s almost certain that your Mr Dickens is.”