Dan Simmons - Drood

There was the same type of flat gravestone selected and used as a dinner table; the same transformation of Charles Dickens, Writer, into Charlie Dickens, Waiter; the same use of a wall as a bar for the gentlemen’s drinks; the same use of crystal and white linen and perfectly roasted squab lifted from hampers in the back of their carriages and delivered by the writer-waiter with the towel over one arm.

Even the nearby marshes and smell of the salt sea were the same, although this stretch of coastal marsh was more desolate and isolated than the Rochester graveyard.

Why was Dickens doing this again with his American friends? Even through the slightly shaky circle of the spyglass, I could tell that James Fields was a bit put off by this forced merrymaking in the midst of a boneyard. The ladies looked actively shocked and ate very little.

Only Eytinge, the illustrator, could be seen to be laughing and joining in the graveyard-theatre gaiety with Dickens, and that is most likely because he had enjoyed three glasses of wine even before the squab was served.

Was this some statement that Dickens, the mortal man, was making in the face of the imminent paralysis or death predicted by Beard and his other doctors?

Or was the scarab in his brain finally driving Dickens mad?

THAT NIGHT, the ladies and most of the other guests were left behind as Dickens took James Fields, a still-inebriated Sol Eytinge, and a very sober George Dolby into the Great Oven of London. (But he did not leave me behind, despite the lack of any invitation—when they left their cab, I followed stealthily on foot.) They paused briefly at a police station on Ratcliffe Highway to pick up a detective policeman who would be their bodyguard for the night’s explorations. I needed no such bodyguard: Detective Hatchery’s pistol was in the oversized pocket of my dark summer cape-coat.

What must have been so exotic, even terrifying, to Boston-born Fields was now, after more than two years of regularly traversing these streets with Hatchery, familiar almost to the point of comfort for me.

Almost.

Thunderstorms were brewing, lightning rippled all around the pitched, leaning roofs above the narrow lanes, thunder rumbled like constant cannon-fire around a besieged city, but it refused to rain. It only grew hotter and darker. Nerves were on edge everywhere in London, but down here in this suppurating pit of the hopeless poor, this nightmare-market of husbandless women, parentless children, Chinese and Lascar and Hindoo thugs and German and American sailor-murderers on the run from their ships, there was a madness in the air almost as visible as the electrical blue flames that played around the tilted weather vanes and leaped between the iron support cables that ran down like rusted mooring lines from buildings that had long since forgotten how to stand upright on their own.

The tour that Dickens and his police detective were giving the two Americans and Dolby was essentially the same as the ones that Inspector Field and Hatchery had shown the Inimitable and me so long ago: the poorest slums of Whitechapel, Shadwell, Wapping, and New Court off Bluegate Fields; penny lodging houses outside of which drunken mothers insensibly held filthy infants (I watched from a dark distance as Dickens seized one of these children out of its drunken mother’s arms and bore the babe into the lodging house himself); lock-ups filled with thugs and lost children; basement tenements where scores and hundreds of London’s huddled outcasts slept in filth and straw within the constant miasmic stench from the river. The tidal mud this hot night seemed to be made up completely of horse dung, cattle guts, chickens’ viscera, the carcasses of dead dogs, cats, and the occasional hog or horse, and acres upon acres of human excrement. The streets were filled with idle men carrying knives and even more dangerous idle women carrying disease.

Charles Dickens’s beloved Babylon. His very own Great Oven.

In one of his lesser novels (I believe it was the plotting disaster he titled Little Dorrit ), Dickens had compared the homeless children who skittered and scattered beneath the arches of Covent Garden to rats and warned that someday these rats, always gnawing at the foundations of the city and society that chose to ignore them, might “bring down the English Empire.” His outrage was real, as was his compassion. This night of 9 June, as I watched through my little telescope from half-a-block distant, I saw Dickens take up a scabbed and filthy child who looked to be dressed in strips of rags. It appeared that James Fields and Dolby were dabbing their eyes while Eytinge watched with a drunken illustrator’s disinterested gaze.

Because it was summer—or as hot as summer—the doors of tenements were open, the windows thrown up, and clusters and mobs of men and women were out in filthy courtyards and no less filthy streets. Even though it was the middle of the work week, most of the men (and not a few of the women) were drunk. Several times these groups would lurch towards Dickens’s party only to back away when the police detective with them flashed his bright bullseye lantern at the thugs and showed his club and uniform.

For the first time, I began to be nervous about my own safety. Although my cheap cape and broad-brimmed hat hid my features and allowed me to mix with most of these mobs, some men took note of me and followed along, calling drunkenly for me to stand them to a drink. I hurried on behind the Dickens party. While they tended to keep to the centre of the street where it was lightest, I crept along in the darkest shadows under porches, tattered awnings, and the leaning buildings themselves.

For a while, I was certain that I was being followed.

There was a small bearded man in rags—it looked as if he had been dressed in filthy strips of seaweed—who lurched along behind me, turning when I turned to follow Dickens’s group, pausing when I paused.

For a wild moment I was sure that it was the Other Wilkie following me and that he had escaped the confines of the house once and for all.

But while this figure (never seen distinctly) was as short as I (and the Other Wilkie), I realised that he was more burly and barrel-chested under those rags than stout in a Wilkie-ish way.

When we entered New Court proper in darkened Bluegate Fields, I no longer saw him following and put it down to coincidence and my nerves. I took several long sips from my flask, reassured myself by touching the pistol in my coat pocket, and hurried to get a bit closer to the strutting policeman, Dickens, Dolby, Fields, and Eytinge.

They stopped at Old Opium Sal’s den, as I knew they would. Here I could have found my way around blindfolded, but because of the bright flashes of lightning—the artillery barrage had grown louder, but still there came not a hint of refreshing rain—I waited until they had gone to the upper regions of the rotting building before I slipped up to the first-storey landing and edged around into the deeper darkness there. Because of open doors and raised voices, I could hear snatches of Dickens’s and the policeman’s explanations and the tourists’ conversation as they toured the opium den.

There was just enough smell of burnt opium in the air to make my body and scarab-inhabited brain ache for the drug. To take the edge off the longing, I drank deeply from my flask.

“The Puffer Princess…” I heard Dickens’s voice drift down in the thick air between thunder rumblings. It was not until months later that I understood this reference.

“Her pipe appears to be made from an old penny ink-bottle…” I heard Fields say.

Between all the understandable snippets, I could hear Opium Sal’s familiar but unintelligible cackles, croaks, whines, and entreaties. The policeman shouted her into silence several times, but the cackles would rise in volume again and drift down to me as surely as the scent of opium smoke. I could tell from my hiding place on the floor below them (as well as from memory) that this opium was lesser stuff and none of the excellent variety burned in beautiful pipes down in King Lazaree’s crypt-den. I sipped again from my flask.