“I heard that obscene Chinaman say that our bodies—and Hatchery’s—would be found floating in the Thames if we continued with this insane quest,” I said. My voice echoed from stone. It was not a completely steady sound.
Dickens laughed softly. I believe I began hating him at that moment.
“Nonsense, Wilkie, nonsense. You understand his point of view. Should something happen to us down here—and we are, after all, men of some public notice, my dear Wilkie—then the ensuing attention on their little sanctuary here would be devastating.”
“So they will dump us in the Thames together,” I muttered. “What was all that French about?”
“You did not understand?” asked Dickens as he led us back towards the first corridor. “I thought you spoke some French.”
“I was distracted,” I said sulkily. I was tempted to add, And I have not been crossing the Channel to the little village of Condette to visit an actress in secret for the past five years, so I have had less opportunity to practise my French, but I restrained myself.
“It was some small poem,” said the author. He paused in the darkness, cleared his throat, and recited…
“I am a great partisan of order,
But I do not like the one here.
It depicts an eternal disorder,
And, when he consigns you here,
God never revokes the order.”
I looked left and right at the walled-up entrances to the ancient loculi. The poem almost—not quite—made sense.
“That and his mention of Wells made it all clear,” continued Dickens.
“Mention of wells?” I said stupidly.
“Wells Cathedral, certainly,” said Dickens, lifting the lamp and leading us on again. “You’ve been there, I assume.”
“Well, yes, but…”
“This lower level of the catacombs obviously is laid out in the design of a great cathedral… Wells, to be precise. What seems random is quite determined. Nave, chapter house, north and south transepts, altar, and apse. King Lazaree’s opium den, for instance, as he was kind enough to explain, would be where the Cloister Garth is in Wells Cathedral. Our entrance point from above would be at the western towers. We have just returned to the south aisle of the nave, you see, and have turned right towards the south transept. Notice how this corridor is wider than the one to the cloister?”
I nodded but Dickens did not look back to see the motion as we pressed on. “I heard some mention of an altar and a rude curtain,” I said.
“Ah, yes. But perhaps you did not follow that the word is ‘rood’— r-o-o-d—my dear Wilkie. As you must know, and certainly I must, since I grew up quite literally in the shadow of the great cathedral at Rochester, about which I hope to write someday, the apse is the semicircular recess at the altar end of the chancel. On one side of the high altar, to hide the work of the priests from the common eyes, is the altar screen. On the other side, the transept side, the opposing screen is called the rood screen. Fascinating, is it not, how that word… ‘rood’… rhymes so charmingly with ‘Drood.’ ”
“Fascinating,” I said drily. “And what was all that rot about Styx, of Acheron, more horrid knaves than Charon, and arses croaking instead of frogs?”
“You did not recognise that?” cried Dickens. He actually stopped in his surprise and swung the lamp in my direction. “That was our own dear Ben Jonson and his ‘On the Famous Voyage,’ written somewhere around the Year of Our Lord 1610, if I am not mistaken.”
“You rarely are,” I muttered.
“Thank you,” said Dickens, completely missing my sarcasm.
“But what did all that verse about Cocytus, Phlegethon, filth, stench, noise, and Charon and Cerebus have to do with Mr Drood?”
“It tells me that a river voyage lies before one or both of us, my dear Wilkie.” The lantern showed the corridor—the “nave” as it were—narrowing ahead towards multiple openings. Transept and apse? Altar screen and rood screen? Shelves of opium-smoking Asian mummies? Or just more foul, bone-filled crypts?
“A river voyage?” I repeated stupidly. I wanted very much to have my laudanum then. And I wished very much that I were at home to have it.
THE “APSE” WAS a circular area of the catacomb set under a dome of stone rising about fifteen feet above the floor. We came to it from the side, as if stepping in from the choir aisle, should this be the layout of an actual cathedral. The “altar” was a massive stone bier much like the one that Hatchery had shifted so far above us now.
“If we are meant to move that,” I said, pointing to the bier, “then our voyage ends here.”
