Dradles grunted again but seemed neither surprised nor injured.
Dickens and I turned in time to see a young boy, no more than seven or eight and all unkempt hair, ragged clothes, and untied bootlaces, hide behind a headstone near the wall that separated this graveyard from the road.
“It ain’t time! It ain’t time!” shouted Dradles.
“Yer lie!” shouted the ragged youth and pitched another stone at the mason. Dickens and I took a step away from the boy’s sturdy target.
“D—— n your blasted eyes!” shouted Dradles. “If Dradles says it ain’t time, it ain’t time. No tea today! Get yourself off to the Thatched and Twopenny and leave off on the pitching or there’ll be no ’apenny from Dradles to you today!”
“Yer lie!” returned the Young Devil and pitched another rock, a larger one this time, which caught the stonemason just above the knee. Dirt, tiny chips of stone, clumps of old mortar, and lime dust flew from the man’s trousers as his tormentor screamed, “Widdy widdy wee! I—ket—ches—’im—out—ar—ter—tea!”
Dradles sighed and said, “Dradles sometimes pays the lad a ’apenny to pelt him homewards should Dradles forget to head home for tea or t’ the house after ten. This is my usual tea time and I forgot to turn the reminding apparatus off, as it were.”
Dickens howled and slapped his thigh with delight at this information. Another small stone flew by us and just missed the stonemason’s cheek.
“Hold your hand!” bellowed Dradles to the tiny loose-laced phantom flitting from headstone to headstone. “Or there’ll be no ’apenny for you this fortnight and more! Dradles has business with these here gentlemen and they don’t ’preciate the pelting.”
“Yer lie!” shouted the boy from the gloom behind some shrubbery between ancient headstones.
“He’ll not bother us more ’til our business is done,” said Dradles. He squinted at me and then squinted less malevolently at Dickens. “What is it you wanted Dradles to show you this evening, Mr D.?”
“Mr Wilkie Collins and I would like to see if there’s anything new down in your place of business,” said Dickens.
Dradles grunted rum fumes at us. “Anything old is more what you mean,” he growled. “The crypts ain’t much for novelty. Not in these days, at least.”
“We shall be delighted to see what is old, then,” said Dickens. “Lead the way, sir. Mr Collins and I shall offer our willing, if not broad, backs as a shield between you and your quick-armed tormentor.”
“Bother the Deputy,” Dradles grunted cryptically. “Stones is Dradles’s work and life and only love, other ’n drink, and a few more pebbles won’t bother him none.”
And thus, with Dradles striding ahead and Dickens and me muddling along shoulder to shoulder behind him, we proceeded towards the great cathedral whose cold shadow had now enveloped the entire graveyard.
BEYOND THE EDGE of the graveyard there was a high-mounded pit with fumes rising from it. Dradles, clutching his heavy bundle to his chest, walked past it without comment, but Dickens paused and said, “This is lime, is it not?”
“Aye,” said Dradles.
“What you call quick-lime?” I asked.
The old man squinted over his shoulder at me. “Aye, quick enough to eat your suit and buttons and boots without any help, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins. And with a little stirrin’, quick enough to eat most of your spectacles, watch, teeth, an’ bones as well.”
Dickens pointed to the fuming pit and smiled enigmatically. I removed my spectacles, rubbed my watering eyes, and followed them.
I had assumed we were going up into the tower. Dickens often brought guests to Rochester—it was a short enough ride from Gad’s Hill—and he almost always arranged to have them go up into the tower to take in the view of the old city, all grey blocks and shadowed streets, and of the sea beyond to one side and the forests and roads stretching back to Gad’s Hill and beyond to the other horizon.
Not this day.
After much clanking of key rings (the old man seemed to have keys in every oversized pocket of his flannel trousers, jacket, and waistcoat), Dradles opened a heavy side door and we followed him down narrow stone stairs into the crypt.
I do not mind telling you, Dear Reader, that I was terribly weary of crypts. I do not blame you if you are as well. I had spent the previous night in an opium-scented space that resembled nothing so much as a crypt, and too much of my following Charles Dickens the past year and more had led into dank places like this.
