Our new home was at Melcombe Place; we had moved from Harley Street a year earlier, partly because of the greater income and literary position that The Woman in White had afforded me. (For my next novel, No Name, I received more than £3,000 for book publication and a guaranteed £4,500 if British or American serialisation was included.)
When I say “our” or “we” I refer to the woman I had been living with for some years, a certain Caroline G—— and her then fourteen-year-old daughter, Harriet, whom we often called Carrie. (There was a rumour that Caroline was my model for The Woman in White—and it is true that I had encountered her running away from a blackguard in the night outside a villa in Regents Park and, running after her, later rescued her from the streets much as was the case with the character in my novel—but I had conceived the idea for The Woman in White long before I met Caroline.)
But Caroline and Harriet were away this week, visiting a cousin in Dover, and—with our two real servants also gone this night (I admit to listing Caroline’s daughter as a “maid-servant” on our annual tax role census at this time)—I had the house to myself. It was true that not too many miles from this home was another house with another woman in it—a certain Martha R——, a former hotel servant in Yarmouth, now visiting London for the first time and with whom I also hoped to live in a comfortable domestic circumstance in the future, but I had no intention of visiting Martha tonight or any time soon. I hurt too much.
The house was dark. I found the jar of laudanum where I kept it in a locked cupboard and drank two glasses, then sat at the servants’ table in the kitchen for several minutes, waiting for the worst of the pain to pass.
The physik soon did its work. I felt renewed, re-energised, and deciding that I would go up to my study on the first floor and write for an hour or two before turning in, I went up the closest stairway.
The back stairway, the servants’ stairway, was very steep and the flickering gaslight at the first-storey landing worked poorly, casting but the smallest circle of doubtful light, leaving the rest of the stairs in deepest darkness.
Something moved in that darkness above me.
“Caroline?” I called, knowing that it would not be she. Nor would it be one of the servants. Our maid-servant’s father had come down with pneumonia and they were in Wales.
“Caroline?” I called again, expecting—and receiving—no answer.
The noise, obvious now as a silk dress rustling, descended the dark stairway from the attic above. I could hear the careful placement of small bare feet in the darkness there.
I fumbled with the light on the wall, but the uncertain jet only flared and faded again, returning to its low flickering.
She stepped into the distant perimeter of ebbing and flowing light then, a mere three steps above me. She looked as she always did—wearing an aged green silk dress with a high bodice. On the dark green silk were tiny gold fleurs-de-lis that descended in constellations to her black-banded waist.
Her hair was drawn up in a bun from a previous era. Her skin was green—the green of very old cheese or of a moderately decomposed corpse. Her eyes were solid pools of black ink that glistened moistly in the lamplight. Her teeth—when her mouth opened as it did now as if to greet me—were long and yellow and curved like tusks.
I had no illusions as to her purpose on the stairs. She wished to grab me and fling me down the long flight of steps. She preferred this back stairway to the wider, brighter, less dangerous front steps. She took two more steps down towards me, her yellow smile widening.
Moving quickly but not in fear or great haste, I flung open the servants’ door to the first-storey landing, stepped through, and closed and locked the door behind me. I heard no breathing through the door—she did not breathe—but there was the faintest of scramblings at the wood, and the porcelain knob turned slightly and then shifted back.
I lighted all the lamps on the first storey. There was no one else here.
Breathing deeply, I undid my pin and collar and went into my study to write.
CHAPTER FOUR
Three weeks passed and according to my brother, Charley (who, with his wife, Kate, Dickens’s daughter, was staying at Gad’s Hill Place), the author was slowly recovering from his terrible ordeal. He was working every day on Our Mutual Friend, meeting people for dinner, frequently disappearing—almost certainly to call on Ellen Ternan—and even performing readings for select groups. A reading by Charles Dickens was the most exhausting performance I have ever witnessed, and the fact that he was up to it, even if he collapsed afterwards, as Charley reported he frequently did, suggested the reservoirs of energy remaining in the man. It still bothered him to ride in a train but, Dickens being Dickens, he forced himself to travel into town by rail almost daily for precisely that reason. Charley reported that when there was the slightest vibration in the carriage, Dickens’s face would turn grey as flannel and great beads of sweat would pop out on the writer’s forehead and furrowed cheeks and he would fiercely grip the seat ahead of him, but with a sip of brandy he soldiered on, refusing to show any other sign of his inner turmoil. I was sure that the Inimitable had forgotten all about Drood.
