The Opium-Eater Read online

  THE OPIUM-EATER:

  A THOMAS DE QUINCEY STORY

  by

  David Morrell

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  Thomas De Quincey—the main character of David Morrell’s acclaimed Victorian mystery/thrillers, Murder as a Fine Art and Inspector of the Dead—was one of the most sensational and inventive English authors of the 1800s. He anticipated Freud’s psychoanalytic theories by more than half a century. In his 1854 blood-soaked postscript to “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” he described England’s first media-sensation mass murders, the Ratcliffe Highway killings, with such vivid detail that he invented the true-crime genre. He influenced Edgar Allan Poe, who in turn inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes. In this special-edition novelette, based on actual events, De Quincey tells the heartbreaking tale of how he became known as the Opium-Eater. An afterword contains numerous photographs of the dramatic locations in the story.

  London, 1855

  The stranger stepped from the storm-ravaged street, dripping rain onto the sand-covered floor.

  “I’m told that the Opium-Eater is here.” Thunder rumbled as he pushed the door shut against a strong wind.

  “Aye. A lot of other people heard the same,” the tavern’s owner replied, wiping a cloth across a counter. “He’s in the back. Thanks to him, even with the foul weather, business is good tonight.”

  The stranger approched a crowd at the rear of the tavern. Everyone was strangely silent. Dressed in cheap, loose-fitting garments that identified them as laborers, men held glasses of ale and cocked their heads, listening to faint words through an open doorway.

  “Murder as a fine art? Not this time,” a voice said, its tone suggesting a man of advanced years. “There aren’t any killings in this story.”

  From the back room, murmurs of disappointment drifted out toward the crowd.

  “But there are several deaths,” the voice continued.

  Now the murmurs indicated anticipation.

  “Father, you don’t need to do this,” a young woman’s voice objected.

  “This man asked me a question.”

  “Which you aren’t obliged to answer.”

  “But on this particular night, I do feel obliged,” the voice insisted. “There’s no such thing as forgetting, but perhaps I can force wretched memories into submission if I confront them.”

  Recognizing the voices, the stranger touched two men at the edge of the crowd. “Pardon me. I need to move past you.”

  “Hey, the rest of us want to go in there too. Who appointed you lord and master?”

  “I’m a Scotland Yard detective inspector.”

  “Ha. That’s a good one. Tell me another.”

  “Better do it,” a man cautioned. “His name’s Ryan, and he is in fact a detective inspector. I saw him at the Old Bailey last week, testifying against my brother.”

  Grudgingly, the crowd parted.

  Detective Inspector Ryan squeezed his way into a congested room that was thick with the odor of pipe smoke and ale. People sat at tables or else stood along the age-darkened walls, their attention focused on an elderly man seated in front of an iron-lined fireplace.

  The man was Thomas De Quincey. More than forty years earlier, in 1821, he’d become notorious for writing the first book about drug addiction, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. The nickname had followed him ever since. De Quincey’s troubled opium nightmares, in which all of history marched before him and the ghosts of loved ones haunted him, made him conclude that the mind was filled with chasms and sunless abysses, layer upon layer. Writing about this unsuspected subconscious world, the Opium-Eater had established a reputation as one of the most controversial and brilliant literary personalities of the era.

  Because of De Quincey’s notoriety, people often expected to see someone larger than life. To the contrary, he was slight, so short that his boots didn’t reach the bottom of his chair. From a distance, he might have been mistaken for a youth, but when seen this close, his wrinkled face conveyed a lifetime of sadness. His melancholy blue eyes had a dry glitter, as if years of sorrow and regret had exhausted his capacity for tears.

  Next to him stood an attractive young woman whose blue eyes resembled his. Her name was Emily, and Ryan’s gaze shifted toward her as quickly as it had toward De Quincey—perhaps even quicker, because in the months that Ryan had known her, his impatience about the way she spoke her mind and exerted her independence had turned to respect and indeed much more than that.

  Emily’s clothing was an example of that independence. If she’d been wearing a fashionable hooped skirt, the immense space it consumed would have prevented her from fitting into the packed room. Instead, her skirt hung freely, with a hint of female trousers beneath them, a style that the newspapers sneeringly called “bloomers,” an insult to which Emily paid no attention.

  Worry strained her features as she tugged at her father’s frayed coat, urging him to leave.

  Beside her, a tall, burly man wore shapeless street clothes similar to Ryan’s. His name was Becker. In his midtwenties, he had a scar on his chin suggesting that he was the kind of man whom Ryan customarily arrested, although in fact he, too, was a police detective.

  Both he and Emily looked relieved when they saw Ryan enter the room.

  “I began searching as soon as I learned that he’d gone missing,” Ryan told them. “Finally a constable mentioned a little man walking along this street muttering to himself, and a woman and a detective sergeant asking about him.”

  “It took us hours to find him,” Emily said, sounding exhausted. “For the past week, Father wouldn’t stop brooding about this date. When he disappeared, I was afraid that he might have done something to hurt himself.”

  “The nineteenth of March?” a man in the crowd asked, puzzled. “What’s so special about tonight?”

