Drood (73 page)

But Martha R——’s compassion for me during this most difficult time was sincere and palpable, in contrast to Caroline’s grudging and often suspicious care.

M
AAT GIVES MEANING
to the world. Maat bestows order upon the chaos of creation in the First Times and maintains order and balance throughout all time. Maat controls the movement of the stars, oversees the rising and setting of the sun, governs the flooding and flow of the Nile, and lays her cosmic body and soul beneath all laws of nature.

Maat is the goddess of justice and truth.

When I die, my heart will be torn from my body and carried to the Judgement Hall of the Tuat, where it will be weighed against Maat’s feather. If my heart is mostly free from the terrible weight of sin—sin against the Gods of the Black Land, sin against my duties as outlined by Drood and enforced by the sacred scarab—I will be allowed to travel on and perhaps join the company of the gods themselves. If my sinful heart outweighs Maat’s feather, my soul will be devoured and destroyed by the demon-beasts of the Black Land.

Maat gave meaning to the world and still gives meaning to the world. My Day of Judgement in the Hall of the Tuat is coming, as is yours, Dear Reader. As is yours.

M
ORNINGS WERE VERY BAD
for me. Now that I had quit dictating
The Moonstone
to the treacherous scribe of the Other Wilkie through the lowest-ebb hours of the night, I often awoke from my laudanum or laudanum-and-morphine dreams between two and three AM and simply had to moan and writhe my way through to the spring dawn.

I usually was able to get myself down to my large study on the ground floor by early afternoon, where I would write until four PM, when Caroline or Carrie or both would take me outside, at least to the garden, to get some air. As I wrote to one friend who wanted to come visit me that April—“If you are to come, it should be before four o’clock, because I am carried out to be aired
at
4.”

It was one such afternoon in mid-April, precisely two months to the day since Mother had died, that Caroline entered my study behind me.

I had paused in my writing and—pen still in my hand—was staring out the wide windows at the street. I confess that I was wondering how I might get in contact with Inspector Field. Though I remained certain that Field’s operatives must be watching me, I had never seen one, despite my cleverest efforts to catch one out. I wanted to know what was happening with Drood. Had Field and his hundred-plus vigilantes burned the Egyptian murderer out, shot him down like a dog in the sewer the way Barris had shot the Wild Boy in front of me? And what of Barris? Had Inspector Field disciplined the blackguard for pistol-whipping me?

But it had occurred to me just the day before that I had no idea where Inspector Field’s offices might be situated. I remembered that the first time he had visited me at 9 Melcombe Place, the inspector had sent up a card—certainly his business address would be on it—but after rummaging through my desk and finally finding it, the card read only:

INSPECTOR CHARLES FREDERICK FIELD

Private Enquiry Bureau

Besides wanting to know what had happened in Undertown, I also wished to engage the inspector and his operatives on some work of my own: I wished to know when and where Caroline was meeting the plumber Joseph Charles Clow (for I had no doubt they
were
meeting secretly).

It was with these thoughts in my mind and my gaze turned to the street that I heard Caroline clearing her throat behind me. I did not turn.

“Wilkie, my dear, there is something I have been waiting to discuss with you. It has been a month now since your dear mother passed on.”

This required no comment and I gave none. Outside, a junk waggon rumbled by. The old nag’s flanks were covered with scabs, and even now the grizzled driver laid the whip on. Why, I wondered, would a rag-and-bone waggon have to hurry anywhere?

“Lizzie is reaching that age where she is ready to be introduced to society,” continued Caroline. “Ready to find a gentleman to be her husband.”

I’d noted over the years that whenever Caroline wished to talk about her daughter—Elizabeth Harriet G—— as
her
daughter, she was “Lizzie.” When she talked about her as our shared concern, she was “Carrie”—the name the girl actually preferred.

“It will be
so
much easier for Lizzie, in terms of matrimonial prospects and social acceptance, if she comes from an established and stable family,” Caroline went on. I still had not turned towards her.