Dickens nodded. “We’re not” was all he said. There was a rotted curtain to the left—perhaps once a tapestry, although all patterns had faded to black and brown in the subterranean darkness over the centuries—partially shielding the bier-altar from the apse-area under the dome. Another, plainer, even more rotted curtain hung against the stone wall to the right of this rude presbytery.
“The rood screen,” said Dickens, pointing with his stick at this second curtain. Still using his cane, he moved the rotted fabric aside to reveal a narrow gap in the wall.
The descent here was much steeper and narrower than anything we had yet seen. The steps were of wood; the tunnel appeared to have been gouged out of soil and stone; there were crude wooden pilings shoring up the sides and ceiling.
“Do you think this is older than the catacombs?” I whispered ahead to Dickens as we carefully descended the steep and winding staircase. “Earlier Christian? Roman? Some sort of Saxon Druidic passage?”
“Hardly. I think this is quite recent, Wilkie. No more than a few years old. Notice that the steps appear to be made from railway timbers. They still show signs of pitch. It is my guess that whoever tunnelled this staircase out, tunnelled up to the catacombs above.”
“Up?” I repeated. “Up from what?”
A second later the stench hit me as surely as if I’d stepped into a rural privy and answered my question. I reached for my handkerchief, only to be reminded once again that Dickens had taken it and used it for other purposes so many dark hours ago.
We emerged into the sewer proper a few minutes later. It was a low, vaulted channel only seven or eight feet across and less than six feet high, the floor of it more oozing mud than flowing liquid, the walls and vaulted ceilings of brick. The stench brought so many tears to my eyes that I had to wipe them in order to be able to see what Dickens’s pale cone of bullseye light illuminated.
I saw that Dickens held another silk handkerchief to his nose and mouth. He had brought two! Rather than use both of his, he had commandeered mine for the corpses of the babies, fully knowing, I was sure, that I would need it later. The anger in me deepened.
“This is as far as I go,” I told him.
Dickens’s large eyes seemed puzzled as he turned to me. “Why, for heaven’s sake, Wilkie? We have come so far.”
“I’m not wading in that,” I said, gesturing angrily at the deep and putrid ooze of the channel.
“Oh, we shan’t have to,” said Dickens. “Do you notice the brick walkway along each side? It’s several inches higher than the foul matter.”
“Foul matter” is what we writers call the manuscripts and written-upon galley pages that the publishers return to us. I wondered if Dickens was making some weak joke.
But the “walkways” were there on each side just as he said, curving out of sight in both directions along the narrow sewer tunnel. But they were hardly sidewalks; the one on our side could not have been more than ten inches wide.
I shook my head, unsure.
Handkerchief still held firmly over his lower face and walking stick now tucked under his arm, Dickens had retrieved a clasp knife from his pocket and quickly made three parallel marks on the crumbling brick where our crude staircase opened into the sewer.
“What is that for?” I asked, knowing the answer as soon as I asked the question. Perhaps the vapours were affecting my higher ratiocinative abil
ities.
“To find our way back,” he said. Folding the knife, he held it in the lamplight and said irrelevantly, “A gift from my American hosts in Massachusetts during my tour. I’ve found it very useful over the years. Come along; it’s getting late.”
“Why do you think our goal lies in this direction?” I asked as I shuffled behind him to the right along the narrow strip of brick, lowering my head to keep the low arching wall there from knocking my top hat into the muck.
“A guess,” said Dickens. Within minutes we had come to a three-tunnel branching of the sewer. Luckily the channel was narrower there and Dickens hopped across, using his stick to keep his balance. He cut three marks on the corner of the centre channel and made room for me to hop after him.
“Why this channel?” I asked when we were twenty or thirty yards in.
“It seemed wider,” said Dickens. We came to another parting of tunnels. He chose the one to the right and marked his three stripes on the brick.
A hundred yards into this lesser channel and he stopped. I saw on the wall opposite—there was no walkway on that side—a metal candle reflector held up on a spade, its handle buried in the muck, with some sort of round wood-and-wire screen propped against the wall beneath it. A quarter of an inch of tallow candle remained in the reflector.
