Dickens changed the subject. “I presume you are using as a model here the Koh-i-noor diamond that was exhibited in the Crystal Palace here at the Great Exhibition and presented to the Queen in June of 1850.”
“I have made some rough notes about that artefact,” I said stiffly.
“Well, my dear Wilkie, there were certainly rumours that the Koh-i-noor was indeed cursed after it was exacted as tribute to the crown by the ‘Lion of the Punjab,’ that heathen Maharaja Dhulip Singh. Just the true story of how that diamond was smuggled from Lahore to Bombay by Governer General Lord Dalhousie himself, even while the Mutiny was still active, should give enough material for two or three exciting novels. It’s said that Lady Dalhousie herself sewed the diamond into a belt which Lord Dalhousie wore for weeks until he handed the Koh-i-noor over to the captain of a British warship in Bombay Harbour. They say that he chained two fierce guard-dogs to his camp bed each night to wake him if thieves or Thugees entered his tent.”
“I’d not heard this,” I confessed. My thought had been to write about a ruby or sapphire sacred to an ancient Egyptian cult, but Dickens’s true tale of the Koh-i-noor made my hands twitch in anticipation of taking notes.
We were interrupted then by an urgent pounding on the door to Dickens’s study.
It was Georgina, in tears and almost beside herself with agitation. When Dickens calmed her, she explained that the Irish bloodhound—Sultan—had attacked yet another innocent victim, this time a little girl who was the sister of one of the servants.
Dickens sent her out to soothe the victim. Then he sighed, opened a cupboard door, and removed the two-barrelled shotgun I had last seen ten months earlier on Christmas night. He then went to his desk and pulled several large shells from a lower-right-hand drawer. Outside, the rain had ceased pelting the window glass, but I could see dark, fast clouds moving low above black branches that were quickly losing their leaves.
“I’m afraid that I have shown too much tolerance with this dog,” he said softly. “Sultan has a good heart—and he is totally loyal to me—but his aggressive spirit was forged in the fires of hell. He refuses to learn. I can tolerate anything—in dog or man—save for the refusal or inability to learn.”
“No more warnings?” I asked, rising to follow him away from the fire and out of the room.
“No more warnings, my dear Wilkie,” said Dickens. “This hound’s inevitable death sentence was pronounced by a power much higher than ours when Sultan was only a pup at his mother’s teat. Now there remains only the execution of that sentence.”
THE EXECUTION PARTY was, fittingly, all male: besides Sultan, Dickens, and myself, the fourteen-year-old Plorn had been summoned from his room. My brother, Charles, and his wife, Katey, had just arrived for the weekend, and Charley was invited along but declined. A weather-faced old blacksmith from across the road had been reshoeing two horses in Dickens’s stable and joined the procession. (It turned out that the blacksmith was an old friend of the condemned—he had enjoyed the killer’s antics from the time Sultan was a puppy—and the old man was honking into his handkerchief even before the execution party set out.)
Finally there were Dickens’s oldest son, Charley, just up for the day, and two male servants, one the husband of the female servant whose sister had been attacked. One servant trundled the empty wheelbarrow that would bear Sultan’s carcass back from the killing grounds and the other gingerly carried a burlap bag that would be the condemned’s shroud in a few minutes. The women of the household and other servants watched from the windows as we walked out through the backyard, past the stables, and into the field where Dickens had burned his correspondence six years earlier.
At first Sultan bounded around with enthusiasm and excitement, unbridled by the new muzzle he was wearing. He obviously thought that he was on a hunting expedition. Something was going to die! Sultan leaped around from one trudging, high-booted, waxed-cotton-coated man to the next, his paws sending out ripples in the puddles and kicking up mud. But when the humans would not meet his gaze, the dog stood at the end of his leash—held by Charley Dickens—and cast an observing eye on the open shotgun under his master’s arm and upon the empty wheelbarrow that had never been a part of any other grouse-hunting trek.
As the group stopped a hundred yards or so from the stable, Sultan’s gaze became meditative, even gloomy, and he fixed the gun bearer—his lord and master—with a questioning look that soon became an imploring one.
Charley slipped the leash and stepped back. We had all stepped back behind Dickens, who continued standing there and returning Sultan’s gaze. The big Irish bloodhound cocked his head to add a question mark to the end of his unspoken query. Dickens set the two shells in place and clicked the heavy gun shut. Sultan cocked his head farther to the left, his gaze never leaving his master’s eyes.
“John,” Dickens said softly to the blacksmith, who stood at the far left of our crescent of execution-witnesses, “I want him turned. Would you please peg a stone behind him?”
John the blacksmith grunted, blew his nose a final time, tucked away the kerchief in the coat pocket of his rain jacket, leaned over, lifted the kind of flat stone one would choose to skip across a pond, and tossed it just behind Sultan’s tail.