  Ryan ignored the question. “I’ll find a cab,” he told Emily. “We’ll take him back to Lord Palmerston’s house.”

  The reference to the most powerful politician in the land made the crowd lean forward with even greater interest.

  “Please come with us, Father,” Emily implored. She increased her effort to raise him from the chair.

  “But I haven’t answered this man’s question—about how I became an opium-eater.”

  “It’s none of his business,” Ryan said.

  “All I wanted to know was whether his obsession with murders gave him nightmares that led to this,” a man protested, pointing at a glass of ruby-colored liquid on the table in front of De Quincey.

  The liquid appeared to be wine, but Ryan had no doubt that it was laudanum. The skull-and-crossbones warning on bottles of the opium/alcohol mixture—legally, cheaply, and easily purchased from chemists and even grocers—was normally sufficient to discourage people from swallowing more than a teaspoon of the pain reliever, lest it kill them. In contrast, De Quincey’s tolerance was such that he sometimes drank sixteen ounces of laudanum per day.

  “After I read his essay about the Ratcliffe Highway murders, all I dreamed about were bodies and blood,” the man in the crowd continued. “He was starting to tell us if he suffered the same nightmares from
writing about so much killing, but then these two”—he indicated Emily and Becker—“and you”—he indicated Ryan—“barged in and interrupted him.”

  “Bodies, yes,” De Quincey agreed, staring at the glass of laudanum. “Terrible deaths. But if they were murders, God is the one who committed them.”

  “Father,” Emily said in shock.

  “Perhaps the happiest day of my life was when I met William Wordsworth,” De Quincey said.

  “What does Wordsworth have to do with this?” someone complained. “The opium makes his mind jump around.”

  “Not at all,” Emily corrected the man, giving him an annoyed look. “It’s just that other minds aren’t quick enough to follow my father’s.”

  “Wordsworth? Who’s he?” a shabbily dressed customer wanted to know.

  “Didn’t you learn to read?” a better-dressed man asked. “William Wordsworth was one of our great poets.”

  “Who cares about a poet? I thought this was a story about a murderer.”

  “That’s not what he said.”

  “I loaned Coleridge three hundred pounds,” De Quincey said.

  “Another great poet,” the better-dressed man explained, but he looked worried that De Quincey’s mind was indeed jumping around.

  “Neither man was considered great at the time.” De Quincey kept staring at the ruby-colored liquid before him. “I was twenty-two. In those long-ago years, hardly anyone knew about Wordsworth, but I admired his verses to the point of obsession. I loaned his friend Coleridge three hundred pounds from an inheritance I received, hoping to gain his favor so that he’d introduce me to Wordsworth. Mind you, it wasn’t my first attempt to meet Wordsworth. Twice before, I’d made my way to Grasmere.”

  “You talk too fast about too many things. Grasmere? Where’s that?”

  “The Lake District,” De Quincey replied. “It’s a village that Wordsworth called ‘the loveliest spot that man hath ever found.’ Twice before, I’d traveled there to pay my respects to him, but each time, I’d felt so nervous that I stayed in a village in a neighboring valley. Twice, with a volume of Wordsworth’s poetry in my coat, I climbed to the ridge that looked down on Grasmere’s lake and a particular white cottage gleaming among trees. Twice, my courage failed me, and I retreated.

  “But this time, I wasn’t an intruder, for Coleridge had asked me to escort his wife and children to his home near Grasmere. This time, my nerves didn’t falter as our carriage stopped before that white cottage. I hurried through a little gate. I heard a step, a voice, and like a flash of lightning, a tall man emerged. He held out his hand and greeted me with the warmest welcome that it’s possible to imagine. The week in which I enjoyed Wordsworth’s hospitality was the happiest time of my life. But such is the wheel of fortune that only a few months later, a catastrophe plunged me into the worst time of my life.”

  “Is this where the murders come in?” someone asked.

  “Pay attention. He said terrible deaths, not murders,” the better-dressed man objected.

  De Quincey gripped the glass of ruby liquid, raised it to his lips, and took several swallows. The crowd gasped. For an average person, that quantity of laudanum would have been lethal.

  Ryan gave Emily a troubled look.

  “Today, Wordsworth’s fame brings many visitors to the Lake District,” De Quincey explained. “But a half century ago, the Grasmere valley was as unknown as his poetry. Fewer than three hundred people lived in the area. Above the lake, only five or six cottages were scattered among the woods and meadows on the rugged mountains.”

  The rain lashed harder against the room’s window.

  “The solitude was so extreme that the few families who found shelter on those mountains waited eagerly for the rare social events that occurred in Grasmere and the scarce other villages. These events were usually auctions of cattle, sheep, wood, and such. To attract buyers, the auctioneers provided refreshments—biscuits, tea, and even brandy—to make the atmosphere resemble a party. It was during one of those occasions, on March the nineteenth, forty-seven years ago tonight, that George and Sarah Green descended from their cottage in a remote upper valley.”

  De Quincey shuddered.

  He pointed as though the mountains loomed before him. “Looking up from Grasmere, you can’t see any indication of that valley. Hovering mists conceal it. A rough path was the only approach. After ascending through dense woods and difficult ridges, the path crossed a wooden bridge with a gap in the middle. Great care was required to avoid falling through the hole and into the force.”