But then, in July, the hunt for the phantom began in earnest.
This was the hottest, most feverish time of the hot, feverish summer. The excrement of three million Londoners stank in open sewers, including that greatest of our open sewers (despite this year’s engineering attempt to open an elaborate system of underground sewers)—the Thames. Tens of thousands of Londoners slept on their porches or balconies just waiting for rain. But when the rain fell, it was like a hot shower bath, simply adding a layer of wetness to the heat. July lay over London this summer like a heavy, wet layer of decomposing flesh.
Twenty thousand tons of horse manure per day were gathered from the reeking streets and dumped in what we politely and euphemistically called “dust heaps”—huge piles of feces that rose near the mouth of the Thames like an English Himalaya.
The overcrowded cemeteries around London also stank to high heaven. Grave diggers had to leap up and down on new corpses, often sinking to their hips in rotting flesh, just to force the reluctant new residents down into their shallow graves, these new corpses joining the solid humus of festering and overcrowded layers of rotting bodies below. In July, one knew immediately when one was within six city blocks of a cemetery—the reeking miasma drove people out of surrounding homes and tenements—and there was always a cemetery nearby. The dead were always beneath our feet and in our nostrils.
Many dead bodies lay uncollected in the poorest streets of this Great Oven, decomposing next to the rotting garbage that also was never picked up. Not just trickles and rivulets but actual rivers of raw sewage flowed down these streets past and through the garbage and dead bodies, sometimes finding a sewer opening but more often simply accumulating in puddles and ponds that mottled the cobblestones. This brown water flowed into basements, accumulated in cellars, contaminated wells, and always ended up—sooner or later—in the Thames.
Shops and industry shovelled out tons of hides, flesh, boiled bones, horse meat, catgut, cow hooves and heads and guts, and other organic detritus every day. It all went to the Thames or was stacked up in giant piles along the banks of the Thames, waiting to go into the water. Shops and homes along the river sealed their windows and soaked their blinds with chloride, and the city officials dumped ton after ton of lime into the Thames. Pedestrians walked with perfume-soaked handkerchiefs covering their mouths and noses. It did not help. Even carriage horses—many of which would soon die from the heat and add to the problem—vomited from the smell.
The air this steaming July night was almost green with the heated effusions of three million human beings’ excrement and the effluvia of the urban and industrial slaughter that was the hallmark of our era. Dear Reader, perhaps it is worse in your day, but I confess I do not see how.
Dickens had sent a note for me to meet him at eight PM at the Blue Posts tavern on Cork Street, where he
would host me to a meal. The note also told me to wear serious boots for a “late-night excursion related to our friend Mr D.”
Even though I had been feeling indisposed earlier in the day—the gout often is aggravated by such heat—I arrived on time at the Blue Posts. Dickens threw his arms around me in the entrance to the tavern and cried out, “My dear Wilkie, I am so happy to see you! I have been terribly busy at Gad’s Hill these past weeks and have missed your company!” The meal itself was extensive, slow, and excellent, as were the ale and wine we enjoyed with it. The conversation was mostly from Dickens, of course, but was as animated and higgledy-piggledy as most conversations with the Inimitable. He said that he hoped to finish Our Mutual Friend by early September and that he had every confidence that the last numbers would boost sales of our All the Year Round.
After dinner we took a cab to a police station house in Leman Street.
“Do you remember Police Inspector Charles Frederick Field?” Dickens asked as our cab rumbled towards the police station.
