“This one is hard to miss. It’s a rather handsome yellow landau… and it’s being drawn by four zebras.”
Feeling slightly foolish, Conan Doyle trotted along behind the hearse, in the coma of a comet’s tail of whooping and skipping street arabs. But as the crowd thinned, the hearse gained speed and began to draw away and Conan Doyle feared it would leave him behind. Fortunately, he was able to steal a hackney cab someone else had bribed to wait behind, by offering the driver a bribe of a larger denomination, and resumed the pursuit. Soon the ominous hulk of Newgate fell behind the hearse and its following cab.
It proved to be a short trip. A brief trot up Farringdon Road ended at Spa Fields, London’s most infamous burial ground, a barren two-acre plot of unconsecrated mud where the poor, the indigent, and the corpses of executed prisoners were interred at a minimum expense to the state. Separated from the surrounding tenements by only a tumbledown wooden fence, a stench of putrefaction hovered about the place, released by the eructations of gas from corpses ripening like vile fruit beneath a thin skimming of mud. Conan Doyle watched as the gates opened and closed behind the hearse and instructed his driver to pull up a dozen feet beyond.
He stepped down from the cab and, removing his top hat and coat to be less conspicuous, tossed them back onto the seat. “Wait here,” he called up to the driver.
“Wait ’ere?” the incredulous driver replied. “With the stink of contagion shiverin’ in me lungs? I’d be like to catch me death!”
Conan Doyle dug in a pocket and tossed up a half crown. “Another if you stay.” And with that, he ducked through one of the many holes in the dilapidated fence.
Although he knew of Spa Fields’s reputation, he was not fully prepared for the blasted vista that greeted him: a churned field of muck, trampled flat of grass and trees. Here and there, a few tilting gravestones, like a mouthful of crooked teeth, marked the most recent burials. In places the ground appeared to be moving and alive, swarmed as it was by fat bluebottles and shabby crows rooting amongst the broken clods for a greedily gobbled morsel.
Stumping across the landscape like damned souls wandering in purgatory were the gravediggers: lumpen golems conjured from grime and filth; although, to call them gravediggers was part misnomer, for they spent as much time digging up as they did digging down as Spa Fields recycled graves with unseemly haste to make room for new interments.
Rising from the blasted ground like a black tumor swelling upon a diseased face was a bone-house crematorium with a brick chimney belching human ash. This was the place where coffins and rotted corpses — after an indecently brief sojourn amongst the worms — were burned to make space for more.
Conan Doyle was in time to watch the hearse rattle across the rutted ground to where the black maw of a freshly hewn grave yawned. Dr. Lamb jumped down and strode toward the waiting grave, the Gladstone bag swinging at his side. Four funeral grooms unloaded the cheap-deal coffin and lugged it to the scandalously shallow grave where it was lowered belowground without care. In place of a formal ceremony, Dr. Lamb dropped to one knee, grabbed a clump of soil, and lobbed the clod onto the coffin. He stood for the briefest of moments, head bowed, as if murmuring a prayer. The perfunctory ritual performed, the doctor settled the top hat upon his crown of blond curls and strolled back to the hearse.
A pair of rumpled gravediggers leaned on their spades as they watched, and now they stirred into action, kicking and shoveling dirt into the grave. The hearse driver shook the reins and the ominous black carriage jounced across the rutted field back toward the gates. Conan Doyle had barely time to spring back into the shadows of the fence to avoid being seen. The hearse clattered through the gates and swung left, heading in the opposite direction by which it had arrived. Conan Doyle vacillated, torn by the urge to follow the doctor and hearse, but finally succumbed to the stronger instinct of staying to ascertain what exactly was in the coffin.
“You there,” he shouted, striding across the muddy ground toward the shoveling figures. “Stop this instant.”
The two gravediggers ceased their labors and looked up with eyes startling white against the blackened grime of their filthy faces.
Conan Doyle reached the graveside and commanded, “Dig it up. Immediately.”
The two grubby fellows answered with gormless stares.
Just then a door in the bone house banged open and a squat figure emerged and stumped toward Conan Doyle with a strange, attenuated gait: a dwarfish man in a full-sized frock coat whose long tails dragged through the mud.
“What is this? What’s going on?” the man demanded in a querulous voice. Up close, his appearance was startling. The stumpy body supported a large head with a prominent, domed forehead. The man also had a clubfoot, as evidenced by the hugely built-up sole of his right boot.
“I must insist you open this coffin.”
“What? Who are you? I am the sexton here. By whose authority—?”
Conan Doyle found himself at a loss for what to say, but suddenly burst out: “I am William Bland, Warden of Newgate Prison.”
The pronouncement widened the dwarf’s eyes. Conan Doyle did not know where the words had come from. He had not consciously chosen to lie, but he would not stop until he had discovered the truth.
“William Bland? Here? Prove it.”
Conan Doyle ground his molars. He did not expect to have his bluff called. But then a sudden inspiration struck him. “Proof? If it’s proof you want—” He dug in his pocket and pulled out the small leather volume of Holmes stories he had unsuccessfully tried to present to the real Warden Bland. “This is one of my most prized possessions: a signed volume of Sherlock Holmes stories. I carry it everywhere with me.” He slipped off the red ribbon, opened to the frontispiece, and thrust the small volume in the dwarf’s hands. “See. Read for yourself: It was presented to me, personally, by the greatest writer of our times, Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle.”
The small man snatched the volume. His eyes crawled across the dedication over and over again. Placated, he handed the book back and spoke in unctuous tones, “My apologies, Warden Bland, but you must understand my caution.” And then he added, with no shred of self-awareness, “There are those unscrupulable types wot do not show the dead the respect they is deserving thereof. As you might have noticed by my execrable vocabules, I am a great reader myself, for I believe it felicitates the brain corpuscles.”
“I quite agree,” Conan Doyle said, adding, “But I must have you open the coffin. I believe a terrible error has been made.”
“Error? I fail to perspicate your meaning. Wot error?”
“I believe the coffin you are currently burying… is empty.”
The sexton made a spluttering sound. “Empty? But surely my men would have noticed the faultability in weight—”
“Most likely lead ballast, added to the coffin to counterfeit the weight of a corpse.”
The sexton looked at the gawping gravediggers who showed no signs of having comprehended any of their conversation. “Wot are you waiting for?” he shouted. “You heard Warden Bland. Dig it up. Now! Sharpish!”
Whipped up, the gravediggers set to with gusto, and within seconds their spades were scraping against the coffin lid. Ropes were tossed down into the grave and looped under the coffin, which was hauled up from the ground with ease. Conan Doyle sensed that his supposition was correct. With the coffin aboveground, the blade of a spade was driven beneath the lid, which pried open with a loud crack revealing…
… a green-faced corpse in a thin white shroud.
The dwarf glared up at Conan Doyle, who stood openmouthed. “Empty coffin, eh? Not so empty after all, eh, Warden Bland? If that’s who you really are!”