Drood (24 page)

“Two large, silent, but living and breathing black men—the word ‘Nubians’ came to mind as I passed them—stood just outside these massive doors and opened them for me as I approached. They were dressed in black robes that left their huge arms and chests bare and they carried strange hooked staffs that looked to be made of iron.

“Based on the imposing entrance stairs from the subterranean river, making a guess based on the statuary and bas-reliefs outside, and judging from the men at the door, I expected that I was entering a temple, but although the echoing, lantern-lit interior did have something of the hushed air of a heathen temple about it, in truth it was more library than temple. Shelves in the first room I passed through and along the walls of rooms I glanced into held scrolls, tablets, and many much more mundane books. I glimpsed scholarly and reference titles such as one might find in any fine library. The rooms were sparsely furnished with a few tables illuminated by torches or hanging braziers and the occasional low, backless couch of the sort historians tell us were present in some patrician’s home in ancient Rome or Greece or Egypt. I could see various figures moving, sitting, or standing in these rooms, and most looked to be Lascar or Magyar or Hindoo or Chinese. But there were no ancient opium sleepers—no beds or bunks or opium pipes nor sign nor smell of the wretched drug. I noticed that most of the men in the various rooms, for whatever reason, had shaved their heads.

“Drood was waiting for me in the second room, Wilkie. He sat at a small table near a hissing lantern. Various books and scrolls covered the table, but I noticed that he was drinking tea from Wedgwood china. He was dressed in a tan robe that made him look quite different than my impression of him as a poorly tailored undertaker at Staplehurst—much more dignified—but his deformities were even more apparent in the lantern light: his scarred head almost devoid of hair, the missing eyelids, a nose that looked to have been mostly amputated in some terrible surgery, the slight harelip, and ears that were little more than stubs. He rose and offered his hand as I approached.

“ ‘Welcome, Mr Dickensss,’ he said with that hint of lisp and slide of sibilants which I have so unsuccesfully tried to reproduce for you. ‘I knew you would come,’ he said as he arranged the tea set.

“ ‘How did you know that I would come, Mr Drood?’ I asked, accepting his handshake and forcing myself not to flinch at the touch of his cold, white flesh.

“He smiled, Wilkie, and I was reminded that his teeth were small, oddly spaced, and very sharp, while his pink tongue seemed extraordinarily quick and busy behind them. ‘You are a man of great curiosity, Mr Dickensss,’ Drood said to me. ‘I know thiss from your many wonderful booksss and storiess. All of which I have admired very much indeed.’

“ ‘Thank you, sir, you are very kind’ was my reply. You can imagine the sense of oddness, my dear Wilkie, sitting in this underground Undertown temple-library with this odd man who already, since the Staplehurst terror, had become a fixture of my dreams, hearing him praise my books rather as if I had just completed a reading in Manchester.

“Before I could think of anything else to say, Drood poured tea into the lovely cup set before me and said, ‘I am sure that you have questionsss for me.’

“ ‘I do, indeed, Mr Drood,” I said to him. ‘And I hope you will not consider them impertinent or overly personal. There is in me, I confess, a great curiosity as to your background, how you came to be here in this… place, why you were on the tidal train from Folkestone that terrible day at Staplehurst… everything.’

“ ‘Then I shall tell you everything, Mr Dickensss,’ said my strange interlocutor.

“I spent the next half hour or so drinking tea and listening to his story, my dear Wilkie. Would you care to hear a summary of Drood’s biography now, or shall we save it for another day?”

I
LOOKED AROUND
. We were within a mile of Gad’s Hill Place. I realised I was panting from the speed and distance of our walk, but my headache had been all but forgotten while I was listening to this fantastical tale. I said, “By all means, Dickens. Let us hear the end of this story.”

“It is not the end, my dear Wilkie,” said Dickens, his blackthorn stick rising and falling with his every second stride. “More the beginning, if truth be told. But I shall tell you what Drood told me that night, albeit in summarised form, since I see our destination in sight.”