“What on earth could that be?” I whispered. “To what purpose here?”
“The property of a sewer-hunter,” Dickens replied in conversational tones. “Haven’t you read your Mayhew?”
I had not. Staring at the filth-rimmed pan obviously made for screening, I said, “What in Christ’s name could they be sifting and hunting for in this muck?”
“All those things that we lose into the sewers sooner or later,” said Dickens. “Rings. Coins. Even bones can have their value to those who own nothing.” He poked at the spade and circular sieve with his stick. “Richard Beard illustrated just such an apparatus in Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor,” he said. “You really must read it, my dear Wilkie.”
“As soon as we get out of here,” I whispered. It was a promise I planned to honour in the breach.
We moved on, sometimes having to scuttle forward in an almost crouching position as the vaulted ceiling grew lower. For a moment I felt panic when I thought of Hatchery’s little bullseye running out of fuel, but then I remembered the heavy stub of catacomb candle in my left pocket.
“Do you think these are part of Bazalgette’s new sewer system?” I asked sometime later. The only good news in our progress was that the overwhelming power of the stench had all but numbed my sense of smell. I realised that I would have to burn my clothes; a misfortune, since I particularly prized the jacket and waistcoat.
I may have mentioned earlier that Joseph Bazalgette, chief engineer of the Board of Works, had proposed a complex system of new sewers to drain off sewage from the Thames and to embank the mudflats along its shores. The passage of the plan had been expedited by the Great Stink of June 1858, when the work of the House of Commons had been disrupted as the members fled the city. The Main Drainage Works at Crossness had been opened just the previous year, but dozens of miles of main and ancillary sewer projects were proceeding across and beneath the city. The Embankment part of the works was scheduled to be opened just five years hence.
“New?” said Dickens. “I doubt it very much. There are hundreds of ancient attempts at sewers under our city, Wilkie… some going back to the Romans… many of the passages all but forgotten by the Board of Works.”
“But remembered by the sewer-hunters,” I said.
“Precisely.”
Suddenly we emerged into a taller, wider, drier space. Dickens stood still and shone the bullseye in all directions. The walls were stone here and the vaulted brick roof was supported by multiple pillars. Along the drier sides of this bowl lay sleeping mats of every description, some of rough rope, others of expensive wool. Heavy lamps hung by chains and the ceiling was darkened by smoke. A square cast-iron stove stood at the highest point on an island in the middle of this concavity and I could see a sort of stovepipe which—rather than rising through the stone ceiling—extended downward into one of four adjacent sewers that radiated from this place. Rough planks on boxes served as a table and I could see dishes and dirty utensils stowed in the boxes themselves, alongside smaller boxes that might hold provisions.
“I don’t believe it,” gasped Dickens. He turned to me with eyes alight and a huge grin on his face. “Do you know what this reminds one of, Wilkie?”
“The Wild Boys!” I cried. “I cannot believe that you are reading those particular advanced editions, Dickens!”
“Of course,” laughed the most famous author of our day. “Everyone literary I know is reading it, Wilkie! And none of us admitting such to the others for fear of censure and ridicule.”
He was talking about advanced copies of The Wild Boys of London; or, The Children of the Night—A Story of the Present Day. It was a dreadful series currently circulating in galley form but soon to be published for the general public, if the authorities did not suppress it completely on grounds of obscenity.
I have to admit that there was little obscene about the turgid tale of wild boys living like pitiable animals in the sewers beneath the city, although I do remember a particularly gruesome and suggestive illustration of several of the boys finding a mostly nude body of a woman in their sewer searches. In another scene, mercifully not illustrated, a boy new to the Wild Boys group comes across the corpse of a man being consumed by rats. So perhaps it was obscene after all.
But who was to imagine that such a fantastical tale, indifferently told, was based on the truth?
Dickens laughed—the sound echoing down different dark channels—and said, “This place is not so different from my favourite London club, Wilkie.”