The dog’s head turned. Before Sultan could look back at him, Dickens had smoothly raised the shotgun and fired both barrels. Even though we were all expecting it, the double explosion seemed especially loud in the damp, cold, thick air. Sultan’s ribcage exploded in a blur of red-shredded hair and striated flesh and shattered bone. I am certain that his heart was pulverised so quickly that no message from nerve-endings had time to reach the animal’s brain. He did not whimper or cry out as the impact knocked him several feet across the wet grass in the opposite direction from us, and I was all but certain that Sultan was dead before he hit the ground.
The servants had the heavy carcass in the bag and then in the wheelbarrow in an instant. They trundled the corpse back towards the house as the rest of us gathered around Dickens, who broke the smoking gun, removed the spent shells, and set the empty cartridges carefully in his overcoat pocket.
He looked up at me as he did this and our gazes seemed to lock much as his and Sultan’s had only a moment earlier. I fully expected the Inimitable to say to me, perhaps in Latin, “And thus death to those who betray me”— but he remained silent.
A second later, young Plorn, seemingly excited by the smell of blood and gunpowder in the air—the very boy whom Dickens had recently described to me as “wanting application and continuity of purpose” due to some “impracticable torpor in his natural character”—cried out, “That was smashing, Father! Absolutely smashing!”
Dickens did not reply. None of the men said a word as we walked slowly back to the warm house. The rain and wind came up again before we reached the back door.
Once inside, I started to head up to my room to change into dry clothes and take an additional brace of laudanum, but Dickens called out to me and I stopped on the stairs.
“Be of good cheer, Wilkie. Even so will I comfort dear Percy Fitzgerald, who gave me the doomed dog in the first place. Two of Sultan’s children are rolling in the straw of the barn even as we speak. Blood inheritance being the iron master that it is, one of those two will almost assuredly inherit Sultan’s ferocity. He will also almost certainly inherit the gun.”
I could think of nothing to say to this, so I nodded and went upstairs for my anodyne.
KING LAZAREE, THE Chinaman King of the Opium Living Dead, seemed to have been expecting me when I had first returned to his kingdom almost two months before Sultan’s execution, in late August of that summer of 1866.
“Welcome, Mr Collins,” the ancient Chinee had whispered when I parted the curtains to his hidden realm in the loculus beneath the catacombs beneath the cemetery. “Your bed and pipe are ready for you.”
Detective Hatchery had led me safely to the cemetery late that August night, had unlocked gates and crypt doors and moved t
he heavy bier again, and had once again loaned me his absurdly heavy pistol. Handing me a bullseye lantern, he promised to stay in the crypt until I returned. I confess here that it was more difficult going down through the tombs and hidden passage to the lower level this second time than it had been when I followed Dickens.
King Lazaree’s robe and headpiece were of different colours this visit, but the silk was as clean, bright, and perfectly pressed as the time I’d first come here with Dickens.
“You knew I would be back?” I asked as I followed the ancient figure to the farthest, darkest reaches of the long burial loculus.
King Lazaree only smiled and beckoned me farther into the burrow. The silent forms on the three-tiered wooden beds set against the cavern walls appeared to be the same Oriental mummies that we had glimpsed during that first visit. But each mummy held an ornate opium pipe, and the smoky exhalations which filled the narrow, lamp-lit passage were the only indication that they were breathing.
All the other beds were occupied, but this three-level wooden bunk at the back of the room, separated by its own dark red curtain, was empty.
“You shall be our honoured guest,” Lazaree said softly in his oddly lilted Cambridge accent. “And as such, you shall have your privacy. Khan?” He gestured, and another figure in a dark robe handed me a long pipe with a beautiful glass-and-ceramic bowl at the end.
“The pipe has never been used,” said King Lazaree. “It is for you and your use alone. This bed also is for your use and your use alone. No one else shall ever lie in it. And the drug you will experience tonight is of the quality reserved for kings, pharaohs, emperors, and those holy men wishing to become gods.”
I tried to speak, found my mouth too dry, licked my lips, and tried again. “How much…” I began.
King Lazaree silenced me with a touch of his long yellowed fingers and longer yellow nails. “Gentlemen do not discuss price, Mr Collins. First, experience this night—then you can tell me if such quality and uniqueness is worth the coin these other gentlemen…” He moved those long, curving fingernails in a sweep that included the rows of silent cots. “. . . have decided to pay for it. If not, there will be, of course, no charge.”
King Lazaree glided into the dark and the robed figure named Khan helped me up into my bunk, set a notched wooden block under my head—it was strangely comfortable—and lit the pipe for me. Then Khan was gone and I lay on my side, inhaling the fragrant smoke and allowing my anxieties and worries to flow out of me.
Do you wish, Dear Reader, to know the effects of this ultimate opium? Perhaps in your day everyone avails himself of this amazing drug. But even so, I doubt if the efficacy of your opium could equal or come close to the perfection of King Lazaree’s secret recipe.
If it is the effect of mere opium that piques your curiosity, I can quote to you here from the first paragraph of the last book ever written by Charles Dickens—a book he would not live long enough to finish:
An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral tower be here! The well-known massive grey square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants. Still the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of this possibility.
There you have it. An opium addict struggling to consciousness in a run-down tumbled opium den at dawn. Ten thousand scimitars flashing in the sunlight. Thrice ten thousand dancing girls. White elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours. What poetry! What insight!
