Drood

Great adventures were pla

I had disguised myself in a broad-brimmed hat and dark summer cape-coat and followed them all from the hotels and then later from Gad’s Hill Place. I had purchased a sailor’s spyglass and hired my own cab (its driver and horse as nondescript as my disguise-clothing). All those days of detective work and the act of being in disguise and following someone invariably reminded me of poor, dead Inspector Field.

During the first days of their stay in London, the Fieldses & Co. were more or less launched into the pages of Dickens’s novels; after brisk hikes alongside the Thames (as if to prove that he was as young and healthy as ever), the Inimitable showed them the rooms in Furnival I

Travelling along behind them in the cab or on foot, I could see Dickens pointing out this old house or that narrow alley where his various characters had lived or died and I remembered a similar tour with him more than a decade earlier when I had been his friend.

I was not invited on their expedition during the day and night of 9 June, the A

This, of course, is the rural churchyard with its lozenge-shaped graves that Dickens had described so well in the opening of Great Expectations (a disappointment of a book, if one were to ask me). And as I watched through my trusty spyglass from some hundred yards away, I was amazed to see Dickens re-creating the same macabre churchyard-pantomime di

There was the same type of flat gravestone selected and used as a di

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 ca

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; pe

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.