“Of course,” I said. “Field was in the Detective Department at Scotland Yard. You spent time with him when you were obtaining background material for Household Words years ago, and he escorted us that time we toured the… ah… less appealing areas of Whitechapel.” I did not mention that I’d always felt sure that Dickens had used Inspector Field as his template for “Inspector Bucket” in Bleak House. The overly assured voice, the sense of easy dominance over obvious criminals and brigands and women of the street who had crossed our path that long night in Whitechapel, not to mention the big man’s ability to take one’s elbow in an iron grip one could not escape and which would then move one in directions one had not planned on going… all of Inspector Bucket’s rough skills had described the real Inspector Field to a “T,” as they say.
I said, “Inspector Field was our protective angel during our descent into Hades.”
“Precisely, my dear Wilkie,” said Dickens as we exited the cab in front of the Leman Street police station. “And while Inspector Field has gone on to retirement and new endeavours, it is my sincerest pleasure to introduce you to our new protective angel.”
The man waiting for us there under the gas lamp outside the police station seemed more wall than man. Despite the heat, he wore a full coat—rather like the loose, long sort that Australian or American cowboys are so often shown wearing in illustrations for penny-dreadful novels—and his massive head was topped with a bowler hat set firmly on a mop of tight, curly hair. The man’s body was absurdly wide and stolidly square—a sort of granite pedestal to the square block of stone that was his head and face. His eyes were small, his nose a blunt rectangle seemingly carved out of the same stone as his face, and his mouth appeared to be little more than a thin sculpted line. His neck was as wide as the brim of his bowler. His hands were at least thrice the size of mine.
Charles Dickens stood five foot nine inches tall. I was several inches shorter than Dickens. This square hulk of a man in the grey cowboy duster looked to be at least eight inches taller than Dickens.
“Wilkie, please meet former sergeant Hibbert Aloysius Hatchery,” said Dickens, grinning through his beard. “Detective Hatchery, I am pleased to introduce my most valued associate and talented fellow writer and fellow seeker of Mr Drood this night, Mr Wilkie Collins, Esquire.”
“Pleasure, sir, indeed,” said the wall looming above us. “You may call me Hib if it pleases you, Mr Collins.”
“Hib,” I repeated stupidly. Luckily, the giant had merely tipped his bowler hat in greeting. The thought of that huge hand enveloping my own and crushing all the bones of my hand made me feel weak about the knees.
“My father, a wise man but not a learned one, if you follow my meaning, sir,” said Detective Hatchery, “was sure that the name Hibbert was in the Bible. But, alas, it weren’t. Not even as a resting place for the Hebrews in the wilderness.”
“Detective Hatchery was a sergeant in the Metropolitan Police Force for several years but is currently on… ah… leave and is privately employed as an investigative detective,” said Dickens. “He may decide to rejoin Scotland Yard’s Detective Bureau in a year or so, but it appears that being privately employed pays more.”
“A privately employed detective,” I muttered. The idea had wonderful possibilities. I filed it away at that moment and the result—as perhaps you know, Dear Reader from my future, if I might be so immodest—would later become my novel The Moonstone. I said, “Are you on holiday, Detective Hatchery? Some form of police sabbatical?”
“In a way as you might say, sir,” rumbled the giant. “I was asked to take a year off because of irregularities in my treatment of a blackguard felonious sort in the pursuance of my duties, sir. The press made a row. My captain thought it might be better for the Bureau and myself if I went into private practice, a leave of absence as you might say, for a few months.”
“Irregularities,” I said.
Dickens patted me on the back. “Detective Hatchery, in arresting the aforementioned blackguard—a presumptuous daytime burglar who specialised in preying upon elderly ladies right here in Whitechapel— accidentally snapped the worthless thief’s neck. Strangely, the thief lived, but now has to be carried around in a basket by his family. No loss to the community and all a proper part of the job, as Inspector Field and others in the profession have assured me, but some of the oversensitive Punch group, not to mention the lesser newspapers, decided to make a fuss. So it is our great fortune that Detective Hatchery is free to escort us into the Great Oven tonight!”