Dradles had brought no lantern and we did not need one: the dying November light came down from above in dim shafts through groined windows that had long been devoid of glass. We walked between massive pillars that rose above us up into the cathedral proper like great roots or tree trunks of stone, and in their shadows the darkness was almost absolute, but we kept to the narrow lanes of fading light.
Dradles set his lumpy bundle on a stone ledge, untied laces at the top, and fumbled in the bag. I expected him to disinter a bottle—I could hear it sloshing—but instead he came out with a small hammer.
“Watch this, Wilkie!” whispered Dickens. “And listen! And learn.”
I thought I had learned quite enough for one day, but I followed as Dradles re-lashed his bundle and led the way down an even narrower corridor between even thicker columns and darker pools of shadow. Suddenly he began tapping the inner walls.
“Hear that?” the old mason asked—absurdly, I thought, since the taps echoed and rebounded everywhere in the crypt. “Tap and solid,” he whispered. “Now I go on tapping… solid still. And more. Solid still. And more… halloa! Hollow! We keep going around the corner here—mind your step; there’s some stairs there in the dark—we keep going and keep tapping and Dradles’s ear keeps hearing what your ear and others’ don’t and can’t hear and… ahah! Solid in hollow there! And inside solid, hollow again!”
We all stopped. It was very dark here around the corner, where more steps presumably led down to deeper vaults.
“What does it mean?” I asked. “Inside solid, hollow again?”
“Why, it means that there’s an old ’un tumbled and crumbled in there, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins!” growled Dradles. “An old ’un in a stone coffin, and the stone coffin in a vault!”
I could feel Dickens’s gaze upon me as if this Dradles-person’s deduction were a significant feat, but I reserved the right to remain something less than overwhelmed. This was not a case of that French phenomenon in which I had some interest—clairvoyance, or “bright seeing.” I mean, it was, after all, a church crypt. It did not take a rude, drunken man playing with a mason’s hammer to tell us that there were bones behind the walls.
Dradles led us deeper into the crypt vault. We needed a lantern now and we did not have one. I used my walking stick to sound out the irregular stone stairs beneath my feet as they spiralled down around one of the great stone trusses that housed the crypts and held up the cathedral. I had dressed for the unusually warm and sunny afternoon, and this subterranean cold made me shiver and wish for home and a fire.
“Aye,” said Dradles as if I had spoken aloud, “the cold here is worse ’n cold. It’s the damp. The rising damp. It’s the cold breath of the dead old ’uns on either side of us and beneath us and, in a minute, above us. The dead ’uns’ breath reaches to the cathedral up ’bove and stains the stone and discolours them pretty frescoes and rots the wood and causes the choir to shiver in their robes. Dradles can hear the rising damp seeping out of the chinks and crevices of these older coffins as surely as Dradles can hear the dead old ’uns echo back their answer to his taps.”
I started to give a sarcastic retort, but before I could speak there came the startling TAP, TAP, TAP of his hammer again. This time I imagined that I could hear something of the complex echoes myself. Dradles’s voice seemed extraordinarily loud in the winding stone chamber.
“There’s two of them about seven feet in, both of them old ’uns with a crook—I fancy they must’ve crook-hitched one another
good when they met promiscuous-like, the way it must’ve been in the dark when candles were the thing—and they’re laid out in what was an underground chapel here long time ago, closed up back when all the heads was rolling and everyone was lifting toasts to Bonnie Prince Charlie and all that.”
Dickens and I stood in the dark where we were while Dradles descended another dozen steps. The chill touch of rising damp moving past our ankles and necks made my hackles rise.
TAP, TAP, TAP… TAP, TAP… TAP, TAP, TAP, TAP.
“There!” cried Dradles, his voice echoing terribly. “Hear that?”
“What do we hear, Mr Dradles?” asked Dickens.
There came a scraping and slithering sound.