  “The force?” someone asked. “The force of what?”

  “The Lake District has a private language. A raging stream is called a force. From that seclusion, George and Sarah Green set out for an auction that was eight miles away in a village called Langdale. In that direction, there wasn’t even a path.”

  “Father, I beg you not to upset yourself. Please, let’s go,” Emily urged.

  But De Quincey persisted. “The auction involved furniture. Two elderly parents were disposing of their household goods, preparing to spend their remaining years with a married son and his family. But it wouldn’t have mattered to Sarah Green what type of auction it was. She and her husband were too poor to buy even the smallest object. As the auctioneer made jokes and attempted to raise the bids on the various items of furniture, Sarah’s fervent purpose was to obtain a future for her eldest daughter. In her youth, Sarah had fallen prey to a man whose intentions were base. Her first daughter had been the result, burdened with the stigma of being illegitimate. Sarah’s unfortunate history was familiar to everyone in the area. That George Green, whom she’d met later, had offered to marry her made people think of him as compassionate. Perhaps her past was the reason that she and her husband lived in that remote valley. Perhaps it pained Sarah to mingle among townspeople and know that they still whispered about her.

  “But on this day, Sarah didn’t care what people whispered. Her out-of-wedlock daughter was grown, and Sarah had come to Langdale to beg various people of means to provide a position for her. Perhaps the girl could work in a shop, or she could learn to be a cook in a great house, or she could feed and dress children at a manor. Sarah’s hope was that her daughter would meet families who offered opportunities, and perhaps one day the daughter would find a suitor who didn’t care about her origins. The alternative was that the daughter, who now worked in a tavern, might succumb to the peril of that environment and suffer the same misfortune that Sarah had.”

  Everyone looked at Emily to see how she responded to this immodest topic. But if they’d expected her cheeks to redden with embarrassment, they were disappointed. She displayed no reaction, accustomed to hearing her father speak of matters that were far more indelicate than illegitimacy.

  “Try as Sarah might, rushing from group to group with increasing urgency, she couldn’t persuade anyone to consider her petition,” De Quincey said. “People later remembered the earnestness with which she approached them and the regret with which they declined her pleas. Then, all they cared about was the auction. They had a vague recollection that she and her husband departed just before sunset. Voices were heard hours afterward, from high in the mountains—perhaps shouts of alarm, but more likely the echoes of jovial partyers going home. No one paid attention.”

  De Quincey stared at the glass of ruby liquid before him.

  “As the sun descended, snow fell in the mountains. From the front door of a distant stone cottage, an eleven-year-old girl, Agnes, watched the flakes accumulate. In the gathering silence, she strained to hear sounds that might indicate the approach of her parents. She closed the door and looked at five other children, all of them younger than she was.

  “Little Agnes studied an old clock on the mantel, one of the few items of worth that the Green family owned. Her parents had told her that they would try to return by seven, but that hour was long past. The children had already eaten the simple meal that their mother had laid out before departing. Agnes
assured the children that their parents would arrive soon, that there wasn’t anything to worry about. When the clock’s hands showed eleven, she finally made the children wash their faces and get into their sleeping clothes, all the while promising that their mother and father would be in the kitchen to greet them when they wakened in the morning. Agnes led the children in their evening prayers and put them to bed. She sang a lullaby to the very youngest. Then she looked out the window in the direction from which her mother and father would approach, but the blowing snow prevented her from seeing anything.

  “George and Sarah Green were not in the cottage when the children wakened. Agnes told her brothers and sisters that their parents, seeing the foul weather, had decided to remain in Langdale and would set out in the morning. ‘They’ll be here before noon,’ the little girl predicted, looking at the hands on the clock, which were now only three hours away from the promised time. Feeling a jolt, she remembered that the clock needed to be wound.

  “The fire was fueled with peat. During the night, Agnes’s uneasy mind had wakened her several times, prompting her to put more peat on the flames. The family’s tinderbox was broken, and if the fire went out, there wouldn’t be any way to restart it—she and the other children would freeze to death. To give her younger brothers something to occupy them, she put on their coats and made them follow her outside to a shed where the peat was stored.

  “As the snow fell harder, they went back and forth, piling a large stack of peat in a corner of the kitchen, lest the snow become so deep that reaching the shed would be difficult. ‘Perhaps Mama and Papa won’t come back to us today,’ Agnes told her brothers and sisters. ‘Because of the snow, they might not be able to set out from Langdale until tomorrow. We’ll show them how grown up we are.’

  “Agnes examined the almost empty cupboard and made porridge, conserving what she had, giving small portions to every child, with a little extra for the two youngest. ‘Until Mama and Papa bring the oatmeal that they planned to buy in Langdale,’ she said. Then the cries of the cow in the barn warned her about other duties. Again, Agnes went outside, the snow even deeper. Holding her often-mended coat tightly around her, she reached the barn and climbed to a loft, where she pushed hay down to the animal. The bundle was almost too heavy for so tiny a girl. Then she milked the cow, but the animal was so aged that it provided less than a pint.