“Except that King Lazaree warned us that some of these diners are cannibals,” I said.
As if in response to our witticisms, there came the squeak and scuttle of rats from one of the openings, although it was impossible to tell which. Perhaps from all.
“Do we turn back now?” I asked, perhaps a shade plaintively. “Now that we have discovered the heart of the mystery of Undertown?”
Dickens looked sharply at me. “Oh, I doubt very much that this is the heart of the mystery. Nor even the liver or lights of same. Come, this channel looks the widest.”
Fifteen minutes and five turnings and scratchings on the wall later, we emerged into a space that made the Wild Boys’ living area look like a minor loculus.
This tunnel was a major thoroughfare compared to the low and mean sewers through which we had already passed: at least twenty-five feet across, fifteen feet high, the centre a river of quickly moving water—albeit a sludge-thick sorry excuse for water—rather than the mere oozes of mud and filth we had been scuttling past. The walls and brick path before us now, as well as the high vaulted arches, were built of gleaming new brick.
“This must be part of Bazalgette’s new works,” said Dickens, his voice sounding awed for the first time, the weakening beam of his bullseye playing across the wide thoroughfare and ceilings. “Although perhaps not officially opened yet.”
I could only shake my head, as much in weariness as in astonishment. “Which way now, Dickens?”
“No way from here, I believe,” he said softly. “Unless we swim.”
I blinked and realised what he meant. This brick walkway was wide—five feet wide at least, as clean and spotless as a new city sidewalk above—but it only extended fifteen feet or so in each direction from our tunnel opening.
“Do we retrace our steps?” I asked. The idea of entering one of those tiny pipes again made my skin crawl.
Dickens turned his light on a post two yards or so to our left. It was made of wood and held a small ship’s bell on it. “I think not,” he said. Before I could protest, he had rung the bell four times. The brash sound echoed up and down the broad bricked thoroughfare above the quickly flowing waters.
Dickens found an abandoned pole at the end of this strange brick dock we were on and he thrust it down into the current. “Seven feet deep at least,” he said. “Perhaps deeper. Did you know, Wilkie, that the French are preparing boat tours of their sewers? They are to be spotlit—women in the boats, men walking alongside for parts of the tour. A sort of bicycle apparatus will propel the flat-bottomed vessels while searchlights within the boat and others carried by égoutiers alongside will illuminate features of interest along the way.”
“No,” I said dully. “I didn’t know that.”
“There is talk of high society in Paris arranging rat-hunting tours.”
I had had enough of this. I turned back towards the tunnel from which we had emerged. “Come along, Dickens. It’s almost dawn. If Detective Hatchery goes to Leman Street Station and announces that we are lost, half the constables in London will be down here searching for the most famous writer alive today. King Lazaree and his friends would not want that.”
Before Dickens could reply, there was a sudden flurry and several clusters of rags floating around white, rodent-like faces exploded from the tunnel.
I fumbled out the pistol. At the moment, I was convinced that we were being attacked by gigantic grub-faced rats.
Dickens stepped between me and the surging, feinting forms. “They’re boys, Wilkie,” he cried. “Boys!”
“Cannibal boys!” I cried back, raising the pistol.
As if to confirm my statement, one of the pale faces—all tiny eyes and long nose and sharp teeth in the bullseye light—lunged at Dickens and snapped, as if he were attempting to bite off the author’s nose.
Dickens swatted away the face with his stick and made to seize the child, but his hand came away with a wad of rags and the naked boy was gone along with his two or three cohorts, skittering down the low, dark passage from which they—and we before them—had emerged.
“Dear God,” I gasped, still holding the heavy pistol high. I heard a sound behind me, from the water, and turned slowly, the pistol still raised. “Dear God,” I whispered again.
A long, narrow boat of no design I had ever seen before had glided up to our brick esplanade. There was a tall figure holding a pole in the bow and another at a sweep in the stern, although except for the high stern and bow and oarsmen and lanterns hanging fore and aft, the craft bore only a vague resemblance to an Italian gondola.