On the sidewalk across the street, a young man in a suit too light in colour and thinness of wool for the fickle spring season, paused, looked over at our house, checked his watch, and moved on. It was not Joseph Clow. Could it have been one of Inspector Field’s agents? I doubted if any of the inspector’s men would be so brazen, especially since I was quite visible sitting in the ground floor bow windows.

“She should bear the name of her father,” said Caroline.

“She does bear the name of her father,” I said tonelessly. “Your husband gave her that even if he granted neither of you anything else.”

I’ve mentioned to you, Dear Reader, that Caroline was indeed my inspiration for
The Woman in White
. When, in the summer of 1854, my brother, Charley, and my friend John Millais came upon this apparition in white robes rushing from the garden of a North London villa in the moonlight—it was Caroline, of course, fleeing from her brute of a husband, who had, she told me at the time, been keeping her prisoner by mesmeric means—I, alone of the three of us men, had pursued her. And I had believed her about her drunken thug of a wealthy husband, a certain George Robert G——, and about how her life with one-year-old Carrie had been one of imprisonment and mental torture.

Some years later, Caroline had informed me that George Robert G—— had died. How she received this information I did not know nor ask (even while recognising how improbable it was that she had received it at all, since she had been living in my home all those years since the night she’d fled weeping across Charlton Street in the moonlight). But I accepted the news as fact and never asked her about it. For all these years, we had both pretended that she was Mrs Elizabeth G——— I had given her the name Caroline when she had come under my care—who had been victimised by her husband with both mesmerism and a fireplace poker.

The probable truth, I had thought at the time—and had no reason to change my mind about the matter now fourteen years later—was that Caroline had been fleeing from a pimp or client turned violent that summer night in 1854.

“You see the advantages to Carrie over the next few years if our girl can say and show that she is from an established family,” Caroline went on, speaking to my back. Her voice had a slight quaver to it now.

The “our girl” made me angry. I had always treated Carrie with the same love and generosity as if she had been my daughter. But she was not. She never would be. This was a sort of blackmail going on, a strategy I had reason to believe that Caroline had known well in the time before I rescued her, and I would have none of it.

“Wilkie, my dearest, you must admit that I have always been understanding when you have told me that your frail and aged mother was the absolute encumbrance to you marrying.”

“Yes,” I said.

“But with Harriet’s passing, you are free now?”

“Yes.”

“Free to marry if you like?”

“Yes.” I kept my face turned to the window and the street.

She waited for me to say something else. I did not. After a long moment in which I could clearly hear every swing of the pendulum in the tall clock in the hallway beyond, Caroline turned and left my study.

But I knew this was not the end of the conversation. She had another and final card to play—one she thought foolproof. And I knew she would play it soon. What she did not know was that I had a full hand of cards to play myself. And more up my sleeve.

S
CRABBLINGS. THERE ARE
scrabblings.”

“What?”

I had been wakened much earlier than usual—a check of my watch showed it to be not yet nine o’clock—and I was alarmed by the phalanx of faces hovering over me: Caroline, Carrie, my servant George, George’s wife, Besse, who acted as our parlourmaid.

“What?” I said again, sitting up in bed. This invasion of my bedchamber before breakfast was intolerable.

“There are scrabbling sounds,” repeated Caroline.

“What are you talking about? Where?”

“In h’our stairs, sir,” said George, his face red with embarrassment at being brought into my bedroom. This was obviously Caroline’s doing.

“The servants’ staircase?” I said, rubbing my eyes. The previous night had not been a morphine-assisted one, but my head ached anyway. Abominably.

“They’ve been hearing it on every storey of the house,” said Caroline. Her voice was as loud and grating as a Welsh calliope. “Now I’ve heard it as well. It’s as if there’s a great rat in there. Scrabbling up and down.”

“Rat?” I said. “We had the exterminators here last autumn when we did all the work on the house and updated the
plumbing
.” I put deliberate emphasis on the last word.

Caroline had the good grace to blush, but she did not desist. “There’s something in the servants’ staircase.”

