“Come,” said Dickens and hurried towards the barn.
The stable doors were open—a blacker rectangle in the near-black night.
“Did you…” I started to whisper.
“They are always closed,” Dickens hissed back. “I checked them at sunset tonight.” He handed me the suddenly silent dog’s leash, set the lantern down, and lifted the shotgun.
From inside the stables there came a final faint jingle of bells then sudden silence, as if a hand were muffling the harness.
“Unclip Sultan’s muzzle and then release his leash,” Dickens whispered very softly, still aiming his weapon at the open doors.
“He’ll tear whoever it is apart,” I whispered back.
“Unclip the muzzle and release him,” hissed Dickens.
I went to one knee, heart pounding, shivering in the cold, and fumbled with the clasps on the muzzle. I was half-certain that the straining, wild-eyed Irish bloodhound—he weighed almost as much as I—would rip me limb from limb the second I removed the muzzle.
He did not. Sultan ceased growling and straining as I dropped the muzzle to the ground and fumbled off the clip of the leash.
“Go!” Dickens said aloud to the dog.
Sultan went, exploding into a run as if he were made of metal springs rather than mere muscles. But he did not run into the darkness of the barn. Instead, the bloodhound veered to the left, leaped a hedge in a single bound, and disappeared out into the fields, heading towards the forest and distant sea.
“D—— n that dog,” said Dickens. I realised how few times I had heard the Inimitable curse. “Come, Wilkie,” he said peremptorily, as if I were a second hound he had kept in reserve.
Handing me the shielded lantern, Dickens ran towards the open door of the stable. I hurried to keep up, almost slipping on the frozen grass even as Dickens reached the doorway and entered without waiting for light.
I came into the gloom feeling rather than seeing Dickens’s presence a few feet to my left, knowing—perhaps clairvoyantly—that he stood there with his shotgun raised and aimed towards the long avenue within the barn, even as I sensed rather than saw the stir and breath of the horses and ponies standing here.
“Light!” cried Dickens.
I fumbled open the shutter on the lantern.
A vague blur in the stalls where the horses—all awake but silent—shifted uneasily, a glimpse of their breath like fog in the cold air, and then a blur of white motion at the far end of the dark space, beyond where the bells and harness and tack hung.
Dickens lifted the weapon higher and I could see his eyes white in the lantern light as he prepared to pull both triggers.
“Wait!” I shouted, the volume of my voice causing the horses to shy. “For God’s sake, don’t shoot!”
I ran towards the white blur. I believe Dickens would have fired despite my cries if I had not thrown my body between him and his target.
The white blur at the closed end of the darkness revealed itself in the circle of light from my lantern. Edmond Dickenson stood there, his eyes wide but staring blankly, not seeing us, not hearing us. He was in his nightshirt. His feet were bare and pale against the cold black cobbles of the livery stable floor. His hands hung like small white stars at the end of his limp arms.
Dickens came up and began laughing. The loud laughter further alarmed the horses but did not seem to register with Dickenson. “A somnambulist!” cried Dickens. “By God, a somnambulist. The orphan walks abroad at night.”
I held the lantern closer to the young man’s pale face. The flame reflected brightly in the boy’s eyes, but he did not blink or acknowledge my presence. We were indeed in the presence of a sleepwalker.
“You must have seen him in the garden below your window,” I said softly.
Dickens scowled at me so fiercely that I expected him to curse me just as he had cursed his failure of a dog, but his voice was soft when he spoke. “Not at all, my dear Wilkie. I did not see anyone in the garden. I arose from my bed, looked at my windows, and clearly saw Drood’s face there—his foreshortened nose against the glass, his lidless eyes staring at me. Pressed against the window, Wilkie. My high, first-storey window. Not in the garden below.”
I nodded as if in agreement but knew that the Inimitable had to have been dreaming. Perhaps he had taken some laudanum to help him sleep—I knew that Frank Beard the physician had urged the drug on Dickens when the writer had been unable to sleep in the autumn. I could still feel the pulse and ebb of the medicine in my own system, despite the cold that caused my arm holding the lantern to shake as if I were palsied.
“What do we do with him?” I asked, nodding towards Dickenson this time.
“What one must do with all serious somnambulists, my dear Wilkie. We shall lead him tenderly back to the house and you shall take him into his room to his bed.”
I looked in the direction of the slightly lighter rectangle that was the open stable door. “And Drood?” I asked.
Dickens shook his head. “Sultan often returns the day after his nighttime hunts with blood on his muzzle. We can only hope that he does so again in the morning.”
I was tempted to ask Dickens what he meant by this. (Inspector Field would value the information.) Had he and his Egyptian mesmerism mentor had a falling-out? Did he wish the phantom dead? Killed by Dickens’s own killer dog? Was he no longer a student of the underground mastermind who—according to the former head of the Scotland Yard Detective Bureau—had sent out his agents to kill more than three hundred men and women?
I said nothing. It was too cold to start a conversation. My gout was returning, sending tendrils of agony through my eyes and into my brain the way it was wont to do before a serious episode.
We took Mr Dickenson by his limp arms and led him slowly out of the stable and across the wide yard to the back door. I realised that I would have to towel off the sleepwalking idiot’s feet before I tucked him beneath his bedcovers.
As we reached the door, I looked back over the dark yard, half-expecting Sultan to come running into the circle of lantern light with a pale arm or albino ankle or dismembered head in his mouth. But nothing moved other than the cold wind.
