Dickens ignored this. “The thief has told you where we will find the stolen opium?”
“I warned him not to play games. He's drawn a map.”
“Recovering the opium shall be our first order of business. Then I shall see to his secret and to Officer Turner's.”
Chapter 22
London, late at night, 1870
DATCHERY” WAS AT THE ABBEY THAT NIGHT WAITING. MADMAN or not, he could be trusted to be where he said he would, thought Osgood. Punctually mad. Datchery-for Osgood had no other name for the man than that preposterous one-took the publisher by the arm and they began to walk the damp streets. A sharp afternoon rain had driven people indoors. But as the two men gradually plunged deeper into the eastern districts of London there was more life; if the rest of London quieted when darkness fell, this place was just waking up. Contrasted with the frail, sputtering lamps of the streets, the public houses and dram shops provided blazing illumination through their windows. Bright signs advertised telegraph services to India to reach family or sailors; posters offered new watches and hats. Sailors came to spend every penny to their names before shipping off again.
It drizzled to a deviously slow rhythm as the two men continued on their journey. Murky liquid rushed through the gutter becoming something altogether different from water by the time the drain swallowed it. The men left wide streets for labyrinthine courts, lanes, byways, and alleys. There was Bloody Bridge, below which the water looked more like mud, named for the number of people who would regularly choose that spot to scuttle themselves.
“Is this near where you live?” Osgood asked.
“No, no,” said Datchery. “I live nowhere.”
“Come!” Osgood objected to the absurdity.
“I mean I'm as poor as Job's turkey, so I keep to rented rooms and lodging houses, mostly, so they will not find me.”
“So who will not find you, Mr. Datchery?” Osgood demanded, but the topic was pushed aside by Datchery's impervious disposition and the vague and inhuman moans and cries circling around them. Osgood tried a different question: “How far will we go?”
“When we are somewhere we should stop, we will,” said Datchery. “Though I am the guide, it is not I who guides us.”
“Then who does?” Osgood asked, knowing there wouldn't be an answer forthcoming, probably because none existed.
Sick men and women lay huddled in the corners. Agents from the charity homes picked up wanderers, mostly women with infants, some with three babies balanced in their arms. Osgood knew Dickens had taken this sort of walk-expeditions to every lost corner of London to observe and record its multitudes. Like the geologist, Dickens had built his books by digging up every layer of life underneath the city.
There were times when Datchery's expression would flatten and become dull-or when his eyes seemed clearer, sharper tools than just a moment before.
They were inside the roughest part of London Osgood had ever seen. In fact, the publisher's only comfort was in observing the fact that none of the cursing crowds of humanity-who, by all appearances, would have spent their daylight hours either on ships or as thieves-had approached them yet. Some offered sarcastic “good nights” from windows or open doorways. Then Osgood noticed that his guide was carrying a large club. In fact, it was more complex than a club. At the top, it had a spike and a hook coming out from the side.
Datchery, noticing Osgood's interest, said, “Without this, we'd be stripped to our shirtsleeves by now, dear Ripley. Dearest Ripley! This is Tiger Bay, and we are coming to Palmer's Folly!” The names themselves sounded like warnings.
THERE WAS A cul-de-sac at a narrow court, entered under a crumbling archway, that ended at a three-story building of blackened brick with a black door and sightless windows. On either side of it stood a public house and a thieves’ lodging house. As the two men walked, each step produced a brittle cracking. It took Osgood a few minutes to realize their path was littered with the bones of animals and fish. In front of the public house was a wretched column of people of both sexes and all races, trying to push past one another for a better view of the steps.
The demonstration on the steps was being performed by a man called the Fire King. He offered, for the reward of small bills, to prove his power of resisting every species of heat. “Supernatural powers!” he promised the crowd.
To the cheers and applause of his spellbound followers, Fire King swallowed as many spoonfuls of boiling oil as were matched by donations, and he immersed his hands in a pot of “molten lava.” Next, the King entered the open doors to the public house and-for a steeper fee, gladly supplied by the philanthropically minded crowd-he inserted himself into the public house's oven along with a piece of meat and came out only when the meat (a raw steak he'd held up for the crowd) was finished.
The two pilgrims to this region did not remain outside long enough to see the cooking, however, for Datchery had walked up to the black door and knocked. A man stretched out on a crusty, ragged couch granted them admission into a corridor, after which they ascended a narrow stairs where every board groaned at their steps; perhaps out of disrepair, perhaps to warn the inhabitants. The building smelled of mold and what? It was an odor that was heavy, drowsy. They made a wrong turn into a room where there sat a piano and a small audience before it; everyone turned to look at them and would not move a muscle until they were gone. Barmaids and ballet girls sat next to or on top of sailors and clerks. One man in the audience seemed to be balancing a dagger in his teeth.
Osgood could only imagine what demonstration would happen after they left, as he never heard any piano music while in the building.
They continued upward through the smoke and mist. “Here,” Datchery said with eerie finality. “Take care, Mr. Osgood, every door in life can lead into an undiscovered kingdom or an inescapable trap.”
The door opened into darkness and smoke.
“No weapons!” This was the greeting, in a gravely voice that seemed to belong to a woman.
Datchery put his club down in the hall outside the door.
Only after some slight, slow commotion was a candle lit. The small room showed itself crammed with people, most coiled together on a collapsed bed. Several were asleep and several more looked as though they could fall asleep at any moment. At the foot of the bed sat a gaunt, careworn woman with silver hair holding a long, thin piece of bamboo.
“Remember, pay up, dearies, won't ye?” she greeted the newcomers. “Yahee from across the court is in quod for a month for begging. He don't mix well as me, anyhow!”
Over a small flame she was mixing together a black treacly substance. Sprawled on the bed was a Chinese man in a deep trance, and a Lascar sailor with an open shirt mumbling to himself-both with glossy, vacant eyes. Across the Lascar's mouth, drool escaped from between rotten teeth and ran down the craterlike sores on his lips. Rags and bedclothes hung from a string to dry in the smoke. The smoke! As the woman held out the bamboo pipe, Osgood recognized the reeking smell as opium.
Osgood thought about the narratives of Coleridge and De Quincey, both of whom, like almost everyone else including Osgood, had taken opiates from the pharmacist to quell rheumatism and other physical ailments. But the writers had indulged heavily enough to experience a swirl of ecstasy and fatigue that were opium's powerful effects on the brain. As De Quincey wrote in a series of published confessions, before it became the motto of thousands, “Happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket.” Osgood thought, too, about the accusation of the police against Daniel Sand that he had left so far away in Boston, that Daniel had given up everything for the thrill and ease of opiate entertainment.