“George,” I said, “haven’t you looked into this?”

“Aye, sir, Mr Collins, I ’ave. I went in, sir, and oop and doon following the noise, sir. But each time I got close, it… I haven’t found it, sir.”

“Do you think it’s rats?”

George was always a little slow, but he had rarely looked as completely half-witted as he did while wrestling with this question. “It sounds like one great ’un, sir,” he said at last. “Not rats so much, sir, as… a single bloody great rat, beggin’ your pardon, misses.”

“This is absurd,” I said. “Everyone get out. I will dress and be down in a minute and find and kill this ‘single bloody great rat’ of yours. And then perhaps you’ll all be so kind as to let a sick man get his rest.”

I
CHOSE TO
enter the stairway on the kitchen level so she could not get below me.

I was certain that I knew what had been making the noise. In truth, I wondered why I’d not seen the woman with green skin and tusks for teeth before this during the eight months we had been in the new house. The Other Wilkie had come along from Melcombe Place easily enough.

But why can the others now hear her?

In all the years the woman with the green skin had occupied my previous servants’ staircases in the dark, no one but I had ever heard or seen her. I was certain of that.

Are the Gods of the Black Lands making her more real the way they have the Other Wilkie?

I set that disturbing thought aside and lifted the candle from the table. I’d ordered the others not to come into the kitchen with me and to stay away from all of the doorways to the servants’ stairway on each storey of the tall house.

The woman with green skin and tusked teeth had drawn blood on my throat before this, long before Drood, the scarab, and the Gods of the Black Land had entered my life. I had no doubt that she could kill me now if I allowed her the proximity and opportunity. I had no intention of allowing her either.

Opening the door slightly, I removed Detective Hatchery’s heavy pistol from my jacket pocket.

With the door closed behind me, the servants’ staircase was almost absolutely dark. There were no windows along this side of the house, and the few candles in the wall sconces had not been lighted. The staircase was unusually—and disturbingly—steep and narrow, rising straight for three storeys before pausing on a short landing and continuing two storeys in the opposite direction to the attic.

I listened for a moment before starting up the stairs. Nothing. Candle in my left hand, pistol in my right, and stairway so narrow that my elbows on each arm brushed the walls, I moved quietly up the steps.

Halfway between the ground floor and first floor, I paused to light the first wall candle.

There was no candle there, although one of our parlourmaid’s daughter’s jobs was to replace them regularly. Leaning closer, I could see scratches and gouges on the firmly fixed old sconce, as if something had ripped the half-burned candle there out with claws.
Or with teeth.

I paused to listen again. The softest of scuttling sounds came from somewhere above me.

The woman with green skin and tusked teeth had never made a loud sound before,
I realised. She had always glided up and down stairs, towards or away from me, as if her bare feet barely touched the steps.

But that had been in my other houses. This servants’ stairway may have had more resonance for such malign spirits.

How had Shernwold died? She had fallen down these very steps and broken her neck, but why had she been in the servants’ staircase?

Investigating the sounds of rats?

And why had she fallen?

The candles missing from their sconces as if eaten?

I continued up to the first storey, paused in front of that doorway a moment—the doors were old and thick, and no sound came through, but there was a reassuring sliver of light at the bottom—and then I went on up the stairs.

The second candle was also missing from its sconce.

Something scuttled and scraped most audibly from not too far above me now.

“Hallo?” I called softly. I confess to feeling some sense of real power as I extended the pistol. If the woman with green skin had been corporeal enough to leave scratches on my neck—and she had—then she was corporeal enough to feel the effects of one of these bullets. Or several of them.

How many bullets were in the cylinder?

Nine, I remembered from that day Detective Hatchery had pressed the pistol into my hand, telling me as I went down to King Lazaree’s den that I should have something to defend myself from the rats. I even remembered what he had said about the calibre.…

“They’re forty-two calibre, sir. Nine should be more than sufficient for your average rat… four-legged or two-legged, as the case may be.”