As he held the carriage door for me, Dickens said softly, presumably so the coachman would not hear, “Before you dine with the lovely Landlady or the delightful Butler tonight, my dear Wilkie, I would advise a change of raiments and perhaps a warm bath.”
I paused with one foot on the step, but before I could say something related to opium or to anything else, Dickens added innocently, “The crypts do leave an echo of the rising damp on one, you know… as our friend Dradles illustrated so wonderfully this evening.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Charles Dickens is going to murder Edmond Dickenson.”
It was the second time in eighteen months that I had sat straight up in bed out of a deep laudanum sleep and shouted those words.
“No,” I said into the dark, still half-claimed by dream but also imbued with the complete deductive certainty of my yet-to-be created Detective Sergeant Cuff, “Charles Dickens has already murdered Edmond Dickenson.”
“Wilkie, darling,” said Caroline, sitting up next to me and seizing my arm, “what are you going on about? You’ve been talking in your sleep, my dearest.”
“Leave me alone,” I said groggily, shaking off her hand. I rose, pulled on my dressing gown, and went to the window.
“Wilkie, my dear…”
“Silence!” My heart was pounding. I was trying not to lose the clarity of my dream-revelation.
I found my watch on the bureau and looked at it. It was a little before three in the morning. Outside, the paving stones were slick with a light sleet falling. I looked at the streetlamp and then searched the small porch on the abandoned house on the corner opposite that lamp until I saw the shadow huddled there. Inspector Field’s messenger—a boy with strange eyes whom the inspector called Gooseberry—was still there, more than a year after I had first spied him waiting.
I left the bedroom and started for my study but paused on the landing. It was night. The Other Wilkie would be in there, waiting, most probably sitting at my desk and watching the door with unblinking eyes. I went downstairs instead to the small secretary in the parlour, where Caroline and Carrie kept their writing materials. Setting my glasses firmly in place, I wrote—
Inspector Field:
I have good reason to believe that Charles Dickens has murdered a young man who survived the Staplehurst train wreck, a Mr Edmond Dickenson. Please meet me at ten AM at Waterloo Bridge so that we can discuss the evidence and prepare a way of trapping Dickens into admitting to the murder of young Dickenson.
Yr. Obedient Servant,
William Wilkie Collins
I looked at the missive for a long moment, nodded, folded it, set it in a thick envelope, used my father’s stamp to seal it, and placed it in an inner pocket of my dressing gown. Then I took some coins from my purse, found my overcoat in the hall closet, pulled on rubbers over my slippers, and went out into the night.
I had just reached the streetlamp on my side of the street when a shadow on the porch opposite separated itself from the deeper shadow of the porch overhang. In an instant the boy had crossed the street to meet me. He had no coat on and was shivering violently in the rain and cold.
“You are Gooseberry?” I asked.
“Yessir.”
I put my hand on the letter but for some reason did not draw it out. “Is Gooseberry your last name?” I asked.
“No, sir. Inspector Field calls me that, sir. Because of my eyes, you see.”
I did see. The boy’s eyes were distinguished not only by their absurd prominence but by the fact that they rolled to and fro like two bullets in an egg cup. My fingers tightened on the letter to his master, but still I hesitated.
“You’re a crossing sweeper, Gooseberry?”
“I was a crossing sweeper, sir. No longer.”
“What are you now, lad?”
“I’m in training with the great Inspector Field to be a detective, is what,” said Gooseberry with pride, but with no hint of boasting. Between shivers he coughed. It was a deep cough—the kind that had given my mother the horrors whenever any similar sound emerged from Charles or me when we were young—but the urchin had the manners to cover his mouth when he coughed.
“What is your real name, boy?” I asked.
“Guy Septimus Cecil,” said the boy through slightly chattering teeth.
I let go of the letter and brought five shillings out, dropping them into Guy Septimus Cecil’s hurriedly raised palm. I am not sure that I have ever seen another person quite so surprised, with the probable exception of the thugs Mr Reginald Barris had clubbed down in the alley in Birmingham.
“There’ll be no message from me to your master tonight or for the next three days and nights, Master Guy Septimus Cecil,” I said softly. “Go get a hot breakfast. Rent a room—a heated room. And with whatever you have left over, buy a coat… something made of good English wool to go over those rags. You’ll be no good to either Inspector Field or to me if you catch your death of cold out here.”
The boy’s gooseberry eyes wandered, although they never seemed to fix on me.
“Go on, now!” I said sternly. “Don’t let me see you back here until Tuesday next!”
“Yessir,” Gooseberry said dubiously. But he turned and trotted back across the street, hesitated by the porch, and ran on down the street towards the promise of warmth and food.
HAVING DECIDED TO DO the hard detective work related to the murder of Edmond Dickenson myself, I set about it with a will the next morning. Fortifying myself with two-and-a-half cups of laudanum (about two hundred minims, if one were applying the medicine drop-by-drop), I took the mid-day train to Chatham and hired a cart to whisk me—although “plod me” would be a better choice of verb given the age and indifference of both the horse and cart-driver—to Gad’s Hill Place.
As I approached the important interview with Dickens, I began to see more clearly the to-this-point-amorphous idea of my fictional detective in The Eye of the Serpent (or perhaps The Serpent’s Eye), Sergeant Cuff. Rather than the brusque, stolid, and gruff Inspector Bucket of Dickens’s Bleak House—an unimaginative character in the most literal sense, I thought, since he was based so clearly on the younger version of the actual Inspector Field—my Sergeant Cuff would be tall, thin, older, ascetic, and rational. More than anything else, rational, as if addicted to ratiocination. I also imagined my ascetic, grey-haired, hatchet-faced, ratiocinated, pale-eyed and clear-eyed Sergeant Cuff as nearing retirement. He would be looking forward, I realised, to devoting his post-detective life to beekeeping. No, not beekeeping—too odd, too eccentric, and too difficult for me to research. Perhaps— growing roses. That was the ticket… roses. I knew something about roses and their care and breeding. Sergeant Cuff would know… everything about roses.
Most detectives begin with the murder and spend ages following roundabout clues to the murderer, but Sergeant Cuff and I would invert the process by starting with the murderer and then seeking out the corpse.
“My dear Wilkie, what a pleasant surprise! The pleasure of your company two days in a row!” cried Dickens as I approached the house and he came out, tugging on a wool cape-coat against the chill wind. “You’re staying for the rest of the weekend, I trust.”
“No, just stopping by for a quick word with you, Charles,” I said. His welcoming smile was so obviously sincere in his childlike way—a little boy whose playmate has shown up unexpectedly—that I had to return the smile, even though inside I was holding fast to the cool, neutral expression of Sergeant Cuff.