What rubbish.
Charles Dickens had not the slightest idea of the power or effect of opium. He once bragged to me that during his second reading tour—still in our future that summer and autumn of 1866—when he was racked by pain and unable to sleep, he granted himself the “Morpheus of laudanum.” But when I enquired further—of Dolby rather than of the Inimitable, since I wanted the truth—I found that the wings of Morpheus to which he had abandoned himself consisted of two tiny drops of opium in a very large glass of port. By this time, I was drinking several port-glasses full of pure laudanum with not even a chaser of wine.
Dickens had no idea of the effects of laudanum, much less of rich opium.
Let me tell you, Dear Reader of my posthumous future, just what the effect of King Lazaree’s opium was like—
_it was a warmth that began in your belly and veins, a little like a good whiskey, but which, unlike whiskey, never stopped expanding and growing.
_it was an elixir that transformed small, cherubic, usually pleasant, rarely-taken-seriously William Wilkie Collins, he of the absurdly large forehead, poor eyesight, and comically voluminous beard, he who was “always good for a laugh” and usually good to serve as what Americans call a “sidekick”—into the self-confident colossus that he knew in his heart of hearts he always was and always had been.
_it was a transformative agent that eliminated the soul-sickening anxiety that had haunted and weakened me since I was a child, that deepened perception, and which bestowed an insight into people, one’s self, and relationships that illuminated even the most mundane object or situation in a brilliant, golden light that must be something like the vision of a divinity.
This is an inadequate description, I fear, but I hesitate before penning a complete description of the unique and beneficial effects of this ancient Chinaman’s opium. (Too many others, those without my innate resistance to the oft-cited negative aspects of the drug, might rush to try it—not realising that opium of King Lazaree’s quality of essence may never again be found in London or anywhere else.) Suffice it to say that the drug was worth every shilling the ancient Chinaman asked for it—asked for it many hours later, when I was helped from my couch and escorted, by the shadow called Khan, all the way back to the steep staircase above which waited the faithful Hatchery—and it remained worth the thousands upon thousands of pounds I would continue paying for it in the months and years to come.
Thank God for my huge payment from Cornhill’s George Smith in advance of my writing Armadale. I would not say that every cent of that windfall went for opium—I remember spending some £300 for wine and investing at least £1,500 in Funds (and, of course, there were gifts to Caroline and Carrie, as we called her daughter, Harriet, at home, as well as money sent to Martha R—— )—but the majority of the astounding £5,000 I received from Smith did end up in the long-nailed yellow hands of the subterranean Mandarin.
Hatchery—huge, hulking, derby-topped—was always waiting for me in the crypt far above, no matter how overdue into the morning (or even afternoon) my return was. Each time he would take back the huge pistol (I always set it next to me in my cot in King Lazaree’s Den, even though I felt safer there than anywhere else in the world) and each time he would escort me out of the crypt, cemetery, and slums back to the world of the sad, shuffling, unseeing mortals who knew nothing of the glories of Lazaree’s premium opium.
I WISHED ALMOST as much as my constantly whining Caroline did that the house on Gloucester Place would open up for us. Our current home at 9 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, had always been comfortable enough for me, but it seemed smaller now between Caroline’s constant complaining and Carrie’s coming into womanhood.
Mostly, though, it was the uninvited inhabitants that made the old place too small.
The woman with the g
reen skin and tusk teeth still haunted the stairways when they were not well lighted, but it was the Other Wilkie who caused me the most consternation.
The Other Wilkie never spoke; he simply watched and waited. No matter how I was dressed when I encountered him, he was always in collar and shirtsleeves and waistcoat, cravat in place. I knew that if I were suddenly to shave off my full beard—which was so much a part of me now that I never really noticed it in the mirror except when trimming it—the Other Wilkie would retain his. If I were to remove my spectacles, he would retain his. He never ventured out of my study and was there only at night, but on those nights I encountered him there, his presence was increasingly irritating.
Sensing someone else in the room with me, I would look up and see the Other Wilkie sitting silently in the yellow-upholstered spiderweb-backed chair in the far corner. Sometimes the chair would be reversed (his doing, I am certain), and he would be sitting spraddle-legged with his shirtsleeved arms on the back, head down and gaze intense, the lamplight glinting off his tiny spectacles. I would go back to work, but when I looked up again, the Other Wilkie would have somehow silently advanced until he was sitting in the curved-back wooden chair I keep near my desk for guests. His small eyes would be fixed intently—hungrily, I thought—upon the manuscript I was working on, and he never blinked.
Eventually I would look up with a start to see and feel the Other Wilkie standing or sitting so close to me that our arms were almost touching. These moments of pure fright and terror were made worse when the Other Wilkie lunged for my pen. He wanted to continue and to finish the work on his own—I had no doubt of that—and I have related to you how violent and ink-spattering these tussles for possession of pen, inkwell, and manuscripts had become before I abandoned the study at night and began to work there only during the day, at times when he would not make an appearance.