“Just my foot rule,” said Dradles. “Dradles measuring in the dark. Measuring in the dark is what Dradles is doing. Wall’s thicker here… two foot of stone, then four of space beyond. Dradles hears the tap-back of some rubble and rubbish that the careless ones who interred this old ’un left between the stone coffin and the stone wall. Six feet in there an old ’un is waiting amidst the fall-down and left-behind—just lying and waiting, no top to his box. If I were to break through with my larger hammer and pick, this old ’un, bishop-hatted crook-type or no, would sit up and open his eyes and say, ‘Why, Dradles, my man, I’ve been waiting for you a devil of a time!’ And then he’d turn to powder sure as not.”
“Let us get out of this place,” I said. I meant to whisper it, but my voice sounded very loud in the winding dark and rising damp.
OUTSIDE IN THE LAST OF THE NOVEMBER evening light, Dickens paid the insolent man some coins and waved him off with thank-yous and what I heard as conspiratorial laughter. Dradles slumped away, still clutching his bundle. He’d not got twenty feet when there was a cry of “Widdy widdy wive! I—ket—ches—’im—out—ar—ter—five… Widdy widdy wy! Then—E—don’t—go—then—I—shy!” and there came an absolute hailstorm of small stones pelting around and against the grey-flannelled figure.
“What a character!” cried Dickens when Dradles and the insane child finally disappeared from sight. “What a wonderful character! Do you know, my dear Wilkie, that when I first met Mr Dradles he was busy tap-tapping away at an inscription on some headstone soon to be set in place—it was for a recently deceased pastry-cook and muffin-maker, I believe—and when I introduced myself, he immediately said, ‘Here in my world I’m a bit like you, Mr Dickens.’ And then Dradles gestured to all the tombs and headstones and headstones in the making around him and added, ‘Surrounded by my works and words like a popular author, I mean.’ ”
Dickens laughed again, but I remained uncharmed and unmoved. Inside the now-lighted cathedral, a choir was singing, “Tell me shep-herds, te-e-ell me.…”
“You know, Wilkie,” said Dickens, still in good humour despite the late hour and growing chill as a breeze came up around us, stirring the brittle leaves across the flat headstone we had dined on only hours earlier, “I believe I know the name of that choirmaster.”
“Yes?” I said, allowing my tone to convey my total lack of interest in this fact.
“Yes. I do believe his name is Jasper. Jacob Jasper, I believe. No, John Jasper. That is it. Jack to his beloved and loving nephew.”
It was not like Dickens to babble on like this, at least not with such banal content. “You don’t say?” I said, using the tone I used with Caroline when she prattled at me while I was reading a newspaper.
“I do say,” said Dickens. “And do you know Mr Jasper’s secret, my dear Wilkie?”
“How could I?” I said with some small asperity. “I did not even know of the choirmaster’s existence until a second ago.”
“Indeed,” said Dickens, rubbing his hands together. “Mr John Jasper’s secret is that he is an opium addict.”
The skin on my face prickled and I found myself standing very straight. I do not believe I breathed for half a minute or so.
“The worst kind of opium addict,” continued the Inimitable. “No laudanum or tincture of opium for Mr John Jasper, the way a civilised white man uses the drug for medicinal purposes. Oh, no! Mr John Jasper takes himself to the worst parts of London, then to the worst slums in those worst parts, and seeks out the worst—that is, to him, the best—opium den.”
“Does he?” I managed. I could feel the rising damp stealing up through my bones to my brain and tongue.
“And our choirmaster Jasper is also a murderer,” said Dickens. “A cold-blooded, calculating murderer, who, even in his opium dreams, plans to take the life of someone who loves and trusts him.”
“Dickens,” I said at last, “what in the blazes are you talking about?”
He clapped me on the back as we began walking across the graveyard towards the road where his carriage had just returned. “A fiction, of course,” he said with a laugh. “That ghost of a glimmer of a shade of an idea—a character, a hint of a story. You know how such things happen, my dear Wilkie.”
I managed to swallow. “Of course. Is that what this afternoon and evening have been about then, my dear Dickens? Preparation for one of your books? Something for All the Year Round, perhaps?”
“Not preparation for my book!” cried Dickens. “For your book, my dear Wilkie! For your Serpent’s Tooth.”