“And so ends another Christmas Day at Gad’s Hill Place,” I said softly. My glasses fogged slightly as we stepped into the relative warmth of the house. I let go of Mr Dickenson long enough to remove and polish them on my coat sleeve.
When I had tucked the ends of the metal frames behind my ears and could see again, I noted that Dickens’s mouth had turned up in that boyish smile with which he had favoured me so many times in the past fourteen years of our acquaintance.
“God bless us, every one,” he said in a childish falsetto and we both laughed loud enough to wake the entire household.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
There was the glowing sphere… no, not quite a sphere, an elongated glowing blue-white oval… and there was the black streak against the dark background.
The streak was on the ceiling and was the result of so many years of smoke rising. The glowing blue-white oval was in front of me, closer, a part of me, an extension of my thoughts.
It was also a moon, a pale satellite in thrall to me. I turned to my left, rolled slightly to my left, and beheld the sun—a sun, orange and white rather than blue and white, flickering out rays into the black cosmos. As the glowing blue-white oval was moon to me, so was I satellite to this burning sun in the darkness of space and time.
Something eclipsed my sun. I felt rather than saw the blue-white oval and long pipe connecting it to me snatched away.
“Here, Hatchery, pluck him out of there. Get him on his feet and support him.”
“ ’Ere, ’ere, ’ere,” shrieked an utterly alien and totally familiar voice. “The gen’lmum paid for ’is night and product, all undisturbed-like-to-be. Don’t be presumin’ to…”
“Shut up, Sal,” bellowed another familiar voice. A lost giant’s voice. “One more peep out of you and the inspector here will have you in
the blackest hole in Newgate before the sun comes up.”
There were no more peeps. I had been floating above the cloud tops of shifting colours even as I wheeled in space around the spitting, hissing star-sun, my blue-white satellite—now gone—wheeling about me in turn, but now I felt strong hands pulling me down from the cosmic aether to lumpy, muddy, straw-strewn earth.
“Keep him on his feet,” rasped the voice I associated with imperious forefingers. “Lift him when you have to.”
I was floating again, between dark cribs set into dark walls, the hissing sun receding behind me. A thin colossus rose before me.
“Sal, get Yahee out of the way or I’ll snap his smoke-clotted bones clean out of his rotted old flesh and sell them as three’a-penny flutes to the Wild Boys.”
“ ’Ere, ’ere,” I heard again. Shadows merged. One was laid back in his coffin. “That’s a good, Yahee. Rest easy. ’Ib, Your ’Ighness, this ’ere gen’lmum hasn’t paid in full yet. You’re pickin’ my pocket if you ’aul ’im out o’ ’ere.”
“You lie, crone,” said the dominant of the two men’s voices. “You just said he’d paid for the night and drug in full. There was enough in his pipe to keep him addled ’til dawn. But give her another two coins, Detective Hatchery. Anything small.”
Then we were out into the night. I noted on the coldness of the air—it smelt of snow not yet fallen—and I noted the absence of my topcoat and my missing top hat and cane and the small miracle of the fact that my feet did not touch the cobblestones as I floated above them towards a distant, rocking streetlamp. Then I realised that the larger of the two shapes still escorting me was carrying me under his arm as if I were a prize pig won at a country fair.
I was recovering from the pipe fumes sufficiently to protest, but the dark form leading the way—I never doubted for a second that it was my nemesis Inspector Field—said, “Hush, now, Mr Collins, there’s a public house nearby that will open for us despite the hour and we’ll order something for you that will set you right.”
A public house that would be open at this hour? As foggy as my sight might have been (and, I realised, as foggy as the cold air itself was this night), no such place could be open in this terrible hour just before dawn on such a harsh, wintry, early-spring morning.
I heard and half-saw Field pounding on a door under a dangling sign: Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters. I knew now, however much my middle hurt from being carried like a country fair pig by Detective Hatchery, that I was not really out here in the cold and dark with these two men at all. I had to be back in my crib-bunk at Opium Sal’s, enjoying the last of my blue-bottle smoke.
“Hold your horses!” came a female voice barely audible over the throwing open of various bolts and the creak of an ancient door. “Oh, it’s you, Inspector! And you, Detective Hatchery. Both out on so terrible a night? And is that a drowned man you have there, Hib?”
“No, Miss Abbey,” said the giant carrying me. “Just a gentleman in need of restoration.”
I was carried into the red-curtained tavern and appreciated the warmth—there were still embers in the fire here in the public space—even as I knew this was all a dream. The Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters and its proprietress, Miss Abbey Potterson, were fictions from Dickens’s d—— ned Our Mutual Friend. No public house with that name existed down here near the docks, although there were many that Dickens could have used for reference.
“They burn sherry very well here,” said Inspector Field as Miss Abbey lighted various lamps and had a sleepy-eyed boy add more fuel to the small fire. “Perhaps the gentleman might like a bottle?”
I was sure that this dialogue was also straight from Our Mutual Friend. Who had said it that my opiated mind might structure this fantasy so? The “Mr Inspector,” I realised, was yet another Dickens interpretation of this very same Inspector Field who took his place in a cosy booth.
“The gentleman would like to be turned upright and put down,” I said in the dream. The blood was rushing to my head now and it was not a totally pleasant sensation.
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 th
e 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.