Hatchery removed a bullseye lantern from beneath his coat. The lantern seemed like a pocket watch in his huge hand. “I shall follow you, gentlemen, but will endeavour to remain silent and invisible unless called upon or needed.”
IT HAD RAINED while Dickens and I were dining, but it only served to make the hot night air around us thicker. The Inimitable led the way, setting his usual absurd walking pace—never less than four miles per hour, which he could maintain hour after hour, I knew from painful experience—and once again I struggled to keep up. Detective Hatchery flowed along ten paces behind us like a silent wall of solidified fog.
We left the wider highways and streets, and with Dickens leading, we entered into a maze of increasingly dark and narrow byways and alleyways. Charles Dickens never hesitated; he knew these terrible streets by heart from his many midnight rambles. I knew only that we were somewhere east of Falcon Square. I retained vague memories of this area from my previous expeditions into the underbelly of London with Dickens—Whitechapel, Shadwell, Wapping, all parts of the city a gentleman would avoid unless looking for the lowest sort of woman—and we seemed to be headed towards the docks. The stench of the Thames grew worse for every gloomy, narrow block we advanced into this rats’ maze. The buildings here looked as if they went back to the medieval period, when London lay fat and dark and diseased within its high walls, and, indeed, the ancient structures on either side of the sidewalk-free streets here overhung us so as almost to shut out the night sky.
“Do we have a destination?” I whispered to Dickens. This particular street was empty of people, but I could feel the eyes watching us from the shuttered windows and filthy alleys on either side. I did not want to be overheard, although I knew that even my whisper would carry like a shout through this thick, silent air.
“Bluegate Fields,” said Dickens. The brass-shod tip of his heavy walking cane—one he carried only on such nocturnal descents into his Babylon, I had noticed—clacked on the broken pavement stones at every third step of his.
“We sometimes calls it Tiger Bay, sir,” came a voice from the darkness behind us.
I admit that I was startled. I had all but forgotten that Detective Hatchery was with us.
We crossed a wider thoroughfare—Brunswick Street, I believe—but it was no cleaner or more illuminated than the rotting slums on either side. Then we were back in the narrow, overhanging labyrinth again. The tenements here crowded high and close exce
pt for the few that were total ruins, merely collapsed heaps of masonry and wood. Even there, in those tumbled or charred absences, I could sense dark shadows moving and stirring and watching us. Dickens led us over a narrow, rotted footbridge that crossed a reeking tributary to the Thames. (This was the year, I should point out to you, Dear Reader, that the Prince of Wales officially turned the wheel that opened the Main Drainage Works at Crossness, the first great step in chief engineer Joseph Bazalgette’s attempt to bring a modern sewage system to London. The cream of England’s nobility and high clergy attended that ceremony. But, setting all delicacy aside, I should also remind you that the Main Drainage Works—and all future sewer systems as well as the myriad of old tributaries and ancient sewers—still drained unfiltered shit into the Thames.)
The more terrible the streets and neighbourhoods became, the more crowded they became. Groups of men—clusters of shadows, actually—were now visible on street corners, in doorways, in empty lots. Dickens strode on, keeping to the centre of the broken streets so that he could better see and avoid the holes and reeking pools of filthy water, his gentleman’s cane clicking on cobblestones. He seemed indifferent to the murmurings and angry imprecations from the men we were passing.
Finally a group of such ragged shadows detached itself from the darkness of an unlighted building and moved to block our way. Dickens did not hesitate but continued striding towards them as if they were children come to ask for his autograph. But I could see him change his grip upon his walking stick so that the heavy brass head of it—a bird’s beak, I believe—was aimed outwards.
My heart was pounding and I almost faltered as Dickens led me towards that black wall of angry ruffians. Then another wall—a grey one with a bowler hat atop it—moved briskly past me, catching up to Dickens, and Hatchery’s voice said softly, “Move along now, boyos. Go back to your ’oles. Let these gentlemen pass without so much as another glance from you. Now.”