“The Eye of the Serpent,” I corrected. “Or perhaps, The Serpent’s Eye.”
Dickens waved away the difference. It was becoming difficult to see him in the growing darkness. The lamps on the carriage were lit.
“No matter,” he said. “The idea is the tale, my friend. You have your wonderful Sergeant Cuff. But even the best detective requires a mystery to solve if he is to be of any use or interest to your readers. That is what I hoped would come of our luncheon and Dradles outing today.”
“A mystery?” I said stupidly. “What mystery was there today?”
Dickens opened his hands and arms to take in the dark cathedral, the darker graveyard, and the many tombs and headstones. “Imagine a villain so devilish and clever, my dear Wilkie, that he murders someone simply to have had the experience of murder. Not murder a family member, as was the way of it in the Road Case in which you and I were both so interested—no, but to murder a stranger, or near-stranger. A murder with no motive whatsoever.”
“Why on earth would any human being do that?” I asked. Dickens was making no sense to me whatsoever.
“I just explained,” he said with perhaps some small exasperation. “To have the experience of having murdered someone. Imagine what a boon that would be to an author such as yourself—or to me. To any writer of imaginative prose, much less the sensationalist imaginative prose for which you are known, my dear Wilkie.”
“Are you talking about preparation for reading a Murder in your upcoming tour?” I asked.
“Good heavens, no. I have my poor Nancy waiting to be done in by that ultimate villain, Bill Sikes, someday. Not now. Already I have jotted down improvements on the method and description of that bloody massacre. I am talking about your tale, my friend.”
“But my tale is about a diamond that brings bad luck to the family that…”
“Oh, bother the diamond!” cried Dickens. “That was just an early draft of an idea. The Koh-i-noor diamond was a disappointment to everyone who went out of their way to see it at the Great Exhibition. Its color was a sickly, urine yellow—no real diamond to the English eye. Toss away your worthless gem, Wilkie, and follow the path of this new tale!”
“What tale?”
Dickens sighed. He ticked off the elements on the fingers of his gloved hand. “Element the first—the idea of someone murdering a near-stranger simply for the experience of having murdered. Element the second—the perfect way to dispose of a body. Your Sergeant Cuff will have a devil of a time figuring that out!”
“What are we speaking of?” I said. “I encountered no sure-fire way of disposing of a body in our bizarre luncheon or more-bizarre tour with the drunken Dradles.”
“But of course you did!” cried Dickens.
“First there is the quick-lime. Certainly you have not forgotten that Pit!”
“My eyes and nose have not.”
“Nor should they, my dear Wilkie! Imagine your readers in terror as they come to understand that your murderer—your casual, random murderer, like Iago, moved by a motiveless malignancy—has dissolved the body of some poor chap in a pit of quick-lime. Everything down to the last few bones and pearl buttons and perhaps a watch. Or a skull.”
“There would still be those remaining last bones. And the watch and skull,” I said sullenly. “And the pit would be right there in the open for Sergeant Cuff and the police to discover.”
“Not for a minute!” cried Dickens. “Did you not understand the gift I gave you in Dradles? Your villain shall enlist—knowingly or unknowingly shall be up to your novelistic judgement, of course—just such a character as Dradles to help him inter the poor, pitiful remnants of his murder victim in just such a tomb or vault as we saw, or heard, rather, this evening. The last bits of the murdered man—or woman, if you truly want a sensational novel, my friend—shall be interred alongside the old ’uns, and that will be an end to him—until your clever Sergeant Cuff works it all out through a series of clues that only Wilkie Collins could provide.”
We stood there for a moment in a silence broken only by the shifting of the two carriage horses and the more furtive shifting of the cold servant on the driver’s box. Finally I said, “All very wonderful… very Dickens-like, I am sure… but I believe I prefer my original idea of a fabled gem sacred to the Hindoos or other heathens, bringing bad luck to some illustrious English family.”
Dickens sighed. “Oh, very well. Have it the way you insist. Look a gift horse in the withers, if you must.” But I heard him say much more softly, “Even though the gem and the Hindoos were my idea, which I have now seen to be too weak to bear the tale.”