T
HE MAN WE CALL DROOD
is the son of an English father and an Egyptian mother. His father, a certain John Frederick Forsyte, was born in the last century, graduated from Cambridge, and trained as a civil engineer, although the man’s real passion was exploration, adventure, and literature. I have checked this out, Wilkie. Forsyte himself was a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, but is remembered today as a teller of traveller’s tales. Part of his training was in Paris—this was after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when Englishmen felt free to return to France, of course—and there Forsyte met numerous scientists who had gone to Egypt with Napoleon’s expedition to that country. The tales he heard made him eager to see such exotic sights—the Sphinx that the French artillery had taken potshots at, successfully shooting off its nose, the Pyramids, the people, the cities, and, yes, the women. Forsyte was young and single, and some of the Frenchmen’s tales of alluring Mohammadan women with their veils and kohl-enhanced eyes inflamed his desire for something more than travel.

“Within the year, Forsyte had arranged to travel to Egypt with an English engineering company that had been contracted by a French company owned by someone John Frederick Forsyte had met socially in Paris, hired by Egypt’s young ruler, Mehemet Ali. It was Ali who first attempted to introduce Western knowledge and improvements into Egypt.

“As an engineer, Forsyte was staggered by the knowledge of the Egyptian ancients as evidenced in their Pyramids, colossal ruins, and networks of canals along the Nile. As an adventurer, the young man was exhilarated by Cairo and the other Egyptian cities, and even more so by his expeditions out of these cities to more remote ruins and sites up the Nile. As a man, Forsyte found the Egyptian women just as alluring as the Frenchmen’s tales had promised.

“It was during his first year in Cairo that Forsyte met the young Egyptian widow who would become Drood’s mother. She lived near the quarter where the English and French engineers and other contractors were essentially quarantined away from proper society—Forsyte’s lodgings were in a converted carpet warehouse—and the woman spoke English, came from a wealthy and ancient Alexandrian family (her late husband had been a merchant in Cairo), and attended various dinners and gatherings arranged by the English engineering company. Her name was Amisi, meaning ‘flower,’ and many Englishmen and Frenchmen and Egyptian men told Forsyte that her quiet beauty earned her the right to the name.

“Despite the Mohammadan prejudice against Franks and Christians, the courtship with the young widow was simple—several times Amisi had “accidentally” allowed Forsyte to see her face without a veil near the bathing place where the local women gathered, which was any Egyptian woman’s tacit acceptance of engagement—and they were married under Mohammadan law without elaborate ceremony. In truth, it took only a single sentence muttered by Drood’s future mother to seal the marriage.

“The boy whom we now call Drood was born ten months later. His father named the boy Jasper, which meant nothing to the mother, neighbours, or the poor lad’s future playmates, who tended to beat the halfbreed lad like a rented mule. For almost four years, Forsyte raised the boy as a future English gentleman, demanded that only English be spoken in the home, tutored his son in his spare time, and announced that the boy’s future education would be at fine schools in England. Amisi had no say in the matter. But—luckily for young Jasper John Forsyte-Drood’s future survival—his father was gone more often than he was home, working on engineering projects that took him great distances from Cairo and his wife and child. On the street, young Jasper John Forsyte travelled in rags by his mother’s side—it was important, Amisi knew, that the other adults and children not know how well-off young Jasper truly was. His playmates, or even Egyptian adults, might have murdered the light-skinned boy had they known the extent of his infidel father’s wealth.

“Then, as suddenly as whim had brought him to Egypt, John Frederick Forsyte’s Egyptian engineering work ended and he followed whim back to England and a new life. He left his Mohammadan wife and mixed-breed child behind without so much as a letter of regret. They never heard from him again.

“Drood’s mother was now twice disgraced—firstly for marrying a Christian and secondly for being abandoned by him. Her friends, neighbours, and relatives blamed her for both tragedies. One day while with the other women bathing, Amisi was dragged away by several men whose faces were hidden behind scarves, made to stand trial before a court of other faceless men, sentenced to be paraded through the streets on a high-saddled ass surrounded by the local police and by howling mobs of men, and then stoned to death by yet another crowd of men while ululating women in their black robes and veils looked on with satisfaction from rooftops and doorways.

“But when the police arrived to seize the dead woman’s child at Forsyte’s former home in the Old Quarter near the river warehouses, the boy was gone. Servants, neighbours, and relatives denied sheltering him. Homes were searched, but no trace of the child was found. Even his clothes and toys had been left behind, as if the boy had simply stepped out into the courtyard and been carried into the sky or dragged into the river by animals. It was assumed that upon hearing of Amisi’s execution for the crime of immorality, some well-meaning neighbour or servant had told four-year-old Jasper to run and he had simply found his way to the desert and perished.

