CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

October of 1866 turned especially cool and rainy. I split my days and nights between my club, my home, and King Lazaree’s underground den, with many weekends given over to being a guest at Gad’s Hill Place.

One rainy Saturday afternoon there, while under the mellowing influence of my laudanum, I told Dickens about various ideas I had concerning my next book.

“I am thinking of something in the line of the supernatural,” I said.

“Do you mean a ghost story?” asked Dickens. We were in his study, enjoying the warmth of the fire. The Inimitable had finished his day’s work on his annual Christmas story and been persuaded by me that the rain was too cold for his usual afternoon walk. Wind whipped raindrops against the bow windows beyond his desk. “Something involving spirit rapping?” he continued, frowning slightly.

“Not in the least,” I said. “I was thinking rather of some adroit mixture of the themes I mentioned to you some time ago—detection, theft, mystery—along with some item that has a curse on it. The reality of that curse would, of course, be decided by the reader.”

“What kind of item?” asked Dickens. I could tell that I had piqued his interest.

“A gem, I believe. A ruby or sapphire. Or even a diamond. I can see the plotting arising from the effects of the cursèd stone on each person who acquires it by fair means or foul.”

“Interesting, my dear Wilkie. Very interesting. The gem or diamond would be carrying some ancient family curse?”

“Or a religious one,” I said, warming under the influence of the mid-day laudanum and Dickens’s interest. “Perhaps if the stone had been stolen from some ancient and superstitious culture…”

“India!” cried Dickens.

“I had been thinking Egypt,” I said, “but India would serve. Might serve very nicely, I think. As for a title, I’ve jotted down The Serpent’s Eye or The Eye of the Serpent.”

“A bit sensational,” said Dickens, steepling his fingers and extending his legs towards the fire. “But intriguing as well. Would you work your idea of a ‘Sergeant Cuff’ into this tale?”

I blushed and only managed a shrug.

“And would opium figure in this book as well?” he asked.

“It might,” I said defiantly, all warmth at his earlier interest now fled. I had heard through several mutual friends of Dickens’s absolute disapproval of my Lydia Gwilt’s praise of the drug in Armadale.

Dickens changed the subject. “I presume you are using as a model here the Koh-i-noor diamond that was exhibited in the Crystal Palace here at the Great Exhibition and presented to the Queen in June of 1850.”

“I have made some rough notes about that artefact,” I said stiffly.

“Well, my dear Wilkie, there were certainly rumours that the Koh-i-noor was indeed cursed after it was exacted as tribute to the crown by the ‘Lion of the Punjab,’ that heathen Maharaja Dhulip Singh. Just the true story of how that diamond was smuggled from Lahore to Bombay by Governer General Lord Dalhousie himself, even while the Mutiny was still active, should give enough material for two or three exciting novels. It’s said that Lady Dalhousie herself sewed the diamond into a belt which Lord Dalhousie wore for weeks until he handed the Koh-i-noor over to the captain of a British warship in Bombay Harbour. They say that he chained two fierce guard-dogs to his camp bed each night to wake him if thieves or Thugees entered his tent.”

“I’d not heard this,” I confessed. My thought had been to write about a ruby or sapphire sacred to an ancient Egyptian cult, but Dickens’s true tale of the Koh-i-noor made my hands twitch in anticipation of taking notes.

We were interrupted then by an urgent pounding on the door to Dickens’s study.

It was Georgina, in tears and almost beside herself with agitation. When Dickens calmed her, she explained that the Irish bloodhound—Sultan—had attacked yet another innocent victim, this time a little girl who was the sister of one of the servants.

Dickens sent her out to soothe the victim. Then he sighed, opened a cupboard door, and removed the two-barrelled shotgun I had last seen ten months earlier on Christmas night. He then went to his desk and pulled several large shells from a lower-right-hand drawer. Outside, the rain had ceased pelting the window glass, but I could see dark, fast clouds moving low above black branches that were quickly losing their leaves.

“I’m afraid that I have shown too much tolerance with this dog,” he said softly. “Sultan has a good heart—and he is totally loyal to me—but his aggressive spirit was forged in the fires of hell. He refuses to learn. I can tolerate anything—in dog or man—save for the refusal or inability to learn.”

“No more warnings?” I asked, rising to follow him away from the fire and out of the room.

“No more warnings, my dear Wilkie,” said Dickens. “This hound’s inevitable death sentence was pronounced by a power much higher than ours when Sultan was only a pup at his mother’s teat. Now there remains only the execution of that sentence.”

THE EXECUTION PARTY was, fittingly, all male: besides Sultan, Dickens, and myself, the fourteen-year-old Plorn had been summoned from his room. My brother, Charles, and his wife, Katey, had just arrived for the weekend, and Charley was invited along but declined. A weather-faced old blacksmith from across the road had been reshoeing two horses in Dickens’s stable and joined the procession. (It turned out that the blacksmith was an old friend of the condemned—he had enjoyed the killer’s antics from the time Sultan was a puppy—and the old man was honking into his handkerchief even before the execution party set out.)

Finally there were Dickens’s oldest son, Charley, just up for the day, and two male servants, one the husband of the female servant whose sister had been attacked. One servant trundled the empty wheelbarrow that would bear Sultan’s carcass back from the killing grounds and the other gingerly carried a burlap bag that would be the condemned’s shroud in a few minutes. The women of the household and other servants watched from the windows as we walked out through the backyard, past the stables, and into the field where Dickens had burned his correspondence six years earlier.

At first Sultan bounded around with enthusiasm and excitement, unbridled by the new muzzle he was wearing. He obviously thought that he was on a hunting expedition. Something was going to die! Sultan leaped around from one trudging, high-booted, waxed-cotton-coated man to the next, his paws sending out ripples in the puddles and kicking up mud. But when the humans would not meet his gaze, the dog stood at the end of his leash—held by Charley Dickens—and cast an observing eye on the open shotgun under his master’s arm and upon the empty wheelbarrow that had never been a part of any other grouse-hunting trek.

As the group stopped a hundred yards or so from the stable, Sultan’s gaze became meditative, even gloomy, and he fixed the gun bearer—his lord and master—with a questioning look that soon became an imploring one.

Charley slipped the leash and stepped back. We had all stepped back behind Dickens, who continued standing there and returning Sultan’s gaze. The big Irish bloodhound cocked his head to add a question mark to the end of his unspoken query. Dickens set the two shells in place and clicked the heavy gun shut. Sultan cocked his head farther to the left, his gaze never leaving his master’s eyes.

“John,” Dickens said softly to the blacksmith, who stood at the far left of our crescent of execution-witnesses, “I want him turned. Would you please peg a stone behind him?”

John the blacksmith grunted, blew his nose a final time, tucked away the kerchief in the coat pocket of his rain jacket, leaned over, lifted the kind of flat stone one would choose to skip across a pond, and tossed it just behind Sultan’s tail.