“But this was obviously not the case.

“You see, Wilkie, a wealthy and important uncle of Amisi’s, a rug merchant named Amun who lived in Alexandria—a man who had always doted on his niece and had been sad when her first marriage had taken her away to Cairo and even sadder when he had heard she had married an infidel—also had heard of the Englishman’s abandoning her and had made the trip to Cairo to urge Amisi to bring her child and to return to Alexandria with him. Amun, whose name meant “the hidden one,” was almost an old man, but he had young wives. Besides being a rug merchant by day, Amun was by night a priest from one of the secret temples celebrating the old religion—the ancient, pagan, pharaonic, pre-Mohammadan religion of Egyptians before they had all been converted under the scimitar to Mohammadanism—and had been determined to convince Amisi to join him.

“He was only an hour late. Arriving in the neighbourhood just in time to see the execution of his niece but with no chance to stop it, he rushed to Amisi’s house—the servants were sleeping in the heat of the day; the neighbours were off enjoying the stoning—and he stole young Jasper John Forsyte out of his bed and left Cairo immediately with the tiny boy clinging frantically around his waist on horseback. Young Jasper would not have known that Amun was his great-uncle or that his mother was dead, imagining in his four-year-old child’s mind that he was being kidnapped by a desert bandit. Together, old man and young boy, they galloped Uncle Amun’s white stallion out through the gates of Cairo and down the desert road to Alexandria.

“There in his home city, within the walls of his fortress of a compound guarded by his clan’s well-armed circle of guards, fellow priests, and loyal Alexandrian assassins, Uncle Amun took Jasper in as one of his own without ever revealing the boy’s identity to anyone. The morning after young Jasper John Forsyte awoke in his strange new surroundings, Uncle Amun took him out to a pen and told him to choose a goat. Young Drood took his time the way only a four-year-old boy can, Wilkie, and finally chose the largest and silkiest white goat, one with the Devil’s own vertically slitted eyes. Uncle Amun nodded and smiled, told the boy to take the goat from the pen, and led the bleating animal and the boy to a private courtyard deep within the sprawling compound. There Uncle Amun, no longer smiling, pulled a long, curved dagger from his belt, handed it to the boy, and said, ‘This goat is all that there remains of the boy once known as Jasper John Forsyte, son of the English infidel John Forsyte and the shamed woman called Amisi. Jasper John Forsyte dies here, now, this morning, and none of these names shall ever be mentioned again—not by you, upon pain of your death, not by anyone else, upon pain of death.’

“And then Uncle Amun put his powerful hand over little Jasper John’s hand on the hilt of the dagger and quickly slashed the goat’s throat. The still-thrashing animal bled to death in seconds. Droplets of blood spattered the four-year-old’s white trousers and shirt.

“ ‘From this moment forward, your name is Drood,’ said Uncle Amun.

“Drood was not Amun’s family name, Wilkie. It was not even a common Egyptian name. Its meaning was, in fact, lost in the mists of time and secret religious rites.

“In the years that followed, Uncle Amun introduced the boy to the secret world Amun and some of his acolytes inhabited. Mohammadans by day—little Drood learned to recite the Koran and say his prayers five times a day as any worthy believer in Islam must do—Amun and the other Alexandrians in Amun’s secret circle followed the Old Ways, the ancient religious ways and rites, at night. Drood followed his uncle and these other priests into Pyramids by torchlight, and into hidden rooms deep beneath other such sacred sites as the Sphinx. Before he reached his adolescent years, young Drood had travelled with his uncle and other secret priests to Cairo, to the isle called Philae and to ancient ruins of necropoli far up the Nile, including a valley where the long-dead Egyptian kings—pharaohs, I am sure you remember they were called, Wilkie—lay buried in elaborate tombs carved into cliffsides and hidden beneath the stone of the valley floors.

“In these hidden places the ancient Egyptian religion and its thousands of years of arcane knowledge flourished. There the boy Drood was initiated into the mysteries of that religion and taught the same secret rituals that Moses had mastered.